Home Town Heroes

Everyone has a hometown story they wheel out to impress potential friends and prospective sex partners. That said, most of them tend to work better in the friends market, because people usually get weirded out on dates when you start talking about that time you accidentally had sex with a wine bottle on the beach. Here are a few stories about hometown pride.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

THE LONE TRANSVESTITE DOG-LOVER OF PENDENNIS CASTLE

I grew up in a small Cornish town in the UK called Falmouth, home to a university and a somewhat unusual mix of art students and Cornish locals trying and failing to figure each other out. Being a town on the agricultural side of things, there were always rumours going round of people getting frisky with livestock. Of course, they mostly turned out to be infantile playground babble, until I left home to go to college in Manchester and my friend set up Google alerts for Falmouth news stories, just so he could tease me relentlessly.

The first thing that popped up was the story of a local dude who'd been arrested for repeatedly breaking into a farm to roll around in pig shit while pleasuring himself, leading to perhaps the best headline ever published: "Sex Slurry Pervert Is at It Again." But what really got me missing home, and earned me the enviable nickname of "Beast" (after bestiality), was a story that took place at Pendennis Castle, a beautiful tourist spot on top of a giant hill that overlooks Falmouth Bay

One day, two women were walking their dogs around the castle, when a lone transvestite appeared, sauntering around the grounds in a black slip-dress. Like a mouse or a shy toddler, the transvestite fled as soon as he realized he'd been spotted. Later, when the man appeared again, one of the women's dogs began chasing after him. Then, according to the paper's report, "by the time the women had caught up, the man was already having sex with the pet" in the brambly moat of the castle. I don't know what it was about the thought of a man in drag speedily mounting a dog in the moat of a heritage castle, but I've never been as fond of my hometown as I was in the moment I heard that story.

SHIT STORM

The town where I grew up has one club. It was voted the third most pleasant place to live in the UK. The club was voted the second worst in the UK, but everyone went anyway. It was the end of winter semester at my college, so everyone decided to go on a bar crawl. The night culminated in a messy end at this particularly awful club. Everyone was in high spirits and my friends and I had taken hours getting ready. We treated it like we were in an 80s teen movie and this nothing December night out was our senior prom—the moment our whole adolescent lives had been building up to. I spent more money on a dress than I ever had before and meticulously planned my shoes, make-up, hair, and accessories around it.

We joined the crawl late because we wanted to stay composed, had a couple of drinks, and wound our way through the teeming crowd of drunk teenagers to make sure we'd be let in to the club before the messier stragglers turned up and ruined the fun for everyone. Strutting in, my friends and I made our way to the bar and bought whatever the most expensive cocktail on the menu was, hoping that everyone would see how extra fucking cool we were. Hands on hips, delicately sipping away, as the mass of our peers started pouring through the doors, we heard a creaking from above us.

A thin jet-stream of brown liquid suddenly began squirting out over one of my friends, before the entire sewage pipe running above the bar exploded, raining liquefied shit, piss, and vomit all over my glammed-up friends and I. I don't try as hard when I go out nowadays.

HACK JOB

I grew up in the Hungarian countryside, where people seem to work on a totally different logic than the rest of the world, so plenty of my hometown stories are probably worthy of this little list you're putting together, but my favorite is as follows: So, the neighbors three houses down from mine were bat-shit crazy—like shitting in a chamber pot in their front garden and openly spreading it across their plants crazy.

Anyway, one day I heard screams coming from their direction, so I ambled out into my driveway to see if I could get a closer look. The mother had the adult son by the ear and was screaming at him about how he needed to tidy up after himself more, while smacking him over the back of the head with a rolled-up newspaper. That wasn't too out of the ordinary—physical abuse was a given in their household, but what happened next added a whole new element to their crazy that I'd never seen before.

The woman grabbed a rock and started smashing the son in the eye socket with it, while he remained completely silent with this almost apathetic, dour look on his face that I still can't get out of my head. Realizing what she'd done, she called out to the son's girlfriend, who ran out screaming, scooped the guy off the floor into her car, and started driving towards the hospital. The mom stood with her head in her hands, clearly overcome with guilt, before snapping back to mental, grabbing an axe from the garden and jumping into the car.

I wanted to see how the whole situation would play out, so instead of calling the police, I hopped on my bike and cycled towards town. I arrived at the hospital to find the woman beating the shit out of a car that definitely wasn't her son's with an axe. Five minutes later, the son's girlfriend wandered out of the hospital doors, giving the mom a bemused look, before calmly getting into the son's car and having a cigarette. The mom carried on smashing up this poor stranger's car, then screamed loudly, got back into her own car and drove off, disappearing for two days until the police located her in a layby about 70 miles away. God, I miss her sometimes.

OUR GUARDIAN HOOLIGAN ANGEL

Before I left Leicester, England for Camberwell's dazzling lights and empty cans of K cider, I was skating this spot in a pretty ghetto part of town with a couple of friends, but we figured it would be fine because we knew all of the local alcoholics and maniacs and were certain they'd back us up if we ever got into trouble. This particular day, however, none of them were around. But we thought we'd be alright because we were 15 and when you are 15 you don't realize that you are actually very weak and have a major pussy-streak until someone flexes on you and you run away with your tail between your legs.

Anyway, two massive Polish dudes in work boots and bomber jackets spotted us in this little closed off area and obviously marked us as easy prey. Storming up to us, they singled out one of our crew and held him up against a wall, frisking him for anything he had. Unfortunately, he didn't have any money on him and his phone at the time looked more like a building instrument than a method of communication, so instead they decided to use him as a pawn for their thievery and marched him up to a shop, told him to steal a bunch of stuff for them and shoved him inside.

The rest of us were freaking out and there was nothing we could do. Even though we were all armed with skateboards, we knew that a smack to the head wouldn't phase these guys, and we'd just end up bloodied and bruised. Standing there, silent, trying to determine what to do, a miracle struck when we spotted our super tough, nutter, shirt-off-on-a-hot-day friend jogging along with his huge dog on the end of an industrial chain.

When we told him what was happening, he got visibly furious, stormed over to the two Polish guys, grabbed them both by the collars and head-butted each of them with the kind of speed I didn't think was possible from a man whose main source of sustenance was warm cans of Stella. The two guys scarpered and I ran into the shop, screaming, "Everything's OK! Everything's OK!" And it was, thanks to our nutcase guardian angel.

OWN BRAND INTERIOR DESIGN

When I was 13, all my guy friends—who were all huge, socially-debilitated nerds—started hanging out in this RPG store managed by a guy called Nick, an 18-year-old fat dude whose two main passions appeared to be role-playing and sweating. Over time, they all bonded and Nick started to take my friends under his wing—reserving tables for us at clubs, buying us drugs, and driving us around, because he was the only one old enough to have a driver's license.

The older we got, the more lame Nick became. He was always lame, but our young, impressionable eyes were too glazed over to notice, until we began to realize that this guy had been hanging out with a bunch of kids five years younger than him for over half a decade. The final epitome came when we were all around 19 (making him 24) and went on holiday to a Greek island together, not far from where we all grew up. We bet him he couldn't down 55 vodka, rum, and tequila shots one after the other. Astonishingly, he won the bet. Not quite so surprisingly, he then disappeared.

We all carried on drinking for another couple of hours, before drunkenly retreating back up to our respective rooms. I swung the door open to mine, flicked the light on and was met by the worst smell I've ever encountered, and the sight of Nick face down on the floor, arse up in the air and shit absolutely everywhere. Honestly, I have no idea how it's possible for one human to produce that amount of excrement, but everything I could see was literally drenched in feces. There were even some Titanic-style shit hand-prints dragging down one of the walls.

The next day, as we were being chased out of reception by the furious hotel manager, Nick screamed at us, "Haha! That'll teach you not to make bets with me!" I haven't seen him since.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

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