Bitchell: White Folk Get Crunk

Scanning Matt’s profile I found pictures of him smoking cigars, discovered Waitrose pays teenagers to “stack shelves, stack papers, and ice haters”, and realized that Dubstep has nothing to do with boys using ecstasy to overcompensate for their masculinity complexes. “Dubstep is so empty it makes the listener nervous,” he writes, “and you almost fill in the double time yourself, physically, to compensate.” It’s a manifestation of a lad’s existential crisis—at least according to Matt.

My flatmate’s fuck buddy and I laughed at what had happened. She said Matt is notorious for wearing a white hat that says, ‘White Folk Get Crunk.’  Five minutes of Facebook stalking and a ten-minute gossip session didn’t explain Matt’s odd behavior, but, I didn’t care. Matt belonged to the internet, where bitchy writers and anonymous commenters hide behind computer screens; I had no reason to think about him IRL. The real world and IRL never collide—at least in towns other than Oxford. Thursday night at Babylove, I parted through the sweaty crowd of girls in Oxfam cardigans and boys in black skinny jeans. I was like,

Then I felt an arm on my shoulder. I turned around. A boy in a white cap stood above me. He pointed in my face.

“Do you know who I am?” he slurred.

“No,” I said. “I’m trying to go to the bathroom. I really need to pee—”

He grabbed onto my arm. “I’m Matt Broomfield. I comment on your articles.”

I burst into laughter. WTF? The internet has invaded my real life, I thought. Doesn’t this guy like Jesus? What happened to Christians refrain from drinking?

“DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?” he asked again. I nodded. “Well, you’re a twat! “You know that? You’re a fucking twat!” I stepped back, but white English hipsters’ favourite band, Destiny’s Child, was playing in Babylove’s packed basement—I had no room to move.

“You’re a twat!” Matt said again, this time smiling. “And you’re a good writer,” he said as he jammed his finger into my chest. “BUT YOU’RE STILL A TWAT!”

“Thank you?”

“YOU’RE A FUCKING TWAT!” He grabbed my shoulders. “I’M REPRESSED, MITCHELL! I’M FUCKING REPRESSED!” He laughed and then pouted his lips, looking both satisfied and disappointed, like Christopher Robin after he told Winnie-the-Pooh he had decided to leave the One-Hundred-Acre wood because puberty had kicked in.

He walked away and started dancing. While fist pumping, he looked as miserable and confused as he did while screaming at my face.

Walking home through Oxford’s snow covered ancient streets, I thought that instead of hiding his secrets like a fifteenth century tutor with a secret prostitute addiction, Matt should live more like the world wide web’s creatures and folk heroes.

Last year, in an essay about her ability to survive drug addiction, American memoirist and Internet celebrity Cat Marnell wrote words that Matt might want to think about next time he leaves a dirty comment on an article and then adds the writer on Facebook: “You call it oversharing,” Cat writes, “I call it a life instinct.”

It’s clear white folk like Matt get crunk, troll oversharers, and listen to Dubstep to compensate for problems they’d prefer to ignore, but what’s even clearer is that they need to share more than anyone else.

“I’M FUCKING REPRESSED”

If you want me to write about something other than trolls I meet in nightclubs that only play 3LW b-sides from 1999, email me. If not, don’t fret. Just act like a dick at a club. See you next week.