My Groupon Adventure Read online

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound.

  Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type adventure in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  Max Dickins is a comedian and writer, who has written for and performed on TV both sides of the Atlantic. He started life as a radio presenter on Absolute Radio, where he was nominated for a prestigious Sony Radio Award. A stage version of My Groupon Adventure was a sell-out smash hit at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival. www.maxdickins.com

  My Groupon

  Adventure

  Max Dickins

  For Mum & Dad. See? I didn’t totally

  waste a good education.

  Contents

  A note from the author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Subscribers

  A note from the author

  Hi guys,

  My name is Max Dickins and this is the true story of how Groupon changed my life: firstly, everything I describe in the following pages genuinely happened. I wish it hadn’t: as you’ll see most of it is horrifically embarrassing. Secondly, all the people I meet along the way are real – although I have changed various names when required to protect their privacy and, in one particular case, to stop them from coming after me with an axe.

  In this book I’m going to tell you how I learnt to be adventurous. I am a stand-up comedian by trade. You probably think that doing stand-up is as adventurous as it gets. Onstage, in the bear pit atmosphere of a comedy club, I was brave and audacious. But offstage I was the opposite. My life was boring. I never did anything new. I never took a risk. I was the antithesis of spontaneity. Until I found Groupon, that is.

  Thanks for taking a chance on my book. If there is one thing that writing it has taught me, it’s that brilliant adventures often begin in such blind faith. And I hope this book inspires you to change your life as I changed mine. I’ve written it for anyone who has ever felt stuck in a rut, who has felt like their life is missing some excitement, who has felt like they’re not living life to the full. I hope you enjoy it.

  Yours,

  Max

  Chapter One

  ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ she said. Jen couldn’t look me in the eye; instead she stared at the floor and played with her hands. ‘I’m sorry. But I think we should break up.’ I shuffled slightly on the cold wooden bench and gazed off intensely into the middle distance. I had not seen this coming. For the next few minutes we sat in silence. Finally, Jen spoke again:

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve dressed up as Batman.’

  ‘I thought … I thought it would be funny. You know, like a wacky surprise.’

  ‘It’s really inappropriate.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know you were going to dump me, did I?’

  Jen had ditched me and she’d chosen to do it in a cemetery. So, although devastated, I couldn’t help but admire her inherent sense of motif. She was the Steven Spielberg of break-ups. The only way the symbolism could have been any more apt was if a mangy old Rottweiler walked into view chewing on a beating heart. ‘But … why Jen? Baby! We’ve never had a row … I don’t understand?’ Yes, I called her ‘Baby’. I admit it. It was one of many pet names I had for her at the time, including ‘Honey’, ‘Sugar Plum’, and ‘The Fat Controller’. She hated that one. Jen had nicknames for me too. Notably ‘Sledgehammer’ and ‘Mega Cock’.

  Jen looked awkwardly at the floor again. ‘I just don’t feel like I did. I’m sorry.’ My eyes felt like they were burning. But I didn’t want to cry because I was dressed as Batman and I’d just look like a ‘Fathers for Justice’ protester. I promised myself that whatever happened I would leave this conversation with my dignity intact. I wasn’t going to get hysterical and make an idiot of myself. No way. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

  ‘PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME! I’ll do anything! JEN I CAN CHANGE ! PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME! Tell me! What did I do wrong?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Max don’t …’ she said, ‘please’. ‘No, tell me. What’s the problem? Is it because of that time I made your blind uncle stroke an aubergine and told him it was a dolphin?’

  ‘I didn’t know you did that.’

  ‘Oh … right … ummm … is it because I tried to kiss your mum last New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘I didn’t know that either’.

  ‘Oh … shit, well, I was really drunk … and I thought we were having a moment, but it turned out she was just offering me some crisps … forget about it. But if not that, then what? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME? AM I REALLY SUCH A DISGUSTING LEPER !’

  Jen paused to gather her thoughts. ‘Well if you must know … you’re just not very spontaneous ,’ she said. Then, ironically, I spontaneously burst into tears. At this point a young boy came over with his mother, who asked whether her son could have a photo with Batman. I nodded with resignation, put my arm around the lad, and his mum did the rest. The boy clocked my sobs.

  ‘Why are you crying, Batman?’

  ‘Because Robin doesn’t want to play with me anymore,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll play with you, Batman?’

  ‘No. That would be inappropriate.’

  The boy was then led off urgently by his mother, who shook her head at me like I had somehow let her down. As if introducing a child to a man crying in a cemetery, whilst dressed as a bat, was ever going to end well. I composed myself long enough to look Jen in the eye and plead, ‘I’m still the same person you fell in love with, you know?’ ‘Exactly,’ she said, ‘that’s the problem.’ Then she kissed me on the cheek and walked away. On cue, it started to rain. I don’t know how she does it.

  I trudged back from the cemetery to my parents’ house where, at 25 years of age, I was still living. I shut myself in my room and for the next fortnigh
t I barely left. I retreated from the world, anchored indoors by the heavy scar tissue of a broken heart. Marooned in existential molasses, I spent all my time alone, trapped in an internet labyrinth of tits and trivia. Things were bleak. I vividly remember accidentally opening the ‘Recently Searched’ tab on my internet browser one day, and it was the most depressing thing I’d ever read, a harrowing glimpse into my life at the time:

  Porn.

  Porn.

  Porn.

  Porn.

  Theresa May.

  Theresa May porn.

  Then the names of loads of celebrities, followed by the word ‘bikini’.

  And finally, ‘How much Colgate would I have to eat to kill myself?’

  Jen would still text me and, of course, I’d always play it cool. Replying at length and immediately, often including poetry. I was happy to be an emotional tampon if it kept alive the possibility of spending one more second with her. We’d regularly meet for coffee and chat about how great it was that we were so chilled about things and how we’d both dealt with the change so well. Then I’d go home and eat lasagne in the bath.

  This lasted about three weeks. Then one day there was a knock on my bedroom door. I quickly slammed down the lid of my laptop as my best mate Dave barreled into the room. ‘ Wassssuuuuup! ’ he said, tongue lolling like a dehydrated Labrador. Dave’s been doing that joke for as long as I’ve known him. Including a good 10 years after it stopped being funny. ‘Alright, Dave. What are you doing here?’ ‘Well,’ said Dave, ‘I popped over to do your mum up the bum, and thought it would be churlish not to say hello while I was in the building.’ ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, ‘It’s good to see you.’ ‘What’s up mate? You’ve been ignoring my texts?’ he said, sitting down on my bed. Dave was now staring at the Thunderbirds bedspread. ‘Oh, that’s only on there while Mum washes my normal one,’ I stuttered. ‘Yeah? What’s on your normal one?’ ‘The Manchester United 1998-1999 treble winning squad,’ I said. My head bowed in shame. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ said Dave. ‘No one’s seen you for weeks?’ ‘Yeah, sorry mate,’ I said, ‘just had a lot on.’ ‘The guys all thought you were dead. We had a party and everything. With a piñata shaped like your head.’ Classic Dave.

  I explained everything. I told him about Jen, the Batman costume, and my subsequent sophomoric wallowing. ‘She dumped you in a cemetery?’ he said. ‘Fair play!’ Dave has many strengths but sympathy is not one of them. ‘To be honest, mate, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. You were really punching above your weight there.’ This was not helping. ‘Is there another guy? Has she left you for someone taller and more successful?’ ‘I’m five feet nine, Dave!’ ‘Course you are, mate’. I told him about Jen’s central charge, that I wasn’t spontaneous enough. ‘Absolutely bang on,’ said Dave, ‘You always say no to everything.’ ‘No, I don’t!’ I protested. ‘Yes you do!’ he said, ‘Now do you want to come down karaoke with me and the boys tonight? It’s a Bon Jovi special.’ ‘Errr … well … I can’t tonight, I’m afraid, mate.’ ‘I rest my case,’ said Dave, ‘what have you got on? Are BBC4 showing a documentary about biscuits or something?’ I let out an indignant chortle. As if I’d pull out of a social occasion to watch a documentary about biscuits! Just how dull did he think I was? No, it was actually an excellent programme about the world’s longest bridges.

  Another month passed. Then, on 13th November 2013 my 26th birthday, everything changed. That morning I’d gone to Costa with Jen, you know, so she could tell me about how great her life was now. And as we awkwardly sipped our lattes she asked me the question that she always asked me. ‘So! What’s new with you? ’ And I had nothing to say. I never had anything to say. I hadn’t done anything new in years. I always saw the same people, in the same places, to do the same things. I hadn’t done anything new because doing something new requires a sense of adventure and I’ve never had one. Not even when I was a kid. Children are meant to be fearless, excited, and energetic. But here I am, five years old, sat on the beach:

  Am I looking for crabs? Swimming in the sea? Building sandcastles, even? No, I’m sat by myself, reading the financial pages, dressed as a sailor. Twenty-one years later that boy had become a man and not much had changed. I was still basically the same height, I still had the same dress sense, and I was still boring. What was really galling was that my parents, despite both being in their sixties, had much more of a life than I did. For example, on my 26th birthday, whilst I was sat at home all alone doing nothing, my parents were on holiday in Nepal:

  There they are. Pricking about with an elephant. Whilst I was stranded on their sofa watching a Miss Marple marathon. But the worst part of my birthday was about ten o’clock in the morning, when I got this text from Mum:

  ‘Oh Happy Birthday Max! PS If you look in the freezer, you’ll find a frozen walnut cake.’

  So I went and got the frozen walnut cake out of the freezer, put it on the table, and I waited all day for a frozen birthday cake to defrost. And then I ate the entire cake. The only way that day could have gone any worse for me, was if, at the bottom of the cake, on the foil, my parents had just written ‘YOU ARE ADOPTED’. Do you know how depressing it is to light your own candles? This is pretty much the loneliest thing I’ve ever done. Apart from a few days previously when I’d put a wig on a watermelon and pretended I had an intern called Sophie.

  I looked in my diary. That evening I had a gig. I thought, ‘That will be nice. I’ll do the gig, hang out with the other comics afterwards, have a few drinks. It will be fun.’ But at five o’clock in the afternoon on my birthday the gig was cancelled, and I thought, ‘Well, I can’t spend any more time by myself on my birthday’. So I went to the cinema (by myself) to watch the film Gravity . I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Gravity , but in Gravity Sandra Bullock floats all alone through the depths of space, just staring into the abyss, and I have never felt more like I understood a film. As the credits rolled at the end of that movie I decided: enough is enough. I’d reached rock-bottom: I needed to get a life. I had to change, but I didn’t know how. So I called Dave.

  Two hours later I was sat in Wetherspoon’s with a pint in my hand. I looked around the pub. A sallow cast of old men stared vacantly up at ubiquitous flat-screens incongruently showing BBC News. The flashing lights of the fruit machines visible in the dark pools of their eyes, like fireworks reflecting off a lake. Tonight was Curry Club, but there was little team spirit on show. Everyone was drinking alone, but no one was talking to one another. Instead, choosing to feign a deep interest in the Greek financial crisis unfolding above them. I took a long, mournful sip of lager: was this my future? Dave, however, was in a great mood. He’d just been to a Vengaboys reunion gig at the O2 Arena, and was carrying a big blue inflatable Venga Bus. (Dave’s tastes, like his cultural references, hadn’t changed since the late 90s. It’s like the Y2K bug affected only him.) ‘I don’t know what to do, Dave. My life’s so boring,’ I said. ‘No. No. Your life’s not boring,’ he said. ‘Yes it is!’ I said, ‘I’ve spent most of the day playing Monopoly by myself!’ ‘No. No. No: YOU’RE boring, mate. Only boring people have a boring life.’ This was very on the nose even for Dave. But he was already on his fifth Baileys, to be fair.

  ‘A boring life, right? A boring life … is the result of taking certain decisions, it’s the result of looking at the world in a certain way, yeah?’ Dave was holding court like a pissed Yoda, gesticulating wildly with his glass, inadvertently spilling Baileys all over the table. ‘You’ve just got to teach yourself to look at the world differently, to trust in the universe, yeah?’ ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Dave?’ I said. ‘Well, like, for example, last week I went to the S Club 7 comeback tour at the Hammersmith Apollo. People told me it would be crap. That Jo and the lads were over the hill. But I took a chance, I asked myself “Why not?” I thought: “This might be brilliant, let’s not die wondering.” And I went and it was the best night of my entire life. My entire life . And I include
the night my son was born in that,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a son, Dave. The Sims isn’t real.’ ‘Look, you can nitpick if you want. I haven’t got time for your sterile pedantry. But it’s like this, OK? Forget about your fears tonight. Listen to your heart. Let’s just touch the sky, no need to reason why. Just listen to the sound. Let it make you come alive.’ ‘Dave, is that an S Club 7 lyric?’ ‘Exactly. “Don’t Stop Movin’’. An all-time classic. Now if you will excuse me, I must go and be sick.’ And with that Dave stood up and made for the toilet, falling over his Venga Bus on the way.

  Annoyingly, Dave was right. Not about ‘Don’t Stop Movin’ ‘being an all-time classic – that was clearly a heinous misjudgement – but about my life. I had to teach myself to take a risk. I needed a sea change in how I was living and to do that I needed to change how I thought about the world. I needed an entirely new psychology. It was a tall order, but if I could teach myself to be spontaneous then perhaps I could win back the love of my life. After all, I still believed that we could make it work. It was just a blip. We were so well matched. I just needed to re-invent myself, to prove that I could grow with her and keep things interesting. Then she would fall in love with me all over again. I was sure of it.

  The very next day I got this text from Dave:

  ‘Fancy seeing Five at the Hackney Empire? Might cheer you up. Cheap tickets on Groupon.’

  Obviously I had no interest in doing that. I’d had my heart ripped out, not my brain. But, still, I was intrigued: what the hell was Groupon ? So I googled it and found this parallel universe of eccentric and exciting offers. On the front page alone were ‘Helicopter Flying Lessons ’, ‘Ferrari Driving Experience ’, and ‘Wakeboarding ’. My stomach flipped. Suddenly I realised that Groupon could be my ladder out of my rut. It was spontaneity for beginners. A simple menu of adventures and all I had to do was order. This Narnia of discounts had suddenly made the universe feel full of possibility again. I felt energised; perhaps I could change my life one Groupon deal at a time? But still I couldn’t bring myself to take the first step. My cursor hovered hesitantly over the ‘Buy’ button. All of a sudden I felt nervous. Pathetic excuses dressed up as faultless logic rebounded around my mind: ‘It’s too expensive’, ‘I’ll look like an idiot’, ‘I’ve got no-one to do it with’. But I knew these arguments were simply no in a tuxedo. My subconscious was desperately searching for a way out. I just couldn’t see myself as ‘that guy ’ who would do these mad things. I shut my laptop and made myself a jam sandwich.