Life and Laughing: My Story (18 page)

Scene 1: We’re bouncing on the trampoline together, giggling. Dad bounces into the sitting position, which leads to me being bounced high into the sky and landing in a tree. We both laugh hysterically and I cling to the branches.

Scene 2: We’re cruising down Rodeo Drive in my dad’s Jaguar. He opens the sunroof. I squirt the windscreen fluid which projects through the roof and into his face. We both laugh hysterically.

Scene 3: We sit next to each other on Colossus, the highest rollercoaster in the world. The car slowly ascends to its full height and then tears downwards, twisting and turning at high speeds. It comes to a halt. We both vomit and then laugh hysterically.

Scene 4: We’re playing ball in the garden. He’s wearing an American football helmet and throws an American football, cut to me dressed as a cricketer. I hit the ball into next door’s garden. It hits a sunbathing John Travolta in the head. We laugh hysterically.

Scene 5: We’re sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows and watching a movie before bed. I’m in my pyjamas and he’s in a dressing gown with the word ‘Dad’ written on the back.

Cat Stevens fades out.

During my trips across the pond, I really embraced the American way of life. I became an all-American kid overnight. I loved baseball, I told everybody to have a nice day and I put massive amounts of weight on my arse. I actually became obsessed with baseball. I passionately supported the LA Dodgers. I watched all the games on TV and can still name all the players, who invariably had names tailor-made for the over-the-top American commentators, my favourites being Darryl Strawberry, Pedro Guerrero and Orel Hershiser.

A trip to Disneyland while visiting our dad in Los Angeles. We were having so much fun with him that we failed to notice the couple behind us lose their child in the ravine.

The highlight of my first trip was when my dad and I went to Dodger Stadium to watch a game. The Dodgers were clinging on to a 1-0 lead when it was the turn of Danny Heep to hit. Danny Heep wasn’t a regular in the team. I had never seen him hit the ball once. In my three weeks of following baseball, I had concluded that Danny Heep was useless. I turned to my dad and said, ‘Danny Heep is shit.’

To which my dad said, ‘Heep of shit.’ He then proceeded to chant, ‘HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT.’ Before long the crowd surrounding us started to join in, ‘HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT.’ My father’s unsupportive jibe was spreading around the stadium. Soon the entire Dodger Stadium was chanting, ‘HEEP OF SHIT’, including the other players, children and even Danny Heep himself (I may be exaggerating). Heep naturally struck out and returned to the dug-out. My dad and I laughed hysterically.

My father continued to smoke constantly. As any wife would be, Holly was worried about his health. Her idea to stop him smoking was to start smoking herself. Her theory was that he would be so worried about her health that they would both quit. This, of course, backfired, and she too became a heavy smoker. But when they weren’t coughing, they seemed deliriously happy, and so were Lucy and I on our visits.

One of the most powerful memories of my early teenage years was how I felt when I returned to England knowing it would be six or nine months until I saw him again. This was the first proper pain I had experienced in my life. I didn’t feel heartache when my parents got divorced. I didn’t miss my dad when I only saw him at weekends. I didn’t even feel particularly upset when we said our goodbyes in Los Angeles. I was excited to get home to see my mum and little brothers. But when I got back to Golders Green and I was wide awake in the middle of the night with jet lag, I yearned for him. I missed him so much.

My bedroom was in the converted loft, and I would creep downstairs to find Lucy in exactly the same state as myself. Crying and longing for our dad. There was a lot of talk by both our parents through the years about how decisions were made for the best – logical, reasonable arguments about how life would be better this way – and most of the time I agreed. You just get on with life, that’s how you survive. But in the small hours of the morning, after every visit to America, the true raw reality of my parents’ separation broke my heart.

11

Wow. That was a little heavy. Let’s lighten the mood and turn our attentions to the loss of my virginity. Strap yourselves in. So as I’ve already told you, I wasn’t the most attractive teenager. Girls didn’t fancy me, they laughed at me on trains. By the time I was sixteen I still hadn’t added to my one blender-kiss at the Hammersmith Palais. I didn’t know how to pull girls; for a while I didn’t know how to pull myself. Opportunities were limited. I had no real friends at Merchant Taylors’ but had remained close to my Arnold House friends.

Like everyone else at that age, Sam was totally obsessed with sex. He was, however, more overt about his obsession than most. He had a library of pornography. His bedroom walls were covered in pictures of tits. I, on the other hand, had no pornography. I was too embarrassed to borrow any or, God forbid, buy any. The most titillation I got was watching Felicity Kendall bend down to do some weeding on
The Good Life
.

That was until we became one of the first households in the country to get Sky TV. When we had Sky TV, they only had one advert on it, for Eagle Star Insurance, which they played over and over again. (It worked, incidentally, as I now have my home insured with them.) The satellite receiver was in my mum and Steve’s room, and they ran a cable to my room so that I could watch the cricket from the West Indies through the night. This set-up meant that the channel could only be changed from the receiver that was in a cupboard next to Steve’s side of the bed. The thrill of early satellite television for me was not the Test Match, but the German gameshow
Tutti Frutti
, which featured girls stripping between standard fingers-on-the-buzzers Q and A. It was in a language I didn’t speak and the picture quality was poor, but
Tutti Frutti
was the best show I had ever seen.

Getting to watch
Tutti Frutti
was not easy. I had to sneak into my mum and Steve’s bedroom while they were asleep, open the cupboard that was less than a foot from the sleeping Steve. The channel would invariably be on number 11 as they tended to fall asleep watching Sky News. I had to change it to 47, RTL. I couldn’t just press 4 and 7; that sophisticated channel changing technology was still at the prototype phase. I had to flick individually through all the channels, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 … until 47. The tension was unbearable, but the thought of German tits kept me focused.

Occasionally Steve or my mother would stir or there would be a noise from the street outside. I would be startled and rush back to my bedroom, only to find I had not yet reached the magic number 47. I may only have reached number 22, the History Channel, or even 46, the National Geographic Channel; interesting, informative and educational they may be, but not the visual stimulus for what I had in mind. So I would return later to complete my mission. I did this every night. I think I watched every episode of
Tutti Frutti
ever made. I even started to enjoy the game play element, and when Hans Schneider was crowned champion, I was genuinely chuffed for him. Hilariously, after a few weeks an engineer came round to look at our Sky Box because Steve had complained to customer services that there was a fault. ‘It keeps changing itself to some weird German channel during the night.’

I genuinely don’t understand why I never had a girlfriend.

‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s a mystery,’ said the engineer. Well, the mystery ends here.

Sam and I had tried following girls in Corfu without success, but now we had a new plan. We would go to a nightclub. We scanned the clubbing section of
Time Out
magazine and selected a trendy hotspot just off the King’s Road. The major stumbling block was that we were two years underage. I was sixteen and looked younger. My most adult feature was the hair under one armpit. I thought of trying to comb it across to the other side or cutting one sleeve off a shirt to reveal my manliness, but it would be no use. There was just no way we could pass for eighteen. Sam looked even younger than me.

‘Sam, there’s just no way we’ll get in. You’ve got to be eighteen,’ I said, deflated.

‘That’s not a problem. I know somewhere we can get fake ID,’ Sam replied confidently.

This was a tremendously thrilling and illegal prospect. Fake ID could open up the entire adult world to me. A world I was desperate to gain entry to. Thank God for Sam, he’s so cool, so well connected. We’ll hook up with his contacts at MI5 who will furnish us with new passports, new names, new identities. Identities of eighteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds who have sex, I’m going to have sex as a fake eighteen-year-old with a new name.

Maybe I could select a name that might help me seduce women, like Don Juan or even David Juan, Don’s older brother who taught him everything he knew. I could choose the name of a dynasty synonymous with wealth, like Kennedy or Getty or Rothschild. I could choose a family name that has become a successful brand, like Cadbury, Ford or Guinness. I could be a Freud or a Von Trapp. The possibilities were endless and exciting. After much deliberation, I decided to keep my first name. Michael was a name I was used to. I liked it and I was worried that if I changed my name to, say, Jake, I might confuse myself unnecessarily. I imagined myself dancing in a nightclub just off the King’s Road when a gorgeous eighteen-year-old girl approaches: ‘Hi, it’s Jake, isn’t it? I want to have sex with you.’

‘No, I’m Michael, I think you’ve got the wrong guy,’ I reply. ‘No, wait, I actually am Jake, look, look at my fake ID, I mean ID.’ I couldn’t risk it.

So it was decided my new name would be Michael Casio-Sony. I decided to take advantage of my oriental looks and pretend to be heir to both the Casio and Sony empires after my mother, Kati Casio, married my father, Ray Cameron Sony, in a ceremony that started precisely on time and where the music for the first dance was listened to on Walkmans.

‘Where are we going to get the fake ID from?’ I asked Sam.

‘The YHA,’ Sam said.

‘The what?’ I questioned.

‘The YHA, the Youth Hostel Association,’ Sam explained.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘It’s the association of youth hostels, what do you think it is? You just join up and fill in your details and apparently they then give you a card with your details on,’ Sam explained.

‘How does that help us?’ I was genuinely confused.

‘You don’t give them your real details, you give them a fake name and date of birth, and then they give you a card with whatever you told them written on it. Bingo, fake ID.’

It might not have been the passport issued by Q from James Bond that I was hoping for, but it seemed worth a shot. Although I was worried that even if the nightclub bouncer believed we were eighteen, did he really want to let in people who were members of the Youth Hostel Association, was that really the kind of clientele this trendy hotspot was looking for? I wanted to look like someone who was going to be drinking cocktails and chatting up girls, not someone seeking shelter.

Sam and I headed down to YHA headquarters in central London and joined the massive queue of foreigners lugging enormous backpacks. I bought my passport-size photo and filled out my form with the key lies. Name: Michael Casio-Sony, D.O.B: 21/2/1974. When I finally reached the front of the queue, I handed over my false information and, just as Sam had said, it was instantly processed with no questions asked. Within minutes, we were both fully fledged YHA members. With a bit of luck, we would be handed cards to use as fake ID to get into nightclubs, and as an added bonus, if we pulled, we could take the lucky ladies to over 20,000 youth hostels worldwide.

We were indeed handed official-looking YHA memberships that displayed our photos, our new names and ages. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the membership card was an enormous piece of paper, about A4 size. It was basically a certificate. But we had queued for most of the day, we’d come this far, it was too late to back out. We went home to freshen up and negotiate our curfew with my mum. We checked
Time Out
magazine; the club opened at 9 p.m. and closed at 3 a.m.