My Shit Life So Far (11 page)

‘You know David Icke?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you read his new book?’

‘No. What’s he saying?’

‘Well, he seems to be saying that the royal family and lots of politicians and, eh, country singers and famous people are, eh, sort of Lovecraftian lizards from the lower-fourth dimension.’

Go Dave. Yes, former Coventry goalkeeper David Icke’s books are a joy. They are at once a feat of imagination and a genuine attempt to understand reality. He believes that everybody in a position of power is a serial-killing, shape-shifting lizard. I’m kind of behind him on this in that I think they may as well be fucking lizards. In fact being a lizard would actually make their behaviour more explicable. My favourite bit is a drawing in one of the books of a huge lizard wearing a robe and wielding a dagger. The caption reads, ‘An artist’s impression of Ted Heath’.

The other reason I remember that party so well is because it was the last memory I had to draw on for quite a while. I woke up in a park two days later, covered in bruises and clutching a dessert spoon. Happy New Year.

Going to Sussex University was great. Yes, a lot of the people were daft, middle-class cunts, but they were often pretty attractive and a relief from the crushing conformity of Scotland. I enjoyed the first few weeks of being on campus, the attitude of optimism and hope that held together while everybody liked each other. The atmosphere that I helped to destroy.

I lived in halls with a group of unsatirisable Americans, some Goths and a good-looking drug dealer guy who took one look at us all and never really spoke to us again. We’d see him occasionally drift into his room with a different attractive hippy girl every so often, but he’d clearly realised everybody else was a desperate loser. People had friends over from other halls and we were a regular community for a bit, until we realised that we had nothing in common but incipient alcoholism, and all social interaction went down to grunts.

One regular visitor to our hall was a tedious Goth who believed herself to be a psychic. People who ask you if you’ve ever seen a ghost are always people who believe in ghosts. They’re limbering up to tell their own ghost story. These are always remarkably tedious efforts about feeling as if someone had brushed past them but nobody being there. I always think that if you’re lying anyway you should at least make it interesting. At the
very least, say that when you play football, the ghost of an old player who died after being struck by lightning appears to run alongside you, offering advice.

Another good tactic to get out of these conversations is to evince complete disdain for anybody who would believe in ghosts, but display a passionate conviction in the existence of ‘Space Wolves’. This works best if you have already primed other onlookers to join in with their own worrying experiences at the paws of the Space Wolves. Allow for a good half an hour of shared reminiscences of these intergalactic scavengers and their pitiless forest planet. It will then be particularly galling for the ghost-story teller to have everybody laugh uproariously at their memory of seeing their grandfather’s face at a window.

My own feeling is that ghosts are probably the unquiet spirits of people who, during their lives, were sexual voyeurs. Why else would they keep hanging around? You felt a strange draught in the room? That’s him pulling his zip down. Get a medium in.

‘I’m getting something from the other side…it’s the man who used to live here…he wants you to…shit on a glass-topped coffee table.’

For a while I did a phone-in on a campus radio show called
The Voice of America
. It was presented by an enormous, bearded American called Brad who was utterly devoid of humour in the way that only an American can be. He was notorious on campus for his banality and mirthlessness, being showered with pint glasses at the karaoke every week where he always sang a perfect rendition of ‘Rawhide’. People listened to his show to hear
the compellingly unironic way he’d introduce the Eagles or Chicago, and I’d man the phone lines to repel the constant complaints with extreme abuse. It was my stated intention to get Brad’s show banned. He could never work out if I was joking and, looking back, there’s a good chance he might have been a psychopath. I remember this as being some of the funniest work I’ve done, but clearly I was drunk. I’m sure every raving tramp in the street thinks he’s delivering a satirical monologue.

Clearly, our campus, like any campus, was full of cunts. There was a group of really lame Italian exchange students who’d go around halls with an acoustic guitar, crashing parties and singing terrible rock ballads. The whole place was full of the sort of pussies that make me think that cockroaches might take over the earth without a nuclear war. There were some of the dullest people in the world there and they all seemed to have brutally dismissive nicknames. ‘Boring, Annoying Kate’ was a pain in the arse, as was ‘Madame Yawn’. There was a guy there who was perhaps, well, retarded. Fuck knows what he was studying. He had a really pronounced lisp and did a campus radio show where everyone would phone in with requests that he’d find difficult to pronounce. It disgusted me actually, the way I’d use up all my change doing that.

National Express coaches were a big part of my life in those days. At the end of a term I’d get a coach to London, then the nine-hour night coach all the way to Glasgow. Looking back, I can see that National Express must have been one of the few companies that didn’t run criminal-record checks on employees.

If you ever meet somebody with three fingers, a swallow tattoo on his neck and a temper, there’s a fair chance he’ll have driven for them in the 1990s. Never argue with those guys. One time we were getting into Glasgow in the fog. The driver got lost and we ended up heading back out onto the motorway. Everybody was taking the piss. ‘Take us round Hampden, driver, we don’t want to miss anything on your sightseeing tour!’ The driver stopped the bus and leapt up into the aisle. He looked just like Mike Reid, with some worrying-looking prison ink.

‘Fucking shut it! If I hear one more word you’ll all be making your own fucking way to the station!’

What happened next is a good illustration of why Glasgow has never produced any truly world-class diplomats. A man stood up with his palms held out in front of him in a gently, gently manner and said,

‘Calm down…ya prick.’

Half asleep, we all had to walk up the side of the motorway to a bus-stop in Easterhouse.

I used to have to wait for ages in Victoria Coach Station on the return journey. It was Dickensian in those days, predators comfortably outnumbering victims. There was a smoky wee Turkish greasy spoon and your best bet was to nurse a few cups of coffee in there with the straps of your luggage looped around your ankle. If I had to wait during daytime I’d go over the road to the pub beside the station. This was always a certain way to get talking to a recently released convict. They get a bus voucher when they’re released and they’d all be having a few beers waiting for
their connection. I met loads of terrifying people there and, as you can imagine, a clear majority were Scottish.

I remember seeing them refurbishing that place years later and just laughing. It was getting turned into an up-market brasserie but there was no way they could possibly change the clientele. The minute they reopened, it was going to be full of maniacs and unsold ciabattas. I went in after it had opened and was shocked to find a crowd of middle-class trendies. How did they manage it? Four quid a pint.

I’ve always been drawn to people who live on the fringes of society, probably because there were a lot of points when I looked like I’d be joining them. At uni I used to go out drinking with a Scottish homeless lad I’d met through a friend. Basically, I was such a heavy drinker that nobody could keep up with me for more than a couple of days, so I’d have a whole pool of reserve drinking partners for when one of my regular buddies was resting their liver. I’d sometimes go and drink with this guy and his friends at some kind of halfway house they stayed in. The homeless get a bad press. Nobody ever mentions how incredibly friendly they are if you turn up at their hostel with quite a lot of wine.

I noticed something among the regulars that I never hear talked about much, but which seems really key to me. People’s terror of their own disorganisation and can’t-be-arsedness is why we can live in a society that is so shit to the homeless. Yes, homelessness often overwhelms people through no fault of their own but it’s related to that part of us that puts things off, that doesn’t
return calls or pay bills on time. I know that sounds terrible but it’s actually important I think. The fact that people see that side of themselves in homelessness is part of the reason that they try to ignore the homeless. In our workaholic culture we don’t want to admit to feelings of disorganisation or boredom with our jobs and lives. We don’t want to empathise, to admit that the economic game we are all playing could see us homeless too. I think that homelessness is making us ill as a society. You’re not supposed to ignore starving people every day; we are built to empathise and trying to shut that bit of ourselves down daily is really bad for everyone.

I asked one guy at the hostel how he ended up there.

‘Have you ever not paid a bill for a couple of weeks, or been supposed to phone somebody and put it off?’

I told him that of course I had.

‘Ever put it off for five or six weeks? If you just don’t pay the bill or return the call, eventually you’ll be here.’

It’s for this reason I hate
The Big Issue
. It seems that we looked at the homeless and decided that their problem was that they didn’t have anything to sell. That’s a real failure to understand the problem, the solution that would be proposed by any travelling salesman. I like the way Blair came in and went on about stamping out ‘aggressive begging’, something I don’t think anybody had ever experienced. Now the streets are a slalom of
Big Issue
sellers and Charity Cunts.

Not only am I not interested in the World Wildlife Fund, Mr Charity Beggar, neither are you. You’re hired by an agency to
represent a different cause every week. Chirpy morons who think that being friendly and extroverted is all it takes to get ahead in life. Middle age is going to hit them like a shotgun blast to the chest. You want to see something really horrifying? Sign off on a direct debit with a Charity Beggar and watch the shutters come down behind their eyes. They’re scanning the street for the next weakling. Really, these blank-eyed date rapists might as well be androids.

At some point in the first year of uni, I went into town to sleep off a crippling hangover on the beach. Turned out I’d picked Brighton’s famous nudist beach. How did I find this out? Did somebody have the good grace to tell me? No, I woke to find myself surrounded by a group of naked old people, a sight that could have defaulted the hard-on of a rapist on ecstasy. I find naturism indefensible. If there’s nothing wrong with naturism then how come I’m still banned from Euro Disney? People say the world would be a better place if everyone were naked all the time. A better place for whom? Rapists. Saying there’s nothing weird about naturism is like saying there’s nothing weird about an 80-year-old man’s massive saggy ballbag. There are bizarrely formed deep-sea fish with see-through bodies and eyes growing out their arses that are less weird than an 80-year-old man’s saggy ballbag. The only thing in the world that is weirder is an 80-year-old man’s saggy ballbag during a game of badminton. So, there’s nothing wrong about letting your 12-year-old daughter play ping pong in the
nude? With a 56-year-old dentist—who’s returning the ball without a bat?

I mean, I’d like to go about dressed as a Viking in my day-today life; but I don’t because I’m aware that would make me a weirdo. But who’s more likely to get arrested when going for a pint of milk: a Viking or someone with their cock out? It’s an experiment I’ve carried out and I can tell you…it’s both. Yet I’ve never heard of anyone being put on the Viking offenders’ register. Naturists are after all nothing more than swingers, but the worst kind of swingers—swingers who are too cowardly to let themselves be fisted in a stranger’s Jacuzzi.

Naturists make the argument that ‘it’s nothing we haven’t seen before’. I’m sorry, but that’s not true. Believe it or not I have never seen an eighteen-stone man’s sweaty testicles rest on a ping-pong table. I have never seen a 75-year-old woman’s arse splayed open as she retrieves her ball on the crazy-golf course. I don’t want to see these women naked. They look like they’ve sat on roadkill. Why do they have to be naked, live, in front of me? Why can’t you just take a naked photograph of yourself, put it on the internet and let me find it in my own good time. And trust me, I will find it.

Let’s be honest though, the ugliness is the real problem. If naturist beaches were full of people who looked like models I’d be down there with a wheelbarrow full of Kleenex and a heat pad on my wrist. Even so, I bet these beaches have perverts jacking off everywhere. Walking through that sand must be like wading through Scott’s Porridge Oats.

Anyway, I tried to ignore the naked people for a while. Then, sitting up (an effort), I tried to nonchalantly throw a pebble into the sea. It hit somebody hard on the arse. To be fair, he had a huge arse—I’d been aiming at the sea and I’d hit it instead, that’s how big it was. The nudists all started to waddle towards me angrily like obscene penguins but luckily couldn’t move too quickly over pebbles. I shall stop this memory now, as it’s distressing me.

To make beer money, I’d give tours of the campus to visiting sixth formers and their parents. I’d lie as much as possible, telling them that the refectory was a centre for animal experimentation and that once a term everybody had to dress as inmates of a concentration camp while the tutors role-played our Nazi tormentors. Once I managed to shag one of the sixth formers, quite a result for a drunken wreck peddling lies for three quid an hour. Her mum was on the tour but I managed to separate them; a championship sheepdog would have been proud of that one. I didn’t have any condoms so borrowed some from our corridor drug dealer, perhaps the only time I spoke to him. When I got back to my room I found he’d given me a pack of brutally ribbed black johnnies. She took it like I was fucking her with a shotgun.

In my second year my grant cheques were late again. One turned up right at the end of the final term and I almost died from alcohol poisoning in the summer holidays. Being skint meant I spent most of the second and third terms living on my friends’ couch. It was a three-storey house with no detectable right-angles, in which we created a biblically disgusting mess. I know you’ve
probably lived somewhere you consider to have been messy. Unless you distributed two large bags of shit across your living room with a rake, it wasn’t as messy as this place. There was a carpet of old CD covers and empty food containers that swirled dangerously underneath us like a special effect in a movie about magic tramps.

My flatmates included a very tall, well-spoken Englishman called Richard, who was an enormous sexual pervert. He came downstairs one day and told me not to use the Hoover for a while because he’d fucked it. Another bloke who lived there was an enthusiastic man-child called Ollie. He was a nice guy but incredibly distracted, strangely naÏve and he spoke in a bubbling, disbelieving way that made his voice sound like it was coming from a 4-year-old. That, and the fact that he said exactly the same kind of things as one. At the very end of the whole year it was just Ollie and I left in the house. We had literally no money and planned to get through the last week using a big bag of rice and some saffron cubes we had to flavour it with. I came home to find that Ollie had cooked the entire bag in a vast cooking pot, not realising that cooked rice goes off. There was about a stone of rice in there and some days, as we starved, we would sit round the pot at dinner time and laugh the hysterical weak laughter of the very, very hungry.