My Shit Life So Far (12 page)

Strangely, the film
Easy Rider
dominated life in the house. A couple of the guys were really obsessed with it, because they loved the look of that period and the music. It was a real big thing in Brighton then, that whole late-Sixties vibe. Anyway,
because I was often in the house skint, I have seen
Easy Rider
about thirty times. I’ve watched it backwards twice. I’d like to say that you notice new stuff every time, but all I actually noticed was that after about twelve times it makes you want to kill yourself.

There was a fucked up old telly in the living room. For some reason, when the picture would go it would respond quite well to someone jumping up and down on the floor. ‘Bobby Gillespie Starjumps’ we’d call them and we got quite good at gauging how many were required. The picture would start to loop and someone would say, ‘Three Bobby Gillespie Starjumps’ and we’d maybe play cards to see who had to do them, but it generally worked. When we moved out we took that telly into the back garden and smashed it to death with bricks.

We’d play cards to decide pretty much everything. Who had to make the tea, or go to the shops. Towards the end, the whole place was just a stinking armpit and we had to clean it up before moving out. We played cards to decide who did what. Nobody wanted to do anything, so we played an epic card game that lasted for about five days. Five days in which lesser men would have been cleaning the house. I finished last and had to do the dishes, which we had never, ever done. It was truly fucking disgusting, unidentified textures brushing against my hands in the water like obscene wee creatures of the deep. Jacques Cousteau would have shat himself at some of this stuff. Mushrooms were growing out of meals people had eaten months before. Like a man, rather than thinking I needed to be tidier in future, I reflected that I needed to work on my card playing.

My drinking took on a new regularity during my second and third year at uni. When I had money I’d like to just sit in the pub on my own during the day, get drunk and read. There’s an insidious side to alcohol where people think it’s a great social lubricant, which it can be in moderation. My experience is that people often use it to cocoon a part of themselves and it’s ultimately a drug of isolation. It’s a depressant and its effects are mainly concerned with bits of the brain it shuts down, not opens up. I remember reading an interview with George Best where the interviewer met him down a pub where he’d go every day to drink a few pints, read the papers and do the crossword. He’d get really annoyed at people coming up to say hello, even though it must have happened constantly, what with the whole being George Best thing. That’s where drinking takes you ultimately—it’s an isolating thing that we do socially. It’s also a drug that allows us to show emotion, in a culture where we’re not permitted to do that very much, so people get addicted for social and emotional reasons as much as chemical ones.

Nowadays there’s so much fuss about binge drinking? I mean, what exactly is binge drinking? Isn’t it what we used to call ‘drinking’. We’re told that people are ‘binge drinking over periods of two or three days’. Surely that’s what we used to call a weekend. I was reminded of the phenomenon passing through Kilmarnock recently. Youths rampaged through the town centre like they were in a zombie movie designed to promote tracksuits. I was getting a train home on a Saturday and all the Celtic and Rangers fans got off the incoming train from the matches they’d
been at, formed an orderly group at one end of the station and had a punch-up. It was like a regular chore they had to get through. I know I never got far with my urban-planning course, but I’ve always thought that Kilmarnock was a good example of why you should always build a town around a river, rather than a bus station.

I used to read all the time while I was drinking—you absorb information quite well in that relaxed state. That’s probably why a lot of alcos get into horse racing and so on—there’s a slight drunkenness that’s almost like a trance state for taking in information. Comedy has a lot do with absorbing stuff and regurgitating it. It’s often to do with knowledge—blurting out the name of just the stupidest historical figure or comic-book character or fruit-based dessert. I think that’s the reason a lot of comics are alcos or stoners, or, like me, have been both.

The next year I lived with some friends who were in a band. They weren’t students, just really mental lads from Portsmouth. They were pretty nuts, doing the odd fuckyouishly confrontational live show, and generally seeming to be up for a bit of a fight. My grant didn’t turn up again and I spent a month stuck in the house with their massive comic collections.

That was what really got me into comics in the way I am now. They literally had thousands of comics and, with nothing else to do, I hot-housed their entire childhood of energy beams and parallel worlds. It was worth being skint to live a whole other childhood, finding the old
Justice Society of America
and
2000 AD
and
Eightball
as my stomach growled in our freezing house.
I still think that comics are one of the quickest ways to encounter alternative ideas. If all you’ve done is watch mainstream media, or read the books that get publicity, comics will blow your mind.

That house was at the top of one of the steepest streets anywhere; Albion Hill it’s called and on certain parts of the ascent you feel like Spiderman. I’d like to see Kate Bush try running up that fucking hill. Sometimes I’d just be too pissed or tired to get up the fucker and would crash on the couch of a friend who lived at the bottom. There was a single dilapidated bench halfway up, at exactly the point where you could have really used a tent and some oxygen.

I found uni a bit of a drag towards the end. I wasn’t hugely interested in the course or in many of the people. I think university insulates people from the real world. I’m all for being insulated from the real world, but maybe not in the way a culturaltheory lecturer is. Maybe more in the way that Prince is insulated from it, with gymnastic superhero sex and endless praise. There was a real politeness to seminars and all the discussions felt slightly perfunctory. I could never shake the feeling that most people in my classes would never read any of this stuff—or even think about it—ever again in their lives.

I remember quite a left-wing academic having a go at a student for being late and the guy explaining that he didn’t have the train fare and had to hitchhike in. The tutor just didn’t believe him, saying that the train was only a couple of quid and everyone had a couple of quid. This tutor was a Marxist, but had forgotten sometimes people don’t have a couple of quid to spare.
Actually, I was the student, and I did have money and I’d turned up deliberately late to avoid doing a presentation I hadn’t done any work on. But I feel the point still stands.

I hitched quite a lot at uni. I’d like to say it wasn’t frightening but it always, always was. One guy who regularly picked me up had a wooden hand and didn’t seem to be in total control of his vehicle. He never spoke either, slaloming the five miles into uni in total silence. Recently I read that the economic downturn in Britain has led to an increase in hitchhiking—and an even bigger increase in sales of gaffer tape and spades.

Graduation went alphabetically and you had to sit through the whole weirdness of it. Seeing adults with their parents is intrinsically wrong and you couldn’t help thinking that in an older, better world, by the time people were adults their parents ought to have been dead. I went to the trouble of getting a doctor’s note saying I had a kidney infection so that I could leave after my name got called and sit getting wasted in the bar, watching though frosted glass as beaming young men and women waved goodbye to university and hello to jobs in Brighton’s graduate graveyard telesales industry.

After I graduated, age 22, I got a job working for a mental-health agency. There was a big asylum closing down near Brighton and people were being re-housed in the community. To ease the transition, people like me who’d be doing support work in the homes worked in the old asylum, mostly just chatting to people and taking them out on the odd day trip. The asylum was pretty tatty and the patients’ rooms were just hospital-style cubicles, beds with a curtain pulled round them. There was lino everywhere. Lino not just on the floor but five feet up the walls, saying this institution has some interesting situations involving shit.

Some of the staff had been there for twenty years and were crazier than the patients. There was an orderly who was a huge Cornishman, built like a wrestler. He’d turn up at 7.30 every morning and go into the patients’ telly room. Then he’d push about ten of the chairs together to construct a makeshift double bed and go to sleep until lunch.

A lot of the patients should never have been there. They’d been sectioned in the 1960s for things like depression, low IQs and alcoholism. There were some real characters too. A particular favourite was a well-dressed old guy who’d come into the telly room most days with an old vinyl record under his arm. It was ‘The Stripper’, that old, faux-sexy tune they’d always play
years ago when someone stripped in a comedy sketch. He’d put it on and do this really stiff dance to it, arms held tightly to his sides, leaning forward from the hips and making careful eyecontact with everybody in the room. People ignored him and tried to watch
Countdown
but there was a scratch in the record that meant it never stopped. It could turn into a real battle of wills.

Another old gent thought he was Superman. He wore a really tight three-piece suit and spoke in a bizarre series of winks, clicks and whistles. I was intrigued by his Superman delusion and sometimes asked him about it. He would deny it at first, but this turned out to be a ploy to protect his secret identity. Once I went to fetch him for lunch and he was standing on his bed with his arms stretched out flying. He gave me a click and a wink and said, ‘Well, now you know!’

I’d work in community houses too. It was great to see some of those people I’d got to know in that horrible hospital coming out and living in lovely suburban houses. I’d cook meals, clean, do the washing-up. All stuff I’d rarely do in my own house so I liked the novelty. I really enjoyed the nights when I had to sleep over; I’d sit up late with everybody watching TV and smoking and telling me their crazy life stories.

Sometimes I’d take people out to places they wanted to go. There was a little catatonic bloke called Brian who I’d take to the pub. He would never say a word. Sometimes he’d stare down at the table but occasionally he’d look up and smile, like he wanted me to talk. I’d sit there and talk to him about anything I could
think of: football, politics, people I knew. When he was in the mood he’d just sit there and nod happily.

One guy wanted to go to church on a Sunday and Brian came down too. This guy was an elderly schizophrenic but also had something a bit like Tourette’s. He’d often say pretty inappropriate stuff, always in a high-pitched chirping voice. The Church of England service is incredibly similar to the Catholic one, with the same fruity robes and hats. I can’t understand the Anglican Church being so down on homosexuality. If you don’t like gays, stop acting so gay. As the service started he launched into a refrain that he was to keep up for the whole thing. ‘The vicar’s bald. I’ve got a penis!’ he said, loudly and relentlessly. After about an hour of this Brian looked up at me. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak.

‘This bloke is fucking nuts!’ he said ruefully.

There’s an interesting theory that madness is part of an evolutionary strategy. Diseases that are harmful are something that we generally evolve a resistance to. Madness has gradually increased, perhaps because the associated creativity is helpful to the species as a whole. Clearly, this is a theory devised by someone who never worked in a care home where they’d have to spend a significant part of an evening persuading an old man in his pants not to eat a family-sized block of cheese.

Occasionally patients would do a runner. Just walk away and keep going. One day Brian went missing for a wee bit. ‘How far could he get?’ I thought. He walked with a bit of a shamble and I’d never seen him move quicker than, say, a zombie. Turned out
he had form and had once made it to Watford, where someone found him sitting at the side of the motorway with his shoes all worn out. This time he turned up at the bottom of the garden, thank God. I heard recently that a psychiatrist is running a trial to fit OAPs suffering from dementia with satellite navigation devices. If they want to give the elderly their freedom and dignity back they should do what we did for our granddad and fit them with a retractable leash. It sounds cruel but he never got lost or had an accident after that. Mind you, he never suffered from dementia either.

While I was working at the mental-health agency I lived in a big, shared house with a bunch of strangers. I think I just met a dodgy landlord in a pub and he gave me a room there. It was three guys working in graduate graveyard jobs in telephone sales. They were all ridiculously ambitious and committed to their horrifying company, and talked upbeat business bullshit. My kitchen of an evening was like a prototype of
The Apprentice
, my soul withering inside me as they presented tales of minor sales triumphs. Between them they possessed the moral value of a cat. It did mean I had the house to myself, because their employer had them working unpaid overtime and they were always sweating about some target or appraisal.

No doubt these guys have now all had their jobs outsourced to India. It always amused me that India didn’t get the one telephone industry where we really could do with Indians on the phone. The Samaritans would benefit greatly if we had people on the line in Mumbai providing context for our trivial depressions.
You’d certainly have difficulty explaining your anxiety about having your in-laws over for Christmas to a guy who’d just watched his family being swept away in a flood.

I was one of those people you sometimes meet in care work who are quite fastidious about looking after their clients, but struggle to look after themselves. My fridge was like an ‘Expert Level’ episode of
Ready, Steady, Cook
(‘Let’s see what Frankie can make with an egg and some Lucozade’). I never bothered to get a duvet and slept in a sleeping bag, and for some reason had decorated my room with garden gnomes. My employers liked me though because I was always keen to do sleepovers. Other people didn’t like those because they had lives and families. I just had a really shit house.

One day one of my flatmates had a day off at the same time as me. I could hear him downstairs playing music and knew I wouldn’t be able to leave the house without having a long, harrowing conversation with him. I did what any reasonable person would do and shinned down the drainpipe. Hats off to the East Sussex police. They got a call about a burglar and had apprehended me before I got to the end of my street. I explained that I’d just been trying to avoid my flatmate and they frogmarched me back there so he could verify my story. He stood in the doorway, apparently unmoved, as I explained that I disliked him so much I had jumped out of a first-floor window. The police shuffled off looking embarrassed enough for all of us.

I have to say I’ve met some really decent coppers. Robert Anton Wilson is a writer who wrote a bunch of great books
about freeing your mind. One of his first exercises is a little list of dogmas you should try to challenge yourself with. One of them is ‘a cop, is a cop, is a cop’. It was hard to get my head around at first because as kids we were terrified of the police. I have a really vivid memory of walking with my mum while a teenager was hauled past surrounded by half a dozen officers. He was stiff with fear, held between two of them like a surfboard. Turned out he’d stolen a bottle of lemonade from a delivery lorry. A bold move, as it had been making a delivery to the police station. But at least he wasn’t at one of the G20 protests. Have you seen the YouTube video of the protestor being assaulted by police officers? It’s like a deleted scene from
The Lord of the Rings
. I keep expecting the camera to pan up to show the burning eye of Sauron glowing above the Bank of England. Eyewitnesses say she was definitely provoking the officer before she was assaulted. She’s lucky she wasn’t totally innocent otherwise she’d have gotten seven bullets in the head. The police officer hit her with a baton after she shouted ‘I’m a woman!’ at him. It’s almost as if he thought she was reminding him—‘Oh yes, the small ones, they have weak legs, thanks for the tip.’ These were the officers most highly trained to deal with incidents like this. What the hell were the untrained ones doing? Headbutting clergymen?

At least the video footage taken during the G20 protests proves that the police aren’t prejudiced. They don’t discriminate against hitting anyone, be they male or female, protestor or man on the way home from work. In every report that described the clashes with police the word ‘apparently’ was used before the
word ‘hit’. This suggests an element of doubt as to whether or not people were actually hit, as if there might be a chance that the videos are being played in reverse by mistake and could actually show the police helping people up off the ground with Velcrocovered batons. That whole scandal made me angry. The internet’s got so many clips of policemen beating people up, it’s a nightmare finding any porn.

Once the asylum closed completely, I got bored of the care in the community element of the job. I was just taking old people round charity shops and to the Bingo. To be honest, if you do that eight hours a day you start to smell stale urine everywhere.

I got a place doing a teacher-training course in Edinburgh. Like most people who go into teaching I was there because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. There’s a real irony that just as teenagers reach their most cynical and judgemental they are sent to be educated by a bunch of people who are there because they have failed at life. Lots of people were there because their parents were teachers. The police are a bit like that too. There’s a good point made about all this by Grant Morrison, who says that Britain has a bit more of a caste system than it realises.

I hate the way that education gets used as a political plaything. What was that thing recently? Teaching British values in school? That’s one step away from the prime minister throwing on a general’s uniform and having a missile parade. ‘And
Brown’s popularity has soared since he unveiled his pet python.’ School needs to be made more relevant to young people. They should test them on subjects that will come in useful—how to roll out of your kidnappers’ moving car, blowjobs and maybe dungeon maintenance.

A recent report said that one in five teenagers self-harm. They could do with a good slap, but that’s just playing into their hands. And Gordon Brown announced he wants to eradicate child poverty and stop child prostitution. Make your mind up! Young people are dying in our streets and this surely means there are questions we should be asking ourselves. Questions like what happens to all their iPods? Do the police get to keep them or is there an auction? There is talk of having 16-year-olds eligible to be those support police guys. What are they called? I simply don’t care enough to find out. 16-year-old police? Do their powers include making a gun with their fingers and threatening to get their dad? Hiring teenagers sends out a message to community-support police everywhere. Basically their employers are telling them that they are only in a job because they haven’t yet finalised training monkeys to take over. The minute they can get them to stop crapping in their helmets, you guys are out on your ear. I seriously think that teenagers are now the only people who can handle the police drinking culture.

I’ve always had a real problem with secondary education. It seems to exist to teach conformity and obedience over anything else. For me, it’s all in the bell. The bell goes and you move along to the next class. It doesn’t matter what you’re learning about, it
could be
Hamlet
or dark matter. That bell goes and you trot along because nothing is more important than the system.

My course qualified me to teach English and was full of the sort of boring, conformist bastards that made Hitler’s rise to power so easy. I thought this was terrible at first, then once I’d been in some staffrooms I realised that these tedious flesh puppets were going to fit in perfectly. I always got on fine with the kids in schools; it was the teachers I struggled with. People who wear tweed and eat their lunch out of Tupperware might have things to tell your children, but those things are going to be thumpingly dull.

After years of thinking about it, it was during teacher training that I finally started doing comedy, aged 23. The Stand had a comedy club in the basement of W. J. Christie’s bar in Edinburgh. Plonked at one end of a strip-club area known as the ‘pubic triangle’, it was run by Tommy Sheppard and Jane McKay, a couple so much larger than life they would have been scarcely believable if they’d turned up in Dickens. Tommy described himself as ‘a businessman’, which I later discovered is a Scottish synonym for ‘crafty’. Jane compered the club and was always outrageous, hilarious, emotional and drunk.

I just turned up one night with a bunch of mates and asked if I could do a spot. Tommy told me that I’d have to book a spot and that obviously I couldn’t just turn up and go on. I was disappointed and told him I’d come down with about ten people and we’d all have bought tickets. That changed things completely and he stuck me on for five minutes. It was a tiny little room holding
maybe thirty or so, with a bar at one side, a dressing area in the fire escape and a mirror high above the bar. From the stage you could see your own face in the mirror, desperately trying to keep it together.

It went really well, even though my act was rubbish. Everybody starts off rubbish; it’s a lot to do with trial and error, so how could they not? I think I started with some joke about how I’d like to know if I was going to be murdered so I could go around behaving really strangely for a few days just to mess up the reconstruction on
Crimewatch
. For the first year my act was all jokes about murders and people losing their legs and stuff like that. An ignored insight into what teacher training was doing to my sanity.