My Shit Life So Far (14 page)

‘You mean a tank of water…?’ I replied.

‘No, a bucket!’

‘Like in a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon?’

‘Yes.’

On a different occasion another guy went outside to take a mobile-phone call when we were sitting in the dressing room of Glasgow Jongleurs. The Rolling Stones were playing in town that night and of course this maniac said Mick Jagger was phoning to see if he could borrow a couple of local gags. In its own way, that’s weirder than anything the Yorkshire Ripper did.

This same guy phoned me one time and asked if he could do a weekend I had booked in with a club up north because his wife was in hospital with cancer. Her hospital was near the venue and it meant he’d be able to be by her side. Why he’d want to be zipping off from the bedside to berate students for 120 quid a night I didn’t know. Maybe they needed the money for cancer drugs or something? Of course it turned out his wife was absolutely fine, quite cheerful in fact, as she’d split up with him a couple of years before. It was worth losing the work because
every time I met him for a few years after this I’d get him to update me on his wife’s recovery. I really banged on about it incessantly. I think in the end he just told me she’d died. It’s just like the lying kids at school; the stand-up circuit is a bit dull. Those guys think that the truth is a bit too boring to tell and they’re sort of right. Mind you, comedians in general are such social retards. Every time I’m stuck in a dressing room I keep expecting Tom Cruise to turn up and drive them all to Vegas.

Having been going full time on the comedy circuit for about a year, I did a run of gigs in Dubai. It’s the only time I’ve ever done that sort of thing because I hate flying and I hate expats. There are only two reasons for someone becoming an expat. Either they’ve failed at life in Britain or they’re a paedophile. The whole British expat community there is like the residue of some experiment to clone Jeremy Clarkson. It’s full of people who can never come home because they get used to the maids and the deference. They always end up going on to other outposts of neocolonial horror and their CVs read like they’re the hero of a Joseph Conrad novel. When they come back, expats always say things like, ‘I can’t believe you still live here…’ and you know they’re only ever a few drinks off saying, ‘because of the blacks’. They always bang on about the weather and the food, like that’s more important than the place being a Third World police state. Here’s a wee rule of thumb I have (no doubt some people will find it naÏvely idealistic): never live in a country that imprisons homosexuals.

The people putting on the gigs were really decent but it took me the first week to get over the flight. I’ve always hated flying, partly because I didn’t get on a plane till I was in my twenties. I distinctly remember that first time as we roared up the runway
thinking, ‘If this thing goes any faster we’re going to take off!’ I’d take loads of Valium and sleeping pills for every flight for a while, but once I was so out of it that I seized a man on take-off and fell asleep with my arms around his neck. Perhaps I was trying to take him hostage, perhaps I’m a deeply sublimated homosexual.

The brace position they ask you to take up in the event of a crash (head between knees) is actually designed so that your teeth will stay with your corpse and they can identify the body. I reckon that if you time it just right at the moment of impact you can probably spit all your teeth into someone else’s lap, messing things up for everybody.

I hate people who say, ‘Don’t worry, if you’re in a plane crash it’ll all be over in an instant!’ That’s the problem. I can’t believe that people actually try to reassure you by saying that you’re going to be snuffed out of existence in an instant of unimaginable pain. Those who tell you there’s no such thing as a good way to die are people who have clearly never heard the phrase ‘drug-fuelled sex heart attack’. On a plane going down you’d fuck anything. I hit an air pocket last week and I had half a mind to hump the trolley. That’s why they never released the black boxes from 9/11. It’s probably nothing but sex groans and the occasional, ‘Blow this tower, Mustapha!’

I stayed in Dubai for a week or so and did a range of different gigs. Some were just like a nice club gig at home, some were like a shite gig in a pub in the Middle East. One was in an expat village—the sort of people who travel to another country
and want to be surrounded by other British people, if you can imagine that. There’s a thing that happens when you do shows where lots of people are sitting with their boss—they wonder if they’re allowed to laugh. This was exactly like that, but there was a big Scottish group who were just visiting and didn’t have to worry about whether anybody else approved. They were just killing themselves. It was great, most of the room just silent and twenty or so guys could hardly breathe. It was hugely uncomfortably, perversely enjoyable. It was the first time I realised I could totally split a room and still do well, that some people in crowds would always hate me but I didn’t really need them anymore.

Everyone on the tour was a great laugh. One of the organisers was a forty-something woman and was trying to shag one of the acts, who was horrified. She was a nice woman but, well, looked constipated. One night it was just the three of us in a hotel room, so the guy kept up an intense conversation with me about movies, desperately hoping I wouldn’t leave him alone with her. As I left, you could see real terror dawning. ‘Wait a minute, Frankie!’ he shouted desperately as I was closing the door. ‘Do you remember that movie where Eric Stoltz played a boy with a giant face? Do you?!’

I’d never been anywhere sunny before so I loved it, just laughed the whole time. I wonder how much of our national temperament, and my own, is simply due to the pish weather. I actually have a policy not to do anything major in Scotland in the winter—everybody’s in a terrible mood. A recent survey
revealed that one in ten Scots are on anti-depressants, which begs the question, what have the other nine got to be so happy about? It also reported that people in Scotland are more depressed in the winter months but I think we just hate the fact that there are twelve of them. But the truth is no poll will ever truly reflect our national character, because no poll includes a category of choked alcoholic sobs. When I was a kid there was an old Spectrum game called
The Hobbit
. One of those old type-in adventures:

‘Get the Sword!’

‘I see no Sword here.’

‘Take the Sword!’

‘What Sword?’

‘Pick up the Sword!’

‘You take the Sword. The Orc Chief kills you.’

You’d always get stuck in the Goblins’ Dungeon. For a while nobody could work out how to get out of there. You’d be sitting there for ages. After a long time (like a day or something) your character-friend Elrond would appear with a glassy look in his eyes, trying to kill you. That’s how I think of Scotland in winter—the Goblins’ Dungeon. People you know well will become unrecognisable after six months of rain. Sometimes you look into a set of glassy eyes and know they’re only a short step away from cleaving your skull with one wellplaced blow. I once did a pilot in Scotland at Christmas and it was like trying to lead a troop of depressed chimpanzees into battle.

I read recently that Andy Roddick challenged Andy Murray to a competition to see how long they could stay in an ice bath, and lost. Obviously Roddick forgot Murray is Scottish. Between October and March this whole country is basically one giant ice bath. At one point Murray actually broke into a sweat. If he’d challenged Murray to sit in a hot tub he’d probably have killed him.

My marriage fell apart quite quickly. I stopped drinking for about nine months and my wife didn’t seem to like me when I was conscious. I left on a bus with all my stuff and went back to Glasgow, my life falling to bits behind me like a temple that’s been robbed by Indiana Jones.

Tommy and Jane were off on holiday so I got to flat-sit their house for a bit, do some gigs and gradually piece my head back together. They had a flat in Marchmont and it was good to live the life of Inspector Rebus for a bit, walking round the Meadows, listening to their Seventies music and often popping out for a fish supper for my tea. The only rule they had was not to use their bedroom because I was still smoking at the time, and Tommy just hated the smell of smoke in his bedroom. One night, one of the barmaids from the Stand came back. She said quite casually that she had a boyfriend, so couldn’t do anything sexual with me, but I could do whatever I liked to her. Encouraged, I made a pretty good effort at fucking her to death. She could have checked her fanny into a Women’s Refuge. Of course, I had got the date of
Tommy and Jane’s return wrong and they walked in to find me fucking one of their staff, in their bed, a lit cigarette smouldering in the ashtray.

After so many years in England I was really glad to be home. Devolution started the year I moved back, although I think nearly half of the electorate didn’t vote in that election. That got written up as voter apathy. Quite typically, vainglorious politicians look at a statistic like that and think, ‘What’s wrong with people? Why don’t they use their vote?’ You never hear them asking, ‘What’s wrong with us? Why aren’t we worth voting for?’ It seems to me that if they want to get people excited, the SNP should play up the party element of independence. The slogan should be ‘Independence—It’ll be a hell of a night! Well, let’s be honest, month.’ Glasgow city centre will have streets running with rivers of whisky and blood, as drunken revellers spill their whisky into the long-standing blood rivers. Edinburgh will have millions of pounds’ worth of fireworks, which on the stroke of midnight will be launched at head-height towards England. Aberdeen, as on every BBC Hogmanay, will be Stripping the Willow. I’m not convinced that this isn’t just a tape that Aberdeen puts on for the rest of us while locally showing something which more closely reflects Aberdeen’s real culture—like a porno version of
A Fistful of Dollars
. Dundee, of course, will be bedlam. Murders, rockets being fired into the sky…who knows when news of independence will manage to seep through?

My friend Scott had just got divorced as well. He decided that we should both go on holiday to get hammered and blow
off some steam. Scott is a wonderful and hilarious human being. He’s a theatre director and thus appears gay but isn’t. I always find those guys to be like some jungle spider whose markings make them look like some kind of plant so they can lure insects. Much like the jungle spider, Scott had to make do with about one victim a year. Scott is always tense and slightly worried, always trying to quit smoking, always in some kind of slight distress—he’s like a beautiful, bittersweet sitcom that never got made. He has, I should add, the most remarkably brown and crinkled face. Once I asked his baby daughter to describe him in three words. ‘That’s easy!’ she replied. ‘A paper bag!’ One of his more endearing traits is a seemingly endless and original set of euphemisms he has for his own penis. There’s a new one every day; ‘The Kidney Wiper’ was my favourite, until he came up with ‘The Vomiting Milkman’.

Somehow Scott had managed to become quite well known as a director of youth theatre in Romania. I’m sure ‘quite well known as a director of youth theatre in Romania’ is used in many social circles as a synonym for ‘paedophile’, but Scott was actually incredibly talented at his job. He had some seminars to do while we were over but I was free to focus entirely on drinking colourless local liquids until I forgot my marriage or just shat a lung.

I got aboard the plane and started to put in some work towards getting drunk. Scott, it was clear from an emotional check-in, was in the grip of a crippling hangover and desperate for a drink. He sank a double vodka and the relief or shock or
something made his leg shoot out involuntarily into the aisle, accompanied by a loud cry of pain mixed with triumph. It should have been clear then that the trip was going to be
Withnail and I in the Third World
.

We landed pissed and were met by our unflappable guide, Claudio. I stood at the carousel trying to recognise my luggage and still hadn’t managed to form any kind of greeting. Finally I alighted on an ice-breaker.

‘What would you say is the worst film ever made?’ I asked, attempting to look him in the eye.

‘
Clash of the Titans!
’ he beamed back, like that was the first question everybody asked him.

At that time, Bucharest was full of stray dogs. It might still be full of them, I’m certainly not going back to the shithole to find out. The dogs lived in terror of the people, who exhibited a blasÉ brutality towards them. There was one town on the trip that didn’t have a dog problem. The local mayor had promised to get rid of them in his election manifesto. When he got in he had them rounded up and fed to the lions in the local zoo. It’s only when you go to Europe that you realise how unbelievably kind to animals the British are. The Romanian equivalent of
Pet Rescue
would feature a naked Rolf Harris running through a burning petting zoo with a club.

Scott had tried to prepare me for the shocking poverty, warned me how much of a psychic torpedo that could be. I laughed it off right up to the point where it triggered a near nervous breakdown. Old women washing their faces in
puddles, a 5-year-old boy prostitute tottering towards our cab in high heels. One day we stepped out of our flat to see an old man on his knees pounding the pavement with a tiny hammer. We just cracked—laughed and laughed till we were nearly sick at the horror we had found there and the horror we had brought.

Scott could speak Romanian quite well, he told me, and would certainly throw himself into it. He’d really roar the words out and wave his arms about happily. Strangely, most of the locals he knew seemed a bit reserved, even puzzled. One night we were drinking with some artists, and Scott went off to the toilet. One of them said something that reduced the others to hysterics. I asked our guide what he’d said.

‘He said that Scott speaks Romanian like a handicapped man from Hungary…who has not visited Romania for some time.’

Scott had a habit of wandering about the flat naked. He is a big man and has a body sort of like an enormous turtle. I would lie in bed hungover of a morning, hoping that he’d put on some clothes before I got up. He’s an impatient chap and he’d march up and down frustratedly outside my room, eager to set off on the day’s trip to some deserted shipbuilding town. The local allmeat diet took its toll and one day I was unable to get up so just lay in bed farting, loud ones that sounded like a round of applause in hell. I could see the big, pink shadow of Scott pacing angrily just beyond the dimpled glass of the door. He burst into my room, actually burst in naked, to a room so filled with eldritch fumes that he was hit with a sort of backdraught. Straining to sit
up, I could see his huge naked form kneeling in the hallway, retching onto the floor like a dying animal.

At the very end of the trip we went to a Romanian wedding. I challenged everybody at the wedding to a drinking competition. Obviously everybody had a lifetime’s experience of drinking the local moonshines and prison-liquors, so it wasn’t going to be easy. Still, nobody had approached drinking with quite my level of single-minded dedication so it ended up being between me and a grumpy, alcoholic artist. I remember his last words being ‘Let’s call this a draw’, as he lapsed into unconsciousness and slid off his chair onto the floor. This was the very last drinking I did and I certainly bowed out in style. It just seemed like a good note to go out on. Also, I suddenly saw very clearly that it would ruin my life and kill me.