My Shit Life So Far (15 page)

Fresh off the booze, I decided to take up taekwondo, which I loved but was pretty terrible at. There was a really great school in Glasgow run by a proper Korean grandmaster and I’d do that two or three days a week. I even went on a week’s training camp at one point. The whole thing is built on ‘Indomitable Spirit’, an ability to never give in. During camp I found that I had a ‘Defatigible Spirit’ and gave in. I really miss it, actually. My next tour is going to be the last one and hopefully I can get into a martial art after it’s all over. There’s just no way that being able to do a rowdy gig in Hull makes you cooler than somebody who can punch their way through a wall.

Apart from the taekwondo I was spending a lot of my social time at the Stand. One of the bar staff was a guy in his late twenties called Rob. He was a nice man, with a tremendous and undermining hunger for drugs and sex that he was always trying to keep a lid on. He was like a cartoon—you could see all the vices he held at bay written in strained lines across his face. He was just desperately trying to keep a grip. I knew him as this very quiet, sincere guy but occasionally you heard stories of the door to his personal dungeon blowing open and the craziness he’d get up to. One night I stayed at his flat after a show and in the morning we got a cab back to the club. The taxi driver was giving off this really weird vibe, silently watching us in the mirror for the whole journey then taking his fare without a word.

‘Wonder what’s up with that guy,’ I laughed.

Rob revealed that he may have phoned the cab company the week before while high. Someone who may well have been that driver had arrived to find Rob with his shirt off dancing in his driveway to pounding techno shouting, ‘Have you got any drugs?’ For future reference, it would seem that cabbies hate that.

I went on the Stand’s inaugural Highland Tour. There were five of us in Tommy’s Mercedes doing gigs in towns with names so Scottish they sounded like they’d been made up for a Disney musical. Jane was compering on the tour and was particularly challenging. Very funny doing the shows, not so funny treating us all to a synaptic meltdown as Tommy drove at 100 mph along
country roads. I decided to poison her. I got a whole load of powerful diarrhoea drugs and was going to spike her drink until one of the other acts talked me out of it. He made a convincing case that there was a fair chance that diarrhoea wouldn’t make her quit the tour and we just tried to tune out the madness for another week.

The Stand was also running workshops for beginner comedians and I would teach at some of them. The students formed a bewildering and exhaustive wall chart of the nuances of mental illness. One early class involved a big guy who had jokes that sort of went:

‘I was fucking this coon…It was a racooon!…I was fucking this black bird…feathers everywhere!’

I said I didn’t think that on a Saturday night the use of the word ‘coon’ was going to go down particularly well. One of the other guys at the back threw his hands up in exasperation and said, ‘Isn’t this just political correctness gone mad?!’

Later at the bar I suggested he say, ‘I was fucking a pair of blue tits. I’m a necrophiliac!’ and he told me he found that utterly offensive.

There was a little bloke there who, how can I put this, didn’t have Down’s syndrome but looked like he did. Nothing was actually wrong with him, but something clearly wasn’t right. He had two different acts, one as himself and one as a female poet. Every show, he’d agonise endlessly about which of these terrible, mirthless acts to perform. When he’d dress up as a woman there was a genuine thrill of Victorian circus horror that would
run through the crowd—somebody once described it as looking like the scene where ET staggers out of the cupboard. Once I was compering a new-act night in Edinburgh and he was asking me whether I thought he should do his character that night. I grumpily told him to just do it as himself and he blurted, ‘But I wore these all the way here!’ and turned round to reveal that he had an enormous pair of fake boobs under his jumper. He’d sat on the train from Glasgow—looking at his best he’d have drawn a freak-show crowd in Middle Earth—wearing these huge pointy knockers.

There was another guy called ‘Mudfinger’. He was quite a bammy Glasgow guy who had hit on the idea of playing a Tolkienesque character who could turn things to mud with his magical finger. He’d come on stage wearing a bed-sheet toga and his magical finger was an empty toilet-roll tube he’d taped to his hand. He’d do a bit of a preamble, explaining his power and then, fair fucks to the guy, would genuinely start trying to turn stuff into mud. That’s where it could start to go a bit awry, because he never did get the hang of actually turning things into mud, but you’ve got to love a tryer haven’t you? The audiences thought not and nearly killed him on a few occasions.

I got genuinely depressed by the workshops in the end. The sheer unrelenting needy madness of the fuckers was too much for me, and I’d worked in an asylum. The last one I did was with the comedian Susan Morrison. While they went through their acts on the stage I found a Valium someone had given me on a night out
once that I’d always kept in my wallet for emergencies. I swallowed it surreptitiously and lay down behind the bar, praying that Susan would be able to think of something positive for me to say to them.

There’s a real link between comedy and mental illness, I think largely because travelling and doing gigs is fucking exhausting. Put Richard Dawkins on a train to gig round the north of England and in ten days he’ll be throwing shit at the walls. Speaking of being mental, there’s no easy way to break this to you. I saw a UFO. Two of them actually, hovering above Charing Cross in Glasgow. Now what the fuck would aliens be doing there? It’s the sort of place you only stop at if it’s on the way somewhere; you’d never actually go there deliberately. It just seems really weird that aliens would travel millions of miles and manifest there, rather than say the West End or Merchant City. I was stepping out of a cafÉ and a big thing that looked like three interconnected silver balls stopped and hovered maybe 500 feet up in the air. Another thing that was exactly the same joined it, they both sat there completely still for a bit, then shot off together at a really ridiculous speed. I ran in that general direction for a bit, hoping I’d get another look. In Glasgow a running man, looking desperately up into the sky, doesn’t attract any attention at all.

I don’t really believe in aliens as such. I suppose I feel that alien life would be genuinely alien, not ships or humanoids or whatever. Terence McKenna has an essay about how magic mushrooms might be alien, that a different kind of
thought is as close as we’ll get to an alien experience. That’s what I think an alien contact would be like, an unforeseeable event that would leave us with a new number between one and ten or a single word that described the feeling when you got a really bad DVD and it wasn’t quite shit enough to be funny.

However, I do believe that the government has a lot of military hardware it develops and doesn’t tell us about. That’s what I reckon these things were, unmanned drone technology. I told everybody when this happened and they all put it down to me having drunk a whole cafetiÈre of coffee just before I saw them. Trust me, as a comedy writer I have drunk as much coffee as anybody in the world. If that stuff made you hallucinate UFOs my life would have been a lot more fucking interesting. But I do have it on good authority that our governments made contact with aliens years ago. They came here looking for water for their dying planet. Now all they want is cocaine.

Why is it that even though there are now great cameras on mobile phones, every UFO picture is still a blurry shot of what looks like a Fray Bentos pie tin being thrown over a hedge? Bonnybridge in Scotland is one of the top places for sightings. Then again, in Bonnybridge you’re an alien if you have ten fingers. Files were recently released that are being called Britain’s X-Files. They’re quite a bit shitter than the American X-Files though. They get abductions, cows missing organs and the alien probes up their bottoms. What have we got in our X-Files? An
out-of-focus picture of a kite and an eyewitness account from a drunk man of mysterious lights appearing in the sky over Gatwick. I mean, why do aliens always abduct rural alcoholics? If we travelled for the thousands of years it would take to find intelligent life, I doubt we’d say, ‘Let’s go over and talk to that guy, the one who’s crapping into his own hand. He must be some sort of ambassador.’

I’m sure it was totally unrelated to my UFO sighting but I was smoking a fair bit of dope then, mostly as a sort of mind salt that made bad television palatable. Eventually you realise that you are pretty much constructing your own shows, bathed in a flickering ultraviolet banality while writing parallel telly in your head. Most of the telly was rubbish and I needed the dope to liven it up. But I did make a few good discoveries. One of my all-time heroes is now a guy called Tom Weir. He was a Scottish walker and climber who did a show called
Weir’s Way
in the early Eighties. It has an ethereal quality, like it could have been made a hundred years ago. Or perhaps it’s that Scotland in 1982 was quite like the nineteenth century. He simply asked people about stuff that nobody else would ask. I remember a show where he asked an old miner what he used to get in his pieces, and there was a fantastic one where he went to a Scottish village where Lawrence of Arabia spent some time after a nervous breakdown. Little is known of Lawrence’s time there, but Tom managed to track down a man who, as a wee boy, had run errands for him.

‘So what can you tell us about T. E. Lawrence?’

‘Well, Tom, he loved a Mint Imperial!’

There’s another great episode where he visited a school on an island and talked to this frightening-looking headmistress with thick glasses, who had modelled her hairstyle on Einstein. He spoke to her about the difficulties of schooling children on an island and she talked proudly of the new school computer. Cut to a loving shot of an old BBC Acorn computer in a shed somewhere, a shot that goes on for ages. Tom seemed enthused and asked if the kids could use the computer whenever they liked.

‘Oh, no’, she replied, shocked. ‘We can’t be sending Mr McKenzie down to switch on the generator every day!’

I also started doing Mexican magic mushrooms with Paul Marsh. They used to be available legally from headshops and are a tremendous thing—they give you a real feeling of poetic clarity. Once I saw the comic-book hero Iron Man appear silhouetted on my bedroom wall. I knew that if I took more mushrooms, Iron Man would walk out of the wall and start speaking to me, so I went to bed. A missed opportunity. Another time I became obsessed with the idea that the mushrooms had let me see an important truth that explained everything and desperately looked for pen and paper to write it down. When I got up in the morning I discovered that in the centre of a sheet of A4 I had written in tiny letters, ‘Language is meaningless.’

I started compering the Stand’s Thursday nights every week. I did Glasgow for a bit and later did a couple of years of the same thing in Edinburgh. It was interesting to do the same local gig so often. After a while, I could walk through town on my way there and sense how many people would be at the show and what the atmosphere would be like.

As with anything you overdo, a lot of weird stuff started to happen. I remember doing the Thursday that was the first ever night of the Glasgow Comedy Festival. A woman went nuts screaming that she was on anti-depressants and they were bombing Baghdad. I’m still not sure how the two were linked, but some audience members took it upon themselves to pick her up and run out through the fire doors with her, using her as a kind of battering ram. Encouraged by this, the next week when I had another nutter throw her drink at me, I just asked a really big punter to pick her up and run away. He did, and neither of them ever came back. They both left their coats. He might have killed her for all I know. I hope he has.

That said, any function has the potential to be pretty weird. I know a comic who had to do a student ball somewhere. It was fancy dress and the only person who came into the bit where he was performing was a student dressed as a jester, with a bell on the end of his hat. The organisers still insisted the comic did his full show.

‘40 minutes I did,’ he told me, ‘and that fucking bell didn’t ring once.’

Once I performed at some kind of student ball at Cambridge at about two in the morning. I find it difficult to be on stage at a
time when I’m normally a couple of hours into a sexually charged nightmare. To worsen the matter, I drank one of those brutal energy drinks. This one might as well have had the slogan ‘A 36-hour erection in a can’. There was a fair bit of heckling, which I could only deal with by threatening to come off stage and kill people. This went down pretty well, I think because people thought I was some sort of ironic Scottish character act, rather than genuinely suppressing a murderous, sleep-deprived rage. As I left, a hypnotist was taking the stage. How hard can it be to hypnotise a bunch of drunken students at two in the morning? I can only hope he led them all off like the Pied Piper and drowned them in the river.

The next night I was in Scotland to perform in a castle for an association of small-shop owners (‘No Muslim jokes please, Frankie’). It was a lot more fun with pipers, me and then a display of falconry. There’s nothing like waiting to go on stage and being told to keep it tight because it’s ‘past the eagle’s bedtime’.

I kept doing the Edinburgh show for way too long because one of the barmaids was really attractive. In fact, there aren’t words to describe it. She was really attractive in the way that the Taj Mahal is really attractive. I’ve always been attracted to women who are out of my league and it’s gotten easier to find them as I’ve got older and uglier. It wasn’t a lust thing, more an admiration of beauty; everybody has a view they love and that was the view I loved. I’d pretend to be looking out at the audience pre-show and would actually just watch her, boredly
washing tumblers. The other comedians all thought I was obsessed with what our audience looked like. She hated comedy, making her perfect. I didn’t really ever get to know her properly. It probably would have spoiled it all.