My Shit Life So Far (8 page)

The school had a nice policy of trying to do stuff for elderly people in the community. Every Christmas we’d be put into groups to make up a food parcel for the old fuckers. The teachers supervised but really only checked them by weight, so we’d try to make them as bizarre and unhelpful as possible. One year myself and the Marinelli twins gave someone a box containing two out-of-date industrial tins of pilchards from their dad’s shop; every available flavour of Angel Delight; a tin of curried beans that had been in my house for so long it was almost an heirloom; and an almost complete pack of Top Trumps: Rally Cars.

A lot of us have felt ambivalent about old people at some point. Grandparents have a lot of annoying habits. Like dying just as you get addicted to their heart pills. Or owning a nice house and then not dying. If it wasn’t for MRSA I’d never have managed to get my new kitchen. On the upside, the elderly do get their own seats on the bus. Albeit ones that stink of piss. But it does always amaze me how many seats on the bus are reserved for the elderly and infirm. Ever got on a bus and thought, ‘Where’s this thing going? Lourdes?’

In fifth year, my friend Aiden and I volunteered for doing community work with the elderly one afternoon a week because it got us out of PE. We had two oldies we visited regularly. One
was an old man called Mr Bowman. He was a really sweet old guy and we enjoyed his endless stories about Scottish history, something he had quite a poor grasp of. The weekly lecture was generally cribbed from a week-by-week periodical he got delivered called
Scotland’s Story
. He would throw people from one era into another and add macabre details nobody could have known like he was a postmodern novelist.

There was an old woman too, whose name escapes me. We found her annoying because she actually wanted us to get her shopping and would send us to Woolworth’s to get stuff for her, rather than make us tea and biscuits and improvise long lies set in the Jacobean period. If she was still alive now she’d have been dismayed at Woolies’ demise. Although it is gone, the administrators are selling the name, so they say, ‘Woolworth’s will be back, but no one knows when or in what form.’ That’s quite frightening. Like you will be sitting watching
Loose Women
one day, and some red and white foam will start to seep under your door, and before you know it there is a 20-foot pick-and-mix aisle trying to kill your kids. Woolworth’s has incurred the highest job losses in the recession so far, with 27,000 workers losing their jobs.

Where WERE all these people? Usually Woolies was devoid of all human life except an 18-yard queue of old ladies trying to buy metal teapots from the one 17-year-old Saturday assistant. Where were these hordes of staff? 13 people in a back room individually unwrapping a hundredweight of cola cubes?

That old biddy had a huge hearing aid that whistled when it wasn’t tuned in properly. We both learned to whistle without
moving our lips and tilt our heads as if we could hear something.

This would send her scurrying off to retune it and we could watch TV for ten minutes. She got wise to that trick, so to convince her it was on the blink Aiden learned to talk in such a way that he just mouthed silently and said every third word.

The worst thing for Aiden and me was that these oldies were getting more action than us. Apparently one in five Scots over 45 has sex without condoms. Who can blame them? If you still manage to get a stiffy at that age you don’t want to hide it. You want to stick a sparkler in it and hold a news conference. Most men that age are married with kids anyway. Sex is like being a member of the National Trust. You get free entry to an old ruin, but you never use it. But I read a tragic story the other day. A 73-year-old man had his sight restored after more than 30 years with a bionic eye. Just in time to see the rest of his body packing up. All this time all he’s had is the image of his beautiful young wife in his head. When he sees what she looks like now he’s going to be in need of a bionic cock.

My school was a Catholic school so there was a fair bit of religious education. This somehow consisted almost entirely of pretty intense diatribes against abortion, with almost no reference to religion whatsoever. There was a school priest and once a month he came round to do questions and answers with the classes. It was a relief from the videos of foetuses but nobody could think of anything to ask him. We had guessed that he wouldn’t have
a clue about any of the stuff we wanted to know, because he was a priest.

‘Where sells vodka if you’re underage, Father? Do you know any slack lassies?’

It had become embarrassing that he just sat there being regarded silently and without curiosity, so one week our teacher tried to prime us before he arrived.

‘You might want to ask Father why do priests wear dog collars?’ he suggested. ‘Or why is it that the Bible outlaws pork and yet we eat bacon?’

There was a long awkward silence as Father Hannaway took his seat. Aiden, in his booming Irish voice, asked him,

‘WHY DO PRIESTS WEAR SHOES?’ Father Hannaway looked visibly shaken but seemed to be getting his head around it just as Aiden followed up with,

‘DO YOU EAT BACON!?’

He did that thing comics do, going for a tried-and-tested piece of material to steady himself. Anyone who had a genuine question had to make do with a lengthy explanation of what myrrh was.

Aiden was constantly taking the piss and misanthropically causing trouble. He had a game he’d play where he’d clip little kids in the face with his bag. He had a real knack for it and could often knock them right onto their backs. I was always pestering him to show me the secret of his technique. One day he silently unzipped the side of his bag to reveal that it held a gigantic spanner.

I’ve always tended to have one enormously tall friend throughout my life, perhaps because I had one in my fantasy life as a kid. He was Irish and had loads of brothers and a sister. I hung out at their place a lot as a teenager. No doubt that was an enormous pain in the arse for everybody but as a kid you never notice those things. I thought of them as this really normal family, in contrast to living in my own quiet, undemonstrative house. Of course, once I’d witnessed a few displays of naked emotion, I began to appreciate the tranquil autism on offer at home.

We both started drinking when we were at school. There was a place all the kids would go where they served you underage. It was called the Outhouse and for a month or so one summer when I was about sixteen we’d all go down there and get pissed on vodka and orange and bottles of Grolsch. I used to really open up on a few drinks and would spraff on about whatever I was reading, generally to some bam from school who’d respond with chat about Celtic’s lack of options on the bench. That pub got shut down for a wee bit and the rumour was that someone had gone in there to settle a grudge with an axe. The victim had bolted for the door and got it thrown between his shoulder blades. A really tricky skill that, you’d imagine. I hope that whatever song was on the jukebox had a bit of a drum roll just before he did it. It sounded fantastical, maybe it never happened and was just some teenage urban myth, but you were always running into people who claimed to have been there. Their stories matched closely enough that even as teenagers desperate for a
drink and to stand in the same general space as some lassies, we never went back.

Everyone looked forward to house parties. That was where you could use the magic of alcohol to batter down sixteen years of Catholic repression and try to pump your chemistry partner. The best ones were where someone had an ‘empty’. This meant that the parents were away and their children had decided, for the sake of popularity, to let a whole bunch of semiacquaintances vomit on the carpets. These parties were very much like the War, people coming back from the same battle with different accounts of what had gone on—claims to have fingered, fought or dry-ridden people in various rooms and cupboards. There was a grotesque, crowing sexual boasting allowed from the victors. I remember one guy shouting into his friend’s face at school,

‘It was great to think of you trying to get to sleep on the livingroom floor while I was next door getting sucked and fucked and allsorts!’

It was harder for kids to buy drink then, I think. There was often not enough booze at a party to stay drunk. I remember Aiden and me standing on our heads against a wall and drinking cans of Bud through a straw in the hope of making it hit us harder. Sometimes the parents would leave slabs of pishy lowalcohol lager. We’d plough through ten cans each, wondering if making our bladders explode might give us a buzz.

I never really had any drive to be popular at school. There weren’t really any groups that particularly appealed to me. I
suppose the one group that I’d liked to have got in with was the Sluts. They already seemed to have plenty to occupy them though. It’s not like girls at school weren’t having sex; they just weren’t having it with us. There were older boys with cars and money building a mighty sex dam way upstream. Our kind lived in parched lands fed by a trickle of ugly nymphos and nerdy girls who lost it on booze. I never got anywhere sexually at school. Neither did Aiden. We both kind of despaired. I could feel how uncomfortably polite and attentive we were becoming to women. Every girl we met got treated like a much-loved, but now terminally ill member of a visiting royal family. They must have thought we were weird as fuck.

Lust is a big part of most men’s personality. They just tend to make a point of denying it, so they can get more sex. In the summertime that noise you can hear isn’t grasshoppers. It’s the sound of men’s teeth grinding as their rusty libidos crank up through the gears. I remember as a young man being told that men’s sex drives tailed off after 17. That’s just something they tell you to try to soften the blow. They can’t tell you that you’re looking at up to seventy years of feeling like a fox trapped on the other side of a chicken coop and an internet bill like a medium-sized export business.

Kingsley Amis (a married philanderer) described his sex drive as ‘Like spending fifty years handcuffed to a lunatic’. I have found mine to be like living inside a burning building. No doubt about it, sunshine makes it all a lot more difficult. No wonder Middle Eastern countries get their women to cover up. There was probably a point in history when Iraq was a beautiful orchard before they shagged it into the dust.

Men are obsessed with breasts. I can still remember the first one I saw when, aged 11, an assistant bent over in Woolworth’s. If there had been more of that sort of thing they might still be open. I have forgotten countless things since then (most of my childhood and all
of Higher Physics), yet that breast is still burnt onto my retina like I’ve just been staring at a tit-shaped lightbulb. It’s a peculiarity of men that we forget things like anniversaries and birthdays yet remember every flash of leg and glimpse of underwear. Perhaps as we get really old those are the only memories that will be left to us. Probably why we spend the last five years of our lives drooling. If I’d spent the time that I’ve spent thinking about sex on thinking about physics I could be world famous by now. For punching my way out of a bank vault with my robot tentacles.

There was a standard thing that happened at school where some dweeby kid would get surrounded and asked specific questions about sexual stuff. This would usually end in them making some tremendous faux pas—a girl called Elaine Doran once got pressured into saying that people got pregnant by pressing their bums together—and everyone would crow derisive laughter into their dejected face. On the more advanced stuff, I didn’t have a clue either and just had to act confident and pretend I knew what was going on. A skill that came in useful when I started to have sex for real.

I first came when I was nearly 12. I’d been watching a movie called
Another Time, Another Place
, which starred Phyllis Logan in what looked like an unpromising tale of wartime island life in Scotland. She gets fucked twice. I was lying in shock in bed afterwards when my dick exploded. This was the night before we went on our summer holiday to Ireland. I spent six weeks locked in the bathroom wanking until my cock was a tattered pink flag of surrender. I tried to hide my burgeoning sexuality from my
parents, but the fact they now spent half the household budget on toilet roll probably gave the game away.

There was a lady Hare Krishna who would hand out leaflets on my route back from school. I’d talk to her because she was quite attractive and I had this idea that maybe she would fuck me to get me to join; that maybe that was how it all worked. I actually got a book on Hare Krishna to see if Hare Krishnas were up for it. They are totally not. By this stage I couldn’t pass her without speaking so I started to walk a much longer way home.

One of our English teachers was called Mrs Tait. She was about 30, a brunette, and wore tight sweaters, stockings and suspenders. It just about drove us all crazy. Thank God I wasn’t in her class—it would have given me a nervous breakdown. For a while our English class was near hers. Her room faced onto the corridor and had frosted glass, except for a narrow strip near the ceiling. Aiden and I would run down after Physics and jump up onto the window sill. We could see in, just, and watch Mrs Tait sitting on her desk with her legs crossed so you could see her suspenders. It was a class full of fifth years, the guys having that preoccupied, twitching look you normally only see in hostages. We weren’t the only guys who’d jump onto the window—there was always somebody up there. Looking back, she must have been able to see our darting sets of eyes ten feet up the wall and probably our hard-ons pressed against the frosted glass. Years later I ran into one of my old teachers down the pub. ‘I have a theory,’ I told him, ‘that Mrs Tait can’t really have existed. She was a shared hallucination brought on by the hormones of
hundreds of boys. She wasn’t really like that but it’s how we all agreed to see her. She was a construct.’

‘I have a theory,’ sighed my old teacher, draining his pint, ‘that she was a fucking dirty cow.’

Of course I’d been programmed with a lot of Catholic guilt. Aged 12 I was mortified about the feelings I had for married women. I even showed some kind of morality. Whenever I wanked about my married English teacher, just before I came I’d think of one of the girls at school. Looking back, me ejaculating about a 15-year-old girl probably wasn’t making God all that happy. When you’re younger you don’t realise that guilt is the engine of all that’s truly arousing about sex. Adam and Eve probably had really boring sex before she ate that apple, gentle stuff surrounded by unnamed woodland creatures. Afterwards it would have been really intense shit with a snake wrapped around them. ‘Who gives a shit about gardens anyway? There’s a big rock just outside the garden we can fuck on! Tell God if he wants to make himself useful he can stick his finger up my arse!’

Recently, a Polish Catholic priest has published a book which provides married couples with a theological and practical guide to spicing up their sex lives. All 400 pieces of advice involve bringing a Catholic priest into your bedroom. Critics have questioned the competency of a celibate monk to write about sex. But then again, if you’ve been married more than two years then a celibate monk is probably getting more sex than you are.

In my early teens we had a black-and-white portable TV in our bedroom. I would tell my mum there was snooker on, then go to
my room and try to watch any film I thought there might be sex in. The first time I saw full-frontal nudity was in the drama series
Tenko
. It was a female prisoner of war washing in a tin bath under armed guard but I felt no guilt. You got to see her fanny. When Channel 4 started their Red Triangle series of banned sex films my synapses melted. There’d be a couple of weeks of films with fullon sex scenes, then they’d throw in a film that had been banned because it featured the brutality of Turkish prison life. Still, the rewards were so great I’d even persevere with those ones. Somebody might get released from the prison and fuck someone! Or maybe a female lawyer would come in to work on somebody’s case and they’d all fuck her! I was desperate. That red triangle on C4 served as a starting pistol for a wanking marathon. By the end I felt like I needed a foil blanket wrapped around me.

In those days if you glimpsed a nipple on TV it was like porn Christmas. Now any teenager with a laptop is just two clicks away from midgets fucking donkeys. I still have a good eye for when sex will appear on TV, a tragic talent really. A couple of years ago I was stuck in a hotel in London and noticed that there was a show on called
100 Funniest Movie Moments
. I gauged that Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene from
When Harry Met Sally
would be in at around number 20 and I could crack one off to it. It was actually something like 21, so I had plenty of time to get back in the mood by the time they showed the rap scene from
Three Men and a Little Lady
. I’m glad they didn’t keep going with that series:
Three Men and the Awkward Bathtime of a 16 Year Old
would have been horrible.

I’ll never forget my first kiss, although granddad denies it. Actually, I was in a terrible nightspot called the Cotton Club and snogged my chemistry partner, locking onto her like a starving vampire. I had a cold, so for quite a while the air coming through her nose was the only oxygen getting into either of us.

Then, the summer after I left school was enlivened by suddenly, briefly getting a girlfriend. She was a student nurse living in the Red Road flats. For three weeks she’d let me come round and dry ride her on her living-room floor till 1 am, at which point she’d chuck me out into streets about as dangerous as wartime Berlin. After hours of near-sex I’d have probably made a reasonable attempt to fuck any assailant to death.

I sometimes have an out-of-body experience where I see myself deleting emails that promise me ‘Live Sex Shows!’ or ‘Britney Spears Sucking Cock!’ from the perspective of my 14-year-old self. The younger me can’t believe how I take for granted the cornucopia of sexual possibility on offer, the blasÉ way in which I reject ‘Nuns Fucking!’ He had to make do with scraps of magazines found under hedges and strained glimpses of library assistants’ knees.

Of course, with porn you could argue is it really these girls being exploited or is it in fact men’s sexual responses that are being exploited? No, it’s definitely these girls! I’ve always wondered, if surgeons can get porn actresses’ tits to look so great, how come they can’t do anything about that dead look in their eyes? How hard can it be to make contact lenses tinged with a bit of hope? I’ve seen sexier looks in the eyes of a snowman. I hate that look they have when they’re picturing their father.

Apparently 66 per cent of women watch pornography, although that figure rises considerably if they’ve ever walked in on their partners when they think they are alone in the house. Jacqui Smith’s husband was criticised for claiming expenses for watching two porn films. Why? He should be praised for his restraint. If I was married to a boiler like Jacqui Smith I’d have 24-hour porn pumped into my frontal lobe by fibre optics. I’d look like one of those monkeys you see on anti-vivisection posters. Look at it this way, it was either claim expenses on two dirty movies or go into Jacqui’s bedroom and claim expenses on a fistful of Viagra, a bottle of vodka and a lifetime in psychotherapy.

Reports said she was ‘livid and shocked’ and has given her husband a ‘real ear-bashing’. Maybe if she tried bashing another part of his body he might not watch so much porn. If you are really not up for it Jacqui then next time why not let him bash your ear. It can’t get you pregnant! I wonder what the pornos were? Maybe Jacqui wouldn’t have been so angry if they were political. May I suggest
Whorehouse of Commons
,
Black Rod and the Earlyday Motion
or the much-loved
A Member up the Dispatch Box
. When he made that public apology he looked incredibly embarrassed. So he should be. You can get all the porn you want online for free.

My porn habit is a bit like having malaria. It’s not a huge problem but every few months I lose a couple of days to it. I’ll sit down planning to look at it for half an hour and come to at four in the morning with the laptop having left a crop circle of electrical burns in my chest hair. I imagine that most men are the same and are just better or worse at hiding it. I think that in those old
novels where men retire to one room to play billiards while the ladies go to the drawing room, the men are really working on old plans for the internet. Huge drawings of steam-powered computers get spread out as one guy clicks billiard balls together to maintain the charade. Nowadays there’s Japanese porn, there’s Russian porn but there are whole continents that haven’t stepped up to the plate yet. Can you imagine what African porn is going to be like? There’ll be bukkake movies that start like
Zulu
—a girl knowing that she’s going to get fucked by the whole horizon. Or maybe their porn is just a 90-minute shot of a running tap.

Things are only going to get worse—BT is bringing in 40 MB broadband. They say it will herald a new dawn in communications and synergise media formats. Blah, blah, blah. The only reason anyone is getting excited is it means feature-length porn films in seconds, instead of sitting there with the Kleenex and
The Big Book of Sudoku
. Personally I think this universal access to limitless, high-definition porn will destroy civilisation more surely than a direct asteroid hit. There’s a horrible irony in the fact that the machine we have to use for most of our work contains the most distracting imagery possible. Writing this book has taken a tremendous act of will. You know why
War and Peace
is so long? Tolstoy’s inkwell didn’t have tiny people fucking in it.

I have a theory that our sex drives were put in place to keep us talking to each other, so we make progress as a species. There were whole years where I’d never have left the house if I hadn’t been trying to get laid. I’m vaguely in line with the Freudian thing that everything we do is an attempt to get more sex. Look at the space
shuttle. Those scientists built that so they could tell ladies about it.

Could it look more like a giant metal dick? I don’t even think they need that main fuel tank—it’s just an aesthetic cock flourish.

The male sex drive definitely feels like more of a curse than a blessing. I was in Berlin on my holidays this year and went to every museum, a standard middle-class non-drinker’s way of pretending that he can enjoy himself. There’s one that has the whole entranceway to a Babylonian temple. You can literally walk down a whole corridor that looks exactly as it would when you were coming through the ancient city of Babylon—it’s beautiful. Before I walked down it I tried to empty my mind and imagine I was actually an ancient Babylonian, going to make a sacrifice. Every step of the walk I was transfixed by the visible top of a German tourist’s knickers, and the washing instructions sticking out of them.

I think there is a lot that we don’t understand about our sex drives. Scientists have discovered that apes will exchange meat for sex. And by scientists I mean a clinically depressed butcher going through a rather messy divorce. If a male chimpanzee shares meat with a female he will double the amount of times he can copulate with her. That probably explains why I’ve been taking bunches of bananas up to the zoo and getting nowhere! Forget apes, I’ll exchange meat for sex. I’ve got everything we need to start the transaction: a freezer full of Turkey Twizzlers and a hard-on. And yes, that is my most recent Facebook update. I might not get to shag a monkey but there’s a fighting chance Fern Britton will be in touch.