My Shit Life So Far (9 page)

The summer I left school I got a job as a library assistant, my first opportunity to really bond with homosexual men and women going through the menopause. I was really unbelievably terrible at it, as I have been at every job I’ve had. The problem is this: all jobs seem to involve receiving a certain amount of oblique sniping or criticism that you are supposed to put up with. I simply can’t be fucked, not even a little bit. On the first day in that job an old posh gent had a go at me for some forgotten reason and I told him to fuck off. I think he was so shocked that he literally couldn’t process it and just wandered off.

When I was growing up the library had a truly shit selection. A biography section labelled ‘Famous Lives’ is always a bad sign. The library was just somewhere warm to go that was out of the house. As a consequence I read everything there that interested me and had to start on things that really didn’t. I’ve read quite a few terrible thrillers by Hammond Innes and Frederick Forsyth. For some reason, men in Glasgow seem to really relate to the adventures of doomed commercial pilots roped into a mercenary gun-drop by old army buddies. On the off-chance that you are reading this and an old army buddy has recently proposed something like this to you, he has money/woman problems and is planning a double-cross.

There were loads of books of old Scottish memoirs that I’d never have read if there was anything else, and I absolutely loved them. Molly Weir, who played Hazel the McWitch in
Rentaghost
, wrote some really interesting books about her life. Of course by the last one she seems to have gone mad in show business and spends the first chapter talking about buying a really big house and having it re-carpeted. Cliff Hanley I liked too. Those books really brought it home that for all the dullness of my life, it lacked what until then had been the defining characteristic of life for every other generation in that city: poverty.

It was around this time that I really got into the work of Noam Chomsky. He’s good at explaining where we are at and warning us about where we’re going. I always remember a thing in one of his books where he says that capitalism can’t have everything its own way because it will ‘create a hell that no rational person would want to live in’. Noam has never been on ScotRail, so doesn’t know that we are already there.

I got into Chomsky because I heard Bill Hicks talk about him in an interview. Bill Hicks is my favourite comedian and really was sort of a political thinker in his own way. It always amuses me to hear comedians say he’s an influence on them, because you never see any evidence of it. The people who say that are always the sort of guys who would shit balloon animals through a burning hoop if it got them doing a reaction show to
I’m a Celebrity
on ITV 9.

Another writer I follow is George Monbiot. He writes about climate change, the general political landscape of Britain and,
eh, growing fruit. I think all his stuff is on www.monbiot.com and I’d recommend it. I’d even recommend the stuff about recondite fruit-growing knowledge. His work will lead to either a highly politicised fruit-growing lobby or revolutionaries who are really, really fussy about apples.

There was a really attractive assistant working at our library. She wore very short skirts and was really bad tempered, something which I’ve always liked. She was the first person I really masturbated about. There was one straight, married guy who worked in that library and it looked like her presence wore him down considerably. He drifted around with a grim look in his eye, sweating like he had malaria. Once I had a huge argument with her about an overdue book. When I got home I found that, during the course of the argument, I had ejaculated.

There was a big comedy-record collection there that I took out and taped everything. It was amazing to find that comedy didn’t have to be shit. Going from watching Jimmy Tarbuck doing old Irish gags on
Live from Her Majesty’s
to hearing classic
Goon Show
s or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore or a Billy album was a real shock. I suppose we all have this naÏve idea that the best stuff will find its way onto TV. That’s pretty much the opposite of the truth.

That was the start of wanting to be a comedy writer. I used to sit and write, imagining that one day I could get one of those jobs where everybody sat in a room drinking coffee and writing lines. I read
Billy Liar
and the stuff where he wanted to be a joke writer didn’t read like foolish daydreaming; it seemed a totally
rational aspiration to me. We got taught that book at school and everybody took his desire to get out of his home town and do something creative as naÏve idiocy. I thought that said quite a lot about Glasgow.

Most of the people I knew stayed on to do sixth form but Aiden and I went to Langside College for a year. It’s a place in Battlefield that I would heartily recommend if you want to meet nutters, lust after unobtainable Indian women and smoke hash. Any given class might have mothers who were doing a class as a hobby, vocational types doing it to get onto another course or mental cases who’d been made to do it to get their bursary. It was probably the only glimpse of anything approaching the real world I’ve ever had, and it was terrifying.

I got into the drama society and acted in a play. Dressed in shorts and a tank top, I played a 12-year-old boy and was several inches taller than the guy playing my dad. A lot of people who came said they thought that I was playing someone with a mental handicap. There were a couple of proper actors in it. I’ve always really appreciated acting as a talent. It’s taken for granted but when you see somebody who’s really good it’s so compelling. I found the proper actors there to be quite a bitchy bunch. Mind you, if I saw stand-up comics having exactly the same conversations they’d sound so positive I’d assume they were being sarcastic.

This was when I first started to put on weight. I’ve had to really battle with my weight ever since; it’s a real slog. In those days obesity wasn’t really an issue in the way it is now. I don’t think we really related the fact that we were all getting fatter
because of all the beer we drank. Ever since college I’ve had to work at never really being slim but never quite reaching properly fat. I swim just enough for my weight to hover somewhere between compliments and abuse. Apparently scientists recommend 3,000 steps in half an hour for moderate exercise. Not only a good way to get fit but also a perfect way to develop obsessive compulsive disorder. One, two, three, feeling fit, one thousand and four…must keep going…two thousand and seventy nine…going absolutely mental. Light switch on. Light switch off.

They say fat people make better lovers. Who says this? Fat virgins. But of course, the debate about size zero models continues. Isn’t it about time that we insisted that all modelling campaigns should be done by models with normal measurements? And then pretend to find them attractive. I’m joking.

There’s a fallacy that men are attracted by advertising images of very thin women in underwear. Actually, we’re attracted by most women in their underwear. In fact, just show us the underwear lying over the back of a chair. We’ll buy your toothpaste.

At Langside I started hanging around with a guy called Joe who was about 22 and a complete basket-case. He’d been a full-on soccer casual and was a very bad guy. He ran a combat club somewhere in the East End. I went along to watch them one time. Always a bad sign to see everybody unpacking weapons in the changing room. The training seemed to involve them leaping
from wall-bars onto the ground in a bid to strengthen their legs, followed by punching each other in the stomach while shouting. They had something that most properly trained fighters lack. Madness.

Joe was a dangerous nut but had a bright, plausible manner that generally got everybody onside. I remember once seeing him trying to get his girlfriend out of her physics class; he wandered right through the door with her arguing. When the teacher turned up and asked him what he was doing there he said he was going class to class raising money for the family of a murdered schoolgirl. The teacher gave him a fiver.

Along with another guy, we promoted a club night. We hired a nightclub in the town and sold tickets on campus and even made some money. Joe said we should use the profits to buy a gun, so that ‘nobody will fuck with us’. I spent my half on a Walkman.

One night we were coming home from town and some wee guys started shouting at us from halfway down Buchanan Street.

‘Take this,’ growled Joe, handing me a lump of metal on a length of cord. He pulled a bottle out of his jacket and charged downhill, unaware that I was legging it the other way.

Eventually, I found a taxi but as I was getting in Joe caught up with me and jumped in too. He was furious that he’d had to ‘run from anybody in the toon!’ I viewed getting away from a fight to be quite a result, but obviously couldn’t say that as the madman frothed on. When we got out of the cab, he broke his bottle on a fence and held it to my throat. He was screaming and
certainly seemed to be building up to stabbing me with it when some couple came by and asked what was going on. Thank fuck for pretty much the only people I’ve ever known to get involved when they see something like that.

That night in bed, I tried to think of how I could escape this maniac. We had a couple of club nights lined up and I was terrified. I thought about telling him that I had a bad heart, a congenital defect that meant I could die if exposed to the least excitement and thus, regrettably, I would have to terminate out friendship. Fuck, I was desperate.

What I did was to tell him that I was emigrating to Ireland, where I had a job. I only had a couple of classes a week, so I sneaked into them wearing a hat and left by the fire escape. Extreme, but it worked. I never saw him again but Joe will definitely have killed somebody by now.

The amusing thing was that my parents really warmed to the guy. He’d been to the house a couple of times and they thought he’d be a good influence. Old people are terrible judges of character. That’s why daytime TV is full of people like David Dickinson who have criminal records. ‘Oooh, he’s a lovely man.’ No, he’s a convicted fraudster. There’s always some presenter on those shows who turns out to have been a burglar. In many ways, I think old people’s lack of character judgement is part of a sublimated desire for death. They suppress the part of themselves that warns them not to allow this stranger into their home, secretly hoping to be defrauded of the money they need to survive or to be bludgeoned to death with their own umbrella stand.

The summer I finished college I applied for a job working in the civil service. I only wanted something for the summer but had to pretend in the interview that I wanted to spend my life there, sorting forms, phoning people, filing things. I lied so much in the interview that it sounded like heavy sarcasm and got the job. It was truly terrible. I don’t know how anybody can work in an office. The tense, political subtext to everything that happens is hellish.

I had a magnificently bleak job. There was a big book of everybody in Customs and Excise who was off sick. I’d have to keep the book up to date by phoning them at home for details of their illnesses. Loads of people were just off with ‘stress’. That’s our word for it, but it might just as well be ‘horror’. There was a guy who had gone missing and I had to phone his distraught wife at intervals and check that he hadn’t turned up. While he was missing he was still on full pay, but if he turned up some irregularity meant it would get cut to half.

Once, I phoned a guy at Fort William because his doctor’s line was completely illegible. Fort William is under a military flight path and just as he was telling me what was wrong with him he was drowned out by jets. I asked him again and more jets drowned him out. The third time, just as the jets stopped, he really shouted it: ‘I had genital herpes!’ That was followed by the tense silence of someone who has just announced that he has genital herpes to his entire office. He knew he’d fucked his chances at the Christmas party and hung up without another word.

I suppose the only real advantage of a job is the licence to steal. The stationery from that job got me through university,

where people would be baffled to see me taking notes in a leather-bound accounting ledger. Toilet rolls are the main item stolen by office staff. It used to be Post-it notes but people found they weren’t as absorbent. The whole thing was only discovered because people kept stealing Post-it notes and sticking up messages reminding themselves to steal toilet rolls.

There was obviously the problem of me just not being able to do a job, at all. I’d get really bored and just go out for a pint. Or sit on the fire-escape smoking. My ‘boss’ was a 22-year-old guy who wore a vest under his shirt, and the idea of having to do what this guy said just seemed ridiculous. Even more than at school, everybody seemed eager for their lives to be mapped out for them. Most of the people in my job were 19 or 20 and they were all married or engaged, all talking about where they wanted to be in the civil service in twenty years’ time. They seemed like rats guzzling down some sugary poison in a lab experiment.

One night I went to the pub with them all on Friday after work. I found the chat really terrifying; the two guys who worked the same desk as me were both trying to get on the office golf team to impress the boss. It was like something you’d heard about people doing in the 1950s. In Japan. We were celebrating a guy in the office getting engaged, at 19, to somebody on another floor of the building. A stripper came in, complete with blank eyes, Caesarean scar and wedding ring. I’m sure I could have one day fitted in with those guys. By sustaining quite a serious brain injury. Eventually, I think I just stopped going in and got sacked.

This was the time of the Poll Tax being introduced a year early in Scotland, to see how it went down. It went down really, really badly and they kept going with it regardless. I went on marches and sit-ins and the like. It was great to see people organising and protesting against something so unjust and brutal. Of course, those people took a lot of flak in the press, as if stopping bailiffs from emptying poor people’s houses could ever make you the bad guys. I never paid the Poll Tax and got a bill for my arrears years later when I was at uni. I wrote ‘Singapore?’ on the envelope, burnt a hole through it with a fag and sent it back. I never heard from them again.