My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (10 page)

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this Jim in the poem didn’t come off at all well. And when I read it out in an En glish lesson, she erupted into tears. I had to explain that the connection hadn’t occurred to me—“A lot of my art comes from an unconscious place, Tracey. I go into a kind of trance: I’m like Jackson Pollock when I sling them words on the page.”

It was nice going out with her. She was one of them girls that matured early and went out with a few boys in our year. I remember my first sexual fumblings with Tracey very clearly. I was terrified of revealing my genitals after the Helmet Harry fiasco—I considered him more of a hindrance than an ally, that little fellow. I thought it might be better if he remained within the confines of my novelty Christmas pants with a tartan pattern and a Tasmanian devil on them.*

From the minute I clattered—belatedly—into puberty, I was on a spree of hopeless, doomed romances. I fell in love with Nikki.

She was a year older than me, and I think she fancied me at fi rst.

I remember her perhaps gently proposing the idea of a liaison, and me responding with such overstated ebullience that her pip-squeak affections were smashed into mush.

“Perhaps you’d like to go out somewhere?” she might have suggested. “Yes, and perhaps you’d like to save my fucking soul,

’cos I’m suicidal. Please look after me.”

Nikki only lived in the next street, and I used to get on her nerves because I would go round to her house so much. I went round there on Christmas Day—Christmas Day! My dad and mum had clubbed together to buy me these Reebok Pump Classics—great big ridiculous trainers that pumped right up,

* We say “trousers” for “pants” and “pants” for “underwear.” Also, we say “knickers” for

“panties.” When having sex with American women I struggle to say “panties” with any sincerity; to me it seems a bit pedophilic.

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I’ve Got a Bone to Pick with You

with a basketball on the tongue. There was no reason for me to have trainers that pumped up. It was unnecessary. It were a gimmick.

But I was still round Nikki’s house wearing them as soon as I’d got them out of the box. She was there with another lad from her year at school, sat in her bedroom, and this bloke was going—very sarcastically—“So, what did you get for Christmas?” And I was just standing there, in these two gleaming white igloos. Ah, the sweet embarrassment. I’ve learned now that when I’m in a situation where my first impulse is to hide the shame I feel forever, that when rendered as a yarn the scenario will probably be funny, so my second impulse is, “Th at’s probably

material.”

My second experience with that babysitter was a good example of this kind of situation. When I was twelve or thirteen, my mum and Colin were going out and decided that I would have a babysitter—even though I was too sophisticated to require a chaperone. When I found out that the person entrusted with this responsibility was to be the same upstanding young citizen who had masturbated in front of me five years before, I was even less keen on the idea.

“I don’t want a babysitter—I’m too old,” was my initial plea.

When this was dismissed I swiftly segued into the more contro-versial, “When I was a child, he wanked himself off, and asked me to help him.” Of course, they thought I was lying. Having sung like a bird to no avail after getting fingered by that tutor, I hadn’t told either of my parents about the thing with the babysitter when it first happened.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he’d said, conspiratorially, “they’ll think I’m weird.”

And initially he got his way, but later on I did discuss the episode with a few people who lived on our street, and someone 75

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came up with the phrase “gay phase.” This had obviously got back to him, as when he eventually came round—my anguished protests having been to no avail—he said, in an inquisitive way,

“What is a gay phase?” Like he thought that might be a possible explanation.

Apparently, some adolescents go through a “gay phase” where they want children to wank them off . That was a bit of a misun-derstanding on the part of the people of Grays—about the difference between homosexuality and asking a child to wank you off. “Both of these activities belong in a box of things we think are disgusting: put them in with animal abuse and racial tolerance.”

Cross about my loose lips, the moment we were reunited he uttered the ominous words, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

“I remember that bone,” I might have replied, had I been feeling a little more sure of myself in this tricky social situation. “I remember you picking it till it sprayed cum on the back of the toilet with a plastic splat.”

Nothing bad happened on his second babysitting assignment, evidently it was a phase and aside from the wanking incident he were a lovely lad, but a pattern of me taking extreme action in a quest to be heard was beginning to emerge. When I eventually started cutting myself—aged thirteen or fourteen—it was frustration and anger that led to it. My response to being trapped or thwarted was to slash myself with a knife or some broken glass—a mode of sanguinary melodrama to which I would periodically return, right up into my twenties.

I also began to dabble with bulimia. It seemed a very practical procedure at the time. I’d got all fat; when I started to get bullied at school as a result, I thought there must be a simple solution, and it turned out there was—eat loads and then puke it out. I’d always been a really fussy child, growing up. As a kid, 78

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I only liked to eat beef burgers, sausages, fi sh fi ngers, waffl es—

lumps of things, food that had been in the Beano.* “This is from Birds Eye, we can trust those guys—look at that smiling old Captain, he’s just like Uncle Albert.”

In an ideal world, I preferred food that was sealed individually—Weetabix, Penguins, Wagon Wheels—and I was very suspicious of anything that’d been mixed. Sausages stuck in a mound of mash was about as sophisticated as my tastes got.

(Even now, when I find something I like eating, I’ll eat it all the time. In my twenties, I spent years living on Weetabix in the morning, with SuperNoodles and a can of tuna later on.) Colin was annoyed by the bulimia fad. “Did you puke up in the sink again? Don’t. It’s clogging the drain up.”

I became a vegetarian at fourteen. There was a lad at our school called Daniel Zahl, whose father was a socialist with

†

a beard, like the “Modern Parents” in Viz. Daniel took me and Sam Crooks to a Vegetarian Society meeting, where they showed us videos of factory farming. I made a commitment in that room that would one day lead to me becoming crowned the World’s Sexiest Vegetarian, a title you’re ineligible for, no matter how sexy you are, unless you don’t eat meat. Morrissey perpetually steeled my resolve, and the probability that my principled dietary stand would annoy Colin was the deciding factor.

“Vindictive vegetarianism,” I like to call it. I’ve never regretted

* Th

e Beano is a beloved children’s comic, which is about sixty years old and centers on naughty, destructive children. It has a good, rebellious spirit, which has been eroded by the passage of time. I read it recently and everyone seemed a bit square. That might be because I am now an adult, not a silly boy.

† Viz is an adult comic book in which the characters, mostly northern, working-class ne’er-do-wells, tell each other to fuck off. When I first saw it as a child it was like seeing the Dead Sea scrolls. Swearing, actual swearing. It was the cartoon equivalent of porn or crack.

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it. I’m incredibly sentimental about animals. It’s the only opportunity I get to occupy the moral high ground: when I got clean, after chatting to some Krishna conscious devotees, I gave up fish as well. They said if you put death into your body you will emit death, but I’m in it mostly for the high ground. “You’re vegetarian?” comes the inquiry. “Yes.” Then the inevitable, “Do you eat fi sh?” This is where they catch a lot of people out: the inquisitor is already at this stage anticipating a “Yes” and loading up with,

“Ah, well, you’re not a proper vegetarian then are you because fish are incredibly sensitive and some of them write haikus.”

That’s why I have to stifle a smug grin when I reply, “No. No, I don’t eat fish because it’s cruel to them, the lovely little things.”

And on particularly smarmy days, “If you put death into your body you emit death.” Even as a junkie I stayed true—“I shall have heroin, but I shan’t have a hamburger.” What a sexy little paradox. V

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9

Teacher’s Whiskey

The first time I’d ever tasted alcohol had been in the staff - room at Little Thurrock primary school, when I was probably nine or ten years old. There was a rota of jobs you had to do at that school, and one of them was cleaning the staff -room. Th is seems

nuts. Why on earth were children entrusted with the task of cleaning the staff-room? Especially as the place was awash with booze. This incident seems so daft and unlikely that my better judgment is trying to insist that it didn’t occur—but it did; they got the pupils to work at the school like it was a nineteenth-century Lancashire mill. It wasn’t hard graft—they never made me tarmac the playground for example—but this isn’t something for which I feel I ought to express gratitude; I should’ve just been listening to stories about ducks and coloring in. And while we’re on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story “The Ugly Duckling” ought be banned as the central character wasn’t a duckling or he wouldn’t have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet. He shouldn’t have been allowed to hang round with them other little ducks either; the whole thing is a filthy, corrupt mess. Nonetheless I’d rather sit pie-eyed and agog being brainwashed by that stinking propaganda than apply Mr. Sheen to the staff - room cupboard.

It was Martin Phillips and me toiling that day; he was a funny 81

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little character, tightly curled hair and NHS specs. Him and me had to clean the staff-room, and in the cupboard we found a little half-bottle of Teacher’s whiskey, which seemed an appropriate brand, for it was, after all, teachers’ whiskey.

I sipped a little bit of the naughty water and treacherously reassured my reluctant accomplice—“Martin, this is delicious”—and passed the bottle. He really committed to it, and drank with such beautiful, unblinking faith. With an almighty glug he tipped the bottle upright into his own little Martin Phillips face, and the liquid filled his cheeks with this foul, medicinal, despicable taste, and the surging heat poured into him. It was a lovely thing to watch, and the whole episode was happily consequence- free.

The first time I got drunk was at my auntie’s house one Christmas. On this occasion, I got really pissed, and gave an early indication of the seemingly infinite capacity I have to adapt instantly to new circumstances. This was the fi rst time I’d ever got properly inebriated, and yet I straight away became a pitiful, lachrymose drunk, saying to my younger cousin Sam—who was about three years old—“Don’t you ever get like this, son.” But I’d only just got like it, that day, for a half-hour. It wasn’t like alcohol had been the ruin of me—my whole empire in ruins, and all the fault of the demon drink.

I was fourteen or fifteen and it was six glasses of white wine that did the trick. As I was drinking them, I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I just keep on doing this?” The need to find out what will happen if I don’t relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.

It was the same with prepubescent masturbation. I remember being on the bathroom floor and thinking, “What happens if I just keep on wanking?” (I’ve had a lot of great moments on bath-82

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room fl oors. The first time I took heroin, I remember being in a similar situation.) Lying in a state of pre-opiated innocence on my mum’s bathroom floor. (Oh that is the telling adjective—or pronoun, or whatever it is—my mum’s bathroom fl oor. She wasn’t there, of course. It was the floor that she owned, but from which she was at this point absent. And I was lying upon the bath rug—which was pink, with a fringe.)