by Raz Shaw
But to me it was a bit of a revelation. Yes, I knew adrenaline was a long-term companion of mine but I never realised how close we’d been from a very early age. That discovery also explains how I ended up normalising it. I needed that churning-up-inside sensation to feel normal and even-keeled. So it became my petrol AND my tranquiliser all at the same time. A contradiction with which a therapist would have a field day.
THE FIRST SNIFF OF ADRENALINE
It was 1971. I was four years old. I was called Darren back then; that was the name my folks misguidedly chose to give me. I was the youngest of three boys. The son of Val and Norman Shaw. Val had a lingerie boutique called Chica. I am not saying that spending my early childhood rummaging through Playtex Cross Your Heart bras and high-waisted lacy panty briefs affected me at all, but I am not saying it didn’t either. Norman was an East End tailor and fledgling property tycoon. We holidayed where most up and coming north London Jews holidayed. Torremolinos, of course! Where else!
In the Torremolinos hotel we had interconnecting rooms to the parents. I had the put-you-up bed. I always had the put-you-up bed. And the hand-me-down clothes. There are many perks to being the youngest of three, but at four years old I had yet to find them. It made me different, though, and I am certain that if I could remember what I thought back then, a bit of me quite liked that.
Anyway, to cut a long story quite short. A hotel fell on us. A Torremolinos hotel to be precise! It was quite an event. An event that could warrant almost a whole chapter, but, in the spirit of brevity, here are the highlights. In useful and easy-to-read bullet points.
ߦ North London family stay at four-star hotel in Torremolinos.
ߦ Three boys aged four, seven and nine go down to breakfast alone, leaving their parents to do whatever parents do when left alone in a hotel room without their annoying kids.
ߦ The three boys have their breakfast and then go and sit on a sofa in the lounge-type area.
ߦ The ceiling to the lounge-type area collapses due to bulldozers on the roof being used to construct a tennis court.
ߦ The sofa, with all three boys on it, falls two floors.
ߦ Val and Norman finish whatever they are doing and head down for breakfast.
ߦ Val and Norman take the stairs as the lift is out of order.
ߦ On arriving at the ground floor, Val and Norman find devastation in the annexe area equivalent to the disaster movie Earthquake. Although that film isn’t out till 1974 so it’s not a reference that would have occurred to them. Not that they would necessarily be searching for movie parallels at that particular moment.
ߦ Eight hours and three dead bodies later (this IS a real-life disaster movie), there is still no sign of the three boys.
ߦ Val and Norman fear the worst.
ߦ In desperation, Norman points out to the rescue workers (tabloid term) a place where the three boys used to sit on a sofa watching a painter paint.
ߦ The rescue workers dig there and lower themselves down twenty feet.
ߦ They shout. The boys shout back. The sofa has landed in an air pocket formed by a felled pillar, thus saving the three boys’ lives.
ߦ The rescue workers rescue the boys. Hence the term ‘rescue workers’.
ߦ The last to be carried out of the rubble-filled air pocket is four-year-old Darren Shaw. He is wearing natty swimming trunks. He has pissed all over them. He is four. Give him a break!
ߦ The crowd cheers as he is led into the ambulance.
And the crowd did cheer. And I think I remember not being totally averse to the cheering. And I do remember thinking that the whole thing was more exciting than scary. And that was my first taste of adrenaline. Apart from the underwear rummaging, of course. And my first taste of defaulting into almost flat-lining when everyone else was a bit overwhelmed.
Being somewhat underwhelmed in the midst of much drama is a curiously calm and empowering place to be. It was the first glimpse of a strange phenomenon that I am only now beginning to identify. Namely, searching for a place of high adrenaline IN ORDER to do everything I can to undermine it and undercut it. No, it doesn’t really make sense to me either. It’s like the weird beauty of swimming underwater. The big world banging on up there, but me in peace and in otherworldly calmness down here. Until the need for breath has to rear its ugly head and spoil everything!
And for a few days after that, we were fifteen-minute celebrities. All over the tabloids. We were called the Chicos de Dios. Children of God.
Well.
Yes.
Possibly.
And all the playing up to the press cameras and stuff just seemed like loads of fun to this peculiar child. And it turns out that being the youngest DOES have some perks. I was the one chosen for all the ‘back in the arms of his mother’ shots! Result. Speak to my agent!
I have no idea whether that was the seed and the spark that led to me being a gambling addict, and/or it was the germ of a personality that oddly enjoyed the trials of dealing with stage 4 cancer; but the connection is definitely there, and reconnecting with that four-year-old brat is certainly eye-opening.
ADRENALINE AT ELEVEN
I was eleven years old.
Pee-pants-hotel-falling-on-top-of-me trauma was well behind me.
At eleven years old I made a horrific discovery. A discovery that would skew the next twenty years of my life. I loved gambling. I mean, I discovered gambling and loved it. As opposed to waking up one day and thinking, ‘You know what, I love gambling.’
In 1978 my parents took my brothers and me for supper at the Wimbledon dog track. We sat and had our meal next to a window looking directly onto the track. We ate our food and the waiter would come round and take our drinks order and at the same time take our bets for that particular race. I didn’t know it then but this was posh gambling. It was never like this again!
I’ll have a glass of cream soda and two whole pounds on trap five, please, waiter.
Posh!
I wasn’t legally allowed to bet. I was eleven. But I did. Bet.
And I won.
I WON!!
I won fifteen pounds.
Fifteen whole pounds.
FIFTEEN!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
I remember it vividly. An adrenaline buzz that felt unlike anything I had experienced before. An eleven-year-old with adrenaline gushing out of every pore and pimple.
A year later I was taken to Vegas. Viva, Viva Las Vegas! With last year’s trackside rush still firmly lodged in my memory Vegas was adrenaline heaven. And it swirled around me like it was designed to. This was old-school Vegas. Late seventies Vegas. Goodfellas Vegas. Big suits and glitter. Big hair and Joe Pesci. And that was just my family.
And moving walkways. And no sunlight. And an amazing soundscape.
And to a twelve-year-old who was unwittingly searching for somewhere to belong, this was it. Stark lighting, buzzers, bells and seedy sex.
It was all so wonderfully awful. So wonderfully other worldly. Awful and wonderful and weird. And so so right. Daylight was the enemy. I was twelve but I instinctively knew that every second NOT spent in the casino was a second wasted. And I wasn’t gambling. I was too young. But I was taking it all in:
ߦ The slightly rancid and musty twenty-four-hour tang in the air.
ߦ The sterile laughter-free zone.
ߦ The random yelps of the craps dealers.
ߦ The multi-toned beeps of the fruit machines.
ߦ The zero-skirted over-made-up cocktail waitresses.
ߦ The free stale sandwiches.
If I knew then how much that kernel of a feeling would grow into something beyond my control, I may have been able to cut it off at its source. But I didn’t. I just felt it. And it was horribly thrilling.
In the evenings my father and my oldest brother would go and see an adult show. Whatever that was. My mother and I would stay behind in the hotel. The Caesar’s Palace Hotel. Complete with those
space-age walkways and banks of mirrors. Filled with the sound of men and women nervously shuffling their gambling chips, croupiers shouting gobbledegook and bells seeming to go off all round you followed by dull almost apologetic cheers. This was more than my twelve-year-old future addict’s heart could possibly desire.
My mum was a little bit of a gambler. That’s where I got it from. She always did have something of a predilection for a casino. And for a fruit machine in particular. Fruit machines are hypnotic. They are designed that way. Hypnosis combined with sporadic bursts of adrenaline. That way addiction lies. Some thirty years later I devised and directed a play about the adrenaline of that addiction. (See Appendix 2.) If only twelve-year-old me had been taking notes. Instead he yearned to pull the lever and press the flashing buttons.
My mum loved pulling and pressing. So to speak. Every time she did, the woman, my mother, became a girl, my mother. It was a fantastic equaliser between us. I stood with her for ages, and now and then – when the casino people weren’t looking – she let me lean into the machine and pull that magical lever. My insides lit up much like the machines themselves. Time disappeared and, in that moment, a huge part of my life was mapped out. And it’s nobody’s fault. Not my mother’s, not society’s, not mine. (Well, more mine than any of the other lot, but not completely mine!) Something triggered inside me that remained resident for almost twenty years.
TEENAGE ADRENALINE KICKS
It was around that time that I discovered that I saw life in a slightly less regular way than the next child. The last few years of my prep school were amazing. I was eleven/twelve/thirteen. I had discovered this personality that could be cheeky rather than naughty, that could interact with people much older than me and that could make people laugh. The low point of those years was, of course, not being cast as Queen Elizabeth I in the school play. A classic casting error. I could have brought so many more dimensions to that woman than Mark Dingemans did! Where the fuck is he now? I was truly bruised by that (that’s not hyperbole, I am ashamed to say that I actually was). I vowed to show them that they were wrong.
MR BATES, PART ONE
The high point of that time was my friendship/adoration/slight non-sexual obsession with my English/PE teacher Mr Bates (leave it). When I look back at it now, he was the first adult to truly treat me as an individual. He was the first adult who really listened to me and who seemed to care about what came out of my mouth. He was the first adult who made me feel unique. He made me feel like a young man who didn’t warrant being talked down to or patronised or undermined. I am not saying I was a special boy. Just the opposite. His genius as a teacher was that he had identified something that, for whatever reason, was lacking in me, and he made it his mission to try to find different ways to fuel that half-empty childish soul. He would talk to me at length about life and about philosophical things. He would allow me licence to express myself in a way nobody had ever done before and not many have since.
It used to upset me and anger me that other pupils and some teachers used to find our friendship a bit suspect. His ‘guardianship’ was totally unconditional, completely devoid of any subtext and absolutely on the level. He was the first person who recognised that I might be seeing life from a slightly different angle to others. He continually encouraged me to express rather than suppress that side of my personality. The unconventional side. That was huge for me. To this day I don’t think I have ever been as creative or articulate as at that time. And it was all down to that one person teaching me the power of saying yes rather than no.
And that has lived with me ever since. It played a huge part in my cancer journey. It helped me accept things even though they were often incredibly difficult, demanding and depressing. It helped me see today as the point. Not yesterday or tomorrow.
TODAY
I realise now that everything Mr Bates was trying to teach me was about trying to accept who you are today. What you have to offer today. What you want today. Accept it, confront it and say yes to it. He did it just by talking to me and seeming to take me seriously. This acceptance from an adult that I idolised felt good. And for a brief moment I think I experienced happy. I think? Yes.
THE POWER OF THE YES
Yes is something I too easily forget to put into practice in my now life, sometimes only remembering its power when it’s too late.
It was something that I absolutely instinctively armed myself with when I was diagnosed. The power of the Yes was a simple gateway to the slightly less tangible concept of positivity. I guess that’s why I am covering my early years in this book. Those were days when my window to all the grace in the world was still fairly wide open, and so anything I was given then has pretty much stayed with me till now.
And Yes is a powerful tool to be given.
Yes? Yes? Yes!
MR BATES, PART TWO
Mr Bates was both an English teacher and a sports teacher so he ticked both my boxes of interest. He was also a little bit naughty. Which I liked. I have always been attracted to naughty people. He was having a ‘scandalous’ affair with the mother of one of my friends. I loved him even more for that. He had a Kevin Keegan perm. I loved him so much for that, that I got a perm to match. On top of my Jew-fro! At the age of twelve! And to top it all, on a school skiing trip to Italy he managed to schmooze the hotel chef into letting us into his kitchen to watch Arsenal v Valencia in the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final on the only telly in the hotel (this was 1980). We lost on penalties. My other hero of that time, Liam Brady, missed a penalty. Losing was disappointing but I was so overcome by the exhilaration and adrenaline of the whole exceptional event that I hardly noticed the result. In fact, I remember skipping to the disco where my classmates had been while Mr Bates and I were watching the match. Me? Skipping? Those must have been happy days. And that euphoria must have translated into twelve-year-old sex appeal because just two hours later I was having my first kiss at the bottom of the hotel steps with a girl older and taller than me! This was adrenaline plus! Could life get any better than this?
Well, no actually. Those remain the happiest two years of my life.
HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
And it was indeed all downhill from there.
The first time I felt my soul die a little was at the age of thirteen when I was sitting my mock Common Entrance exams. Common Entrance, to those who don’t know, is the gateway from posh junior school to posh senior school. I think the first exam I took was geography. For me geography was an extremely dreary middling subject. I could do English. Or at least I had an interest in it. I had zero interest in the sciences. None. Not even biology! Geography seemed to me to be the love child of English and science. I should have been able to get at least somewhere with it. It was when I read the first question that it hit me. Right in the gut. It wasn’t that the question didn’t make sense or even that I couldn’t have had some reasonable stab at it; it was just that it was the first time I realised that I wasn’t equipped with enough academic clarity to get to the heart of that question.
CLARITY
Clarity is absolutely the key to academic intelligence. Without that clarity I didn’t have the tools or the insight to scribe a reasoned and articulate argument that would ultimately warrant top marks. At that moment I realised that it takes both measured clarity and a methodical but sponge-like brain to be conventionally intelligent. At that moment I realised that that could never and would never be me. At that moment I discovered sad for the first time. Sad because I knew this exam and the rest of my school life were going to be a bigger academic struggle than I ever thought they would be. And deeper sad as I knew that I was never going to ‘sparkle’ with intellectual notoriety. A notoriety that I had secretly craved.
And that sadness, buried deep in my soul, has been my constant companion ever since. That sadness has been my creative driving force, too. It has forced me to be always searching for something that I can do as well, if not better, than others. Something that I can completely own. Something I
can hold on to that might make me feel uniquely me. And, one chilly April afternoon in 1982, I found it.
I was fifteen. A boy in chaos. Trying and failing to find his own identity. His USP, if you like. Being threatened with an enforced school move as it was evident he was in full drift mode. Of course it didn’t help that I had two brothers with big personalities who preceded me at the same school. It was the first time I found that I didn’t like being compared to anyone else. Still don’t. I was just another of the Shaws. ‘Oh no, not another bloody Shaw’ was the recurring schoolmaster refrain. So I fought and fought and fought against it. I wasn’t aware that I was fighting. I just knew I didn’t fit. Anywhere.
Then the epiphany happened.
I walked into Dyne House auditorium. The school theatre. I sat on the back row and watched a rehearsal taking place. It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t a metaphorical bolt of lightning. It was just a slow melding into belonging. I can’t remember what the rehearsal was or even why I was there but I can remember the odd but beautiful feeling of discovery that I had found my club. My world. And to this day, every time I find myself in a darkened, almost empty theatre, normally about to start a tech, I catch myself and recollect that feeling and am reminded of the lost fifteen-year-old uncovering his very own Neverland. A place where being different was an asset not an oddity. And uniqueness was encouraged as it was at the heart of creativity.