Alcatraz
Shortly after Josie’s tour ended, I managed to secure the tour support for another favourite comic of mine, Milton Jones. Surprisingly, Milton’s tour contained no scrapes. The most crazy it ever got was when I dropped an open yoghurt on the floor of the dressing room and Milton got some yoghurt on his shoe.
All in all I had a lovely time; such a lovely time, in fact, that as soon as it was over I immediately left the country. I hadn’t been able to afford a holiday in years but while supporting Milton, I saved enough up to be able to go to San Francisco and stay in a hostel for ten days on my own.
I’d never stayed in a hostel before and I wasn’t entirely sold on my room mates, one of which was a guy who had brought a lady back one night and ‘done it’ in the bunk above me. This was doubly annoying because it wasn’t even his bunk. He had moved beds in order to disturb me in the worst way possible. As if knowing someone’s in the bunk below is one of his major turn ons and since there was no one in the bunk below him that night his options were to move onto the bunk above me or to ask me if I wouldn’t mind moving onto the bunk below his for the duration of the shagging. He chose the nicer option of the two but still, not a fan.
I ended the holiday with a trip to the world famous maximum security prison, Alcatraz. I had to book the Alcatraz trip in advance because it was so popular and I looked forward to it the whole holiday. I’m sure you’re aware that in order to get to Alcatraz you have to take a ferry because it’s on an island. The ferry journey itself was nice and relaxing, until I idly looked inside my wallet to see that all of my cards were missing. All of them. Someone had taken the cards but left the cash. I had just been pickpocketed and yet I was the one heading directly to jail. Not. Fair. I was freaking out. We were now halfway to Alcatraz so I could hardly ask them to turn the ferry around. I was trapped, so I began to pace around the top deck like a madman, willing the ferry to hurry up and get there, the other passengers all looking at me thinking, Well, he is really looking forward to going to Alcatraz, that limey can barely contain himself.
As soon as we arrived at the prison I ran to a nearby help desk. I only had a pay-as-you-go phone, with no internet, so I didn’t know the number to call in order to cancel my cards. I needed help.
‘You’ve got to help me,’ I pleaded. ‘My credit cards have been stolen.’
The lady behind the desk looked perplexed. As far as she was concerned this British tourist clearly believed that if you get mugged in San Francisco the first thing you’ve got to do is report directly to Alcatraz. For all she knew I could’ve been mugged in London then got straight on a plane and flown here, determined to take this all the way to the top. I saw the confusion in her face.
‘I just need to use your phone so I can cancel my credit cards,’ I clarified.
She looked apologetic. ‘I’m sorry, you can’t, this phone is for staff use only.’
OK. A few problems with this. For starters, I’ve just arrived at a prison, therefore I’m entitled to a phone call. I’ve seen enough American films to know the system over there. Also, this is Alcatraz and I was trying to catch a criminal, so they should be the first people to rush to my aid. The guards who used to work there back when it was a fully functioning prison would be appalled to learn that these days the employees were allowing pickpockets to run amok through the streets of San Fran, refusing the victims access to the staff phone. I tried to convince this lady to let me use the phone but she refused time and time again. We actually argued for so long that by the time I gave up, the ferry had returned back to the mainland. I was stranded and, of all the islands to be stranded on, Alcatraz was probably the hardest to leave. I was trapped on an island that has been specifically designed to contain people. The few people who have apparently escaped Alcatraz were never found and were thought to have died while trying to swim to freedom. The next ferry would not arrive for another forty-five minutes, so in the meantime I took the audio tour.
The Alcatraz audio tour is narrated by ex-prison guards and ex-prisoners of Alcatraz. I think it’s safe to say I was not in the best head space to be taking this particular audio tour. Every time a prisoner was describing how tough it was to be incarcerated on Alcatraz I was so happy, walking around in front of the other tourists saying stuff like ‘Good!’ out loud and snickering at their pain. The ex-guards would talk about the punishments dished out to the murderers but I was like, ‘Hurry up and get to the pickpockets! Tell me what horrors awaited them! The very worst I hope! I do hope you didn’t spare the pickpockets!’ Other visitors would’ve seen me nodding my approval at the size of the tiny cells and testing the strength of the bars, pulling them until I was satisfied that no two-bit crook was going to bend them any time soon. Fantasizing about throwing the staff at the ironically named Alcatraz Help Desk into one of these babies, have them do a long stretch for assisting and enabling a common thief and being traitors to the spirit of Alcatraz itself. Maybe I’d throw all the staff in prison and become the new Alcatraz prison warden and clean up this goddamn city once and for all. I’d soon have this beautiful jail chock-full of criminals once more and I’d reserve a cell in the darkest, dankest reaches of the building for the sonuvabitch who lifted my credit cards and give him a bunkmate who would have sexual intercourse on the bunk above him all night long (by this point I’d decided that the thief was definitely the sex guy from the hostel). And if Alcatraz ever shut down again and went back to being a tourist attraction then I, the ex-warden, could narrate the audio tour and I’d make it a lot more hardcore than the tame-ass one I was currently listening to. I’d send out a message to all filthy criminal punks, pure and simple: ‘just because this prison is closed does not mean I won’t still hunt you down and destroy everything you hold dear you scum sucking vermin. Remember my name – and not just because it’s written on the credit cards that you stole, which I’d like back by the way. Seriously, just give me back my credits cards you arseholes, what is your problem? You’ve ruined my friggin’ holiday! I hate you! T-shirts are available in the giftshop, thank you for visiting Alcatraz.’
The tour is meant to take an hour but I obviously had to rattle through it in order to catch the ferry in time. You can and should spend hours on Alcatraz. I don’t think anyone before me has ever arrived on one ferry and left on the very next one. I boarded, absolutely livid. I was certain the cards had been stolen by the man who had done sex on the bunk above me the night before and if I hurried back to the hostel I would surely be able to catch him before he made his getaway.
I arrived at the hostel and realised I could use the payphone in order to cancel my cards. I went upstairs into my locker to retrieve my bag which contained some loose change, and what should I find there but all of my credit cards which at some point had somehow fallen out of my wallet and into my bag. My own messiness had caused me to ruin my entire trip to Alcatraz. The real crime here was poor organisation and the criminal was none other than yours truly. I rethought my future contribution to the Alcatraz audio commentary. ‘Guys, sometimes it’s possible to lose things by accident instead of being a victim of actual crime so I implore you all to check your pockets several times and consider all possibilities before you go spoiling your visit to one of the world’s most fascinating and informative tourist attractions. That being said, the people who work at the Help Desk here are still fully certified dicks so feel free to flip them off from me on your way out and tell them to “suck it” as your ferry’s pulling away. T-shirts are available in the giftshop, thank you for visiting Alcatraz.’
Wine
I was now living in a different Wood Green house with a group of friends I had known since before starting comedy. It was a terrific house to live in because everyone was very social and would often organise fun nights out, or nights in, together. My housemate Daniel was once bought a private wine tasting by his sister as a birthday present. A sommelier would be coming to the house to talk him through a series of fancy wines and all of his housemates were invited too.
There were six of us there, eight if you count the sommelier and his apprentice, and we quickly learned that when you invite a stranger into your house and allow them to hold court it inevitably makes for quite the awkward atmos. It also became clear that the whole thing was a sales pitch in order to get us to buy the wines. We had naïvely assumed that paying for the experience of the wine tasting would be enough. But paying for the wine tasting was the furthest thing from enough. The whole tasting was one big pressure sell and he tried to get us to buy the wines by telling little stories with each demonstration. Every single story was about a different time him and his mate Jim had got absolutely blasted. The stories got gradually more and more debauched until we all stopped laughing at them and instead reacted with concern because the man seemed like he might have had a serious problem. The stories that weren’t concerning were a little on the dull side.
One story was about how he had rung Jim up and told him he’d got a bottle of that wine he likes, so Jim told him to come over to the hotel he was staying at and bring some cheese. So the sommelier went into a cheese shop and bought a whole wheel of blue cheese, then went to Jim’s hotel where they put the cheese on a radiator so it was nice and soft and ate it with spoons that the hotel owners had allowed them to get from the kitchen themselves because they knew them so well.
The thing is, when he originally told that us story I was twenty-six and thought it was boring but just now as I wrote it out for you I have to admit that sounds like the best thing ever. I’m thirty-two now and, as a thirty-two year old, sitting in a hotel eating a wheel of blue cheese from a radiator with spoons I’ve selected myself from the kitchen because the staff know me, staying up late and sharing an expensive bottle of quality wine with my best friend, sounds like my ideal evening, and I genuinely wish I was doing it right now. If you told me that story today, as a thirty-two year old, I would buy the wine from you immediately, get the name of the cheese and buy that too, then grab a spoon, crank up the heat and head to my nearest radiator.
Every time we tasted the wine he would ask us what flavours we were getting. Our answer, always, was ‘wine flavour’, as we had no idea. He would then tell us what flavours we should be getting (none of which we could detect – he could’ve said anything he wanted and we would’ve acted like we could taste it) and at one point he said, ‘You should be getting a hint of . . . do you remember those French sweets, Campinos? You should be getting a hint of that.’ Campinos were a strawberries and cream flavour boiled sweet that I hadn’t eaten since I was thirteen on a school trip to Boulogne. He said, ‘I bet you’re kicking yourselves now you didn’t guess that one.’ We weren’t kicking ourselves; I was hardly going to start guessing artificially flavoured sweets in order to appear sophisticated (‘I’m detecting a whiff of Jolly Ranchers, anybody else? Exquisite!’).
It then came to the part of the night where he asked us, ‘So – who wants to buy some of the wine I’ve shown you today?’ I felt like I was back at the French porcelain exhibition. Come to think of it, a lot of these wines were French also. Maybe this was a common French sales tactic – do a presentation that appears not to be a sales pitch and then put them in an awkward position at the end and ask them if they want to buy all the things they’ve politely agreed were nice. Maybe that was what the man in Paris said to me regarding the dog. Maybe he was starting a sales pitch that would eventually lead to me having to buy the dog but the lady overheard and decided she’d had enough of pressure selling so gave us both a piece of her mind. God, I hope that’s what happened.
The sommelier stood with his arms open, looking around at us for an answer.
‘Sorry, we don’t really have any money,’ the birthday boy said.
Well. The wine man threw a right strop. He moodily repacked all the wine into the hamper he’d brought it in, while his apprentice looked at us apologetically.
‘Sorry,’ my friend tried as the wine bottles bashed against each other in the boxes.
The man didn’t even look over. ‘No, no . . .’ he muttered, ‘who cares, you got your free taste.’ He was right actually: on the plus side, we had got a free taste.
It took quite a long time for him to pack up all of his stuff so we just had to sit there and watch as he angrily repacked his wine tasting equipment and occasionally threw us glances or muttered ‘waste of my time’ under his breath. When he eventually did leave we were all a bit stressed so we unwound with a £5 bottle of wine we’d previously bought from Morrison’s. It tasted of Wine Gums.
Badminton
While living in North London I regularly played badminton with my friend Sam. Sam used to play squash for Northamptonshire and I hadn’t played any sports since I was thirteen when I was in a rugby team. The rugby team I had been in was a good one though. I joined the team when I was ten and we won every single game we played until we all turned thirteen and all the thirteen year olds in the whole country had a growth spurt except for us. We were now going up against fully grown adults who were shaving as they walked on to the pitch; we lost every single game we played and found out the hard way that we had an awful lot of ‘cryers’ on the team. Fastforward to my late twenties and I’m losing every single game of badminton to Sam but holding the tears back and being a brave, brave boy.
Sam and I arrived on the badminton court one evening and, as we started to play, two women came in and started a game on the court next us. After five minutes one of them walked over, stood on our court while we were in the middle of a rally and said, ‘DOUBLES!’ It was a little forceful but we accepted because we didn’t seem to have a choice and because they were worse at badminton than I was.
‘Boys versus girls,’ the woman said, ushering Sam over to the same side of the net as me. ‘Boys versus girls’ made me fear we were about to enter into a ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ argument instead of a badminton match, most likely resulting in Sam and I standing on our side of the net shouting ‘from Earth!’ until our voices got hoarse. But to my relief we started playing badminton and about two minutes into the game two men walked in, also holding badminton rackets. The men stopped in their tracks when they saw us playing badminton and stared in disbelief. I noticed their faces and concluded that these guys must’ve been mighty impressed with how much we were thrashing these ladies and then one of them stepped forward and said to one of the women, ‘What’s all this?’
She looked back at him, angrily. ‘You were late! If you’re late this is what happens, we find some other men and they play with us instead!’
Now as far as badminton players go, these men looked pretty gangster. They were way stronger than me and Sam, and I feared we were about to enter into another doubles game and one we would most certainly lose (because that game of doubles would be an actual fight with fists and kicking, not a badminton match with rackets and a shuttlecock).6 Although, I was quite flattered that the ladies referred to Sam and I as ‘other men’, as compared to these guys we did not look like we qualified. One of them actually had a full beard that he’d shaved patterns into.
At this point in the story, I’d like to point out that every time I went to play badminton there was a child at the leisure centre who would bully me. He was six years old, tops, and someone had clearly updated this kid about what adults are scared of these days, because every time I was in the changing rooms getting changed he would burst in with two different friends every week and point at me and laugh. His timing was amazing because it’s like he knew when I was about to put my shorts on. I’d hear him outside giggling his way up the corridor, which meant I had to rush and pull my shorts up really quick. I’d get them on just in time before he burst in and absolutely killed himself laughing. This kid laughed like an actual cartoon character, both hands on his stomach, rolling around the floor on his back and kicking his legs in the air with unparalleled glee. I know I could’ve just changed into my shorts before I left my house or worn shorts underneath my trousers but it was a long journey to the leisure centre and I had to go
by tube. I didn’t want to expose my nobbly knees to my fellow passengers because I’m very self-conscious about my nobbly knees. I also didn’t want to stand there with an oddly big butt because I’ve got secret shorts on underneath a pair of cords.
Anyway, this kid did this to me every week and would then run up to the viewing gallery and laugh at me from there while I was playing badminton on the court below. Sometimes he’d even run downstairs and somehow sneak up behind me without me knowing and when I turned and saw him he would kill himself laughing again and scamper away. I could only imagine what a nightmare this little sod was to kids his own age considering how effortlessly he bullied a man more than twenty years older than him. Relentlessly tormenting this innocent badminton novice with all the confidence of someone with ties to the mob. I’m still scared that when he grows up he’ll track me down and pick up where he left off just for the sport of it. Man, I hated that kid.
So we’re playing doubles against two ladies and two angry men have shown up and are wondering why the women aren’t playing against them like they promised and in the end the ladies say to them, ‘Look, you can play the winner, how’s that?’ and they agreed. We didn’t seem to have a say in the matter. We did not want to play these men but we were already winning by a significant margin against these ladies. I then did my best to throw the match. Sam, however, is naturally competitive and so continued to wipe the floor with them. The men began giving the women advice during the game, on two occasions initiating some sort of huddle where they discussed our weak points (although we only had one weak point and that weak point was me). We (Sam) still ended up winning the game and so had to play these angry men who seemed to think they now had something to prove. And we (Sam) thrashed them even easier than we’d thrashed the two women who may or may not have been their girlfriends but whose approval clearly meant a great deal to these particular guys. We were playing a blinder.
James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes Page 19