Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

His mum picks him up in her car and I go straight back in to do my laps. I’ve been swimming every day because Don Draper started doing that in Mad Men. I looked at his body and thought that I’d like to look more like that. I know the actor will have got to look like that with weights and dieting. I take a pretty intensive chlorine poisoning every day and reflect that this – trying to be more like someone who doesn’t exist by doing something they probably don’t do – is one of the few times I’m behaving like other people.

  Murphy and Stewart are coming round. I try not to have another joint because I know I’ll be pish company but I actually end up taking some acid. There’s a Chinese family killer on the loose. Channel 5’s news does that slow zoom onto his photo and I’m afraid that he’s going to turn into a lizard.

  We used to all go round to Murphy’s when we were teenagers. There was me, Marshy, Stewart, our friend Ian and a guy called Chris Murray. Chris was an Irvine Welsh character, a prototype of venal brutality. The first time I ever played FIFA he beat me 6–0. Every goal was greeted with screams of triumph, sometimes on his knees like a player. He was last sighted by Stewart with another villain and what appeared to be a schoolgirl. They were about to collect a Crisis Loan at the DSS so they could all go fuck at a Travelodge. His Bukowskiesque existence seemed to suit him, and he was described as fit and upbeat.

  We’d often said we should all go back to Murphy’s again but I was the one that really meant it. He still lives in the same flat. One day we all got in a cab and turned up on his doorstep with a PlayStation 3. He gave me that look that stoners sometimes have like I’ve stepped out of their TV. He told us to come in for a beer but there was a tremendous awkwardness hanging over the little kitchen table that now held a huge bag from Gamestation. Murphy’s doing well for himself these days with some limo business and was wearing two different kinds of machine-frayed denim.

  There was an awkward moment of maybe this wasn’t a good idea, but eventually his wife and kids fucked off and we all ended up playing a big tournament of two players each team, which is always brilliant for getting everybody shouting at each other. I hadn’t seen him in 20 years.

  Stewart was in unbeatable form that night, and eventually we packed it up and watched this blaxploitation zombie flick of Murphy’s called Nigger Mortis. It was really funny, and even interesting because we were all really stoned. Grass can be like salt for the mind. Paul told me he ran into someone who knew me through somebody I went out with when I went to uni. Paul reports the verdict.

  ‘He went out with her for a bit and he was a right cunt to her.’

  I very much doubt the story but I joke that it doesn’t really narrow things down.

  When we left I gave Murphy a kind of semi-emotional hug in the hall and I ended up talking about how I just want my kids to be happy.

  ‘You’re living in the wrong country,’ grinned Murphy, and I laughed but it made it a long cab home.

  Tonight we all end up standing, drinking beers over the wax township. I explain my original thinking was to come back to Glasgow and dominate a scheme. Employ agents who manipulated the locals and move them about the board. When it came down to it, the effort of doing anything with what I’d made, I just couldn’t be fucked.

  I look at them both over the top of my glasses.

  ‘In this sense, I am like God.’

  They both laugh, even though I am deadly fucking serious.

  We talk about getting DMT. It’s a kind of super-drug that we can never quite track down. It gives you a 20-minute high where you’re in another reality talking to what have been described as ‘the machine elves of Hyperspace’. Who doesn’t want that?

  ‘I mean, it’s maybe not a party drug,’ Stewart said, ‘but I’d really like to talk to the little fuckers.’

  ‘You should put it in your book,’ monotones Murphy, deadly serious. ‘Say you’re looking for it, some cunt might give you some.’

  ‘A drugs plea,’ I agree. ‘Maybe I could write a scene where we’re all talking about how much we want DMT and then they turn the page and it’s like my anguished face but made out of words and the words read “Get me DMT” over and over again.’

  ‘The character of Boyle in the book bursts through into our reality like a literary astronaut,’ laughs Stewart, in the intonation of a Sunday Herald review. ‘The author’s thirst for psychotropic substances literally transcends the page. A word golem leapt from my copy and began searching my house for drugs.’

  I wheeze with laughter and when I stop, I say, ‘But, seriously, where the fuck can we get DMT?’

  Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

  Terence McKenna

  Chapter 08

  Everybody now classifies themselves as having a ‘public’ and a ‘personal’ self. I’m sure that has always been the case on some level – you speak differently to your kids than you do to your co-workers or whatever. Now with Facebook and Twitter and even things like texting, we have a variety of different masks. We are never done selling ourselves, marketing a public personality but believing that our ‘real’ self is unaffected.

  The one real problem with that is [drumroll] … that’s how a psychopath thinks. I’ll bet a psychopath does a lot of the same things you do. Sticks exclamation marks into a text because they don’t want to admit the sheer lack of emotion they feel about the communication. Psychopaths must love Facebook. It’s like a primer in shallow humanity. If you had to pick a psychopath out of a group of people, would it be more or less difficult if they all communicated in only 140 characters?

  Each new generation seems increasingly comfortable about being marketed to, and about marketing themselves in turn. You don’t even need to be in show-business anymore. What you’re marketing might be your friend’s band, a run you’re doing for charity or even just an article you’ve read – but really it’s you. It might be you as a great friend, as a person who cares about cancer victims or even just as being politically aware, but we all know what we’re really selling.

  This is encouraged because guess what happens in that gap between the real you and the you that you pretend to be? That internal wasteland – that’s where they sell you stuff! You’re not that sporty outgoing type you pretend to be but maybe with a new snowboard and an off-road vehicle you could be. You could be the intellectual you pretend to be if you bought a bunch of important books you piled beside your bed but never read. You’re reading this one instead of Gravity’s Rainbow, you fucking idiot. I’m not saying that being a psychopath is particularly bad for you – hey, if you want to be part of a society that bombs little brown people into mince, it’s probably an advantage.

  This is the reason actors are so foolishly over-celebrated. They’re a metaphor for the general culture of unacknowledged psychopathy. The nearer the edge they are, the more we like them. You always hear about actors being ‘vulnerable’ as a compliment, and it’s never particularly in reference to the characters they play. The idea that ‘mask wearing’ is driving them mad makes us identify with them more, because it’s how we all feel.

  I have a theory that all actors are pretty fucking crazy; it’s just when they step out of line that they’re allowed to talk to the press and reveal what a fucking nutcase they really are. You read about actors with ‘painkiller addictions’ and have this idea that they’re taking too much paracetamol. They’re actually crushing up and snorting powerful opiate pills and fighting the Withering King and his Memnoch Army as they traverse a swirling medieval landscape. Who’d have thought that pretending to be somebody else every day could send you crazy?

  Take Charlie Sheen, who went on tour with his one-man show. Which is a neat trick when you have multiple personalities. Given how many voices he has in his head he could easily stage a production of Les Misérables. It says a lot about h
ow he’s treated his body that the last role he got offered was playing Martin Sheen’s corpse. Charlie says he’s confronted his drug demons, and the good news is that it was all a misunderstanding and now they’re getting on brilliantly. He even provided a blood sample during an interview – after lighting the wrong end of a fag brought on a coughing fit. Because of his offensive comments and out-of-control behaviour, TV executives have cancelled his sitcom, and offered him his own reality TV show. With the blank, expressionless eyes of a snowman, he says, ‘I’m on a drug and it’s called Charlie Sheen.’ Ironic, as he’s taken so many drugs that the one thing no longer present in his bloodstream is his own DNA. He told an interviewer, ‘I have one speed. I have one gear.’ It sound to me like he actually has a lot of gear and only some of it’s speed. He also said he’s got ‘Tiger Blood’ in his veins. It’s certainly a lot safer having a blood transfusion from a tiger than from Charlie.

  At the moment Sheen’s life consists of going on huge drugs benders with groups of porn stars. If he’d straightened himself out he could have a really mediocre career as a bit-part Hollywood actor. He’s crazy like a fox! And also actually crazy. What a tragic waste, not being Charlie Sheen is. How majestic it will be for him to die, possibly quite soon, knowing that when they make a movie of his life, it will be a porno.

  I think that I, like a lot of comedians and social critics, have taken a wrong turn somewhere in imagining that by slating our culture we’re providing some kind of social critique. First up, I’m not sure that the two things are all that related. Ireland has always had a vibrant literary and musical culture, but it’s a fairly horrible, priest-ridden, fucked-up society. More moral societies like Canada and Norway (I realise how brutally subjective that is, but don’t care) have incredibly dull cultures. More than this, blasting Britain’s Got Talent, or the Beckhams, or whatever, is something people can pretty much do themselves, and indeed the shiteness of those things is part of their appeal.

  Also, let’s remember that the public culture we are presented with isn’t real. It isn’t even real-ish. To give you an example, Celtic manager Neil Lennon was being sent threats, replica bombs and bullets with his name on, by the sort of people whose IQ goes up when they stand in dog shit. This was reported under headlines like ‘Scotland’s Shame’, with various people characterised as being either terrified or outraged. I’d say the actual mood of people at the time was the standard human reaction to sectarianism in Scotland. Bored, disappointed, but not surprised. That doesn’t work for the culture, though, because the culture is a soap opera.

  Think of all the gurning and overacting soap opera actors have to do: telling their drinking partner that of course they put that bet on for him, then contorting their face into a parody of guilt. It’s much easier to convey broad things like terror or outrage – as a result, the public’s actual reactions are completely ignored. To be honest, it would be almost impossible to be truthful using the machinery of our culture. Tabloid headlines, talk-show monologues and Twitter posts aren’t really capable of communicating something as complex as ennui, and the increasingly concise nature of all that stuff makes it almost impossible to convey an original thought.

  So there we go. All those X Factor and Jordan jokes, all that shit is pointless. But look at it this way. In the old days, before automated abattoirs, there would have been a big guy who swung a hammer at the cows to kill them. A big, heavy sledgehammer that he’d bring up and down in an economical arc created by practice and indifference. I’m sure that other people in the abattoir would have kept that man at a distance socially, but sometimes they’d look up from their tasks on the bloody floor and admit that there was a certain beauty to those short brutal swings, those folding legs, those silent deaths. The following remarks should be taken in that spirit.

  Julie Burchill said in the Sun that I had a face only a blind mother could love. She’s wrong; they hate me as well. Unless I’m wearing their husband’s aftershave. This from a woman who looks like The Penguin on human growth hormone. Blind mothers would love you too, Julie, if they could touch your face without getting their fingers eaten off. Reader, do you see the beauty in that? Good.

  Show-business does have its upside. James Corden has managed to marry an attractive woman. I would say she lives in a perpetual solar eclipse but it’s really more akin to strobe lighting. She spends so much time in shadow she has moss growing up the front of her face, and has developed her own rudimentary system of sonar where once an hour she will just scream into the darkness in the hope that someone will rescue her from her starless prison.

  Superdrug have been selling record amounts of a new hairspray endorsed by Cheryl Cole. It’s the hairspray she herself uses. Yes, you too could have hair like Cheryl’s. Lonely hair. Hair with a void that can never be filled. Hair that will hold firm despite the fact that it’s dying inside. I’d use a gel.

  Cheryl published her autobiography, called Through My Eyes. Presumably the full title, Through My Eyes You’ll Just See the Back of the Inside of My Head, wouldn’t fit on the cover. I must confess I did find it difficult to put down. I was worried if it touched anything in my home that thing would somehow become fatally tainted by its mediocrity. The book’s cover price is £18.99, but if you’d like to buy it just send me a cheque for £8.99, and I’ll come round and smack you in the mouth.

  Poor Cheryl, the Americans just didn’t find her insincerity believable. Will the Black Eyed Peas still want to work with her if she heads for obscurity? Fear not, Cheryl. If they desert you too, I’ll gladly provide the Black Eyes. And the Pee.

  Cheryl was replaced on the judging panel by Nicole Scherzinger. That must be like coming home and finding your husband in bed with a plank of wood. Which must have brought back some painful memories for her.

  She’s reportedly been getting death threats. One threat carried the warning: ‘Every1 has a bullet for you.’ Which is plainly nonsense. I’ve got six. Louis was also very upset to receive death threats. Simon gets them, but merely runs them through his shredder and snorts them for strength.

  Poor Chezza was so upset that for days family and friends were trying to coax her out from behind the sofa with a bowl of coins and a mirror. The last time someone bombed that badly in America they built a memorial at Ground Zero. She now can’t walk down the street in the States without being unrecognised.

  Cheryl told the American producers she could speak more clearly. They replied, ‘Half past three’. She went straight to the airport and explained to the US staff where she wanted to go, which is why she’s now in the town of ‘Fek Kin Ootta Heer’ in North Korea. I’ve always found it perfectly easy to understand Cheryl Cole. If my dog curls up into a ball and shits itself I know she’s singing.

  She only did four days’ work. Doesn’t sound much, but for some folk in Newcastle that’ll do a whole family for a lifetime. In fact, her sacking has reduced total employment in the area by half. If it wasn’t for Sid Waddell there’d be nobody earning a wage. Actually, I don’t think Cheryl will struggle for work – it’s just instead of advertising shampoo they’ll probably be testing it on her. What will she do? Apparently she plans to continue her break from singing, which she started when she joined Girls Aloud back in 2002. With her extensive judging experience they’ll be crying out for her at The Hague when the Ratko Mladić trial kicks off.

  ‘… You made that massacre your own, pet.’

  ‘… Never mind all them dead Muslims, pet … can you sing us “Copacabana”?’

  Cheryl was not only sacked from the US show; she’s no longer a judge on the British one. But I’ll only know for sure if my intensive delving into the world of Voodoo has worked if her legs fall off at Christmas.

  There’s a rumour she lost the UK show because her manager will.i.am didn’t hit it off with ITV execs. Apparently, he borrowed a technique from his brother Sam, trying to sweeten the deal by offering them green eggs and ham … and, despite their repeated refusals, just suggesting it again and again, changing
either the location or the species of dining companion.

  It would be difficult for Cheryl to go back to being a judge on The X Factor here again. I mean, how would she be able to criticise a contestant for their lack of talent and ability when she was sacked for not being able to sit on a chair? To be honest, I sometimes just stare at all the pictures of our Cheryl and wonder if maybe, maybe the deeper problem is that she’s just too beautiful to live in such a heartless age. Then I slide the rifle back under my bed and think, ‘Not yet, Frankie, bide your time, bide your time.’

  Cheryl rebuffed Simon’s attempts to contact her, completely ignoring all the flying monkeys tapping at her window. Simon was keen to apologise and bombarded her with so many texts it was almost impossible for the ones of Ashley’s cock to get through.

  Cheryl’s doing her best to overcome allegations of racism in her past – she married a black guy, she caught a disease in Africa and has a body like fried chicken. I hope her malaria doesn’t flare up before her heavyweight title bout in Vegas.

  No sooner was Cheryl ditched by Simon Cowell than she apparently got back with Ashley. The whole Ashley–Cheryl thing is just like Romeo and Juliet. If Romeo had an etching made of his penis and sent it to Desdemona, Rosalind and Portia. I thought she looked loved-up lately but just assumed her cleaner had done a particularly thorough job on the reflective surfaces in her flat.

  Ashley apparently missed Cheryl badly. He tried cheating on other women but it’s just wasn’t the same. Anyway, they didn’t sleep together, they just sat and talked about the old days, Cheryl apparently dwelling on the rise of Prussia under Frederick the Great, while Ashley focused on Charlemagne.

  Watch it, Cheryl. Ashley wants you to move back into a 12-bedroom house. He might still plan to pull women, safe in the knowledge anyone on a predominantly lettuce-based diet couldn’t hope to open more than three or so doors. I reckon he’s just turned on by the idea of that 25 per cent chance of getting caught … move back in and it could end up being like some giant, heartbreakingly pornographic version of Deal or No Deal.