Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  ‘There is a slurping noise coming from Dara’s arsehole, like a mouth eagerly drinking soup.’

  I’m in a little windowless dressing room with no toilet and the temptation is to piss in the sink. I’m about to do it when I think that I need to keep my dignity, however wired I’m feeling. I walk down the corridor to the bathroom but it’s being cleaned by this young black guy, so I go back and piss in the sink.

  Dara Ó Briain has got me onto his The Apprentice reaction show, which I’m almost certain is called You’re Fired. I could only watch five minutes of it on iPlayer, but it rates quite well. I see Dara briefly in the corridor and thank him for his help. He laughs off my thanks but I want him to know how much I appreciate it. I grip his forearm and look him in the eye.

  ‘Thanks a lot, big man. I was OK until I heard what happened to Richard Herring.’

  ‘Oh yeah, car crash, horrible,’ he nods.

  I wonder if he thinks Herring was killed in a car crash, then I realise he means his arse looked like it had been in a car crash, which it did.

  ‘I’m surprised at how little it got reported,’ I tell him. ‘He was doing quite well with that podcast thing …’

  Dara shakes his head, and I know that this is both a sadness at Herring’s death and a dismissal of my idea that anyone can be doing well with a podcast.

  I realise it’s a bit serious for a corridor conversation.

  ‘I’m really grateful. This could well save me from having an arsehole like a cat flap that someone’s forced a sofa through,’ I beam, and he nods. Later I worry that he doesn’t know anything about the rapist, that he seemed unsure of what I meant. Then I think that it’s the kind of thing I usually say anyway, so fuck it.

  I’m eating the little chocolates that they’ve left me in the dressing room. It’s weird but when you do a TV appearance they give you a little gift. It’s often something like facial-care products. Sometimes it’s flowers. I’ll take those with me even if I’m going back to Scotland the next day, give them to my girlfriend or my daughter, pretend I bought them. It’s never chocolates, I think numbly, my tongue feeling like it’s swelling in my mouth. I’m standing, looking for the chocolate box but it’s gone and my legs are trembling. The room tilts and roars and there’s a tremendous smell, like a wet animal, and I’m trying to get to the door but I’m asleep.

  I’m in a bigger dressing room, propped up on a sofa, my head resting on the wall. I should be rehearsing my jokes for the show. I want to panic but I don’t, and I can’t help feeling that I’ve had a lovely, relaxing sleep. There’s a big guy draped over two of those little upholstered stools. He’s in a suit but his trousers are off. I think it’s Dara. I’m aware that somebody is sitting beside me on the sofa and I’m pleased to have company. I turn round and the swimming sensation makes me grin.

  He’s wearing a beautiful black suit. Armani, I think, and he’s a big fluffy white lion. He seems pleased to see me and raises a beautiful gold-topped cane to his brow with a wink.

  ‘Francis,’ he chuckles in an impossibly deep voice. ‘I have a feeling you’ve been avoiding me.’

  I laugh a long, ridiculous laugh of relief and agree that I have. I stretch out my legs lazily and feel that rush you get when you’re coming up on ecstacy, or acid. He knows what I’m thinking.

  ‘Acid, yessss,’ he growls. ‘A bit of MDMA in there to take the edge off it.’

  I see he has the box of chocolates on his lap and pops a couple of coffee creams into his mouth with a paw.

  ‘Are you going to rape Dara?’ I giggle. I’m honestly feeling that it would be interesting, maybe even exciting, if he did.

  ‘Rape?’ He seems surprised. ‘Goodness me, no, this is something that he wants … Rape? No, I wouldn’t call it that.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask, and it seems strange that I haven’t asked already.

  ‘It’s pronounced Showbiddnnnessss…s,’ he purrs.

  ‘Do you appear differently to everybody? Does everybody see something different?’

  He looks at his own paws in puzzlement. ‘No, I’m a lion.’ He seems thrown. ‘Do I look like a lion to you?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’

  He stands up exactly as a man would, his thigh muscles bulging through his trousers, and his tail, which drapes from a neat hole in the seat, suddenly whips about excitedly.

  ‘Fucking watch this,’ he grins conspiratorially and produces from his fly a huge, red, animal penis. Semi-erect it’s about the length of a policeman’s truncheon. He unscrews the top of his cane and replaces it with a gold attachment from inside his jacket, which he screws on with a practised motion. Placing the stick in front of the sleeping body he slides his now-bulging cock into the attachment. It seems to function like a snooker rest.

  ‘Why did you rape Paul Merton?’ I blurt, and he seems a little put out. ‘He’s pretty famous, and normally you seem to …’

  ‘I know, I know …’ He shakes his mane apologetically and turns to look at me. ‘I just hate all that fucking boring shit he does about silent films.’

  I feel myself nodding. ‘That’s no reason to rape him …,’ I start.

  ‘And he does all those adverts for insurance and stuff.’ He’s growling now and stiffening along his cock rest as he gets angrier. ‘And Have I Got News is shite now!’

  ‘IT’S BEEN SHITE FOR YEARS!’ I open my mouth to say something else but he roars.

  ‘NIGGER’S GOT TO BUST A NUT, AIN’T HE?’

  My vision blurs, like the acid is hitting me in a big wave. I feel like I’m looking at a single colour that’s every colour in the room, then my vision comes back sharply and the lion is fucking Dara, pressing his arse cheeks back gently with his paws. The lion seems very much an animal now, bending over the body like prey as he thrusts rapidly along the rest into the jiggling mass beneath him. The room fills with a colossal purring noise and it slowly dawns on me that it’s coming from Dara.

  ‘Yesss … They purr … They purr when they want it …,’ whispers the lion, slightly out of breath.

  ‘I don’t think he wants this,’ I say, trying to stand. I have some idea that I can talk us both out of here, even do the show.

  ‘He does, he does …,’ the white lion groans. ‘It’s the mask, the face you wear, it takes over, it wants this.’

  I try to pull at his shoulder but I’m fucked, and it’s almost as if I’m patting him on the back, congratulating him.

  ‘Those masks you wear to deal with your producers, your agents, your crowds, you are those masks …’

  He is giving an extra-hard thrust every few words now, emphasising his points.

  ‘Think about how much airtime you give your mask … It’s the fucking AIRTIME! That person you think you are, when are you him? WHEN ARE YOU HIM?’ he demands.

  Underneath the purring, there is a slurping noise coming from Dara’s arsehole, like a mouth eagerly drinking soup. My legs just aren’t working and I fall back on the sofa nearest the door. I can see Dara’s face now and his eyes are open. He’s asleep but he has exactly the ironic smile he’d have presenting a show.

  ‘This is what he wants!’ shouts the lion. ‘To be a living cipher, to be recognised by strangers, a high as blank as the purrrest heroin. Rrrrrrragghhh.’

  As he thrusts faster, his words become incomprehensible, just a lion growling. ‘Rrraggghhh’ he says to me, nodding vigorously. ‘Grrraggghhh!’

  I think of going to Dara, ‘This is definitely Red Button material.’ It seems so stupid I actually try to say it, but it’s slurred and I can’t really hear myself. I reach across and try to squeeze Dara’s cheek to wake him but he keeps smiling ahead with the same glazed eyes. I pull myself up by the door frame but slump back down uselessly. I’m suddenly aware of how I can leave.

  I’m walking through the centre of Glasgow, rattling my suitcase along and nobody recognises me. There is something about Glasgow in the sunshine, and I hold onto that feeling even as it starts to rain. I break into a jog and it’s
a light little bounce, like running when I was a kid, like there was never any age in my legs, just work. I know that if I wanted to I could move faster than this, that this is not even my body and I’m not tied to it.

  I stop to look at a newspaper board, which has something about Alan Hansen in big letters, with a picture of him. A guy comes up to me and my chest flutters, but it’s just change he wants and I give him a few quid. He’s freaked a bit by me smiling and laughing, and he doesn’t even say thanks.

  I’ve been saving this bit, but I stop in front of the darkened windows of a music shop and I look at myself. It’s not me. It’ll pass a passport check and nobody who doesn’t really know me will notice but it’s not me. I get back to the high-rise and phone an estate agents, and put the flat up for sale. He asks a lot of questions but I insist, ‘Really mate, you’re going to have to come and look at this.’

  I make a cup of tea and take my little joint-rolling tray down into the stateroom one last time. The new episode of The Game has Neil meeting up with this guy in Soho who shows him how the game can work. A man hails a cab, then has to answer his phone, so they just walk right into it. At the bar someone has just ordered a drink they can’t stay for. They sit down at the table and the drinks arrive without ordering. Neil is told of the value of living in the moment, of how life can unfold around you.

  The man suddenly has a hunted look, glances round quickly, then grabs Neil by the wrists, sees the two rusty brown marks there and seems relieved. He tells Neil that soon he will tell him about the secret rulers of the world. A beautiful woman at the bar has been stood up and the man leaves with her.

  Neil phones someone.

  ‘No,’ he tells them. ‘I checked it out. He knows absolutely nothing about The Game.’ Neil wets his thumb and starts rubbing the marks off his wrists.

  ‘Secret,’ he giggles to himself. ‘Rulers,’ he giggles louder. ‘World!’ and it finishes on his hysterically laughing mouth.

  Just washing the mugs in the sink, I have a really brilliant idea and I try to forget about it.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Anna Valentine, who came to Glasgow to have a look at the book while I was in the middle of a throat infection so extreme I was literally gargling with codeine. I was off my tits and my memories of the day when put together make little sense. I admire her tolerance of the whole Jacob’s Ladder experience.

  Much gratitude to Grant Morrison, whose inspiringly mental Final Crisis comic is where I took the book’s title from. The ‘Fuck it! Stun It! Kill it!’ line in the Star Trek bit was something Grant said to me too, and now that I think about it, that would have made an even better title. I recently re-read Final Crisis, and tripped out on a bit that made the whole of my vision break down so I could almost see reality as a construct or projection – like I could almost see on a molecular level. It was amazing! Thank fuck for people like Grant, Terence McKenna, Bill Hicks and Robert Anton Wilson. To me, they’re sort of the antibodies the planet creates against fear and dogma.

  All the people I’ve quoted in the book are worth a look. Everyone evinces some kind of boredom or ennui these days – reading something more interesting would really fucking help! Seriously, if you want to be happier just switch your fucking TV off and read Gene Wolfe, or James Ellroy, or whatever you can get into. It’s just got to have some complexity, some density of ideas. We’re supposed to be challenged and, sadly, most of the time we don’t even have the guts to challenge ourselves.

  Many thanks to Meryl O’Rourke, who had a look at a couple of early passages. And just generally for being inspiringly funny. Thanks to Nick Morley for his illustrations. Bizarrely they really are as I’d imagined, including a chilling likeness of Paul Marsh, who he has never met or seen.

  The idea for The Game TV show came from my friend, the screenwriter Rae Brunton. Rae is one tenacious son of a bitch when it comes to ideas. He had the idea for the whole first episode described here. I thought I’d flesh out the series and try to imagine what good TV might look like.

  Most of all, to my real audience. Treehouse and Mike, you make me laugh every day. Thanks for showing me how to be happy. You doofers.

  FRANKIE BOYLE

  Credits

  Cover photographs: © Tony Briggs

  Copyright

  First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  © Frankie Boyle 2011

  Illustrations by Nick Morley

  Frankie Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  The novel element of this book (identified by the italic type) is a work of fiction. The fictional names and characters are the work of the author’s imagination, as are the incidents portrayed in it. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  The remaining chapters (identified by the upright type) contain previously published material.

  p. iii John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer © the estate of John Dos Passos; p. 14 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (Profile Books, 2009); p. 76 Hakim Bey, Immediatism, reproduced by kind permission of Autonomedia; p. 76 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience © R. D. Laing, 1967. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; p. 94 Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers © Bret Easton Ellis, 1994; p. 122 Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing, published by Portobello Books © Raj Patel, 2009; p. 148 David Icke, Children of the Matrix, reproduced by kind permission of David Icke books; pp. 161–162 Obituary of Jeff Conaway by Ronald Bergan, 30 May 2011 © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2011; p. 168 C. P. Snow, reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd; p. 182 Thomas Geoghegan, The Law in Shambles, reproduced by kind permission of Prickly Paradigm Press; p. 190 and p. 302 Terence McKenna, reproduced by kind permission of the estate of Terence McKenna; p. 228 Robert Anton Wilson, permission granted by Writers House LLC as Agent for the Estate of Robert Anton Wilson; p. 252 Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes © 2007 by Aviva Chomsky and David Barsamian. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt & Co; p. 270 David Madsen, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, reproduced by courtesy of Dedalus Ltd © 1995.

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-0-00-742678-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-00-742680-5 (trade paperback)

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  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007426812

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