My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  At camp, we were no more prepared to set up tents and light fires than a tribe of monkeys. In fact, one of our guys (a real wingnut who seemed much too tall and old to be a Cub) immediately climbed a tree and started screaming like a monkey, breaking off branches and throwing them into the camp. Another got off the bus and just ran straight down towards the river bank, crashing straight into the river. The real Scouts looked shell-shocked as the monkey guy leapt down from the tree and tried to engage them in swordfights with an enormous stick. Clearly, all pretence of being a real outfit, unit or possibly troop had been blown.

  The Scouts sent an observer to one of our meetings. I missed it but apparently he stood around slack-jawed watching boys get pelted into stacks of chairs with a big training shoe. We were all made to attend a real Cubs meet in a better part of town. The Cubs had to line up and do a little salute at the start! The leader was called Akela! The gymnastics badge didn’t simply require jumping two-footed over a chair! Their leader called out a boy to give a mad little speech about the history of Scouting. He had an enormous gum boil, easily half the size of his face, and spoke in a wet mumble like the Elephant Man Jr. The meetings must have been bad because our Cubs got shut down and there was fuck all to do again.

  In a way crime makes perfect sense in those nothing-to-do places. A teenager came up to us once on a moped he’d stolen and said he’d give us rides on the back of it. I was too scared but some of the kids got on for a backie. I still have this vivid picture of him shooting off across the waste ground at the end. He might have been the last truly free individual I ever met and is no doubt dead.

  I had a rich fantasy life as a kid, honed on the dullness of my surroundings. I read The Hobbit when I was little and after that every magic-type kids’ book that I could find. I loved Alan Garner and Diana Wynne-Jones, and just read that stuff all the time.

  My own fantasies were a whole lot weirder than anything in the books. I had this baroque story that I thought about for years. I’d go off and play on my own, thinking about it and acting out the scenes. I was a magician who travelled from town to town in some Middle Earth-type world with his travelling companion who—get this—was an enormous guy that he had created from mud. My companion, whose name escapes me, was always falling to pieces and I’d have to redo the spells. He had rubies for eyes—not any old rubies, but magic rubies that I stored powerful fire spells in. The stories largely involved the two of us rocking up to town and not getting any respect from the local king or whoever. He’d generally try to put us in jail or set his men on us. That’s when my good buddy would unleash all the pent-up rage in his fiery eye, often burning not just the king and his men but the whole town that had disrespected us.

  But here’s the best bit. I had a sword that would cut whoever it touched and give them a wound that would never heal. I think I must have read about that somewhere. In some versions of the story, I had cut myself with the sword, all down one arm, so my arm was hidden and bandaged in my cloak and I was often weak. The story regularly revolved around me trying to rest up while we were in prison or being chased. My fiery friend would stand guard over me while I summoned up enough energy to destroy our enemies. Later on in life, this made my national standup tour feel pretty familiar.

  My brother and sister and I were allowed to get one comic each a week. We’d get The Victor and The Dandy and sometimes others. I was never one for savouring the artwork; I just loved the stories. My favourite in The Victor was a thing called‘Deathwish’. It was about a racing driver and sometime stuntman who had been horribly disfigured in a crash. He wore a mask to cover his injuries and basically longed for death. Each week he’d try to do something in the race or stunt he was working on to kill himself. It always backfired and helped him win his race or do an amazing stunt, much to his disappointment. There was a brilliant panel once of him coming to in his hospital bed to the sound of popping champagne corks, just lying there looking disgusted.

  I’d plough through our comics quickly and read my sister’s Bunty when nobody was looking. It had a lot of weird stuff.‘Susan the Sham’ was great: a girl who’d been in a traffic accident and had an evil uncle who was making her pretend to be deaf for compensation reasons. Every week she’d overhear something she really ought to tell somebody about but couldn’t. One of the main stories—did I dream this?—was about a lassie who lived a pretty much normal life except for one thing. She was trapped inside an enormous energy ball. She’d go to school in it and have to deal with a certain amount of hassle but when it got too much she could always just shoot off into the sky in this fiery orb. I once tried to make a sketch about this for a pilot I was doing. The producer read the script and then said one of my favourite-ever sentences:

  ‘Do you know how much of our budget it would take to create an energy ball?’

  That’s the great thing about television. Sometimes, you just feel that anything could happen. The guy didn’t say it was impossible. He was just thinking of the repercussions of sticking an actress in a big, glowing energy ball!

  A new comic came out that was an absolute mindblower. The Buddy it was called. Cheery title but a clue to its disturbing nature was in the human-skull jacket pin given away with the first issue and the lead story of ‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain!’ They had Limpalong Leslie, an international footballer with one leg shorter than the other. His footballing brain always had to be working overtime as he was essentially crippled. He’d leap over tackles saying, ‘Ho ho! He telegraphed that one!’ It was still less weird than Tuffy, the story of a homeless goalkeeper. He could never find a house, even during the couple of seasons he played for Spurs.

  I felt outside of the stuff the other kids were into, like the whole football thing. I support Celtic but as I got older I struggled to see those clubs as anything other than big businesses making money out of some of the poorest people in society. You go to those grounds and they’re these giant chrome fortresses rising out of blighted, deprived communities. Celtic won the European Cup in 1967 with a team all born within five miles of the ground. If they tried that now they couldn’t find eleven guys who still had two legs. I find it difficult to believe that people can care about whether some millionaire pervert has got a thigh strain or not. That’s another thing about football—it’s a bit gay. Guys fretting over some lad’s calf or hamstring—they might as well all fuck each other in the centre circle.

  Both of the Old Firm clubs have profited massively from sectarianism. Personally, I think everyone involved over the years has shown that they don’t have Northern Ireland’s best interests at heart and it should now be given to a third party, like Spain. Imagine how little the average Belfast citizen would care for the problems of religion if he could just get a nice bit of tapas on the Falls Road. And it wasn’t fucking raining all the time. And he still had knees.

  The standard of football has been pretty terrible for a long time. There have been some great sides but they’re pretty rare. Most of the time the Scottish League is like watching a really gruelling donkey race. Sure, like most people I support one team over another, but it’s getting more and more difficult to care what colour of hat the winning donkey is wearing.

  TWO

  Primary school was great. On the first day I was looking around thinking, ‘There’s no catch…this is genuinely a big, warm room full of toys.’ Now, Little Frankie would have hated it if he knew that one day I was going to gloss over his nursery education, which he absolutely loved. On the other hand, books can only be so long and I’ve got a lot of stories about drug abuse to get to. Let’s just say that Little Frankie pulled the paddling pool off its stand about once a month, soaking himself and having to go home in a pair of huge borrowed shorts.

  The great thing about primary education is the positivity and praise the kids get. Probably not the best way to prepare them for the reality of adult life in Scotland, but I like it. I think if we actually focussed on an education system that prepared people for life in Scotland it would be a lot li
ke the Fritzl household. I mean, what gets me about this whole sordid story is Fritzl’s wife saying she didn’t know. Did she not suspect something when her husband came in every week with sixteen bags of shopping, including kids’ clothes and nappies? Who did she think they were for—the dog? ‘I know we treat him like one of the family, but sandals and shorts?’ People have accused Fritzl of neglect, but he was fucking them every day—they probably would have loved a bit of neglect. Even Adolf Hitler must be going, ‘…und I thought Ich war ein Cunt!’ The whole thing is so common in Austria they now sell ‘Hallmark’ cards with ‘Congratulations on escaping from your underground sex hell’. Of course, I shouldn’t joke; Fritzl’s daughter has been through a horrific ordeal. But just wait until she gets all the back payments for child benefit. That’ll cheer her up.

  I loved primary and it was so supportive that up until I was about 9 or 10 I still thought I could draw. Teachers had always said,‘Well done’ when I drew or painted something, so I didn’t realise that I couldn’t draw at all—almost to the level of a handicap. This dawned on me when I challenged my friend Charlie to a drawing contest. We were going to draw a space shuttle as it was the first one and the kids were really excited about it. I used a ruler and drew a big rectangle in the middle and two bigger rectangles on either side, for the booster jets. Then I drew triangles on top of the rectangles—turning them into rockets! Sure, the space shuttle that I drew freehand inside the main rectangle (the fuel tank!) was a little shaky and looked a bit like a face, but the overall effect was pretty impressive.

  Charlie blinked impassively at my drawing and then produced what seemed to be a black and white photograph of the space shuttle. There were little scientists doing final checks on the scaffolding at the launch base, partially covered by the shadow of the main fuel tank. Did you ever read Peanuts when Charlie Brown would be building his shitty little snow fort and Linus would have built an actual castle with battlements and a flagpole? It was like that. I insisted mine was best and went off to find a judge.

  As a kid I was fascinated by space shuttles and by astronauts in general. This was before all the blowing up took the shine off things. Good old NASA. With all their money, could they maybe have a mission where everyone doesn’t nearly die? They should have some honesty and call their next mission ‘Operation Spacegrave’. Remember all the unmanned missions they used to send up in the 1950s and 60s? You know what they did with the monkeys and dogs that piloted them? They poisoned them! All their bodies are still up there. So an alien civilisation’s first contact with earth will be a ring of abandoned spacecraft filled with dead chimps and Alsatians. Approaching earth for some sublimated alien race must be like when the police close in on the house of a serial killer and find an outer perimeter of faeces wrapped in newspaper.

  One day on our way to school my friend Gary McRedie and I found a huge porn mag. It was thicker than a dictionary and full of big Seventies bushes—women who looked like they were giving birth to Kevin Keegan. I didn’t really understand what it was (I don’t think), but had to admit it was strangely compelling. Gary suggested that we hide it under a shrub so we could come and look at it whenever we liked. The next day it was gone—someone had found it! I was disappointed but also oddly relieved. It was only years later, as I was telling someone this story, that I realised Gary McCredie had gone back and got it for himself.

  There was quite a lot of religious stuff at primary. Every week we’d go down to the church and practise hymns, led by Miss Moat, a spirited big woman who looked like she played centreback for somebody half decent. At least I was lucky enough not to go to a Jesuit school. The Jesuit saying is ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.’ Usually a sexually confused manic-depressive.

  We made our first confession when we were seven years old and had to really rack our brains for sins. I said that I’d stolen something, which I hadn’t, and that I’d lied, which I had—about stealing something. An old man listening to a child’s sins while they’re both locked in a wooden box? If I was a sexual pervert I would definitely join the priesthood. Although clearly the sexualpervert community is way ahead of me on that one. Earlier this year the Pope met victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. If I’d been fingered by a priest the last person I’d like to meet is the ultra priest 9,000. It’s like fighting the endof—level boss in a video game. First confession at the age of seven must be incredibly boring for the priest. Imagine having to listen for hours on end about stealing conkers and farting during school assembly. This is why so many priests like to help out by giving the poor kid something to really confess about next time around.

  First holy communion was the big one—all the girls dressing up in terrifying tiny bridal outfits to trot up the aisle and ‘marry God’. It was a whole community doing this. If one guy had made a kid do that in his basement he’d have been locked up for life. I lost both my front teeth during the week of my first communion so my smile in the photos is the tight-lipped smirk of an unrepentant murder suspect. I always remember the present I was given for making my first communion. It was the biography of a terminally Christian boy with cerebral palsy. It was called I Won’t Be Crippled When I See Jesus. I put Emil and the Detectives to one side and read it every night with a sense of numb horror.

  I’ve always found it weird that people in our community could reconcile the opulence of the Church (even our little church was disgracefully beautiful compared with the houses people lived in) with the generally held socialism that most folk seemed to believe in. I remember a visiting priest giving an angry sermon about communism and lots of men getting up and quietly walking out. Often priests will give a homily about the evils of greed in a room with more gold and gems than Dale Winton’s bathroom. At least I was old enough to miss hearing Mass in Latin. In my parents’ day the Church believed so much in the mystery of God they revealed it in a language no one could understand. If you wanted to know how much Jesus loved you, you had to take along Linguaphone tapes.

  The depressing thing about religious people is their sheer bloody-mindedness. A Christian coalition recently organised an advertising campaign to be shown on the side of buses in response to an atheist campaign. Personally, I’m in favour of any religious war carried out on buses that doesn’t involve blowing me up. If people aren’t swayed by the Pope, the Bible, the Koran, Jesus and four thousand years of organised religion, I’m not sure the number 16 to Larkhall is going to cut it. The message reads, ‘There definitely is a God.’ Yeah, tell that to the poor sod who drives the bus and gets spat on ten times a day for the minimum wage. It might be more accurate if the message was printed on the inside of the bus and read, ‘There definitely is a God. And he hates you.’

  I have a theory about the Pope. You know how he fought for the Nazis? Well if Nazi scientists did manage to save Hitler’s brain then maybe they kept it alive in a jar for years waiting to implant it into someone with power on the world stage. That someone would need to wear a very big hat to hide all the stitching left by a brain transplant. They probably thought about putting his brain into an NFL quarterback but held out for the Pope. The Pope has said that condoms don’t help prevent the spread of AIDS. Someone ought to tell His Holiness that he must be putting them on wrong. You’d have though the Pope would have been well up for using condoms. It would have scuppered the court cases of many of his priests if there was no DNA evidence. In Africa AIDS has killed 25 million people in three decades. That’s a lot of funerals. I can see why the Pope doesn’t want to lose the work.

  There was a thing at primary called ‘The Black Babies’. It was a hugely misguided charitable effort they used to drop on us in Catholic schools. You sponsored an African baby and, I think, sometimes got to name them. At least, that’s what I’m told by my African friends Wolf Tone and Murdo McCloud. Anyway, there was always some daft kid who misunderstood and thought that they’d actually get the baby for a bit. They were too young to realise that there are a thousand good reaso
ns why a little African baby shouldn’t be shipped off to another country and that human beings should never be exchanged for money. I think that Madonna basically has the emotional development of one of those kids. She can pay for a little black baby, so why shouldn’t she get to keep it? She’s probably been drawn in by the advertising—if you get an African kid it costs £2 a month to feed and if it gets cataracts they’re only a pound to fix. Actually, I feel really sorry for little David Banda. The only black role models he’ll have growing up will be homosexual backing dancers. Madonna is said to have had his nursery painted like a jungle, to make him feel at home. Hopefully the kitchen’s done out like the inside of a UN helicopter.

  Every summer we went to stay at my gran’s place in Ireland. She lived in a really remote part of Donegal, which is beautiful and bleak. I’d say maybe a little of the bleakness seeps into the people. The bit we lived in wasn’t so much quiet as empty. If someone wanted to film a movie there that was set after a nuclear apocalypse they would have had to bus people in.

  My gran lived with my granddad, my great-uncle and my uncle James in a little whitewashed farmhouse. My brother and I would sleep in a small room with both uncles, my great-uncle often getting himself off to sleep with a long, tongue-in-cheek monologue about how we were going to Hell, and listing all the torments that would be waiting for us. I always enjoyed it as a sort of grim joke, but it worried John and afterwards you could hear him muttering his prayers hard even over all the snoring.