My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  They were all very religious. My uncle got a new car and nobody would get into it until a priest had been out to bless the thing. A priest came out and got paid to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and throw holy water over the bonnet. My granny prayed a lot, for everybody. I sometimes wonder if I’m not still just working through the goodwill she built up with for me with God. One day soon I’m going to run out of her Hail Marys and both my legs will drop off.

  Everybody was obsessed with death in that household. They’d talk about it a lot. Once we were all getting on the bus as we left at the end of summer and I said ‘See you next year!’ to my granddad. ‘I’ll be dead next year,’ he replied, without sadness. That’s Catholicism; it’s a great big death cult. Look around a church at all the golden crucifixes, the big marble statues of Jesus dying. The nativity, the only part of the story that’s about life, is just a temporary thing they throw up for a few weeks. It’s generally focussed round a £5.99 Tiny Tears doll—one year our church had a rocking horse for the donkey. It had‘I’m a cowboy’ written on it.

  My granddad was a difficult guy. Joyless, to the point where he found other people’s laughter upsetting. He’d often scold us for laughing, as would my mum. They thought that laughter was infantile. I thought the idea of somebody hating children’s laughter was really funny, like an ogre in a fairytale. My granddad had a very hard life. He grew up in poverty I can’t imagine at a time when children were hired out to farms as rural labour. He had to work in Scotland to support his brothers and sisters, and ended up burying most of them when they were still young. Now his health was gone and he was in constant pain. I knew all this, but I was a child so I hated him for being a grumpy old cunt.

  Boredom was a huge part of our lives there. It’s the rainiest county in Ireland. Which is a bit like saying you’re the Dirtiest Woman in Dundee—a lot of competition and little prestige. Often we’d be stuck indoors listening to fiddle music on a crackling radio. Everybody spoke Irish so you’d have to entertain yourself. I read loads of books there on my top bunk, the days ticking by slowly. I’d always run out of actual kids’ books and have to dive into my granddad’s stack of masculine adventure novels. There was a real lurch trying to get into a story of a mercenary on the run from the East German police when you’d just finished a book about a boy who had magic shoes.

  They farmed sheep there and occasionally we’d have to help out, acting as auxiliary sheepdogs when the sheep were being herded, or taking lunch out to the shearers when they clipped them in a nearby pit. There were actual dogs as well and we’d be so bored we’d dote on them to a degree they found exasperating. These creatures had to have a complex skillset—able to run after sheep on a hill but also to put up with little children who wanted to make them wear a blouse.

  The highlight of every week was the arrival of the baker’s van. This guy drove around the middle of nowhere selling cakes and sweets and stuff, and we would clean him out. We’d be sitting on rocks with nothing but fields for miles eating these bright purple or luminous yellow cakes. Every Sunday a wee bus came to take everybody to Mass in the local town of Dungloe. Mass was crushingly dull and sometimes in Irish, but afterwards you were in town till the bus left. A proper town with sweets and penknives and toy guns and footballs.

  Dungloe was famous in Ireland for its annual summer beauty contest called ‘Mary from Dungloe’. Irish communities from all over the globe would contribute fresh and conventional-looking examples of their gene pool. You’d have a Chicago Mary and a Glasgow Mary; who knows what their real names were? The whole thing was exactly like Father Ted’s ‘Lovely Girl’s Contest’ and everyone for miles around seemed obsessed with the thing. One year a local girl won—Moia McCole, the Donegal Mary. She lived at the bottom of our hill and everybody was really excited. They drove about at night honking on their car horns and there were big bonfires and parties. The Sunday World printed a photo of her where she was leaning forward a little too far and you could see her nipple. I cut it out and had a wank behind a big rock.

  There was a peculiarity in that part of the world whereby people sometimes had a second name related to their job. I guess it started because so many people had the same first names and surnames. The guy who delivered the post was Dimrick the Post. There was a baker in Dungloe who my mum’s family knew as Anthony the Cake, but my dad’s lot called Anthony the Bun. It was great meeting people who were called the Van or the Loaf. It was like a whimsical branch of American wrestling.

  Often we’d get driven to the pub by my uncle where we’d drink something called ‘Football Special’ in life-threatening quantities. We particularly loved it because it had a head on it like a pint of beer. Looking back it was actually a thick chemical scum. It also meant that we were basically drunk on sugar.

  The main pub we went to was called Tessie’s. It was a rundown place with a stone floor and barrels in the corner. On cold nights you all sat in Tessie’s kitchen by the fire. Everybody played a card game called ‘25’ for tiny stakes—fifty pences was about the limit. In reality it was just an excuse for people to curse each other and the games were always accompanied by explosions of laughter. They’d curse each other for playing their hand badly or too well, for winning too much or being a sore loser or a cheap bastard or just a bastard. One time some American tourists wandered in and asked if they sold low-alcohol lager—they asked half a dozen drunks playing cards on a barrel as a dog ate crisps off the floor. After a disbelieving pause everybody screamed with laughter. This wasn’t just rudeness; nobody there had heard of such a thing as low-alcohol lager and it sounded like a ridiculous contradiction.

  We kids loved going to the pub and would get really upset on the nights the men would go without us. It’s possible that we were cripplingly addicted to the sugar high. Some nights we’d go to bed then hear the car leaving the drive, so we’d run out after them. We knew we couldn’t stop them going without us. I think we just wanted to leave them with the image of us in their rear mirror, standing in the doorway in our pyjamas forming a tableau of disappointment and recrimination.

  There was a relaxed attitude to drink-driving, in that you were basically allowed to drink-drive. I saw a guy one night struggle to get his key into the car door for a few minutes then hop in and drive off. My uncle would have about ten pints some nights and then drive us all home. I guess the feeling was that we weren’t going to crash into anyone, because barely any fucker lived there.

  One year I went over to Ireland with my mum in winter. It was really beautiful in the snow. My cousin Mark was there too and every morning we’d pull our wellies on and walk for miles in a different direction, always finding somewhere interesting. I think it’s my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.

  I was generally pretty bored and under-stimulated when I was a little kid. Other than going out to play in the backs, we didn’t really do much of anything. My brother and I got a Spectrum computer one Christmas and it totally took over our lives for a couple of years. There were loads of addictive games which to a modern child would seem like playing with a jobbie on a stick. It’s amazing what people were doing with less memory than is currently in the average vibrator. Those games were like little coding haikus. There was one called Schooldaze, which was a chillingly realistic depiction of school. You had wee tasks to do for your own benefit but everything got derailed because you had to spend all of your time in classes or you’d get punished. I intensified the reality loop by sometimes failing to do my homework because I was playing the game. There were some surprising freedoms in it too. You could, for example, just fuck yourself out of the top-floor window and fall to your death. The Headmaster would stand over your corpse and say, ‘You are not a bird, Eric’, quite callously I thought. Also you could go into the empty rooms and write swearwords on the blackboards, which we thought was unbelievably hilarious. The teacher would give you lines if they actually caught you
but seemed remarkably calm about teaching a class who were looking at the word‘Cuntbucket’.

  There was also a game called Emlyn Hughes’s Supersoccer. Like everybody, we hated Emlyn Hughes but the game was strangely compelling. There was a bug where if you put a heavy tackle in on someone they would just sort of die—lie down on the pitch and just never get up. Their inert form would be repositioned by the computer for free-kicks. You could also score from a kick-off by taking a really big run-up and just blooter it into your opponent’s goal. My brother and I had a tensely negotiated agreement not to do this and we both did it absolutely every time.

  I was about eleven when I started going to the cinema by myself; my parents just had no interest in that kind of thing. I really wanted to see Star Wars because everybody at school had the action figures and was talking about Return of the Jedi. Eventually my dad said he’d take me. What he actually took me to was the first Star Trek movie, the really shit one with the baldy woman in it. I’ve never had the heart to tell him.

  The first thing I went to see on my own was Footloose. I was really into old rock and roll records and thought it sounded brilliant. I borrowed my brother’s fake leather jacket and sat in the cinema with the collar turned up. It’s still pretty weird that those guys were Kevin Bacon and Chris Penn, and that it was basically gay.

  I started taking my sister along to the local cinema in Muirend, a real time capsule with staff who looked like they were being hunted by Ghostbusters. There was a doorman called Frank. Strictly speaking, what he was actually called was ‘Frank the Wank’, something people shouted at him everywhere he went. I was on a bus years later and two teenagers saw him coming out of a newsagent in his civvies and actually got off the bus to shout it at him. I’d drag my sister along to my choice of movies—which meant every rubbish fantasy film that came out, things like Krull and Beastmaster. I think my parents would give me the ticket money for both of us if I took her along, so I’d bribe her with Maltesers and she’d sit there dispassionately watching Rutger Hauer have an unconvincing swordfight with a man dressed as a cyclops.

  I was really excited when the old cartoon version of The Lord of the Rings got a showing at the GFT. As a kid I’d have been delighted to know that everybody would eventually get into Tolkien. This is back in the days when fantasy was just for total nerds. There were about a dozen to fifteen heavily bespectacled kids—one was a diabetic whose mum had brought him a big box of raisins for a snack. It was great to set eyes on Glasgow’s other dweebs. There was a bit when Aragorn laid into some orcs and we just all went mental. I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you’re part of a big social scene, it’s an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow, wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying.

  THREE

  I know one shouldn’t dwell on the past, so I’ve really tried to put the misery of my secondary education behind me. On the other hand, if I ever meet Steven Tilsbury again, I’m going to bundle him into the back of a campervan, which I’ve had specially adapted by the Chinese military, and he’s going to spend a very difficult nine months strapped to a surgical table, fed intravenously, while I create a masterpiece of suffering with a nail file and a cigarette lighter. STEAL MY FOOTBALL SOCKS WILL YOU STEVEN?

  School days are only happy if you have a particular yen to be taught five hours of geography a week by a convicted paedophile. Actually, to be serious, the sex at school was embarrassing. You’d think after 20 years the janitor would know what he’s doing. I still can’t come unless I’m in a small dark room filled with sports equipment.

  There’s that amazing clichÉ that schooldays are the best days of your life. Things have gone very wrong in your life if your best days involved being shouted at by an alcoholic for spelling ‘broccoli’ with two i’s. Anyone who had the best time of their life at school has never licked LSD off what they think used to be a hooker. To be fair I didn’t hate everything about school. I only hated the teachers, the pupils, the lessons, the building, the food, the smell, every second I spent there—but I have to say the driveway was sort of OK.

  The journey to secondary school involved taking a bus and then walking for a couple of miles. The walk always had the sun hanging directly in front of me—the Mayans couldn’t have aligned this thing any more directly with the fucking sun. When it had been raining there would be puddles reflecting the light up into your eyes and it felt like walking into the belly of a spacecraft.

  Our school was a zoo for children. On my first day I sat shellshocked at the side of the playground, a complex ballet of deadarms, gambling, taunts and violence. At one end were railings surrounding a deep staircase into the basement. This was the‘grog pit’. If someone’s bag could be got off them it would be hurled down these steps. If they went down to fetch it, an animal howl of ‘GROG PIT!’ would go up and the whole school would crowd up onto the railings and spit on them. I saw a tiny first year emerge to jeers, wet and slippery like a newborn calf. I instantly knew that my task for the next five years was to get through this.

  Later I found that a big part of surviving was to get yourself a lockable room in which you could sit out lunchtime. Teachers would sometimes give the keys to their classroom to responsible kids, ostensibly to do work. It was actually so these weaker specimens could have a locked door between them and those who wanted to take their money, humiliate them or simply punch them repeatedly in the arms and legs. I was in the Latin Club and half a dozen of us would have lunch there for a couple of years. I’d never studied Latin, and could probably have survived in General Population. Michelle Caldwell was in the Latin Club though, and she tended to cross her legs in a way that let you see up her skirt. I loved Latin Club.

  I should probably mention here that the Latin teacher who let us have the room was a nice chap who was the school’s expert on sex education. A spindly, balding man with a ginger homeless beard, he’d occasionally pop up into religious classes and give a lecture on contraception. Apparently the only thing that was allowed was something called the rhythm method, but withdrawal was preferable to, eh, using a condom. I imagined that he practised withdrawal a wee bit himself as he had a noticeable facial twitch. Almost a spasm, it made him look as if he was about to yell out some obscene prophecy. He had nine children.

  Even having a room didn’t guarantee safety as often crowds would gather round them like zombies, trying to break in or holding the door closed after the bell so everybody inside would be late for their next class. A guy tried to break into the Latin room one time through one of those little strips at the top of a window, the kind you have to undo with a hook on a stick. He was an enormous, powerful guy—unbelievably tall. I knew his family and they had contacted The Guinness Book of Records because they were convinced that he had the biggest feet of any boy his age in the world. I also knew he was adopted. Who knows how his adoptive parents must have felt as this enormous, villainous cuckoo grew to dwarf them in their home? It was a tense lunchtime, two of us trying to stop the door from being kicked in, the others trying to push these record-breaking feet back out through the window.

  There was a lot of behaviour from the kids that just verged on madness. On our first day in technical class we got this long lecture about safety in the classroom. We were all just looking at each other in disbelief thinking, ‘No way! They’re giving us chisels?’ Within seconds of the talk finishing someone blew metal filings into somebody else’s eyes and that was that—a year of technical drawing instead.

  One of the technical teachers had a bizarre burbling voice. He was a bit like an incomprehensible version of Bernie Winters. Once he gave me a long talking to and I had genuinely no idea if it was praise or censure. Probably the latter, as I was pish at techie. There was an assignment to build a little bookcase once. I didn’t have a clue so I stole the display model that the teacher had done. Just so it wasn’t too obvious I r
e-glued the runners on the bottom and ended up with a C.

  The technical classes back then were idiotic. Teenage kids are like the A-Team. Give them a few rudimentary objects and they’ll construct a death machine of some kind. By the end of term the class was more tooled up than an Orc army. It’s like a conspiracy. Why don’t they teach kids in poor areas how to be hedge-fund managers and bond traders? Instead they get shown how to make mug trees and spice racks.

  Years later I was writing on 8 out of 10 Cats, working on their Big Brother special. I’d watched Big Brother all that week to get up to speed and was pretty horrified.

  ‘They must really sift through the applicants to find such fucking idiots!’ I groaned. ‘I mean, people aren’t all just fucking idiots are they?’

  Jimmy Carr just looked at me patiently and said, ‘Don’t you remember school?’ I suppose that’s true, the place was full of utter goobers. Once we were doing a science experiment in pairs. It was about velocity, so you measured how fast a little car went down a slope with five weights on it, then four and so on, to see if mass affected velocity. I was paired with a big, dotie Of Mice and Men character. I set the car with five weights and went to put it at the start line. He took it from me and ripped three of the weights off. ‘No point using five!’ he scoffed. ‘There’s only fucking two of us.’

  Some of my favourite kids at school were the pathological liars. It seems that a tiny but indefatigable percentage of any school population will claim their bones have been replaced with metal and that they hang out with U2. The best one I knew was a boy called Ed Raven. He transferred into our school in second year but looked about eighteen and was sort of a hunchback. He claimed to have been living in Germany, where he was the national BMX champion. He also said he was independently wealthy, owning a meat factory near Berlin. I mean, if you could lie about anything, who would lay claim to a meat factory? Ed Raven would. That was his genius. My friend bumped into him many years later outside Glasgow Uni. Raven was walking with a cane and brushed past him having no time to answer questions. His ship was moored in the Clyde and he had to get back before the crew grew restive.