My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  ‘Get the Sword!’

  ‘I see no Sword here.’

  ‘Take the Sword!’

  ‘What Sword?’

  ‘Pick up the Sword!’

  ‘You take the Sword. The Orc Chief kills you.’

  You’d always get stuck in the Goblins’ Dungeon. For a while nobody could work out how to get out of there. You’d be sitting there for ages. After a long time (like a day or something) your character-friend Elrond would appear with a glassy look in his eyes, trying to kill you. That’s how I think of Scotland in winter—the Goblins’ Dungeon. People you know well will become unrecognisable after six months of rain. Sometimes you look into a set of glassy eyes and know they’re only a short step away from cleaving your skull with one wellplaced blow. I once did a pilot in Scotland at Christmas and it was like trying to lead a troop of depressed chimpanzees into battle.

  I read recently that Andy Roddick challenged Andy Murray to a competition to see how long they could stay in an ice bath, and lost. Obviously Roddick forgot Murray is Scottish. Between October and March this whole country is basically one giant ice bath. At one point Murray actually broke into a sweat. If he’d challenged Murray to sit in a hot tub he’d probably have killed him.

  My marriage fell apart quite quickly. I stopped drinking for about nine months and my wife didn’t seem to like me when I was conscious. I left on a bus with all my stuff and went back to Glasgow, my life falling to bits behind me like a temple that’s been robbed by Indiana Jones.

  Tommy and Jane were off on holiday so I got to flat-sit their house for a bit, do some gigs and gradually piece my head back together. They had a flat in Marchmont and it was good to live the life of Inspector Rebus for a bit, walking round the Meadows, listening to their Seventies music and often popping out for a fish supper for my tea. The only rule they had was not to use their bedroom because I was still smoking at the time, and Tommy just hated the smell of smoke in his bedroom. One night, one of the barmaids from the Stand came back. She said quite casually that she had a boyfriend, so couldn’t do anything sexual with me, but I could do whatever I liked to her. Encouraged, I made a pretty good effort at fucking her to death. She could have checked her fanny into a Women’s Refuge. Of course, I had got the date of Tommy and Jane’s return wrong and they walked in to find me fucking one of their staff, in their bed, a lit cigarette smouldering in the ashtray.

  After so many years in England I was really glad to be home. Devolution started the year I moved back, although I think nearly half of the electorate didn’t vote in that election. That got written up as voter apathy. Quite typically, vainglorious politicians look at a statistic like that and think, ‘What’s wrong with people? Why don’t they use their vote?’ You never hear them asking, ‘What’s wrong with us? Why aren’t we worth voting for?’ It seems to me that if they want to get people excited, the SNP should play up the party element of independence. The slogan should be ‘Independence—It’ll be a hell of a night! Well, let’s be honest, month.’ Glasgow city centre will have streets running with rivers of whisky and blood, as drunken revellers spill their whisky into the long-standing blood rivers. Edinburgh will have millions of pounds’ worth of fireworks, which on the stroke of midnight will be launched at head-height towards England. Aberdeen, as on every BBC Hogmanay, will be Stripping the Willow. I’m not convinced that this isn’t just a tape that Aberdeen puts on for the rest of us while locally showing something which more closely reflects Aberdeen’s real culture—like a porno version of A Fistful of Dollars. Dundee, of course, will be bedlam. Murders, rockets being fired into the sky…who knows when news of independence will manage to seep through?

  My friend Scott had just got divorced as well. He decided that we should both go on holiday to get hammered and blow off some steam. Scott is a wonderful and hilarious human being. He’s a theatre director and thus appears gay but isn’t. I always find those guys to be like some jungle spider whose markings make them look like some kind of plant so they can lure insects. Much like the jungle spider, Scott had to make do with about one victim a year. Scott is always tense and slightly worried, always trying to quit smoking, always in some kind of slight distress—he’s like a beautiful, bittersweet sitcom that never got made. He has, I should add, the most remarkably brown and crinkled face. Once I asked his baby daughter to describe him in three words. ‘That’s easy!’ she replied. ‘A paper bag!’ One of his more endearing traits is a seemingly endless and original set of euphemisms he has for his own penis. There’s a new one every day; ‘The Kidney Wiper’ was my favourite, until he came up with ‘The Vomiting Milkman’.

  Somehow Scott had managed to become quite well known as a director of youth theatre in Romania. I’m sure ‘quite well known as a director of youth theatre in Romania’ is used in many social circles as a synonym for ‘paedophile’, but Scott was actually incredibly talented at his job. He had some seminars to do while we were over but I was free to focus entirely on drinking colourless local liquids until I forgot my marriage or just shat a lung.

  I got aboard the plane and started to put in some work towards getting drunk. Scott, it was clear from an emotional check-in, was in the grip of a crippling hangover and desperate for a drink. He sank a double vodka and the relief or shock or something made his leg shoot out involuntarily into the aisle, accompanied by a loud cry of pain mixed with triumph. It should have been clear then that the trip was going to be Withnail and I in the Third World.

  We landed pissed and were met by our unflappable guide, Claudio. I stood at the carousel trying to recognise my luggage and still hadn’t managed to form any kind of greeting. Finally I alighted on an ice-breaker.

  ‘What would you say is the worst film ever made?’ I asked, attempting to look him in the eye.

  ‘Clash of the Titans!’ he beamed back, like that was the first question everybody asked him.

  At that time, Bucharest was full of stray dogs. It might still be full of them, I’m certainly not going back to the shithole to find out. The dogs lived in terror of the people, who exhibited a blasÉ brutality towards them. There was one town on the trip that didn’t have a dog problem. The local mayor had promised to get rid of them in his election manifesto. When he got in he had them rounded up and fed to the lions in the local zoo. It’s only when you go to Europe that you realise how unbelievably kind to animals the British are. The Romanian equivalent of Pet Rescue would feature a naked Rolf Harris running through a burning petting zoo with a club.

  Scott had tried to prepare me for the shocking poverty, warned me how much of a psychic torpedo that could be. I laughed it off right up to the point where it triggered a near nervous breakdown. Old women washing their faces in puddles, a 5-year-old boy prostitute tottering towards our cab in high heels. One day we stepped out of our flat to see an old man on his knees pounding the pavement with a tiny hammer. We just cracked—laughed and laughed till we were nearly sick at the horror we had found there and the horror we had brought.

  Scott could speak Romanian quite well, he told me, and would certainly throw himself into it. He’d really roar the words out and wave his arms about happily. Strangely, most of the locals he knew seemed a bit reserved, even puzzled. One night we were drinking with some artists, and Scott went off to the toilet. One of them said something that reduced the others to hysterics. I asked our guide what he’d said.

  ‘He said that Scott speaks Romanian like a handicapped man from Hungary…who has not visited Romania for some time.’

  Scott had a habit of wandering about the flat naked. He is a big man and has a body sort of like an enormous turtle. I would lie in bed hungover of a morning, hoping that he’d put on some clothes before I got up. He’s an impatient chap and he’d march up and down frustratedly outside my room, eager to set off on the day’s trip to some deserted shipbuilding town. The local allmeat diet took its toll and one day I was unable to get up so just lay in bed farting, loud ones that sounded like a round of applause in hell. I could see
the big, pink shadow of Scott pacing angrily just beyond the dimpled glass of the door. He burst into my room, actually burst in naked, to a room so filled with eldritch fumes that he was hit with a sort of backdraught. Straining to sit up, I could see his huge naked form kneeling in the hallway, retching onto the floor like a dying animal.

  At the very end of the trip we went to a Romanian wedding. I challenged everybody at the wedding to a drinking competition. Obviously everybody had a lifetime’s experience of drinking the local moonshines and prison-liquors, so it wasn’t going to be easy. Still, nobody had approached drinking with quite my level of single-minded dedication so it ended up being between me and a grumpy, alcoholic artist. I remember his last words being ‘Let’s call this a draw’, as he lapsed into unconsciousness and slid off his chair onto the floor. This was the very last drinking I did and I certainly bowed out in style. It just seemed like a good note to go out on. Also, I suddenly saw very clearly that it would ruin my life and kill me.

  Fresh off the booze, I decided to take up taekwondo, which I loved but was pretty terrible at. There was a really great school in Glasgow run by a proper Korean grandmaster and I’d do that two or three days a week. I even went on a week’s training camp at one point. The whole thing is built on ‘Indomitable Spirit’, an ability to never give in. During camp I found that I had a ‘Defatigible Spirit’ and gave in. I really miss it, actually. My next tour is going to be the last one and hopefully I can get into a martial art after it’s all over. There’s just no way that being able to do a rowdy gig in Hull makes you cooler than somebody who can punch their way through a wall.

  Apart from the taekwondo I was spending a lot of my social time at the Stand. One of the bar staff was a guy in his late twenties called Rob. He was a nice man, with a tremendous and undermining hunger for drugs and sex that he was always trying to keep a lid on. He was like a cartoon—you could see all the vices he held at bay written in strained lines across his face. He was just desperately trying to keep a grip. I knew him as this very quiet, sincere guy but occasionally you heard stories of the door to his personal dungeon blowing open and the craziness he’d get up to. One night I stayed at his flat after a show and in the morning we got a cab back to the club. The taxi driver was giving off this really weird vibe, silently watching us in the mirror for the whole journey then taking his fare without a word.

  ‘Wonder what’s up with that guy,’ I laughed.

  Rob revealed that he may have phoned the cab company the week before while high. Someone who may well have been that driver had arrived to find Rob with his shirt off dancing in his driveway to pounding techno shouting, ‘Have you got any drugs?’ For future reference, it would seem that cabbies hate that.

  I went on the Stand’s inaugural Highland Tour. There were five of us in Tommy’s Mercedes doing gigs in towns with names so Scottish they sounded like they’d been made up for a Disney musical. Jane was compering on the tour and was particularly challenging. Very funny doing the shows, not so funny treating us all to a synaptic meltdown as Tommy drove at 100 mph along country roads. I decided to poison her. I got a whole load of powerful diarrhoea drugs and was going to spike her drink until one of the other acts talked me out of it. He made a convincing case that there was a fair chance that diarrhoea wouldn’t make her quit the tour and we just tried to tune out the madness for another week.

  The Stand was also running workshops for beginner comedians and I would teach at some of them. The students formed a bewildering and exhaustive wall chart of the nuances of mental illness. One early class involved a big guy who had jokes that sort of went:

  ‘I was fucking this coon…It was a racooon!…I was fucking this black bird…feathers everywhere!’

  I said I didn’t think that on a Saturday night the use of the word ‘coon’ was going to go down particularly well. One of the other guys at the back threw his hands up in exasperation and said, ‘Isn’t this just political correctness gone mad?!’

  Later at the bar I suggested he say, ‘I was fucking a pair of blue tits. I’m a necrophiliac!’ and he told me he found that utterly offensive.

  There was a little bloke there who, how can I put this, didn’t have Down’s syndrome but looked like he did. Nothing was actually wrong with him, but something clearly wasn’t right. He had two different acts, one as himself and one as a female poet. Every show, he’d agonise endlessly about which of these terrible, mirthless acts to perform. When he’d dress up as a woman there was a genuine thrill of Victorian circus horror that would run through the crowd—somebody once described it as looking like the scene where ET staggers out of the cupboard. Once I was compering a new-act night in Edinburgh and he was asking me whether I thought he should do his character that night. I grumpily told him to just do it as himself and he blurted, ‘But I wore these all the way here!’ and turned round to reveal that he had an enormous pair of fake boobs under his jumper. He’d sat on the train from Glasgow—looking at his best he’d have drawn a freak-show crowd in Middle Earth—wearing these huge pointy knockers.

  There was another guy called ‘Mudfinger’. He was quite a bammy Glasgow guy who had hit on the idea of playing a Tolkienesque character who could turn things to mud with his magical finger. He’d come on stage wearing a bed-sheet toga and his magical finger was an empty toilet-roll tube he’d taped to his hand. He’d do a bit of a preamble, explaining his power and then, fair fucks to the guy, would genuinely start trying to turn stuff into mud. That’s where it could start to go a bit awry, because he never did get the hang of actually turning things into mud, but you’ve got to love a tryer haven’t you? The audiences thought not and nearly killed him on a few occasions.

  I got genuinely depressed by the workshops in the end. The sheer unrelenting needy madness of the fuckers was too much for me, and I’d worked in an asylum. The last one I did was with the comedian Susan Morrison. While they went through their acts on the stage I found a Valium someone had given me on a night out once that I’d always kept in my wallet for emergencies. I swallowed it surreptitiously and lay down behind the bar, praying that Susan would be able to think of something positive for me to say to them.

  There’s a real link between comedy and mental illness, I think largely because travelling and doing gigs is fucking exhausting. Put Richard Dawkins on a train to gig round the north of England and in ten days he’ll be throwing shit at the walls. Speaking of being mental, there’s no easy way to break this to you. I saw a UFO. Two of them actually, hovering above Charing Cross in Glasgow. Now what the fuck would aliens be doing there? It’s the sort of place you only stop at if it’s on the way somewhere; you’d never actually go there deliberately. It just seems really weird that aliens would travel millions of miles and manifest there, rather than say the West End or Merchant City. I was stepping out of a cafÉ and a big thing that looked like three interconnected silver balls stopped and hovered maybe 500 feet up in the air. Another thing that was exactly the same joined it, they both sat there completely still for a bit, then shot off together at a really ridiculous speed. I ran in that general direction for a bit, hoping I’d get another look. In Glasgow a running man, looking desperately up into the sky, doesn’t attract any attention at all.

  I don’t really believe in aliens as such. I suppose I feel that alien life would be genuinely alien, not ships or humanoids or whatever. Terence McKenna has an essay about how magic mushrooms might be alien, that a different kind of thought is as close as we’ll get to an alien experience. That’s what I think an alien contact would be like, an unforeseeable event that would leave us with a new number between one and ten or a single word that described the feeling when you got a really bad DVD and it wasn’t quite shit enough to be funny.

  However, I do believe that the government has a lot of military hardware it develops and doesn’t tell us about. That’s what I reckon these things were, unmanned drone technology. I told everybody when this happened and they all put it down to me having drunk a whole cafetiÈre of
coffee just before I saw them. Trust me, as a comedy writer I have drunk as much coffee as anybody in the world. If that stuff made you hallucinate UFOs my life would have been a lot more fucking interesting. But I do have it on good authority that our governments made contact with aliens years ago. They came here looking for water for their dying planet. Now all they want is cocaine.

  Why is it that even though there are now great cameras on mobile phones, every UFO picture is still a blurry shot of what looks like a Fray Bentos pie tin being thrown over a hedge? Bonnybridge in Scotland is one of the top places for sightings. Then again, in Bonnybridge you’re an alien if you have ten fingers. Files were recently released that are being called Britain’s X-Files. They’re quite a bit shitter than the American X-Files though. They get abductions, cows missing organs and the alien probes up their bottoms. What have we got in our X-Files? An out-of-focus picture of a kite and an eyewitness account from a drunk man of mysterious lights appearing in the sky over Gatwick. I mean, why do aliens always abduct rural alcoholics? If we travelled for the thousands of years it would take to find intelligent life, I doubt we’d say, ‘Let’s go over and talk to that guy, the one who’s crapping into his own hand. He must be some sort of ambassador.’

  I’m sure it was totally unrelated to my UFO sighting but I was smoking a fair bit of dope then, mostly as a sort of mind salt that made bad television palatable. Eventually you realise that you are pretty much constructing your own shows, bathed in a flickering ultraviolet banality while writing parallel telly in your head. Most of the telly was rubbish and I needed the dope to liven it up. But I did make a few good discoveries. One of my all-time heroes is now a guy called Tom Weir. He was a Scottish walker and climber who did a show called Weir’s Way in the early Eighties. It has an ethereal quality, like it could have been made a hundred years ago. Or perhaps it’s that Scotland in 1982 was quite like the nineteenth century. He simply asked people about stuff that nobody else would ask. I remember a show where he asked an old miner what he used to get in his pieces, and there was a fantastic one where he went to a Scottish village where Lawrence of Arabia spent some time after a nervous breakdown. Little is known of Lawrence’s time there, but Tom managed to track down a man who, as a wee boy, had run errands for him.