My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  I nodded at the barbed wire. ‘You know what that means round a beer garden. People on this island steal patio furniture.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Sandy, ‘and sell it to each other.’

  Malcolm took us back to his place to party. I think that his wife wasn’t too pleased because she locked herself in the living room and played All by Myself over and over again. We waved goodbye to her when we left, as she puffed a cigarette out of the window, mouthing along to the words in a way that made little smoke signals rise up into the night.

  It was a good show, inside a theatre where big cottony drapes formed a kind of indoor tent. Afterwards Jim and I got stoned and came up with my favourite-ever idea. It was to be a double act called The Entertainments. They were two Victorian performers who travelled to other dimensions to perform shows. There they staged Harry Houdini-style tricks to disturbing audiences (we wrote one where they were aboard the Imperial Zeppelin of King Bohar the Bronze, another at the MOBO Awards). When a trick failed it could have tremendous consequences for that dimension; the colour blue might disappear or China might declare war on the sun. We wrote quite a bit of material and tried to get BBC Scotland to put it on the next series of LFS we were doing. They dismissed it as the ramblings of the deeply stoned. I honestly still don’t know if it was idiocy or genius, so here is the script we wrote that night, perhaps inspired by the general weirdness of Rothesay, decide for yourself.

  A guest introduces the item. This could be the singer from that week’s band; Greg; the current Mr Scotland.

  Guest: Ladies and Gentlemen. The Entertainments.

  The phrase ‘The Entertainments’ is dubbed over with a scratchy vinyl recording of an otherworldly upper-class voice and the guest moves in a puppet-like way as they voice this, as if gripped by an unseen force.

  Red velvet curtains open with a swish to reveal the set. The set is Barok the Living Stage: a dark mixture of reds and purples suggestive of a Victorian Music Hall. We see the pianist behind an 1980s Yamaha organ with Mr Salbutamon standing in readiness upstage. There is a large steam-powered clock standing on the stage and a large oval screen above and behind the performers.

  The pianist plays Victorian-style organ music throughout the item, but breaks into snatches of inspiring Eighties power ballads while Mr Salbutamon is attempting his feats of amazement.

  Pianist: It is our pleasure to be performing here tonight at the Lord Haringey School for the Rehabilitation and Violent Restraint of the Racially Ambiguous. Women and the uneducated may need to bite down on leather during the performance. Mr Salbutamon is here to amaze the mind and boggle the sensibilities. And of course fight the forces of entropy as they attempt to gnaw entry into our dimension.

  Entropy sound effect on the organ ‘ooh ahh ooh ahh’ taken from the killer’s intro music in Dirty Harry.

  Pianist: I…am here too! Mr Salbutamon has an exemplary record of achievement in the fields of Illusionism, Bind Breaking, Telepathy and Marksmanship. His insistence that he could only shoot on Whitsun and during a total eclipse meant that he did not receive the crimson ruby at this year’s Berlin Olympics.

  Unfortunately at a recent performance held at the King Albert Hall in New Berlin, Mr Salbutamon was defeated by Nektia the sub-demon of effeminacy in a high-stakes game of blindfold backgammon. Chance is a tempestuous whore! As a consequence…this is now Lloyd Cole.

  Splat. Jelly falls from ceiling and hits deck. Guy comes and scrapes him off floor with shovel and puts him a container on the organ. The pianist coughs awkwardly as he addresses the jelly.

  Pianist: Lloyd. Tonight Barok the Living Stage is being powered by Indifference.

  Shutter goes up to reveal a glass container in which there is a disco with a chap dancing round a dog. Barok grumbles. Gas comes up and fills the container.

  Pianist: We found Barok the Living Stage wet and starving in a basement in the shantytowns of Outer Berlin. As we stood there we asked ourselves, ‘Could this be living?’ Tonight’s first spectacle of wonder shall be the mordant carnival of sensory manipulation which Platinious called ‘The Corruption of Possibility’.

  Salbutamon brings out a fan of playing cards.

  Pianist: Pick one! Ha! Success! The six of hearts. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed ‘The Corruption of Possibility’.

  While the pianist is announcing this, children with blank flour bags over their heads and feet—called Pheenome—roll out a step for Salbutamon to stand on and an ear trumpet that goes up to Salbutamon’s arse.

  Pianist: Compared with our next feat of amazement, even the mighty pyramids of Berlin are naught. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Salbutmon gives you ‘The Six Pillars of Zeus’, where-in he shall manipulate his gastric tunnels to vocalise classic works of literature.

  Salbutamon lets rip a huge fart which turns into a cough.

  Pianist: Ah, a practice stroke. To prepare for this trial Mr Salbutamon has been drinking brandy and followed the Boys Brigade Manual for Sudden Physical Exercise on Cold Mornings.

  Duality! Not only is Mr Salbutamon’s reputation at stake. On the accomplishment of this task he shall be granted an opportunity to rescue his beloved wife from inter-dimensional flux. Trying in vain to find her way to warm bosom of Berlin she wanders the timestreams calling his name. Little does she know that she stands within the echoing hallways of devils.

  Mrs Salbutamon appears on the inter-dimensional monitor as she walks through a tunnel like The Wizard of Oz/Labyrinth. Then straight into the trick. This feat is performed ‘against the clock’ with the steamclock centrepiece beginning a countdown. Mr Salbutamon farts the names of novels—in what sounds like a strained human voice—while the pianist plays along, intermittently abusing Salbutamon and singing Eighties power ballads. There is a farting sound, then the novels’ titles: King Solomon’s Mines , Fear and Loathing in Berlin and the novelisation of the feature film The Jewel in the Nile.

  Pianist: Well done Salbutamon. Victory! The chance is yours…quickly to the portal, pull her free, Barok has provided you with a rope. She is beyond the door! Hear her call your name! Do not surrender her to the Anti-Rooms of Misrule! Salbutamon! Quickly, the many-angled ones are stirring!

  An inter-dimensional portal opens up as part of the stage. It’s a bit like a gorilla’s vagina; there’s steam and lights and stuff coming out and two Pheenome use the rope to climb out of the dimension. Salbutamon pulls more rope out and his wife gets closer to the camera. The last tugs on the rope should smack his wife’s face against the screen. The clock runs out and we see her spiralling back into the void. He falls back as the rope comes out of the opening. He lands on his back. We see he has pulled something out of the void.

  Pianist: Well done, Mr Salbutamon. Your wife is being traded on the market of souls. Her price…two groats. And a giant worm has entered this dimension, where it has begun to devour Time.

  Traces of the netherworld remain. Salbutamon, your boobery snared the narrative of class struggle! In our physical vibration it has manifested as Glen Michael and Taggart locked in a mortal combat!

  Glen Royalist, wearing a gaudy crown, rings etc., but hugely bearded and wearing rags, is holding a jewelled dagger to Taggart’s throat. Meanwhile, Taggart is similarly dishevelled and wearing a necklace of chicken bones as he holds a sharpened chicken bone to Glen’s throat.

  Pianist: Ladies and Gentlemen, the patrons of tonight’s performance have been Messr’s NestlÉ and NestlÉ of Berlin. Providing purpose for the godless savages of the tropics.

  Goodnight.

  Just reading that back makes me think that we had lost it to drugs. In fact, it makes me think that I was a junkie and Jim was my imaginary friend. Glen Michael, I should explain, was a guy who presented a cartoon show in Scotland when we were kids. He actually appeared on the first series of Live Floor Show, popping up as a brief cutaway when Bob Doolally claimed to have been married to him. After the show he got up on stage and delivered quite a mental speech encompassing the nature of comedy and h
is own legacy. Pretty much exactly what you would have hoped for.

  Another sketch I wrote with Jim for Live Floor Show included a character called Dr Presley. He was a sort of vainglorious rogue scientist who described himself as being at the centre of most of the world’s conspiracy theories. He had a vaguely South American air and was guided by a horrendous skull-faced monkey on his shoulder called Nando. His monologues were often him listing the reasons he was ‘so fucking great’:

  ‘I have attracted flak for selling powdered milk to Africa. And African breastmilk to Tescos. My influence is such that I attempted to have my face carved on to the surface of Mars, only to find it was already there. I have learned to use 68 per cent of my brain power; I can design a new language everyday…particularly one that consists only of harsh insults and requests for love making. I have files on everyone based on genetic probability factors so I can blackmail anyone before they have done the thing for which they are blackmailed in such a persuasive way as they become compelled to do the thing they are being blackmailed for.

  ‘I conducted an experiment wherein I gathered 68 volunteers. They were paired at random; one member of each pair had a purple satin scarf bound over their eyes. They were getting a torch, a map, a radio and thirty minutes to negotiate a multilevelled course of obstacles. 67 of them were eaten by a giant crab. I’m always saying it, but that’s definitely the last time I conduct any experiments on…GIANT CRAB ISLAND!!!’

  Despite the fact that I talk about them a lot, I’m really sceptical of most conspiracy theories. I don’t think the World Trade Center bombings were a CIA plot, or any of that stuff. I think the biggest mystery about the whole Diana thing was not whether or not she was murdered in a plot hatched by Prince Philip to prevent the future king’s father-in-law from being a Muslim, but how did Mohammed Al-Fayed make so much money when he’s clearly a fucking maniac!

  People still think that Elvis faked his death. If he did, is it really likely he would have died in a shitting accident? If you faked your death you’d make it something brave—pushing a young girl out of the way of a lorry. Who’d fake their death as a jobby-related heart attack? That said, I have an open mind; I’m not the sort of person who believes everything he sees in the news. It’s 30 years since Elvis’s ‘death’; 40 since we ‘landed on the moon’ and 80 since we discovered ‘penicillin’. You would be shocked at some of the stuff I would be able to tell you if I was still alive.

  Throughout these whole few years of being on Scottish telly I was living with a woman in Edinburgh. It was tempestuous, partly because I was always drugged and writing, partly because we were both nuts. She was an artist and did lots of drawings of me being beaten to death or being sexually abused by animals. Looking back, that probably wasn’t a good sign. She was great, though, funny and creative, but it was never right between us and we struggled along like badly set bones.

  We went to relationship counselling for a bit. One day I went on acid. I was talking to the counsellor about my childhood and looking out the window. The tenements facing us seemed to clench themselves into a giant stone fist.

  I’ve since discovered one of the keys to a successful relationship is the ability to listen to what your other half did during the day and pretend you are not cripplingly bored. Nodding is good. As is the occasional ‘Really?’ If you hear a name you recognise take a stab at identifying them

  ‘Is that Maggie that works on reception?’

  ‘No, that’s a different Maggie. Sometimes I wonder if you listen to me at all!’

  Right or wrong you have ‘taken an interest’ and that’s what matters. Annoyingly, your partner will often be interested in hearing about your day at work. A good tactic is to pretend you work in some secretive military job that you can’t talk about.

  It was at this point that two years of drug abuse began to have a cumulative effect. We made a sacrifice for success in our Dr Presley writing (a joint and a one pence piece) to a statue in the park. Afterwards we noticed that the statue had a tiny monkey on his shoulder and a jester’s robe around his feet.

  In the writing session that day, we seriously started to think that somehow we had managed to magic Dr Presley into actual existence in our reality, that escaping from his fictional prison was exactly the sort of thing he’d be trying to do, and that he was going to fuck us up badly. We had taken pills with the horse tranquilliser ketamine in them, which I don’t think helped.

  We wrote a sketch for the show where Jim played Dr Presley and I was Dr Presley 36, a version of the Doctor from another dimension. The sketch started with Dr Presley cutting my throat quite horribly. He then goes on to deliver a truly mental monologue that I can’t believe found its way onto national TV. It detailed the various reasons that he ‘is so fucking great’ and every so often the Doctor would make the whole room shake with his bizarre mental powers.

  Of course it’s ridiculous to think that the Doctor could have made the leap into our reality or started to fuck with us. I split up with my girlfriend that week. As she told me she was leaving, the show started on the TV over her shoulder. She dropped the news as I was watching the doctor slash my throat from end to end.

  I was in quite a weird place after the break-up and had a few one-night stands, something I’d not really done before. I got off with the oldest woman I’ve ever slept with. Older women are underrated. The sex is great and they’ll often tidy your room afterwards. And you never miss Emmerdale. Actually, this lady was maybe only 42, but it seemed pretty old at the time. It was great actually; we both got high and went at it with that abandon you have when there’s nothing to lose. I’m not proud of this, but I couldn’t manage to come, and to try to get myself to come I focussed on a picture of her on her bedside table where she was much younger. It felt like I was trying to push my cock back through time. In the photo she was standing on a pier on holiday holding a big fish she’d caught. Still, it worked.

  We had both taken a big ecstasy tablet I’d never seen before. It was enormous and looked sort of like one of those old Refreshers sweeties. Anyway, if you ever see one, take it; we were high and shagging for about two days. It was nuts; her gynaecologist will have thought that she’d been hit by a car. Eventually, we ordered a pizza and watched a movie. It was A Perfect Storm, that George Clooney tuna movie. It says a lot about that film that even high on ecstasy, eating pizza beside a beautiful woman I was going to fuck before and afterwards, it was still shit. I hope they use that sentence as a quote on the DVD box.

  It sort of ended badly because she had this shelf of books under the TV. It contained every commercial book that you’d seen people reading on a train for the previous few years: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and so on. I thought it was an ironic statement, a sort of joke, and complimented her on what I took to be some kind of artistic critique about the mundanity of modern culture. It transpired that this was her actual library and our utter incompatibility was suddenly obvious. Still, it was fun. Two days may actually be the perfect length for a relationship.

  That was the only period of my life where I shagged around, and I learned quite a lot. For instance, role-play is great. There’s nothing makes sex better with a chick than spending a couple of years pretending to be her long-lost brother. I also learned not to date women you meet through your friends. You don’t want to find out what your friends’ lives are like. I couldn’t go partying with Andy all night once I knew he had kids, and that his name was Andy.

  I ignored the idea that you are supposed to find out somebody’s history before becoming intimate. Ask your partner about their sexual history before you fuck them? It’s hard enough trying to forget my own. The last thing I want to hear before sex is a fucking roll call. You listen to someone’s whole sex life, you’ll rather stick your dick in a red-hot meteor. I know they can’t cure HIV, but how hard would it be to come up with something that meant you could taste it on people’s saliva? It’ll mean that most people with HIV will never develop AIDS. They’ll choke to death on Tic Tac
s.

  Eventually, I managed to get a friend I’d been seeing out of boredom pregnant. We were both pretty pleased about it and ended up with a beautiful daughter. I had always wanted a girl. I found out that it was a girl when we had a scan the day before the birth. I was walking home through the park and, after having a good look around to check nobody was there, skipped across the bridge.

  It’s going to be interesting being a full-time dad in a few years, and finding out just how boring my kids find me. There’s so much information and distractions these days that kids get bored easily. In my day if someone found a porn mag it would circulate around the school for weeks. By the time you got a loan of it, it would be like trying to look at something encased in amber.

  I think being a parent is the ultimate responsibility. People label somebody like Amy Winehouse self-destructive, but I blame her parents. Especially her mum. She’s the one that must have fucked a horse. Angelina Jolie is often described as the most beautiful woman in the world. Yet after so many kids she must have vag like a rubbish chute. Susan Boyle’s vagina on Angelina’s body, now that’s what I’m talking about. Scientists, there’s a Frankie Boyle Live DVD to the first to deliver.

  I hated being at the birth, having always found hospitals creepy. Luckily my daughter’s mum had to have quite a lot of drugs so I nipped out for a couple of hours in the middle and watched a football match without her realising.