Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies

by Nick Frost

  I stuff my sub-machine gun, spare clips and a handful of dummy rounds into my bag and jump into my car to head home. I discover the house – a big, ground-floor flat I share with Michael Smiley and Simon – is empty. It’s right next to Highgate Station and the back garden is huge with an area of woodland beyond that’s a real hotspot for European Jays.

  It’s a very hot day, the kind a tabloid might refer to as ‘a scorcher’. I open the back door that leads directly into our lovely back garden and allow some much-needed breeze in. I change into some tiny house shorts and mince around with the gun for forty minutes or so. I take turns raiding the other guys’ bedrooms. Tossing a balled-up pair of socks into the room, stunning the terrorists inside with a flashbang before moving in and cleaning up with a series of devastatingly accurate double-taps. PapPap! Tremendous.

  After a while it’s time to put some time in on the task at hand, stripping this firearm. I retrieve a giant bag of icky, smoke a bowl and get to work. At first I follow the pictures, slowly pushing out the pins in the correct sequence, stripping the receiver out, barrel, ejector port etc. It’s going well and I decide to start stripping it with a blindfold on, hone my martial skills properly. I blindly strip and rebuild the weapon three or four times. Pleased with the way it’s going I decide to smoke another bowl and take the rest of the day off.

  I remove the Bluetones scarf I’d been using as a blindfold and straight away something feels wrong. My spider-sense tingles. I look to my left as it feels like someone’s watching me through the window. I’m right – someone is watching me. Actually six someones, six armed police officers.

  Two of them are already in the room pointing Glocks at me. Great handgun. The other four, armed with rifles and, ironically, actual MP5s, are outside. Once we’d laid eyes on one another it was on. I tensed. They tensed. This is really bad and very dangerous. One wrong or quick misplaced move – hell, even a deep breath – could end in me being killed.

  They see their opportunity and stream in like a big blue tsunami. They holler various things at me, like ‘don’t fucking move’ etc. I’m now working on instinct, my anus clenches and a small cough is released. I, slowly and in one silken movement do two things: I take my hands off the replica and raise them, palms and fingers spread, high into the air above me. I then shuffle backwards away from the shooter and further onto the settee. I couldn’t have been more submissive if I’d tried.

  I’m hauled off the sofa and hogtied. Once immobilised they stop pointing their killy guns at me. Still, I’m not allowed to move or speak. They search the house methodically, laying out everything they find in a logical and pleasingly symmetrical manner.

  Mine was not the only firearm-shaped thing we owned. With the weed and still smoking bong, the table now looked like a snapshot from a raid on a Triad girl farm. I was oddly thrilled.

  By and by the mood lifts. They’d set out ready to kill a lump with a skinhead and having not had to kill anyone they relax slightly.

  I could hear them shouting and talking to the girls in the flat next door. I was embarrassed by what they were saying, I’d rather they’d lied and told them I was some kind of hardnut. I heard snippets of this conversation . . .

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘—blah blah blah—’

  ‘Actor.’

  ‘Silly little boy . . .’ etc.

  Some laughter, they were clearly flirting with these girls – still if it kept them from shooting me in the mind then go for it.

  Forty or so minutes passed. My voice, which at first had been high-pitched and squeaky, returns to normal. When they’d streamed in, and while I was sitting back and opening hands up to the heavens, I was also shouting, ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m an actor!’ but in the highest possible voice. I called it the übersoprano.

  The lead officer screams back at me, ‘If you’re an actor what’s your Equity number!!!’ I stumbled, I did not have this information to hand. That was when shit was bad. Since then I’d recovered somewhat and my story had checked out and shit was less bad. That said, I never in a month of Sundays with the replica and the big lump of green believed I’d stay out of custody. No fucking way. I imagined the call to production from a young, court-appointed lawyer. Not good.

  I then wondered how they’d known about the gun. Apparently a poor old lady had seen the barrel sticking out of my bag as I got out of my car. They’d blocked the road off and had sent scouts in to watch me hop around the house like Die Hard’s John McClane but in short shorts. What a dick.

  The team’s chief told me, with some jollity, that in their pre-raid briefing they’d decided to take me down, to shoot me if I’d had the gun in hand. It was so close. I actually think in this rare instance being stoned helped me.

  The guy in charge picks up my ’erb bag, sniffs it, zips it back up and leaves it on the table.

  ‘You’ll deserve a nice stiff drink after this, son, and you may want to knock this shit on the head, eh?’

  Police laughter. I couldn’t believe this, it actually appeared that I would not only escape custody but get to keep my ’erb bag as well. What the fuck!

  They stride towards the back door from whence they came and leave me with a final piece of wisdom . . .

  ‘You did well, mate, a lot of people piss themselves.’ Much laughter from the Blue Tsunamis. I was thrilled I hadn’t pissed myself.

  ***

  When I wasn’t setting off security buttons in cash booths I was still working on the bar. Wavy Davy had gone and in his place were two South African guys, Dion Sampson and Tony Lindsay. I still know Tony, he’s one of my best friends, I was best man at his wedding and godfather to one of his children. He looks like a skinny, white Dwight Yorke. His initials are tattooed on my arm (along with Simon Pegg’s, Michael Smiley’s, Danny Brown’s, Edgar Wright’s and Nira Park’s). Sadly I don’t really see Dion any more. It’s one of those horrible drift-aways where six months becomes a year and a year becomes five becomes ten. I regret this.

  I’m a pretty good mimic of accents, particularly South African, and for two days with the help of my voice skills I completely fool Tony into believing I’m from Durban. It’s a story Tony still tells today.

  I don’t remember leaving the big lump of a house in Golders Green but I do. I move in to a house on Cricklewood Lane, number 142. I live there for a long time. With whom and in what order I have no idea.

  It’s a small, three-bedroom maisonette with a wonderfully large balcony. I had a great time living there and again people come and go and rotate but I finally had my own room and I loved it. Number 142 was a revolving door of lunatics, alcoholics, actors, singers and artists. I’m not sure which tag suited me best, definitely not actor though. I never wanted to be an actor. The thought of being an actor was a terrible nightmare to me then. Having people watching me show off seemed a horrendous notion. Don’t get me wrong, I had my moments but usually that was in small groups of high friends, not un-high in a studio watched by eighty people. I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I had no long-term goal.

  Down the way at 148 lived the wonderful Kiwis Keith and Michelle and Michelle’s sister Rebecca. I still keep in contact with them to this day and occasionally see them when I’m down in Wellington. I invented a thing called the Cheese Eagle, a raptor that only eats cheese that Michelle used to love. I’d swoop down and grab her Edams. That sounds weird. Sorry, Keith.

  At work I’d moved from the bar onto the floor and found that I was a great waiter. My unflappable, logical mind found it easy to prioritise sometimes up to twelve tables. (Not easily, waiting twelve tables is very hectic.)

  I’ve said before in interviews that being a waiter was how I learnt to become an actor, that and my long training since I was a child in pretending and mimicking accents and doing impressions and copying what I saw on films and adverts and television. I quickly understood that if you wanted to make big money as a waiter you had to adapt to every customer that came through the door. I think generally there
are only seven or eight different types of people in the world so it wasn’t too difficult.

  If ‘Geezers’ came in I was a farkin’ cockney barrow boy, I was a chirpy, cheeky, cockles and friggin’ mussels ‘big old boy outta Repton’ kind of toilet. They loved it. If a rich Indian family came in I’d bow and scrape and only talk to the oldest man in the group or the most glamorous lady. If businessmen came in there would be lots of ‘yes sir no sir’. Out of all the groups I served, businessmen were by far the rudest. I was literally shit to them. Their self-importance was boundless. I had to frequently remind myself they couldn’t be that big a deal otherwise they wouldn’t be having a shit hamburger at Chiquito while discussing unit cost on lengths of PVC piping. Anger at rudeness aside, I started to make some pretty good money.

  I liked working in the restaurant. I never had a thought about my future. I never really had, even as a child. (A trait I hope my son doesn’t inherit.) That said, this stupidly blasé attitude has served me well over the years.

  At this point I had little or no contact with Mum and Dad. I was too angry and too sad. I’d been left alone when they moved to Wales and alone was how I considered myself mostly. Of course from time to time there’d be phone calls. As soon as I heard Mum on the other end of the phone, literally the first two words she spoke, I could tell that she’d been drinking. I hated it. As soon as I heard the tiny slurs of speech I turned off. ‘Is Dad there?’ I’d talk to him instead and usually I was pissed off with him for letting it happen. He didn’t let it happen by the way, he had no choice. Mum’s all-powerful character and illness within meant it was easier to go with it than fight against it. I feel ashamed that I treated them this way but I didn’t know what else to think or do. So usually we just didn’t talk.

  Being a dad myself now and knowing what they’d gone through I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been to not see or speak to your son for months at a time. I think it has and will kind of haunt me for ever now they’re not here. ‘I could’ve done more.’ In reality though there was nothing more I could’ve done.

  What I really wanted to do was write novels. Thanks to Rachel I’d discovered a love of moody Russian literature, the works of Milan Kundera and other eastern European existentialists. I longed to sit in a chilly, carpetless garret eating a watery potato soup, itchy blanket slung across my shoulders, writing about lost love and how grim and pointless life was. Thank you, Comrade Solzhenitsyn.

  Copying Red’s example I trawled through the myriad junkshops and secondhand places in Edgware and Golders Green hoping to strike gold. What gold meant was a first edition hardback book. I think in all my time doing it I found three, one by Norman Mailer, one by Aldous Huxley; the third one, my prize possession at the time and more so now I’ve worked with Steven Spielberg, was the first edition novelisation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I loved that book. Still do. I love the film and I loved the soundtrack that fifteen-year-old me used to listen to at night to frighten myself.

  Years later I find myself on the set of The Adventures of Tintin directed by the lovely Mr Spielberg – Uncle Steven as Simon and I take to secretly calling him – I’ve got the book with me and on the last day of the shoot he signs it! Such a nice personal inscription. Funny how things work out. That first edition I found in a junk shop is now priceless, to me anyway.

  When I wasn’t trawling secondhand shops for rare first editions I was working. I worked most of the time. Thing about that sort of existence is if you don’t work you don’t make money. Simple as that. I had a vague concept at the beginning of my foodservice career that I’d save some money and travel again but it wasn’t working out that way.

  What I earned I spent. After most weekend shifts and some weeknights we’d end up in a Nepalese restaurant in Cricklewood called the Pink Rupee. To this day I still think about the perfect Butter Chicken they served. We’d sit there sometimes until three or four in the morning pissed and laughing.

  There was a lovely old man who looked a bit like Fu-Manchu who’d come in late at night and read his paper, he was nice, we’d chat to him and mid conversation he’d fall asleep into his curry. Fu-Manchu was the only person I ever knew with bona fide narcolepsy. It was so shocking it wasn’t even funny. It was a bit funny, obviously not funny if he were piloting a container vessel, but here in the relative safety of the Pink Rupee, sometimes it could be a bit funny. A couple of times I had to fish him out of a particularly saucy Pasanda to stop him from drowning. I’d gently lift his face out, move the plate away and pop his head down on a napkin. Seconds later he’d be awake again, wheezing his sixty-a-day laugh and tucking into his supper.

  I drank, I partied, and I worked serving mediocre hamburgers to fucking horrible businessmen. This was my existence and it was a rut that I liked being in.

  At Chiquito we had a thing called the Birthday Song – if someone came in and it was his or her birthday we’d be forced to sing the following ditty:

  Happy happy happy birthday,

  Happy happy happy birthday,

  Happy happy happy birthday,

  To you, to you, to you, Olé!!!

  Some fucking genius got paid to write this. I’d heard it was Chris de Burgh but I’ve never received confirmation on that. We used to have a better birthday song but TGI Friday’s took them to court for infringing birthday song copyright. It was basically the same song but someone had cunningly changed the word ‘Friday’s’ to the word ‘Chiquito’. (Probably the same genius that got paid a Trillion Turkish Lira to write the new birthday song!) Who knew the rules surrounding theme restaurant birthday song law could be so tricky to navigate.

  The birthday song generally made me sad. For someone who got embarrassed easily and had/still has a little working-class chip on his shoulder, having to sing for rude dickheads who were essentially lauding up the fact they did jobs where they weren’t forced to sing for a stranger’s birthday made me cross. Busy Friday and Saturday nights were the best for the birthday song. All the waiters would grab spoons and pans to use as percussion instruments and we’d really belt it out. Part of this was about defiance, not wanting to be broken. Sometimes instead of the last ‘Olé’ we’d mumble the words ‘fuck you’. It was so quick and hidden among the rest of the cacophony people never twigged. Hardly ever.

  The birthday song was very popular, punters lapped that shit up. Sometimes annoyingly customers would pretend it was someone’s birthday even if it wasn’t, just for the embarrassment factor and the free fried ice cream.

  On a quiet Monday afternoon having a couple of young kids demanding the birthday song when I’m the only waiter and Wavy ‘Flaming ball-bag’ Davey was the only bartender was another matter. You had to do it so you’d suck it up and belt it out. If you were lucky they’d leave you a thirteen pence tip.

  Tiny tips were always given back. At first I didn’t have the balls to do this but after a while getting a pound tip off twenty women who’d eaten and drunk 400 quids’ worth of burritos and margaritas, who also received great, fast, efficient, friendly service, was too much to take. Sometimes I’d follow them out and give them their pennies in the car park . . .

  ‘Oh, thank god I found you, you forgot your change.’

  They’d smile, confused . . .

  ‘Oh, it’s fine, it’s for you.’

  I’d smile . . .

  ‘I think you need this more than me. Thanks though!’

  Outrageous behaviour. Waiters live on tips. Fact. But . . . As a waiter, to expect a tip is wrong wrong wrong. It needs to be earned. Tips is actually an acronym – To Induce Prompt Service. I think Dr Samuel Johnson, the inventor of the modern dictionary, coined this.

  Late one night almost as my shift was about to end I was given a table of surly Middle Eastern gents. Getting a table at the very end of a long shift was a pretty mean thing for the host/hostess to do. If you’d been cross and shouted at the host you were generally punished at some point.

  A clever host has the power to make your shift very ea
sy indeed. It’s about gently filtering tables into your section bit by bit. If you’ve twelve tables all at different points in their meal it’s easy to cope. Sit four tables all at once and you have a problem. I wasn’t generally a shouter but illogical people who are shit at their jobs make me cross.

  Tonight it was my turn to face the hostess’s wrath. I’d snapped at some earlier lunacy and I was to be punished. Or not, as it turned out. I’d almost finished cleaning my section and just about to ask my GM if I could close when the hostess, Melissa, who was actually pretty good and absolutely lovely, sat a group of surly men at my table. It essentially meant that a half-ten close would now become a half-twelve finish. Maybe later. The repercussions were great, it meant that I wouldn’t be smashing the granny out of a Butter Chicken and eight pints until at least one in the morning. Not cool.

  Middle Eastern businessmen want one thing from a waiter: to be treated like kings. If you can identify the richest one in the group and pander to his needs then you might hit the jackpot. Pander too much though and you’re perceived as a snivelling worm and they’re more likely to set their hawks on you at the end of a meal than give you a big tip.

  They sat and drank bottles of spirits; the thing about buying bottles of spirits in a restaurant is you get charged by the shot, thirty-three shots per bottle at £6 a time, that’s almost £200 a bottle, and that was the cheap shit. They drank jug upon jug of margarita, they feasted on nachos and fajitas and delicious, deep-fried chimichangas, in fact everything on the menu, and everything good Texaco-Mexico cuisine had to offer.