Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies

by Nick Frost

  ‘Go on . . .’ I pushed him to open up the freezer. His little face looked so young and excited. It was like watching eight-year-old Simon open up his Stretch Armstrong on Christmas Day. Simon opens the freezer. Once the icy fog clears he sees nothing. There is nothing in the freezer but an icy emptiness. It’s like a diorama of Hoth. There is nothing at all in the freezer. There are no pies. What’s more I knew there were no pies. He looks around with a weird smile on his face, understanding perfectly what was going on yet at the same time understanding nothing. He can’t believe that I would’ve, that I could’ve, done such a thing.

  ‘What’s going on? Where are the pies?’ He’s clearly heartbroken. What have I done? I’ve completely misjudged this.

  ‘There are no pies,’ I regretfully advise.

  He slumps, spirit crushed. I begin laughing manically, taken by the evil spirit that inhabits my kitchen. It instructs me to scream and rip my shirt in half. So I do. Simon looks terrified.

  Simon didn’t stay with me for long in Ivy Road. In Australia he’d met and toured with a Northern Irish bloke called Michael Smiley. They’d decided to move in together as they were both stand-ups and had become very good friends. The first time I meet Smiley I’m terrified. He has a skinhead, bad teeth and scars from a bicycle crash on his face. He’s by far the most energetic, aggressive, funny lunatic I have ever met. I loved him and still do. He’s one of my best friends sixteen years on. Michael was a great stand-up, audiences loved him and were frightened of him in equal measure. He’d escaped the ravages of eighties Belfast and moved to London and fell into the world of cycle couriering. He loves cycling. Me and Simon used to tease him about what gear he had on his bike, he’d laugh because we were idiots.

  The first time I saw Michael do stand-up he started his set like this: ‘I’m not actually a stand-up comedian [ripple of laughter], I’m just here to tell you you’ve got fifteen minutes to clear the room!’ With his thick Belfast accent it got a big laugh. Sometimes when he did it the laugh was a nervous one at first that developed into a relieved roar when people realised he wasn’t from a terror agency. I think Michael was a bit suspicious of me to begin with, two working-class men circling around each other, I understood.

  Somewhere in the mishmash of my timeline Michael and Simon find a flat in Kentish Town and move in. It’s a cool place. I still wallow in my Ivy Road flat for now. I’d moved from being a waiter on the floor and into the kitchen. I started working on the line. I was the only non-African and I loved it! I’d known a lot of these guys for a few years when I was a waiter, now though I was part of an elite crew. The kitchen brigade.

  I began at first in the prep kitchen. I’d come in early each day and start my shift at 8 a.m. I’d check in all the deliveries, put them away and crack on preparing the sauces and salsas and marinades the restaurant would need for that day. By far the best thing about that job was the fact I didn’t have to deal with customers. It was bliss and I actually felt like I was learning something. I’d spend hours slicing and chopping vegetables. Stirring sauces and preparing crispy tortilla shells for the nachos.

  Being in the restaurant first thing with just the cleaners and the duty manager was sweet. We chatted, we had music on, we drank coffee, ate stuff we shouldn’t have been eating and laughed. During my time in the kitchen I really got to know a lot of those lovely Ugandan men very well. At one point a year or so in I’d picked up enough of the language to be able to do a small stand-up routine in Swahili. They bloody loved it. I’d watch them clap and howl with laughter as I portrayed a man, stopped by police, having to explain why there’s a monkey in the boot of his car. Monkey in a car boot comedy must be pretty big in the comedy clubs of downtown Kampala judging by the level of rich African laughter it would elicit.

  Me and my friend Yusuf, a Ugandan ex-international footballer turned line cook, worked on an elaborate and very false backstory of my time as a child in the remote Ugandan town of Mukono. The story revolved around the fact my father used to be the manager of the Mukono Collins Hotel and this is where I grew up. It would freak out new Ugandans when they arrived at the restaurant. I loved that game. I guess it was like acting. I loved Yusuf. We went to a party one night where I met the wife of deposed and exiled Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. She was all right.

  There was a big manual at the back of the kitchen, it told you in very simple steps how to make every sauce they used in the restaurant. That was my job and eventually I didn’t need the manuals. Sadly for me that knowledge no longer exists inside my brain. It’s a shame as I often yearn for the rich and creamy queso sauce or a sharp and spicy green tomatillo sauce for my homemade burritos. I can make my own versions but they’re not quite the same. The only recipe I remember is the one for guacamole, I love it and it’s something I still make to this day.

  I was moved out of the prep kitchen and onto the line. This is where I really wanted to be. Cooking, although it was definitely not cooking. Not really. Not in the truest sense. It was putting together pre-made elements of a dish, not doing every dish from scratch. It was still tough and needed a great deal of skill on certain sections. I started, predictably, on the starters section. The waiters took a while to get used to the fact I was now a Linepig. Some of the sneakier foodservers, the ones who’d do anything for a tip, would try and approach me to sort them out free shit for their tables. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  A tiny machine would beep and puke out an order. It was then my job to gather all the bits together. Easy. I moved from appetisers to mains and from there onto the grill. The grill was where the action was. The weekend on that broiler, Friday to Sunday, was crazy. It was so busy. From 12–4 p.m. you were slammed and from 7–11 p.m. you were slammed.

  One of the differences between the bar and kitchen was you could shout and swear in the kitchen and no one in the restaurant could hear you. Some of those poor waiters got sworn at so much. Bad waiters could potentially put some really bad fuck on your night. It could take the kitchen a long while to recover. I was responsible for anything that was cooked on the grill, steaks, fajitas, ribs, and every kind of burger. It’s the kind of stress I like. The whole kitchen can fall or thrive on the strength of their Grill Man. At times on busy nights you could have fifty things on that griddle all at different points of readiness.

  Like most things that involve a lot of people, communication is the key. When it’s flowing and going well it feels amazing. We’re all one beautiful Ugandan hive mind moving as one, making sure all the items the waiters need find their way onto one big tray all at the same time. When it wasn’t that, you were fucked, hard and quick.

  Although I liked working in the kitchen more than I’d liked working on the floor, it had its downsides. The worst one was the clean-up after a busy night, having to degrease that griddle and the floor and every other bit of your section was a pain in the potty-hole.

  I’d done every job possible in that restaurant and for the first time in five years I began to have an itch I needed to scratch. This was something I’d never thought of before. I began to think that maybe I should leave that place and move on.

  I was living a weird double life at this point. Working in the place had now taken a back seat to hanging with Simon and Smiley and other loonies, watching tons of stand-up and meeting good, funny people. My mind was being fed and this new sense of possibility made working at Chiquito more and more of a drag. There were so many great comics at the time and London culturely, comedically felt so fertile.

  I was definitely different back then to the person I am now. I felt comfortable and relaxed and myself with Simon and Smiley and my friends at the restaurant, people I’d known for a while and trusted. Anyone else though and I retreated into myself. I became the silent shadow on Simon’s shoulder, ever present but hardly talking.

  I’m not sure why. Chip on my shoulder maybe, a suspicion of these types of flamboyant arty folk? I think the simplest answer was probably the truest. I was a bit shy and I thought, wrongly it turned out
, that all these funny, smart people would just not be interested in what I had to say. Not true.

  I think my working-class thought processes were a lot different to theirs though. A lot of the time I was silently working out whether or not I could take these people in a fight should push come to shove. How would I escape should there be a small fire? Does anyone have drugs? That kind of thing, but mostly it was just shyness.

  This was the time I met Edgar Wright, the sweetest little ball-bag you’d ever wish to meet. I remember going out with Simon one night to the Battersea Arts Centre to see some stand-up and afterwards we stood around drinking in the bar, and that’s where I saw him – a small and delicate little hair bear with skin as fine as wedding porcelain. He was a young director doing stuff with Alexei Sayle and Lenny Henry. He talked a lot and quickly (this has never changed), his passion and knowledge of all things TV and film meant it took me a while to fully get to grips with him. Not that I didn’t like him, I just couldn’t find a gap in the conversation to say anything, and even if I had I wasn’t sure at that point if it’d be valid or funny enough.

  As well as Edgar I met cool young bands and musicians, editors, costume designers, actors, writers, comedians. I was really lucky. I felt myself growing inside. Something had been awakened. The restaurant didn’t seem enough, it was basically all I knew but I just couldn’t do it any more, so I left. There was no fanfare. I just left. Five years. Goodbye. I knew I’d only leave to go to another restaurant but it felt good anyway. It was positive.

  After five years of stability now came a time of job-hopping. Moving from restaurant to restaurant. Work was no longer the most important thing in my life, it was raving and comedy and Simon and Smiley and my mate Danny and Maxwell and all the other new people I’d met who’d enflamed my throbbing art gland. That took money though. I think if the truth were told I was a little bit embarrassed that I had to wait tables while my new mates did comedy. I had no reason to moan, these guys were skilled and worked bloody hard.

  Simon and Smiley were living together at 9 Busby. It was a fantastic place. If you could avoid the violent racists or dangerous street gangs that littered the walk from Kentish Town tube you were laughing. It was fine in the day but coming home from work after midnight was sketchy. My trick when walking past groups of youths on bikes, hoods up, spitting, is always to either be totally invisible or act like a loony. I’d much rather mime eating some of my own fudge than get myself all stabbed up.

  The house, if you ever made it, was a big lump of a place and because of Simon and Smiley’s generous souls they took pity on me and let me live there. I paid very little rent. This meant though that I was morally obliged to get a Smiley talking-to about the virtues of ‘Pulling your own weight, big lad!’ I’ve had lots of these, even fairly recently – we call it getting ‘Smiley’d’!

  Michael had the room at the top of the house, he was very Bohemian and had his bike hanging on the wall and a pair of Technics 1210s set up, no bed just a mattress, bongo drums, big record collection with the odd picture of George Best in his prime here and there. It was mostly off limits but we were allowed to go up and play records when he wasn’t about, which was often – Michael was a very good, in-demand stand-up who’d tour the country most weekends.

  Simon had the big room downstairs next to the kitchen, two big floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated the place and there was a lovely original Victorian fireplace on one wall next to his futon. It was really nice, he too had a banging sound system.

  My room was the place where the other two left boxes of shit they didn’t want or need any more. In fact you could be fooled into thinking that freezing, damp room was a storage area for a tramp’s mortuary. If you pushed aside some of those boxes and made your way past the binliners full of shoes and faux furs, you’d see that some poor soul, me, had made a rudimentary bed. No mattress, just cushions held together by a thin cotton blankey, two flat, yellow pillows without cases and a duvet without a quilt cover. This was the Crab Pit. This was the bedroom where I lived. A sordid shit hole.

  The room was so cold in the winter that when I woke up an icy fog would hang low, hugging the floor like mist in an Arctic pre-dawn. I think this is where I got my superhuman resilience to the cold. I have to be cold at night. I know human beings are split into two camps in this matter, warm room or cold room, but I am definitely firmly encamped in the latter. The colder the better. What’s the duvet for otherwise?

  My need for extreme cold has driven wedges between me and some girlfriends in the past. I say wedges, we argued about it and then in the night they’d die of exposure. I lost three of them like that. Shame.

  I went to a wedding in Ireland once with Chris and was forced to stay in a B and B, first and last time by the way. Don’t get me wrong, lovely little place, new build though, the owners were nice, very welcoming but the house was like a fucking sauna and the windows were locked shut. It was immense. I awoke at 6 a.m. so hung-over and hot that I had to walk four miles into town topless in the rain to cool me down.

  ***

  After three years of not drinking I have a weird notion pop into my head. I’d been really strong up until this point and hardly ever thought about alcohol. Still, the voice in my head had now begun to tell me it would be all right to have one beer. Just one little ice-cold pint. It can’t hurt, can it?

  I had to push these thoughts from my mind remembering the friends’ rooms I’d pissed in and the countless times I’d borrowed a hairdryer to use on yellow, wee-stained sheets. There’s a kind of shame we don’t have a word for in English, I suspect the Germans do, they have a word for most things grim. It describes the embarrassment one has at being caught dumping a wet mattress in the street. Combine this with fights and anger and the dreadful quilt of fear that frequently hung over me days after heavy drinking occurred and you can see why I wanted – no, needed – to ignore this voice that had begun to crackle inside of me.

  I don’t know what started this man ringing his bell in my head but I felt like I needed to have a drink, just one, just to try, just have one. Okay? Just one. No! Yes, do it. Stop! I can’t stop. The din and screaming of my Weakness being fucked loudly in the room next door by a young stud with a giant dick became so loud I fled the house to escape its wanton moans.

  I left our house in Busby Place and walked past the old Jewish school that’s not there any more. A few times after massive benders we’d find ourselves standing on the balcony in sarongs and balaclavas drunkenly toasting the horny sixth form girls who’d laugh at us as they went into class.

  The din turned into a sinister whisper as I wandered into Camden Town. The shouting made me angry. The whispering made me frightened.

  I stood and paced up and down outside the World’s End. I stopped and looked up, the name of the pub was not lost on me. I spent an hour outside cogitating on what was the best thing to do, all this time the hiss building in my head like the rumbling in Tommy Lee Jones’s 1997 hit film Volcano. I went into the pub. I’d never been in it before and was struck by how shit it was, how the clientele were either down and outs or stick-thin Italian tourists with futuristic haircuts.

  I walked around that pub looking at those people, those guilty day drinkers, and I go to the toilet to do a quick line of tears. Standing at the bar now with that noise roaring out of my brain I start counting out change and finally order a beer. A Foster’s of all things. The barman places it on the counter and turns to put my sweaty coins into the till. By the time he turns back I’m gone. I left the pint on the bar and ran outside.

  All in all I spent nearly two hours in turmoil at the thought of that Foster’s. Fighting this urge. I was tired and it laughed knowing how unrelenting it could be. I’ll fucking show you. I strode back in and the Foster’s was still there. The barman has put a beermat on top to denote the pint is still active. Oh god, it was still active. I took the hat off the glass and looked into the golden column. The crescendo of noise was deafening now, but as I lifted the jar up to my l
ips the noises and clatter, clank and chatter, ceased. Anne Heche and Tommy Lee Jones look up, it’s awfully quiet?

  BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!

  I drank that pint down in one go, it was cold and it was fizzy and it was amazing and the guilt and disappointment I felt at that moment tasted fucking great. What had I done? Emperor Yamamoto looked up from his map of Pearl Harbor and uttered his now legendary words, ‘We have awoken a sleeping giant.’ That old, dead Japanese bastard was right. The AA has a saying: One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough. I ordered another. This time I watched the trace as the bubbles fled up, it was a real Ice Cold in Alex moment.

  I gulped that one down too, not as quickly as the first but in four big shunts. Then another. I needed to call Simon, racked with guilt and excitement I wanted to tell him about what I’d done. I was still a year or two away from getting my first mobile, my main Christmas present from Peggy that year. I’d made a massive Christmas error by searching the house looking for my pressie haul. I’d found a bag under some coats deep in a cupboard. I shouldn’t be doing this but I can’t stop myself, I open the bag and holy fucking shit the Ericsson mobile phone of my dreams! Bosh!

  Sometime between that point and Christmas Day Simon made a decision to change the phone so when I opened the gift, full of excitement, my crestfall was plain for all to see as I set my eyes on a giant lump of a Samsung mobile. A lesson there for every naughty boy and girl.

  But this terrible moment was still a couple of years away. I go outside and call Simon Pegg from a red phonebox. He came straight away. I think he was pretty pleased I’d started again, to be honest. It meant we could now get right on it.

  After four or five pints we stumbled back through Kentish Town with our trousers round our ankles. We got home hungry for more and smashed up a bottle of Blue Label Smiley had been keeping for special, he wasn’t in so we went for it. That next morning I woke up with one of the worst hangovers ever. I find a large, rabid badger has shit into my brain and down the back of my eyes. It’s horrible. That was the beginning of my second coming as a drinker. If you’re expecting a PS to this where I go through some kind of primal pissmageddon then you’ll be disappointed. Things were different from then on with drink for me. Yes I got pissed and beaten and swore at people and got sworn at and puked, passed out and blood-farted bacchanalian havoc all over the place, but I wasn’t the same person I was when I stopped four years previously and that made me happy.