American on Purpose Read online

  As I was chatting to the ladies, whom I remember as being giggly and delightful, their pimp interrupted. He was a very tall black guy who was dressed like Huggy Bear. He told me to leave his hos alone.

  “Pay ’em and you can do what you like with ’em, but don’t be costing me money and interrupting my business.”

  I told him what I thought of his business and how I felt the girls deserved a better class of employer. Things got a little heated between me and this fellow and we both knew it was gearing up for a scrap, but before I could lay a finger on him he reached into his fur coat and brought out a shiny black handgun that seemed oddly large. He smashed me across the face with it and I fell to the ground, dazed and drunk, but through my fuzzy vision I saw him point it in my face. Then he pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

  “Well, well,” I thought, “this is it.”

  I don’t remember being afraid, only a bit sad, although the guy with the gun looked more scared than I was. His eyes were huge and I could see spittle at the edges of his mouth. I still dream about this, and in the dream I can see down the barrel of the gun to the waiting bullet. I don’t know if that is possible or it’s just a little garnish added by my imagination.

  I heard someone speak in an Irish accent. For legal reasons, let’s say it wasn’t Finn.

  “Hey, bucko. Look at me!”

  The pimp glanced at the speaker. I can’t be sure of the exact words but the voice was strangely calm and sober, saying something like:

  “Look at me. You know who we are. He’s with us. You know who we are. You pull the trigger and we will kill you and your mother and your father and your friends. We’ll kill your girls, your kids, and your dog and we’ll piss on the fuckin’ bodies. Now put your popgun away before you bring the fuckin’ Apocalypse on your house.”

  The pimp made the right choice for us all. He pocketed the gun and took off. By the time we were in a taxi I had the makings of a stupendous black eye, which we all agreed was a fine trophy from a terrific night out.

  20

  Setting the Tone

  The work on the site in Harlem was drawing to a close by the time Telemachus Clay premiered. Thankfully my eye had returned to normal by then, somewhat to the regret of Stanley, the bartender, who said it made me look dangerous and sexy. Anne, though, was not a fan of the black eye, or the story, and she was getting very tired of my drinking. I don’t blame her, I was getting a little tired of it myself, but what could I do? If I didn’t drink I would be worse—I’d be locked up in a psych ward, or so I believed. Anne never tried to get me to stop drinking, though, she was a Highland girl. It’s not like she was a stranger to whiskey and she snorted just as much coke as I did, which, in real cokehead terms, was not that much, I suppose. We were more drunks really.

  Telemachus Clay is not a great play, and the American Modern Dance Theater’s production did nothing to enhance its reputation. We had been rehearsing and working on our odd dancey show for months, and by the time it opened I was bored with the whole thing. The first night was fun, though. James and Susan came in from the burbs, Anne was there of course, and also Jamesy and his junkie wife, Lucy—she had taken to talking to me a little more since she realized I was in a play. Roswell and a couple of guys from the construction site showed up. So did the painter Steven Campbell from Glasgow, who was causing quite a stir in the New York art world at the time. Anne had been friendly with him and his wife, Carol, at art school but it was a tricky social situation. Steven loathed cocaine and had absolutely no time for Jamesy, another classmate at the Glasgow School of Art, whom Steven dismissed as a worthless trendy. It was an unfair assessment, and Steven could be a pretty opinionated guy.

  Afterward we all went to the funky Pyramid Club on Avenue A and watched the trannys dancing on the bar and heard a new band called They Might Be Giants, who were onstage in the back room. Everyone was very nice about my performance in the play, even if they didn’t quite get why a midwestern farm boy prancing around a pretentious makeshift set meant to depict the debaucheries of Hollywood would speak with a Scottish accent. I told them it was because my character was an innocent, but they didn’t seem to get it. To be honest, neither did I.

  Steven and I got to talking, and I liked him. He had come to New York on a Fulbright scholarship, which he told me was a big deal for a painter. He was about to have his first solo show at a place called the Barbara Toll Gallery and asked if I would come along because it would be nice to have someone around with my kind of midwestern accent. I said I’d be delighted.

  Steven called me up on the day of his opening and asked me to meet him in some bar in the Bowery. He said it was important, that he was very nervous. It was only about four-thirty and I had just gotten home from work so I jumped into a cab, still in my overalls. When I got to the bar, a fashionable yuppie hellhole, he was perched on a stool at the end of a long counter.

  “I’ve discovered something. Try this.”

  He handed me a frosted glass containing a clear syrupy liquid. I sipped it. It was terrific, clear and clean, and it thumped you in the chest.

  “What is it?”

  “Stolichnaya. Genuine Russian vodka. The Soviets just started exporting it.”

  “Hey, Comrade!” I yelled to the nervous male model/bartender who had been trying to figure out if my overalls were a fashion statement or not. He walked over and smiled thinly.

  “Yes?” he said.

  I pointed to the Stoli bottle behind him.

  “Time to redistribute the fucking wealth!”

  By the time we arrived at his opening we were pretty toasted and the whole New York art scene was already there, cooing over the giant canvases that Steven had painted. He completed one a week, commuting to his studio in Bed-Sty, Brooklyn, and from his SoHo loft Monday through Friday. Each day, he took the subway and ate the sandwich his wife made for him at lunchtime. He was a very cool guy.

  At the gallery we propped ourselves against a wall as he gazed unbelievingly at the sight of his triumph. We watched his wife, Carol, a very down-to-earth Scottish woman with a fantastic shock of blond hair and extravagant black horn-rimmed glasses, small-talk with the rich and the fashionable. A weird-looking old fella in a bad wig came over and told Steven his canvases were astonishing. He droned on oddly for a while, then drifted off on the arm of some pterodactyl-like woman in a silk printed dress that clung to her bones.

  “That guy thinks he’s Andy Warhol,” I said.

  “That guy is Andy Warhol,” said Steven.

  Anne and I would have dinner with Steven and Carol occasionally, but it was hard to find time, and they had just had their first child so they were kind of busy. Jamesy and I still occasionally worked together on carpentry and renovation jobs, but we didn’t see much of each other. I had started working on made-to-order loft beds for customers on the Upper East Side that I had met through Finn and Callum. Jamesy had decided he was going into the motorcycle business—bikes had always been a passion for him—and he wanted to open his own store. Plus, he was also busy dealing with whatever it was he had to deal with with Lucy.

  Then Roswell started getting into smack, and I had very little patience for that scene, so things got pretty quiet for a while. Then Chad Moran came to town.

  Chad is mad. Genuinely and certifiably. He’s smart and talented and kind and funny, he can be good fun to be around, but he’s full-tilt-batshit-tonto. When I ran into him in San Francisco in 2007, after not hearing about him for many years, I was genuinely astonished to discover that he was still alive.

  Chad had fronted a successful pop group from Scotland called The Tonesters, a kind of Thompson Twins-esque funky group. Think Depeche Mode, but with humor and sex. The group also had a girl backup singer called Esther Okimbo. Esther’s family was originally from West Africa, but her father had had to flee due to some kind of political unrest and for some reason had chosen to raise his children in the tiny Scottish village of Auchinleck. Therefore Esther, while looking as African as anyon
e could, had a provincial country Scottish accent. It was an intriguing mix—Chad certainly thought so, considering he had left his wife for her. He and Esther had turned up in N.Y.C. from Scotland, keen to replicate their previous success in a bigger market.

  I had never met Chad when we were both in Glasgow but I’d heard about him. He had a reputation as an electrifying performer and an amazing front man for his band but was also known as being a dangerous and unpredictable lunatic. Not in a bad way, he wasn’t violent, but he was renowned for climbing up buildings or jumping out of cars or streaking whenever the fancy took him. He also disappeared from time to time. Once, a scheduled television performance in London had to be canceled when he went AWOL, only to surface a few days later in the locked ward of a mental hospital in Aberdeen—six hundred miles away. A drunken bender, a little bit of amphetamine sulphate, and lack of sleep had launched him into a temporary psychosis and he had been captured by the police as he “shot” imaginary monsters with a pretend gun in Aberdeen’s railway station, much to the alarm of respectable commuters. I could relate to Chad. I had been that nutty from time to time. I would have shot the killer ducks of Kelvingrove Park if I had been smart enough to hallucinate a weapon.

  His band had done well, sold some records and filled some biggish theaters, but eventually the record company grew tired of Chad’s antics. That kind of behavior is applauded only if you are making really big money for these bastards.

  He knew Anne from Glasgow and we met up with him and Esther in a bar on Sixth Street just after they came to town. Chad had just discovered Captain Morgan’s Old Jamaican Spiced Rum and was drinking a large bottle of it by the neck. The bar staff looked on apprehensively but were prudent enough not to interfere.

  Chad explained to me that this rum tasted so good to him that he suspected that he had been Captain Morgan in a previous life—his last name was Moran, after all—and proposed that we drink the stuff until we fell down and talked like pirates all day. It sounded like a decent plan to me, so that’s just what we did.

  Chad was fearless in his pursuit of a good time and I found it infectious, spellbinding even. I wanted to be around him. He made me look like the sensible one. I only realized some years later that Chad was not crazier than me, just a few stops ahead of me on a train going nowhere.

  We were inseparable for a while, Chad and I, drinking and carousing all over town. I became the drummer in his new band, also called The Tonesters, and although we never played a single gig or even rehearsed or were even alone in a room with musical instruments we had a few meetings at record company offices in Manhattan on the strength of Chad’s U.K. reputation. My other friends couldn’t stand him. Steven the artist had no time for that kind of nonsense, he was too serious and dour. Jamesy thought he was just another New York morality tale that was waiting for a bad end, and Roswell found him more frightening than the IRA guys from uptown.

  Anne was not a big fan, either, even though for some reason that I have never been able to fathom, women loved Chad. He was rock-and-roll Rasputin, the mad sexy monk. Maybe it was because we were insane and drunk and funny and had accents, I’m not sure exactly what, but whenever I hung out with Chad, we were surrounded by girls looking for a party. They got one, too.

  It wasn’t my friendship with Chad that ended my marriage to Anne—I did that with my behavior—but running around New York with him surely accelerated the process. At three o’clock one morning, after drinking and snorting coke in my Eleventh Street apartment, Chad and I decided to find out which one of us was the better fighter. So we left the apartment and jumped the chain-link fence into the yard of the elementary school that faced our building. Anne and Esther watched from the fire escape as Chad and I proceeded to good-naturedly knock the shit out of each other, eventually declaring a draw when we were both sufficiently bloodied.

  When I got back to the apartment I was exhausted but not as exhausted as Anne. She had had enough, and not just of our schoolyard brawl. She wanted to move back to Glasgow, where she thought we stood a chance of being a normal couple leading a conventional married life.

  I realized she was right, that it would be the smart thing to do. Things did seem to be spiraling dangerously out of control in New York. My tourist visa had run out ages ago, and it would only take one arrest to have me deported and never allowed to return, and anyone with half a brain could see—even I could see—that an arrest was definitely in my immediate future. So after just over a year in the East Village, Anne and I gave away our stuff, said goodbye to our friends, and headed back to the old country.

  Like many people who come to New York to live and then have to leave before they really want to, I spent the next three or four years with the vague feeling that there was a great party going on somewhere and I was not at it.

  21

  The Gong Show

  Anne and I agreed that returning to Glasgow was going to save our relationship, but we were mistaken. The move actually ramped up our problems and, if anything, hastened the demise of the marriage, although I am not quite sure that, given my selfishness at the time, it could be called a marriage in any but the technical sense.

  At the Chip Bar, I not only got my job back, I actually got a promotion. They made me “chargehand,” meaning that, in addition to bartending, I had to supervise the other staff members and balance the cash register at the end of the night. Strangely, having to work hard in the presence of so much booze was not a challenge for me. I liked being the boss, and because the bar was always so noisy and crowded I rarely had time to stop and have a drink myself. It wasn’t something you could do drunk, anyway, it was just too focused. Although, of course, I did have some beers when I was working, figuring if it looked like I was having a good time then the clientele would, too.

  I approached the job as something of a performance, laughing and joking with the customers and trying to create a welcoming and comfortable environment for folks who came there to forget about their own bullshit for a little while. Bartending taught me more about being a stand-up comic than anything else.

  I worked long hours, sixty or seventy a week, and Anne and I only occasionally bumped into each other in the dingy single room we had rented from a bitter divorced landlady who lived in the same building with her large collection of incontinent and surly cats.

  Anne had found work at the BBC as a graphic designer—the position she had always wanted—and was happy to be among her old art-school friends. We were living separate lives—when I finished work, I wouldn’t go home. I’d stay in the bar, getting drunk with the staff from the restaurant downstairs. Inevitably this routine led to infidelity, and infidelity led me to drink more to drown my guilt. So the only time I was sober was when I was actually working.

  The work was my escape. Certainly I felt it was all I had. In my unhappiness with my life and myself there had to be one thing I was good at. Working hard was my only shot at self-respect.

  The folks who owned the bar seemed to appreciate my efforts. They even sent me to a local college to learn about wines so I could discuss them knowledgeably with the more pretentious—and wealthy—patrons. Each Friday my day began at a tasting class. The problem is, of course, that when you’ve got an alcoholic in your wine-tasting class, it can be a challenge to persuade him to spit out the sample after he has been swooshing it around his mouth. My whole being rejected such a barbaric ritual, so I was hammered on fabulous, expensive plonk by eleven a.m. every Friday. But somehow I passed the course. To this day, the only academic credential which I have ever achieved is the completion of a basic wine-tasting course certified by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust of Scotland. Ah the irony. The framed certificate hangs in the Chip, and I go and look at it whenever I’m in Glasgow.

  There’s also a copy hanging in the green room of my TV show.

  Given its proximity to the BBC, the Chip was a favorite haunt of actors and creative types who worked there. These people in turn brought in other actors and creative types from the the
ater and film world. It was a very showbizzy crowd, and that’s the reason Michael Boyd, the new artistic director at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, happened to be there one night. Michael was already making a name for himself as something of a maverick—he’s now the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—with his unconventional and daring approach. He eschewed the lumpy, formal style of elitist theater and encouraged the energy and vitality of performance that he felt existed in the spirit of Scottish variety performers. Basically he was a closet vaudevillian with a sparkling, innovative mind and was transforming the Tron into a very popular location, a hot spot for what passed as the glitterati in Glasgow, even though it was in the decidedly untrendy and downright dangerous East End.

  Michael watched me work the bar for a while and eventually asked me if I had ever been a performer. I told him about Telemachus Clay, which made him giggle, and I also confessed that in New York I had attempted an open-mike spot at the Comic Strip comedy club but had met with limited, or indeed disastrous, results. The audience of drunken mafiosi didn’t understand my accent but hated me anyway.

  Michael was interested in my story and told me about an idea he had. There was a large public bar at the Tron Theatre with a raised platform at one end that Michael wanted to turn into a stage every Friday night where amateurs could try their luck in a “gong show.” After observing my antics behind the bar and learning of my interest in the performing arts, he thought I should do it.

  I said I’d think about it.

  I snuck in to the first gong show and stood at the back. The room was smoky and packed with a large, hostile, drunken crowd who delighted in yelling instructions to the gong master, Harry Lennon, who was also the good-natured stage manager of the theater. Harry seemed very reluctant at first in his role as allegorical executioner but soon grew power-crazed with the beater in his hand as act after act came onstage. Housewives with pithy wee morality tales—these days they’d be blogging—were gonged immediately. Singing children fared a little better, until they got too sweet, then the mob would bray “GONG!” until Harry had no choice. One juggler lasted all of six seconds, while a mime who came on fully made up with a stripy shirt and beret was gonged before he even got a chance to move, never mind walk into the wind or pull an invisible rope. He didn’t take it well and, breaking the sacred code of his order, yelled, “You’re all a bunch o’ fucking shites!” at the crowd, which laughed uproariously.