Riding the Elephant Read online

  Part of the grand notion of the Cumbernauldian Futureworld was that everyone would have a car, so the roads were made wide to allow these vehicles to travel fast and avoid the congestion in cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, which had come of age in the era of horse-drawn traffic. This design ethic required pedestrians to keep away from these fast-moving vehicles, so sidewalks were out of the question. Instead there were footpaths which weaved in serpentine routes around the freeway system. No crosswalks, only tunnels or bridges, which later would prove marvelously efficient for teenage gangs ambushing each other with sticks and bottles, or even more deadly attacks by solitary and dangerous predators. I still get a jolt of adrenaline if I ever have to walk through a tunnel.

  I don’t think the town was built to be awful; it just ended up that way. I imagine it like a couple of movies I’ve made. The script was good enough to get backed and they had a shot and everybody tried their best, but it just didn’t work. Like booze and drugs, the design quirks of Cumbernauld nearly killed me, or maybe they made me who I am. I still can’t decide. Probably a little of both.

  I left home for the first time in 1965, when I was three years old. I’m not entirely sure of the details; my memory of that time period is sketchy even though I hadn’t started drinking yet, other than maybe just a wee bit of whisky rubbed on my gums to ease the teething process. The story is that my poor mother, who was heavily pregnant with my sister at the time, was trying to keep up with the domestic demands of the house and was doing the laundry by hand. Wrestling with it. Rinsing it off. Strangling it down to a heavy moist bundle, then hanging it to dry on a clothes horse next to the cooker or the coal fire. On wash days the house reeked of fried lard and my father’s smelted underpants. Perhaps that’s why I ran away.

  My older brother and sister were already in school, so I was the only kid hanging round the house all day getting under her feet. According to family lore, I was a restless and hyperactive child. My youngest son is like that, and my aunt Susan told me I was exactly the same.

  “Except you were fat,” she added kindly.

  So I was an agitated tubby little bastard who got bored watching my mother wash clothes, and one day when her back was turned I just wandered right out the front door.

  That’s the thing that no one tells you about children—they are irresponsible idiots.

  Had we still lived in a tenement building, I would not have gotten farther than a few paces. Life in those buildings was much more communal and I would have been spotted and apprehended by any number of bossy ladies who were engaged in similar tasks to my mother. But everyone was a little more separate now, and there was no one outside because it was raining very hard. The twisted and winding footpaths meant that within twenty or thirty seconds I was out of my mother’s field of vision. Conversely—if circumstances had been different—if we had still lived in a tenement and I had, by some miracle, made it to the street, I could easily have wandered into traffic.

  I actually believe I can remember that day. Of course I could be fooling myself, but I recall looking at the gray sky and being very happy and singing at the top of my lungs about being a little teapot who was short and stout. Apparently I had been AWOL for about thirty minutes when she found me standing on the footbridge over the freeway singing to the cars rushing by underneath. I don’t know what exactly I was singing to them, but I suspect I had continued my free-form diminutive teapot theme. I was soaked to the skin, wearing the traditional toddler outfit of a little T-shirt and no pants—a look still popular with out-of-shape middle-aged men at the Burning Man festival, though it’s known today as “shirt-cocking.”

  I can hardly stand to imagine the terror of the poor woman when she noticed I was missing, especially now that I have been through the traumatic process of dealing with toddlers. Before my mother died, I apologized many times for what I put her through that day, although she said I was worse when I was a teenager.

  “You were always a wanderer,” she told me.

  * * *

  —

  My wanderlust has taken me all over the world, although these days I tend to wear trousers if I feel like walking in the rain and singing at cars. Most of my traveling has to do with work. I roam from town to town and tell jokes. That’s been my job for thirty years, apart from a few side trips into acting and hosting and writing along the way. Traveling makes me feel good. Or at least it used to.

  As my late-night show came to an end, I kind of went to pieces. It’s not that I didn’t want to leave; I did, but even if I had not, I felt that there was a change in the wind, that the late-night television world was resetting itself and there was no longer a place for someone like me. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I might never work again, I imagined Where Are They Now? pieces in the tabloids about me declaring bankruptcy or going to jail for crimes committed in desperate financial circumstances. There would be photographs—an old, fat bald man in a badly lit mug shot—and gleeful stories of my demise. Those fears were unfounded: I’m reasonably careful with money, I watch what I eat, and, if I say so myself, I’ve got lovely hair, but my mind just went to its default position—bracing for disaster. I think it would be fair to say I am a catastrophist. (If that’s a word. If it’s not, it should be just in case.)

  I was given plenty of good advice from people I trusted, many of whom had gone through similar transitions. Sage counsel about not making hasty decisions and giving myself time to take stock and consider what to do next, et cetera. Probably the smartest thing I heard at the time was from my oldest friend, John, who lives in Prescott, Arizona, and seems to have garnered the spiritual wisdom that comes to those who spend too much time at high altitudes. He said: “Don’t just do something. Sit there!”

  Of course I ignored that and booked a massive stand-up tour. I returned to my old habit of running away, which had stopped working as an effective strategy years before, if it had ever worked at all.

  I was utterly wretched. My baby boy Liam was very young at the time and we were terrible at being apart. He would cry and try to reach through the phone to try to hug me when I called. I learned the entire children’s book Curious George—I can still recite it word for word—in order to tell him his favorite story over the phone at bedtime.

  For the first time in my life I did not enjoy being on the road. I began to detest it. During this period I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is a very successful musician. Musical artists are told from the very beginning of their careers that they must tour in order to reach their fan base, but my friend no longer plays live. He loathed touring but was told by his representatives that if he went for too long without being out on the road, no one would come and see him if he ever decided to get back to it. My guess is that he was given that advice by the people who had a percentage of his earnings, because you can make more money from someone who is in a constant state of generating revenue, even if it is driving the poor bastard crazy.

  That wasn’t my story, though. I just panicked and ran.

  It’s not that I disliked performing live. On the contrary, that was the only fun part of the day. The shows were fine and the audiences were great and I felt comfortable for the ninety or so minutes when I was on stage, but I felt increasingly lonely and bored and isolated and sad and full of self-pity. That’s no fun for anyone, but for a sober alky it can be deadly. That time period was one of the closest I have come to taking a drink in over twenty-seven years of abstinence.

  I grumped and grumbled through the last dates of that run until finally I reached a point that I had not been to before. One morning I got in the car to go to the airport—yet again—after a few days at home with the family. Megan was standing in the driveway holding Liam, who was four years old at the time. He was very upset that I was leaving, and I really, really hate seeing him upset. Before the car pulled away he motioned for me to roll down the window. When I did he climbed through it and curled up in my lap.

  “Daddy, please don’t tour anymore,” he said through big, honest, salty tears.

  “Okay, after I get back from these next few shows, I won’t. Until you say it’s okay. Okay?”

  He said that would work for him, and on the way to the plane I got on the phone and started canceling as many shows as I could without getting sued. What the hell else could I do?

  This was a very big deal for me, an enormous change. My financial security, not to mention my entire self-worth, is wrapped up in my ability to do my job. I am also a guilt-riddled renegade Protestant with a dangerously inflamed work ethic. I did not miss one show in ten years of late-night television. Not one. In that time both my parents died, I got married, and my second son was born. I had cold sores and flu bouts and head colds and dental surgery and colonoscopies and biopsies and tattoos. I even did a week of shows with shingles! Shingles, for fuck’s sake!

  Shingles is clearly a terrible name for the condition it describes. Shingles sounds happy and sparkly, maybe an upbeat stripper or one of Santa’s lesser reindeer—“. . . and Donner and Blitzen and Shingles!” As anyone who has had it will tell you, shingles is an agonizing, unbelievably painful malady. It’s like being stabbed by a rusty but invisible dagger multiple times every day. There’s a shot available for it now and I’d strongly advise you to get it unless you are an anti-vaxxer, in which case you deserve shingles, you dozy bastard.

  When you cancel shows, everybody (except Liam) gets mad at you. Managers, agents, and promoters get huffy, but they don’t yell at you because they have been through it many times before and technically they are in your employ. But some of the people who were planning on attending those shows got very angry indeed, and they do not work for me. On the contrary, I work for them and they can be pretty horrible bosses. The majority of people understand that everybody’s plans change, that’s just part of life, but some of the reactions I got on social media were so vitriolic and hateful that I wondered why the hell these individuals had planned to come and see me in the first place. They clearly hated my guts. Trolls like that on social media are like hecklers or drunk drivers, I think. Most people don’t do it, and the ones who do are too dumb to realize or too selfish to care that they are ruining things for everyone else.

  Anyway, if you had planned on seeing me and I canceled the gig, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Liam is older now and has told me that he is fine with my going on tour now, as long as he can come too.

  Actually, I think he’s considering heading out on the road without me. He is my son, after all. I just hope his childhood is happy enough to keep him from telling jokes for a living. All stand-up comedians—in fact, most people involved in the arts who I admire—seem to have forged their creativity in some form of childhood trauma, so I suppose I have to thank the soulless modernist town planners of postwar Britain for my life today. Without Cumbernauld I would probably have been happy to settle into a more stable adulthood of quiet desperation rather than the volatile, flamboyant journey I have been on since I can remember.

  If circumstances had been different, I would have been a happy kid, which I think would have ultimately made me miserable.

  3

  Out, Damned Spot

  One of the more unhelpful yet persistent themes of my adolescence was occasional but spectacular bouts of acne. Given that my skin problems were shared by most of my contemporaries, it would have made sense that everyone would be supportive of each other, but Scottish teenagers are as wickedly thrilled by the perverted tickle of schadenfreude as any Hollywood producer or gossip columnist. I still remember some of my zits forty years later. One in particular—the Dawn Harrison, named for reasons which will become clear presently—was sufficiently meaty and revolting not only to distort the weight and balance equation of my face but to alter the entire course of my life. That zit may have sent me into a whirling vortex of alcoholism and despair that took years to escape, or it may have saved me from something worse. Some things we just don’t get to know for sure.

  Dawn Harrison was just what I was looking for. She was very clever and pretty and blond. She rode horses on the weekends and was kind to everyone and always stood up to the thugs and bullies who roamed the playgrounds and corridors, even—and this still impresses me—if she wasn’t the victim at the time. She would place herself in potentially violent confrontations to protect other kids. An astonishing, brave, and rather magnificent young woman. She was from a much wealthier family than anyone else I knew, and her skin seemed to glow with health and prosperity. She was so far out of my league that I felt nauseated with adrenaline and hope when she smiled at me, which she did from time to time. Then again, she smiled at nearly everybody unless they were bullies or assholes, which I was careful never to be around her. Dawn Harrison made you want to be a better person.

  Clearly I have a type, because this is also an exact description of my wife, Megan. Right down to the horses and smiling.

  Dawn traveled to school every day from the fancy enclave of Dullatur, which was a genteel Victorian village nestled between green fields and a members-only golf club about five miles away from the shitty damp concrete sprawl of the new town. Dullatur has since been consumed and absorbed by Borg-like urban growth, but in 1975 it was the Hamptons of Cumbernauld. Her family clearly had enough money to send her to a private school, but for some reason—my guess in hindsight would be an ethical choice fueled by well-meaning liberalism—her parents sent her to mine.

  I was in love with her from the first assembly, when we all arrived from our small, grubby elementaries to be co-opted into the miserable collective of the comprehensive high school system. In first year (seventh grade) I didn’t speak to her at all, but in the summer of 1975 I went to America with my dad, and when I returned to school for the next term I was The Kid Who Had Been to New York. Also, although I hadn’t noticed this myself, I had grown six inches in height and apparently leaned out sufficiently to shake the hated nickname “Tubby.” My voice had dropped an octave, although occasional words would squeak at a pitch that alerted nearby dogs. I had also developed serious man-eyebrows, which I never really knew I was lacking until they actually grew in. (Sadly, as of the writing of this book my once-manly eyebrows seem to be on the way out. I suspect by the time I’m in my dotage they will be completely gone and I’ll look like a surprised turtle.) Halfway through the school year, I was beginning to experience short periods of, well, confidence would be too extreme a word, but there were definitely periods of less-than-crippling anxiety.

  Dawn started talking to me, and it seemed I was capable of talking back. She asked me about New York and I asked her about horses and we seemed to get along. Much to my chagrin, though, she also got along with David Simpson, who was my friend in class but was to become my bitter rival in the pursuit of Ms. Harrison. He was a nice guy, or at least not a sadistic thug, and those were thin on the ground during my school years, so I couldn’t afford to lose him as a comrade. We both knew that we wanted Dawn and understood that our friendship did not mitigate our competition. I believe the phrase may the best man win was actually used at some point, which seems credible since that’s the way people used to think.

  It seems to me, particularly in politics, that no one really cares about the best man or woman winning, just the one who they support. Loyalty is not borne so much out of admiration or respect for their candidate, but more out of the hatred of the opponent. “Sure he’s a grabby sex pest/pedophile/traitor, but he’s our grabby sex pest/pedophile/traitor.” This is an inevitable result of slanderous negative campaigning and an ineffective, partisan, and mostly lazy media who will cut and paste any old fucking cabbage in order to be first with the clickbait link. Although let’s not forget to blame the vast majority of people who are sheep and do not wish to have their beliefs challenged while they roll around with their pals in their own smug, self-righteous shit.

  One day in the school library, Jim Love, the famous fourth-year (tenth-grade) bad boy, actually head-butted Mr. Biggins, the PE teacher, when they got into an argument about the correct clothing for school. The ensuing drama and melee resulted in all the kids huddling in lockdown among the books while the police raced to the scene. Violence against teachers was a very, very big taboo. An absolute planet killer. They were allowed to hit you, but if you hit them back that was assault, and you were going to jail. It was a flawed system. I think we all agree on that now.

  The happy accident during this drama was that Dawn and I were stuck at a table at the far end of the room with no one else around. In a moment of shocking pluck brought on by the apocalyptic feel in the air, I asked Dawn if she would go on a date with me that weekend. She said yes, which so shocked me that I had to ask her to repeat the answer three times. I would have tried for a fourth, but I could tell that the saintly Aphrodite of my adolescence was beginning to lose patience.

  I took no joy in seeing the look on David’s face when I broke the news later as we walked home from school. There was hardly any room for gloating (although I managed to fit in a little), as my entire being was overflowing with happiness and romantic love. Well, not my entire being. There was a tingling sensation on the tip of my nose, which I was trying to ignore.

  By 4:30 the following morning, when I got up for my milk delivery round before school, a massive zit—or “plook” as they are known in the common parlance of my people—was threatening beneath the skin on the tip of my nose. It was not yet visible to anyone else. Only I and the plook itself knew of its existence. With the boundless optimism of youth, I headed out the door into the dark Scottish morning, hoping that the cold air and physical activity of the job might somehow banish the lurking monster back to the shadows by the time I returned for breakfast.