American on Purpose Read online

  It began with Eldorado. Not the lost city of gold. Another one.

  Eldorado, affectionately known as El-D, was a cheap fortified wine favored by low-end derelicts in Scotland in the 1970s and eighties. It was imported from South Africa in a flagrant disregard of the antiapartheid embargo. Not that many people who drank El-D really concerned themselves with the injustices of the political situation in the deep south of the Dark Continent. Anyone who drank El-D on a regular basis was dealing with a whole mountain of trouble closer to home, generally known as chronic alcoholism. El-D and its less romantically named competitors, Four Crown and Scotsmac (“The Bam’s Dram”), were dark, sherrylike wines laced with cheap rum, and they had the approximate octane rating of aviation gasoline. Buckfast, a similar rocket fuel from Buckfast Abbey in England, was another brand but kind of off limits for my clique since it was made by monks, and monks are, of course, Catholic. I myself have drunk Buckfast, though, and if Catholics have been drinking this stuff throughout history, that would certainly go a long way toward explaining the luminosity of some saintly visions.

  All of these so-called wines tasted absolutely fucking terrible—like syrupy-sweet cough medicine—but no one was drinking them for their flavor or how nicely they complemented a fine Camembert. They were drunk straight from the bottle to “get the job done.” The Scots are born engineers, even in matters of intoxication.

  Eldorado, then, was my baptism by fire, the wretched preamble to my life as an active alcoholic. Stuart Calhoun and I were fourteen when we first observed the Friday-night tradition of drinking alcohol in the woods behind the school before heading off to the local YMCA disco—Cumbernauld’s Studio 54 for the teenage fast set—and since the legal drinking age in Scotland is eighteen we obviously needed an older confederate to make the purchase for us. We wanted three cans of lager and a bottle of Woodpecker hard cider.

  Enter Sandy Calhoun.

  Stuart’s by-then legal older brother agreed, for a small fee, to be our buyer. We met him early on Friday night, about six p.m., just enough time for us to run home from school, take a bath, put on our ridiculous seventies trousers and our plastic-and-rubber platform shoes, and head out.

  We both smelled of acne cream, hair gel, and way too much Brut aftershave when we connected with Sandy outside of Templeton’s, the only supermarket in a twenty-mile radius. Templeton’s had a wine and spirits section, off limits to us but not to Sandy. He took our cash and we waited outside in the gloomy drizzle. In Scotland it gets dark about four p.m. in the winter.

  We waited for what seemed like an hour but was probably closer to five minutes before Sandy returned with the “kerryoot.” Kerryoot is Scottish slang for, literally, “carryout” food or drink purchased in one place and then carried out to be consumed elsewhere, although it almost always means alcohol and you would be very unwelcome at most house parties if you did not arrive with a kerryoot. Our kerryoot that night was not the beer and cider we asked for. Sandy gave some flimsy story about none being available, so he got us a bottle of El-D instead and kept the change as his payment. That was the deal, essentially, though it should be noted that with the substitution of El-D his cut was substantially larger. This was Sandy Calhoun, though, what the fuck could we do? We thanked him and skulked off to the woods near the school to consume our dangerous contraband. He went off to cheat or beat someone else.

  I remember standing with Stuart in that damp Mirkwood, feeling the thrill as we broke the seal on the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and smelled the treacherous brew, the dark elixir of the ring.

  I remember retching as I took my first swig from the long, dark-green, glass neck. I remember holding my nose and trying to push past the awful taste in order to feel drunk for the first time. I had tasted alcohol before, sips offered by tipsy grown-ups at family gatherings, or by my dad when he was drinking beer and in a particularly genial frame of mind. This time was different, there was no restraint, no authority figure standing between me and my thirst for knowledge. I remember the excitement, and I remember feeling grown-up, and then I remember nothing at all.

  Nothing.

  I completely blacked out that first time. The next conscious thought I had was coming to on the couch in the living room of my own house with a sense of dread and fear and confusion that I would later become way too familiar with.

  Someone—my mother, I hoped—had removed my clothes and put blankets over me. I had peed myself during the night and the coldness of the old piss had crept up my back. I had a thumping headache, so I reached up and touched my forehead, sending a shock of pain through my system that rapidly accelerated the waking process. I got up, wrapped myself in the driest blanket I could find, and shuffled over to the little mirror above the TV. I had a giant purpling bruise on my forehead, and the mother of all black eyes. That was nothing compared with my deep sense of shame. I had never felt so lousy in my entire young life, and at that moment I swore off alcohol forever.

  I learned later on that the best thing to do after waking up in such a state was to drink some alcohol as quickly as possible in order to numb the psychic and physical pain, but at that point I was still a rookie.

  It was still dark outside, but light was threatening. I had no idea of the time. I thought the rest of the house must be asleep, but not my mother, who must have heard me shuffling around. She came into the room and turned on the light, which I shrank from like Gollum. I still recall the look of anger and concern as she stood there in her pink quilted dressing gown, her arms folded across her chest and her hair restrained by rollers and a net. Even if she were not my mother, I would love her forever for what she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  I expected dire recriminations and yelling and maybe a slap or two (and certainly I got a bit of that later), but her first concern was that I was okay.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “You were steamin’ drunk. Mr. Elmslie brought you home.”

  This was very bad. Mr. Elmslie was a police sergeant who lived a few doors away from us.

  “Did he arrest me?”

  “No, but he could have. You punched him in the face. Right here in the house. I was a witness.”

  “Oh fuck!”

  My mother was outraged that I had sworn in front of her, so I apologized immediately. She told me to clean myself up and get the wet blankets into the wash. Then she went off to make tea, which is what Scottish women do in moments of high drama. I imagine she served Sergeant Elmslie about four cups the night before.

  I crept into the bedroom to get some clothes; my brother was, of course, awake.

  “Da is gonnae fuckin’ kill you when he gets home frae night shift.”

  I said I knew. And I did. But I was wrong, as I often was about my father.

  As it turned out I had woken up at about six and my dad, who was working the night shift, wasn’t due home till about seven-thirty. By that time I’d had a bath and helped my mother clean up in the living room, though the cushions from the couch, scrubbed and leaned up against the wall outside to dry, advertised my disgrace. Before Dad arrived, my older sister, Janice, filled me in on what she knew. She’d been at home with my mother when Sergeant Elmslie rang the doorbell, about nine o’clock. Janice answered to find him standing there, holding me up by my collar. I had been picked up by two beat cops who found me lying in a gutter in the Kildrum area of Cumbernauld, near the YMCA. I had vomited on my clothes and was unconscious. When the officers woke me I was abusive and attempted to be violent, but they were local tough guys and found me hilarious as opposed to dangerous. They did, however, take me to the local station and lock me up so that they could keep an eye on me until they could find out who I was. (No one carried ID back then.) When Sergeant Elmslie came onto his shift and looked to see what he had in the cells, he recognized me and, being a good egg, decided to take me home in his car rather than put my parents and me through the official nightmare of an arrest and charge. For his kindness, Janice said, I’d taken a swing at him w
hen we got to the house. Then I vomited a few more times before falling asleep.

  Nobody knew how or why I had the black eye or the bump on the head, but later that evening, after the tea-sodden Sergeant Elmslie had left my house, Stuart and Sandy’s mother had turned up to accuse me of getting her son drunk and leading him astray. Stuart, by then, was at his own house and apparently in a state much the same as mine. My mother was outraged by Mrs. Calhoun’s accusation and turned on her, blaming Sandy for the whole sorry fiasco. It seems that, in my stupor, I’d ratted Sandy out to my mother as the source of the booze. The two women stood there yelling at each other on the doorstep, providing gossip and entertainment for almost the entire town for weeks to come. I was in deep shit, Janice said. She still has that special flair for the obvious.

  My father arrived home a little late that morning, closer to eight. My mother had made a cooked breakfast to add to the dramatic tension, and the entire family had gathered in the kitchen. My father had been told all when he made his usual night-shift call home. The bacon and fried bread and flat sausage were eaten in terrible silence, and when Dad was finished my mother brought him his cup of tea. He dismissed everyone except me. He had never hit me before, and I figured this was the time. I still had a dreadful hangover, and the smell of food that was hanging in the kitchen was making me gag.

  “You feel pretty rough, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You do that again I will chop yer fuckin’ heid aff, you understand?”

  “Yes, Dad. I’m sorry. I won’t ever drink again,” I said, and I meant it.

  “I know,” he said. “Okay. Go and apologize to Mr. Elmslie.”

  I went.

  And that was it.

  I thought for a few awful moments that my dad was going to forbid me to work on the milk truck in order to curtail my available funds and thus cut off any possibility of the purchase of alcohol, but he didn’t. I should have known better—work is always a virtue and a sign that there is nothing fundamentally wrong. That’s what we believed, and I think I still labor under that myth. So I kept my job.

  Years later, when my father came to visit me in rehab, we talked about this first episode under the watchful eye of a concerned counselor. He told me I looked so bad he couldn’t in all conscience add to my misery.

  And so I believed my drinking career was over.

  It was, for a month or two.

  10

  The Filth and the Fury

  When I did drink again it was not El-D, and I was careful, consuming just a few beers before I went to the Y disco, and I soon began to see what the fuss was about with regard to alcohol: it was fun. If you got the right buzz on, it really could make you feel like a giant as you took that Friday-night saunter into the darkened church hall where the girls were already dancing in little circles around their handbags.

  The Y disco was run by a well-meaning but pragmatic social worker called, I think, Stuart. Half the population of Scotland it seems is named Stuart, most of them men. Y-Stuart was one of those altruistic poet types that are produced by slightly upper-class family life and a liberal education. Y-Stuart actually wanted to live in areas like Cumbernauld so that he could help the local teens. He was a genuinely good man, but we considered him odd, and even libeled him heinously amongst ourselves as a predatory pederast, which he was not. He did have some strange ideas, though. Y-Stuart gave all the teenagers free rein once they got inside the hall. He didn’t stop people making out or fighting, he just sort of let it happen. If things got out of hand he’d call the cops, but things never really did. We all knew that if the cops were called too often the place would be closed down, and nobody wanted that. Y-Stuart didn’t let everyone inside the hall. He would insist on smelling your breath first, figuring this was the way to detect if anybody had been drinking alcohol or partaking of the only other mood modifier available, glue. Glue sniffing was wildly popular among a small group at that time. It was still a few years before the British working classes discovered hashish, which would come in cheap and plentiful supply from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon, and it was way before heroin arrived and took the whole fucking thing ten notches lower. In the mid-seventies, kids who wanted to get high would buy a bag of potato chips and a tube of Evo-Stick. They’d either eat the chips or throw them away, squeeze the glue into the empty chip bag, cover their mouth and nose with the bag, and inhale its contents deeply, quickly, and often. The effect was hallucinatory and was speedily followed by a strangely ethereal, giggly buzz, but with the nasty side effect of killing people every now and again. It was seen as kind of low rent, so only the real wackos did it.

  However noble Y-Stuart’s motives were for smelling the breath of approximately one hundred teenagers every Friday night, the result must have been foul, all that boozy or gluey breath covered over with gum or cough drops, not to mention the fact that Scottish dentistry in the seventies was borderline medieval. The guy must have destroyed his sense of smell and caught every virus going, but there he was every Friday.

  “Smell your breath.”

  “Haaaaaaaaah.”

  “In you go.”

  The music my friends and I listened to in those days seemed incidental to dancing with or staring at girls. It was just background noise, the same tired old crap that had been around for years. Every Thursday night on the BBC’s Top of the Pops we’d watch the usual bouffant-haired crooners in bedazzled jumpsuits singing about Mandy or Boogaloo or Rainbows and shite like that, accompanied by session guys playing Fender Rhodes pianos. There was some good stuff, of course. Everyone loved Bowie but he seemed too strange with all his songs about aliens, and he was way too effete for us at the time. Zeppelin rocked, and The Who were adored, but they also had that long hippy hair that implied, if not homosexuality, then certainly sensitivity, which was just about as shameful. The Beatles had broken up years before, and the Stones were already consigned to the dustbin of middle age. We would listen to the music because we had nothing else, but we didn’t identify with the groups. They were distant, rich, and smug bearded fuckers who belonged to our older brothers and sisters, or the younger cooler teachers. Not to us.

  The music I really loved at that time was the old stuff Gunka James and my Auntie Betty had listened to when they were younger. Fifties-era rock and roll from the U.S.—Eddie Cochrane, (young) Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and the like. My generation was in the no-man’s-land between the baby boomers and generation Xers and we were practically disenfranchised from contemporary rock music.

  Then came punk rock.

  We’d been hearing about the Sex Pistols on the news and in the tabloids, this outrageous London band that was offending everyone with their disgusting antics. To a teenage boy this was a call to arms. Here were people I could relate to. They didn’t have cars, they didn’t have money, they didn’t have girlfriends, and they were angry. Perfect.

  The first punk rock band I ever heard was not in fact the Pistols but the Damned. I heard their double-A-side single “New Rose/ Neat Neat Neat” at Craig Keaney’s house after school, and even with the volume down because his dad was sick it was an astonishing and dramatic revelation. The energy and sound was like a fight. It was adrenal and thrilling. Punk had arrived and I was in.

  Our parents and teachers despised punk, which made it even better. By the summer of 1977, I would leave my house in the evening to go and hang around street corners, spitting and smoking with my friends. I was forbidden by my parents to wear the painted ripped uniform that proclaimed my allegiance, so every night I went to my secret lair under the freeway bridge near my house to change in full view of old ladies riding the buses that trundled past. A lot of kids had a similar routine. Everybody had a little hideout in which to transform themselves into their punk alter ego. We called it getting “punked up.” We had punk names, too: Davie Vomit, Johnny Shite, Harry Bastard. I chose Adam Eternal because my great grandfather Adam had died in the First World War and I thought the word “eternal”
sounded cool.

  Dressed like our nihilistic heroes from the London punk scene, we would broodily sulk at the sidelines of the Y-Disco until the DJ (Stuart again) would play a punk record, then all the girls would flee and the punky boys like me would rush the dance floor so we could do our punk dances, which were the Pogo—standing very straight with your arms glued to your sides then jumping up and down, as if heading an invisible soccer ball—or the Dead Fly—lying on your back and waving your arms and legs around as if you were a bug that had just been sprayed with some lethal toxin.

  I wanted to dye my hair but it would have got me belted at school and would have made me stand out too much from the other kids, inviting a kicking. Not all of my peers had embraced the new wave of music and fashion. I read somewhere that hair could be colored on a temporary basis by using food dyes, so I went to the kitchen cupboard, where ingredients for my mother’s occasional forays into baking fairy cakes or clootie dumplings (a heavy fruitcake much loved in Scotland) were kept. I didn’t find any food dye but I did locate a tiny bottle of vanilla essence. Reasoning that vanilla ice cream was blond in color, I thought vanilla flavoring would probably have the same effect on hair. I shampooed it in and of course nothing happened except that I smelled fabulous and I was followed around by every dog in the neighborhood for about a month.

  Like all youth movements, we were sure that ours was striking terror into the heart of the establishment, but I think all we really did was give them a fit of the giggles. The music was sublime, though.

  I had never been very interested in playing music before punk arrived, but to really be into it properly then you had to be in a band. My brother had commandeered the attic with an old drum kit he had acquired from somewhere. He had played along with albums by his favorite groups, ones that I hated, like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. After a while he lost interest, so I seized my opportunity and kissed his ass until he let me use the kit. I taught myself rudimentary thumping beats and fills from whatever albums I could lay my hands on—British acts like the Rezillos, the Damned, the Skids, the Clash, 999, Johnny and the Self-Abusers, the Adverts, Souxsie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks, and of course the Sex Pistols.