Mayhem

The school was like a mausoleum to me, like somewhere you came to die five days a week. I didn’t even enjoy the weekends because the Monday loomed like death. I used to be considered clever once upon a time, but school knocked that out of me, like it was decided ‘that just wouldn’t do’.

Actually, there were those that thought me ‘too clever for my own good’. A big, lanky wise-ass with a witty way with words. A future game show host on STV, perhaps. Imagine that: being too clever for school. Picked on by my peers and picked on by my teachers, that was the truth of it. Even the janny disrespected me and tried to win popularity points off the kids who despised him by ridiculing me. Auld McMasters the janny, back in the days when there was some sort of Glasgow education department policy that jannies had to have physical deformities ideally in the leg department. They had to hobble, limp or drag a leg or they didn’t get the job of cleaning the shitty, pissy toilets. And they had to have the shittiest attitudes and most two-faced devious dispositions. I try to imagine the ad in situations vacant.

“Bad-tempered cripple required for cleaning and other duties including sucking up to teachers, watching youngsters do the toilet and picking on the weakest. References required”

It was an old school with ink-wells in the desks. The central area resembled a prison with walkways all the way around on two levels. The railings were ornate and ancient which stopped you from falling to the ground (although there was talk of a ‘suicide net’ after wee Wullie Nesbitt decided one day he didn’t like school too much and leapt over to the world beyond). Speaking of prisons, the whole edifice resembled a block at Barlinnie just up the road and was probably built at about the same time: a Victorian prison-school.

Inside it smells of boy’s farts and girly bubble gum. This used to be considered a good school with an academically impressive alumni, but it has gone downhill big time in recent years. Now it has gang members and pregnant teens on its books. There are fights in the playground and windows get panned in by stray (and not-so stray) footballs. It also employed teachers who gave up on their profession long ago, there only to pick up a wage and see through the years. Or some of them that have been there the whole century and remember ‘the good times’ and now blame the not-so-good times on the present intake who are mostly fodder for the local industries, a brewery, an abattoir and a cigarette manufacturer.

No room for cleverness here. Not, that is, unless you came from the ‘better’ catchment areas. Yer Eastlands and Lower Manse. Bungalow-lands full of blazered youths with hardy school-bags and rosy cheeks. They would be the ones getting the Highers at this school. School prefects they’d be with little badges on lapels. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I was from ‘the scheme’. The high flats. The school, almost as an entity to itself, is aware of such details. Who is and who isn’t? Are one’s folks of the common hoard or are they all cosy and bungalowed, a social class above? Folk say Scotland is something called a ‘classless society’ at least relative to our big snobby neighbour down south. Those folk are full of shit. Scotland is as class distinction-ridden as anywhere else, maybe even more so. If you have a brass door knocker in Scotland instead of a bell, then you’re one step up from the hoi polloi. The way you speak and the words you employ to express yourself will give you away in an instant.

But I guess we at least try to give the appearance of egalitarianism. The workie can sit down with the Kelvinside lady, but just not on the good chairs.

Honest to God when I look back at that school and my time there, I could easily have ended up like one of those kids in America – Columbine or Sandy something, one of those ghastly happenings. If I’d have had access to some sort of a gun, I could easily have seen me going nuts and shooting a load of folk. Only I would have targeted them. I know exactly who it would have been, and I would have enjoyed every second of shooting them point blank in the head but first I’d have bullied them a little; ridiculed them like they did to me. I could never understand them Columbine boys being so indiscriminate. Surely, they would go for the ’jocks’ who bullied them and not some poor wee lassie that had piss all to do with them. Maybe they were so intimidated by their torturers that even with machine guns they still couldn’t stand up to them? A sort of fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome.

 If I’d been armed like that I’d have taken out Auld McMasters first; had that gimpy auld cunt whimpering like a child and confessing to all sorts of stuff like spying on lassies while they were pishing and wanking off the first years in his wee hut next to the blaise pitch.

I was cursed from the start. I should never have been born into a world like this. I was not ‘built’ for it. I was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Figure that for bad luck!

 My mother and father were both fine people, dressed well, always spotless, polite to a fault, liked a laugh but both of them were damaged by their own childhoods. My mother was emotionally abused inside and outside of the home. My father suffered the neglect of obsessively aspirant parents and was bullied at school for being the ‘posh boy’. They were loving parents but, as the poem has it they ‘Gave you all the faults they had, and add a little extra just for you'. From early days I seemed to adopt the role of ‘innocent victim’ as though it was a birthright.

This is me in the very early noughties and working as a ‘Decision Maker’ with the Benefits Agency in Liscard on The Wirral. Previous to this I had been on the academic staff at Liverpool John Moores University pretending to be a history tutor but more on that later. I’m in the staff toilets this day hunched over a toilet bowl trying to vomit. I am unable to do this satisfactorily, but I manage to have a steaming shit. The smell is rancid. Two scouse lads come in and comment upon the stench.

 “Fookin’ ‘ell, laar. Somebody has fookin’ died in ‘ere”.

 I remain in the cubicle until they leave then sneak back downstairs to my desk. I am unsuited to this work and hate the idea of working for ‘the SS’. I have left-wing credentials and believe I am betraying them. Also, I don’t appreciate the potentially confrontational side of the job.

 However, I do get on well with the other staff. They are mainly women and I enjoy making them laugh. They are my audience, and I am once again ‘the class clown’.

My ‘appalling attendance record’ started on my very first day. I’d been binge drinking for days and had walked the three miles from Birkenhead only to tell my new manager on arrival that I ‘wasn’t very well’ and needed to go home.

 I was both a secret drinker and a not-so-secret drinker. Those that knew me knew I liked to drink to excess but not many were aware of the long binges on my own and at home which were followed by some days of very vomity recovery. This would all be passed off as food poisoning or a very bad flu.

 Why did I do this? Complacency, perhaps? Even some sort of conceit. Definitely a quest for oblivion; an escape. A slow form of suicide. There were times that I got so depressed and maudlin during these binges that I took ‘too many’ pills. Partly in an attempt to sleep (one’s sleeping pattern gets kind of messed up during a week-long binge), sometimes to make myself be sick and be unable to drink on but there would be suicidal thoughts in their too: a little risk taken with one’s existence but never the ‘bottle’, excuse the pun, to take a sure sufficiency, maybe eight, maybe ten, maybe twelve pills, maybe even more, it’s hard to remember any of these precise details. Whatever enjoyment there is in this behaviour can only ever be at the start before it develops into a miserable drudge and dependency before, thankfully, will not allow another drink to pass your lips and that’s when expelling every last ounce of bile from one’s stomach commences (I swear there was one time when what appeared like tire rubber came up. It burned my lips on it’s way).

Boredom, too, has set me on the road to alcoholic onanism. The thought of me, a bottle, a pouch of baccy and a few films to watch has tested my weak character many times and come off best. But, the real demon that has had me scurrying to the bottle the most is ‘hurt’. Maybe a confrontation or a falling out or a slight of some sort. For nearly all of my life I have proven defenceless against those type of things.

This where my feelings of self-worth come into play and perhaps the environment I grew up in. My mother and father were not drinkers in any real sense. Perhaps they would share a bottle of Commandary St John sherry-wine in their young married life and my father had enjoyed a pint of Guinness before his stomach problems prevented this. No, what I mean is how drink was viewed in Scottish society. 

This was a society where not taking a drink was a bigger social faux pas than being seen staggering home after getting blootered in the pub with maybe a black eye for good measure. In the pre-touchy-feely days, drink was how you solved your problems not what was seen to cause them. There was an old cartoon in the Evening Citizen that made my dad laugh. It was a bloke on a psychiatrist’s couch droning on about his problems and the bored shrink says to him stone-facedly “Huv ye no’ tried just huvin’ a good bucket?”, meaning away oot and get wellied and you’ll feel better. The Scottish cure-all.

It was therefore acceptable to abuse alcohol. I’m not blaming this for my own personal woes, I’m just saying it was a cultural norm.

 

Fifteen Years Gone

The thunder roared and I swear there was lightning blazing across the sky. A summer storm. My old man was taking the boozy Welshman’s poem literally and he wasn’t going gently anywhere. My younger brother and I sit (or stand, I can’t remember) on either side of this hospice bed as Robert Wylie fights for every breath, his toes curled to ninety degrees to hang on to the stress of life. He makes a sound like those horses he used to back that struggled in last.

“Fray Bentos, son. Fray Bentos” meaning they were only fit to end up in a tin of that proletarian fare.

Three score years and ten plus one. Not fair for a Glasgow man who did not drink and smoke himself to the grave. Not fair for a man who treasured life so much. Modern jazz, history of art, philosophy, politics, poetry, and all the rest. A life fighting against the pricks (and what pricks some of them were). A life in and on the extreme is what has led him here, a struggle to the very end.

Rest in peace, old son. You were more loved than you knew.

 

Tribal Markings by Robert Wylie

No regrets about throwing

Cut-throat razors in the air,

And catching them in my teeth,

Such has been my life-long remedy.

For the itch of boredom.

 

True, the risk is there

To miss, just that once,

And I would have minutes to reflect.

But better bleeding swiftly

As the result of error

Than plodding the safety road

Where the grass is the same colour

On both sides of the dry-stone dyke.

 

I have the tribal markings.

Denoting my creed.

A notch on cheek, and jowl

When I haven't got it quite right,

Where the blade has missed the throat,

But has left its impression,

Nonetheless.

Mass Murder in the Cake Aisle

 

The sky darkens along with my mood. There was a time when I enjoyed the rain, the drama of it, but no more. What’s to enjoy about it when eventually it will begin seeping through the ceiling again, dripping down the wallpaper?

I should move out, but I can’t. I’ve moved too often and I’m sick of the upset.

Again with the bus! These days I spend more time on the bus than I do walking which is a change from before when he must have walked half way to the moon and back. Probably because of the bus pass or maybe I am just tired of schlepping about the place.

Mind you, it is very easy to get irritated on a bus. People are just plain irritating. Farting about trying to locate a bus pass they should have had ready at the stop while up ahead the lights are changing back to red, folk having intimate conversations on mobile phones. I wonder how many American-style gun rampages would have taken place on buses if it weren’t for strict gun laws. Mind, nothing to stop you knifing a few folk.

I can easily board a bus in a perfectly good mood and three stops later be a quivering mass of fury. Inside, at any rate. Not the done thing to show that one is a quivering mass of fury just because someone is talking foreign on a phone. That sort of behaviour would have you in court faster than you could turn around.

“Mr Gibbs. You were a visible mass of quivering fury simply because this foreign gentleman was speaking to an elderly relative on his phone?”

“Yes, your honour. I’m afraid I very much was, but I am o so penitent now.”

 

Everyone has a wee scintilla of prejudice inside them. I’m sure if I went to Poland or wherever and spoke English very loudly on a bus then folk would get irked. Who knows? Maybe they’d get more than irked?

It’s maybe because this irkiness had need to be suppressed for so long that the beast Brexit came along. It became the only means by which folk could express the irkiness.

All these petty irritations one faces on a daily basis could certainly trigger the most awful carnage. Just look at those Columbine boys. Mind you, without the availability of serious armoury – bombs, automatic machine guns, etc – would they ever have attempted to cause anyone serious damage? Nah! They’d have simply grown up into cynical, bitter Americans. Trump-fuelled right-wing agitators at worst. Wife-beaters and alcoholics. The tall, geeky-looking one (and wasn’t that part of his trouble?) might even have turned out OK. Wife and kids and manager at PC World. It was the wee guy that had real evil in him.

If I wanted to get me a gun and go loop-de-loop in Morrison’s I’d have a bit of a chore on my hands, For a start, where to get a gun? Hang about the Kirkgate until someone offers me one? Sidle up to a hard looking cunt in The Central Bar and ask ‘know where I can buy a gun, pal? I’ve got money…!’. I’d get dragged in the bogs and battered and crawl home skint. By the time I’d managed to get any sort of armoury together my rage would have spent, and I’d return to looking for ‘reduced for sale’ stickers as per usual.

Even the whole ‘reduced for sale’ scenario could get pretty hairy these days. I’ve seen hostility over the ownership of a 30p cheese and onion quiche before now. Up at ASDAs around seven when the girl with the sticker gun hoves into view a line of nervous sweat already visible on her brow, she’ll find a mob has formed awaiting the final reductions of the day.

And tactics? A gang of them will crowd round the poor girl and fire things back to their co-conspirators waiting in an outer ring. I’ve seen wifie’s using trolleys as barricades against unwanted competitors. One day someone is going to get hurt over some 10p ready-meal or two lamb chops for a pound.

‘Carnage in Supermarket – 10 killed. “A big gala pie for 20p. Emotions were high” says survivor’.

I felt real rage just the other day in Scotmid’s when some wee arty middle-class guy plundered the five or six ready-meals on offer. I felt like walking over and smashing them and him to fuck.

If I’d had a gun…fuck knows what would have happened?