Beautiful Women - Gift or Blight?

 

She had a body, sinuous like a wet question mark. The question being whether she’d let you gain erotic access to it? Her name was Gloria; G L O R IA, like the song and never was a woman so well named for she created more erections than McAlpine’s. He wondered if it was a good thing being a woman that good looking? Most men would be too tongue-tied to talk to her just as a normal human being. If they spoke to her at all they’d be just trying to impress her with all sorts of shite about cars and money and how they wrote songs and would she like to hear him on Soundcloud (actually, that last had been part of my own routine during which she’d looked as bored as an audience at a Theresa May speech).

O Gloria. O Glorious. Will you ever be mine?

Never in a month of Sunday’s!

If I was a beautiful, sexy woman I’d definitely get out a lot more.

I wonder what I’d look like in the bath?

And what about her woman friends who had come to the pub with her? What was it like for them sitting next to such a vision? They paled in her presence. Men only talked to them to get nearer to her. They talked louder than they normally would hoping that sultry Gloria would overhear and somehow be impressed.

She sure didn’t look too impressed. She wasn’t an ice-queen, but she didn’t laugh easily, not at what the men said anyway.

Did women like being pestered by men in this way? I suppose, perversely, they’d be upset if they weren’t. Chatting up, it used to be called back in my day (if there ever was a ‘my day’?). You gave them your chat and hoped that you’d ‘pulled’. Fishing terminology. Hooked up. Back in my auld da’s day you called it ‘getting a lumber’. Sounds more onerous than romantic. And, even if she lived way out in Yoker or somewhere in the back of beyond, you had to accompany the lassie home and maybe get a winch for your trouble. Winch. Lumber. Sounds like docker’s talk, and maybe it was.

In the ambulance later I was thinking about all of this and what I’d done. Life is such a fleeting thing (think of it a moment and now that moment is gone!) and one must make the best of opportunities (even if they weren’t opporchancities at all). You can’t be lying on your deathbed and suffering flashbacks at all the chances you missed or, more to the point in my case, made a mess of.

I remember women I could have had chances with but didn’t take them. Thon wee Asian barmaid in The Crown. Christ, she was cute. Played darts too. The pillow talk could have been sensational, not to mention staving off the old premature whadyamacallits by shouting out three-dart finishes.

“153? That’s treble twenty, treble ninetEEN, DOUBLE EIGHTEEN. CHRIIIIIST!!!”

The High Flats

The fire escape was the place where teenagers were introduced to passion. Surprising how one can blot out the smell of stale urine and dank fag smoke when a lassie is letting you grab at previously unexplored body parts. The fire escape, as its title suggests, was a last ‘resort’ kind of a place and thus not well tended by any caretaker (indeed, one was not surprised to find the odd human jobbie on the stairwell. Maybe a stranger too far from their own lavvie? Or evidence of some kinky erotic practice too filthy for home consumption?).

There was no more care or consideration given to the fire escape than there was to the rubbish chute. Auld Shitey, the caretaker (so called as some lads had dropped human excrement on him from the height of the eighteenth floor while he was sweeping below. He therefore earned this unwholesome soubriquet through no fault or characteristic of his own!) would no sooner think of giving the fire escape a going-over with a mop or brush as he would have of sending himself down the chute with a sponge strapped to his arse.

The main stairwell was kept better for it was more used. Indeed, the three-day-week in 1974 saw it overused as the lifts were off due to power restraints and everybody from auld pensioners to young wifies with shopping had to schlepp up the stairs even if they lived on the twenty-first and top floor. Us youngsters barely noticed any undue ordeal over this. In fact, the darker the stairs the more fun could be had for kids love the thrill of the dark (though maybe not so much when they are alone with it)

Playgrounds in the sky. A good jape was to get yourself and a mate on top of the lifts (an Allan key on the first floor while the lifts at Ground) and frighten the bejeesus out of its occupants by making ghostie noises from above.

Men had died building these blocks. You heard stories about accidents and men plunging hundreds of feet. Industrial accidents, certainly at that time and before, were treated by the law and employers a bit like ‘collateral damage’. “Ach well, Mrs Murphy, yer man’s deid, aye, fell fae the top and splattered all over, but, ye know, he was at his work so fair’s fair, eh?”

Same with driving, innit? “Drivin’ too fast, eh. Well, six month ban and dinnae be so stupid again!”

Anything to do with something that makes money is treated leniently by the legal system. Grenfell Tower? No-one of any note is gonna be found culpable for that and they’ll drag it on so long, just like Hillsborough, that tracks will have been long covered before any type of verdict is reached. The law is there to protect the rich at all costs.

Is Socialism the politics of envy? Maybe so. The aristocratic embrace they cried it when Lloyd George was doling out peerages like sweeties to keep the lefties tamed. Worked on some but not on others. Lord Kinnock “I can do good work from inside the system” Aye right, Neil!!

Local mythology has me believing in my mind’s eye that I saw wee Johnny Anderson hang by his fingers from the very top of the fourth block (my block) for a dare. Did we really all look up in awe at the wee figure and how would he get back up or would he plummet and be a mash of flesh and bones right in front of us. Anyway. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

There were the Manson brothers (Charles?) who lived on the 12^th and dropped kitchen knives from their bedroom window hoping to spear the heads of the wee footballers below playing under the dim streetlamps (the streetlamps in Glasgow at that time – late 60s, early 70s seemed to have the effect of making the streets darker or at least illuminated like a Hopper painting).

I was slender and tall and timid in this febrile environment, ever-wary of potential bullying scenarios. I wouldn’t even play out with my wee brother in case he was to witness any humiliation I received. For this reason. I became a loner wandering to lonely woods to commune with imaginary friends and half-imaginary ghosts. I dogged school and wandered backroads and the ‘nicer’ areas where doctors and solicitors lived with their wives and kids who never dreamed of missing a school day and would become prefects and compile early CVs. Entering onto someone else’s ‘bit’ or patch in the rougher areas of Glasgow was a dangerous idea and could easily get one ‘a doing’.

A train track, the Barrhead to Glasgow line, ran right alongside the flats. I was intrigued by this. I think I was a young hobo without realising what such a thing was. I wanted to run away, and trains took you away and fast. They could also kill you. Some kids played ‘Chicken’ on the lines, just jumping at the last as the train roared by.

The five towers were like standing stones, their adjacent maisonette blocks like obedient children. On winters nights the blocks became fevered with light, families at their tea and watching the news about Heath and his troubles. My da worked in an ambiguous capacity at a local factory, Rawlpug. He’d come home in the evening smelling of oil and with black fingernails from misplaced hammer blows and little chunks of flesh missing on his hands. Having previously been on the blacklist for union activities he found it tricky to find work in light industry and found himself applying for jobs he wasn’t strictly qualified for just to try and put food on his family’s table. Hence he was a machine setter who didn’t know the first thing about machine setting and still had the nerve to plot strikes and generally be a pain in the arse to his employers (this was to be the reason why he began training as a social worker before they kicked his militant arse out of the factory).