Read American on Purpose Online
Authors: Craig Ferguson
M
y parents were shocked and horrified by my decision to leave school at sixteen, which was the youngest age the state allowed. My older sister, Janice, and my brother, Scott, had gone on to higher education, with Scott going as far as to move out of the house—he decided he wanted to be a journalist and took a flat with a bunch of mock hippies in the unfashionable (and therefore fashionable to some students) Denniston area of Glasgow. Scott attended the University of Strathclyde during the week and brought his laundry home on the weekend. Janice, now a budding scientist, commuted to the same university from the family home every day on the don’t-stop-even-if-a-kid-needs-to-crap bus that I had taken with Gunka James.
I tried to figure out over the years why my siblings handled school better than I did, but I have never really found a satisfactory answer. Obviously they kept company with the same teachers and kids and were surrounded with the same violence and threats, but somehow were able to navigate it all with much greater ease. My younger sister Lynn says it was just as hard for her as it was for me.
My mother had a theory that my loud voice made me a conspicuous target. When I was ten years old and being dreadfully perse
cuted by a monstrous old harpy of a teacher named Mrs. White, my mother tried to give me whispering lessons so that maybe Mrs. White wouldn’t notice me so much. I think perhaps the real reason is that I was a needy little cur who liked attention, and in my environment, unfortunately, if you were noticed, you got hit.
Whatever caused my misery, I couldn’t take it for a moment longer than I had to by law. The day I left school I was approached by two teachers. One was a ghastly macho, closeted phys-ed guy who told me just how much of a shit I was and how much of a disaster my life was going to be. The other was my English teacher, who said I was squandering my intelligence by not remaining in school. I thanked the phys-ed guy for his wisdom and asked the English teacher if he had such a regard for my intelligence then why did he always use corporal punishment rather than appeal to it. He gave me a funny look and said, “You know the answer to that.”
I didn’t. Not then and not now.
I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn’t poison the writing that I was discovering for myself. I’m grateful for that. I’ve often talked to well-schooled men and women who have a disdain for the classics because they
had
to read them. I understand this. No one forced me to read
Crime and Punishment
. I read it because I chose to. I didn’t write a paper on it but I did find it entertaining and thought-provoking. I was horrified by how much I could identify with Raskolnikov’s whiney self-justification—clearly there was a warning here.
Raskolnikov led me to the Karamazov brothers, who were in the same part of the bookstore as Ishmael and Queequeg, who were pushed up on the shelves next to Winston Smith, Jem Finch, Joseph K, Mr. Scrooge, and Dracula. My education continued, haphazard and informal, American, European, and Russian authors all mixed together with no regard to any syllabus or any geographical or historical time frame.
I believe in education, and sometimes I wish, usually when an embarrassing gap appears in my knowledge during a conversation with someone who is well educated, that I had somehow managed to stick out my schooling and follow a path into a structured college or university course, but I didn’t. Yet most of the time I now think that being an autodidact—a dilettante, I suppose—has given me just as much as it has robbed me of.
Once out of school, I had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I wanted to be a rock star, lauded and adored and worshiped, drunk, laid, gorgeous, and dead by the age of twenty-five, but that was too Byronic and romantic for a Protestant, working-class boy, so I put that idea on ice for a while and went for something similar but more in my price range. I became an apprentice electrician.
I managed to get “a real job” at Burroughs Machines, a U.S. firm with a huge factory just outside of Cumbernauld. I was to go through the four-year recognized union training to become what was then called an “Electronic Technician.” I worked in various areas of the factory to learn all about the adding machines that the company built there. Digital technology had not yet arrived but I do remember talk from the brighter and more committed apprentices about the new “binary,” or “digital,” systems that were coming in. I wasn’t interested in the future of electronics, I just wanted to make enough money and play drums and not get belted every time I pissed off a teacher.
Joining the adult world did have some interesting side effects. On the factory floor I met Bert, a small, bearded American guy who had served in Vietnam and then left the U.S. in disgust on account of the way he was treated when he returned. His angry trek through Europe eventually brought him to Scotland, where he had met a redheaded girl and stayed. Bert told me all about
acid and Vietnam and the Summer of Love and San Francisco and L.A., and although he was cynical about America you could tell he missed it.
I met Alex, a guy who had suffered polio as a kid and as a result walked with sticks and leg braces. He drove a little three-wheeled blue car that the government issued to disabled people and smoked the best hashish in Scotland. He would get some for you, too, because the cops never stopped a handicapped car.
I also met Willie.
Willie was one of those assholes that everyone who wants to get high on illegal drugs has to deal with. Willie was an electrician at the factory but he said he was really a keyboard player. The truth is, he was just a dealer. He was a chubby fellow with thinning long hair, and at the time I was sixteen, and he would have been around thirty. He liked hanging out with my friends and me, and he even became the keyboard guy for a band I was in. He would dribble his wiggly synthesizer solos over the guitars and drums.
Willie had a house, a real house that he didn’t share with his parents, so every Friday night, after getting drunk on beer in the Reo Stakis Steakhouse and Pub (though never once had I even smelled, much less seen, a steak in there), we would go to Willie’s house for a “band meeting,” meaning we would smoke hash and listen to Willie talk shite.
What Willie really did was open up the world of drugs. He seemed to have access to everything, although he remained cagey about where it came from. Through Willie I got to try Red Leb—hashish that came in dry, burgundy-colored cubes smuggled in from Lebanon—and Paki Black, another type of hash, thick, trea-cly, and opiate-laden, that you crumbled into a joint and smoked with tobacco. I loved hash for a while, it made me feel goofy and fun and introspective and deep all at the same time. Hash made you the maharishi.
Then came “sulph”—amphetamine sulphate, the poor man’s coke, an off-white powder that was snorted in a line. Sulph had a speedy and adrenal high which I initially loved because it let you drink as much alcohol as you liked without passing out, but coming down from it was catastrophic; it made me horrifyingly paranoid and twitchy. I only took it a dozen times or so. I have an addictive personality, I’ll try anything a hundred times just to make sure I don’t like it.
Acid was wild. Whenever I took an acid trip, and I suppose I have taken about twenty or thirty—all of them before the age of twenty-one—I always thought that it went on way too long. The insane giggling, the otherworldliness, the ridiculous meaningless insights. It just overstayed its welcome. Always. Anyone who has taken acid will know what I mean. It’s horrible, and when you have an unpleasant experience—a bad trip—it’s hellacious. The first bad trip I had with acid was the last time I took it, but that wasn’t until much later, when I would be stalked by ferocious yet partially imaginary killer ducks in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow.
There was no crack, it wasn’t around yet, though there was some opium, which we smoked in a bong. And, of course, eventually—“You gotta at least try it, man”—there was heroin.
I never responded well to heroin. I tried it a few times in my life, but it made me kind of nauseous and sleepy and I wanted to eat. This pissed off my fellow users because they felt sick and didn’t think it was right to order pizza when you were on the nod. I felt it was hypocritical to have rules given when we were on heroin, but I guess even junkies have their conventions. I never shot smack (thank God), just snorted the fumes from a burning line laid out on some tinfoil, a procedure known as “chasing the dragon” in the ridiculously melodramatic vernacular of opiate lovers. Even recovered junkies often refer to themselves as dope
fiends
—as if using heroin made you scarier and more “out there” than a blackout drunk. Addicts can be very competitive about their wretchedness.
Another reason I never got into heroin was because of the others who did. They all seemed so fucking self-righteously corrupt. They put me in mind of my little buddy Raskolnikov.
I probably would have gotten into more trouble with Willie and his pharmaceutical smorgasbord but I met Gillian, and not for the last time I was saved by love. The two great loves of my life.
Women and alcohol.
I
had kissed girls before, of course. I had flirted and made out and fumbled with them. A magnificent large-breasted blousy lass called Fiona had even given me a hand job behind the power station on the way home from school one day. I had worked at a fairground during summer vacations and sometimes the girls who were on holiday would let you feel them up, but it was tough for them because, in the hypocritical custom of the time, they had to try and keep some sort of reputation for chastity, while any boy they even kissed would report and exaggerate the encounter to all the other boys, using the following lingo:
Among my peers, the idea that any normal female would genuinely desire to have sex was dismissed as nonsense. We’d been taught from an early age that sex was shameful and bad, that men wanted it all the time because they were slaves to their appetites, and that women were good, they didn’t like or want sex but would allow it in order to have babies, or because they were drunk, or English. No one actually said this out loud, it was just hinted at. I was given absolutely no sexual education at school, and there was never any “talk” from my parents, so in that area I am also an autodidact. I feel I approached my studies with a verve and enthusiasm that was unmatched in other regions of my life.
Gillian saved me from druggy Willie. She was my first real girlfriend, and she wasn’t much of a drinker, but her father was an alcoholic sportswriter for the Scottish
Daily Record
so she accepted my excessive alcohol consumption in a way that she would never have tolerated drug-taking. Any drug-taking. Drink as much whiskey as you like, but don’t even think of smoking a doobie. This is still not uncommon as a prejudice. I suppose in Scotland, at least, alcohol has the historical advantage.
If I wanted to be around Gillian, then, I had to forsake the drugs, and this was no problem for me because I really wanted to be around Gillian. Before I met her, all the girls I had kissed or
fooled around with were not people I was attracted to, they were just available and willing to put up with my breathy attempts at sexiness, but Gillian was different. She was beautiful. Voluptuous and charismatic like a young Loren, with deep, dark-brown eyes and dark-brown hair as shiny as the shampoo adverts on TV. She smelled a little like peaches, and there wasn’t a trace of acne on her skin. I met her at a party just after I had dropped out of school and got to talking with her. I asked if I could walk her home and she said yes. She also said that she couldn’t be my girlfriend because she was going on holiday the next day with her parents and she might meet someone, but I didn’t care. It was a cool, light summer night and I wanted to be around her for as long as I could. I walked her back to her house—she lived in a good part of town, near the other protestant school, the one she had attended. I stood outside her front door and she kissed me hard on the mouth and I could feel her desire, not like a favor or a blessing, but like something she wanted. I was shocked and confused, but before I could attempt even upstairs outsidies she had said goodnight and had gone inside, leaving me breathless on her doorstep.
I saw my buddies on the way home. “Just winching,” I told them, but they didn’t give me too hard a time. Even just winchin’ somebody who looked like Gillian was a triumph.
She was away three weeks. Her family had a little money and had gone to the impossibly exotic location of San Francisco for their annual vacation. I tried not to think about her making out with spectacularly toothed American boys, but it was hard. I had been there, I had seen the promised land of dentistry.
The night Gillian got back there was another party—house parties became frequent in the summer, as the more gullible liberal parents went on holiday and showed their trust by leaving their teenagers at home unsupervised.
She arrived before me that night. I had been drinking hard cider and Breaker malt liquor in the woods beforehand with some
Stuart or other, but I wasn’t drunk, just a little buzzed, enough to be confident. When I got to the party somebody told me she was in the kitchen, talking to some other girls. I wandered in to say hi and almost keeled over. She had a deep golden tan which made her even more luscious. I asked her if she had a nice time.
“It wiz awright. San Francisco wiz great.”
I told her about my trip to America and how I planned to return there and shamelessly hinted that she could come with me if she played her cards right. Then I got to what I had to know.
“Meet any boys?” I asked.
She smiled. She had a terrific smile.
“Naw.”
Funny, but I kind of knew she wouldn’t. It was San Francisco, after all; if you are a guy and you’re worried about the girl you like hooking up with someone on her vacation, I suppose San Francisco is the safest bet, assuming she doesn’t give her heart to a lesbian—and who among us hasn’t done that?
Gillian said that she had got me a present. It was at her house but we could go and get it if I wanted.
I did.
We were inseparable for about two years. She worked as a secretary in the Inland Revenue tax-assessment center in East Kilbride, and I continued to con Burroughs Machines with my feigned interest in the emerging computer business. We watched TV in each other’s houses; she came to see my crappy bands play shitty local gigs; she ruefully dealt with my growing alcohol intake; our parents met, we talked about running away to America, but she liked her job and her family and was worried that she’d lose contact with them. I don’t believe she ever left Cumbernauld, although we did go on a fantastic trip to London.
We stayed with my Uncle Davie and Aunt Sylvia, who lived
in Romford. We saw Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and did the whole touristy thing. We were in love, and during that trip Uncle Davie and Aunt Sylvia let us sleep in the same room. They assumed we had been allowed to do that in Scotland, and although that was not true, both Gillian and I kept quiet about it. We had fooled around a lot in Scotland but the trip to London was when we finally consummated our relationship. We lost our virginity to each other.
We were both seventeen and were impossibly cozy, safe, and romantic together, but by the time I was nineteen the momentum of our relationship had taken me over and I felt trapped. There was talk of an engagement, and I thought that I would be with her forever, but if it came down to Gillian versus America she would lose. One night we went to a birthday party in the Rock Garden in Glasgow.
It was a twenty-first for a friend of Gillian’s from work and we were excited because the Rock Garden was a trendy bar that we’d heard about but had never been to. I’d also heard of the band that would be playing, a notorious art-school punk group once called the Bastards from Hell and now known as the Dreamboys, more in deference to the singer’s adoration of H. P. Lovecraft than to any of his bandmates’ dreamy looks.
Their sound was very exciting, rocky and wonderful and creepy and loud. Kind of like the Cramps but stranger. Their lead singer, Peter Capaldi, had the most commanding stage presence I had ever seen. At the end of the set he announced that this was to be the band’s last show because they couldn’t find a permanent drummer.
And with that, Gillian and I were doomed.