Nerd Do Well (7 page)

Appropriately, I played Francis as a tiny boy, in a scene where his father sits the future saint on his knee and imparts some nugget of wisdom, which motivates Francis in later life. The boy playing my dad walked on to the stage as if returning from work (not sure what Francis of Assisi’s dad did for a living; maybe he worked at the Wall’s factory on Eastern Avenue), at which point I leapt up and exhaled a booming ‘Helloooooo, Father,’ which reverberated around the walls of the Lady chapel and garnered an unexpected laugh from the audience.

Once seated on my eight-year-old father’s lap, I was given a plastic tube full of fruit jellies, which I tucked into enthusiastically as Dad delivered his scripted words of wisdom. The cue for my next line came and went, but there were still three sweets left in the tube and I was determined to finish them before I spoke. The older kids in the front row were all leaning forward and hissing my line at me, which I knew full well. I nodded at them reassuringly and continued to chew.

The tittering started again and I realised it was because of me. I grinned broadly out into the auditorium with a face full of fruit jelly and calmly waited until I was able to advance the plot further, which eventually I did much to the relief of the assembled parents and clergy. I was never reprimanded for confusing my theatrical priorities with my sweet tooth, and my parents were clearly amused and even proud of my faux pas. I certainly didn’t feel as though I’d done anything wrong, far from it, I felt it had all gone rather well.

The following Christmas, the inevitable nativity play rolled around, but much to my surprise, I was not cast as Joseph but instead some weary traveller, whose narrative purpose was to demonstrate that a lot of people had come to pay their taxes in Bethlehem and accommodation was in extreme demand. I was instructed to walk across the stage, looking for a room, which I did with ridiculous enthusiasm, getting down on my knees, looking under chairs and even under my own armpits, only to hear a frustrated voice sternly whispering ‘Simon!,’ similar in many ways to the voice I would hear five or six years later as I closed in for my fifth kick of the papier-mâché model of St Peter’s bell, the real version of which had barely ceased to vibrate at the commencement of our nativity service and the debut of my man looking for accommodation character.

By the age of seven, I was performing alongside my mother and her friends in musicals such as
Carousel
and
The Music Man
. Even now, when I hear songs such as ‘If I Loved You’ and ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ or even an orchestra tuning up, I experience a powerful sensation of excitement and anticipation. It was a magical time for me; the shows were hugely popular and would play to audiences of five hundred every night for a full week with matinees at the weekend. Hanging out at the theatre, getting into costume, putting on ridiculously thick make-up, seeing my mum’s friends in their bras was all a tremendous thrill.

As well as the physical and emotional rush of performing, I was developing a love of theatre as an extremely evocative mode of storytelling. I obviously didn’t interpret that love as such, I just remember the shows having a huge emotional pull on me.
Carousel
had a particularly significant effect on my sense of the dramatic, probably because it dealt with themes such as love, death, loss and parental responsibility. It also includes a paranormal twist towards the end, when the main character, Billy, accidentally stabs himself, becomes a ghost and is transported fifteen years into the future to alleviate the stresses caused by his departure. To a nerdling it was appealing for obvious reasons – ghosts, time travel and moderate violence – but I think there were probably deeper emotions at work within me. My grandfather Albert had died a year or so before, my first intimation of death, and my parents had separated shortly afterwards. Those themes running through the play’s narrative probably affected me more than I know, resulting in something of a subconscious catharsis, which engaged me with the moment and fastened it in my mind forever. It’s strange how I don’t remember
The Music Man
so well and that was a whole eighth of my life later, although if drunk enough, I can I still sing the first few verses of ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’.

It was during
Carousel
that I experienced my first incidence of performing in the face of adversity (this being a full year before Denise Miller’s threatened kiss inspired me to get intimate with a brick wall). There were a number of young people in the show, varying in age from my tender seven years to cool guys and sweets-smelling girls in their late teens. I loved being the little kid in the gang; there’s always one: from the Double Deckers to the Red Hand Gang. I was the one who could fit through small windows, or sneak past the policeman, or pretend to be lost so that the security guard at the junkyard didn’t notice the rest of the gang sneaking in behind him to rescue the mean old man’s dog. In reality it wasn’t like that – we just used to hang around at the bottom of a backstage stairwell before the show started and I would try to gain acceptance by acting like a monkey. I told jokes, did impressions, performed pratfalls, all in the pursuit of those status-affirming laughs that let me know I was ‘in’ with the big kids, although in reality I was never ‘in’, just tolerated.

I was a puppy for the girls and a chimp for the boys, which is quite versatile for a seven-year-old. Before one evening performance I was particularly eager to finish getting ready for the show and get down to the stairwell to commence hanging out, since my fellow gang members were already down there. I hurtled from the dressing room, down the corridor, through the fire door, then, just as I reached the top of the stairs, tripped. Much to the horror of my ‘friends’, I rolled head over heels, down the concrete steps, grinding my lower back against the hard corners, which were edged with an aluminium strip to limit wear and tear. I managed to right myself before I got to the bottom of the staircase and ran back up, barely containing the explosion of tears that issued, once I fully understood what had happened. I glanced back at them as I headed back to the fire doors and noticed their expressions of concern were morphing into smirks as they tried to contain their amusement. I clearly wasn’t too badly injured or I wouldn’t have got up at all, and their amusement was as much the product of relief as it was an enjoyment of my misfortune (probably about 30/70).

I was a little hurt by it though, because until that point the laughter I had elicited from them had seemed to me to be on my terms, whereas now I just felt like a clumsy little idiot. One of the older girls chased up the stairs after me and found my mum, who managed to calm me down and establish that nothing was broken. I had bruised my coccyx fairly badly, and as my first scene approached, the pain in my lower back grew more acute. I was playing one of the Snow children in the show, the prissy offspring of Enoch Snow, a stuck-up society type, if my memory serves me correctly. Our first scene consisted of a dance routine as the children follow their father somewhere, like obedient little ducklings. One of the moves required us to bend at the waist, something I was finding increasingly hard to do by the time it came to go on, I was stiff as a board, but to save face and, in my mind, the entire show, I persevered. I distinctly remember making a slightly pained face as we performed the move as if to show the audience that I was being a trouper, as if they would sit there in the darkness of the auditorium thinking, that kid sure has got a lot of moxie. It was an odd thing to do considering nobody in the audience had any idea that I had recently taken a spectacular tumble down a flight of stairs. Whatever my reasoning, there is no doubt that I relished the drama, which is somewhat appropriate for a budding actor, although I’m looking back now (as I often do while writing this book) and thinking, what a prick.

Look At Me! Actually, Don’t Look At Me

A
p.

s musicals go,
Carousel
could be said to be have affected me more deeply than any musical has ever affected any straight man, as it also provided me with my first brush against the complexities of celebrity. Specifically, how the desire to attain self-validation can ultimately have the opposite effect. It’s something I remain conflicted about even today, and this small incident may have been implicit in shaping my feelings on the idea of personal visibility to this very day.

I was hanging about backstage in full costume shortly before the show began, my older crew having given me the slip, or perhaps found somewhere safer to hang out and ‘forgotten’ to tell me. In the show, the Snow children were dressed with Von Trapp uniformity in velvet jackets and little straw hats and knickerbockers. I needed the toilet before curtain up and I convinced myself the only way to do that was by leaving the backstage area, walking through front of house and out into the foyer where I knew there were male and female toilets. My memory tells me I knew this because of the Galaxian machine which stood against the wall between them; Gents on the left, Ladies on the right. However, having checked this out, I find it cannot be true because Galaxian didn’t appear until 1979 and this was 1977.

Space Invaders didn’t come out until 1978 so I have no idea what was between the doors of the male and female toilets on the first floor of the Gloucester Leisure Centre in 1977. Nothing? Was there really a time before video games? Strange to think of these invisible voids that exist around us, waiting to accommodate advances in technology that will soon become commonplace. So much so that it will be hard to imagine life without them. There were spaces on walls before light switches, let alone plasma TVs. Desks without computers, roads without cars, hands without mobile phones. Conversely, as microtechnology and digital storage maximise space and convenience, voids are opening up, subtly erasing any memory of the three-dimensional objects which filled them. The spaces occupied by photo albums, the box TV, filing cabinets, cassette decks, record players, books, ashtrays or more short-lived necessities like CD storage units,
VHS
players and tapes or hard-drive towers.

Computers have been shrinking since they first appeared. I wonder what the rooms that were filled with those huge, whirring, tape-spewing early computers are used for now. Are they empty? Or are they perhaps being utilised for an altogether more analogue form of storage? It makes you wonder what spaces will be filled or created by the next arrival or obsolescence. The mobile phone may well shrink out of our grip as the era of the cyborg approaches. Sounds like science fiction but we are inexorably approaching an era in which the phone will no longer be something we ‘pick up’.

The threat to the key has long been a possibility since the magnetic strip began to give us access to hotel rooms and office buildings, but now contactless technology has equipped us with locks that recognise corresponding chips when brought into proximity. How long before the chips housed in those keyless entry fobs creep under our skin, making us technically part machine, recognisable to our houses, cars, workplaces, parking spaces? Who’s to say these chips won’t be able to communicate over longer distances and ringing a friend will only require you to think their name? Although this would potentially lead to a lot of unintentional calls answered with the question, ‘Did you mean to call or were you just thinking about me?’ Could be quite embarrassing.

The space around us has an intriguing potential to be cleared of things we need or filled by the things we don’t yet know we need. That space between the male and female toilets at the Gloucester Leisure Centre was waiting for that Galaxian machine even before the leisure centre was built, when it was simply a volume of atmosphere, twenty-five feet above a field, or some woodland. The galaxy itself was waiting for the Galaxian machine in the same way it was waiting for Earth to settle into orbit around a sun that will eventually consume it. Oh balls, I’ve opened it right up now. I’m getting into the realms of chaos and consequence and our meaningless, flickering tenure, not only in space but also in time, when what I really wanted to do was tell the story of a seven-year-old show-off who needed a piss. I suppose what we learn from this digression is that you can’t always trust your memory. It fills spaces with little inaccuracies, or else becomes a space in itself.

One thing I can be certain of is that there was a gentlemen’s toilet on the first floor of the Gloucester Leisure Centre in 1977. I know because I distinctly remember entering it in my velvet jacket and straw hat and fishing my penis out of my knicker-lockers to relieve myself next to a punter who regarded me with nothing more than a half-hearted double take. What I really wanted was for someone, not necessarily the pisser, but someone, to say, ‘Wow, are you in the play? That’s amazing! You’re amazing! You are amazing for being in a play.’ Nobody did. I don’t even remember turning any heads, just experiencing a vague sense of embarrassment and regret and an awareness (even at my tender age) that my desire to be recognised was slightly pathetic.

When I returned backstage I was reprimanded by my mother, mainly for going missing for ten minutes but also for breaking the fourth wall, which apparently extended from the sides of the proscenium arch to the door that let the actors out into the auditorium. I remember her telling me it was unprofessional. I felt stupid and needy and suspected the people who had noticed me mingling, those that weren’t in bizarre costumes, had thought me faintly ridiculous. This was the seventies though and, by contemporary standards, everybody was dressed in bizarre costumes.

I have never lost the perspective given to me by my journey to and from the real-world toilet, and although sometimes it’s fun to relax and enjoy a degree of fame, I fully appreciate the transparency of the desire. The recognition that has resulted from the work I have done has fastened me into a pair of knicker-bockers, since at times getting noticed cannot be avoided. Being recognisable is like wearing a bizarre costume, particularly when you are with people that most keenly appreciate whatever it is you do.