The Horse's Penis

I probably had my first alcoholic drink at one of my eldest sister’s parties. After she got married she would often throw these parties, inviting her friends, the family, members of her drama group and whatever. They used to have games like “Spot the Intro”, “Guess the Vegetable” and “Give the Dog an Erection”. The dog was Lucky, a yellow Labrador who spent most of his life trying to hump my little brother. On his hind legs he was bigger than my brother too, and rabidly amorous. How we laughed as he buggered Jimmy up and down the garden on a summer’s day. I think that was probably just one more thing – aside from the various head injuries – that contributed to my brother’s recurring nightmares and psychotic nature.

There was always a lot of booze at my sister’s soirees, and my older siblings and their friends would ply me with alcohol: let’s face it, there’s nothing quite as entertaining as a pissed eight year old. I never had a drink without getting drunk. I just kept pouring it down me, whatever it was; vile tasting bitter or foul old scotch. I liked gin. Then I’d race off to the toilet to throw up, and after twenty minutes I’d be drinking again. At the end of the night I’d throw up again, and spin out.

So I looked forward to family gatherings with much enthusiasm. Weddings, funerals, court appearances, duels: you name it. I’d invariably do something embarrassing like moon at the carpet or urinate on someone’s mother, but hey: it’s my culture.

I soon started to drink with my friends. One day after school my friend Desmond Radley called for me, his pendulous breasts clinking madly.

            “Have you considered Weightwatchers, Des?” I asked him.

            “No,” he replied, “I’ve been going through my dad’s cupboards. And look what I found.” He prised open his jacket to reveal three bottles of wine. “There’s a lot more where this came from. The Old Boy, he’s got loads of it.”

So off out into the village we went, stopping only to retrieve my fags from behind a loose brick in the wall; down to the paddock by Wally’s stables, where we proceeded to get good and drunk. After a while Desmond fell to his knees in the grass and started to vomit, and when he’d finished he looked up with an expression of rapt wonder and exclaimed: “Hey, look at that horse’s penis!”

I had to agree, it certainly was a huge, comical penis. More comical still was the way the horny beast thrust it through the sharp forks of an old tree stump, whinnying with delight.

            “The horse is having a wank!” I declared. “It’s wanking itself with the tree stump!”

            “What a huge knob.”

            “Yeah.”

            “That’s amazing.”

            “Yeah.”

Well, we never saw that horse – or any other - horse masturbating again, but we repeated our drunken escapades on a nightly basis. Every afternoon, without fail, Des would turn up at my front door, his coat stuffed with various alcoholic beverages, and we would guzzle them by the stables. Other kids would come and join us, and sometimes my mum was good for £1.20 to get some ciggies from the machine in the social club, or a packet of Number 6 off of Mr. Rossi, the ice-cream man.

It wasn’t long before it all came on top. One afternoon Des failed to show up, and in the evening I got a phone call.

            “My dad,” he said, “has found out. He went in his cupboard and there were only about three bottles of wine left. He’s not happy.”

            “Oh dear.”

            “Yes, indeed. Far from happy actually. It turns out that this wasn’t just any old wine. He’s been collecting it.”

            “Oh dear.”

            “For years.”

            “I see.”

“For thirty years.”

“I see.”

“And it was worth a lot of money.”

“Oh.”

“A lot...”

“Ah.”

“...of money.”

“Right.”

“Some of those bottles were over fifty years old.”

“Arse.”

“Anyway, he wants to see us. Tomorrow night. To work out how we’re going to pay him back.”

Well, in the end, Mr Radley let us off lightly. We had to wash his car for nothing every Saturday for a year, but that was ok. He was old and decrepit and would probably forget about it in a fortnight; maybe even die. I hoped so. 

Neville the Schizophrene

I used to live in a cold water flat in Grimsby. I say cold water: actually it was more like ice. I'd been living there for three or four months with my girlfriend and neither of us had been completely naked in all that time. You needed a St Bernard just to go to the bathroom. 

Fuelled as I was by amphetamine, Special Red cider, grass from the garden and a totally deluded sense of my own importance I was able to survive: sometimes by the seat of my pants; usually by the seat of someone else's.

There were three house rules: Sit down, chill out, and don't be playing any heavy metal.

The place was a lot like Picadilly Circus at rush hour. I played guitar in a rhythm and blues band at the time, so that lot were in and out like a fiddler's elbow. I had a drunk friend called Bill, too. Bill was an ageing blues guitar player who I'd found behind a hedge somewhere. He moved in. There were a few transient and desperate groupies. And there was the nutter who lived upstairs.

I'd first got talking to Neville after I'd heard a drum kit being beaten to within an inch of its life upstairs in the middle of the night. Turned out that somebody on the mental health team had suggested to Neville that he might like to take up drumming for the therapeutic opportunity it afforded. Never one to do things by halves, he was soon in possession of a Keith Moon style double drum kit complete with goldfish and explosives.

Neville thought that his new hobby might be contributing to the strained relations he was now experiencing with his flat mate. I thought that this might well be the case, but that his paranoid schizophrenia probably didn't help matters much, either. For Neville, God bless him, was barking mad. He'd once been in the merchant navy, but had had to be air-lifted off the ship in an Anderson stretcher after deffing out and half killing several of the crew.

I'd often be awoken at some god awful time in the morning by the violent rapping of Neville's cane as he paced up and down my living room in his Cuban heels, his poncho flung dramatically across his shoulders, reliving his latest delusions.

  "I have just returned," he would tell me, "on my rug, from the universe, where I have been to maintain the order of all things."

One of the manifestations of Neville's craziness was that at times he truly believed that he was the Author and Sustainer of all creation. This was something that we had in common.

  "Neville," I would groan, "please could you not be so outlandish before I've had a drink?" 

One day I was contentedly chopping up speed in the kitchen with the intention of taking it all myself and selling a few bags of crushed up Canderel to the students who lived down the road, when Neville appeared from nowhere, and before you could say "Good lord, you cunt, would you stay away from the Berwick", had filled his face with powder, stripped himself naked, and ran fully engorged into the street to batter the traffic with a large branch that he'd found in the garden.

Within an hour he'd been arrested and confined to a psychiatric unit, and was released into my care after 28 days on the condition that I would be responsible for administering his medication. I had no problem with that; I even encouraged him by taking it myself. I lost several days and ran the risk of major brain damage but hey, what are friends for? And I've never been able to resist an interesting looking pill.

After that, there were four house rules: Sit down, chill out, don't be playing any heavy metal and under no circumstances whatsoever let Neville go anywhere near the amphetamines.

Like alcoholism, Neville's illness was progressive, and I can hazard a guess at what happened to him. But whenever I think of him - like now - I like to imagine him standing proud, cane in hand, as he travels on his rug around the universe, maintaining the order of all things.

Fat Frank

Fat Frank, he was a fatty, Frank

built just like a Sherman tank

his eating habits caused a riot

Frank, you must go on a diet.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him, or: tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

There is awesome power and creation in making a decision and then following it up with action, and the more daring the decision, the more fantastic the results. This is how revolutions happen; this is how we change the world.

Jesus Christ, at the age of thirty, made a decision to quit carpentry and become an itinerant preacher. So that’s what he did. And look what happened.

*

I have a friend, Jamie. I first met him about fifteen years ago in a squat in Gloucester Street in Brighton. I’d heard about him long before that. The hippies hated him. They blamed him for everything. I mean, this boy really seemed to get their backs up. I knew I was going to like him, even then. One day, while all the bearded Nazis were sitting around listening to the Incredible String Band, smoking nutmeg and trying to have a spiritual experience, a brick came rocketing through the window of the front room, by the hand of a disgruntled homosexual who lived up the street. Amazingly, Jamie got the blame for it. And he wasn’t even there. The reasoning seemed to be this: If Jamie was more like the hippies and not so much like Jamie, the said homosexual would not have been angry and would not have thrown the brick. I mean, who could ever have anything against a bunch of right-on flower children, you dig? So when Jamie arrived back home to the squat, he was asked to leave again, forever.

Jamie, at that time, was a street junkie, and I would usually see him begging on street corners, or getting in to some aggravation with somebody somewhere. To be honest, much as I liked him, I thought he was a no-hoper, even then.

Well, he went his way and I went mine, and we met up again about ten years later, in a street in Winchester. Jamie had just got out of a treatment centre, where he’d been for the best part of a year. It was one of those “concept houses”, where they make you dress up in a nappy and get all your peers to beat you with a big stick and put signs on your back saying “I am a worthless bastard”. He’d gone there to address his long-term heroin addiction (which he had), but they’d overlooked the root cause of his problem, which is that he’s a raging alcoholic.

As luck would have it, I was in the grip of extreme alcoholism myself, so we were perfect best friends for each other from that moment on.

We spent the next couple of years in his house drinking ourselves into a state of near death. Sometimes I used to look at him and think: thank God I’m not as so far gone as you, mate. Towards the end Jamie couldn’t get himself out of bed. We’d even have to carry him to the toilet. He slept with his bottle clutched tightly to him. Finally somebody came along and carted him off to a treatment centre in Portsmouth, and that was that. I didn’t see him for months, and in that time I was given a council flat and proceeded to drink myself into a state of terminal hopelessness.

It was paranoid and suicidal drinking. It was closed curtains and darkness. It was blunt knives and blood in the bathroom. It was futile drug overdoses and the overpowering stench of fear. It was fucking grim.

Then one day Jamie turned up, at my front door. He was sober. It was years since I could remember him coming to my house in that condition. Not really. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him sober. In fact I’d rarely seen him standing up. I was amazed.

This is what he said to me:

            “Have you had enough of all this shit yet? Because if you have you can come with me and get sober and never have to drink again.”

I looked at the council flat that I’d got after six years of homelessness and sofa-surfing; I looked at the black hole that I’d fallen into and couldn’t escape; I looked at the desecrated ruins of my life, and I looked at him. If it had been anyone else things might have turned out differently, but it was Jamie that I was looking at, and I knew just how hopeless he’d been. Something unbelievable had happened to him. I’d had enough of the way I was living a long time before. But I’d never really known what my problem was, or that there was anything I could do about it. It was a no-brainer. Right there and then I made a decision to go with him and do whatever it was that he’d done. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of my friend and the unknown. He got me a detox, and we left two days later. It was as a direct result of that decision and the subsequent action I took that my obsession to drink was removed.

I never went back.

Joy is jumping off a cliff and building your parachute on the way down

40 years old, and I still can’t bear the monotony of working.

For seven months I’ve been working as a cleaner in Pizza Hut: mopping, scrubbing, rubbing shoulders with acne-ridden cretins and rehearsing my grievances.

I thought at first that it might do something for my humility.

It didn’t.

It did do something for my awareness though, I have to admit. It was just me, God, the hoover and the incessantly chattering nonsense of my thinking.

I got quite used to stepping off the thought train at will, and observing it clatter ludicrously past from the platform.

There were even a couple of days when my thinking ceased completely, and those were days of joy.

joy is the absence of thought

I sat amongst the people on the bus joyfully; I took out the rubbish joyfully; I scrubbed toilets joyfully; I watched the traffic joyfully (although I didn’t label it as traffic because there was no thought and I was in joy, and everything was  God experiencing Himself on the white screen of my awareness).

Moments like that are just experiences though, and it is the nature of experiences to pass.

The problem with the human experience is that we’re consumed with terminal wanting, and forever chasing something that can only ever be temporary.

nirvana is temporary

enlightenment is an illusion

More recently I have noticed resentment and dissatisfaction creeping back in.

Creeping?

THUNDERING.

No longer am I thinking about how fortunate I am to be able to work, when by rights I should be dead: no.

I am thinking about how this is a job for a retard, which I am so clearly not.

Anyway, so I quit my job. It’s only the last in a line of decisions which to an outsider might seem ill-advised. But the fact is this: I am feeling rebellious. Is it God’s will that I suffer a situation intolerable to me, and just take endless inventory around it looking for “my part” in my discontentedness, for fear that an impulsive act might eventually lead to my downfall, or is it God’s will that I say a loud “fuck it”, throw down my broom (so to speak) and rely upon Him to help me weather the consequences, whatever they may be? And anyway, sometimes I want what I want.

I mean, am I still living in fear here, or what?

Or do I believe that whatever my actions, everything will be as it should be?

So just for today I will be practicing Step 3 like this:

joy is jumping off a cliff and building your parachute on the way down