Green - part i

 

For a while I couldn’t really remember much. I just had a bad feeling. And this feeling sort of grew for a while. It sort of dominated me, in an ambiguous way. I thought it would never go away.

I now realize that, at that time, this was a necessary psycho-emotional state. I don’t want to talk about the bad feeling though; for it is gone and is in the past. And with it went the mental block; now I do remember. And I know why: I have grown into my conscience.

*

First though: the title. Green works on three levels. It refers initially to youth. Greenness behind ears; a tricky metaphor, being essentially incomprehensible. My research tells me it derives from a Shakespeare allusion to ‘salad days’. My research (I spend a lot of time online these days) tells me that nobody is sure of the allegorical steps that take one from salad days to youth and inexperience. But, as often is the case with cliches, the intended meaning has been absorbed into the English language’s cultural mysticism; that series of nods and winks by which we strive to communicate while remaining resolutely opaque, to even ourselves.

And this is the second level on which Green works as a title: the opacity of its provenance. The metaphor is not just youth, but also incompleteness; puzzle and enigma.

And this is the third level: the dear green place. Glesga, Glaschu. That is: Glasgow, the setting for my story, my hometown.

*

I had spent the night in Waterfoot, ten miles south of the city, at a house party held to celebrate absent parents. This was about the furthest I’d been from home in years. It was the wilderness, almost abroad. As far as I could tell, the entire settlement comprised two rows of houses with hat-roofs like those that would be worn by a pilgrim, otherwise surrounded by green rurality. The barbecue the night before had been undertaken within a swarm of carnivorous midges. My arms were exercised from swatting; we, all of us, had engaged in a systematic massacre of our enemies. Yet we had lost the war. We had succumbed to their terror and removed ourselves to the warm confines of the kitchen. We had cooked our food in the stove and smoked cigarettes under the extractor fan. This was the tail end of the Scottish summer.

A taxi home would have cost more money than I had, and anyway, I hadn’t wanted to go home. I wanted to stay and drink and sing and argue. I wanted to prolong the night indefinitely. Eventually our numbers were reduced; people went home, people were sick with intoxication, people fell asleep. Eventually it was just me and Josh arguing about the mechanics of the proletarian revolution. I was convinced by the general strike model at this time; Josh correctly derided this as unscientific utopian thought. Josh, as is his wont, fell asleep while singing the red flag.

It was just me and the cat. The cat was unusually subdued. I played a game with it that involved inducing it to focus its eyes upon my right index finger. I would then try to confuse it by switching its focus to my left index finger. It obediently swayed its head from left to right, never at any point appearing to get any joy out of the situation. I’m not sure I was getting anything out of it either. Eventually, once I was sure the cat was successfully hypnotized, I managed to sleep for an hour or so on the floor.

My mum picked me up at about 8 and I got changed into my suit and tie on the back seat as we drove to Paisley. The matter was delayed again, another month with no resolution. After the sheriff court, mum bought me a sandwich. She said, ‘Oh Benny, at least you’ll have plenty of material for your book when you write it.’

She is quite a positive person.

*

So that was maybe a bleak place to start; and it is a fact that the cat died the next day. I don’t think this had anything to do with me. But not everything was bleak and I don’t want to give a false impression. A lot of happy memories came back too, and I’m going to strive for balance.

I came up in Clarkston, a petit-bourgeois suburban wander to the south of Glasgow. I learned most of what I know at the  Royal Academy of Hard Knocks: how to build a jeef, how to get into an argument, how to rip the piss, how to pull a bird. I had a good amount of pals, but Josh was the most significant.

We met in high school when we were twelve years old. We were in the same registration class. He had queried my fashion sense in the typical ironical manner. ‘Nice jacket,’ he had said.

‘Are those the same trainers that Sean McGonagall wears?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Cunt.’

It was an accepted school fact that Sean McGonagall was the jakiest pupil. He had no friends, smelled like a mixture of marmite and wet paint, and suffered from various horrendous skin complaints. I think I should point out that the above was a good natured exchange. There is, in my opinion, no greater crime than not being able to take a joke. If you are going to get through school, you have to be able to brush off an insult and throw something back in return. It was imperative to maintain a stockpile of witty rejoinders in one’s mind, primed to bat off any number of criticisms, which could be, and often were, directed seemingly at random to one and tended to relate to one’s haircut, clothing, mother, intelligence or sporting abilities. There was also a schoolwide pathology whereby homosexuality was alleged not just in people, but also in objects and subjects. ‘You are gay,’ you might be told, à propos of zilch. ‘Maths is gay,’ it would be claimed. ‘That’s a gay hat.’ There was doubtlessly nothing more acceptable than homophobia at my high school.

Rewinding back to my exchange with Josh, I note that falling back on ‘fuck off’, or ‘cunt’ was pretty lazy, but registration was at 8:45 so we’d only been awake for about twenty minutes. Pray allow me a pass.

Anyway, Josh and I were walking home from school together one day. We cut through the old folks’ home’s car park and Josh practically tripped over the biggest wad of cash we’d ever seen.

‘Jesus fuck, Ben,’ he said. I let this slide, but even below the excitement I remember thinking: it’s Ben Allan. Like a fucking mountain, you dick.

There was £940 there, secured by a blue elastic band. We had a money fight in Josh’s bedroom and lost £150. The next day we skipped school to go shopping and bought Burberry combat trousers and N64 games and Adidas trainers. This was probably, at that time, the best thing that had ever happened in my life.

A week later Josh’s mum found the £150. We came clean in stages. We won a lottery scratchcard was the first attempt at coming clean. Old folks’ home car park came out eventually. I think our parents were just relieved that we didn’t earn it selling drugs and didn’t steal it from the corner shop who paid me £1.50 a day to deliver newspapers to houses on a four mile loop.

*

I spent a lot of time in Giffnock too, which was essentially Clarkston but with Jews. People from Giffnock are the only people in Scotland who don’t stop to gawk at Jewish families walking in 1920s New York gangster dress of a Friday evening. Nothing more normal in the world. I miss that. Maybe one day I will buy a house in Giffnock near the synagogue, so that my children will grow up tolerant of different cultures.

As a youth, Giffnock formed part of the roaming grounds of whatever gang I was going about with at any given time. Not a gang like fighting and organized crime. We just wandered around for a lack of any particular place to go. We had haunts all over; off licences we visited in order of who was most likely to sell without asking for ID; quiet lanes in residential areas in which bevvy could be consumed. And there were golf courses, train tracks, parks and burns all over in which a degree of seclusion could be achieved. We were well travelled.

In the years after the millennium I didn’t have as much reason to be there, but I vividly recall finding myself at a party in a detached house in the grander, more bourgois area of Whitecraigs, which is the southern extension of Giffnock, towards Newton Mearns. This was a bit outwith my childhood stomping ground, although it was near Rouken Glen park where my parents had never taken me out in a boat on the duck pond.

We had been at Optimo, on which more later, and, as usually happened, we were far too fucked to go home at the end. Sleep was not on the agenda until midday on Monday and we needed somewhere to be. Noise came of a party in Whitecraigs and into taxis we piled.

The setup was unusual: there were maybe thirty of us crammed into an untidy bedroom. Lisa’s parents were, I think, sleeping in an adjacent room before, presumably, busy days at work the next morning. Almost no effort was made to keep the noise down, and almost everyone seemed to smoking. I couldn’t be bothered to roll a cigarette, but there was an empty bong next to the spot on which I found myself. I poured a stagnant Bacardi Breezer into it, stuffed it with soapbar, and got a puff on. I continued to want to experience the visio-tactile thrill of smoke streaming from my face, and I continued to not be arsed to roll a cigarette, so pretty soon I was so stoned that I thought I was going to die. This was all the more confusing for the fact that at no point had it occurred to me that this behaviour was going to get me stoned.

It started with an idea that I had, something which to a sober mind would no doubt be either completely incomprehensible or so obvious as to be completely unfunny. This idea was, and remains, indubitably the single funniest thing that I have ever experienced. I collapsed into a bundle of mirth; I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breath. I soon had cramps in my stomach muscles. A crowd gathered around me; the people wanted to know what was so funny. And I was desperate to tell them. The people have a right to know. But first I had to stop laughing.

With what felt like all the strength in the world, I managed to calm down. I became once more relatively upright. After one last deep breath, I attempted to tell everyone the thing of the utmost hilarity. After one word, I relapsed into hysteria. I repeated this several times until, eventually, I had completely forgotten what I was laughing it. There was nothing to laugh at.

This was a sudden and terrible realization. It tolled through me; a tsunami of doom. Nothing was funny and I was definitely going to die.

‘You’ve turned green,’ said Lisa, helpfully.

I came clean about the fact that I was definitely going to die.

I recall that the heads of the other people at the party looked like little animals that lived on top of their bodies. Some people were cats, other people were cartoon dogs or squirrels. Lisa and Natasha took me downstairs to get a glass of water. In the full glare of the lights, every colour was a police siren. I felt like I was being slapped in the face by the red carpet on the stairs; the yellow curtains in the kitchen stamped on my chest. Natasha took me to a dark room, sat with me and stroked my head. I rolled cigarettes, one after the other, to have something to do, to keep my mind and fingers busy.

I remember feeling strangely bereft once the drugs wore off and I realized I was pretty much fine. Now that I felt sure I was going to continue living, life didn’t seem particularly exciting.

‘I really thought I was going to die,’ I said.

‘Everyone else thought you were too.’

*

Almost every Sunday we went to Optimo. The Sub Club, on Jamaica Street in the City Centre, was a dark subterranean hole with a ceiling so low you could kiss it. When it got big, the whole dancefloor bounced with the bass drum. The music was dance music. House, techno, whatever—I loved the music, but I never got into it in a connoisseurial way. The first time we went it was because we’d heard it was a cool place to take ecstasy. Within a year it seemed like everyone I knew was a DJ. For me, as much as I liked the music, it was primarily about the hedonism, so this isn’t going to be one of those memoirs that reads like a ‘wanted’ section in a niche music magazine.

It’s not that music wasn’t or isn’t important to me. If you pulled my leg I could tell you a few tunes that can drag me right back to that period; I mean, if you really insisted. Emerge by Fischerspooner would be the most obvious one. Whenever I hear that simple, squelchy bass line fade in I still get a bitter taste on my tongue like a crushed paracetamol. Seventeen by Ladytron was another one that works on me like a time machine to this day. And then probably anything by Vitalic, but specifically La Rock 01 which was maybe the most fucking mental thing I had ever heard at that point. A special mention has to go to Special Request, which frequently came on early in the night and I think might have had something to do with Chris Morris of Brass Eye, which if true (I think he denies it) would perhaps slightly spoil it, although I’m not sure why. Silver Screen by Felix da Housecat was lethal also.

Contemporaries are likely reading this and noting that I’ve went for the poppier tunes. It's not that this was all I liked at Optimo, it was just that unlike nearly everyone else (at least, every male else), I didn’t go and buy a set of decks and turn dance music into a money-pit hobby. I only really listened to it on nights out. This was enough; and it was thrilling. I had never listened to any dance music at all pretty much before Optimo and my experience of clubbing had been getting into The Garage and the Shack.

These clubs were an experience of a totally different sort. You would get tanked up, then queue round the block for ages, then pretend to be sober while the bouncer inspected your fake ID, then, once inside, drink 20 promo vodkas and not get a pull. You may occasionally dance to a song that you liked, perhaps Last Night by the Strokes, which they always played even though Hard to Explain was the superior single from that album. On the night bus home you would smoke cigarettes and maybe get involved in a chant of some sort and by the time you got off you were so desperate to piss that you thought you were going to explode and you’d have to go right there and then, and you would go for hours. Optimo was different from this, or at least, it seemed to be to me.

I don’t think I ever even tried to pull there. Maybe I’ll get called out on that statement, but in my memory at least it was just about taking ecstasy, feeling great, and hearing amazing music in a cool environment. But maybe that’s not quite true. I suppose the truth is I was quite a nervous person. The alcohol and drugs helped to hide this chronic shyness. Optimo was, probably as much as The Garage would have been, equally about obliteration and the annihilation of memories.

What memories? The angsty start to the night; chewing cheeks rotten, grinding down teeth. Puffs on nauseous cigarettes following by a quick march to the toilet to evacuate, followed by a deluded fear that the drugs had been ejected to the sewer system. Later on, at half one or two, dancing in a state of euphoria, soaked in sweat, wanting it to last forever. Then by half two you would still be fucked and happy, but the panic was: where to next? At three on a Monday morning, where would we go? There was always somewhere. So many strangers’ parties at first. But soon the strangers became friends or friends of friends, and soon there was always a party, and soon the parties were not just on Sundays, but on Friday, Saturdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays.

It made it very difficult to hold down any other regular activity whatsoever. Uni, work; everyone was always getting sacked or dropping out. I was no exception.