Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (11 page)

The biggest problem I faced now was the fact that I couldn’t read or write to save my life.

G
ETTING
S
ERIOUS

I
was still covered in a roadmap of angry red scars when I went to night school to learn how to read and write, having roundly failed to do that when I was younger. The difference was that now I actually wanted to learn, because I could see that I had no choice. No glittering future as a boxing champ lay ahead of me now. And I wasn’t stupid. I knew that with my injuries but without a proper education I would have few opportunities to get on. I knew that not learning to read and write at this point would make it more than likely that most of Auntie Coral’s predictions for me would come true. I knew that illiterates generally end up at the bottom of the heap, and the bottom of the heap is not a place where I wanted to spend much time.

Going back to school in my twenties is by far the bravest thing that I have ever done, because only someone who has been in my position knows how mortifyingly embarrassing it is to be unable to read and write; skills that most seven-year-olds have already mastered. I had to summon up hundreds of times more courage than I had ever needed going into a boxing fight or squaring up against someone on the street. Going into the office to arrange the classes was awful, but thank God I did it, because I hate to think of the alternative.

The night school was funded by the government, which was finally doing me a good turn after having participated in my awful childhood by appointing the worst guardians ever. It took me about a year to learn how to read and write to a reasonable level and it was the best thing I had ever done. I still can’t spell very well – my son Harley, who, at the time of writing has just completed his reception year in school, is rapidly overtaking me – but technology has caught up with me in the form of computers and their much-appreciated spell checkers. I took some computer classes as well as literacy classes. I loved using computers because of the underlying logic and because writing on the computer meant that I could check my spelling and that my abysmal handwriting did not matter. We were also taught basic numeracy skills, which I needed almost as much. For light relief, I started shagging a bored housewife who was about ten years older than me who was taking the course out of boredom or perhaps in the hopes of meeting a young stud like me. I did not mind doing her the favour, particularly as she did not expect anything else of me.

It might sound mean, but a lot of the other men and women doing the adult literacy course were real retards who were never going to be able to get to grips with what they were studying, because they simply did not have the necessary grey matter. It was wrenching for me to have to sit with them knowing that I was intelligent and that I still had the same problems that they did. This added to my embarrassment, as did the fact that many of the teachers treated us all as dumbasses and seemed to have very low expectations for us all, without exception. They tried to be nice, but it came over as condescending and it was obvious that most of them assumed that none of us had much between our ears. In most cases, these assumptions were correct but, despite my low self-esteem, I did know that I had it in me to conquer what had always defeated me at school. I gritted my teeth and determined to continue. I knew that I had no choice.

There was, however, one lady, Grace, who was very kind and generous of spirit and seemed to realise how badly I wanted to learn and that I had the capacity to do so. I will always be very grateful to her.

‘Look,’ Grace said to me. ‘This is how it works. If you apply yourself and do your best, I can help you, and you will be able to learn quickly. It is not as difficult as it seems at first and you are more than ready for it.’

Grace helped me outside class too and my proudest moments were when I found myself beginning to read the signs in shop windows and headlines in newspapers without too much effort, just like an ordinary adult person.

As soon as I had acquired a reasonable standard of literacy, I started to study for a gym instructor’s qualification, a Fitness for Industry (FFI) certification so that, even if I could not become a professional boxer, I could work in an area that had always interested me. Because I had seen a lot of gaps in the knowledge of the physiotherapists and other professionals who had helped me get well, I felt that there was a need in the market for someone like me, who knew about the practical aspects of health and fitness. Because I was proud and determined to be self-sufficient, I took jobs to pay for the training.

My body had healed, by and large, and I was still very fit and strong despite my injuries so I got jobs as a doorman for nightclubs. As a doorman, I was quickly given the nickname ‘Fingers’ because of the finger that my right hand was missing ever since I fell off that roof. The tradition of giving doormen nicknames is as old as the profession. Most doormen go by these monikers rather than their real names so that, if a job goes bad, they can scarper and nobody will be able to trace them, because their real name is unknown. I understood the logic behind the tradition, but didn’t appreciate my nickname, because ‘Fingers’ is also a label attached to pickpockets, and I had never been involved in crime, petty or otherwise.

Because the money I was able to make on the door was not quite enough, I also did a bit of mini-cab driving on the side. Mini-cab driving was a pleasant enough way to make some money and pass the time, and it also offered other attractions in the form of the many women passengers who would hire the cab to take them home after a night out with the girls and then invite me up to their place to give them a good seeing to. Women are reputed to be the more retiring sex but, from what I saw, this often is not the case at all. I was young, very fit and handsome with my thick black hair and I was usually happy to oblige, seeing this as an attractive perk of what could otherwise be quite a boring job. I didn’t leave the meter running.

When I passed my first qualification, I got distinction for anatomy and physiology. The notes at the bottom said, ‘If this was a spelling test you would have failed but luckily enough it’s not.’

I was getting somewhere, and finally I began to feel like a bit less of a loser, but my passion for physical fitness was not earning me enough money yet. That still came from the cab driving and, increasingly, from providing security at nightclubs and other venues. Once again, all those years that I had spent boxing stood me in good stead, and, even if the arm that I had injured was not as strong as it used to be, I still had two fists and I knew how and was not afraid to use them. I was a highly trained aggressor who knew all about technique, and I was also a vicious thug with an inferiority complex and an entirely justifiable chip on my shoulder – an explosive combination.

And I still liked hurting people when I felt that they had it coming to them. God, did I like to do that!

As people got to know me on the door, my reputation as someone who was more than able to stand up and fight grew and I started to attract the attention of the sort of men who needed people like me; people who were not afraid to hit first and ask questions later. Nowadays, the area of door and security work is much more regulated in every aspect. By comparison, back then it was like the Wild West. I welcomed every single opportunity to expose myself to violence, and each time I was involved in a confrontation and survived, I became more confident, happier and less like the frightened child I had always been. In those days, doormen were mostly recruited by word-of-mouth. There was a sort of informal network of built-up guys who spent their days in old-school sweat gyms and their nights in black tie on the doors. They were much the same crowd as the ones I had grown up with – the ones who had managed not to end up in borstal, and some who had and who had come out stronger as a result.

Because we were all East End guys, we mostly worked in the East End, but occasionally we did West End gigs too. Whereas the East End was full of difficult people – the usual blacks, Irish, gypsies and general trouble-makers and ne’er-do-wells – the West End was more champagne Charlies and quite upmarket. The West End had its own problems, but they usually did not involve street fights. The East End often offered scenes from hell and, as I was frequently the only white doorman, and the smallest doorman, I saw it all.

One gig I had for a few months was at a club I’ll call the Jungle (not its real name), which is a well-known black club in East London. By the time I was working there, it was a massively popular nightclub with jungle music and hordes of drugged-up partiers out for a good time. A good mate of mine was the head doorman, and he was working with Leroy, an equally tough character. Leroy was tough but even he could not deflect bullets. He was shot and killed while I was working at the Jungle. The promoter of the venue had been dealing drugs, and had fallen foul of some drug dealers one night. They were pissed off because he owed them money. I was working on the door with a big guy called Dexter, who I really liked – everyone liked Dexter. We were expecting trouble, so we were all wearing bulletproof vests and keeping our eyes open so that we would be ready to deal with the tricky situation that we were anticipating. When the dealers turned up, they tried to get into the club, but of course we could not let them. They were understandably upset, and immediately pulled out their guns and started waving them around. We picked them up and threw them out, but one of them came right back and shot Leroy. The bullet ricocheted off Leroy’s elbow and went into the side of the vest into his heart, killing him straight away. It was just bad luck that it was Leroy, because it could have been any one of us, and he was massively unfortunate that the bullet ricocheted, because his vest should have been able to absorb the blow.

You might think that the last thing that anyone would want to do after that was go back to working on the door, but the rest of us felt that it would be the right thing to do. We were determined not to be scared off, because we didn’t like to think of scumbags of the sort that had killed Leroy getting away with it.

One other night, I was away from one of the doors I usually worked on when another doorman was killed. It was a similar situation. A bunch of tough black guys had turned up from South London and had been refused entry into the club for some reason. The door was slatted, saloon-style, and these guys shot the doors out, took out the window, put their guns through it and unloaded an automatic pistol into the foyer, hitting about ten people. Nobody was ever caught for this crime. The only description received for the guy who had unloaded his pistol was that he was small, black and wearing a hoodie. He could have been one of hundreds of thousands and to the best of my knowledge he was never identified. Chris, the doorman, was one of the people killed and, although I did not know him well at all, I did take note of his death, as we all did, because it could have been any one of us. But none of these things made me scared, because I was fearless, not because I believed that nothing could happen to me but because I really did not care if I got shot and killed. I never did heroin, but I imagine that similar sentiments must be felt by anyone with the habit; I know it could kill me, but who really gives a fuck? Not me, mate.

Who needed drugs when there was a chance of getting killed on any given night at work? Knowing that was my high, right there.

Soon I moved on from just doing door work to private, close-protection jobs for some very serious people who also had lots of wealthy clients, Arabs and foreign dignitaries, all of whom needed bodyguards to take care of them when they visited London. This was very lucrative work for everyone involved and a real change from the environment I was coming from, and I felt that it would open the doors to some real money for me. I was correct in this assumption.

My break came when I was working in London’s West End, in a Jewish neighbourhood with a lot of very wealthy residents. I was at a nightclub I’ll call Charlie’s, which catered to a rather moneyed clientele and presented itself as a very exclusive establishment with a dress code and an entry policy to match. This was the late 1980s and there was cocaine everywhere – it went with the Lycra dresses and the big hair – and it went up the noses of a lot of Premier League players, models and ex-public school boys rolling up in limousines.

A friend of mine ran the door at Charlie’s and he invited me to work for him. He told me that not all the money that exchanged hands in the club was legitimate, because there were plenty of drugs floating around, but that wasn’t really my concern. I would be there to take care of the punters and to do my best to make sure that nobody got hurt and, so far I was concerned, if people wanted to get off their faces on cocaine that was nobody’s business but their own.

I had been used to working in dives where I spent my nights taking guns away from irate Irish, Scots, blacks, gypsies and regular London geezers and breaking up fights every five minutes, so working the door in a more upmarket establishment was a nice change and a bit of a rest, and it did not make any difference to me whether the punters were sticking cocaine up their noses or not. I had grown used to working for joints where the customers regularly invited the doormen to fight it out. The only way to deal with the dregs of society who turned up was to give it to ’em proper. It was the only language they understood and, if you did not stand up to them, they did not respect you. If you did not beat them to a bloody pulp, they beat you, so it was an easy choice to make. Going to work, it was never a question of whether or not there was going to be some violence, but of how much, and how long it was going to take to quell it.

This West End gig was almost restful in comparison. There was rarely any violence at all, and when there was it was just a little scuffle between a couple of toffs who really did not want to get blood on the expensive shirts they had just picked up on Savile Row. We would take it out the back where they would take a few pops at each other to save face and nobody would ever be any the wiser. The clients were generally nicer here, and a lot of celebrities turned up, which lent a certain amount of glamour to the job.