American on Purpose (12 page)

A
nne and I agreed that returning to Glasgow was going to save our relationship, but we were mistaken. The move actually ramped up our problems and, if anything, hastened the demise of the marriage, although I am not quite sure that, given my selfishness at the time, it could be called a marriage in any but the technical sense.

At the Chip Bar, I not only got my job back, I actually got a promotion. They made me “chargehand,” meaning that, in addition to bartending, I had to supervise the other staff members and balance the cash register at the end of the night. Strangely, having to work hard in the presence of so much booze was not a challenge for me. I liked being the boss, and because the bar was always so noisy and crowded I rarely had time to stop and have a drink myself. It wasn’t something you could do drunk, anyway, it was just too focused. Although, of course, I did have some beers when I was working, figuring if it looked like I was having a good time then the clientele would, too.

I approached the job as something of a performance, laughing and joking with the customers and trying to create a welcoming and comfortable environment for folks who came there to forget
about their own bullshit for a little while. Bartending taught me more about being a stand-up comic than anything else.

I worked long hours, sixty or seventy a week, and Anne and I only occasionally bumped into each other in the dingy single room we had rented from a bitter divorced landlady who lived in the same building with her large collection of incontinent and surly cats.

Anne had found work at the BBC as a graphic designer—the position she had always wanted—and was happy to be among her old art-school friends. We were living separate lives—when I finished work, I wouldn’t go home. I’d stay in the bar, getting drunk with the staff from the restaurant downstairs. Inevitably this routine led to infidelity, and infidelity led me to drink more to drown my guilt. So the only time I was sober was when I was actually working.

The work was my escape. Certainly I felt it was all I had. In my unhappiness with my life and myself there had to be one thing I was good at. Working hard was my only shot at self-respect.

The folks who owned the bar seemed to appreciate my efforts. They even sent me to a local college to learn about wines so I could discuss them knowledgeably with the more pretentious—and wealthy—patrons. Each Friday my day began at a tasting class. The problem is, of course, that when you’ve got an alcoholic in your wine-tasting class, it can be a challenge to persuade him to spit out the sample after he has been swooshing it around his mouth. My whole being rejected such a barbaric ritual, so I was hammered on fabulous, expensive plonk by eleven a.m. every Friday. But somehow I passed the course. To this day, the only academic credential which I have ever achieved is the completion of a basic wine-tasting course certified by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust of Scotland. Ah the irony. The framed certificate hangs in the Chip, and I go and look at it whenever I’m in Glasgow.

There’s also a copy hanging in the green room of my TV show.

Given its proximity to the BBC, the Chip was a favorite haunt of actors and creative types who worked there. These people in turn brought in other actors and creative types from the theater and film world. It was a very showbizzy crowd, and that’s the reason Michael Boyd, the new artistic director at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, happened to be there one night. Michael was already making a name for himself as something of a maverick—he’s now the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—with his unconventional and daring approach. He eschewed the lumpy, formal style of elitist theater and encouraged the energy and vitality of performance that he felt existed in the spirit of Scottish variety performers. Basically he was a closet vaudevillian with a sparkling, innovative mind and was transforming the Tron into a very popular location, a hot spot for what passed as the glitterati in Glasgow, even though it was in the decidedly untrendy and downright dangerous East End.

Michael watched me work the bar for a while and eventually asked me if I had ever been a performer. I told him about
Telemachus Clay
, which made him giggle, and I also confessed that in New York I had attempted an open-mike spot at the Comic Strip comedy club but had met with limited, or indeed disastrous, results. The audience of drunken mafiosi didn’t understand my accent but hated me anyway.

Michael was interested in my story and told me about an idea he had. There was a large public bar at the Tron Theatre with a raised platform at one end that Michael wanted to turn into a stage every Friday night where amateurs could try their luck in a “gong show.” After observing my antics behind the bar and learning of my interest in the performing arts, he thought I should do it.

I said I’d think about it.

I snuck in to the first gong show and stood at the back. The room was smoky and packed with a large, hostile, drunken crowd
who delighted in yelling instructions to the gong master, Harry Lennon, who was also the good-natured stage manager of the theater. Harry seemed very reluctant at first in his role as allegorical executioner but soon grew power-crazed with the beater in his hand as act after act came onstage. Housewives with pithy wee morality tales—these days they’d be blogging—were gonged immediately. Singing children fared a little better, until they got too sweet, then the mob would bray “GONG!” until Harry had no choice. One juggler lasted all of six seconds, while a mime who came on fully made up with a stripy shirt and beret was gonged before he even got a chance to move, never mind walk into the wind or pull an invisible rope. He didn’t take it well and, breaking the sacred code of his order, yelled, “You’re all a bunch o’ fucking shites!” at the crowd, which laughed uproariously.

It was an absolute bear pit, where success for a performer was all but impossible. It was also hysterical.

I had to try it at least once.

It took a few weeks for me to come up with an act. I decided I would do a parody of all the uber-patriotic native folksingers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland and appeared on local television every New Year in the annual orgy of maudlin, folksy sentimentality that the Scots call Hogmanay. Though everyone I knew thought these guys were annoying as hell, I had never seen anyone publicly go after them. Perhaps it would be seen as treasonous to attack anything homegrown, but I was willing to risk it, so I wrote a little song about how sexually attractive sheep are and prepared a little spiel. I put together a costume made of my wedding suit, which had been shrunk beyond recognition by an incompetent dry cleaner, and a hideous green sweater I had been given as a present one Christmas by a relative who must have hated me. I also wore a pair of ill-fitting glasses with broken black frames
held together by a Band-Aid, and to complete the look a pair of plastic zip-up Chelsea boots, pants tucked inside.

I needed a name for my character, something that might get an immediate laugh so that I wouldn’t be gonged off the second I spoke. I remembered Bing Hitler, the name Peter Capaldi had come up with for our little drag act. Peter had by then become a well-respected working actor and I figured he wouldn’t be using it again, so I stole it. I could easily have called him for permission, but that’s not who I was then.

Not telling anyone what I was up to, not even Anne, I finished work early one night, drank a few beers, and headed to the theater. In my outfit I waited backstage until the real folksinger ahead of me had been gonged off, and then Harry called “Next!” and out I went.

They laughed at my look, an encouraging sign, but then it fell silent. I walked to the microphone. In the most ridiculous provincial Scottish accent I could muster, I bellowed:

“My name is Bing Hitler.”

“Gong!” shouted a female voice from the back of the room.

“Thank you, Mother,” I shot back.

The crowd laughed again. I’ll never forget the power behind that sound. I knew immediately they were with me. I pressed on with my little spiel about how Scotland was great and everywhere else was not, pursuing my point to ludicrous degrees. Why Scottish insects were better than English insects, which were effete dandies. Why the world was lucky there were only five million Scots, because if there were more we’d make everybody eat fucking haggis, which was more tasty than anything those so-called French or Italian bastards had to offer. Why being Scottish was better than having an orgasm, or sex, which never happened for Bing at the same time. For a finale I sang my fake folk tune, which I called “The Sheep Song”:

It wasn’t much, but it represented just the kind of inane garbage that most of us Scots had been force-fed from as far back as we could remember. The audience loved it. When I was finished they shouted for more but I had no more, and told them so. They thought that was a joke. Eventually, not knowing what to do I turned to Harry and yelled, “Gong!” He gonged me off, but they were still cheering when I got backstage.

There was a fifty-quid prize for winning, but the audience, quite rightly, gave it to the guy after me, an octogenarian in a tweed cap who played a blistering “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on the harmonica. I, however, took away a couple of bigger prizes.

(1) When I was onstage, I had seen the theater director Michael Boyd standing at the bar, laughing his ass off; and

(2) finally I had discovered what I wanted to do.

B
ing was not an instant hit. I had no material to speak of beyond a few lines of shtick and “The Sheep Song.” I booked a few gigs in local bars but I would die onstage after a few minutes because I hadn’t enough material, and I wasn’t yet experienced or confident enough to riff. I had a woeful appearance at the Cul De Sac bar right next door to the Chip, where I still worked full time as bartender.

The place was jammed to the gills with people I knew who had heard about my triumph at the gong show. I choked, I panicked at the awkward silence, clammed up, got sweaty, and even forgot the words to my comedy song. This resulted in the first review I ever received. It ran in an underground magazine, and though I can’t recall its name, I’ll never forget the headline: “Bing Stinks.” You get the gist.

For some reason a bad gig didn’t bother me that much. I actually enjoyed the failure in some perverse way, and sometimes through drunken misjudgment of what people would find funny, I actively encouraged it. In one show at the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline, on Scotland’s east coast (nowhere near as prestigious as its New York namesake), I lambasted the locals simply for being east-coasters. I
told them that where I was from, on Scotland’s more civilized west coast, east coast men were considered idiots and sheepshaggers, but I told them that I empathized. It was their only option, given that the women of the area were so fucking ugly.

This kind of comment will rarely endear you to an audience, and this one rushed the stage, grabbed my guitar, and smashed it up in front of me. I bolted out the back door and into a waiting taxi that the theater manager had ordered to take me to the local train station. As we sped away with an angry mob in pursuit someone threw a large rock that shattered the back window and showered me with broken glass. I was pretty drunk and a little alarmed, but I loved this. In an odd way I thought it was romantic. But I guess any attention is good attention for a nutcase. I gave the cabdriver the fee I got for the gig (always get the money up front) to cover the repairs.

Michael Boyd persuaded me to do another gong show, and I survived it but felt that was enough, to do any more would be pressing my luck. Around this time, something of an alternative music-hall circuit was springing up around Glasgow and Edinburgh. There always seemed to be benefit shows going on for miners’ families crushed under Margaret Thatcher, or to free Nelson Mandela (the caving of the racist right-wing South African government later was of course due to the pressure exerted from obscure Scottish entertainers). I wrote more material and started to play these shows, usually wedged into the bill between the lesbian a cappella folk group and the performance poet. There were very few stand-ups around—actually, I’m the only one that I can recall—but there were plenty of comedy acts.

One, called Victor and Barry, was a comedy duo who wore dressing gowns and sang campy and amusing ditties about genteel Scottishness. I wasn’t crazy about them (I was probably jealous)
but most people ate it up. Victor and Barry were played by two young actors getting started in their careers—Forbes Masson, now a very successful and respected actor in Scotland, and Alan Cumming, who you may know as one of the leading ladies of Broadway. Even my sister Lynn was part of a comic double act. After attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, she and a fellow student formed the Alexander Sisters, a hilarious send-up of desperate middle-class Scottish matrons.

Meanwhile the comedy circuit in London was in full swing, and unlike Glasgow or Edinburgh it was producing brilliant stand-ups like Rik Mayall, Eddie Izzard, and Alexei Sayle. I told myself it was almost cooler to be in comedy than in music, but while London was teeming with comedy clubs, Scotland had none. Most of my performances were openers for rock bands, or occurred in nightclubs, where they would expect me to entertain drunken hipsters who were instantly pissed that the music had been turned off for me. In these situations the heckling started before I even made it to the microphone, which forced me to develop a particularly aggressive style. Sometimes I won them over, sometimes I made things worse. Sometimes my aggression, combined with too much alcohol, made for a rather difficult evening for everyone.

One night, while performing at the Rock Garden—the bar where I had met Peter Capaldi and joined the Dreamboys, years before—a drunken heckler approached the stage to take issue with me over a joke in my act he didn’t like. I proceeded to make a fool of him, but he was too drunk to sit down and shut up, so he lunged at me, and I, being a drunk Glaswegian first and a comedian second, knocked him cold, necessitating an ambulance for him and a quick getaway for me, out the kitchen door, avoiding his friends and the cops.

Here’s a tip for all you aspiring young comics: Don’t beat up the customers. It is very difficult to get laughs from an audience when
you’ve actually drawn blood from one of their number. It kills the mood.

I kept trying, though, gig after crappy gig, until one night at yet another benefit show at the Tron Theatre, a guy by the name of John McCalman, who was something of a big shot at the local radio station, made me an offer. He grew up worshiping BBC radio comedy shows, acts like the Goons and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Local Scottish radio was not known for programming comedy (not intentionally, anyway) but John asked me if I fancied trying to write and record some shows. I jumped at it. We recorded a few monologues I had written for Bing Hitler, who had now developed from a folk singer into a misanthropic buffoon who stood onstage, ranting about everything in the world he hated. The list included bees, whales, cats, vampires, scones, and, of course, the English.

These tapes played into the late-night alt-rock show, and they got a pretty warm reception, though the act sounded dry—just a guy in a studio, talking in a funny voice. You need real people in front of you for that type of comedy, or at least I do. I feel more energized and relish the immediate feedback a live audience supplies. Still, I was getting my name, or at least Bing’s name, out to more people who seemed happy to watch me live. Now the nightclub patrons actually cheered sometimes when the DJ stopped the music to announce me.

I quit my job and signed up for unemployment benefits, making me a bona fide member of the show-business community.

Anne was very supportive when I gave up bartending. I think she felt it might keep me away from the booze. It didn’t work out like that. Anyway, we were circling the drain pretty fast by then.

We had finally gotten a mortgage and were living in a small ground-floor apartment of our own on Maryhill Road. It was a cheap, shitty, modern building on a busy thoroughfare and I hated
it. I found it hard to be around Anne, who was always angry—with justification, I hasten to add—since most nights I was coming home too late and too drunk. Some nights not at all. At one grimy after-hours party in someone else’s apartment, as I was sitting on the living room floor, talking to a very attractive girl, Anne turned up with some of her friends. I didn’t know she’d be there too, even though we lived in the same house and were supposedly a couple. We were both pretty drunk and Anne soon let me know that I had disrespected her one time too many, and although I have to say she would have been right about that on a thousand other occasions, in this instance I really was just talking to the girl. Anne was a Highland lass, though, and full of good whiskey, mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. She removed one of her stiletto-heeled shoes and started pounding me over the head with it, causing a spectacular ruckus and no small amount of blood.

I drunkenly told her our marriage was over, which I don’t think came as news to anybody, and I left the party with the beautiful girl. We went to her house.

Later Anne and I tried to patch things up; she was contrite and so was I, and, as I said, there was genuine affection between us, but it was impossible. She was a generous soul who wanted a life and marriage and kids, and I was a selfish asshole who wanted booze and sex and drugs and escape and adventure, and I blamed her for our leaving New York. We were hopelessly and terminally incompatible.

For my birthday that year Anne gave me an inflatable atlas globe, along with a birthday card in which she wrote:

I give you the world.

Have fun blowing it up.