Life and Laughing: My Story (16 page)

Just as she opened her mouth to agree, the lights darkened and the music changed to Gloria Estefan’s ‘Can’t Stay Away from You’. It was too late, she’d agreed. My timing was spot on. The dance floor cleared of girls who weren’t willing to take their ‘dancing’ relationships to the ‘slow dance’ level, leaving just a handful of us.

I’d like to just clarify what a slow dance actually entails. Alison and I were holding each other’s hips and stepping from side to side. The song finished, and Gloria Estefan was aptly replaced by ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ by Journey. Alison wasn’t all that keen on me and quickly disappeared, but it didn’t matter. I was a hero. Everyone had witnessed our dance. My friends, and boys I barely knew, patted me on the back: ‘Nice one, McIntyre.’ I was proud that I had found the courage and succeeded, even though Alison may only have been a victim of excellent timing on my part.

There was one person that night who sent every girl in the gym into a flutter. Pulses racing, blushed faces, what a hunk. With timing even better than mine, Steve walked in to collect me as ‘The Time of My Life’ from the
Dirty Dancing
soundtrack played. There wasn’t a single girl at the disco (or mother collecting their child) who didn’t want to run into his arms and attempt ‘the lift’.

My Alison dance was as good as it got for me that night. It could have been worse. I just wasn’t one of those boys whom girls had crushes on. I knew I was different. I was a funny kid, in more ways than one. But even from such an early age, I was obsessed with finding my girl. I wasn’t interested in all girls. I wanted my one. I always felt incomplete, like I was missing someone, someone to love and to bring the best out of me. I knew she was out there somewhere, just not in the Arnold House School gym.

But she was.

Dancing with Gary Johnson was Kitty Ward. The love of my life, my wife and the mother of my children.

It would be nearly ten years until we met.

10

My teens had begun. I had two dads, two mums, one Date, one Slow Dance, one Snog. My boxing record was one Win and one Loss. I held the Under-9 long jump record, was an experienced voice-over artist and a keen ‘fake’ guitar-player. Oh, and I was destined for fame and fortune according to a Tarot card reader in a now closed down spiritualist bookshop in Kensington.

I left Arnold House and headed to a public school called Merchant Taylors’ in a place named Northwood, outside London in Middlesex. My parents thought it would be good for me to go to a school in the sticks, lots of beautiful grounds, sports and fresh air. It took me ages to get there, and when I got there, I hated it all day, then it would take me ages to get back. Everyone else at the school lived locally in suburbia. There were 150 boys in my year and I couldn’t stand any of them. They were all the same to me. Boring. There’s a Billy Connolly routine when he mentions how the real characters in life are the very rich and the very poor, but everyone in the middle is dull. That’s what the boys at Merchant Taylors’ were. Middle. They were middle class and lived in Middlesex and destined to be working in middle management with a middle parting, driving a middle of the range Audi in the middle lane.

The teachers were like they were from another era. They all dressed like Professor Snape from
Harry Potter
and were about as friendly. One of them was friendly though. Particularly friendly with certain boys; I would say overly friendly. He fancied them. He never did anything improper while I was there; he would just hang out with the students a lot, complimenting them on their work and their bottoms. Years after I’d left I heard that he was fired after his lust finally got the better of him and he lunged for a boy’s crotch in the pavilion after a cricket match.

I had no real friends. Not even the paedophile showed an interest. Not a happy time for me, made worse as I was beginning the long and painful transition from boy to man, commonly known as puberty. Why it has to take so many years, I have no idea. There’s a classic scene in the film
An
American Werewolf in London
when he first changes into a werewolf. He collapses on the living room floor and, while screaming in agony, his body changes shape with hair sprouting out of it. The whole scene lasts about forty seconds. As painful as it looks, I wish puberty happened like that. Exactly like that. Even with the soundtrack. The song ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival should be cued up on the family stereo of every teenager in the world. As soon as they feel shooting pains in their body, they must rush to the hi-fi and press ‘play’, then drop to their knees and transform into an adult. That’s where the analogy must end; they shouldn’t then go on a killing spree and wake up naked in London Zoo.

As it is, this excruciating maturing of your body is spread over several years. I wasn’t even aware of puberty. It never crossed my mind that my body had a lot of growing up to do and nobody mentioned it. My mother and father failed to tell me anything at all during this time. I think they left it to each other, but because they weren’t on speaking terms, they didn’t realize I was still in the wilderness. I never had the chat about ‘the birds and the bees’; in fact, for many years, I thought that birds and bees had sex with each other.

So it was a bit of a shock when my body experienced its first changes. Hair appeared under my arm. Not both arms, one arm. I had hair under one arm for almost a year. My left arm. I appeared to be going through puberty from left to right. I was half man, half child. I was all set to become a Greek mythological figure.

Once a week we had swimming. Changing for swimming was a chance for all the boys in my class to catch up with each other’s various rates of development. Some kids had experienced no changes whatsoever. I had my hair under my left arm, other kids had hair under both arms, or pubic hair or both, or a little wispy moustache or a small gathering of hairs on their chest. Everybody was at different stages. Everybody except for Panos Triandafilidis, the Greek kid, who was so hairy, it was difficult to see where his foot hair, leg hair, pubic hair, chest hair, facial hair and nose hair began and ended. He had hair in his ears and on his back; I think I saw a couple of strands on his eyeballs. When he walked near soap, it would automatically lather. He looked like early man. Early man, that is, with a girl’s voice as his voice hadn’t yet broken.

My voice took years to break. For years I sounded exactly like my mother. Every time we picked up the phone at home, callers would get us mixed up. A classmate of mine once called, my mum picked up and they had a five-minute chat about Latin homework. Steve once phoned from work, I picked up and he told me he couldn’t wait to come home and have sex with me.

The worst part of all these hormones running around my body was my spots. I would go so far as to say acne. I would get horrendous clusters of spots appearing anywhere on my face. Just when one would leave, another would show up. My face looked like a pepperoni pizza with extra pepperoni. What really wound me up were the products like Clearasil that were supposed to help. The advert would say, ‘It gets rid of your spots in just four days.’ Just four days? Four days is the amount of time it takes for a spot to heal on its own. Spots last four days if they are untreated. So all Clearasil does is make you stink of Clearasil.

I, of course, made things even worse than that for myself. I chose ‘skin-tinted’ Clearasil. What you may have noticed from looking at the faces of your fellow human beings is that they all have different-tinted faces. There isn’t one skin shade for all. I’m sure there’s someone in the world with the exact skin tint as the skin-tinted Clearasil. This product is like a miracle for them; they put it on their face and the spots literally disappear behind this medicinal product that’s working hard to rid their face of the hidden blemishes in just four days. Unfortunately for everyone else, and me, the skin-tinted Clearasil makes you look worse than before. I would wipe this beige goo all over my spots, leaving me with what looked like bits of somebody else’s face on my face; and it stank.

There was also a dandruff situation. Mine was by no means the worst in the school. There were so many white speckles on school blazer shoulders that when my grandmother came once to watch me play cricket she thought it was part of the design. All this came at a time when I first started to have sexual desires. Before adolescence, girls were soft and made me feel funny inside; now, I wanted to ravage them, a lot.

Unfortunately, these new feelings coincided with me looking horrendous. I would see girls from local schools on the overground Metropolitan Line Tube I took to and from school. I had hair under one armpit, spots covered in skin-tinted Clearasil occasionally with dandruff stuck to it and the voice of a posh girl. I was so embarrassed by my appearance that I would dread any schoolgirls getting on the same carriage as me. I would seriously panic that the species I was so desperate to attract would literally laugh at my appearance.

Every day I took the fast train to school. The fast train missed out certain stations. It was fun to see the other teenage school kids waiting on the platform thinking the train was going to stop and then jumping out of their skin-tinted skin as we whooshed past. The trains were pretty old and rattly. When the train reached its top speed, the sound of the rails screeching was deafening and the passengers would be bouncing up and down in their bench-like seats. I preferred the fast train, not because it was quicker, but because it didn’t stop to let in teenage schoolgirls. The only stop between Finchley Road, where I got on, and the school, Northwood, was Harrow-on-the-Hill.

Sorry, I’m going to interrupt myself because I’ve just remembered a little story about Harrow-on-the-Hill. I was once trying to get there on a bus and I asked the West Indian bus conductor where the bus was going. ‘Herne Hill,’ he said. Herne Hill is nowhere near Harrow-on-the-Hill. But if you say Herne Hill with a West Indian accent (try it) it sounds exactly like Harrow-on-the-Hill. So I ended up in Herne Hill.

Anyway, as I was writing. My biggest fear when stopping at Harrow-on-the-Hill was realized one morning when, as I was sitting alone, about fifteen loud, gum-chewing, hair-twiddling, hoop-earring-wearing girls got on and sat all around me in their green uniforms with shortened skirts and green tights. I was so embarrassed I went bright red, which only served to highlight my skin-tinted Clearasil even more. The loudest of the girls had cheap make-up and her hair was pulled back so tight in her shocking pink scrunchy, it looked like she’d given herself a face-lift. She stared directly at me, I immediately turned to look out of the window. ‘You’re well ugly, intya,’ she said while her friends all cracked up laughing at me bouncing around as the train picked up speed. I would have felt more comfortable playing the National Anthem on my guitar on top of Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s Jubilee.

My confidence was at an all-time low. Even in sexual matters concerning only myself I managed to fail (brace yourself for this). At some time during puberty, boys start to masturbate. Deal with it. If you’re a young boy reading this, thank you for taking the time out of your hectic masturbation schedule to read my book. If you’re an even younger boy, this is all still to come (so to speak), and if you’re a parent, please knock before entering your son’s bedroom. Now, as I have previously mentioned, my parents never discussed any sexual developmental matters with me. I have also mentioned that at Merchant Taylors’ I didn’t really have any close friends. The net result was that I didn’t know what ‘wanking’ was.

I started, due to nature, to get erections. My fellow students would talk endlessly about ‘wanking’. I came to the conclusion that wanking meant to have an erection.

So I was constantly getting erections and doing nothing with them. I thought that I was wanking. My vulgar classmates were often chatting about their own masturbation and borrowing each other’s pornography. ‘I wanked three times last night’, ‘Can I borrow your wank mag?’, that kind of thing. A classmate once pointedly asked me, ‘Do you wank, McIntyre?’

To which I responded, ‘Yeah, all the time,’ thinking he was referring to getting erections, ‘I wake up wanking.’

‘You wake up wanking?’ he said incredulously.

‘Yeah, always. I wanked this morning on the train. I wanked for most of Geography. My mum had people round for dinner last night, and I couldn’t stop myself from wanking the whole way through it,’ came my shocking response.

Of course, the more I didn’t attend to these erections, the more frequent they became, until soon they became permanent. I was walking around with a permanent erection. I telephoned my friend Sam, who now went to Westminster School in central London. Although I was embarrassed, I knew Sam would have some answers.

A few weeks after I discovered masturbation.

This was obviously before the days when all teenagers had a mobile phone, but I was lucky enough to have a phone in my bedroom. Although you wouldn’t know it was a phone because it looked like a Ferrari. There was a shop on Golders Green Road that sold gimmicky phones, and as a family we embraced them. The phone in the hall was a frog, and the phone in my mum’s room was a piano. I should probably update you on the décor in our home and how my mother’s taste was developing in the nineties. The house was very colourful. Pastel colours. Every pastel colour there is, clashing with each other. All the rooms had different-coloured carpets from each other and from the hallways and from the walls that had different colours from each other. It was as if she’d looked at the Dulux colour chart and said, ‘I can’t decide, let’s have all of them.’ So I called Sam on my Ferrari phone.