Still Standing: The Savage Years (34 page)

‘Well I’m going to have a look,’ Murphy said, leaving me to try to do something with my wig which was less bouffant than usual, having travelled across the Atlantic hidden at the bottom of my case, rolled up in the leg of a pair of jeans in case customs asked too many questions. ‘I’m not missing out on a party.’

Within five minutes he was back.

‘Not to your liking then?’ I asked, lifting the hair of the wig with a tailcomb and giving it a good blast from a can of lacquer.

‘Well, there’s gay and then there’s very gay, and that down there is very, very, very gay’ was the party boy’s only comment.

The hair lacquer came in handy for killing the enormous palmetto bugs that scuttled across the floor with alarming regularity. One good squirt was enough to paralyse them, enabling me to squash them with the
Yellow Pages
. The covers of this makeshift instrument of death were soon splattered brown with the blood of my many victims.

During spring break Fort Lauderdale is heaving with teenagers and lying on the beach surrounded by thousands of the little monsters, each with a radio or ghetto blaster blaring out disco music, was hardly a relaxing experience. Every young male of the species took delight in hollering out, ‘Pussy, pussy, hey puss-eee,’ every time a desirable female came into sight even though he wouldn’t know what to do with one if it were shoved in his face accompanied by a
detailed instruction manual complete with torch and magnifying glass.

My first impressions of the country I’d wanted to visit since I was little weren’t good, I’m afraid, and after my first night working the Copacabana Club I wanted to nuke the entire population of Florida.

They couldn’t understand one single word I was saying. I might as well have been speaking in ancient Aramaic for all they knew, as my thick Birkenhead brogue was impossible for them to decipher. It didn’t help matters much that I was gabbling from nerves and that the sound system, surprisingly for a club this size, was lousy, plus my microphone could’ve been the one that the Andrews Sisters used to entertain the troops during the war, it was so antiquated. In all it was a disaster and all I wanted to do was get straight on the first plane home, away from the chants of ‘Pu-ssseee’, non-stop partying, palmetto bugs and Americans.

I had a few days’ stay of execution before my next gig, which was to take place in the disco of the hotel in lieu of payment for our rooms. I was dreading it, so we went to Disneyland for a couple of days, staying in the kind of rundown motel that I’d seen so often in the movies.

As a kid, my two goals in life were to go on holiday to a Butlin’s Holiday Camp and Disneyland. My mother wouldn’t even consider the former as she thought Butlin’s ‘common’, and Disneyland was out of the question as it was way out of our price league.

‘The only way you’ll get to Disneyland, son, is if you join the merchant navy and go to sea,’ I remember her saying as she ran a sheet through the mangle, ‘or if your dad wins the pools and I don’t hold out much hope on that one, seeing’s how he couldn’t win a bloody argument.’

Now here I was, standing at the gates of the Magic Kingdom and gazing upon Cinderella’s Castle, gibbering ecstatically like a child, bursting at the seams to explore every single square inch of this promised land.

I tore around with the speed of a roadrunner, impatient to get on the rides and irritated with Paul and Murphy for not showing the same enthusiasm. I made poor, long-suffering Murphy go on the Peter Pan ride with me six times, oohing and aahing each time as our car, shaped like Captain Hook’s galleon, flew over Tower Bridge. Either some pixie dust had fallen on him or he’d been temporarily lobotomized by the subliminal hammering he was taking from the Disney Corporation’s brand of highly manufactured magic as he started to enjoy himself, even going so far as to ask me with glazed eyes and a rictus grin if I wanted to go on the Pinocchio ride again.

I’d like to take the opportunity to apologize here and now to the young woman who played Snow White, for I stalked her with the zeal of a
Star Trek
fanatic who’d been told that Mr Spock was in the vicinity. I’m surprised Disney didn’t take a restraining order out on me, for every time Ms White turned round I was behind her, frantically waving at Murphy to take a photo.

I have to say it was a great day out; Disney certainly knows how to run a theme park. The staff fascinated me. Surely no one can be that cheerful? It wasn’t natural. How did they do it? I’d have to be on heavy medication round the clock to keep that up and despite finding them slightly irritating and plastic I grudgingly admired them for their unwavering ability to never let the mask slip. They always managed to convey that Disneyland was the only place in the world they wanted to be, as they flashed that one-thousand-watt
‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’ smile at everyone they ushered through the turnstile.

After nine hours of charging around Disneyland I lay on my bed in the motel, surrounded by a mountain of carrier bags containing an assortment of Disneyana gleaned from the shops on Main Street, exhausted but happy.

‘I can’t get this bloody tune out of my head,’ Murphy moaned.

‘Which tune?’ I said, yawning.

‘All of ’em, particularly that annoying La, la la la … shite.’

‘You mean “It’s A Small World”?’ Paul piped up, starting to sing the damn thing.

‘Don’t!’ Murphy and I chorused in unison, Murphy vanishing into the bathroom for a shower and me outside on the veranda for a fag.

The occupants of the room next door seemed to be checking out and I couldn’t help noticing that they had a lot of luggage, including a set of lighting and camera equipment. I nodded and smiled to be polite and one of the men lugging a metal case out came over to me.

‘Could I have one of those, buddy?’ he asked, running his fingers through his shoulder-length hair. ‘I sure as hell need one after a day in there.’

‘You been shooting a film?’ I asked offering him a Lambert & Butler.

‘Yeah,’ he said nonchalantly, accepting a light. ‘We’ve been shooting a porno.’

‘A porno? In the room? Don’t the management mind?’ I couldn’t believe it.

‘What? The management of this dump don’t give a damn
what goes on in these rooms as long as they get their money. How long are you staying here for?’

‘We leave in the morning,’ I said.

‘Good thing, man, this place sucks, it’s only fit for winos, hookers and people like us in the porn business. You wouldn’t catch me getting into a dirty bed in this motel, oh no.’

Thanking me for the cigarette, he went back to his colleagues and I wandered back into our room to tell the others what I’d just heard and to inspect the bedding for any suspicious stains.

I’d have done anything to get out of having to go on at the Marlin as I didn’t want a repeat performance of my experience at the Copa. However, the audience at the Marlin were a different lot altogether. Whereas the Copa crowd were too cool for school, the patrons of the Marlin were a more down-to-earth bunch … a little rougher, shall we say, and far more my type of audience.

In the middle of ‘Don’t Tell Momma’ a leather queen walked on to the dance floor and shoved ten dollars down the front of my basque. I thought he was sending me up until a young Latino sporting a vest that bore the slogan ‘I love Florida’, a sentiment I couldn’t agree with, did the same thing, only this time he dropped his dollar bill down the top of my thigh-length patent boots.

I shouted to the DJ to stop the backing track as I wanted to enquire why these sons-of-bitches (an Americanism I’d picked up, but thankfully later dropped) were using me as a collecting box.

‘It’s a tip,’ the leather queen shouted.

‘A tip? I’m not a fuckin’ cab driver,’ I roared back to much merriment among the crowd.

‘No,’ he explained, ‘over here if we like you, we tip you.’

‘Really …’

I worked like a whore on a dock full of sailors on shore leave to get those tips, sending the crowd and the hotel up ruthlessly (the leather queen was a godsend) while talking about my experiences in Florida, real and fictional. I didn’t really get mistaken for the Princess Aurora by gangs of adoring children in Disneyland, nor did I inadvertently land a starring role in a porn movie called
Lift My Veil and Kiss Me
, the torrid tale of a young nun’s sexual awakening shot in a motel room with fourteen soldiers and an Alsatian.

I was simply doing what I did back home, only tailoring the material for an American audience and speaking a little slower to give them a chance to get used to my accent, and it paid off. The fire-eating brought them running with fistfuls of dollars, Skippy broke all box office records and by the time I got to the end of the rousing and slightly obscene parody (all right, downright filthy) of ‘Que Sera, Sera’ that I always finished with I resembled Ken Dodd’s mattress with money sticking out all over the place, even from my wig.

By the time Murphy came back to the dressing room I’d offloaded my loot on to the make-up shelf and was busy counting it out.

‘Five dollars, ten dollars, that’s fifteen … and another ten, twenty-five, and one dollar – what miserable bastard tipped a dollar?’

‘They want you to do another couple of nights, Savage,’ Murphy said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘They loved it.’

‘I’ll do the whole week at these prices,’ I said, straightening out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. ‘I’ve made over three hundred bucks here. Look! Someone shoved a twenty down me drawers.’

‘I’ll have that,’ Murphy said, snatching it out of my hand. ‘Manager’s perks.’

‘Pimp,’ I said, trying to snatch it back.

‘If I’m a pimp, me little darlin,’ he replied, ‘then you know what that makes you, don’t you? Now get changed and come out, the manager wants to buy you a drink.’

I did two extra nights and then flew to work the Copa in Key West, which turned out to be another enjoyable and highly profitable experience thanks to my new-found confidence and shameful hustling for tips.

‘I must see if I can get the crowd at the Vauxhall into this tipping habit,’ I said to Murphy on the way home.

‘Try it,’ he said, ‘just try it.’

I did, and someone gave me 5p.

In April I marched with over thirty thousand others through London in a demonstration against Clause 28, an amendment to a government bill making it illegal to ‘promote homosexuality in schools or the acceptability of homosexuality’. This bill came about after a Tory bigot named David Wilshire, who was later to be implicated in the MPs’ expenses scandal, discovered an innocuous book entitled
Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin
in a teachers’ resource centre. With the help of Dame Jill Knight, the Dolores Umbridge of politics, Wilshire was then able to introduce Clause 28.

‘They’ll be herding us into trucks and sending us to concentration camps next,’ Murphy said grimly, echoing a lot of gay men and women’s thoughts.

The comedian Simon Fanshawe and his partner Rick, always very much into the world of alternative comedy, asked if I’d like to compère a comedy show at the Glasgow Mayfest ’88.
I was a bit apprehensive at first about stepping out of my comfort zone but Murphy convinced me, saying it wouldn’t do me any harm to get out and be seen by a wider audience. I’m glad he did as I had a ball.

The majority of the acts appearing at the Mayfest seemed to be staying in our hotel and each night after we’d all finished our respective shows the hotel bar became party central. Ian McKellen, still just a plain old CBE back then and not yet fully out of the closet although there were a few toes peeping out from under the door, was appearing in his play
Acting Shakespeare
at the Theatre Royal and he invited me and Murphy to go and see him. I was slightly in awe of Ian after watching him on stage as he’d managed to make Shakespeare, a playwright whose text was previously incomprehensible to me, suddenly make sense. He brought the words to life. It was a revelation, almost as if a magician had revealed the secret to a trick that had always had me puzzled, and I became both a fan of Ian’s and a fan of Shakespeare. He gave me a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets which I still have, my favourite starting with the lines

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field

– mellifluous verse to describe the ageing process, which had Botox been invented in Mr S’s day he probably wouldn’t have written. Ian’s a good man, generous of heart and mind, who knows how to have a good time, and we’ve remained firm friends ever since.

A mutual admiration society was set up between myself and Charabanc, a women’s theatre group from Northern Ireland who were on just before me at the Mitchell Library.
Somewhere over the Balcony
was a dark comedy set in Belfast’s infamous Divis Flats and written by Marie Jones, one of the trio of actors who later went on to write the hugely successful
Stones in Their Pockets
. I fell in love with these wild women who, like myself, enjoyed nothing more than a late night after a show spent drinking, singing and spinning a good yarn in the presence of lively company. Murphy sang ‘Slievenamon’, an Irish ballad that my father would’ve enjoyed and that had the Irish girls in tears and me heartlessly squirming.

Marie promised to put me in one of her plays if I agreed to perform it with them in the Divis Flats, which of course I did, so if you’re reading this, Marie, I’m still bloody waiting.

Business was very good for the show at the Mitchell Library, which thankfully went extremely well. Despite my initial reticence at leaving the protective cocoon of the gay circuit for the uncharted territory of the Glasgow Mayfest I loved every minute of it, especially my glowing reviews in the broadsheets, which I pretended I hadn’t seen as I’d already adopted the stance among actors that ‘I never read them’.

I was nervous on the first night of the show, unable to sit still and chain-smoking to calm down.

‘What’s up with you?’ Murphy said, annoyingly unruffled as I tried to hide my nerves in the dressing room I shared with the other comics. ‘What are you getting nervous about? Don’t forget, this lot out there have never seen you before, give ’em the old tried and true you’ve been doing down the Vauxhall.’