Late Nigh Walks

There can be nothing to make you feel more ancient than young people who had out flyers for city centre night clubs avoiding you in the street.

These pretty long legged sexy chicks saw husband and I approaching and almost got hit by a speeding car to make sure we weren’t getting an invite to ‘Hard Rock Sexy Night at The Nice’ n’ Sleazy’.

We laughed, wrapped our warm woollen coats around us and carried on regardless. Young people were hanging out in groups in what can only be described as beachwear, on a dark September night in Glasgow. I don’t ever recall wearing a skimpy pair of knickers and a tiny bra without a coat, in the freezing cold.

As we walked further down the road we came upon a couple of big fat Romanian women selling pink glittery cowboy hats and some cheap cellophane wrapped roses. The fat Romanian woman took one look at husband and offered him the chance to buy a cheap tacky pink hat.

“Do I really look like a man who wears pink plastic cowboy hats? He asked politely as he stuck both hands into his long black cashmere overcoat.
The woman begged for money and we both walked on, I have no issue with Eastern European beggars or hat sellers but if we don’t get offered the nightclub tickets then we surely don’t qualify for the pink hats either. The Romanians need to get some marketing tips from the sexy club promoters.

It had been a good night out; we had gone to a lovely restaurant called The Rogano in Glasgow for our wedding anniversary.

We used to eat there many years ago but since our incessant travelling and busy lives we haven’t really had time to enjoy our own culinary delights in our own fair city for such a long time.

It was lovely and the meal was awesome.

We both decided to take the surprise menu.
It consists of the latest fresh produce and seemed a good idea.

I asked the waiter (who must have about 18 years old if he was day)
“Does the chef come running out the kitchen dressed as a cat, carrying a huge silver platter and as he meows loudly does he pull the lid off the platter and reveal a stuffed mouse?”

The young man, in the very posh restaurant looked at me with frightened eyes and said “No, I think it might be fresh fish” without a smile or any hint of humour.

“Well cats like fish as so that would work also” I added, still trying to be funny, as other diners craned their necks to see who the mad person was.

“She is always trying to be funny, ignore her and please add a bottle of Rose to that order please” husband sombrely spoke. The waiter liked him and hated me and my ‘whacky’ ways.

The food was fabulous. After dinner I decided to go outside to their heated seating area and have coffee and a ciggie, husband brought out his after dinner brandy to join me, it was our wedding anniversary and so we should be together he told me.

Outside there was a small drunken debacle going on with various Glaswegian punters who after too much expensive wine, were going a wee bit mad. Just shouting and staggering about, nothing violent.

The restaurant waiters, who were all dressed in their starched black and whites, were nervously trying to contain the madness.

We sat beside two women in their mid-fifties who were slightly merry and nice, if not slightly beaten down a bit. They had the air of two women who had seen their fair share of shit lives. Just as we sat down with our coffee and drinks, one big fat drunk man stumbled away from their table.

The gas heaters pressed down warmth through the frosty Glasgow air, out door tables are popular since the smoking ban and are always crowded at night.

“That drunk man would not leave our table, but we did get rid of him eventually, he wasn’t bad, just a bit crazy” the blonde weary woman said to us. I think she was concerned that we assumed she and her friend were part of the drunken rabble.

“Well I am sure he meant no harm” husband added and smiled.

Two male waiters milled around the small steel topped tables and started clearing up as the drunks moved out.

The two women explained they were sisters and then just as we were about to toast 27 years of marriage the blonde one blurted out “My son died last year, our mother died this year and my husband died when I was young and our cousin died” she pointed to her sister and added “her husband just got put in a home with a long illness and is never coming out again”

We all sat there is complete silence, the staff shuffled their feet and didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know what to say so I blurted out “My mother was murdered!”
The two women stared at me; the atmosphere was thick with awkwardness and husband burst out laughing and said “It wasn’t a competition; you don’t have to shout out deaths Janey!” He laughed more and clapped his hands with amusement at my odd statement.

The two women laughed as well and I giggled under my breath, the posh starched aproned staff stood uneasily and then they started laughing as well.

“Here is to all the dead people we both know, and to many more years of enjoying the living” I said and lifted my coffee cup, we all clinked glasses and sat smiling.

“Yes, cheers!” said the two ladies.

We all sat chatting some more about life and other stuff that strangers do when they meet, we traded backgrounds and past address’s and spoke about jobs and places we both knew and have been.

“We haven’t been out in years, this was nice chatting” the blonde woman added and smiled broadly.
“Yes, it is nice” I said and it was nice.

The Handbag and the Pliers

I recall our first wedding anniversary as if it were yesterday. We ran a pub at the time and we both got out of bed to them smell of coffee emanating from the coffee maker which was on a timer and spluttered to life every morning at 9am. The radio clicked on and Fat Larry’s band sang ‘Zoom’. It was 1981.
I never thought we would last a year of marriage. No one did, in fact the favourite bet had been 6 months. We were so mismatched, one person really quiet and easily annoyed the other (me) loud and rambunctious.

I knew he would be my boyfriend from the minute we met, he mentioned on an early meeting that he wanted to travel and from that moment I set out to bewitch him into my way of thinking.
Any boy that wanted to escape Scotland was ok by me.

I couldn’t believe I met someone who saw beyond, babies, factory work, religious bigotry and football. My idea of hell was to settle down in a wee council house, raise some kids and spend my life making steak pie and soup whilst being a member of the local bingo. It was his idea of hell also.

Yet, still we didn’t match. He didn’t like socialising, he mistrusted people in general, hated families, despite being one of seven sons with an overbearing father who was named locally a ‘Gangster’ and he disliked having to work in the pub his father gave us to run.

It seemed all our plans to run away to see the world were put on hold, to appease his dad. We conformed, we became publicans, we served booze that we didn’t drink, we breathed in smoke that we didn’t want and we listened to enough shit from drunken wife beaters to make any normal person prefer a slow death rather than carrying on.

But carry on we did.

So that morning of our wedding anniversary we requested a night off to go into town and have dinner in a city restaurant. I was excited, we never got to eat dinner together in almost a year as the pub was so short staffed, and we worked the shifts between us.

One ate dinner and the other tended the bar until it was swap over time. Either one of us ate would regularly eat slightly cold food.

I pressed my burgundy skirt that matched my jacket, a crisp white blouse was laid out and I found a wee handbag that was given to me by my sister. I never up until that point used a handbag. I had no need.
I never carried cash or keys and I never owned any make up!
I was twenty years old and had never been shown or had any interest in make up.
I didn’t come from people who used make up, my mum never had any in her life and my sister married young and left home when I was 14 years old, so I hadn’t been introduced to it.

I remember sitting in the bedroom wondering what to put in that handbag and I came up with an idea. I lifted a pair of heavy red rubber-handled pliers made of dense stainless steel and shoved them into the black satin lining of the bag just to weigh it down a bit. It felt better with a bit of weight in it.

Later that night husband and I headed off on the bus into town. It was a short ride as we lived near the city centre and we walked to the restaurant. It was lovely just to sit down and eat Indian food in peace, both of us getting warm food at the same time.
“Where did you get that wee handbag?” husband asked as I lifted it politely to go to the bathroom, they way other women did.
“My sister gave me it” I answered.
He looked puzzled and said “What do you have in it?”

I leaned over in and whispered “I didn’t have anything to put it in, so look”
I held the bag open and he saw the big pliers in the bag. He laughed out loud and said “Are you going to take the fittings off the toilet pan and bring them back to the pub?”

“I should do that actually as our toilet pan in the pub is broken” I laughed back.

I went into the fancy toilets of the Indian restaurant and stared at pliers in my handbag and wondered if there were other women in the world who carried tools in their bag because they didn’t own stuff to put there. I couldn’t ever imagine what I would ever need a handbag for in my future, who needs to carry stuff around with them? Pockets were good for loose change and keys.

Little did I know that in my future I would own a huge bag collection and ultimately end up carrying my entire life in bags as I travelled around the world, needing so much stuff, like my IPod, passport, credit cards, painkillers, tampons, pen and notebook all at my fingertips! How naïve I really was back then.

That night was lovely, we enjoyed the dinner and spoke about how after one year of marriage it was still ok and we should try to see if we could last another year.

“I promise Janey, one day we will get away from here and travel, I don’t know how or when but we will get there” he whispered as we stood in the cold September night as the rain slashed side ways into our faces.

Well we stayed in that marriage and that pub for another fifteen years before fate dealt us a hand to escape. My father in law died in 1994 and the family turned on each other to the point where we felt we were running blindly into an abyss. We had to make a life changing decision. We would simply go.

We didn’t know where we would end up, what job we should be doing or even where we would stay. With having an eight year old daughter in tow now the adventure was a lot scarier and riskier than we anticipated.
But we did it, we never once looked back. We left our pub and flat, got a house and I became a stand up comic and writer.

Slowly of course, not overnight. Though sometimes when comedy seemed too hard or to politically difficult to break into with me being a woman and in her 30s, my husband never once told me to give in. He reckoned after 15 years of doing his preferred job I should carry on with my preferred career, no mater how difficult it seemed to be.

So today we are 27 years married, and tonight we are going to my favourite top restaurant. I will carry a handbag, but leave behind the pliers; I will pay for the meal, as I prefer to do that. We will eat nice food and wonder yet again why we are still together (this is something we do quite often, as we are still mismatched). We don’t have answers, we can only keep wondering. It may take us another ten years of wondering, but that will be ok, I suppose.

If not… I can always shove heavy pliers into my handbag and hit him hard on the head, ok not the romantic ending you wanted dear reader, but…it’s my life and I get to choose!

The Acid Trip, the Robbers and Nancy the Dog

Back in 1982 we owned a bar in the East End of Glasgow.

It was the kind of place that Hollywood directors would later spend millions of pounds recreating when they made films about the birth of New York.

It was a back street hellhole; the customers wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Tarantino film which had featured vampires, dead people and heroin users.

The carpets stuck to your feet with years of urine and indecipherable waste that may have dated back to Victorian times.

The walls were a result of umpteen fires; it had loads of smoke damage and sported that aged, crackled paint which is now fashionable with gays in urban lofts.

The artwork consisted of the kind that showed dogs and cats dressed in cheap suits playing poker pasted on a tacky mirror. The customers looked like the badly dressed animals in the picture.

I fitted in: that was the scary part.

I was only 21 years old.

We had a pool table. Occasionally, if a fight broke out, the pool balls and cues were used as weapons and stabbing implements. How lazy were our thugs? They didn’t even bother to carry their own artillery.

We had to buy new pool balls and cues every three months due to the damage they received. New eyes and foreheads weren’t our responsibility.

One hot summer day, I got very bored.

It’s not a good sign if you get bored in a place where there might be a police raid every half hour.

That would be fair excitement to any other soul in a city, but not in Glasgow.

It merely broke up the monotony of dull drugged men, Duran Duran on the jukebox and a vicious pit bull terrier called Nancy that occasionally came bursting in and bit people at random. We never knew who the evil white snub-nosed dog belonged to, but we all carried a scar.

It would butt the door open with its hard head, a scream would go up - “Nancy!” - and people who knew the war cry would leap onto tall stools, the bar or the pool table till Nancy got her fill of anyone who didn’t know the Nancy code.

Some foolish man would assume that this feared ‘Nancy’ was some disgruntled wife coming in for her useless husband and stayed in his place, supping his beer.

Her jerking evil square-looking head, pink nose and foaming mouth made good use of her twenty second raid.

Then the poor unaware soul that never jumped to safety got bitten.

Nancy would run back out of the other door that could be pushed from the inside and off she would go to the next pub on her rounds of biting people, till she got bored as well I suppose.

So the day I got bored I decided to freak out the young guys who had just dropped acid. Acid was popular back then.

I knew this was a potent form of LSD as there had been talk of it knocking people mental.

My plan was this: I would get a local notorious bank robber called Billy who was a customer of mine to fake a robbery in the pub to really freak the boys.

It would be funny I said, as we plotted the scene.

There were three young guys at that pool table. ‘One-Ear’ - a ginger haired spotty man with one ear. ‘Bob the Cat’- a diehard punk who wore chains on his neck. And ‘Dodo’- an eighteen year old skinny heroin user who sang Gene Pitney songs with his eyes shut.

I gave Billy a hand gun that fired blanks. I say this like everyone had a fake gun lying beside the hand wash sink, but this was the East End of Glasgow and that was as normal as having dogs and cats play poker on your walls.

Then I had to recruit the other ‘actors’. One guy called Ike was, in fact, a real actor and was in the film ‘Gregory’s Girl’.

I directed the show.

Ike would be shot and fall to the floor, I would hand over a bag of cash and the gun would then be fired at me and I would die. We spoke in hushed tones till we got the scene right in our heads.

Billy walked outside and pulled over his face the brown nylon tights I gave him as a mask. I watched through the glass panel on the door.

He dramatically held the handgun aloft and prepared to run into the bar to play out the scene. At that moment two policemen, who were in a passing car, stopped their vehicle and leapt from it, jumped on him and held him on the pavement.

“It’s a fucking joke.” he hissed as the coppers tried to cuff him. “We are going to freak the customers out. Go ask Janey.” I am sure they had heard every story and excuse going in the East End. Amateur dramatics were not going to stand up in court they must have reckoned.

I was wondering what the fuck was keeping Billy. I mean, he didn’t have to get into character - he was a real robber!

Then I saw through the small door window the policeman started to drag him into a police car and I dashed to the door, opened it and pulled Billy free and shouted at the policemen:

“What the fuck are you doing? We are playing at me being robbed! Do you know how bored I get in there?” I pointed at the pub. “He is not going to rob me. He is pretending to rob me to scare those three fuckwits who are full of acid. It will be fun!”

The policemen looked at each other, shrugged and then let Billy free.

“Come and watch through the other door and see it, if you don’t believe me,” I hissed.

The policemen must have been as bored as me because they agreed and Billy once more pulled the tights over his face, watched as the two policemen ran to the other door on the other side of the building.

They opened the door quietly and peeped through, unnoticed by the three acid heads who still hadn’t hit one ball and were stoned out of their skulls.

Billy kicked the door in and screamed: “Everyone on the fucking floor!”

The three guys didn’t even move, they all stood stock still and stared at the ceiling.

I stifled a giggle and then Billy ran at Ike. He fired the gun at his head. A huge bang went off and Ike dropped to the floor in his best acting skills.
I screamed for effect.

Then Billy demanded that I hand over the money. I had a big bag prepared and held it over and Billy then shot me. The gun noise failed this time and Billy actually shouted “Bang” to make up for the lack of noise!

I fell behind the bar and lay there like dead.

I managed to fall in a position on the floor where I could still see the three pool-playing acid heads.

They hadn’t even moved! They were all staring at the fucking ceiling.

Billy held the gun over towards the three guys and shouted: “You saw fuck all or you die!”

None of them spoke. They all stood stiffly and stared upwards, not moving, not breathing, not looking anywhere but the same spot on the ceiling that they had been visually fixated with since the robbery began.

Billy ran out. At that moment Nancy the biting dog ran in, she took one look at the bodies on the floor, the men staring at the ceiling, she was totally confused and headed straight for the other door for a quick exit.

I had never seen that dog looked so scared in my life!

At the other door she saw the two policemen on their knees peeping through the door. She finally got her victims, leapt and bit one viciously on the head and made off into the street. Barking as she went.

The policeman screamed, fell into the pub which by now resembled an elaborate game of statues and the three acid trippers dropped to the floor when they saw the policeman in uniform.

They huddled together under the pool table and clung to each other like doomed men on the Titanic.

I leapt to my feet and clapped my hands, laughing loudly. The three men under the pool table screamed like girls.

Ike got up and hugged me and we both took a bow. The three men screamed again. This time one fainted and the other two screamed more.

The policeman ran around looking for the dog and demanded the first aid box.

Billy came running in carrying the money bag and laughed at the policeman with the bleeding head and watched the remaining two acid boys scream and scream over and over again. The noise was deafening. Ike and I were laughing our heads off and commenting on each others fantastic ‘death’ positions.

At that point, my father-in-law came into the pub and tried to make sense of the chaos.

“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted over the noise.

“George, it looks bad but here’s what happened. Billy, Ike and I decided to pretend to be robbed to freak out the junkies, the police watched on for a laugh, but one of them got attacked by Nancy the biter and Ike and I pretended to be dead, then Billy ran back in and the guys under the pool table are really scared...funny eh?”

“Why?” he merely asked, his arms outstretched.

I looked around at the frenzied scene and said quietly: “I was bored”.

The three acid trippers lay under that pool table for nearly an hour and could not be coaxed out till the drug finally left their system. The policemen drove off to the local emergency hospital to get a tetanus jag for the injured cop and Ike, Billy and I decided that acting was a great job and one day I should write a play about the pub.

“Maybe when I get bored enough” I smiled.

And one day I did!