FRIDAY 6/4/2-24: EXCITING ADVENTURES IN THE
STASI VAN
We all woke up in various slothful states of disrepair, in stages. The floor is hardly the most comfortable place to spend the night, so I creaked and cracked and snapped and jarred my weary aching bones into some vague semblance of walking ability, making us all a cup of coffee. In the early hours of the morning, I remembered telling Fred that Burger Shop Slaughter, from his band I Spit On Your Gravy (from the classic album Fruit Loop City), is one of my all-time fave songs. The three of us drunkenly sang the whole thing, with Andrew filming it on his phone. A classic life moment. Checking through my own phone randomly, I found a twenty-three-second-long video, time stamped 00:40 a.m., of Andrew and I (him in close-up, me off-camera) screaming insanely along to Gypsy Motherfucker by GG Allin. Neither of us could remember filming this. Which is hardly surprising, as it was from around nine hours after we started drinking the night before. Oh well, these things happen. Whilst this video is a timeless modern masterpiece…I won’t be sharing it. Sorry to disappoint, gentle reader.
Thank your lucky fucking stars.
Laughing.
Classic nasty, hateful, vicious, superb song, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh1jlAg9eW8&ab_channel=scumfuc616
Food had been kind of scarce over the last couple of days, and apparently the guys had been eating somewhat sparsely over the previous couple of weeks, so we decided to go to a nearby café to get a full breakfast. The place had recently changed hands, and I had never been in it. So why not go in with a guy looking like a giraffe wearing a (local St Kilda’s pizza shop) Topolino’s baseball cap, and another hulking bearded guy in a jeans jacket and a cowboy hat? In a small village, it won’t attract any attention.
Of course.
We went into the small café, which only has room for around a dozen people. The two middle-aged women in charge were very pleasant, and I recognised their young waitress, a girl of round seventeen who was working in the new local Chinese the last time I saw her. I comment that I was in last February when she was in and that it was freezing, two degrees with no heating on. She said she had been glad to get out of there, and that the owners of the place were so stupid they had been pouring hot oil down the drain, as opposed to disposing of it sensibly. This idiocy had now led to the road having to be dug up in front of the place. I had been wondering about that, and I shook my head and tutted. We ordered our food, and Fred ordered a Maltesers milkshake to wash it down with. Inspired by this, I ordered the same. Andrew was more sensible and went for coffee.
The two pleasant older women were very solicitous of their Australian customers, once they heard their unusual accents (we don’t get many Australians round these parts, obviously), bombarding them with friendly questions about their trip and why they were there and suchlike. As the food arrived Andrew and Fred talked to them amiably, and I told the women that Andrew was a filmmaker and Fred was his documentary subject, their not-here friend Dick was a filmmaker too, they were showing their films in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and they were staying with me. They oohed and cooed, because it genuinely was really unusual for the village to have this sort of stuff happen in it. Then somebody, I can’t remember who, made the bright move of saying the trailer for Pub was up on Youtube. They went through to the back of the café all excited to watch it, and we just continued eating, not even thinking anything of it, because we were so used to the subject matter. This is the trailer in question:
The atmosphere in the place noticeably cooled after this, and the women stayed through the back and stopped talking to us – laughing here as I recall it. I thought shit, the Pub trailer has Fred fucking a cooked chicken in it, I hope that young lassie never saw that.
“Did you see the trailer?” I asked her.
“I only saw half of it,” she said noncommittally, smiling. I briefly wondered if that meant that one of the women had snatched the phone from her hands during the weird scenes in the trailer to stop her seeing them. But it was too late, the damage was done now. When we finished and paid at the door, the woman who took the money didn’t say much at all, far from her solicitous manner to her tourist clientele earlier on.
Some people just don’t know how to handle high art, I must say.
I noted the change of atmosphere outside to Andrew, and he noted noticing the same thing after the trailer had been watched. “Let’s face it, this is not a film for nice people,” he said sagely, and I had to agree. Fuck it. Still laughing here.
We fucked around the flat for a few hours, until it was time for us to go pick up the van at 3.45 p.m. I’d booked it for that time to save as much time and money as I could during the day, leaving it as close to showtime as I could, plus time to get through to Glasgow for the GMAC screening. We stepped out of the flat, Andrew last, and I looked round and saw him shut the glass inside front door. It had clicked shut before I could even say anything.
“Oh shit. You shut that door,” I said, groaning.
We all woke up in various slothful states of disrepair, in stages. The floor is hardly the most comfortable place to spend the night, so I creaked and cracked and snapped and jarred my weary aching bones into some vague semblance of walking ability, making us all a cup of coffee. In the early hours of the morning, I remembered telling Fred that Burger Shop Slaughter, from his band I Spit On Your Gravy (from the classic album Fruit Loop City), is one of my all-time fave songs. The three of us drunkenly sang the whole thing, with Andrew filming it on his phone. A classic life moment. Checking through my own phone randomly, I found a twenty-three-second-long video, time stamped 00:40 a.m., of Andrew and I (him in close-up, me off-camera) screaming insanely along to Gypsy Motherfucker by GG Allin. Neither of us could remember filming this. Which is hardly surprising, as it was from around nine hours after we started drinking the night before. Oh well, these things happen. Whilst this video is a timeless modern masterpiece…I won’t be sharing it. Sorry to disappoint, gentle reader.
Thank your lucky fucking stars.
Laughing.
Classic nasty, hateful, vicious, superb song, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh1jlAg9eW8&ab_channel=scumfuc616
Food had been kind of scarce over the last couple of days, and apparently the guys had been eating somewhat sparsely over the previous couple of weeks, so we decided to go to a nearby café to get a full breakfast. The place had recently changed hands, and I had never been in it. So why not go in with a guy looking like a giraffe wearing a (local St Kilda’s pizza shop) Topolino’s baseball cap, and another hulking bearded guy in a jeans jacket and a cowboy hat? In a small village, it won’t attract any attention.
Of course.
We went into the small café, which only has room for around a dozen people. The two middle-aged women in charge were very pleasant, and I recognised their young waitress, a girl of round seventeen who was working in the new local Chinese the last time I saw her. I comment that I was in last February when she was in and that it was freezing, two degrees with no heating on. She said she had been glad to get out of there, and that the owners of the place were so stupid they had been pouring hot oil down the drain, as opposed to disposing of it sensibly. This idiocy had now led to the road having to be dug up in front of the place. I had been wondering about that, and I shook my head and tutted. We ordered our food, and Fred ordered a Maltesers milkshake to wash it down with. Inspired by this, I ordered the same. Andrew was more sensible and went for coffee.
The two pleasant older women were very solicitous of their Australian customers, once they heard their unusual accents (we don’t get many Australians round these parts, obviously), bombarding them with friendly questions about their trip and why they were there and suchlike. As the food arrived Andrew and Fred talked to them amiably, and I told the women that Andrew was a filmmaker and Fred was his documentary subject, their not-here friend Dick was a filmmaker too, they were showing their films in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and they were staying with me. They oohed and cooed, because it genuinely was really unusual for the village to have this sort of stuff happen in it. Then somebody, I can’t remember who, made the bright move of saying the trailer for Pub was up on Youtube. They went through to the back of the café all excited to watch it, and we just continued eating, not even thinking anything of it, because we were so used to the subject matter. This is the trailer in question:
The atmosphere in the place noticeably cooled after this, and the women stayed through the back and stopped talking to us – laughing here as I recall it. I thought shit, the Pub trailer has Fred fucking a cooked chicken in it, I hope that young lassie never saw that.
“Did you see the trailer?” I asked her.
“I only saw half of it,” she said noncommittally, smiling. I briefly wondered if that meant that one of the women had snatched the phone from her hands during the weird scenes in the trailer to stop her seeing them. But it was too late, the damage was done now. When we finished and paid at the door, the woman who took the money didn’t say much at all, far from her solicitous manner to her tourist clientele earlier on.
Some people just don’t know how to handle high art, I must say.
I noted the change of atmosphere outside to Andrew, and he noted noticing the same thing after the trailer had been watched. “Let’s face it, this is not a film for nice people,” he said sagely, and I had to agree. Fuck it. Still laughing here.
We fucked around the flat for a few hours, until it was time for us to go pick up the van at 3.45 p.m. I’d booked it for that time to save as much time and money as I could during the day, leaving it as close to showtime as I could, plus time to get through to Glasgow for the GMAC screening. We stepped out of the flat, Andrew last, and I looked round and saw him shut the glass inside front door. It had clicked shut before I could even say anything.
“Oh shit. You shut that door,” I said, groaning.
“Was I not meant to? I was wondering even as I did it if I should be doing it,” Andrew said in confusion, sensing something was up, frowning.
“Well, now we can’t get back in. The door locks if you close it, and can’t be opened from the inside. I should have said to you, it’s not your fault, you weren’t to know,” I said, sighing. It was a weird quirk of the door’s. I had somehow managed to lock it twice from the inside…and it has no lock. There’s just something weird with the mechanism in the door that means it locks when you shut the door. You can open it from the inside with a knife just slid down the lock to spring it, but you can’t do that from the outside. I had just gotten used to not shutting the door, but had not warned my guests about the dangers of closing a door in a flat.
“We’ll just have to break in later, fuck it,” I sighed shrugging. I did make sure to say to Andrew a couple of times it wasn’t his fault, because it wasn’t, and I wasn’t angry, because I wasn’t. These things happen. We crossed the road and got the bus up into the town in the pouring rain, Fred not increasing the bus window value by sketching on it this time. I had him and Andrew wait under an abandoned shop doorway whilst I walked over to the van rental place ten soaking minutes’ walk away. I’m not naming the company, they’re not paying me to advertise. I had rented a van because it was cheaper than a car, and would have more room for luggage.
The young rental guy and I walked round the red four-door Transit Custom van in the bucketing rain, him looking at the identifying sheet that showed all the marks and scrapes and dings out of the paintwork. He pointed out various places where the pain had supposedly been damaged: “You can’t see for the rain, but there’s scrapes here…and here…here…” He went along pointing at rainsoaked, totally invisible supposed damage sites. I just nodded and said nothing much, making the occasional vague assenting grunting sound. Christ, for all I knew he could claim anything at all about this stuff, that we made holes in the paintwork that could have been there earlier, but we just couldn’t see them! Great stuff!
A couple of nose-rivulets-dripping minutes later, and he was finally fully finished pointing out…nothing, something, anything, whatever. He handed me the keys and scooted back off into his dry office. I was very glad I had worn a much heavier rainproof coat than the one I would usually wear, or I would have been soaked even worse than I already was. I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped out of the rain into the van, noting that, thankfully, the tank was full, which would at least save us having to stop at a petrol station. I had stopped into one on the way down to the van to get some Rennie antacids, because I had heartburn, and it cost me four fucking quid! I was just not worth it, should just have suffered in silence! Least the heartburn would have warmed me up in the rain! Still, once again, no use crying over mopped-up spilled stomach acid. I slid my own GPS plug point into the cigarette lighter, and put in the address. That was the only thing left from my car before scrapping, and I was glad I had kept it.
I picked up the guys and we endeavoured to batter through as quickly as we could get to Glasgow as possible, as Dick’s bus from Inverness was getting in at 4.30 p.m. Still, it would take us at least an hour to get through to Glasgow from Kilmarnock town centre, probably more, because I would have to drive sensibly in the wearying rain (“Youse are finally getting to experience some guid Scottish weather!” I said brightly to my meteorologically-culture-shocked guests) to avoid hydroplaning to a nasty fiery death. Still, I couldn’t have picked up the van any earlier, or it would have cost us more, so Dick would just have to wait.
We managed to get through to Glasgow without crashing and burning, needless to say, or I wouldn’t be writing this. I had to admit, I enjoyed driving the van, and it was great to be able to just hop in a vehicle and drive somewhere instead of having to rely on a limiting bus service to get you from here to there. I need to get myself another car as humanly possible, though some of the people-watching I have done over the last few months has been absolutely priceless and shock-and-awe-inspiring. It was around 5.20 p.m. when we got through to Buchanan Street Bus Station. I parked illegally with hazard lights flashing, and Fred and Andrew jumped out to find Dick. Several minutes later they came back, Andrew scoffing something from Greggs. Dick got in the back and we moved off, me thankful we’d managed to get away with parking where we did without a cop of traffic warden moving us on from such a double-yellow-lines-stained extremely busy traffic-snarled area. Dick was a bit half-cut, having apparently had several cans of Tennent's with some weegie ‘characters’ he’d met up the back of the bus.
(Third photo: Andrew Leavold)
We drove round and down a few one-way-system-aw-fuck roads before we found our way over to a car park pretty near the GMAC, which we couldn’t get parked near. We weren’t sure if we should buy a ticket, because the ticket machine times had been spraypainted over by annoying wee pricks – sorry, fine young street artists – and we couldn’t read them. Also, it was past time for the number to ring to pay that way. We asked a couple of people down there parking their own vehicles, but nobody seemed to really know. Eventually we just said fuck it and left the damned thing, gambling that we’d be alright. We quite simply didn’t know if we had to pay, or how much, and we had no coins to pay anyway, so it wasn’t really our fault.
We made our way to a nearby Café Nero to get a warming cup of coffee and get out of the rain for a while. We sat in a corner near the coffee bar, Dick pulling up a chair, when a morbidly obese woman who worked there snottily informed us that she needed access to a door behind Dick that, of course, he had not noticed, and access to the walkway itself. We moved to a different table, unimpressed with her attitude, as the rest of the weird lumpy grumpy lumpenproletariat denizens looked like something from a homeless shelter scene in a David Lynch film. We were actually raising the tone of the place with our presence, as unbelievable as that may have seemed.
Maybe that was what she didn’t like, that when we left our bright peacock mostly-dark colours and personalities would be gone and she’d be left alone with the cast of the travelling roadshow of Freaks: The Terrifying Musical. I drank my mocha and went over to see about getting myself a bottle of water from a fridge to the left of the counter, where another barista was sloooowly serving another customer. I was looking in, evaluating products and prices in very small type up the side, when Sweaty Betty from earlier came over and started rudely reaching across me in front of my line of vision to replace bottles in the gap-tooth display. I grabbed a bottle of water, disgruntled, then moved away from this eighth-wit and her passive-aggressive shit to stand behind the other punter getting served.
I stood for two or three minutes with absolutely no acknowledgement whatsoever from the woman serving. The endomorph who had been messing with me went back behind the counter. She could have served me but just stood, not acknowledging me or making any move towards me. I just cursed, took the fucking bottle of water and put it back, and sat back down with the guys, itching to get the fuck out of there. Which was probably the whole idea with the unhappy woman anyway, though not one of us had said a single word out of place to her or her lobotomised co-worker. You’re serving overpriced English coffee in Glasgow, ‘ladies’, not sparkling water on the French Riviera.
Christ, getting pretentious in Glasgow, that’s just about the funniest thing imaginable, for anybody who knows anything at all about that city. There are genuinely a lot of great people there, and Glasgow patter can be second to none. But it has its pretentious, sniffy arthole section of the citizenry just like anyplace else, and arty pretentious Glaswegian wanks are the worst kind in the world. If we had had any thoughts about staying for a second cup, they were swiftly nixed and we decided to get out of there. Dick nipped into a Specsavers to get the leg on his specs sorted, lucky they were still open.
It was near as dammit to showtime, so we dragged our weary waterlogged carcasses along to the Trongate, where the GMAC was (and I would imagine still is!) located. It’s a multi-storey office building. We went in and a bored security guard in the empty lobby merely looked at us and went back to watching something on a screen, not even saying anything to us. Watertight building protection! We saw the place was on the fifth floor, and got the lift up. There was nobody upstairs, though it was only half an hour until the screening started. We soon found our hosts, the amiable Gary and Bev. They plied willing participants with beer and water (I was driving, so that was for me), and gave lucky Dick a full bottle of Prosecco that had apparently been lying about after some other event. He tanned the full bottle during the event, getting progressively more fucked as the night went on, from his head start with the back of the bus cowboys he had met.
I took a brief walk around the floor before anybody arrived, noting that they had issues of American Cinematographer magazine in a rack. I had never seen one on this side of the Atlantic before, and it took me back to writing for the publication at the turn of the century. We were hoping beyond hope for a decent turnout, though the GMAC had done no advertising – they were merely a rental venue, and it was up to the event organisers to advertise. In the event, though, sadly and depressingly, only three paying (£5 + donation was the suggested fee, a bargain at twice the price) customers showed up. One was Stephen Scanlan, a friend of mine for 36 years, and the other was a pal of his, Tobias, whom I had not met before. The other paying customer was a guy called Scott who was an old friend of Fred’s.
“Well, now we can’t get back in. The door locks if you close it, and can’t be opened from the inside. I should have said to you, it’s not your fault, you weren’t to know,” I said, sighing. It was a weird quirk of the door’s. I had somehow managed to lock it twice from the inside…and it has no lock. There’s just something weird with the mechanism in the door that means it locks when you shut the door. You can open it from the inside with a knife just slid down the lock to spring it, but you can’t do that from the outside. I had just gotten used to not shutting the door, but had not warned my guests about the dangers of closing a door in a flat.
“We’ll just have to break in later, fuck it,” I sighed shrugging. I did make sure to say to Andrew a couple of times it wasn’t his fault, because it wasn’t, and I wasn’t angry, because I wasn’t. These things happen. We crossed the road and got the bus up into the town in the pouring rain, Fred not increasing the bus window value by sketching on it this time. I had him and Andrew wait under an abandoned shop doorway whilst I walked over to the van rental place ten soaking minutes’ walk away. I’m not naming the company, they’re not paying me to advertise. I had rented a van because it was cheaper than a car, and would have more room for luggage.
The young rental guy and I walked round the red four-door Transit Custom van in the bucketing rain, him looking at the identifying sheet that showed all the marks and scrapes and dings out of the paintwork. He pointed out various places where the pain had supposedly been damaged: “You can’t see for the rain, but there’s scrapes here…and here…here…” He went along pointing at rainsoaked, totally invisible supposed damage sites. I just nodded and said nothing much, making the occasional vague assenting grunting sound. Christ, for all I knew he could claim anything at all about this stuff, that we made holes in the paintwork that could have been there earlier, but we just couldn’t see them! Great stuff!
A couple of nose-rivulets-dripping minutes later, and he was finally fully finished pointing out…nothing, something, anything, whatever. He handed me the keys and scooted back off into his dry office. I was very glad I had worn a much heavier rainproof coat than the one I would usually wear, or I would have been soaked even worse than I already was. I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped out of the rain into the van, noting that, thankfully, the tank was full, which would at least save us having to stop at a petrol station. I had stopped into one on the way down to the van to get some Rennie antacids, because I had heartburn, and it cost me four fucking quid! I was just not worth it, should just have suffered in silence! Least the heartburn would have warmed me up in the rain! Still, once again, no use crying over mopped-up spilled stomach acid. I slid my own GPS plug point into the cigarette lighter, and put in the address. That was the only thing left from my car before scrapping, and I was glad I had kept it.
I picked up the guys and we endeavoured to batter through as quickly as we could get to Glasgow as possible, as Dick’s bus from Inverness was getting in at 4.30 p.m. Still, it would take us at least an hour to get through to Glasgow from Kilmarnock town centre, probably more, because I would have to drive sensibly in the wearying rain (“Youse are finally getting to experience some guid Scottish weather!” I said brightly to my meteorologically-culture-shocked guests) to avoid hydroplaning to a nasty fiery death. Still, I couldn’t have picked up the van any earlier, or it would have cost us more, so Dick would just have to wait.
We managed to get through to Glasgow without crashing and burning, needless to say, or I wouldn’t be writing this. I had to admit, I enjoyed driving the van, and it was great to be able to just hop in a vehicle and drive somewhere instead of having to rely on a limiting bus service to get you from here to there. I need to get myself another car as humanly possible, though some of the people-watching I have done over the last few months has been absolutely priceless and shock-and-awe-inspiring. It was around 5.20 p.m. when we got through to Buchanan Street Bus Station. I parked illegally with hazard lights flashing, and Fred and Andrew jumped out to find Dick. Several minutes later they came back, Andrew scoffing something from Greggs. Dick got in the back and we moved off, me thankful we’d managed to get away with parking where we did without a cop of traffic warden moving us on from such a double-yellow-lines-stained extremely busy traffic-snarled area. Dick was a bit half-cut, having apparently had several cans of Tennent's with some weegie ‘characters’ he’d met up the back of the bus.
We drove round and down a few one-way-system-aw-fuck roads before we found our way over to a car park pretty near the GMAC, which we couldn’t get parked near. We weren’t sure if we should buy a ticket, because the ticket machine times had been spraypainted over by annoying wee pricks – sorry, fine young street artists – and we couldn’t read them. Also, it was past time for the number to ring to pay that way. We asked a couple of people down there parking their own vehicles, but nobody seemed to really know. Eventually we just said fuck it and left the damned thing, gambling that we’d be alright. We quite simply didn’t know if we had to pay, or how much, and we had no coins to pay anyway, so it wasn’t really our fault.
We made our way to a nearby Café Nero to get a warming cup of coffee and get out of the rain for a while. We sat in a corner near the coffee bar, Dick pulling up a chair, when a morbidly obese woman who worked there snottily informed us that she needed access to a door behind Dick that, of course, he had not noticed, and access to the walkway itself. We moved to a different table, unimpressed with her attitude, as the rest of the weird lumpy grumpy lumpenproletariat denizens looked like something from a homeless shelter scene in a David Lynch film. We were actually raising the tone of the place with our presence, as unbelievable as that may have seemed.
Maybe that was what she didn’t like, that when we left our bright peacock mostly-dark colours and personalities would be gone and she’d be left alone with the cast of the travelling roadshow of Freaks: The Terrifying Musical. I drank my mocha and went over to see about getting myself a bottle of water from a fridge to the left of the counter, where another barista was sloooowly serving another customer. I was looking in, evaluating products and prices in very small type up the side, when Sweaty Betty from earlier came over and started rudely reaching across me in front of my line of vision to replace bottles in the gap-tooth display. I grabbed a bottle of water, disgruntled, then moved away from this eighth-wit and her passive-aggressive shit to stand behind the other punter getting served.
I stood for two or three minutes with absolutely no acknowledgement whatsoever from the woman serving. The endomorph who had been messing with me went back behind the counter. She could have served me but just stood, not acknowledging me or making any move towards me. I just cursed, took the fucking bottle of water and put it back, and sat back down with the guys, itching to get the fuck out of there. Which was probably the whole idea with the unhappy woman anyway, though not one of us had said a single word out of place to her or her lobotomised co-worker. You’re serving overpriced English coffee in Glasgow, ‘ladies’, not sparkling water on the French Riviera.
It was near as dammit to showtime, so we dragged our weary waterlogged carcasses along to the Trongate, where the GMAC was (and I would imagine still is!) located. It’s a multi-storey office building. We went in and a bored security guard in the empty lobby merely looked at us and went back to watching something on a screen, not even saying anything to us. Watertight building protection! We saw the place was on the fifth floor, and got the lift up. There was nobody upstairs, though it was only half an hour until the screening started. We soon found our hosts, the amiable Gary and Bev. They plied willing participants with beer and water (I was driving, so that was for me), and gave lucky Dick a full bottle of Prosecco that had apparently been lying about after some other event. He tanned the full bottle during the event, getting progressively more fucked as the night went on, from his head start with the back of the bus cowboys he had met.
I took a brief walk around the floor before anybody arrived, noting that they had issues of American Cinematographer magazine in a rack. I had never seen one on this side of the Atlantic before, and it took me back to writing for the publication at the turn of the century. We were hoping beyond hope for a decent turnout, though the GMAC had done no advertising – they were merely a rental venue, and it was up to the event organisers to advertise. In the event, though, sadly and depressingly, only three paying (£5 + donation was the suggested fee, a bargain at twice the price) customers showed up. One was Stephen Scanlan, a friend of mine for 36 years, and the other was a pal of his, Tobias, whom I had not met before. The other paying customer was a guy called Scott who was an old friend of Fred’s.
(Left to right: Tobias, Scanny, Scott, Fred)
(Scott, Fred, Dick, Andrew)
An understandably disappointed Andrew – the venue had cost him £350 rental, after all – said a few words and the films kicked off with Pub. Fred was sitting in the front row having a beer or two with his pal Scott. I was sat a couple of rows behind him by myself. At one moment, Fred toasted the mention of some of his friends that had died with a can, and I thought was quite poignant. I had already grown quite fond of this man, this trickster, this non-pretentious jack of all artistic trades who had seemingly no ego whatsoever, who never pulled any pissy hissy star trip fits, who never once tried to make out he was anything but an average, ordinary human being. Which he blatantly, patently is not, obviously, in a good way, but it shows the make and mark and measure of the man. He was dense, mercurial, inscrutable yet somehow totally open at the same time…a real riot laugh enigma, a life-vandaliser, an endearing human tornado blowing saucy cartoon kisses to the world 24/7. After all the pain and trauma and damage he had been through, had put himself through, too, with booze and self-destructive madness: “I headbutted a tram!” It was absolutely incredible.
Watching Pub was oddly emotionally overwhelming a bit, for me. Here the star of the documentary was, with his daughter in the film talking about him and, for my own reasons, when the screening of Pub was over I found myself crying. Bev asked if I was alright, but my somewhat fractured sobbing eye-kneading explanation about the “vivid technicolour explosion” of a man in it must have sounded a bit off. But what the fuck, it was heartfelt anyway, and it’s a very poignant, feelgood film.
I wasn’t quite sure what Gary and Bev would make of the films. The Scottish arts scene can be a somewhat serious, humourless middle-class endeavour, and if they didn’t have a sense of humour they were going to be in trouble. In the event, they both loved the films, and Bev’s laugh was the loudest in the room. I was laughing too. I have seen Pub: The Movie many times, but hadn’t seen Ribspreader. I really enjoyed it. It took seven years to make, and cost only twenty grand, pretty much the same budget as Pub, as Andrew told us. It’s about Brian, a one-time cigarette advert star on Australian telly, who becomes a toxic nicotine avenger against people who smoke. It’s gory, funny, sexy, sleazy, and smart-stupid, with a blackly humourous Troma-type vibe running through it. Indeed Troma head nutter Lloyd Kaufman puts in a cameo, spewing every Australian clichéd slang term you can imagine, so just think that and you’ve got your level of film.
(Poster and photo: Dick Dale)(obviously)
I loved the bigtit rhyming goth girls who murder the guy and eat him, too, to the superb song Killer In The Night by Meatbeater (the film has a great industrial and punk soundtrack all through it), so if that sounds like your kind of trash treasure trove…dig in! Fred often repeated the funny line “You know what to do, Brian!” from the film during the trip. By this point, Dick was pretty smashed on vino and lager, and was shouting at the screen randomly. It was hilarious, like a director partly heckling and providing a live DVD commentary track on his own film. “EVERYTHING’S FUCKED!” he helpfully shouted at one chaotic scene in the film. “HE’S HER BROTHER!” he shouted at another part. “YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT THAT IN THE FUCKING SCRIPT, YA STUPID CUNT!” I laughingly shouted back. His drunken interjections were totally entertaining, adding a whole different interactive dimension to the viewing, making it all the better.
Watching Pub was oddly emotionally overwhelming a bit, for me. Here the star of the documentary was, with his daughter in the film talking about him and, for my own reasons, when the screening of Pub was over I found myself crying. Bev asked if I was alright, but my somewhat fractured sobbing eye-kneading explanation about the “vivid technicolour explosion” of a man in it must have sounded a bit off. But what the fuck, it was heartfelt anyway, and it’s a very poignant, feelgood film.
I wasn’t quite sure what Gary and Bev would make of the films. The Scottish arts scene can be a somewhat serious, humourless middle-class endeavour, and if they didn’t have a sense of humour they were going to be in trouble. In the event, they both loved the films, and Bev’s laugh was the loudest in the room. I was laughing too. I have seen Pub: The Movie many times, but hadn’t seen Ribspreader. I really enjoyed it. It took seven years to make, and cost only twenty grand, pretty much the same budget as Pub, as Andrew told us. It’s about Brian, a one-time cigarette advert star on Australian telly, who becomes a toxic nicotine avenger against people who smoke. It’s gory, funny, sexy, sleazy, and smart-stupid, with a blackly humourous Troma-type vibe running through it. Indeed Troma head nutter Lloyd Kaufman puts in a cameo, spewing every Australian clichéd slang term you can imagine, so just think that and you’ve got your level of film.
(Scanny, Fred, Tobias, Gary, Dick, Andrew, Me, Bev)
Dick told us after the screening that the sequel to Ribspreader was going to be about vaping. Quick as a flash, Scanny said that it should be called Serial Vapist. A fine title! But all too soon it was finished. Scott bade Fred farewell, and Bev scooted off home. We all rain-sloshed round to a music pub and bar round the corner called Avant Garde. There was a band playing decent country covers. The singer was wearing a big camp pink hat and Fred marvelled that he’d worn the same one onstage before when singing. I got bought a pint of diet cola and stood talking at the bar to the pleasant and amiable Gary, making other conversation here and there with the others. Dick, however, was on a bit of a mission. He stumbled around with a pint and sat down next to a random group of people.
A few minutes later, Dick staggered over to the bar, sat on a stool there…and promptly fell off onto the floor. Needless to say, this did not go down well, and we promised the bar staff we would keep an eye on him. A guy from the table of strangers Dick had been sitting at bounded up, clapped a hand on Dick’s shoulder, and chuckled “Ah told ye no tae stand up!” at him, before sitting back down again. I could only imagine the conversation that had led to that. Dick stood up moments later, staggered around a bit, and then…fell on the floor again.
I was black affronted (Scottish phrase meaning mortally embarrassed) and grabbed him up off the floor, hands under his armpits, hissing “Yer a grown man, for fucksake!” at him. The barmaid was mightily unimpressed by this point and we had him sit on a chair by a table with his backpack, making sure he didn’t move. We decided to leave before anything else could happen, and headed out of the pub. “I’m sorry for any intrusion into your night,” I said to the people round where Dick had fallen, but they were all dismissive anyway. It’s Glasgow, they have all probably seen and done far worse. It’s just shit being sober in a pub with drunk people, you know how that goes.
My brain was fried, and I couldn’t remember where the fuck we had parked, but a combo of Scanny and Gary’s keen GPS senses, mixed with me recalling the direction we had walked up to get to the unfriendly coffee dump and Specsavers meant that we found the van soon enough. We said bye to Gary, Scanny and Tobias, and headed over to the vehicle and gratefully finding that there was no ticket on it. Dick got in the back, with Fred, Andrew and I in the front, and we managed to make it back through to Crosshouse without hydroplaning horror, having calmed down a bit from our pub embarrassment.
But when we got back, of course, we had the problem of the closed inside door to deal with.
We stood getting extremely soaked and contemplating it, Dick complaining a bit that he didn’t know what he had done to annoy us, and us trying to shush him. No way would anybody get through the window where my washing machine was to get in – it was too small and too high up. Breaking the glass was the only depressing option. It was past two by this point, and my neighbours’ lights were still on. I texted my cool upstairs neighbour Mike, whom I get on well with – big music fan, with good taste – and told him we were going to have to pan the door window in, and to expect the CRASH AND TINKLE!! I asked Andrew to kick the door in. He tried a couple of times, but the fucking thing held fast. Which probably have been great under any other circumstances, but right now it was the worst outcome possible.
This is where we came in at the start. The locked inside door laughed at us mockingly. I shrugged, and went and grabbed a brick from the top of the driveway wall a few feet away.
Walking back over to Andrew (sober), I handed him the wet, slimy future projectile. “Well, you can do the honours, seeing as how you locked us out.” He took it from me, weighed it up for a second, stepping up to the doorstep, like a bowler at Melbourne Cricket Ground preparing to chuck a googly at the batter for an opposing team. Then the director raised the building block over his head and…
…threw a superb overhand lob straight through the unresisting glass! KABOOM KACHINK PATOW!! My, what a lovely shattering scattering glass-sound that was in the early hours of the morning. I prayed that nobody would call the cops, thinking a riot was happening, or the place was being broken into. In the event, nobody did, so it’s good to know you can cause such loud mayhem and your neighbours wouldn’t care much if you were being murdered in your home and call the feds. I actually met one of my neighbours, an amiable guy called Gary, a week or so later, and he told me he’d just been getting in from work, had heard laughter(!) from my doorway and had thought we were having a party(!!). Aye right! Laughing here. But the destroyed door deed was done, I widened the hole in the glass a bit, then stepped through into the underfoot-crunching hallway when I could slip through without decapitating myself or slitting my jugular or something. Oh, the glass was so pretty twinkling in the dark night in the hallway! Like Christmas lights early! What a fucking nightmare. Andrew mused that he had kicked a door in before, but never panned in a glass one with a brick, and this seemed to him like some oblique achievement. Laughing here thinking about it.
We stood getting extremely soaked and contemplating it, Dick complaining a bit that he didn’t know what he had done to annoy us, and us trying to shush him. No way would anybody get through the window where my washing machine was to get in – it was too small and too high up. Breaking the glass was the only depressing option. It was past two by this point, and my neighbours’ lights were still on. I texted my cool upstairs neighbour Mike, whom I get on well with – big music fan, with good taste – and told him we were going to have to pan the door window in, and to expect the CRASH AND TINKLE!! I asked Andrew to kick the door in. He tried a couple of times, but the fucking thing held fast. Which probably have been great under any other circumstances, but right now it was the worst outcome possible.
This is where we came in at the start. The locked inside door laughed at us mockingly. I shrugged, and went and grabbed a brick from the top of the driveway wall a few feet away.
Walking back over to Andrew (sober), I handed him the wet, slimy future projectile. “Well, you can do the honours, seeing as how you locked us out.” He took it from me, weighed it up for a second, stepping up to the doorstep, like a bowler at Melbourne Cricket Ground preparing to chuck a googly at the batter for an opposing team. Then the director raised the building block over his head and…
…threw a superb overhand lob straight through the unresisting glass! KABOOM KACHINK PATOW!! My, what a lovely shattering scattering glass-sound that was in the early hours of the morning. I prayed that nobody would call the cops, thinking a riot was happening, or the place was being broken into. In the event, nobody did, so it’s good to know you can cause such loud mayhem and your neighbours wouldn’t care much if you were being murdered in your home and call the feds. I actually met one of my neighbours, an amiable guy called Gary, a week or so later, and he told me he’d just been getting in from work, had heard laughter(!) from my doorway and had thought we were having a party(!!). Aye right! Laughing here. But the destroyed door deed was done, I widened the hole in the glass a bit, then stepped through into the underfoot-crunching hallway when I could slip through without decapitating myself or slitting my jugular or something. Oh, the glass was so pretty twinkling in the dark night in the hallway! Like Christmas lights early! What a fucking nightmare. Andrew mused that he had kicked a door in before, but never panned in a glass one with a brick, and this seemed to him like some oblique achievement. Laughing here thinking about it.
As I said earlier, there is a trick you can do with the door, where you can slip a knife down the mechanism and you can slide the door open. I couldn’t even find a fucking knife, I was so flustered! I stepped back through the deathtrap doorhole and nipped upstairs to see if I could borrow a knife from Mike. It looked like he was in, I wasn’t too sure, but he wasn’t answering his door anyway, and I couldn’t blame him. I went back downstairs, stepped through the near death experience – sorry door – again, and, sighing in relief, found a fucking knife and clicked the door open. I found a broom and dustpan and started to sweep up…when Fred stepped up, said “I’m a cleaner, let me do it,” and…swept the mess up. “Amazing how far the glass spreads,” he noted.
I couldn’t believe it, just standing in awe watching him. Talk about an amazing guy! He was under no obligation whatsoever to do this, he just moved into automatic clean-it-up mode, no mess no fuss, no bullshit, no ego, just a guest going way above and beyond for his host. It was touching, and watching him doing it made my head swim. He did a far better job of it than I ever could have. Luckily, I had an extremely sturdy black rubbish bag left from a few I had bought the year before, and it all got swept up and into the bag quite nicely. I thanked Fred profusely, humbled at how humble this man was. I would still find wee bits of glass here and there in the living room or hallway for a couple of days afterwards, but if you need broken glass cleaning up after panning your door in on a soaking rainy night, I would highly recommend Fred as your man. Take that as a recommendation of the highest order.
Everybody traipsed in after Fred had cleaned up. I told Dick I would like him to sleep outside in the van. The idea of him drunkenly rampaging about the flat was a nightmare to me, but, more seriously, I had visions of him hurting himself on the remaining door glass if he had to get up to go to the toilet or something. The destroyed door was right next to the toilet door, and it could genuinely have gotten nasty. Explaining a dead Australian to the cops was the last thing I wanted. I wasn’t even that angry, and hardly raised my voice – as I said to Andrew, I knew this made for an even better story, and I was always weighing things up in that way. Fuck it, getting to see him and Fred had made up for any snafus that popped up along the way here and there.
“Aw, why do I have to sleep in the Stasi van?” Dick moaned, in one of the best lines of the entire chaotic visit. The guys had seen a Stasi van in Berlin, when visiting the Stasi Museum, and it was good to know that Dick was equating our transport with German motoring imprisonment efficiency! Vorsprung durch techdick, ya bas! He went and got his sleeping bag from the bedroom he was sleeping in, and asked for a pillow. I only have two, and Andrew and Fred had one each – I don’t use them – so he was sent out into the van muttering with a towel rolled up for under his head.
Violent gory stumble-stagger drunken death thankfully avoided, we all set out to crash. We didn’t have to get up too early, thankfully, because it was now around three, so we headed off to crash, me on the floor where Dick would have been…
AN EYESORE END TO THE DAY
…only to start to feel something funny shortly afterwards in my eye. It was scratchy and painful, and, as I lay there on the floor, staring at the shrugging ceiling, I started to get paranoid that I had glass in my eye. Thinking back, I had handed Andrew the brick back through the door to throw away, and I hadn’t washed my hands after it. Had I rubbed my eye and inadvertently gotten some glass into it? Bloody idiot! I sighed expansively. Great. I sat up, my eye nipping, feeling my eyelid and face. No blood coursing down my cheek, which was, I decided, a good thing, though I am no doctor.
I sat indecisive for what seemed a measurable eternity in pain and mounting despair. Crosshouse Hospital isn’t too far away, but I wasn’t about to walk there in heavy pouring rain. And the idea of having to wake a comatose Dick in the Stasi van to explain what was happening, then having to either usher him into the flat or have him come with me and stay in the van…somehow…well, it was just too impossible to contemplate. This would be the perfect time to go, three in the morning on a torrential night, there would likely be zerobody there, but it just wasn’t for happening, unfortunately.
The usual chaos, in other words.
So I just lay for around three hours in runny-scratchy-eye misery, waiting for the sun to come up and the rain to stop. When it was dry enough, I got up, got dressed, woke Andrew, and told him what I was doing. I couldn’t just have them wake up and not know what was happening, and I didn’t have a pen around to write a note. He understood, could see my eye was inflamed, and I set off. It didn’t take long to get there, and there were only four other people in, which was great – there wouldn’t be as Hellishly long a wait as there had been the last time I was there for another health problem. I checked in, got seen by the triage nurse, and went to sit down. I was beyond shattered, a bit depressed and in pain, hardly believing that this could happen during an extremely inopportune moment like this. If you know me, though, you’ll know how much mishap is just part of my DNA, woven deep into the bloodsoaked tartan fabric of my life. Ho-hum.
I sat for nearly four hours which, for the NHS recently, is pretty damned decent. At one point I was nodding off, having positioned myself in front of the corridor the nurse would call me down from, paranoid about missing her. I was thankfully helped in my wakefulness by a fractured female drug addict in her forties, who was just randomly haranguing everybody there about how "vaping is the new thing,” asking everybody if they smoked or vaped. She was the kind of person Irvine Welsh could stick into his new dance party West End abortion production Trainspotting: The Musical (a real cash cow show) to make some more money dancing on graves in a country with horrendous drug death numbers. I had my eyes closed to rest the sore one, and to try and avoid her talking to me, which did work quiet well, but it did mean I nearly fell asleep, half-waking up with a “THAT’S ME!” start from my semi-slumber when my name was called.
Got orange dye put in my sore eye by a nurse, who looked at it under a microscope to see if the dye made any cornea scrapes or scratches or cuts show up. She couldn’t see anything, and reckoned it was just – thankfully – dirt in my eye, but gave me an ointment to put in the affected orb and advice to make an appointment with an optician if the discomfort continued beyond Monday or Tuesday. I walked home quite happy at the result, and crashed out for a few hours. Helluva fucking day and nightmare all round. But the madness wasn’t over yet, not by any means...
So I just lay for around three hours in runny-scratchy-eye misery, waiting for the sun to come up and the rain to stop. When it was dry enough, I got up, got dressed, woke Andrew, and told him what I was doing. I couldn’t just have them wake up and not know what was happening, and I didn’t have a pen around to write a note. He understood, could see my eye was inflamed, and I set off. It didn’t take long to get there, and there were only four other people in, which was great – there wouldn’t be as Hellishly long a wait as there had been the last time I was there for another health problem. I checked in, got seen by the triage nurse, and went to sit down. I was beyond shattered, a bit depressed and in pain, hardly believing that this could happen during an extremely inopportune moment like this. If you know me, though, you’ll know how much mishap is just part of my DNA, woven deep into the bloodsoaked tartan fabric of my life. Ho-hum.
I sat for nearly four hours which, for the NHS recently, is pretty damned decent. At one point I was nodding off, having positioned myself in front of the corridor the nurse would call me down from, paranoid about missing her. I was thankfully helped in my wakefulness by a fractured female drug addict in her forties, who was just randomly haranguing everybody there about how "vaping is the new thing,” asking everybody if they smoked or vaped. She was the kind of person Irvine Welsh could stick into his new dance party West End abortion production Trainspotting: The Musical (a real cash cow show) to make some more money dancing on graves in a country with horrendous drug death numbers. I had my eyes closed to rest the sore one, and to try and avoid her talking to me, which did work quiet well, but it did mean I nearly fell asleep, half-waking up with a “THAT’S ME!” start from my semi-slumber when my name was called.
Got orange dye put in my sore eye by a nurse, who looked at it under a microscope to see if the dye made any cornea scrapes or scratches or cuts show up. She couldn’t see anything, and reckoned it was just – thankfully – dirt in my eye, but gave me an ointment to put in the affected orb and advice to make an appointment with an optician if the discomfort continued beyond Monday or Tuesday. I walked home quite happy at the result, and crashed out for a few hours. Helluva fucking day and nightmare all round. But the madness wasn’t over yet, not by any means...
(Chris gets a gift from Fred, a couple of weeks after the visit)
Link to Part 4:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2024/04/banned-in-crosshouse-part-4.html
Link to Part 4:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2024/04/banned-in-crosshouse-part-4.html
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