“A bitter debate and
a feminine fate
Lie in tandem like two precious babes
While the former gets warmer
It's the latter that matters
Except on the nation's airwaves
And custodians of public opinion stay fat
After vainly discussing her rights
Lay hands off her body
It's not your fucking life!” – Bad Religion.
Lie in tandem like two precious babes
While the former gets warmer
It's the latter that matters
Except on the nation's airwaves
And custodians of public opinion stay fat
After vainly discussing her rights
Lay hands off her body
It's not your fucking life!” – Bad Religion.
Well,
gentle readers, now that certain areas of The Greatest Country In The World are
giving women about as much choice as Malta and Northern Ireland in the abortion
stakes (i.e. sweet fuck all), I thought I might bring you a poignant,
heartwarming story about a transatlantic termination from a quarter century ago.
So sit back, “grab yourself an adult beverage” (as a guy from the unemployment
office put it to me on the phone once in Chicago) and pin
back yer ears…
When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to be the lyricist and singer in a punk band. The fact I couldn’t sing didn’t matter; Hell, that was a positive asset in that thorny musical field. I didn’t want to be rich, or famous, just scream at sparse frowning crowds and take the piss during my Really Fucking Angry Young Man phase of my late teens/early twenties. Why? Ah, choose a reason, the usual youthful angsty angry crap, you know the drill. Why not? Good an answer as any.
The first band I was in in the late 80s, Postman Postmortem, did just one so-called ‘practice.’ The idea of throwing together some tunes instantly fell apart when we realised that our bass player could literally not play a single note. He told us he liked banging along to songs when he was listening to them, pretending he was playing them. This was not helpful. The rest of us were not pleased he had not made this confession before we came down for a practice. Some angry and disbelieving words were exchanged. We disbanded on the spot.
In 1990, when I was 20, the second band I was in, funk-punk-blues combo Puppet Porn (named after the Pete Jackson splatter porno puppet epic Meet the Feebles), was more successful. Well, I say more successful, at least insofar as we managed to at least have several practices and put together six songs. We formed to play at the Battle of the Bands to be held at Falkirk College of Technology (now changed its name to something I can’t be bothered looking up). Needless to say, this never happened.
Can’t even remember why now: lack of practices, people not turning up for practices, in-band squabbling, drugs and alcohol fumbling, and just being general mad young waster cunts (naming no names in case the rest want to remain anonymous), as I remember. I drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam at one practice when half the band failed to show up. I was not entirely sober at the end. Putting it mildly. I would never do that again. But as I said, at least we managed to get a few songs together, and I still have a tape somewhere to prove the ahead-of-our-crime existence of this legendary band. Necrophilia, mocking pensioners with hypothermia, mocking dead film stars, necrophilia again (cos I was weirdly obsessed by the underground sick classic film Nekromantik at that time), mocking badly dubbed porn, and mocking (lot of mocking was going on) global warming were our concerns.
And boy were they concerning.
But nobody ever heard them, so the authorities remained thankfully uninvolved.
Anyway. Flashfastforward until the mid-90s. I was briefly the singer for a now-defunct great wee Falkirk band named Turtlehead. I quit before they recorded anything, but they recorded two film-based pop-punk songs I wrote the words for, which are still up on the net, Medication Time and B Movie Baby:
When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to be the lyricist and singer in a punk band. The fact I couldn’t sing didn’t matter; Hell, that was a positive asset in that thorny musical field. I didn’t want to be rich, or famous, just scream at sparse frowning crowds and take the piss during my Really Fucking Angry Young Man phase of my late teens/early twenties. Why? Ah, choose a reason, the usual youthful angsty angry crap, you know the drill. Why not? Good an answer as any.
The first band I was in in the late 80s, Postman Postmortem, did just one so-called ‘practice.’ The idea of throwing together some tunes instantly fell apart when we realised that our bass player could literally not play a single note. He told us he liked banging along to songs when he was listening to them, pretending he was playing them. This was not helpful. The rest of us were not pleased he had not made this confession before we came down for a practice. Some angry and disbelieving words were exchanged. We disbanded on the spot.
In 1990, when I was 20, the second band I was in, funk-punk-blues combo Puppet Porn (named after the Pete Jackson splatter porno puppet epic Meet the Feebles), was more successful. Well, I say more successful, at least insofar as we managed to at least have several practices and put together six songs. We formed to play at the Battle of the Bands to be held at Falkirk College of Technology (now changed its name to something I can’t be bothered looking up). Needless to say, this never happened.
Can’t even remember why now: lack of practices, people not turning up for practices, in-band squabbling, drugs and alcohol fumbling, and just being general mad young waster cunts (naming no names in case the rest want to remain anonymous), as I remember. I drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam at one practice when half the band failed to show up. I was not entirely sober at the end. Putting it mildly. I would never do that again. But as I said, at least we managed to get a few songs together, and I still have a tape somewhere to prove the ahead-of-our-crime existence of this legendary band. Necrophilia, mocking pensioners with hypothermia, mocking dead film stars, necrophilia again (cos I was weirdly obsessed by the underground sick classic film Nekromantik at that time), mocking badly dubbed porn, and mocking (lot of mocking was going on) global warming were our concerns.
But nobody ever heard them, so the authorities remained thankfully uninvolved.
Anyway. Flashfastforward until the mid-90s. I was briefly the singer for a now-defunct great wee Falkirk band named Turtlehead. I quit before they recorded anything, but they recorded two film-based pop-punk songs I wrote the words for, which are still up on the net, Medication Time and B Movie Baby:
As I said, I left before they really got going, and the new singer Brian was far better than I was. But I still stayed in contact with the band (still talk to Paul, the bass player, to this day – hiya Paul and Leanne!) after it, and it was through this that, about a year or so after I left (to “pursue my writing” – chuckling here – if I had only known…), they told me of an interesting wee occurrence that was happening: an American punk girl was coming to visit them in town, and she would be looking for someplace to stay.
And therein lies a wee story.
But to understand that story, I need to give you some background.
And therein lies a wee story.
But to understand that story, I need to give you some background.
From 1992 until 2011, the legendary underground American punk mag Maximumrocknroll put out an offshoot mag called Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life. This publication allowed people from round the world to advertise venues or places to stay in their countries, people you could crash with, etc, for touring bands or individuals. It was a global networking opportunity long before the internet changed everything forever.
(Incidentally, just while we’re on the subject. You know all these modern trans activist extremists and anti-social-injustice worrier types, the axe-and-hammer-wielding performance anxiety artistes who look like the cast of The Toxic Avenger IV, and that are causing such chaos in the Western world right now? Well, they basically started off deep in the American underground punk scene in the late 80s or so. It's just taken them three decades to filter up to the top of society. You would see letters from wackjob extremist individuals ranting about capitalism, or communism, or feminism, or abortion, or gay rights, or whatever, in MRR’s (as the mag is also called – still exists to this day, but is closing down later this year) letters page. You could also read their crazed, mouth-frothing, deluded extremist ravings in interviews, hear their mad murder-the-CEOs records, and it was all a real joy to vicariously behold.
Being from a small post-industrial Scottish town, all this San Francisco Bay Area lunatic fringe extremism seemed really interesting and angry and new and immediate. Bands like, say, Vegan Reich (not from SF; their name tells all) or Active Minds (the latter from this side of the pond) would put out pompous, self-righteous, extremist, faux-anarchic vegan ranting records, where if you didn’t adhere to their impossible, often middle-class standards, you would be ostracised from the punk scene. Sound familiar? There is nothing new under the frowning confused disapproval-burning sun.)
As I say, back then, when it was all new, I thought it was interesting and wild, and supported it in its extremism from afar. Of course now, being older and wider and wiser, now that it's gone mainstream (mental illness just simply isn't what it was, kids!) I think it’s all disgusting and pathetic, but that’s a whole other sociological and psychological topic I will be getting to on this blog eventually. Just think of this post as my own one-time-only MRR opinion column and you won’t go far wrong. Suffice to say, for a few years in my early 20s I loved reading that mag, and still have fond angry memories of ordering obscure records from America and reading columns by the likes of Ben Weasel (singer of my fave band back then, Screeching Weasel; not listened to them in years), the creepy Mykel Board and Rev. Norb and George Tabb and Jennifer Blowdryer and such.
Meanwhile, waiting patiently for me after that bleary-misty-eyed digression into youthfueled underground punk extremist art. As I said, Turtlehead had a visitor coming from Boston to stay with them, who had contacted them through an ad they had put in Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life. They had said that if anybody anywhere was coming to Scotland and needed a place to stay that the band would put them up. Her name was Pauline Proper (not her real name, which was a name that sounds so much like a fake nom-de-punk you’d think I was lying if I told you it) and she was coming across from some shoestring recording operation named Hamstrung Records in Boston to check Turtlehead out and potentially release stuff by them.
19 years old, she was on a tour of the UK, checking out various bands and cities. I can’t remember if they asked me if she could stay with me for a couple of days, or if I offered, but the end result was the same: she was going to stay with Gazo, the guitarist, for a couple of days, and then sofa surf at my place in the town centre above the now-defunct Firkins shithole pub. It all sounded fun and interesting and novel, and I was right up for it. A chance to check out a Real Live American Punk Girl of the type I’d read about in MRR and seen in Repo Man or The Decline of Western Civilisation, or indeed any film put out by Penelope Spheeris during her wet-for-young-punk-guys period! Magic! Living cultural history right in your living room! I felt every inch the excited gawking tourist as I excitedly prepared for her arrival.
Anyway, this is how I looked when Pauline Proper, Boston punk scene tourist chickadee extraordinaire, first met me. Still laughing here. She looked confused, to be honest. So was I. Who was this poserish, pudgy, rubbish, pierced-tongue, goth-type bird with dyed blonde hair with the roots showing, wearing a Rancid teeshirt? This bird was about as punk as…oh, I dunno, come up with your own non-punk comparison, must I do all the work? I don’t know what I was expecting, but she most definitely was not it.
She was yer common or garden pop-industrial fan-type, all told. The band weren’t much impressed either. It turned out that she didn’t really want to see them play to potentially put a record of theirs out, she was just a cheap bitch looking for free places to crash. But fair enough, MRR solidarity and all that, eh, punk DIY comrade? We went up to Firkins where some zoomer woman, angry at my attire, couldn’t handle my joking about how my clothes were “a lifestyle thing” and went to throw a drink over me, which I only just managed to block with my hand. Least she could have thrown it at my face, given me a chance to open my mouth!
Ah, tolerant Falkirk, what a beautiful oasis of calm and serenity and sisterly love in the Central Belt. Bring a tear to a glass eye.
After that fine piece of homophobia (maybe I awakened strange new sexual feelings in this redneck and she lashed out in angry horny confusion) I staggered off upstairs to bed. I got woken up the next day by Gazo, who was dumping Miss Proper on me a day early cos, well, he basically couldn’t stand her and thought she was a weirdo. Which she was, really, but I didn’t think, given my half-woman-half-hotel-fire attire of the previous evening, that I had any room to talk. So in she came, and off he went.
We sat having a sporadic, sputtering conversation for a while, which I half-jokingly reminded me of the one in Pulp Fiction about silences on dates. She agreed. She told me she had Master tattooed on one bicep and was getting Slave tattooed on the other; how very Marilyn Manson, dahlink. That she had her tongue pierced but was scared to tell her mother, and it was really painful eating with it whilst trying to hide it at the dinner table. That 90s-popular skapunk oafs Rancid were her fave ‘punk’ band. Joy.
I’ve never been able to abide that semi-sentient, sub-Clash, fart-in-an-echo-chamber-sounding band, and it was clear that she was just a serious middle-class poser. Who else could afford to fly over from America and travel round the UK? She knew fuck all about the punk scene, obviously, and had very little of any interest or intelligence to say about, well, anything much at all. We had less than zero in common, and I could see why Gazo had foisted her onto me when he did. But still, well, in for a penny(wise), in for a pound (foolish), so I had to just nod and grin and grit my teeth and bear it. “I was backstage at a Nine Inch Nails show once and Trent Reznor looked at me!” she said to me in excitement, without irony, and I thought fuck, if that’s a life highlight you must have lived a shite life, that is absolute rubbish, who gives a fuck?
And I just nodded
and smiled
politely.
At the time, I was in my minimalist Bukowski Lone Writer phase (Olivetti Lettera 22 manual portable was the word-weapon of choice, and a wee beauty it was too), and didn’t own a telly or video (remember them?). I got a loan of them so she wouldn’t be bored, just being hospitable, and got a few bootleg horror and weird films to watch from my pal Scanny. That night we started watching some lesbian vampire film with me lying on the floor and her on the couch. I felt…stirrings lying there and, feeling uncomfortable, got up and went out to a friend’s house for a few hours to get stoned and get the fuck away for a while. I came back late and assumed she was sleeping as there was no sound from the living room, but I certainly wasn’t going to check.
The next morning I lay in bed until late, not wanting to disturb Pauline. Heard nothing from the living room. Eventually peeked my head round the door. She was lying with her face turned away from the door on the couch, under a blanket. I got the feeling she was awake and just pretending not to hear me, so said nothing and went back to my bedroom. Eventually it just got silly and I went back through. Thankfully she was up and about. As I had been lying staring at the ceiling I had decided to confront her about all this. Her behavior was weird and, for a house guest, she wasn’t being particularly pleasant. The atmosphere was pretty uneasy, even though I had been nothing but gracious and accommodating for the whole time. Gazo’s reaction was the right one, and it backed up my feelings towards the situation. This couldn’t go on any longer, for both our sakes.
“Look, Pauline, I just wanted to ask you if everything was alright, if anything was bothering you,” I said, slowing down my speech, as I had learned to do since first meeting her. “You just don’t seem to be having a good time here.”
“I’ve heard that abortions aren’t safe here,” she said, looking hunted, haunted, desperate, a tear sliding down her cheek. I was surprised, oddly enough. I admit, I was also instantly offended, in a Scottish way. This was hardly a fucking third world country! I sighed and gently got out of her what was bothering her. She told me she had gotten pregnant before leaving America, and was going to have an abortion done here, but she had heard bad things about our health care system. Anybody who has encountered the American health (don’t) care system will know how literally sick a joke that is, but the lassie was a teenager, alone abroad, pregnant, frightened, in a stranger’s flat…and confessing that she needed to have a termination.
I couldn’t fucking believe it! I mean, how the fuck could I have expected…this? It was just meant to be a fun meeting, playing host to a young woman from a country I loved at the time, then a tearful poignant eternal parting of the ways laced with lies about keeping in touch forever. Where the fuck did teen abortion fear fit into my now-naïve best laid plans gone mental? How the fuck did this happen? What the fuck were you meant to do in a situation like this? I gathered my thoughts, deciding we’d have to go to the family planning clinic at the long-since-bulldozed Falkirk Royal Infirmary hospital, which was only a few hundred yards’ walk away. We got ready and walked over there, got checked in, and I sat beside her as we waited. Shit, the women here will think I’ve knocked her up, or she’s my girlfriend, I thought, and she looks a bit of a state. She went in by herself, as we had arranged, was in for a while, then came back out. We walked out of the hospital.
“Well?”
“I’ll get it taken care of in Edenburg," she said, mispronouncing our capital city's name like clueless Americans always do.
I nodded. It was never mentioned again.
“Why…eh…why were you doing…that?”
“I told my family that I would go to some Scottish forests, so I was just taking a photo there so it looked like the plants were big trees. I can show them the trees when I get back.”
I nodded. Seemed perfectly logical to me. What…the…fuck? I asked no questions, and said nothing more. It seemed like the only appropriate response, and I feared what further answers might be forthcoming if I pushed the matter any further.
Going the long way home to my central Falkirk flat, we took a walk back down by the canal, where the old St. Mungo’s used to be (and the new one is now), for a bit of sightseeing. We saw a couple of swans, as we neared the bridge at Grahams Road, down where parts of the Ewan McGregor film Young Adam were shot.
“You know, I don’t know how those swans survive,” I mused, smiling, “cos I’ve never in my life seen anybody feeding-“
Right at that exact moment a hand appeared over a wooden fence by the swans and threw them some bread. I laughed in amazed incredulity. It was one of those coincidental moments that seems so perfect that it must have been rehearsed somehow, and somebody somewhere was watching with a camera to see your reaction for a reality telly show. But no, it was absolutely real. You know the kind of moment I mean, the kind they call a “plate of shrimp” moment in Repo Man, and you’ve had a few of them yourself, you know you have.
We walked back up into Falkirk and stopped off in Asda’s to get some food, just round the corner from my place at 3F Melville Street. As we walked round, Pauline saw a wee teddy bear on a shelf and stood googlyeye-gazing at it. It was another moment when you get an X-ray right to the centre of somebody. My heart melted a bit…but not too much. I still didn’t much like her, as she was still pretty weird and, frankly, obnoxious. But I dipped into the well-hidden softer side of me that has caused me trouble with some advantage-taking women before, shrugged, and headed to the checkout. And no, she did not buy the teddy bear, thankfully. I don’t know what I would have said or done if she had. Probably burst out in hysterical laughter and gotten kicked out of the shop.
So we went back to my place, ate, watched some cheesy horror film, slept, got up the next morning, walked down to the train station a hundred yards away, and stood awkwardly making tiny talk until the next Edinburgh train arrived. As we did, I gave her a gift of the single of New Rose by The Damned, the 1976-minted first UK punk single. She took it, then turned and walked off without so much as a fucking thank you for the record or, for well, anything at all. I would assume she got her abortion. I don’t know or care, because I never heard from her again. Which was a total fucking blessing, for obvious reasons.
So that was that. I fed and sheltered a stranger, tried to keep her entertained, took her to the drink-slinging pub, and the family planning clinic, and the shrunken Scottish forest, and the kept swans, and the teddy bear supermarket…for her to dump her personal problems on and then just walk out of my life forever, without a single word of thanks ever crossing her pouty poser lips. Mind you, she was white middle-class American, and some of them are the most obnoxious, oblivious people you could ever meet. I could only imagine what a house of horrors the hospital in Edinburgh would become when she got back to Boston to breathlessly tell her idiot friends about her crazy goshdarn Scotch adventures.
No doubt the institution would become like something out of a Victorian insane asylum, with rusty instruments and weird, incomprehensible foreigners barking unintelligible threats and orders at her poor frightened American ass, until Pinhead from Hellraiser hovered out of the shadows on a cloud of death-air with a steampunk machine sneering “We’ll tear your zygote apaaaart!” That sort of ignorant portrayal would not have surprised me in the slightest, given her general bratty demeanour and lack of grace, etiquette, and gratitude. Yes, she was undergoing a weird crisis in her life, but there is no excuse for ignorance. And yes, there speaks a middle-aged man. But you know I’m right.
It’s funny. Pauline no doubt got an abortion safely and easily in Edinburgh without judgement. Also without cost, because no doubt a termination would have cost her a shitload in a country that has no regard for human life whatsoever, and treats health care as a luxury rather than a necessity. So the way it is here is the way it should always be. I have always been pro-choice, and always will be. I mean, as women say: no uterus, no opinion or say in the matter.
Which is fine, fair enough, but I will just say one brief thing on that. Ladies, when you maintain the sneering, angry, manhating attitude many of you seem to harbour these days, spewing hardline dogma, you just make men far less predisposed to listen to you, or want to be on your side. For what it’s worth, that is, coming from somebody with a penis. Though I can understand the anger in America, though, religion-indoctrinated misogynist Hell that certain backward parts of it are. It truly is the most advanced tragedy in the world. But it's not like my opinion ultimately matters one way or another in the matter, especially with regards to a foreign country. And it wasn't my kid, so why would I give a shit anyway?
In writing this piece, I idly wondered if I could find Ms. Proper on the net, just to see what she looks like these days; I certainly wasn’t going to contact her. I did indeed find her under one single entry on one of those sites that charges you money for reports on people. She’s now 42 years old and still living in Boston. She’s not even on Facebook, so, from the level of mentions she generates in search engines, it’s clear she never went on to become any top A&R person for a record label of any kind, major or DIY.
Funny that, eh?
Laugh mirthlessly amongst yourselves.
THE NEVER ENDING
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