American on Purpose

by Craig Ferguson

  Suddenly there were hundreds of punk bands. The American scene was developing too, and I followed it obsessively, groups like Talking Heads, the Cramps, the Dead Kennedys, Blondie, and the incandescent Ramones. I tried to learn techniques from drummers who played with more established artists that were still considered acceptable. There wasn’t much. Zeppelin was out, the Stones were out, likewise most of the giant stadium bands. Roxy Music was okay, Iggy never stopped being hip to us, and Bowie and Lou Reed skated through this era with no damage to their cred simply by being too cool to be affected.

  I formed or joined a slew of different but always awful bands with memorable names such as Night Creatures, the News, Prussia (what the fuck!), and the Fast Colours. Truly woeful outfits that would rehearse in garages. They were literally garage bands, and they had the trademark of all fledging rock outfits, the one kid crowbarred into the group despite playing a hopelessly inappropriate instrument (flute/oboe/accordion) because his father had a car and was willing to ferry our instruments to practice. You have never heard “Anarchy in the U.K.” butchered until you hear it with a clarinet solo.

  Sometimes we’d rent little side halls in churches until we made such a racket they closed us down, often literally pulling the plug, about ten seconds into the first song. There were no bona fide public performances, but girlfriends and buddies would come to rehearsals and help the band members smash up their instruments. We all thought you had to smash up your instruments during rehearsal; I suppose that’s why many of these bands never got past that first practice. I never let anyone smash or damage the drum kit, though; sometimes I even had to fight to protect it, but I did because:

  (A) It was still technically my brother’s, and

  (B) I had found something to be genuinely enthusiastic about. I loved drumming and I actually got to be pretty good at it.

  What I lacked in technique and precision I made up for in volume and energy, which went a long way with my fellow punkers.

  Meanwhile the London scene quickly moved from punk to the shameful New Romantic period, with bands like Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, and the truly ghastly Visage, but being in the provinces we were a little behind the curve and thankfully stayed pure a little longer.

  It wasn’t just the music, it was also the attitude. A real fuck-you to that sanctimonious, whining sixties mob with their Love and Peace and suspicious tolerance of folk music. Punk rock felt like it belonged to us, that it had no rules and no leaders. It was, in fact, pure anarchy, and I loved it. I knew at the time it was an immature adolescent fantasy, but I didn’t care; I was an immature adolescent fantasist. It was ideal for me. It was the engine that drove me off the treadmill that was being constructed for me without my permission—go to school, let the bastards beat you up, learn a trade, find a job, marry a wife, have some kids, acquire some bills, grow fat, become disappointed, and blame the whole fucking mess on the English or the Catholics or your wife or your kids or the government.

  Punk rock put an end to all of that. Punk rock said:

  “No crime if there ain’t no law.”

  Obviously with my new weltanschauung I began to have real problems at school, but I found a solution.

  I left.

  11

  The Real World

  My parents were shocked and horrified by my decision to leave school at sixteen, which was the youngest age the state allowed. My older sister, Janice, and my brother, Scott, had gone on to higher education, with Scott going as far as to move out of the house—he decided he wanted to be a journalist and took a flat with a bunch of mock hippies in the unfashionable (and therefore fashionable to some students) Denniston area of Glasgow. Scott attended the University of Strathclyde during the week and brought his laundry home on the weekend. Janice, now a budding scientist, commuted to the same university from the family home every day on the don’t-stop-even-if-a-kid-needs-to-crap bus that I had taken with Gunka James.

  I tried to figure out over the years why my siblings handled school better than I did, but I have never really found a satisfactory answer. Obviously they kept company with the same teachers and kids and were surrounded with the same violence and threats, but somehow were able to navigate it all with much greater ease. My younger sister Lynn says it was just as hard for her as it was for me.

  My mother had a theory that my loud voice made me a conspicuous target. When I was ten years old and being dreadfully persecuted by a monstrous old harpy of a teacher named Mrs. White, my mother tried to give me whispering lessons so that maybe Mrs. White wouldn’t notice me so much. I think perhaps the real reason is that I was a needy little cur who liked attention, and in my environment, unfortunately, if you were noticed, you got hit.

  Whatever caused my misery, I couldn’t take it for a moment longer than I had to by law. The day I left school I was approached by two teachers. One was a ghastly macho, closeted phys-ed guy who told me just how much of a shit I was and how much of a disaster my life was going to be. The other was my English teacher, who said I was squandering my intelligence by not remaining in school. I thanked the phys-ed guy for his wisdom and asked the English teacher if he had such a regard for my intelligence then why did he always use corporal punishment rather than appeal to it. He gave me a funny look and said, “You know the answer to that.”

  I didn’t. Not then and not now.

  I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn’t poison the writing that I was discovering for myself. I’m grateful for that. I’ve often talked to well-schooled men and women who have a disdain for the classics because they had to read them. I understand this. No one forced me to read Crime and Punishment. I read it because I chose to. I didn’t write a paper on it but I did find it entertaining and thought-provoking. I was horrified by how much I could identify with Raskolnikov’s whiney self-justification—clearly there was a warning here.

  Raskolnikov led me to the Karamazov brothers, who were in the same part of the bookstore as Ishmael and Queequeg, who were pushed up on the shelves next to Winston Smith, Jem Finch, Joseph K, Mr. Scrooge, and Dracula. My education continued, haphazard and informal, American, European, and Russian authors all mixed together with no regard to any syllabus or any geographical or historical time frame.

  I believe in education, and sometimes I wish, usually when an embarrassing gap appears in my knowledge during a conversation with someone who is well educated, that I had somehow managed to stick out my schooling and follow a path into a structured college or university course, but I didn’t. Yet most of the time I now think that being an autodidact—a dilettante, I suppose—has given me just as much as it has robbed me of.

  Once out of school, I had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I wanted to be a rock star, lauded and adored and worshiped, drunk, laid, gorgeous, and dead by the age of twenty-five, but that was too Byronic and romantic for a Protestant, working-class boy, so I put that idea on ice for a while and went for something similar but more in my price range. I became an apprentice electrician.

  I managed to get “a real job” at Burroughs Machines, a U.S. firm with a huge factory just outside of Cumbernauld. I was to go through the four-year recognized union training to become what was then called an “Electronic Technician.” I worked in various areas of the factory to learn all about the adding machines that the company built there. Digital technology had not yet arrived but I do remember talk from the brighter and more committed apprentices about the new “binary,” or “digital,” systems that were coming in. I wasn’t interested in the future of electronics, I just wanted to make enough money and play drums and not get belted every time I pissed off a teacher.

  Joining the adult world did have some interesting side effects. On the factory floor I met Bert, a small, bearded American guy who had served in Vietnam and then left the U.S. in disgust on account of the way he was treated when he returned. His angry tre
k through Europe eventually brought him to Scotland, where he had met a redheaded girl and stayed. Bert told me all about acid and Vietnam and the Summer of Love and San Francisco and L.A., and although he was cynical about America you could tell he missed it.

  I met Alex, a guy who had suffered polio as a kid and as a result walked with sticks and leg braces. He drove a little three-wheeled blue car that the government issued to disabled people and smoked the best hashish in Scotland. He would get some for you, too, because the cops never stopped a handicapped car.

  I also met Willie.

  Willie was one of those assholes that everyone who wants to get high on illegal drugs has to deal with. Willie was an electrician at the factory but he said he was really a keyboard player. The truth is, he was just a dealer. He was a chubby fellow with thinning long hair, and at the time I was sixteen, and he would have been around thirty. He liked hanging out with my friends and me, and he even became the keyboard guy for a band I was in. He would dribble his wiggly synthesizer solos over the guitars and drums.

  Willie had a house, a real house that he didn’t share with his parents, so every Friday night, after getting drunk on beer in the Reo Stakis Steakhouse and Pub (though never once had I even smelled, much less seen, a steak in there), we would go to Willie’s house for a “band meeting,” meaning we would smoke hash and listen to Willie talk shite.

  What Willie really did was open up the world of drugs. He seemed to have access to everything, although he remained cagey about where it came from. Through Willie I got to try Red Leb—hashish that came in dry, burgundy-colored cubes smuggled in from Lebanon—and Paki Black, another type of hash, thick, trea-cly, and opiate-laden, that you crumbled into a joint and smoked with tobacco. I loved hash for a while, it made me feel goofy and fun and introspective and deep all at the same time. Hash made you the maharishi.

  Then came “sulph”—amphetamine sulphate, the poor man’s coke, an off-white powder that was snorted in a line. Sulph had a speedy and adrenal high which I initially loved because it let you drink as much alcohol as you liked without passing out, but coming down from it was catastrophic; it made me horrifyingly paranoid and twitchy. I only took it a dozen times or so. I have an addictive personality, I’ll try anything a hundred times just to make sure I don’t like it.

  Acid was wild. Whenever I took an acid trip, and I suppose I have taken about twenty or thirty—all of them before the age of twenty-one—I always thought that it went on way too long. The insane giggling, the otherworldliness, the ridiculous meaningless insights. It just overstayed its welcome. Always. Anyone who has taken acid will know what I mean. It’s horrible, and when you have an unpleasant experience—a bad trip—it’s hellacious. The first bad trip I had with acid was the last time I took it, but that wasn’t until much later, when I would be stalked by ferocious yet partially imaginary killer ducks in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow.

  There was no crack, it wasn’t around yet, though there was some opium, which we smoked in a bong. And, of course, eventually—“You gotta at least try it, man”—there was heroin.

  I never responded well to heroin. I tried it a few times in my life, but it made me kind of nauseous and sleepy and I wanted to eat. This pissed off my fellow users because they felt sick and didn’t think it was right to order pizza when you were on the nod. I felt it was hypocritical to have rules given when we were on heroin, but I guess even junkies have their conventions. I never shot smack (thank God), just snorted the fumes from a burning line laid out on some tinfoil, a procedure known as “chasing the dragon” in the ridiculously melodramatic vernacular of opiate lovers. Even recovered junkies often refer to themselves as dope fiends—as if using heroin made you scarier and more “out there” than a blackout drunk. Addicts can be very competitive about their wretchedness.

  Another reason I never got into heroin was because of the others who did. They all seemed so fucking self-righteously corrupt. They put me in mind of my little buddy Raskolnikov.

  I probably would have gotten into more trouble with Willie and his pharmaceutical smorgasbord but I met Gillian, and not for the last time I was saved by love. The two great loves of my life.

  Women and alcohol.

  12

  Love and Sex

  I had kissed girls before, of course. I had flirted and made out and fumbled with them. A magnificent large-breasted blousy lass called Fiona had even given me a hand job behind the power station on the way home from school one day. I had worked at a fairground during summer vacations and sometimes the girls who were on holiday would let you feel them up, but it was tough for them because, in the hypocritical custom of the time, they had to try and keep some sort of reputation for chastity, while any boy they even kissed would report and exaggerate the encounter to all the other boys, using the following lingo:

  1. just winching—Kissing only. A boy would say this if he wished to protect the girl’s reputation at the expense of his own. This was rare, but it did happen.

  2. upstairs outsidies—Feeling breasts through the girl’s sweater or coat. She’d often be unaware of the thrill she was giving, since boys often mistook elbows or purses for the real target.

  3. upstairs insidies—Hand inside bra, or even fully unhitched bra. Unheard of in the winter months.

  4. downstairs outsidies—Hand on vaginal area through clothes. Similar to TSA check at U.S. airports.

  5. downstairs insidies—Getting your grubby teenage hands on a girl’s bare genitals. Fingers would be sniffed to corroborate any claim made of this.

  6. shag—Full intercourse. Any claim of which was generally viewed (correctly) as a lie.

  Among my peers, the idea that any normal female would genuinely desire to have sex was dismissed as nonsense. We’d been taught from an early age that sex was shameful and bad, that men wanted it all the time because they were slaves to their appetites, and that women were good, they didn’t like or want sex but would allow it in order to have babies, or because they were drunk, or English. No one actually said this out loud, it was just hinted at. I was given absolutely no sexual education at school, and there was never any “talk” from my parents, so in that area I am also an autodidact. I feel I approached my studies with a verve and enthusiasm that was unmatched in other regions of my life.

  Gillian saved me from druggy Willie. She was my first real girlfriend, and she wasn’t much of a drinker, but her father was an alcoholic sportswriter for the Scottish Daily Record so she accepted my excessive alcohol consumption in a way that she would never have tolerated drug-taking. Any drug-taking. Drink as much whiskey as you like, but don’t even think of smoking a doobie. This is still not uncommon as a prejudice. I suppose in Scotland, at least, alcohol has the historical advantage.

  If I wanted to be around Gillian, then, I had to forsake the drugs, and this was no problem for me because I really wanted to be around Gillian. Before I met her, all the girls I had kissed or fooled around with were not people I was attracted to, they were just available and willing to put up with my breathy attempts at sexiness, but Gillian was different. She was beautiful. Voluptuous and charismatic like a young Loren, with deep, dark-brown eyes and dark-brown hair as shiny as the shampoo adverts on TV. She smelled a little like peaches, and there wasn’t a trace of acne on her skin. I met her at a party just after I had dropped out of school and got to talking with her. I asked if I could walk her home and she said yes. She also said that she couldn’t be my girlfriend because she was going on holiday the next day with her parents and she might meet someone, but I didn’t care. It was a cool, light summer night and I wanted to be around her for as long as I could. I walked her back to her house—she lived in a good part of town, near the other protestant school, the one she had attended. I stood outside her front door and she kissed me hard on the mouth and I could feel her desire, not like a favor or a blessing, but like something she wanted. I was shocked and confused, but before I could attempt even upstairs outsidies she had said goodnight and had gone inside,
leaving me breathless on her doorstep.

  I saw my buddies on the way home. “Just winching,” I told them, but they didn’t give me too hard a time. Even just winchin’ somebody who looked like Gillian was a triumph.

  She was away three weeks. Her family had a little money and had gone to the impossibly exotic location of San Francisco for their annual vacation. I tried not to think about her making out with spectacularly toothed American boys, but it was hard. I had been there, I had seen the promised land of dentistry.

  The night Gillian got back there was another party—house parties became frequent in the summer, as the more gullible liberal parents went on holiday and showed their trust by leaving their teenagers at home unsupervised.

  She arrived before me that night. I had been drinking hard cider and Breaker malt liquor in the woods beforehand with some Stuart or other, but I wasn’t drunk, just a little buzzed, enough to be confident. When I got to the party somebody told me she was in the kitchen, talking to some other girls. I wandered in to say hi and almost keeled over. She had a deep golden tan which made her even more luscious. I asked her if she had a nice time.