‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘And also when I’m walking around,’ I continued, ‘and in the pool.’
‘You wank while you’re walking around! You wank in the pool!’ Sam said, revolted.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Sam. I can’t stop. I’m wanking right now.’
Sam hung up.
My problem only lasted a couple more days before (I’ll be delicate) there was an eruption. All on its own, untouched by me. It’s how the story of Adam and Eve would have been if there was no Eve. Suddenly it all made sense. My embarrassing mistake was realized, and I am proud to say I haven’t masturbated since (this may not be true).
As you can imagine, home life was turning into a disaster. I was hormonal, snappy and ugly. For some reason, rebelling against your parents is part of growing up. Your parents give you life, feed you and clothe you, and then you turn on them in your teens. I would come home from school with my tie half undone, my shirt hanging out of my trousers and my skin-tinted Clearasil smudged on my face.
‘Hello, darling, how was school today?’ Mum would ask.
‘Fuck off, I hate you, I hate you!’ I would scream before running upstairs to my bedroom and slamming the door behind me.
I was a nightmare to live with. I committed all the domestic teenage crimes. My mother constantly accused me of ‘treating the place like it was a hotel’ because I would never tidy my room, I’d leave my clothes on the bathroom floor and steal her towels when I went out.
I was a repeat offender at eating without getting a plate. I would stand at the fridge, grazing on whatever took my fancy, grabbing clumps of ham and dipping them in the mayonnaise jar.
‘Michael! What are you doing? Get a plate if you want to eat something,’ my mum would demand as she walked into the kitchen.
‘Fuck off, I hate you, I hate you!’ I would scream as little bits of mayonnaisey ham spluttered on her face, before I ran upstairs to my bedroom and slammed the door behind me.
I feel I need to update you on the relationship between my mother and Steve. While I was skipping my guitar lessons at Arnold House, bouncing around on the Metropolitan Line and walking around with an erection, they were married, and my mum had been pushing out baby boys at an alarming rate. I have three brothers, Nicholas, Thomas and Andre. Technically they are half brothers, so officially I have one and a half brothers. They were like Russian dolls. Not because they were smaller than each other and looked alike, but because they all look like fat Russian girls. That’s a joke. They were probably the best part of my teenage life, just like my kids are the best part of my life now. It’s wonderful to have innocent new people crawling and toddling around.
Me and Lucy with our little brothers Nicholas and Thomas in our Golders Green garden.
I apologize particularly to Steve for my behaviour during these years. If a teenager rebels against their parents, I can tell you, rebellion goes up a notch with a step-parent. Steve made an enormous effort with me, but it was no use, I could barely look at him. Before puberty Steve was a cool bonus dad, resisting my stomach punches and winning at my sports day. Now he was just this bloke living with us, in my face. Get out of my face. Who are you? You’re not my dad.
He never reacted to me and I must have pushed him right to the edge. Many lesser men would have reacted. There was one moment when, looking back, he says he was close to breaking point. After months of behaving appallingly, I went down to the kitchen for a drink. This normally involved standing at the fridge and drinking out of a bottle or carton. I was wearing a dirty old T-shirt and my boxer shorts the wrong way round. I opened the fridge and scanned the contents. I couldn’t see anything I wanted, so I had a good rummage around. Steve then entered the kitchen to be met with the sight of me bending down. Now, you know that little opening on the front of boxer shorts? Well, that was now at the back and wide open due to my bending.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Steve exclaimed.
‘There’s nothing to drink,’ I moaned with my head in the back of the fridge.
‘Do you know that your arsehole is on display?’ Steve asked in disgust.
‘What!’ I quickly stood up, knocking my head on the shelf, spilling yoghurt on my hair and covering the back of my boxer shorts with my hands. After countless teenage strops and tantrums, this could have been the final straw. Steve walked out muttering to himself about how he couldn’t take much more. But he didn’t (for want of a better word) crack, and he never did. Not with me anyway.
As I’ve previously mentioned, Steve is a remarkably good-natured man. My teenage shenanigans weren’t enough to derail his passive personality. He never even raised his voice. But it soon transpired Steve did indeed have a breaking point. One average summer’s day he was driving my mum in the BMW 3-Series with their two toddlers Nicholas and Thomas (Andre wasn’t born yet) in baby seats in the back. I should mention the car is the same 3-Series as before and was now so old that actual grass was growing on the floor. Grass. Growing in the car. I don’t know if this has ever happened to another car. I remember the day when my mother announced the phenomenon and the subsequent debate over whether to cut it or add an herbaceous border.
Anyway, so Steve was driving to or from a spot of shopping in Temple Fortune when a car full of yobs pulled up alongside our moving garden. They started hooting to get attention, and making lewd gestures and suggestive remarks to my mum. Make no mistake, these thugs were wild-eyed and dangerous. My mother told them to fuck off, but Steve calmed her down, not wanting to encourage them. He tried to manoeuvre the car away from the ruffians but ended up directly behind them in traffic. My mum was rattled, but luckily the kids in the back were pretty much oblivious to the unsavoury incident.
The traffic started to move, and Steve began to pick up speed when the hoodlums in front braked suddenly, deliberately forcing him to do the same. He screeched to a halt. My mother reached in front of Steve to hoot them, but Steve again felt it would only encourage them to respond. The traffic moved once more, and again the villains in front braked hard, forcing Steve to do the same. This time the whiplash hurt one of the kids, who started crying. The yobs in front were swearing and laughing. The situation was getting tense. They had to get out of there.
My mum was hysterical and scribbled down the licence plate of the ASBO wannabes and told Steve to drive immediately to the police station, for their own safety as much as to report the incident. Steve remained ice-cool. He managed to drop back in traffic and reach the police station without further trouble. They got out of the BMW. My mum, still shaken, lifted the kids out of the car. Steve then spotted the culprits sitting in traffic a little further down the road.
‘There they are,’ said Steve methodically.
‘Quick, Steve, get in the police station!’ my mum implored.
‘Wait here,’ Steve said in an unfamiliar voice and with a look in his eyes she’d never seen before. Only one person had seen this look before, the bully who locked him in the cupboard on his first day at school. My mother screamed for him to come back, but it was no use. Steve sprinted down the road at fathers’ race-winning pace.
There were four of these youths in the car. Late teens/early twenties. They were hoodies in the days before hooded tops. Their eyes lit up at the prospect of a fight as Steve knocked on the driver’s window. The driver rolled down the window: ‘Yeah! What the fuck do you want, mate? Do you want me to get out of this car and beat the shit out of you?’ threatened the driver, with the rest of the car chipping in with similarly articulate intimidation. But Steve wasn’t there to engage in macho posturing. Steve had reached breaking point and, although they didn’t know it yet, that was bad news for them.
Steve grabbed the driver by the throat and ripped him out of the car window. He then lifted him up off the ground and issued a few basic suggestions about how he might wish to behave in future. The three other thugs got out of the car but, rather than confront a man who pulls other men out of car windows with one hand, made a run for it. Steve
dropped the driver on to the road and received deserved applause from fellow drivers and elderly Jewish ladies who had abandoned their Danish pastries to come outside and witness the kerfuffle.
From then on, I was a little bit more respectful around the house and always made sure my boxer shorts were the right way around when bending.
My real father and Holly also married, a lovely summer wedding with the reception at Drayton Wood. And they too produced children of their own, Billy and Georgina, another half-brother and half-sister for me. Bringing my total to one sister, one half-sister and four half-brothers (the equivalent of one and a half sisters and two brothers).
But their love affair with the English countryside soon ended and they moved to Los Angeles. They sold Drayton Wood with its 35 acres of land, swimming pool, tennis court, stables and two paddocks. They sold the Range Rover, their wellies, their Barbours, their two dogs (a Great Dane called Moose and a sheepdog named Benjie), two cats (Marmalade and Turbo), three horses (Nobby, Dancer and Lightning), two cows (Bluebell and Thistle), no partridges and several pear trees. And my dad sold his BMW 635 CSI.
I can understand the lure of LA. Holly had been living there, the sun shines every day, and it’s the home of showbusiness. England, however, was the home of his children and leaving us was heartbreaking for Dad. I tried to convince him not to leave England’s green and pleasant land and sung the National Anthem (unaccompanied this time) as he packed his suitcase. I remember him telling me over and over again how he loved me and how leaving Lucy and me was the most difficult decision of his life. In truth, I didn’t feel abandoned. You can’t miss something you never really had in the first place. We led separate lives. We only saw each other every other weekend – that was simply not enough time for us to have a proper relationship.
The plan was for Lucy and me to spend our school holidays Stateside with our dad. The first time I went to California, I had to agree it had the edge over Hertfordshire. My dad and Holly bought a beautiful Spanish house in the Hollywood Hills. It had an enormous swimming pool, a guesthouse, a trampoline, a grand piano and celebrity neighbours. Holly drove a Chrysler Station Wagon, and my dad bought a new Jaguar. My father started a video production company making music videos, and Holly opened a children’s clothes shop called Lemonade Lake. Lucy and I loved it. We went to Universal Studios, Disneyland and Sea World, rode the biggest rollercoaster in the world at Magic Mountain, but best of all spent quality time with our dad. For the first time since Hampstead, it felt like we lived with him.
Me and my dad after he moved to Los Angeles.
I want to get across to you how special a time we had together on these trips to America, so I’m going to write it as a cinematic comedy montage. Cat Stevens’s ‘Father and Son’ plays as we see:
Scene 1: We’re bouncing on the trampoline together, giggling. Dad bounces into the sitting position, which leads to me being bounced high into the sky and landing in a tree. We both laugh hysterically and I cling to the branches.
Scene 2: We’re cruising down Rodeo Drive in my dad’s Jaguar. He opens the sunroof. I squirt the windscreen fluid which projects through the roof and into his face. We both laugh hysterically.
Scene 3: We sit next to each other on Colossus, the highest rollercoaster in the world. The car slowly ascends to its full height and then tears downwards, twisting and turning at high speeds. It comes to a halt. We both vomit and then laugh hysterically.
Scene 4: We’re playing ball in the garden. He’s wearing an American football helmet and throws an American football, cut to me dressed as a cricketer. I hit the ball into next door’s garden. It hits a sunbathing John Travolta in the head. We laugh hysterically.
Scene 5: We’re sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows and watching a movie before bed. I’m in my pyjamas and he’s in a dressing gown with the word ‘Dad’ written on the back.
Cat Stevens fades out.
During my trips across the pond, I really embraced the American way of life. I became an all-American kid overnight. I loved baseball, I told everybody to have a nice day and I put massive amounts of weight on my arse. I actually became obsessed with baseball. I passionately supported the LA Dodgers. I watched all the games on TV and can still name all the players, who invariably had names tailor-made for the over-the-top American commentators, my favourites being Darryl Strawberry, Pedro Guerrero and Orel Hershiser.
A trip to Disneyland while visiting our dad in Los Angeles. We were having so much fun with him that we failed to notice the couple behind us lose their child in the ravine.
The highlight of my first trip was when my dad and I went to Dodger Stadium to watch a game. The Dodgers were clinging on to a 1-0 lead when it was the turn of Danny Heep to hit. Danny Heep wasn’t a regular in the team. I had never seen him hit the ball once. In my three weeks of following baseball, I had concluded that Danny Heep was useless. I turned to my dad and said, ‘Danny Heep is shit.’
To which my dad said, ‘Heep of shit.’ He then proceeded to chant, ‘HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT.’ Before long the crowd surrounding us started to join in, ‘HEEP OF SHIT, HEEP OF SHIT.’ My father’s unsupportive jibe was spreading around the stadium. Soon the entire Dodger Stadium was chanting, ‘HEEP OF SHIT’, including the other players, children and even Danny Heep himself (I may be exaggerating). Heep naturally struck out and returned to the dug-out. My dad and I laughed hysterically.
My father continued to smoke constantly. As any wife would be, Holly was worried about his health. Her idea to stop him smoking was to start smoking herself. Her theory was that he would be so worried about her health that they would both quit. This, of course, backfired, and she too became a heavy smoker. But when they weren’t coughing, they seemed deliriously happy, and so were Lucy and I on our visits.
One of the most powerful memories of my early teenage years was how I felt when I returned to England knowing it would be six or nine months until I saw him again. This was the first proper pain I had experienced in my life. I didn’t feel heartache when my parents got divorced. I didn’t miss my dad when I only saw him at weekends. I didn’t even feel particularly upset when we said our goodbyes in Los Angeles. I was excited to get home to see my mum and little brothers. But when I got back to Golders Green and I was wide awake in the middle of the night with jet lag, I yearned for him. I missed him so much.
My bedroom was in the converted loft, and I would creep downstairs to find Lucy in exactly the same state as myself. Crying and longing for our dad. There was a lot of talk by both our parents through the years about how decisions were made for the best – logical, reasonable arguments about how life would be better this way – and most of the time I agreed. You just get on with life, that’s how you survive. But in the small hours of the morning, after every visit to America, the true raw reality of my parents’ separation broke my heart.
11
Wow. That was a little heavy. Let’s lighten the mood and turn our attentions to the loss of my virginity. Strap yourselves in. So as I’ve already told you, I wasn’t the most attractive teenager. Girls didn’t fancy me, they laughed at me on trains. By the time I was sixteen I still hadn’t added to my one blender-kiss at the Hammersmith Palais. I didn’t know how to pull girls; for a while I didn’t know how to pull myself. Opportunities were limited. I had no real friends at Merchant Taylors’ but had remained close to my Arnold House friends.
Like everyone else at that age, Sam was totally obsessed with sex. He was, however, more overt about his obsession than most. He had a library of pornography. His bedroom walls were covered in pictures of tits. I, on the other hand, had no pornography. I was too embarrassed to borrow any or, God forbid, buy any. The most titillation I got was watching Felicity Kendall bend down to do some weeding on The Good Life.
That was until we became one of the first households in the country to get Sky TV. When we had Sky TV, they only had one advert on it, for Eagle Star Insurance, which they played over and over again. (It worked
, incidentally, as I now have my home insured with them.) The satellite receiver was in my mum and Steve’s room, and they ran a cable to my room so that I could watch the cricket from the West Indies through the night. This set-up meant that the channel could only be changed from the receiver that was in a cupboard next to Steve’s side of the bed. The thrill of early satellite television for me was not the Test Match, but the German gameshow Tutti Frutti, which featured girls stripping between standard fingers-on-the-buzzers Q and A. It was in a language I didn’t speak and the picture quality was poor, but Tutti Frutti was the best show I had ever seen.
Getting to watch Tutti Frutti was not easy. I had to sneak into my mum and Steve’s bedroom while they were asleep, open the cupboard that was less than a foot from the sleeping Steve. The channel would invariably be on number 11 as they tended to fall asleep watching Sky News. I had to change it to 47, RTL. I couldn’t just press 4 and 7; that sophisticated channel changing technology was still at the prototype phase. I had to flick individually through all the channels, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 … until 47. The tension was unbearable, but the thought of German tits kept me focused.
Occasionally Steve or my mother would stir or there would be a noise from the street outside. I would be startled and rush back to my bedroom, only to find I had not yet reached the magic number 47. I may only have reached number 22, the History Channel, or even 46, the National Geographic Channel; interesting, informative and educational they may be, but not the visual stimulus for what I had in mind. So I would return later to complete my mission. I did this every night. I think I watched every episode of Tutti Frutti ever made. I even started to enjoy the game play element, and when Hans Schneider was crowned champion, I was genuinely chuffed for him. Hilariously, after a few weeks an engineer came round to look at our Sky Box because Steve had complained to customer services that there was a fault. ‘It keeps changing itself to some weird German channel during the night.’
I genuinely don’t understand why I never had a girlfriend.
Life and Laughing: My Story Page 12
