Jam Tops, the Fonz and the Pursuit of Cool

by Kris Lillyman

  Frazer smiled. “You should have told Gordy, Daze - he’d have wanted to know. You and him had something, you know?” The kind-hearted punk was much more perceptive than he let on.

  Daisy felt a pang of deep regret, she knew Frazer was right but it was too late now. “You tell him for me. After half-term, when I’ve gone. Tell him I’m sorry.”

  “Sure. Okay. It won’t be the same though - he’ll miss you. He might not know it yet but he will.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps when Pippa’s out of his system.”

  “Sooner rather than later I reckon.”

  “We’ll see. Anyway, I guess this is it.”

  “Yep. Good luck, Daze - have a great time in Africa.”

  Daisy smiled ironically. “Yeah, well I’ll try. See you, Frazer. Thanks for everything - thanks for being so understanding.”

  “Hey, no problem. You gotta do what you gotta do, right?”

  Daisy nodded. “Right.” Then she gave Frazer another peck on the cheek and walked away.

  ***

  The next day, during a heavy rainstorm, Daisy found herself nervously sitting on the tarmac of Heathrow airport onboard a BOAC flight bound for Dar es Salaam. The miserable weather mirrored her feelings exactly - even though the eternally cheerful Glynn and Lynn Flynn had tried to raise her spirits all the way to the airport with a medley of upbeat sing-along-songs. But she was in no mood to be cheery; her life as she knew it was about to change dramatically and there was not a damn thing she could do about it.

  As the big Boeing 747 rumbled along the runway and swept up into the blackened sky, Daisy could think of nothing else but Gordy and whether, one day, she would ever see him again.

  ***

  After half-term, when they got back to school, Frazer told Gordy of Daisy’s departure and he was stunned. He just couldn’t believe it, why on earth hadn’t she said something?

  It came as a double blow to Gordy who was still reeling from his recent break-up with Pippa prior to the half-term break.

  Indeed, he had spent a miserable week off school just moping about the house, shut in his room, forlornly fantasising about Pippa and their fabulous and frequent fumblings in the shed, painfully aware that they would never be repeated.

  He had ventured out of the house only once - going around to Trevor’s, desperate to occupy his mind with something other than romantic rejection, but Trevor was ‘too ill’ to come to the door.

  Gordy was worried about his friend - this illness of Trevor’s seemed so odd, so sudden - but for the time being Gordy had problems of his own.

  And then, after the worst half-term break in history, Gordy returned to school to hear the news about Daisy.

  And he felt surprisingly bereft.

  ***

  For a time, Gordy and Frazer were a good pair together as they skulked dejectedly around the school, each having been dumped by their respective girlfriends’ (although in Frazer’s case it was less of a dumping and more of a gentle let down).

  But as the weeks went by things gradually got better.

  School soon proved too humdrum for Frazer who, once again, reverted to life as it was pre-Daisy, which meant attending only sporadically - whenever the mood took him, which averaged out at around three days a week.

  He and Gordy stayed friends but saw each other less and less. And with Trevor’s continued absence from school, Gordy eventually drifted away entirely from his old nerdy friends and started hanging with a newer, more switched on crowd as befitted his carefully cultivated image (even though he still had the urge to sing a show tune now and again which he forcibly fought down).

  Finally, Gordy’s broken heart healed sufficiently for him to move on. Strangely, his experience with Pippa had made him more confident - he understood what it was all about now - and it gave him an extra swagger, an added sense of ‘knowing’ which, quite unexpectedly, seemed to make him a whole lot cooler in the eyes of others.

  Over the course of his next two years at Poplar Park he remained obsessive about clothes and music and spent whatever money he had on them. In those years he had numerous girlfriends - some short term, some long term, but they all helped ease the pain caused by Pippa Wilson.

  As he got older, Pippa became nothing more than a fond memory of how he lost his virginity.

  But one thing endured and stubbornly refused to go away; the sadness he felt at Daisy’s departure and the occasional pondering of what had ever become of her.

  His times at Bailey’s Bandstand during the Summer of 1978 and his transformation from nerd to something resembling ‘cool’ were the best of his life and made him the man he finally became.

  And it was all thanks to the person who made an equally stunning transformation that long, hot, glorious Summer.

  Daisy Flynn. The girl that got away.

  Part Two: The Eighties

  Chapter Sixteen

  Magaluf, Majorca 1985

  Gordy woke up on the cold tile floor. His head throbbed badly and felt as if it might explode if he moved too quickly. Indeed if he moved at all he was afraid that his poor stomach may not be able to handle it and he could very well throw up.

  However, movement of any kind, was restricted by a very heavy leg that was laying across his back - a man’s, which appeared to be muscular, hairy and, socked. An arm, which presumably belonged to a female, because of the neon pink polish on the fingernails, was supporting Gordy’s aching head like a an uncomfortable fleshy pillow and a head, which belonged to a third person was happily sharing it.

  The head (which was attached to a rather portly, quite stinky body) belonged to yet another man who was stretched out on the tile floor, just like Gordy, and snoring loudly.

  Gordy raised his banging head, and blinked his bleary eyes in order to fully focus on the scene laid out before him in the small twin-beddded room of the two-star Majorcan flea pit he was currently laying on the floor of.

  It looked much like the final battle scene of Commando, that he and his mates had watched at the pictures just prior to jetting off on their Club 18 - 30 holiday, in which old Arnie Schwarzengger had gone ape shit with a big, heavy machine gun leaving a shed load of dead bodies lying in his wake.

  There must have been twenty people or more - on the floor, on the beds, on the balcony and in the tiny bathroom which Gordy could just make out from his uncomfortable viewpoint - there was even one bloke still fast asleep with his head hanging down the toilet - presumably having nodded off in the act of puking if, indeed, that was possible. Gordy guessed that it was.

  It was like one, big, mad version of Twister where all the players had fallen into a mass simultaneous coma. Very ugly.

  Amongst the sleeping, half-naked and fully naked bodies, were umpteen empty bottles of San Miguel beer and numerous empty bottles of spirits - particularly vodka, which seemed to be a favourite.

  Gordy groaned as a vague recollection of last night’s revelry appeared in the hazy mists of his alcohol addled memory. It had certainly been a wild party that was for sure.

  It comprised mainly of Gordy and the nine mates he was on holiday with, together with some lads they met from Ireland, a group of very friendly girls from Manchester and another couple of loud, legless, liberally minded Geordie lasses who they met up with at a night club who needed very little persuasion to go back to the hotel for a ‘piss-up’.

  And a very good time was had by all - with various groups from various floors of the hotel joining in with the fun.

  Gordy remembered getting off with one of the Newcastle girls - who, he seemed to recall, was reasonably good looking with big hair, big boobs, lots of make-up and a very short skirt.

  He looked down at the arm that his head had been resting on and followed it back to the shoulder and then the face of it’s owner. As he suspected, it belonged to the Geordie girl he was with last night. As her features came
into focus, he suddenly recoiled in shock and grimaced involuntarily, immediately revising his former opinion of ‘reasonably good looking’ and amending it to ‘face like a bag of spanners’.

  Clearly not his finest hour.

  She was lying on her back now, breathing heavily like a chain-smoking asthmatic and naked except for a skimpy pair of lacy knickers, legs and arms akimbo. Her hair was less big now and her make-up was smeared grotesquely all over her face. She was clutching an empty bottle of Warninks Advocaat between her bare breasts (which, for the record, were every bit as big as they had been last night which for Gordy, who now found himself clutching at straws, was a tick in the ‘plus column’ at least).

  Gordy slowly, very slowly, very gently, untangled himself from his position, moving the heavy leg that was laying over his back - which turned out to belong to his friend Bangers - and placing it down next to Geordie Girl as he finally managed to extricate himself and stand up.

  Gordy’s head was pounding as he glanced around the room, picking out one or two of his mates in between the unnamed, unknown hordes of sleeping revellers.

  Bangers was by his feet; Bubble was lying out in front of him (whose head had been sharing Geordie Girl’s arm with Gordy), Stigger was on the bed, Digger was on the balcony and Spud, Stingy and Squeak were sprawled out on the floor in various parts of the room. The only two unaccounted for were Bigsy and ‘H’ but Gordy was sure they were somewhere buried under the bodies and bottles.

  Not for the first time, it struck Gordy that all his friends had nicknames apart from him. Even though he was now twenty-two, he remembered back to when he was fifteen and to The Cool List which he had committed to memory long ago (even though he still kept the original draught for posterity in a drawer at home in his bedroom).

  Item Number 9, ‘Nicknames’. One of the few things listed he had not achieved and still wished for. But for some reason it had never happened. The Cool List was a thing of the past now, as was The Fonz, Gordy’s main inspiration for it, but he still remembered it’s teachings and tried to live by it’s code - even if things had gone a little off kilter lately - particularly with the crowd he was now hanging with and, perhaps more pertinently, his current situation.

  Suddenly anxious about what he must look like, he glanced around the room for a mirror and, much to his regret, found one.

  His carefully crafted quiffed, quaffed, combed, gelled and blow-dried mullet of the night before was now just a tangled, untamed mess sticking out at all angles. His pastel pink suit (complete with jacket sleeves rolled up), his pride and joy - a la Don Johnson in Miami Vice - who Gordy now modelled himself on - was crushed, creased and filthy, as was the white vest he wore underneath. Furthermore, the white espadrilles on his feet, which finished off his whole ‘Sonny Crockett’ ensemble, were quite possibly ruined.

  Bugger.

  Gordy, unlike his holiday companions, was still obsessive about clothes and the pursuit of ‘cool’ whereas they; Bangers, Bubble, Stigger, Digger, Spud, Stingy, Squeak, Bigsy and ‘H’ - who collectively, for the purposes of the holiday, had decided to call themselves ‘The Desert Rats’ - were most definitely not.

  They were drinkers and party boys with only a passing interest in clothes and their appearance. Indeed, aside from last night when they had all dressed in their normal ‘going out’ clothes, for a pre-organised Club 18 - 30 excursion to a night club, they had spent the entire two week holiday in matching T-Shirt and short combos. This consisted of stripy pink, yellow and green shorts and blue T-shirts with The Desert Rats printed on them together with a picture of a very drunk ‘Beau Geste’ style rat wearing a French Foreign Legion type uniform. Each T-shirt had the wearer’s name printed on the back arching across the shoulder blades.

  Much to his eternal shame and severe embarrassment, Gordy, too, had been forced to wear this attire for the entire duration of the holiday. It was all part and parcel of hanging around with this particular bunch of lads; the price that had to be paid.

  He had only been hanging around with them for a few months and was still not entirely comfortable with them but, unfortunately, all his other friends were in serious relationships and had fallen by the wayside, leaving Gordy as the only single one out of all those he had been friends with since leaving school.

  He’d not seen Trevor in years - the last Gordy heard he had been going off to university - somewhere up North if memory served him correctly. And as for Frazer, he had shacked up with a Siouxsie Sioux look-a-like who had just given birth to their baby boy, Spike. Frazer and Beth (the Siouxsie Sioux clone) now lived in a small terraced house just off Bradley town centre. Gordy had visited and they were still good friends but Frazer was all loved up and a father now to boot, so nights out with Gordy - or a two week holiday to Majorca for that matter - were definitely out of the question.

  So it was The Desert Rats or nothing. Although Gordy was starting to think that ‘nothing’ might have been the better option.

  Suddenly he missed Trevor badly. How had they grown so apart? Gordy had conveniently forgotten that he hadn’t considered his oldest friend cool enough when they were fifteen or that he was so smitten by Pippa Wilson that he had all but ignored anything and anyone else.

  Gordy only remembered Trevor taking the best part of a year off school for some mystery illness that was never properly explained - something to do with legs from what Gordy recalled, convinced that it was Trevor, not he, who was responsible for the breakdown of their friendship.

  Nevertheless, it didn’t alter the fact that he would swap all these ‘so-called’ new friends in a flash if Trevor was around.

  Coupled with his wistfulness over Trevor, came the familiar pang of regret that was always associated with Daisy Flynn. Gordy had thought about her regularly over the years and wished he’d handled things differently back when he had the chance. What had become of her? He wondered for the umpteenth time, and where was she now?

  Gordy felt as though he had lost his way somewhat in the last couple of years. All the highly prized ‘cool points’ he’d earned at school and immediately after he had all but lost. For a time he was, without doubt, the Steve Cool of his generation (even though, technically, Steve Cool was the Steve Cool of his generation, but he chose not to dwell on that). Nonetheless, Gordy had once had it all; the clothes, the friends, the girls, the stylish reputation - indeed, in his own mind, he was the Bowie of Bradley - the epitome of cool.

  But it had now all fallen by the wayside. He was still stylish, of course, and always would be, but his old friends had moved on and he had not had a significant girlfriend in over eighteen months.

  The new bunch he was hanging around with were all nice lads, but far from the cool crowd he had hoped to be a part of.

  Yet somehow, there he was in Magaluf, slap bang in the middle of Party Central nursing the mother of all hangovers in a room full of paralytically pungent, passed out piss-heads.

  It was all very depressing.

  Thank God there was only one hellish night left of the holiday to endure. Gordy had never drunk so much in his life before these last two weeks. It wasn’t that he didn’t drink, indeed, he liked a drink as much as the next man - it was just unfortunate that the next men happened to be Bangers, Bubble, Stigger and Digger et al - and they really liked a drink.

  Gordy had barely glimpsed the sun in all the time he had been in Majorca as The Desert Rats’ usual routine was to go out early - about 6pm, then hit the drink hard all night until about 6am, before staggering back to the hotel to sleep off the effects of the vast quantities of San Miguel they had imbibed - which usually took up most of the daylight hours.

  It was all far too much for Gordy and he was finding it difficult to keep up, resorting to surreptitiously hiding his drink in some darkened corner of the bar so that his companions would think he had already drunk it, before moving on to the next place for yet another beer.

  A
nd as for seeing the sun, Gordy was convinced that he was paler now than before he left home - so much for the Factor 30 sun cream his mum had ordered especially for him from Avon, which she had packed in his suitcase (along with some Piriton pills for his prickly heat just in case it should flair up again like it did that once in Mudeford in the Summer of ‘77).

  Gordy couldn’t wait to get back to the sanctuary of home for a nice cup of tea and the Sunday roast Barb had promised him before he left. There might even be a musical on BBC2 that they could watch together. Surely it would be okay just this once so long as he didn’t tell anyone.

  With the thought of home in mind, Gordy was determined to get at least a little bit of colour before he left - after all, a tan would look good with his pink pastel Don Johnson style suit if he could ever get the stains and creases of last night out of it.

  However, Alan Brewer, Gordy’s dad, had always been concerned by the pink suit, worried that his son was a wooly woofter after all, so he, for one, would be glad to see the back of it.

  But that was by the by.

  Presently, Gordy was being careful not to disturb anyone as he picked his way cautiously through the haphazard heaps of sleeping bodies covering the floor, heading for the balcony - seeming to recall that his towel and swim shorts were out there on a chair - or at least they had been when last he’d seen them.

  Sure enough, his swim shorts were there but not quite as he remembered. A big lad with what looked like a dodgy wedge-style haircut was fast asleep in the chair and wearing them on his head as a night cap. Furthermore, Gordy’s beach towel - in fact Barb’s favourite beach towel which she had brought home from a trip to Madeira - was draped over him as a makeshift blanket.

  This presented something of a problem but after weighing up the situation Gordy concluded that ‘Wedge Boy’ was probably far too zonked out to wake up should someone, namely Gordy, try to relieve him of his night cap and blanket.

  As stealthily as he could, Gordy plucked the swim shorts off Wedge Boy’s head, then very lightly pulled at the towel. For a moment he thought he was home free but suddenly Wedge Boy woke up and stared at him angrily, clutching hold of the towel firmly as Gordy tried to wrestle it from his grip.