The Devil Rides Out
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain
in 2010 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Paul O’Grady 2010
Paul O’Grady has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Paul O’Grady. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs 9780593064245 (cased) 9780593064252 (tpb)
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In memory of
Buster Elvis Savage.
The greatest canine star since Lassie.
AT MY MOTHER’S KNEE …
AND OTHER LOW JOINTS
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
. THE
BIG NIGHT OUT, THE ONE YOU STARTED
preparing for the moment you opened your eyes on a Saturday morning, asking yourself, as you contemplated the pattern of cracks across the bedroom ceiling that looked like Barbara Castle in profile, ‘What am I going to wear tonight?’ This question would later prompt a trip into town to buy a new top, a garment that would invariably turn out to be a skin-tight, Omo-white, cap-sleeved T-shirt, exactly the same as all the others that lay in my wardrobe drawer. Didn’t matter, there was something about a brand new T-shirt that made you feel ‘dressed up’ and dazzling.
There was a hysterical queen on the club scene known as ‘Suicide Lee’, so-called for the many wrist-slashing escapades and overdoses of paracetamol he put his body through each time he was dumped by the latest boyfriend. Since this happened every other weekend, the sight of a comatose Lee being carried out of a club by a posse of agitated queens became quite a regular feature on the late night streets of Liverpool. These futile suicide attempts never took place in the privacy of his own home. They were always carried out in
public, usually in the toilets of a pub or club where he knew that he would be quickly discovered by his long-suffering friends and saved yet again from the jaws of death. He probably got off on the adrenalin rush of all this high drama and the subsequent attention, which he mistook for sympathy when in reality it was ridicule and piss-taking on a grand scale.
One Saturday teatime he awoke on a friend’s bed from a drug-induced coma, the result of another attempt at self-harm the previous night, and asked his anxious pal wanly, in his best Camille voice, what the time was.
‘Half six,’ came the gentle reply.
‘Oh my Christ,’ Suicide Lee screeched, sitting bolt upright in the bed and springing into action. ‘What am I going to wear tonight?’
I never socialized with Suicide Lee – I couldn’t stand him, to be honest, and thought he should abandon any further botched attempts on his life and instead entrust the task of dispatching him to one of the many people, myself included, who would be only too happy to volunteer for the job – but in a way I sort of empathized with him when I heard the ‘what am I going to wear’ story. Even the debilitating aftereffects of an attempted suicide couldn’t stop this queen’s primeval urge to find the all-important something to wear and get out there clubbing. Every self-respecting young person went out on a Saturday night regardless of circumstances. To stay in was unthinkable; it meant you were a social outcast, a disgrace, a complete loser forced to sit in his bedroom listening to records and fretting while the rest of the town was out clubbing and having a ball.
I was going out tonight though and looked friggin’ gorgeous, or so I believed. My skin-tight jeans had been
freshly washed in the bath that afternoon and then spun and tumble-dried in the launderette on Church Road, where sometimes, in my haste to get ready, I forgot to ask or rather to grovel pathetically before the unpredictable pit bull who ran the launderette for her kind dispensation to use the drying machines. This faux pas would result in my being shown the door with a sharp reminder that the ‘use of dryers was strictly for those who had done a full load in the shop previous’. Like a mantra she read this out from a handwritten sign sellotaped to the wall over the spin dryer, as if it gave her declaration some sort of official authority. It was just one of the many rules and regulations written out on the inside of empty soap-powder boxes and then stuck on machines, walls and even windows of the launderette that either she or the other fifteen-stone piece of officialdom – similarly encased in a uniform of polyester overall and battered slippers – who ran the show when she wasn’t there had conjured up between the service washes in their little cubby hole that they grandly referred to as ‘the Office’. A refusal to be allowed to use the dryer meant running home to perform the laborious ritual known as ‘ironing your jeans dry’, a process that was never 100 per cent successful and meant enduring a damp crotch, arse and pockets all evening.
No damp jeans tonight though: a brand new pair of brushed denim Sea Dogs were about to make their debut, as was the ubiquitous cap-sleeved T-shirt bought that afternoon in Birkenhead Market. Hair blow-dried viciously until the top resembled a guardsman’s busby with back and sides nicely curled under by torturing my naturally wavy hair with a round hairbrush. Any imperfections such as a pimple, spot or love bite would be amateurishly disguised with a generous daub of Rimmel’s Hide and Heal that was the colour
of magnolia emulsion and glowed unnaturally under the fluorescent lights of a club. After checking myself in my ma’s dressing-table mirror I descended the stairs, leaving an eye-watering smog of Aqua Manda for Men in my wake. My mother, sat on the bottom step talking to my aunty on the phone, scrunched up her face and fanned it frantically with her hand like a panto dame who’s just found out that the slipper fits Cinderella.
‘What in God’s name have you covered yourself in?’ she moaned. ‘It smells like a gas attack, and I hope you’re going to wear a coat, you’ll catch your death going out like that.’
A coat? She had to be kidding. Only nesh old people wore coats. I had my brown leather bomber jacket – trendy enough to be considered acceptable outdoor wear. It had an elasticated waist that rode up at the back and I wore the sleeves pushed up to the elbow. It was also a size too small for me and therefore could never possibly be mistaken for anything as enveloping and shameful as a coat.
‘I won’t be late,’ I lied, ‘and if I’m not home it means that I’ve stayed at one of me mates.’
‘Mates? Which mates?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Ooh, I’d like to be behind you to see what you’re up to with these mates, my lad.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ I thought.
‘He’s off out tomcatting it again, Annie,’ my mother sighed resignedly down the phone to my aunty. ‘I don’t know what he’s up to, but I can tell you one thing,’ she added, giving me the once-over as she spoke, ‘the devil rides out. Oh, the devil rides out tonight, Annie.’
‘I
WONDER WHAT I DID IN A PAST LIFE THAT WAS SO EVIL TO BE
cursed with a lunatic like you for a son,’ my mother sighed. ‘I must’ve been the one who said to the Gestapo, “Anne Frank? Oh, she’s behind the wardrobe.” Why else would I have to suffer a big soft ciss who at eighteen years of age has to sleep with his mother because he’s scared of ghosts?’
Personally I saw her more as a Madame Defarge than an informer but whatever sins she fancied she’d committed in a past life, she was right. I was scared of ghosts. Bloody well petrified.
I’d been to see
The Exorcist
at the Futurist Cinema in Liverpool and had wound myself up on the journey home to such an extent that when I got in and scuttled up the stairs to bed I lay ‘like a big soft ciss’ unable to sleep, fully convinced that an abomination similar to what I’d seen earlier on the screen was lurking somewhere in the room waiting to pounce the moment I dared to close my eyes. Pulling the blankets over my head, I tried to blot out the image of that possessed child with the obscene black tongue and nice line in projectile vomiting.