Word up! Getting through this book at a cracking pace. This week we descend into the dank, rat infested basement that is my life in 2017.Also there is a pretty grotty first paragraph so you might want to light and candle and burn some incense to get in the mood for that.
IF YOU'VE MISSED THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK IT STARTS HERE
CHAPTER FIVE
KING OF THE RATS
AUGUST 2018
I don't remember when but I must have snuck out of the flat in Camberwell vanishing into the night and reappearing days later in my flat. I lay down on my bed. It could be a room in anyone's house anywhere in the world. I was the only person who had ever been in my bedroom in the two years I'd lived there, well actually i'd once had a girl back. We'd had a fun evening and really hit it off. I was cleaning up the sexual mess in the morning and she very flippantly said
"where shall I put this'' talking about the cum filled tissue at the side of the bed.
"I'll put it in the bin downstairs."
"You don't have a bin in your room?"
She sounded shocked. Why would I have a bin in my room I thought. In my mind there are only two rooms in the house that need bins the bathroom and the kitchen. She went quiet, there was a marked change in atmosphere.
"would you like a coffee?"
"no I better be going"
Five minutes ago she had my cock in her mouth. Now I felt like she never wanted to see me again as I didn't have a bin in my bedroom. I pondered it as we walked silently to the station. No bin in my room was a clue to the sad life I lived. I should have told her before we went back to mine that I didn't have a bin in my bedroom so she could have made an informed decision about coming home with me. If I didn't have a bin in my room, what else didn't I have? She must have thought. A cursory glance would have revealed a bed frame for starters. Until #BINGATE we'd been getting on great but the lack of bin revealed the unsaid truth of my life. The next time I brought a girl back I'd be ready, I'd have a bin in every room, maybe two in some. I looked around my bedroom as I closed my eyes, I never had bought those bins. My front room was the life and soul of the party but my bedroom was just a weird introvert who hid out at the top of the stairs. Maybe my bedroom was the real me and the front room was the me I wanted the world to see. I'd left Willy Sabitini behind in a park in west London. As I drifted off I pictured him fingering a homeless person. Sleep could not come quickly enough the only time I got any respite from the ferris wheel of misery that spun through the fires of hell in the daytime was when it lifted into the clouds of heaven in dreamland. This was no way to live a life I thought. A series of temporary jobs, a self indulgent hobbie that took up all of my time for virtually no financial rewardsand a bedroom that made Tracy Emins "my bed" look like property porn. Before I knew it it was morning and I was due at my financial advisors.
I hadn't seen Kevin for a couple of months; he'd become the one ray of light in these dark days. There he was sitting at the back of the office grinning like a dog with a tennis ball, I imagined him wagging his tale under the desk as I approached him. He said
"I knew you'd be back"
"I couldn't stay away."
"because you've worked so hard the last three weeks and I know you'll look really hard for a job I've put you on a retainer until you are back on your feet."
He seemed happier than usual. I asked him why
"I'm starting legal proceedings against the bus I get to work."
He explained how there was a big queue for the bus that day. Apparently the driver said good morning to everyone except him. When he'd pulled the bus driver up on this he'd been asked to get off, he didn't want it to escalate so got off but was going to get his revenge with a strongly worded letter.
"Did you do anything else?" I asked
"I hadn't topped up my Oyster card"
"yeah he's in the wrong, destory him"
As far as Kevin was concerned this was discrimination. I did wonder if that was Karma for all the free bus passes he'd been handing out. I offered to be a character witness.
"Thanks, do you know about the secret bus routes?
"I don't"
"Have you ever seen an empty bus at night?"
"Yeah, aren't they just out of service driving back to the garage?"
"They aren't out of service..."
We were interrupted by his boss who told us that Kevin was running late and his next client was there. Kevin said
"if the bus driver wasn't racist we wouldn't be behind and I'm currently dealing with a high risk customer"
He pointed at me. I did my best high risk face at his boss who backed away.Kevin told me to relax
"I better get back to my flat."
"I hope you are going back there to chill out. Don't rush back to work as you've had a tough couple of months. Check your bank account when you get in"
I thanked him and said
"You'll tell me about the bus routes next time?"
He nodded as I shuffled past his boss who stank of BO and was wearing a pair of glasses that were sellotaped together. Kevin's voice faded into the background as the carcinogenic white light of the office transitioned into bright summer sun when I exited onto the street.
Now that I'd sorted my finances out in my continuing attempts to give something back to society it was time to pay a visit to the therapist I was helping. It was the first time since I'd re entered the body of Harry. For some reason the therapists face and name would never stay in my head John? Frank? Tim...? Every time I saw him it felt like we were meeting for the first time. As I climbed the steep stairs to his top floor flat I imagined myself as a character from a Greek myth going up to the top of a mountain looking for meaning in the chaos and just getting the universe's unreasonable silence in response.
The room we sat in felt like we'd broken into an Airbnb. Everything felt temporary. He said that it was his home but I didn't believe him. It felt like the couch I sat on was an afterthought. I imagined it wasn't there when his first client turned up and they had had to sit on the floor it was only after they left that he realised you needed a couch to be a therapist so he frantically surveyed the IKEA web-site trying to find one that could be delivered ASAP. The pictures on the wall were so neutral he may as well have framed white pieces of paper. Last time we'd met he'd been projecting a lot of his issues on to me telling me that I had problems with my familyand that maybe I had made the wrong choice with my career. I raised my eyebrows and said
"Yeah my family and my career."
Reading between the lines this was probably why he was so keen to keep seeing me. I was actually thinking of making this our last session but before I could bring it up he said
"I think we should talk about your self obsession" (More projection). He thought I was self obsessed? I told him
"if I'm self obsessed why am I paying you to give you therapy?"
"I didn't realise that's what you were doing"
So I wrote in my notebook lack of self awareness and I made a note to move on to that when the time was right I had to deffend myself first.
"I'm not self obsessed,on the contrary I'd always tried to help people." I said in a prickly tone.
When I'd thought about helping this guy at the start it was because I thought I was selfish but now it became clear my real problem was I was selfless. If I'd spent a bit more time focussing on myself over the years then maybe I wouldn't be in this position. I should have had good karma. I'd always helped people whether it was through my magazine, filming projects, my column in the Guardian or the comedy nights I ran. In fact back in 2017 I'd been fired for working on the most charitable thing I'd ever done.
Before Rats In the mid 2000's when I was on the up I was an important figure. I ran a comedy magazine and promoted gigs featuring underground acts and big names. But in recent years the circuit had become staid and corporate with every act a carbon copy of the next. It had always been crawling with Oxbridge twats and uni student types but now that was endemic as all the funny people were forced to work on building sites, in Amazon warehouses and immersive theatre shows set in Tudor times. Comedy became more of an industry and less of an art form with ambitions revolving around a Live At The Apollo appearance. A TV show that required you to package your personality into a ten minute clip and sell it to the British public. You'd walk out on stage as a smoke machine bellowed and rock and roll music blared and say something like "a lot of people think I look like a french bean" canned laughter would be added in so it didn't matter what you said as long as you were confident and you wore what the stylist told you. In order to sustain that show it needed a constant stream of new acts so training camps were set up in the form of comedy schools where you had all your originality knocked out of you by teachers who had had no success in the industry as a live performer.
For the more alternative acts there were clown schools, where you would pay hundreds of pounds and have to go to France. A man would beat a drum during your performance and would tell you you were shit until you cried. Once you'd cried on stage you were ready to be a clown and you would get a certificate. The certificate was great for these wealthy unfunny acts to pitch their craft as a vocation to disapproving parents. Once you had your paperwork an agent would more likely sign you. Comedy was once a place for people who didn't want to conform to society but the schools made sure every act was the same. Rats was set up to redress the balance, an outlaw comedy night where the savvy acts had their bad instincts deprogrammed and were put back on the circuit as artists. Rip up their certificates and make the sellouts give up or fast track them into the advertising industry which is where most of them would end up anyway. For me the only way to become a real comedian was in the real world not the classroom.Harsh but the strongest steel is forged in the fires of hell.
This was in direct competition with the mindset of the day which is to be positive about anyone's efforts no matter how bad or in the open mic circuits case racist or misogynistic those efforts were. An act could walk out and do a shit on the stage and you'd have to say "aren't regular bowel movements great, sign of a diet high in fibre" instead of "you selfish cunt why have you just done a shit on the stage." It’s an interesting dichotomy as no one likes performing at an open mic and no one likes watching an open mic yet there are hundreds of them a night across the globe. Every major city has a shitty open mic night. With no barrier to entry for either performers or audience (most open mic nights are free) you would often find audience members having to make their own entertainment by heckling the "comedians' ' who they were often funnier than. But what took me aback was how at the beginning of the night the MC would speak like we were about to sit down to watch a show at the London Palladium. Then an act would do their 5 minutes of racist, misogynistic material with no jokes or any logic or structure to complete silence and the MC would return and speak like we’d just seen Chris Rock. I felt like I was in a room full of that anthropomorphic dog meme sat in the house on fire. Rats was all about acknowledging and laughing at the elephant in the room, the zenophobic, talentless elephant in the room. At rats they would blame the night, me, the room, the audience, anything but admit their ill thought out act or lack of charisma was the problem. The audience I was cultivating rightly found this hilarious but the open mic hacks couldn't deal with it which just made it funnier. Slowly but surely the night began to build an audience, we were making headway. I wouldn't say life was good but there was hope it soon would be.
It was great as my stand up had barely made a dent in the public consciousness but this felt like it was going somewhere. A prime example of the blind spot I occupied in the British public's vision is I once did the Edinburgh Fringe where the only tweet throughout my one month run was someone tweeting asking would anyone like their tickets for my show as they'd double booked themselves with James Acaster. Last year James had a successful critically acclaimed show based on his girlfriend leaving him for Mr Bean. What he'd failed to mention in his show was she'd left me for James Acaster. I got all of the heartbreak he had but none of the commercial appeal of writing a show about your girlfriend leaving you for Rowan Atkinson. Not even PT Barnum could spin my girlfriend left me for James Acaster to sell any tickets so rats was going to be my ticket out of here.
"You know James Acaster?"
His voice snapped me back into the room. I'd forgotten... Paul? was there
"Yes I know James, we started at the same time and he's selling out theatres and I'm hosting an open mic night called Rats"
"Were hosting a night called rats, you said it ended"
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CHAPTER SIX IS HERE
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