Frank Skinner Autobiography (28 page)

Then it was my turn. I explained that I was in a band and so I just needed a job that would tide me over till we got established. The expression on the woman's face made me wonder if I'd accidentally said ‘Eat my nob-cheese' instead. She said that someone, as she put it, ‘with your qualifications' should be taking the ‘job-market' a bit more seriously. With my qualifications? That was the thing with growing up in a place like Oldbury. You get two O-levels and people start eyeing you suspiciously, like you were some sort of Stephen Hawking figure. I felt that the photographer from the
Smethwick Telephone
could have turned up at any moment with an easel, palette and artist's smock. Incidentally, one night on stage at Birmingham Town Hall, I asked if anyone in the audience knew why the paper was called the
Smethwick Telephone
, and one bloke said, without a trace of humour, ‘Cus it's from Smethwick.' Anyway, the YEO woman said that there was a vacancy at Hughes and Johnson's Stampings. I was very familiar with Hughes and Johnson's and it had one major plus-point. It was literally next door to the New Inn. I almost tore the card when snatching it from her hand.

When I turned up for my interview, the personnel manager said that, as I had O-level Art, he supposed I could draw a straight line, and gave me a job in the drawing office. I had never done anything approaching a technical drawing in my life, but no one seemed to care. I started on the following Monday and fucking hated it. We had to do an eight-hour day, for goodness' sake, not including lunch. I got home that night and my dad asked me what I thought of my first day at work. ‘Horrible,' I said.

‘Never mind,' he said consolingly, ‘tomorrow will be better.'

‘I know,' I said, ‘I'm not going.' And I didn't, but by day three I had got over the shock and it was literally back to the drawing-board, staring at sheets of tracing-paper, pretending I knew what I was doing.

The drawing office was separate from the other offices, even closer to the New Inn than the rest of the factory. On the other side was Harrold's the newsagents. The owner, Edward Harrold, was known locally as Teddy the Paper-Chap to adults, and The Beano Man to kids. He always wore the same long grey coat and wellingtons, and his baggy black trousers were cut off where the wellingtons started. If you got up close when he was on his bike, you could see that his legs were so filthy that they were the same colour as his wellingtons. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I never knew him to change those clothes, and he was too stingy to employ paper-boys so did all the deliveries himself. You would see him delivering daily papers at four in the afternoon and evening papers as late as ten at night. Every morning, his sister, Ivy, served newspapers and fags whilst breakfasting on lard sandwiches at the counter. Eventually, word went round that the Harrolds' dirty old shop was full of money. Someone broke in and gave them a bashing. I turned up for work one day and the shop was closed down. The policeman on duty said they had found boxes of money in there, much of it long since gone out of circulation, and brands of cigarettes that no one had seen since the war.

It wasn't a great area for brother and sister partnerships. I would occasionally stick a couple of quid in the local post office, run by Sidney Grayland and his sister, Peggy, in anticipation of a lads' holiday we were planning in Burnham-on-Sea for the following summer. I turned up with my two quid one Thursday and found the post office closed. A criminal known as the Black Panther had broken in during the night, beat poor old Sid to death, and tied up Peggy so tightly that the ropes had to be surgically removed.

I was a less obvious target for attack. My first wage packet was £14.50. I gave a fiver to my mom and drank the rest. The combination of boring job and money in my pocket did wonders for my thirst. For the first fourteen months at Hughes and Johnson's, I couldn't remember past 9.30 on any night. I never remembered leaving the pub, or getting home, or anything in between. If the police had said it was me who raided the newsagent or tied up Peggy Grayland, I couldn't have put my hand on my heart and sworn they were wrong. When I got too bloated to drink more, I'd put my fingers down my throat and make some room, and I woke up covered in cuts and bruises with no idea where I got them. I was seeing a very nice girl but she dumped me because I had arranged to meet her on New Year's Day and didn't show. The truth was, I decided to have a quick pint with my dad on the way to my one o'clock rendezvous, and woke up on my sofa at four. Apparently, Dad and me had both been chucked out of the pub for singing. I didn't actually remember it myself.

Maybe all this drinking is normal teenage behaviour, I don't know, but the thing is, it was fun. ‘Fun' is not a word I often use because it's been completely hijacked by local radio DJs who apply it to things that are definitely not fun. There are fun-runs and fun-pubs and fun-days, and they're all shit, but getting drunk every night is fun. Well, sort of.

Anyway, what fun there was started to go a bit sour. I got chucked out of the band because I was turning up pissed to rehearsals, and they changed the name from Olde English to a name I can't remember but which, inevitably, had something to do with Tolkien. This, of course, meant I could never go back. I have an aversion to all things children's literature. Any adult who reads Tolkien, Pooh, Harry Potter and the rest, is a worry to me. I didn't read children's literature when I was a child so I'm damned well not going to read it now. It's for kids. Look, they don't read hard-core pornography, I don't read their stuff. That's the deal. Either way, I was out of the band.

Then I was in church one Sunday morning when my heart suddenly started pounding and I could barely breathe. I walked out, mid-Mass, and staggered home. It was raining, and I thought I was going to collapse and die right there on the wet pavement. I saw a doctor the next day and he told me that if I carried on like this I'd be an alcoholic by the time I was twenty-one. This would have been fine if I was a rock star, but for someone who works in a scabby drawing-office between a newsagent where people eat lard and a pub where people eat glass, it was just pathetic.

The doctor gave me some tablets and told me not to drink with them. I went to the New Inn and ordered a lemonade. An old black guy came in, a regular who, like Teddy the Paper-Chap, also wore wellingtons all the time, but combined them with surprisingly elegant suits. On one occasion he had brought a saxophone into the pub, so my mates and me presumed he was some sort of jazz player. From then on he was known as Duke Wellington. Anyway, he asked me about the lemonade and I explained about the tablets. ‘Well,' he said, ‘it sounds like whatever you needed that was in the booze must be in them tablets as well. So you might as well just drink the booze.' It made perfect sense. I ditched the tablets and went back to the cider. However, I did cut down somewhat and started just getting drunk instead of very drunk. I had been treating life as if it was a limited-overs game, whereas, really, it is a five-day test match. Getting drunk instead of very drunk was a much more pleasant way of carrying on and I stuck with it for some time.

‘My battle with the bottle' stories are always very tedious. I carried on drinking until I was thirty, so I won't go on about being drunk unless it's really relevant. You can safely assume that, during the next thirteen years, any incidents I describe usually involve some degree of drunkenness. You don't need to hear the details and, besides, it's starting to make me thirsty. I mean, you know, thirsty.

Being that, at the present time, I'm incarcerated in a tenth-storey flat in Birmingham, writing all day, the ‘Today, I did this . . .' elements of the book are starting to get a bit tricky to write. When I look back at the book, I don't think I'll see the Vialli section as a highlight. Anyway, my point is that the more observant readers will have noticed that I – fairly accidentally I must admit – have put together something of a structure for the book which alternates a sort of journal comprising a description of my current experiences with a chronological autobiography telling what happened in my past. I didn't set out with this as a definite structure, but I thought it would help you because celebrities' pre-celebrity lives aren't necessarily all that interesting to read about and I hoped regular helpings of showbiz-glitter would help you through it.

As it turns out, I've let myself get a bit wrapped up in my past, and although I like doing the journal I don't want to make a rod for my own back on the structure front. I have found myself thinking, ‘Well, I'd like to put three journal bits together here, or have two consecutive past-life bits there, but I'd better not because they won't like it if I mess with the structure.' Well, fuck off. From now on, they happen when they happen, and if I don't like that I'll change back.

I was in a pub one night with some mates who told me they'd seen some prostitutes standing on a street in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. They'd pretended to be punters and asked how much it was for sex. ‘Five quid,' was the reply. None of us could believe it was so expensive. I'm not kidding. Remember, this was the early seventies. It was over a third of my weekly wage, and for what? Some old tart from Balsall Heath. If I spent a third of my weekly wage now, I could probably shag Fergie. Anyway, one mate, I suppose I better not name him, said he'd got a fiver and he was considering a late-night drive. A few of my mates were starting to get cars now. I was even having driving lessons myself. But tonight, though I didn't know it, I was heading for a lesson of a very different kind. (I feel there should be some dramatic ‘da-da-daaaaaa' music at this point. If only this was a CD-rom.) I put it to my mate that he might have the fiver but he didn't have the guts. In a dramatic gesture that would not have been out of place in an episode of
Maverick
, he slid the fiver along the table towards me. ‘Woooooaaaah!' went the crowd. I felt my stomach implode, but I cowboyed-up. ‘Gooo onnn!' went the crowd. I picked up the fiver. Much cheering ensued.

At this point, I must say that the following story is profoundly grim. A young man's first entrance into the world of what the local radio DJs call ‘bonking' should be, one feels, strewn with rose petals and shot in soft-focus, but this particular encounter fell a long way short of mystical. I actually had rose petals with me. I still carried the ones Mick Jagger had scattered on me at the Odeon, but I would not have liked to squander them on a night like this.

And the challenge had come quite early in the evening, so my focus was still unnervingly sharp. What I'm saying is, there's still time to pull out and skip to the next section. If you continue with this one, don't come crying to me.

Here goes. I drove with my unofficial sponsor to the street where he had spotted these women. Sure enough, two of them were on the prowl. On the way, I had dropped some very heavy hints that there was still time to back out, we could nip in for a drink somewhere, he could have his fiver back, and no one would be any the wiser. But no, he was determined that the challenge should be met. I had never done anything remotely like this before but reckoned I knew the type of thing that was said. We pulled up and I wound down the window. It was, as far as I could tell, the more attractive of the two women who approached the car. This was probably the last good news of the night. The other, a tall, broad-shouldered white woman with afro hair, reminded me of the cartoon-character Hair Bear. I was already scared as it was. If she had approached the car I would have been worried that she might possibly overturn it in a fit of pique. The approaching whore, also a white woman but with straight, jet-black hair, was probably in her early thirties. She wore so much make-up it was hard to tell. This was how our exchange went. Throughout this conversation, she chewed what I hoped was gum.

‘Yeah?' she said.

‘I wondered if you might know where I could find a good time.' Suddenly, I had become a nineteenth-century gentleman, leaning out of a hansom cab window as he once more gave in to his secret vice.

‘No,' she said, as if surprised by my enquiry. Perhaps she had taken me literally and thought I was trying to use her as some kind of late-night Entertainments Officer. If I'd thought my mate would have let me off, I would have said, ‘Oh, well, sorry to bother you,' and wished her a respectful good night, but I knew he wouldn't swallow it. Which was more than I could say for her. So, I persevered.

‘Oh, really? I thought you would.'

‘Look,' she said, impatiently, ‘d'you want business?' Now, whereas I felt that my euphemism had got a disarming jolliness about it, hers, well, it just made the whole thing sound sordid.

‘Erm, yeah,' I said, loath to share the metaphor.

‘Ya got five?' she asked. Every element of my being wanted to say ‘I dunno, I've never measured it', but she really didn't look like a woman who enjoyed persiflage.

‘Erm, yeah.' What a time to develop a catchphrase.

‘Come on,' she said abruptly, with an air of ‘There's work to be done.' I stepped out on to the street, with my mate explaining that he was going to just pull round the corner. I think he meant the car.

My new friend opened the front-door of a terraced house and I followed her in, taking one backward glance at Hair Bear. I must have been hysterical by this stage because I actually said, ‘Are you gonna be alright out here on your own?' She looked back at me as if I was an inanimate object. I paused to wonder if a more inappropriate thing had ever been said. And then I entered the whore's lair.

It was a small room with a tiny, dark-blue three-piece and, surprisingly, a rather enticing coal-fire. She turned and held out a hand. Maybe she always liked to begin proceedings with a hearty handshake? ‘Got the money?' she asked. She was obviously used to having it up-front, so to speak. I handed over my mate's fiver. I have to say, I had liked her better in streetlight. Under a harsh, bare light-bulb she looked like Cher's six-month-old corpse. Still, I didn't feel it was my place to suggest a lamp-shade. She put the fiver in the pocket of her long denim coat. In fact, she was all in denim, with matching jeans and waistcoat. It was going to be like fucking one of Status Quo. She took off the coat and hung it on the chair. Then popped open her waistcoat, which had studs rather than buttons, to reveal small naked breasts and a pot-belly that had so many stretch-marks, it looked like a grey slinky. I would have walked out there and then had it not been for the coal-fire.