Small Man in a Book (14 page)

In Venice with David. James is tagging along.

The first time I noticed his talent was when we were filming the scene where I realize that he’s the son I didn’t know I had. We were in a cabin, the windows covered up to simulate night, and I vividly remember playing the rather intimate, two-hander scene and thinking to myself,
Bloody hell, he’s good! I’d better pull my socks up
. Just at that moment the boat lurched violently one way, then the other, and a loud scraping sound was heard. We looked at each other in shock.
That can’t be normal, can it?
It wasn’t – we’d hit a rock. Opening the cabin door revealed crew members, normally the model of composure, panic-sticken and running through the narrow corridors. Within minutes, we were all up on deck wearing our life jackets. The official term is ‘mustering’, and we mustered with some degree of anxiety until being told that, while the boat wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, we were in no immediate danger of sinking.

One night, while filming at the infested beach resort, we were walking back from a taverna together along a dusty road in the darkness. James was telling me how he wanted to write, but didn’t know how to start. I told him to just get on with it. I wonder if he did?

The last notable in this remarkable cast was a very young, slightly chubby and entirely unknown Russell Brand, playing one of the fans on the boat – more or less an extra, with maybe two lines. He was a remarkable boy even then, and would hold me spellbound on the deck each morning as he recounted his adventures of the previous night when he’d ventured off the ship and explored the seamier side of Istanbul.

‘I confidently predict that one day you
will
remake Dudley Moore’s
Arthur
.’

‘Her hand shot out from the darkness, a finger beckoning me onward … Should I enter hither? Behind me, gunshots filled the night air … I leapt on to a nearby canopy and began my escape across the rooftops of Istanbul …’

Listening to him tell these wonderfully vivid and absorbing tales, as the ship chugged on around the Mediterranean and the wind blew through our hair, was like watching Peter Pan flying around the rigging of Captain Hook’s
Jolly Roger
. Although he was just an extra on the shoot, I took the unprecedented step of predicting that he would one day be a big star. Well done, me.

Nineteen years earlier, I was continuing my mammoth daily bus journeys to school right through to the end of my time at Porthcawl Comprehensive, an occasion marked by spectacular failure at A level. This didn’t matter, as I’d really been staying on solely to enjoy more school shows and to keep on resitting O levels until I had the five required for a university grant. The A levels were never really needed. Academic historians might wish to note that I eventually walked away with O level passes in English Language, English Literature, Drama, Economics and Maths.

Throughout these long-distance commutes I was involved in the various unrequited yearnings detailed earlier in this book, and it was while on the bus that I would build up a modicum of confidence and belief that I might be in with a chance. This was due to the darkened plastic sheet that hung behind the driver’s cab, a device originally employed solely to separate the driver from his passengers but nowadays primarily used to
protect
the driver from his passengers. When sitting in the seats closest to and facing directly this large piece of darkened plastic, the reflection that came back was an altered image of oneself, as the plastic was slightly curved. This had the effect of squashing whatever it was reflecting, and so a fat person would appear fatter, making the seat something of a no-go area for the tubby. Long-faced horse whisperers like me, though, were able to see a far more solid fellow staring back at them, someone who had been working out for a while, and with some degree of success (to the point that, at the height of my state of denial, I became convinced I looked a little like Christopher Reeve, star of the
Superman
films).

I can’t help wondering now whether my romantic history would have been different if I’d managed to strap any of my distantly adored beauties into the front seat of the Neath-to-Porthcawl bus. As it was, I ploughed on bus-less and living in hope of romance that was never to surface.

Every year as Christmas approached, I would dread the Christmas Disco, which for us would take place at the now-vanished Stoneleigh Club, just along the road from the record shop in Porthcawl and not far from Fulgoni’s ice cream parlour. Here it was that I would chat happily with a variety of girls; dance with them, even. But come the end of the night and the dreaded slow dance to ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’, I would be left at the edge of the dance floor wondering how so many of my mates had managed to find themselves wrapped around a girl. Each year it was the same, John Lennon taunting me, reminding me that it was Christmas and asking me what I’d done. The answer, when it came to girls, was an emphatic ‘nothing’. He’d bang on, reiterating that another year was over and that we were about to begin a new one. He’d then add insult to injury by cheerily informing me that he hoped I’d have fun. No one was hoping more than me, John, no one.

Several of my teenage years ended like this, drunken friends getting off with drunken girls while Sober Bob strolled home mystified by the unfairness of the universe.

The Stoneleigh was one of the very few nightclubs at which I spent any time as a teenager; the other was the Troubadour in the Aberavon Shopping Centre, where I worked weekends while in the sixth form. Seeing the name of the place in print is a little misleading, lending it an undeserved air of sophistication when you bear in mind that the glasses were made of plastic. If readers are at all familiar with a nightclub called the Troubadour, it’s more likely to be the one found on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a legendary venue famous for the role it played in launching the careers of, amongst others, Elton John, James Taylor and Carole King. To really appreciate my memories of the Port Talbot Troubadour, it’s vitally important that you clear your mind of any thought of the Los Angeles venue. They were very different.

I worked behind the bar of the Port Talbot branch, handling the plastic glasses on Friday and Saturday nights, during the last summer before leaving home and heading off to college. In doing so I joined a group of regular employees who would have been a scriptwriter’s dream, so clearly were their characters defined; had it been a sitcom that was being written, then a convincing argument could have been made for their individual and collective entrapment (the state in which, we are told, all successful sitcom characters find themselves).

There was the single mum, Julie, who I’m guessing would have been in her early twenties, with lots of make-up but the perfect skin of a porcelain doll. Then the young lovers, Sandy and Andy. Sandy worked behind the bar and Andy helped the DJ. (Did he? I don’t know how anyone writes an autobiography without a team of helpers.) And then there was Barbara, the older, matriarchal member of the team. (Was she forty? Was she younger? I don’t know! I was nineteen, it was ages ago.) I do remember her regarding me with amusement as a nice boy who’d lived a pretty comfortable life up till now and had perhaps not experienced much of the earthier side of life. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but one evening she responded to something I said with an emphatic, ‘What you need is a good fuck.’ Perhaps I’d asked her what it was she thought I needed?

The resident DJ at the club was a jovial fellow with the violently heterosexual name of Roger Knight. He worked on a raised dais, from where he enjoyed a panoramic vista that encompassed the entire dance floor and most of the rest of the club. From his lofty eyrie he had control of the sound system and lights. Not just the flashing and spinning disco lights as they pulsated in a never-ending festival of colour (red, blue, green … ooh, purple) but the house lights too. When one of the not infrequent fights broke out, Roger would press a button – like Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga reaching under the table to fire his gun – switching on the ceiling lights nearest to the affray, and calmly point to the newly illuminated offenders so that the bouncers would know where to go. He did all this without breaking a sweat, still managing to mix seamlessly from KC and the Sunshine Band into something new from Level 42.

If you’ve ever worked in a bar or ‘disco’, as I suppose this was, then you’ll know that the running of the place is a curious blend of show business, the hospitality industry and a hint of the underworld. It has to be said that some of the clientele would have struggled to keep up with the etiquette requirements at the Henley Regatta and could be quite direct in their responses to what was going on around them. One chap to whom I served a pint of something or other screwed up his face in disgust and spat the mouthful of liquid straight back out at me, saying, with admirable economy, ‘That tastes like piss.’ Thus expressing in four words what even the most gifted food critic would struggle to contain within a page.

The many scuffles and fights I witnessed while working at the Troubadour weren’t limited to the boys, although it was usually the young men that started them. The girls would often get involved too, in the traditional ‘leave it, Wayne, he’s not worth it’ manner, pulling at the mid-eighties-fashion-clad arms of their beloved before getting a taste for the action and piling in themselves.

Fans of the macabre will be pleased to hear that the bloodshed wasn’t confined to the dance floor. One of the most disturbing sights I have ever witnessed was revealed to me all those years ago in the Ladies’ toilets after an especially unpleasant mishap. Earlier that evening, I’d noticed a bit of a scene developing around the entrance to the conveniences, and the subsequent appearance of an ambulance crew. Once the club had closed and we were clearing away the plastic glasses, one of the bouncers came over to me, gesturing towards the toilets and smiling, ‘Come and have a look at this, Rob …’ The bouncers were always very friendly to me, huge, hulking, brick outhouses of men, often with children’s faces. They seemed to take to me. There was something of Androcles and the Lion to our relationships, although I can’t honestly claim to have ever removed thorns from their toes. We went into the Ladies toilets, to be met by a sight that wouldn’t have been out of place in Brian De Palma’s
Scarface
.

A toilet was lying in pieces within its cubicle; there were pools of blood on the floor, and blood splattered over the walls. It was all I could do not to be sick. The bouncer told me what had happened, shaking his head and tutting as he recounted the story. Apparently, a girl had been standing on the then unbroken toilet, looking over the cubicle divider to chat with her friend, one booth along. The toilet had given way under her weight and split open. As she fell to the ground, the jagged porcelain of the shattered toilet had sliced into her leg and, hey presto, ‘Say hello to my little friend.’

It wasn’t a bloodbath every night, though, and I had many good times amongst the regular staff whose number I was swelling during the busy summer holiday period.

As I look back now on these few months of work, which would lead up to my leaving home and going to college, the whole episode takes on the air of a Neil Simon play. Me, the young innocent, taking my first faltering steps into the adult world, bumping up against all sorts of characters who, in light of my age and the setting in which we found ourselves, related to me for the first time more as an adult than as a child. Substitute Brighton Beach, New York for Port Talbot, and Eugene Jerome for me, and my story could remain roughly the same without any impairment of the audience’s enjoyment.

All the staff welcomed me and made me feel as though I was one of the team – although, looking back, I was more than a little wet behind the ears and I’m sure, for this reason alone, a great source of amusement to them all. I was yet to be initiated into the ways of the fairer sex, with no sign of a girlfriend on the horizon despite many efforts on my part to woo my classmates at Porthcawl, all of whom seemed to have taken a vow of abstinence when it came to anyone answering my description. But surely, you protest, working in a nightclub must have presented you with some opportunities to explore new possibilities? Hmm, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? If I might be permitted to employ the terminology of the football fan for a moment, perhaps I can relay to you an episode in which it can be said I missed ‘an open goal’.