'Thrown Out' Acrylic on canvas board 30 by 40cm
This is the eighth in my ‘Strange and Sometimes Troubled Memories’ series.
There's not much of a story behind this painting, a moment in time, a snapshot of pointlessness, pertinent in its depiction of a previous me.
I went to dad’s bedsit as I often did, in lieu of school, to get drunk and a maybe a little stoned, to kill five or six hours.
He must have been flush because he took me down the boozer. (that’s not how I talk.)
The nearest pub was about two hundred yards up a steep lifeless street littered with the wandering undead.
I pushed on the heavy wooden door, its windows decorated with faded adverts bearing dated logos.
I remember it being a hot summer day and the dampening gloom inside was soothing and welcome.
The smell of stale beer-soaked carpets drifted up my nostrils and all was well.
Near-death figures, hunched over tables, nursing drinks, fragmented by light beams slicing through hovering clouds of smoke. A slimy guy with absolutely no self-awareness, and looking like his clothes were melded to his skin by weeks of grime, sat on a tall stool at the bar while a barmaid cleaned glasses and humoured him with such professionalism that to an onlooker, she would have appeared to adore his company.
We went straight into the empty games room and dad stacked little towers of coins on the side of the shiny pool table. He said ‘Rack ‘em up’ and strutted into the adjoining room.
Manoeuvring the coins into the metal slots on a horizontal ridged slider protruding from the side of the table was most satisfying, even more satisfying, was the thundering sound of the balls cascading down inside the table when the slider, unlocked by the coins, was shoved firmly in.
I flipped up the protective velvety cloth which was attached to one end of the table onto the baize, smoothed it out and arranged the balls on it in the correct regulation formation inside a black wooden triangle. I left the black ball resting on top of the two middle balls at the base of the triangle then pulled out the fabric protector like a tablecloth from under crockery. I lined up the spot on the table with the gap where the black ball would sit, made a quick back and forth shunt with the triangle and the black ball fell into position. I carefully lifted the triangle leaving a lovely cake of shiny pool balls.
I browsed the cue rack, taking a couple out to test their feel and once I found a suitably heavy one with a small tip, I adorned that tip with its blue chalky lipstick. ‘Lovely little kiss on the pink there’ echoes in my mind. The little sea-blue cube of chalk with a circular indentation in the open end of its black and white paper jacket was a thing of tactile beauty. I could’ve eaten it.
I got a feel for my cueing by hitting the white ball in a measured way up and down the table, trying to get it to roll to a stop just before touching the cushion closest to me, behind where it started it’s run. Dad came back a happy man with drinks in hand.
He brought a pint for himself and a half for me as I was only 14.
We both lit up cigs and then he said ‘You break’.
I took a long drag on my cig, rested it on the lip of a metal ashtray and blew the smoke out of my nose while I thwacked the white ball up the table which split the colours with a sumptuous crack.
I could tell dad was impressed by the way I moved around the table, the coolness of my swagger, (I’d seen Paul Newman), the speed and flourish with which I potted balls, even ones which other mere mortals wouldn’t dare to attempt. My pool etiquette was also faultless, no smoking over the table, no resting drinks on its side, putting my hand up if a fluke went in, with the correct amount of humble decorum. Owning up, if some unseen foul had taken place, with complete honestly, like a proper snooker gentleman.
Drinks were finished in fifteen minutes and he went and got another round.
We played for about two hours, gradually getting pissed. Best day off school ever.
I was only just ahead in frames, because I often bottled it on the black when I got overexcited about winning, he pretended he was letting me win.
Eventually the landlord of the pub came around to collect glasses. He was a big strapping fellow with a tucked in shirt which heroically harnessed a rotund belly from which two slim bird legs dangled only just touching the floor. He had forearms which looked like bloated mouldy hams, and an air of someone who’s never taken shit of anyone for even a second. I could imagine what his face would look like when he took his glasses off in anticipation of a fight. He saw me with a drink in my hand as I was trying to place it discreetly on the table behind me.
I may have been fourteen years old, but I looked like I was about ten which made it even worse. My baby-face, seemed like a curse when I was younger but became quite pleasing from my mid-twenties to early forties as I always looked ten years younger. Then age cruelly crept up on me and painted me as an old weasel, an immature boy peering out through mustelid eyes.
The landlord looked at me, glared at dad, and said 'Is he drinking?'
My dad looked at me, and did a double-take with feigned shock and said 'You little shit!'
I spurted out laughter.
The landlord shouted 'OUT!'
We staggered out giggling like naughty schoolboys.
My mind now drifts to pubs, slouched and swaying in my history, so much life and money pissed away in those gorgeous disgusting safe-houses. Memories rise and fall, sipping away, slipping away.
9/11, the 9/11, The American barman, dazed, but still having to take orders.
Everyone in the pub is glued to the perpetual horror of skyscraping-chimneys on a large TV bracketed to the wall, updates and statistics continuously scroll across the bottom of the screen. The towers keep collapsing and crumbling into dust. The geographical distance of the tragedy to the pub we sit in somehow dampens the horror.
We are glued to each other in a dark corner, shamelessly coiled in a secret affair. Her warm slender fingers clasped between mine under the table as I twiddle with the silver ring around her thumb. Her adorable self-conscious smile, face tilted down, milk chocolate glazed eyes melting me, the smile turns into a giggle. Her elfish features flirtatiously catch the light and her perfectly bobbed hair is tucked behind her ears. The squirmy intermingling of new born feelings, tiny hairs prickling in a static-electric skin fizz. Complete warm soft energy consummation.
The next morning, the reality of the previous day’s events become horribly vivid in the sober cold daylight, the imposed resigned grace of a falling man frozen against giant frames of unbroken glass, on the monochrome front page of the Metro. Life is changed forever. The sound of a jet engine funnelled down through tall buildings in a city will never be the same.
I’m on the floor looking up, the tough guys at the bar are sniggering, and I’m calling them bitches. Dan is trying to pull me back to my feet and telling me to shut the fuck up. I’d supposedly gone home ill from work with the flu, but gone to the pub instead, I thought it might be a good idea to kill the germs with alcohol, drink myself through it. Slurring at the landlords wife, ‘you... are... so... beautiful’
The owner of the pub turned up with unfortunate bad timing, and was sternly talking to the New Zealand landlord whom he’d entrusted his pub to, saying, ‘What were you thinking, letting him get in this state’
They’d rang Dan to come and get me. He took me to the loo and was trying to hold me up against the stinking ceramic communal wall urinal while my piss was spraying everywhere.
They put me in a taxi and sent me to my brothers, I fell abstractly down his stairs which were partitioned off from the living area by ribbed glass, like some kind of pissed Picasso.
7/7, the 7/7. There was no way of getting out of London. Stunned in a vacuum left by the explosions. I’d been in a meeting and got a text which read ‘bombs going off’. Meeting adjourned. I sneaked out of the stock room window and climbed up a metal ribcage ladder onto the flat roof of the building and smoked in a daze while ghostly sirens echoed out across lovely London.
The usually dead pub was filled with stranded commuters, staring at the TV screen which played the events over and over, a splintery decapitated bus, the smoky underground carnage, this wasn’t happening.
The alcohol released me and tears rolled down my emotionless face. A smartly dressed woman in a trouser suit with a kind of Jackie Brown vibe going on, sat next to me and put her hand on my back between my shoulder blades, I looked straight into her eyes and the unconditional caring in her consolation stopped time. We drank together and talked in an increasingly intoxicated clichéd manner, overemotional, lacking sense, now kissing aggressively like our plane is going down, or it’s the end of the world, which is what it seems like. We share a taxi and I drop her off outside her flat on the way home. She kisses me goodnight.
My birthday, I’ve dropped two E’s, they are unexpectedly potent, much too much, my head is in space and my body is trying to function without it. I’m playing pool and about to take a shot, I hear a loud awful clatter, I look down confused, the cue is on the floor, impossibly wrapped around my feet and I’m still angled in a playing stance, noticing my empty non-sticky hands and people are staring at me because of how fucked I look. I’m swaying at the bar and the barmaid is wide eyed, like I’m a crashing plane, she serves me another pint and the ten pound notes in my palm are fluttering around like paper butterflies and my friend takes one out of my ten fingered hand to pay her.
I speed-walk to the pub after work, on arriving, something is wrong, everyone looks scared. I look to my left and the biggest guy I’ve ever seen, a cartoon homunculus thug in the flesh, is stood swaying and a stool is tipped over next to him. He’s an oblong colossal mass, still bearing the strength from flab covered muscles he no doubt once, too often, flexed.
He says ‘what the fuck are you looking at’ straight at me
The bar maid says ‘if you don’t leave I’m calling the police’.
‘Fucking call em’ he says.
The tough guys who prop up the bar every day have their heads down, pretending like nothings happening.
I gulp down half of the pint, walk up to him smiling and say ‘yorright?’
I lift the stool back up and sit on it, take another gulp of lager and start making a roll up with an unflinching grin. I look around and the work-mates I arrived with have all left. He looks at me like a dumbfounded giant looking at an overconfident mouse and can’t work out why I’m not afraid of him.
I’m not scared because I’m in a pub.
I’ve got a bit of speed and drink in me, this is my world, the ubiquitous pub, always the same, no matter who’s in it or where it is, nothing bad ever happens to me in pubs. He could hit me in the side of the head with a glass and it would either bounce off or shatter without even scratching me. I’m invincible. In this alcoholic theatre the people are like shadow puppets before my audience of narrow lubricated eyes and a wide cocky grin.
He sits opposite me and wraps his massive hand around my arm above the elbow, slurring words, inches from my face. He has the complexion of a pan sealed joint of meat.
‘I’m the toughest man in London’, he says in a Russian accent.
I say, ‘Fair enough, but why is the toughest man in London giving these nice people a hard time, they’ve done nothing to you.’
He stares at me like I’m a dream character.
‘Look at the state of ya’ I say. ‘You look like an orc’.
He grins, showing pewter teeth which are too few to fill his pale grey gums.
He says ‘You cheeky little shit.’
I keep making him laugh without taking my eyes off his. Persuading him to leave is a convoluted arduous task but I finally manage to usher him out of the door and watch as staggers off down the street and the barmaid brings me over a pint which she tells me is on the house.
In a dark booth, she’s literally grinding herself on top of me, this can’t be good, she's breathing life into my mouth. Taut denim seams. My palms are on the soft little mounds on either side of her midriff below her t-shirt and above her jeans. Nothing else matters except the locking together of our eyes and energy. This is the longest I’ve been in a pub without a alcohol going down my neck. All pain is gone, but not for long.
Dan agreed to come for a pint after work, he ended up staying for four. He’s trying to leave, struggling to get free of my hands which are like a vice around his chubby bearded face, I’m trying to kiss him on the lips saying, ‘This’ll be a lot easier if you just hold still!’
A run-down pub, stark and unnecessarily bright because of its wall sized windows looking out on to the rainy street. I don’t know the area but it’s definitely rough. The worst kind of people sit around, the sort of people who hate people like me, a stranger who has no right to walk into their haunt without a care in the world looking like some kind of fucking art student. They all stare at me when I walk through the door, I couldn’t give a fuck, I need a drink, I order two large glasses of red, take them over to a small round table in the middle of the room, sit down and make a roll up. I’m on my way to a rehab centre, there's no way I'm going there sober, fuck that.
Striding in, staggering out.
Lovely lovely beer gardens. Glasses emptied so fast as to leave a web of froth slowly sliding down their insides and glistening in the warm sunlight.
Times when things were more light hearted. Laughing faces. Nice people just having fun.
Snorting lines in the toilet. Fuck, life is good, just for today.
Happy, relieved of the burden which squats in the real world outside.
Collapsing, body is giving up. I need help.
I’ve upset some people from work on our annual summer outing, I’ve got at least two people crying, one is a guy.
I’m walking to the toilet, the next thing I know I’ve crashed through a table, sending everyone’s drinks flying, angry people are pushing me around. I think these e’s have ketamine in them. I stagger on to the bathroom, the bouncer is sweating, throwing water on his face, he takes one look at me and goes ‘fuck me, they’re strong aren’t they.’
Stood at a fruit machine, feeding it pound coins, it’s flashing at me and making silly sounds. Banging big plastic buttons, sipping cold lager from the hard thin rim of the glass, tap tap tap, the lights climb and the machine explodes in a victory frenzy, coins chug clattering into a collection tray below and the guy who’s been hovering near the bar behind me, waiting for me to fail, grabs his drink and goes to his table, pissed.
Depressed, alone, the drinks don’t last long enough, watching people thrilled with each other’s company, revel, I know I if I don’t leave now, I will black out and wake up somewhere stupid.
All the pubs rifle back to the time with dad.
My victim mentality cursing my indoctrinated loser mentality.
Daytime drinking, not working, not going to school, the only aspiration, numb oblivion.
Failing to rise to any potential that could’ve been within me, acting like a daft twat.
I was mentally ill from as young as I can remember, probably much like my parents before me.
'They fuck you up.....'
Then I went on to self medicate in the only way I knew how.
I went through years of prolonged subtle self-harm, escaping from depression and crippling fear with substances imbibed or inhaled.
At some point when I was earning enough, I paid for therapy on numerous occasions.
It didn't suit me. I always went for a couple of months before it triggered me to go into even greater manic episodes of intoxication. I have to say though, I liked talking about myself for fifty minutes or so, it was the only time I talked and someone listened. I’d probably try it again now If I could.
2012 was the last time I had a drug or spliff.
I calmed down and stopped drinking really irresponsibly around eight years ago and it’s three years now since my last alcoholic drink.
Part of me sometimes feels angry that that part of my life was taken away, fucked Joel Dobson is dead and Jack Greenwood was born.
No more fun.
No more lovely pubs, I can’t go home, back to the mothership.
I’m boring as fuck.
I wouldn’t mind if I was mentally really good, but at the moment I’m not.
On the other hand, I’m sober, no more time being spewed down the toilet.
I’ve become an artist. I actually followed my dreams!
I get to paint every day. I have a beautiful, caring partner who looks after me, and I somehow give solace to her, we have a nice house to live in, we eat great food. My life is the best it’s ever been. I wouldn’t change a thing.
They say fortune favours the brave but despite small successes like getting in exhibitions and selling paintings sporadically to people around the world, I still don’t even come close to making a living, I’m still waiting for that fortune to favour my brave arse. I read somewhere that if you follow your dreams the whole world conspires to make it happen, I’m still waiting patiently for that to happen.
I wouldn’t ever want to drink alcohol again though.
Pubs are now like dark gaps in the landscape. Blackouts from my hazy past.
I don’t like been around people when they’re drinking now. I’ve been to a few art exhibition openings and see people gradually change, become brain impaired, people who were lucid moments before, start talking at me embarrassingly, their inhibitions washed away. It's like seeing a mass hypnosis. The only way I can tolerate drunk people is to be more drunk than them, that’s why I was always so fucked. They creep me out, I don’t know how the heck anyone put up with me for all those years, how could they even stand me.
I don’t even like to go out in the evening anymore at all.
Now it’s food, sofa, duvet, Bella, pets, safety, TV, film or even better, a book with some music on.
Finally sober.
Sometimes I have drunken dreams still, and wake up hungover, that’s just not fair now is it?
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