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I’d been to the Barley Mow several times but never during the Fringe. To me, it was just a normal pub with a platform at one end of the room which normally went unused. I’d never seen it any closer to the limelight than holding a karaoke machine, some speakers and a couple of mics. On the odd occasion it had been used for poetry slams, open mic comedy or visiting bands, but nine times out of ten when I visited the place with friends, the bar was a bar, and nothing more.
At first, I’d been surprised Glenn had allowed his people to book a licensed venue in which to perform his gigs, but he’d pointed out, “Show me a venue in the entire city that doesn’t sell alcohol, Afton. Even churches have communion wine on the premises.”
“I don’t think they sell it, though. And I very much doubt they’d let a heathen like you near any available microphone, unless you were requesting an exorcism.”
He’d been right, of course; during the Fringe it was nigh on impossible to find a dry venue, especially in the evenings. Maybe through the day he could have performed in a cafe or restaurant but that would have been a bit small for the crowds he’d be capable of drawing. This was Scotland; the last country on earth where anything approaching prohibition would work. Hell, maybe that was why he’d had to get out to get clean and sober. He’d moved to another country that had at least tried it, and had a far more sympathetic attitude to people with alcohol and drug addictions. In the main, here, we tended to treat it as a bit of a joke. Anyone who couldn’t ‘take his ale’ was a pussy.
Glenn had repeatedly asked me to leave the apartment with him, referring to me as a calming influence, which had amazed me. Glenn Peterson, needing something else, someone else to calm him down? With his level of experience?
“You need time on your own to get in the right frame of mind.”
“What if you’re what gets me in the right frame of mind?”
“Aren’t you used to it by now?” I’d asked. “Talking to people, live, I mean.” His talk show was recorded a few hours before broadcast, providing a buffer, room to edit out anything unprofessional, embarrassing, or which didn’t ‘fit’ within the general tone of the show. But even so, real people still expected to be entertained at the time of recording. “You can’t tell me you still get nervous.”
“God, yes,” he’d said, with a half-laugh. “If I’m used to anything, it’s being in front of a studio audience but with a whole crew behind me. I had people helping me with Intervention, sure, but a talk show is clearly a team effort. This is a one-man show when it comes right down to it. In the studio, I didn’t make any major decisions about how the show went; that is, I made suggestions about future guests and so on. But the director had the final word. I was just the little dancing monkey they put in front of the cameras to act like a tit until we got the minute-by-minutes in.”
It hadn’t escaped my notice that Glenn spoke in the past tense. He had a whole crew behind him. The director had the final word. Glenn? He was just the little dancing monkey. To him, the show was over. The few months after the Fringe only existed to fulfil the terms of his contract and to give them time to either find a replacement host or to come up with another show to fill the time slot.
It tickled me to hear him dismiss his input on the show as merely making suggestions for future guests. I knew from a bit of Googling and that time I’d looked him up on YouTube that there was a running joke on his show; the director fought to keep him under control, with Glenn constantly pushing against any rules that Tom tried to put in place. The best way to get Glenn Peterson to do something was to tell him the networks’ censors didn’t want him to say or do it. That, in turn, had driven traffic, his viewers wanting to see how much he could get away with. And they were his viewers, rather than the show’s. I was willing to lay money on the vast majority of those who tuned in each evening only doing so to find an answer to the question, “How much trouble can Glenn Peterson get into tonight?”
He never met a line he didn’t want to cross, a classic offshoot of his addictive personality. If coke and booze were off the menu, adrenaline had definitely taken its place. Adrenaline and blood pressure – those of Tom’s, that was.
All of which made his jittery behaviour before the gig all the more difficult to explain.
“I’m pretty much sitting in people’s laps, Afton,” was his explanation. “There’s no room for editing or going for another take.”
“You chose to book the Barley Mow,” I retorted. “Your ego could fill a bigger venue, even if your reputation can’t.”
Glenn asked me to sit as close to the front as I could get but, despite any nascent desire to please him, I’d refused. “I know exactly what stand-up comedians do to people sitting in the front row. You can pick on someone else.”
He’d cajoled and wheedled and even at one point said, “Go on, I’ll do that thing you like with your nipples,” but hadn’t managed to persuade me.
“You constantly change the timing and placement of every little hint of a joke,” I pointed out. “How do I know there’s not something in there you can use to pick on someone in the audience?”
“When have you ever known me to be a cruel comedian?”
Despite everything, an excellent point. Glenn had often spoken out against comedians who styled themselves as satirists but who were, according to him, nothing more than bullies. He couldn’t stand punching down, expressed strong distaste for comedians who used their audience to shine a light on people in unfortunate circumstances. The only person Glenn Peterson really took the piss out of on stage was Glenn Peterson.
“Okay, sit where you like,” he’d said, his shoulders slumped. “I just like to have someone to focus on when I do stand-up and you’re...an easy person to focus on.” The grin had seemed genuine enough, but could have been an attempt to cover up his momentary neediness.
“Why are you so nervous? You’re Glenn Peterson.”
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed.” A brief pause and a watery smile, then, “You’ll be there. And it’s different now. Being back in Edinburgh. Close up to people. In the studio there’s distance. Hell, even in concert halls there’s more of a distance between me and the front row. Fuck, what was I thinking, having my people book a venue this small? I’ll practically be sitting in the audience’s laps...”
“Ah, so that’s why you wanted me to sit in the front row,” I joked.
“I’ll let you sit in my lap later if you like,” Glenn offered with a grin. “I’m just saying, if you wanted to be a supportive friend and make me feel better, you could...you know.”
“Offer you sexual favours in return for a successful gig tonight?”
“Well, if you want to put it like that...”
He always did this. Always. Defaulted to flirting. Nervous? Make a dirty joke. Uncomfortable? Make a (respectful!) pass at the person he was with. Something on his mind? A few hours of sweaty, violent sex and Jesus Christ, how the hell did he still have the power to make me feel so desperate for him, after all these years?
The place filled up rapidly, mostly with young couples coming to eyeball the bigshot who’d pissed off to America to make it big then decided to return home...but for why? Over the buzz of the crowd, I made out a few lines of conversation, from people probably too young to remember what Glenn had been like before he’d even been Glenn, to me at least. They knew him only as “that guy who went to the States and got his own talk show”, rather than Glenn Morangie, glassy-eyed and pale of skin.
“He definitely doesn’t look like he’s pushing fifty,” one young woman said to a lad I presumed was her boyfriend, judging by the frown he gave in response. If they’d only been friends, he wouldn’t have been so put out by her commenting on another man’s appearance.
Holding my glass to my lips to mask the smirk, I took a long, slow sip of vodka. Better to just stick to one drink. I had absolutely no doubt what the man himself and I would be up to later, and vowed to stick to soft drinks from now on.
The young man nudged his girlfriend, eager to challenge her comment. “I wondered why you were so keen to get tickets.”
“I’m just saying, I’m curious, is all. Apparently he used to be quite the party animal.”
Oh, boy. You have no idea.
“Yeah, a fuckin’ waster, if you ask me,” the boyfriend replied and somehow I managed to not jump in and demand to know how very dare he.
But it was the truth. Even my own sister had, several times back in the day, referred to Glenn using those very words. And if he hadn’t been pissing his life away, there would have been no need for me to attempt a one-woman intervention.
“At least he’s got himself cleaned up. You don’t present your own TV show for years unless you clean yourself up; you know how puritanical those networks are,” the girl pointed out. I liked her. She had her head screwed on. “I hope he still knows how to cut loose,” she said, and immediately I perked up. Eavesdropping technically was immoral, but in such a situation as this I wasn’t sure anyone in their right mind could blame me for being curious, especially with this God-given opportunity to find out what people thought of the man I was currently sleeping with.
“That’s the last thing he needs to do,” her companion said. “From what I hear, he used to go way, way too far.”
Oh, you don’t know the half of it, I prayed I wouldn’t be recognised, hiding out here near the back. At first, I’d assumed people of this couple’s age wouldn’t be too familiar with Glenn’s past, but with the internet making everyone’s history searchable, it had been too much to expect. And of course, no-one came to a Glenn Peterson show called Intervention without having some clue that he’d been a drinker in his former days.
~*~
My concerns about Glenn slotting bits and pieces into his show that might identify me remained, though he’d promised not to drop me in it. In calling the show Intervention, he’d sworn he hadn’t been referring specifically to my attempt to stage one, and of course he’d named his performance months before. Adverts and flyers and publicity proved that.
But given how mischievous he could be, I couldn’t fully trust him until I witnessed him go through his routine start to finish on stage, rather than pacing up and down my living room, littering every surface with pieces of scrap paper, sticky notes and profanity.
This being his first one-man show back in Scotland – and possibly only run, who knew? – he’d had to refer back to his ‘former life’ here but I’d absolutely banned him from naming me, on pain of death by rusty Wurtenberg wheel.
Listening to him speak to an audience of two hundred, about events I recognised as I’d been present, was strange, to say the least. He named a couple of comedians and actors in passing. “I was at a party at so-and-so’s house back in 2001,” jarred against “It was after I’d had a fight with such-and-such outside a nightclub in Glasgow.”
I’d claimed my desire to be kept the hell out of it had been down to discretion, but really it had been down to my pathetic desire to avoid acknowledging how much it had all hurt. I’d been a virtual unknown in those days; only the most dedicated fans would have recognised me. I doubted very many people even knew now I’d ever been part of Glenn Peterson’s gang. It was funny how many fake relationships got built up in the press and the real ones, the genuine ones with feelings and consequences, passed by without comment from the chattering classes.
All of which made it easier for me, in the end. There had been grief and heartbreak and pain and loss, and all those things teenagers had to experience as a rite of passage, but at least I’d had privacy while I muddled my way through. If I’d had to go through all that under the media spotlight, I doubted I’d have come through it with my tenuous sanity intact. Indeed, the intensive therapy had continued well into my twenties.
I’d returned to it after my marriage breakup, but not for long, reasoning that I was a grown-up now. I knew how to cope with these sorts of things. But of course, Joseph leaving had hurt like hell, I acknowledged, even as I observed Glenn gesturing to someone in the front row, doing that thing stand-up comedians did. Make eye contact, laugh with them. Make a connection.
Joseph leaving had come out of the blue. Kind of. There had been distance, naturally. One could hardly fail to deny that when the wife was in New York and the husband in Vancouver. But I’d expected, hoped, that the distance was nothing more than physical. Miles on a map. Nothing more.
That phone call, though. Jesus.
Glenn’s voice, the laughter of the audience, faded away and for a moment I disassociated. Maybe not quite as dramatically as having an out of body experience, but the sound in the room muffled, as if I listened from behind a thick curtain, or a closed door. I remained in the room, but at one remove, overwhelmed by the feeling of loss. Grief.
“I’m okay now,” Glenn assured a group of lads sitting round a table in what constituted the ‘front row’. “I’ve been sober for nearly twenty years.” Here, Glenn paused for the audience reaction. And just as he’d predicted, where Americans would applaud, Scots groaned. One or two well-meaning attendees slapped their hands together once or twice but ceased as soon as they realised the majority opinion in the room was “Aw, man, imagine no bein’ able tae drink.”
A national cliche it may have been, but cliches only came about through overuse, and they were overused because they were true.
“Honestly, I was in my thirties before I realised not everyone had an identical twin slightly more blurry and transparent than they were.” And a grin, to show it was okay to laugh at the reformed drunk. “I thought I was some kind of double-hard bastard, you know?” Quick sweep around the room, to acknowledge the people sitting further back. “I was convinced I’d been in fights with twice as many people as I’d actually been taking on. Course, I can smile about it now. I’ve had my teeth fixed for one. I had to go all the way across the Atlantic to find a decent dentist...” The boos he got in response to that little dig at British dentistry were good natured; one could tell by the laughter that immediately followed.
“I was honestly surprised I didn’t do more damage to myself,” Glenn went on. “But when I sobered up, I realised that when you’re drunk, you’re a bit looser, you know? Say you fall over...after being unwise enough to take on a nightclub bouncer, for example...which of course I would never do.” Wink at the person you picked out from the audience, pause for laughter with which you might even join in, if you feel the crowd’s with you.
If Glenn was as nervous as he’d earlier claimed, it certainly didn’t show. Even as he continued with his story about how he lost a tooth in a bar fight then found it in his own coat pocket the next day, he gave a perfect impression of a man completely at ease with his surroundings. “I have never broken a bone. Never. Not once in my...” He cupped a hand round the mic and coughed to confuse the number and continued, “...years on this earth. Okay, okay, I’m nearly fifty.” When he got a wolf whistle, he pretended to go all coy, batted his eyelashes. “Oh please, stop it. No, actually, praise me. I am that needy. Anyone will tell you. Even my girlfriend. She’s here tonight.”
Glenn Peterson, you utter bastard.
Wait, what? I’m his girlfriend, now?
“Yeah, she’s chained to a radiator round the back. Can’t let her get too far away. Christ, no, I’m joking. Just so you know, I do not keep women chained to a radiator. God, you say something like that in America and they’d believe you. Or maybe I just look like a serial killer. Do you think I look like a serial killer?” he asked of one blonde woman near the front, who immediately covered her mouth in that laughter-smothering way people do when they’re in the spotlight against their will.
“I might be a psychopath,” he went on, addressing the rest of the room, “but I have perfect teeth. Lost a tooth in a fight, although technically did I lose it? It was in my pocket all the time, God knows how. Like Rose finding the Heart of the Ocean in that overcoat after being rescued from the Titanic. Ah, there you are.” He mimed pulling something out of his pocket. “Or should I say, it was more like, ah, they y’arr,” he slurred, with a drooping mouth, mimicking the effects of a hangover on one’s face. “So. Never broken a bone, and here’s how. When you are absolutely off your face on booze, you don’t brace yourself when you fall. The alcohol loosens you up and you don’t expect to trip, or fall, or run headfirst into someone nearly a foot taller than you. So technically, if you have a tendency to indulge in, shall we say, rowdy behaviour, the safest place to be is in a state of total inebriation. And I managed that for a good many years in my twenties and thirties. Well, you have to live up to the national stereotype, don’t you? You know, when I was around twenty-two, twenty-three...”
Effortlessly, Glenn took the audience on a journey through his early twenties, before even I had known him, making light of his drunken antics. And I could forgive him for that; these people were here for comedy, not therapy and rehab. Once or twice, he glanced over in my direction, though I endeavoured never to make eye contact. I doubted whether or not he’d be able to make me out clearly, anyway, due to the lighting. That’s what I told myself.
Though Glenn literally and figuratively stood in the spotlight, the rest of the room wasn’t in total darkness. My corner of the pub had dim strip lights overhead, the kind that would have reminded one of a boring Friday afternoon maths class right before home time, if Glenn Peterson hadn’t been commanding everyone’s attention as he worked the room.
I’d always suspected he’d been the class clown. He liked to say he thought of himself as a talk show host and occasional actor, but comedy was where he’d first come to the public’s attention, and comedy was what had brought him back to Scotland.
To me.
Shuddering, I tried to keep my attention on the rest of his routine. I had absolutely no doubt he’d quiz me on it during the journey home. Of course I knew the material, but he’d want to know how I thought the crowd reacted, if there was anything in his routine he ought to fiddle with and adjust for the next show. I kept telling him I was no expert on stand-up.
I’d been married to a comedian but Joseph’s ‘thing’ had been more improv and sitcoms, so no words to memorise at all, or lots of them, scripted by other people. Two extremes, thinking on his feet, which even now I admired him for, loath as I was to admit it, or having his every filmed word barring a few improvised lines, written by someone else.
So I kept telling Glenn I was no expert, but for some reason he valued my opinion. And of course, after his teaser about his ‘girlfriend’ which I was sure was a nod to my desire for privacy and discretion and to be kept bloody well out of it, I thought it best to pay close attention. Did I trust him to not talk about me in public? Yes. But I didn’t trust him not to skirt the line and I needed to know how hard to punish him later.
He’d enjoy every damn minute of it.