I first realized that Pete was remarkable at a convention for addicts at a hotel in Birmingham where such things are held, that is to say, a mediocre hotel. A convention for addicts has more variety than you might imagine, many classes of people, ages, etc. If there is a common bond it is derived from the shared solution. Ex cons, people with pink hair, a fair few coach trips from treatment centres. A lot of smoking.
I’d met him once before at an event at a treatment centre in Birmingham where I’d said a few words and he’d sung a few songs. Since then he appeared to have acquired crutches and he swung enthusiastically through the crowded lobby to say hello. I suppose the presumed temporary nature of crutches makes it okay to ask what the injury was in a way sensibly forbidden by wheelchairs or even canes, the general rule being ‘crutches, funny story, cane, sad story’. I asked Pete what had happened and he, and this is odd, smilingly responds, ‘I have cancer and I’m having my leg amputated.’ The news is unusual but it’s the smile that’s most strange. I, aghast, say, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m sorry.’ And he says, ‘No, I’m okay, I’m clean and I want to live.’ Now when he says this it is entirely without bravado and with the kind of certainty that, if I’m honest, I’ve never seen in anyone other than the spiritually switched on. By definition in fact, Pete’s connection to a Higher Purpose was so strong that his forthcoming amputation was irrelevant. I’m very good at saying ‘the material world is an illusion’, I’m less good at blithely brushing off cancer as if it is the will of the universe. I was in awe at Pete and started to keep in contact with him, in a way to study him, curious as to whether he was for real, to see if at some point he would yield to self-pity or rage. He didn’t. He FaceTimed me from his hospital bed and showed me the bandaged stump before the anaesthetic had worn off. I was at a charity car wash which I’d impulsively been drawn to by the attire of the women conducting it, but such baser motivations were washed away on talking to this saintly man, joking from his post-operative bed.
I’m mates with another bloke who’s had a leg amputated, Will, who is like Balloo from the Jungle Book, a big cuddly, handsome, hulking thug. The first time I met him I knew I’d like him, he was loud and aggressive and vulnerable. He works with the street homeless in Oxford and he announced himself to me and the group of men we were hanging out with by recounting the tale of his journey to our group meeting, in which he’d got out of his car to have a row with a fella who had cut him up on the M40, a key detail being the reattachment of his leg prior to getting out of the car and punching the bloke. This was told with a kind of breathless, post-adrenaline regret, not mournful, but with a ‘whoops, I let myself down there’ Englishness that was very endearing. When I met Pete I thought I should connect them. Pete was about to go through a procedure that Will had already experienced and it seemed like an obvious connection to make.
The two men chatted and by all accounts got along and I was able to modestly contribute to Pete’s recovery – to be honest though, given his incredible aptitude for positivity, he’d’ve been fine anyway. When we last spoke he told me, again without bitterness, or even sadness, that the cancer had likely spread to his lungs and he faces another procedure. I hold Pete in my mind as an antidote to self-pity. Perhaps if we spend time around positive people, being positive to one another, we can raise our common frequency as well as our individual wellbeing.
Your own strategy, your native program, will get you so far. Mine got me to the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year Final. I was drunk, I was high, I was a trembling time bomb but I was there. I lived in yet another Lost Boys, Fight Club flat. I signed on, and I slept on a futon with my mate Karl overlooking some public toilets in Bermondsey, South London. I had mates, peers, but not mentors. I’d gotten myself thrown into, then thrown out of a drama school – ironically for being too dramatic – and there were potential mentors there. Christopher Fettes, the Principal of Drama Centre, was part Caesar part serial killer, aloof, grand, magnificent; I, like all the students, adored him. He was a brilliant teacher and arriving as I did at nineteen, essentially a boyband member without a cap, it was Christopher who inundated me with classical references, Nietzsche, semiotics, archetypes; he was a calm cyclone of incredible wisdom. He also made me feel I was great.
I hear addicts like me speak and I know how common it is to crave adulation. Men, who if you saw them eyeing you in a boozer would make you grip your glass a little tighter and steel yourself for kick-off, gently describing the tender need for love. When I was nineteen I wanted to feel love. I was rootless and was trying to suck nutrition out of the air, usually through a pipe. In the environment of that drama school I learned that what I’d always quietly, fiercely believed was true: that the strangeness, the oddness, the ‘not quite fitting in’ could be a gift, not a latent disability. Somehow though, whether it was through my inability to receive it or the fact that it was not there to receive, I didn’t feel nurtured. I felt feted and occasionally great, like I had a dangerous power that might kill me or make me a star, but that wasn’t what I needed. I needed to be held.
Eventually I spilled out of that place in a characteristic manner, eliciting the kind of ‘sorry, but no’ regretful goodbye that addicts become accustomed to. There was a lawless and carousing quality to my behaviour that needed direction, not quite prison or the army but some version of that with more love and more room for creativity and perhaps better food and nicer uniforms.
I think of the men a few generations older than me, conscripted, and remember that they weren’t all hard-handed uncles; Kenneth Williams had to do a turn, Spike Milligan, fragile, volatile, strange men, how the hell did they do it? In both of those cases, under duress and ending in misery. When I visit prisons I note the men that are like me, the ones that seem like soft outsiders, that I can’t wrangle into my preconceptions of knuckly blokes that look bred for it. Drugs were my mentor and my muse, my miserable belief and my hopeless religion. And they got me as far as the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year Final. I walked the track like an F1 driver the day before the show and was terrified by the vastness and the possibility of success. I gave the evening over to drink and drugs, threw all hope at the altar of escape. I was off my head when I went on that stage, that massive stage. I came nowhere near winning but it was enough for me to level-up.
The Empire invited me back to be in a political fundraiser show – was it the dockers, what was it? Rob Newman was there and it was all too much for me to take. You see Rob Newman had been part of a ludicrously cool and glamorous double act with David Baddiel, maybe ten years earlier, and whilst he had since clearly gone through a number of personal metamorphoses – primarily, plainly, a rejection of that glamour, fame, all that – to me, it was as if there were an archangel in the room. His comedy had always been intellectual, melancholy, erratic, bipolar, great comic voices, suddenly and surprisingly political, and he was dreamily handsome, long haired. I idolized and emulated him before I had any idea that was what I was doing. For him to suddenly be on the same carpet as me was ridiculous. Albeit, this was a grungier incarnation: the hair was shorn, and he had in retrospect violently abdicated the ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ aspect of his former celebrity, but that is of course a pretty rock ‘n’ roll thing to do. Man, I stared before I sidled. I looked at him and drank him in and had no idea how to be normal. I would’ve given away my ragged soul for a Cyrano to handle the conversation. Instead I went over to the famously shy comedian and coughed up mental illness at him. In all actuality I was roaming around quite drunkenly, a devotee without a faith, a disciple without a guru, a young and mentorless man, reaching out into a world that scared me, ashamed even of my need for guidance.