Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (10 page)

There were eight people living in my block and before the first year of my tenancy was out I had knocked out about four of them because they were scum and they deserved it. I won’t go into all the details, but just to give you one example, the guy who lived in the flat opposite me was a drunk who would come home at four in the morning and find himself locked out because he was too wasted and too stupid to realise the key was in his own pocket. Eventually he would start hammering the shit out of his own door trying to get in and shouting, ‘Let me in!’ even though he lived alone. Between him and the drug dealer and the guy running prostitutes, I was not exactly in very salubrious company.

Still, some things were going very well.

I was known among my mates for being particularly lucky with women, but things didn’t always go exactly according to plan. One night, I had been out clubbing in East London with my pal Psycho Sam and the rest of the boys from Dagenham. As usual, it didn’t take me long to pull a good-looking bird who, for the purposes of this book, I’ll call Sophie. Sophie and I saw each other for a while, but a month or two into our relationship I had a rather painful experience with my new girlfriend. Sophie still lived at home with her parents. One day, we were messing around on the living-room floor, aware that her Mum and Dad might come back at any moment. In those days, I went commando. I never wore any underwear – I didn’t see the point. On this occasion, my lack of underwear had provided quick and easy access to what I saw as a very important element in my relationship with Sophie. Sophie was on top of me, and I still had my trousers on, with the zip down.

When we heard a key in the door, Sophie and I both hurried to cover up. Sophie jumped up and, in the process, a hook on her clothes got caught in my zip and pulled it up right over my erect penis, catching it in its teeth. Years later, I saw the film
There’s Something About Mary
and felt the pain all over again. I was in agony, and there wasn’t any way of getting the zip down without making matters even worse.

‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ Sophie whispered. ‘Mum’s going to come in here any time now.’

I ran into the downstairs loo, eyes smarting with the pain, and did my best, but that zip wasn’t going anywhere. I could hear Sophie and her mother chatting in the lounge. Sophie was trying to buy me time so that I could get myself sorted. But that wasn’t happening.

After about half an hour of some of the worst pain I had ever experienced, we were forced to admit my predicament to Sophie’s mum.

Her mum had a look and kept a straight face. ‘We’d better call the emergency doctor. You can’t stay like that for long. What if you got gangrene?’

Gangrene! I didn’t like the sound of that.

When we called the doctor, making a poor job of stifling his laughter, he advised me to get myself to A&E. I didn’t like the sound of that, either.

‘Give it one last go,’ I suggested to Sophie and her mum. ‘Maybe we can get it off and I won’t have to go into the hospital.’

‘All right then.’

So now, my girlfriend and her mum were both down on their knees in front of me trying to pull down the zip, while I bit my lip and tried not to swear in front of my girlfriend’s mum.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ her mum said. ‘I’ll get a pair of scissors and cut the zip out of the trousers. Perhaps then it will be easier to pull it down.’

I closed my eyes while she brandished the gleaming scissors around my crotch. No man likes to see blades flashing around that particular area of his body, but she managed to accomplish the procedure. This didn’t improve matters much, however. Now I was standing stark bollock naked in my girlfriend’s mother’s lounge with a zipper hanging off my knob. Even with all the pain I was in, I could see that I must look ridiculous. Even Sophie had succumbed to laughter now, as she went upstairs to find me a pair of tracksuit bottoms to wear so that we could go to A&E without creating a scene.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ the admissions nurse asked me when I arrived.

‘Well,’ I explained, ‘I have a zipper attached to my knob and I need to have it removed.’

‘You what? Give us a look!’

I could see that I wasn’t getting any sympathy here. I wasn’t getting any discretion either. Along with the laughter, she raised her voice and explained what was going on to her colleagues, who res ponded with hilarity and rushed over to inspect me. Then I heard a familiar voice calling my name. I looked around and, just my luck, there were some people I knew sitting in A&E, all enjoying the show.

A long and very uncomfortable wait ensued and finally I heard my name called. I was whisked off by a very camp young male nurse who proceeded to lay me down, inject my penis with anaesthetic, cut the zip off and stitch me up. After the procedure, he sympathetically dabbed me with cotton-wool balls soaked in disinfectant.

‘Don’t worry, love,’ he said consolingly. ‘You’ll be right as rain very soon and we’ll have you back in action.’

I heard a snort and looked up to see that Sophie had abandoned all pretence of sympathy by now.

For weeks afterwards, I sported a penis swollen to twice its usual size and black and discoloured with all the bruises. I made the most of it, of course, and showed it off to anyone I thought might be interested and quite a few who probably were not.

And ever since then, I have never gone without my pants!

The male nurse was right, too. Before long, I was back in action, both in terms of getting off with birds, and getting into frequent, bloody fights.

Despite my boxing success and my newfound ability to make friends, I was always scared. Scared that everything that Bill Starling and Auntie Coral had said about me was true. Scared that my achievements in boxing didn’t really count for anything and that one day they would all be taken away. Scared that I would find myself in a situation in which I couldn’t take care of myself.

And then, one day, quite suddenly, I stopped being scared. I had always been one to get involved with fights, and in one of those fights I was stabbed quite badly. It wasn’t like the superficial flesh wound the first stabbing had left me with but a real, deep stab where the knife had penetrated my skin and plunged right into my abdominal cavity. I remember experiencing it as a strange sort of joy, a wordless ecstasy. I put my hand to the warm flow of blood and realised that, although I was going to need medical attention, I was OK. I was going to live. I had been hurt, but they had not been able to do me any lasting damage.

Wow, I thought. That’s it. I’ve been stabbed in the gut and I am still here. It doesn’t even hurt as much as I expected. There was never anything to be scared of.

From that moment on, I was never frightened of anything, and I resolved that, from then on, I would never let anything or anyone stand in my way. Now, far from running away from violence, I actively sought it out and, because of the circles I was moving in, it was never difficult to find. Not only was I not scared any more, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I would never be scared again and that I had effectively killed off the frightened little boy I had once been.

Every time an opportunity for me to be violent presented itself, I embraced it wholeheartedly and joyously. Whenever I felt that someone deserved to be hurt, I was more than happy to make sure that he got what he deserved. If I had a spot of bother while I was driving, I would get out of my car, pull the other driver from their vehicle and beat the crap out of them, driving away only when they had been reduced to an abject heap of snot and tears. Whenever anyone wanted to fight with me, I was delighted to give them that opportunity. If they were asking for it, who was I to say no?

Fuck it, I thought. What have I got to lose? I am just going to do what I want to do. Because I hated myself so much, I was always challenging myself and setting myself up for a fall. When I went out, I would look for the biggest, craziest guy and effectively say, ‘Come on then, come and shoot me and we’ll see who comes off worst.’ They were always perfectly satisfied to oblige, until they realised that they had bitten off more than they could chew – and by then it was too late!

From having been a frightened child right up until my early twenties, I suddenly became a raving maniac with a death wish. That was my strength: if you are fighting someone and you are willing to die and they are not, you are going to win. I was willing to die in a fight, to stab or be stabbed, to shoot people and to do whatever it took. I didn’t care if I lived or died and that made me utterly invincible. Whenever I got into a fight and found myself looking into the other man’s eyes, what he saw looking back at him were the eyes of a person ready and willing to die. There is nothing more terrifying. That was who I was in those days of twenty and more years ago.

Some of the people I fought with were bullies, and I like to think that most of them deserved what they got because if I hadn’t beaten the crap out of them they would have done it to me or, worse, to someone who was less able to stand up for himself. As my reputation as a fighter grew, my friends and their friends would give me a ring whenever anyone had been giving them a hard time, and I would happily go and sort it out for them. The aggressors would pull out knives or bats or whatever and threaten me. So far as I was concerned, the more violent and dangerous they were the better, and the more I liked it. The nastier my opponent, the more reason I had to batter him until he was black and blue. I got stabbed and bitten repeatedly, but it was all water off a duck’s back to me and, every single time I was badly hurt and survived, it just strengthened my resolve never to back down and my conviction that there was little if anything that anyone could do to seriously damage me.

The trouble was that not everyone I beat up deserved it because I was always very quick to put up my fists, and ever reluctant to negotiate before things turned nasty. So what did that make me? I liked to think that I was standing up for myself and for people who couldn’t stand up for themselves, but the fact was that I was becoming as bad as the bullies.

Nothing mattered anyway, because I was on my way to becoming a boxing champ. And then I would have respect in spades and I was going to be earning ten grand a fight, which also meant that I would have all the women I wanted. Even if I didn’t become an international champ, I knew that I would be able to make a decent living as a middleweight; that was my plan B.

Then, when I was about twenty-four, I fell off a roof, ending my plans to become a professional boxer once and for all and taking out plans A and B in one fell swoop, and probably plans C, D and E as well.

What happened was this: I was working on a steeply pitched roof with no scaffold, on a roof ladder that was hooked over the apex of the building and lying flat against the tiles. Because the roof was so steep, the ladder wasn’t secured properly and, when it slipped, I ran on the spot like Wile E. Coyote until I fell the seventy feet or so to the ground. My fall was broken by a glass door that the plasterers working in the house had left outside leaning against the wall, and I tore through it on my way to the ground, almost severing my arm and slicing my right hand in half right through the middle. I landed heavily on the ground, surrounded by shards of glass.

I remember the incident very well. I didn’t feel any pain at first, just some shock from the impact. I managed to sit up and tried to assess the situation. It all felt quite unreal. The objects around me seemed to be more highly coloured than they should have been, but otherwise everything seemed to be quite normal.

I’m OK, I thought. I’m all right. Just got a bit of a bruise. I got to my feet and tried to run away. I managed to take a few steps. This was the worst thing I could have done, as my arm was hanging by a thread and one of my lungs had been punctured through the back. The motion made the blood pour thickly from my severed arteries. I started to run. All the other guys started chasing me. ‘Paul, what the fuck are you doing, mate? You’ve got to sit down. You’ve been badly hurt.’ They grabbed me and lowered me to the ground as gently as they could. Someone called an ambulance.

What’s this? I thought. They put me sitting in a puddle. What the fuck are they playing at? And it’s all warm…

I heard somebody retching and looked around. A young bloke who had only recently started working on the site was vomiting up his lunch. Most of it landed on me. I didn’t care.

I looked down. The puddle I was sitting in was my own blood and the stain was rapidly spreading across the ground as it merged with my colleague’s thrown-up lunch.

Oh, I thought. I’m bleeding…

I was technically dead by the time I reached the hospital.

They managed to bring me around by hooking me up to the machines and pumping me full of someone else’s blood. The doctor asked my sister Anne for permission to amputate my hand, as she was the only relative he was able to contact. Fortunately, she did not give it. Now, my hand is missing a finger and some of its functionality, but I would rather have it than not.

When I was together enough for the doctors to talk to me, they explained that they had been able to bring me back from the dead because I was so young and so fit. I could not have been fitter, in fact. I had been training every day, so when they filled me up with someone else’s factor A and hoped for the best I was better able to handle it than most.

I had survived the fall, but my boxing career had died. I was never going to be a boxing champion now. I was not even going to make a decent living as a middleweight. My arm was never going to be its old self. That meant that I was just one more illiterate, belligerent, problematic person.

I weighed up my choices. There weren’t many.

But then something fantastic happened.

I had to have physiotherapy and all sorts of treatments before I was well enough to go back to work and, in the course of the treatments that I received, I realised that my boxing training had taught me more about physiology and nutrition than most of the healthcare workers I was meeting seemed to know. That meant that I might be able to find some sort of a job in a related area. Perhaps, after all, there was also a plan F.