Eric Bristow (11 page)

It was chaos, complete chaos, but they managed to restock the hotel within an hour of it running dry. It was a mistake they never repeated again. The hotel staff had completely overlooked the fact that there were two and a half thousand hardcore drinkers at this place. It wasn’t your old dears on the slots. These lads were having pint after pint, with double vodka chasers for good measure.

This sort of thing happened to a few places I appeared at, for instance the Holiday Village in Great Yarmouth. The people who worked these establishments just didn’t realise how much these guys could drink.

Another favourite place was Penticton in Canada where I did a 29-day tour. This was paradise. I stayed
at
a hotel where my balcony overlooked a big lake and on either side were mountains. I sat on the balcony with a bottle of champagne and a bowl of fruit, courtesy of the hotel, and realised life didn’t get much better than this. The tour finished in St John’s and a guide took me to a place where the salmon went through. This part of the river was only about eight feet wide and when the salmon came, they came in a rush, millions of them. The guide said that you could literally walk on them because there were so many. It was like a bottleneck. They gave this bit of the river to the Indians in return for stealing their land many centuries ago. The Indians came in great big lorries packed with ice and just pulled the fish out of the river and threw them on to the lorry to be sold.

A great place to go was Scandinavia. Before Maureen came on the scene I used to go to Sweden and Denmark for two things: the darts and the women. In Sweden they were all beautiful blondes. I never got drunk in Sweden. I’d go on the pull instead and try and take one of them home. More often than not I succeeded, but then I’d end up staying up all night with whoever I had pulled and I’d not get any sleep, though I suppose it was better than waking up with a hangover. I had sex with some beautiful women over there, women who wouldn’t have given me a second look if I wasn’t a good darts player.

In Denmark we stayed right beside Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. Tivoli Gardens is a beautiful amusement park cum pleasure garden. The BDO put about forty of us in the Triton Hotel close by, right next to the train station and thirty yards from the red light district. Thirty yards away in another direction was the only bar in the street, the Spunk Bar. Our boys were in there like a shot; the moment we got there they were in. They wanted a beer, nothing more, but they came out just as quick when they discovered it was a hardcore gay bar full of transvestites and Freddie Mercury look-alikes dressed in leather. Everyone bolted from that place, apart from Billy Leonard, the old pro from the north, who smoked his Park Drive unfiltered and drank bitter and mild. He stayed there all the time, morning, noon and night! He couldn’t have cared less about the clientele.

I went in to get him at one point because we were all going on a pub crawl and said, ‘Billy, what the hell are you doing in here, mate?’

‘Best pint around here,’ he replied.

And he was sitting there, chatting away to this group of five or six people he thought were women, and I said, ‘Billy, these are geezers dressed up as birds.’

‘No they’re not,’ he said.

‘Billy, these are blokes, mate.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘I’m only having a drink with them.’ And they were his mates for the duration of the tournament. They even sold knickers and
leather
pants in there with Spunk Bar written on them, but I don’t think Billy bought any.

We stayed at that hotel every year for the next ten years, and we had all these women darts players with us, a mixture of old ones and young ones. I used to take them to the sex shops. There was this old girl called Lily Coombs who was sixty and had been playing the game for years who approached me in a very innocent way and said: ‘Eric, will you take me to a sex shop? I’ve never been in a sex shop before.’

I ended up taking six of them down to this place and there’s nothing worse than walking around a sex shop with a load of nutty women, especially ones who are picking up giant dildos and going, ‘What do I do with this, Eric?’

Lily was the worst of the lot. She’d say things like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen one that big. Is yours that big, Eric?’

At the opposite end of the spectrum, away from the sex shops and Spunk Bars, were the tours to the Middle East states: Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar. These were essentially dry countries. I went with Maureen and Big Cliff and on one of our first visits, we were the guests of a nephew of the ruler of Dubai. He entertained us on his private yacht and had these two henchmen with him at all times. They were big, bigger than Cliff, and as we sat down to eat they pulled a net
up
from the side of the boat which was full of fish and invited us to choose one to eat for our dinner. Cliff chose one, but I waited for the last one to die and said, ‘I’ll have that one; he’s the strongest.’

Maureen didn’t like that at all. She said, ‘I’ll have chicken and chips!’

So the big geezers were sent all the way to our hotel, half a mile away, to get her some chicken and chips, all because Maureen was squeamish.

Although the Middle East was dry, it wasn’t really. We’d heard Bahrain was the driest of the states, so Cliff smuggled in a bottle of champagne in his luggage and I smuggled in a bottle of brandy. Before we were due to play our tournament we had brandy and champagne cocktails in Cliff’s hotel room. We were ready to play after that. At the tournament Cliff went on first and I went and sat with all these Brit ex-pats who said to me, ‘What do you want to drink?’

‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘I’m all right.’

‘What do you want to drink?’ they said again.

‘I don’t want anything. I’m sick of Coke.’

‘No, what do you want to
drink
: brandy, vodka, whisky, what do you want?’

‘I’ll have a brandy and lemonade then,’ I said, my face lighting up.

As soon as Cliff finished his game I ran up to him and said, ‘Cliff, Cliff, get over there with those lads, they’ve got booze.’

The whole audience was at it. At the end of my game I got on the microphone and announced, ‘I have never seen so many happy people on Coke and lemonade in my life!’ And with that they all stood up and cheered. The concept of a dry state was farcical.

It was a farce at the airport as well. We were waiting with a load of Aussies to get on a plane to take us from Bahrain to Muscat. As we queued patiently to board this sheik came along with his twelve wives and thirty-plus bodyguards, walked straight past us, straight onto our plane, and it took off. ‘That cheeky sod has nicked our plane,’ I said to Cliff. The Aussies were even more furious than us because they had to get a connecting flight at Muscat, which they missed because we had to wait three hours for another plane.

When we got to Muscat, Cliff was in pain and discovered that an ingrowing hair on his backside had turned septic. He’d got this huge yellow boil thing on his bum and had to go to hospital to have it lanced. The doctor told Cliff afterwards that it had been like harpooning Moby Dick. He played darts later that night, only hours after it was done. The medics had told him to lay off the booze but he was back on it. When we returned to the hotel he asked me if I’d change the padding and put a fresh one on. I said, ‘I love you, Cliff, but I’m not going near that arse of yours, no way.’ So he had to get some poor sod from the hotel to do it for him.

The Middle East was great. The food was all curry, curry, curry, which suited me because I’m a big fan of all things hot and spicy. I was eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The place was full of Brits. They’d gone over there with the intention of working for nine months then going back home, but they got sucked into the lifestyle and the money and never went back. Some had been there for fourteen years.

It was strange playing tournaments in the Middle East because the culture was so different, but nothing compared with how weird it was playing in the Falkland Islands. The local population were odd, and probably still are. I did ten days there, playing exhibitions about eighteen months after the end of the 1982 war with Argentina. All our army boys who had been posted out there after the war to make sure the Argies didn’t come back were on ninety-day tours, and every one of them was counting the hours until they could get back home. They had a Malaysian couple doing the cooking for them, who had been working four and a half years out there without a day off. I said to them, ‘And our lot are worried about ninety days!’

I loved the army lads. What I didn’t like were the islanders. They hated having the soldiers there, despite the fact that they had been saved by them during the Argentine invasion. One young soldier had gone missing after knocking off one of the local girls. The army lads
I
spoke to reckoned the islanders had bumped him off. His body was never found.

The only exhibition I played for a mixed crowd of army boys and natives was in Port Stanley at a great big pub. Because of the hatred felt it was bound to kick off, and it did when three locals had a go at a young squaddie. I went over to this soldier’s mates and I said, ‘Is your pal OK?’

‘Don’t worry about him,’ one of them said, smiling. ‘He’ll be fine. He can sort it out.’

The young soldier invited these three locals outside, and they all walked out of the pub, but the soldier’s mates didn’t go with him which puzzled me because I’ve always been taught that you stick together in times of trouble. I needn’t have worried. This young army lad came back into the pub minutes later having done these three blokes. His mates weren’t worried about helping him because they knew he could take care of himself. I was pleased because these islanders were plonkers. There were twelve hundred of them living in an area the size of Wales and basically it was a backwater. Why we ever went over there to save them I’ll never know. They should have been left to the whim of General Galtieri who would probably have lined them up against a wall and had them all shot.

It wasn’t all bad. The army took me to an underground bunker which acted as a missile silo, and they showed me how to knock down a plane or a ship with
a
rocket. It was easy, frighteningly easy. There were eight army lads stationed there, and four of them had to be awake at any one time in case of attack. Every three days or so the Argies sent a boat out and it crossed into the exclusion zone. When it did it was all hands on deck at this bunker as warning flares were sent up into the sky and the Argie boat, as soon as it saw this, scarpered. If it hadn’t they would’ve sent one of these £900,000-a-pop rockets to sink it, and this was a game they played once, twice and sometimes three times a week.

I played at one Falklands venue where four soldiers turned up from nowhere and said to me, ‘We had to see you while you were here.’

They’d been dropped onto the moorland and had to live off the land for four days, but they had their civvies in their rucksack so they got changed and went on the lash with me until the early hours of the morning. At the end of it they said, ‘Don’t say anything. You haven’t seen us, have you?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no,’ and off they went into the darkness.

A few hours later a boat came to pick them up. I was tucked up in bed by this time, because I had an exhibition to play later that day, and nobody was ever the wiser.

It wasn’t all fun and games abroad. By 1980 I had got myself a manager called Dick Allix. They all wanted to manage me when they realised how good I was, and
why
not? These people are mercenaries; they want their 10 per cent cut. But Dick was the best. He used to be the drummer with a band called Vanity Fair who were one-hit wonders in the sixties with a song called ‘Early in the Morning’. As soon as I signed for him he got me a deal that involved me and Maureen going to Jamaica for a ten-day tour, which was a big mistake!

On the first night we arrived late into Kingston, went to the hotel and Dick went to bed, closely followed by Maureen. I went to the hotel bar for a drink, and as I was sat there I started talking to an English bloke. He asked me what I was doing in Jamaica and I told him about the darts and then said, ‘I’m going to have a couple of beers, go across the road for a KFC and then I’m going to bed.’

The bloke leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Listen, son, you might go across the road, but you won’t come back.’

This was only about ten o’clock at night and I looked at him as though he was some kind of nutter and said, ‘What are you on about?’

‘Just don’t go over there, mate. Seriously, don’t go over there,’ he said, and I could see in his eyes that he had my best interests at heart.

So I had a couple more beers and went to bed. It was frustrating though, knowing I could have been tucking into a big bucket of chicken and chips.

In the bedroom I had a look through the window. By
this
time it was pitch black outside, but I could see shadows in the darkness and no cars were stopping when the traffic lights were on red. It was a dangerous place: the drivers in these cars were too frightened to stop. We moved hotels the next day and stayed in one outside town, but the violence, or perceived threat of it, didn’t end there.

Dick is into pirates so we all went on a day trip to Port Royal. That’s where they lured pirates close to the shore so their ships would get dashed against the rocks. It was a pretty dull place so we decided to walk half a mile through sandy woods to get to the ocean. As we got there we saw a black kid with red Y-fronts floating in the water.

‘He’s brown bread, him,’ I said.

Dick said, ‘No he’s not, he’s snorkelling.’

I did a double take, looked at Dick and said, ‘Well, where the fuck is his snorkel then, you dozy twat? You two better get back to the port. I’ll pull him out. Now get out of here because we don’t know what’s happened.’

Dick and Maureen headed back and I pulled this kid out of the water and on to the sand. I wasn’t going to give him the kiss of life or anything like that; he was too far gone. I just left him to dry on the beach. His clothes were nearby and as I walked past them to go back I could see a few small bushes and two black guys hiding behind them. My heart started going boom, boom, boom, and the sudden adrenaline rush made me
feel
dizzy. These were probably the blokes who had killed the kid, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t kill me. Everything was going through my mind at this point, so I looked around for something to defend myself with. I picked up what looked like a heavy log, but it was hollow and dry and just crumbled in my hand. In the end I found a big brick and started walking. I knew these two guys were behind me, but after about a quarter of a mile they stopped following me. Thank Christ for that, I thought, and began to relax.