Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (30 page)

Once back again in Britain, this time at Rangers, I think Paul had realized that his use for football and its use for him had reached a plateau. Sporting genius, his one great ally in staving off the everyday, was showing the first signs of starting to fade.

He remained a tremendous asset to any club, but whereas other pros might enjoy these later seasons of industry respect and entitlement, Paul could see nothing but the yawning abyss of decline. He started to talk more of the frightening and unmapped years beyond. When the world no longer saw Gazza, he felt, they would have to accept Paul Gascoigne instead, and he truly believed that that incarnation of himself would not be acceptable to them. He would disappoint. Be found out.

That dreaded moment finally came, in Paul’s mind, when, in one of the most notorious decisions ever stage-managed by an eclipsed
star, the then England manager Glenn Hoddle inexplicably decided to leave Paul Gascoigne out of the England 1998 World Cup squad, a side that everybody else, including the rest of the players, knew he had every right to be part of. It was a shocking decision that utterly destroyed Paul’s confidence and allowed his most destructive inner demons to gain the whip hand. Even though his greatest playing days were behind him at the time of France ’98, there simply wasn’t a team in the world who, had the scores been level with fifteen minutes to play, wouldn’t have drawn breath had they seen Gazza warming up at pitchside ready to battle against them. Purely from a morale point of view, he should have been in the squad – the sight of Paul Gascoigne running on to a pitch sent an electric charge through crowds the world over. But Glenn Hoddle wanted to make his splash. In the event, it turned out to be just the latest in his long line of managerial belly flops – and one with catastrophic repercussions for the player.

From that point on, Paul’s off-field stunts became more implosive, the self-loathing blossomed and his obsession with stopping the clock filled his every action.

Never quite having the faith in himself to buy into life when he was a global success, when ruin became an option he embraced it as if it were his destiny. He had been the greatest triumph in the world, now he would show how good he could be at failure too. Failure, ruin and despair – why not? It’s something to do.

Initially, there was no shortage of volunteers willing to
‘cure’
the bad Paul
‘Gazza’
Gascoigne – the broken person Paul has always thought he must be – and Paul has been an attentive and, I suspect, lucrative patient. In those first years after retirement from the game, pyschobabble and clichéd self-discovery became his new Italian. Then, in more recent times, the need for rescue and redemption became all too physical, real and acute.

My phone number has never changed and yet he never calls, probably as part of the latest twelve-step programme or through a misguided embarrassment at what he later became. The last time we met up we went to a restaurant near my home and, while he didn’t exactly wolf down his steak, he looked good and drank nothing
but water. I drank wine and told him how sweet it tasted. His eyes twinkled because he knew how wrong and therefore appropriate a joke that was; an appalling jest that only very close friends can dare. The sort of joke nobody tells around him any more because he has supposedly become a tragedy, a walking cautionary tale. Except he hasn’t quite, thank God.

That night Sonny, now old enough to hear and understand Paul’s unexpurgated stories, came with us to witness his silly stunts and japes at those on surrounding tables. All the old traits were present and correct, and Son laughed, I noted, like nobody else – and I have to include myself here – has ever made him laugh. The kind of laughter when breath becomes exhausted and you make a genuine request for your tormentor to stop.

That is something that, in my life, only Paul Gascoigne can do.

More than anything in this world, I would wish Paul to get well and realize, once and for all, how widely loved, respected and important he is. Though these books may include many notable people who have punctuated our pop culture over the last forty years, nobody comes close to making the impression on me that Paul Gascoigne did.

I have never met anyone like him and certainly never expect to do so again.

Ain’t It Grand To Be Blooming Well Dead

O
ne of the few traits I haven’t inherited from my parents is a belief in crackpot superstition, although some of the more widely held gags in this field I will go along with because they are bordering on tradition and often a lot of fun to perform anyway. So I’ll walk around ladders, place unwanted mirrors carefully on to skips so as not to break them, throw salt about and open both front and back doors every New Year’s Eve. The only exceptions to this are a couple that come directly from the old man and that I have never heard of being adhered to by anyone else. Therefore, so as not to let these loopy tics die out because of my sluggishness, I will never watch a light go out, and if I see an ambulance I will hold my collar until I chance across a four-legged animal. Dad lumbered me with these when I was about six. The first I remember was delivered to me as we walked along Rotherhithe New Road and one of the streetlights went out as we approached it.
‘Fuck
it,’
Dad barked.
‘You
should never see a light go out. It means a death in the
family.’
He then carried on casually talking about something else while I, now completely freaked out, tried to process this dreadful new information. To this day I will look away when flicking off a table lamp, look back and watch it come on again, then look away once more for its final extinguishing. I even blow out candles with my eyes shut. As for the ambulance/four-legged animal thing – and here Spud had warned me that if I ignored the ritual it would mean
‘something
really rotten is going to
happen’
– I have to say I am a little more flexible. If I am driving and see the flashing blue lights of a hospital emergency, I do allow myself to simply trap my shirt collar under my chin. This counts, as far as I am concerned, although it does
make you look like you are at the wheel with a broken neck. As a further concession, I include insects as part of my release from the deal because they do technically have four legs and a couple of others to spare. Nowhere in the rules does it say the freeing creature can’t have more than a leg-quartet and I believe my loosening of the regulations is an overall sign that I am maturing. Against this, if I am walking my own dog and see an ambulance, he won’t be allowed to count and I must source a fresh one.

Actually, let me begin this chapter again.

One of the many traits I’ve inherited from my parents is a dogged belief in crackpot superstition. The first time I became aware of these unseen forces that control all our lives was at about the age of five when, just before a trip to the park with Mum and Dad, Spud said he was going to nip into James Lane, the local turf accountants, to put on a few bets. This bookies was only a ninety-second walk from our flats but we had barely begun to make our way up Debnams Road when the old man suddenly exploded with rage.
‘Oh
, for fuck’s sake
Bill!’
he stormed.
‘What’s
the fucking matter with you? Silly bastard! If I lose money ’cos of this, I’ll go off a-fucking-
larming!’
Going off alarming was Spud’s favourite phrase to illustrate any kind of uproar or fuss. Looking to find out what had triggered this fury I saw our near neighbour old Bill Pitts mooching toward us. Dad and he were old friends, but they seemed to be having heated words.

‘Fuck
me, Fred, I have to go out
mate,’
I recall Bill pleading, to which Dad replied something about why, if this was so, could he not find alternative routes.

Sensing my concern, Mum leaned down to let me know what was going on.

‘It’s
y’
father,’
she explained.
‘He
was going to put some money on a horse race, but now he can’t because he saw Bill and he thinks it’s bad luck to have a bet when you’ve just seen a boss-eyed
man.’

Like any five-year-old, I accepted this bizarre data completely without comment and mentally placed it right up there with the shape of the earth and the ocular benefits of eating up all my carrots. There could be no doubt that Mr Pitts had jinxed Dad’s intended wagering,
for when it came to being cross-eyed, Bill was an undisputed leader in the field with a strabismus equal to, or arguably greater than, the great silent comedian Ben Turpin. Everybody called him Boss-eyed Bill Pitts, even Bill himself. When he would come to our door to
‘order’
whatever goods Dad had liberated from the docks that week, should the old man not be in, he would say,
‘Tell
yer dad to put me down for three of the ladies gloves he’s getting. Tell him they’re for Boss-eyed Bill, he’ll
know.’
In fact, everybody knew.

‘One
home, one
away,’
was the most common way of describing his condition, although neither of Bill’s eyes could technically be said to be
‘at
home’, given that they both settled toward the inner recesses of their sockets.
‘Fuck
me,
Bill,’
people would say,
‘can’t
you stop looking at your hooter for five minutes? It’s not that
fascinating.’

‘Buckle-eyed’
was the other term for it, and if Dad ever saw Bill on the street, providing he wasn’t going to place a bet, he would shout a hearty,
‘Aye
-aye, Buckle! I’ll be round the Duke of Suffolk later! If you see two of me I’ll be the one in the
middle!’

Before modern sensibilities lead you to start a campaign to get retrospective compensation for Boss-eyed Bill, I should point out that he had a popular wife, five kids and a temper that was a boon to glaziers who specialized in pub window replacement. Perhaps if he’d been living in the suburbs nobody would have mentioned how boss-eyed he was and even given him charitable status. Doubtless today there would be corrective surgery readily available or else he might better be known as Ocular Different William, but back then he was Boss-eyed Bill and just got on with being Boss-eyed Bill. It was only in taking walks near betting shops that he found his challenging way of looking at the world to have its drawbacks.

The point of all this concentration upon superstitions will soon be revealed, but before we move on I must record a story that goes beyond a belief in mere luck into a dimension beyond. In the late sixties there was a great revival in populist occult imagery, the most notable exponents of which were probably bands like Black Sabbath, Black Widow and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. TV also fuelled this craving for the unsettling in strange, creepy series such as
Mystery & Imagination, The Liars
, and
Journey into the Unknown
,
whose haunting whistled theme tune over scenes of an abandoned midnight fairground totally mesmerized me.

Children were given their chance to get in on the supernatural fad via Waddington’s Ouija Boards, sold in all good toyshops. These wooden slabs emblazoned with the letters of the alphabet, numbers one to nine and the words
‘Yes’
and
‘No’
allowed all junior mystics to get in touch with the more garrulous sort of ghost, and newspapers of the time were full of stories about sessions that had begun by timidly asking
‘Is
anybody
there’
and ended up with people leaping possessed from high windows or sacrificing close friends at the centre of hastily drawn pentagrams. As a result, every kid wanted a piece of that action. Nobody I knew had a proper Ouija board but it was soon discovered you could achieve much the same results by writing all the necessary information on pieces of paper arranged in a semicircle with an upturned drinking glass through which to channel the spirit’s message. I imagine a rumbled Waddington’s wanted to suppress such infringement of copyright but soon everyone was at it. The problem now was that, when you’re ten or eleven, waiting for longer than twenty seconds to engage with a chatty wraith tends to test one’s patience, so most kids would give the sessions a bit of a helping hand by shoving the glass around the letters themselves while feigning shock and panic. You could always tell when one of your mates was manufacturing the mystery because whatever phantom they were pretending to be would have a penchant for words like
‘bum’,
‘bastard’
and
‘tit’,
coupled with a curious eagerness to point out who around the table was, in fact, a secret homosexual. Thus 99 per cent of these initially sombre séances rapidly descended into farce.

Thus one day in Stephen Micalef’s house, Mark Jeffries, Tommy Hodges, Peter King and I all promised, promised,
promised
that we wouldn’t fake it and no matter how long it took we would wait until the glass began to move purely guided by an unseen force. After a few failed attempts at this avowed discipline – I believe a Mr John Arse put in an appearance at one point – we were off again with all our index fingers atop the beaker as it slid around the letters. The name George was forming up and, as usual, as the fourth letter
revealed itself we were all noisily accusing each other of
‘pushing
it’
and creating the kind of racket that might dissipate the chances of any drifting ghoul wanting to stick around. After the glass came to rest it was decided to ask a question that would flush out any charlatans, but we were momentarily stumped as to what that might be. Our ethereal chum waited patiently while we thrashed this out. Then I came up with the idea that I should remove a coin from my pocket and hold it in my hand without looking at the year engraved upon it. If the spirit guessed this date correctly then we knew we had a live one. I took a penny, one of the pre-decimal large ones, and without so much as glancing at it put it in my back pocket and sat down again.

‘I
thought you were going to hold
it,’
said Pete.

‘Well,
you’d all say I nicked a look at it if I did, so now nobody can, can
they?’
I replied. I wanted this thing watertight.

Tom remarked that the ghost would be forced to look at my bum now to find out what year was on the coin and after a good chuckle at this we asked the question formally.

The glass began to slide: 1
 . . . 
9
 . . . 
1
 . . . 
3. 1913.

Excitedly taking the penny from my pocket, I stared at the numbers beneath Britannia wielding her trident on the reverse: 1913. I showed this around and a strange sickly silence fell over us all. This was a bit weird. Placing our fingers back on the glass we started to ask each other what to request next. Our voices now were low and serious, all the effervescence knocked out by the inexplicable accuracy of the stunt. Before we could agree on a suitable enquiry, the glass began to move again: C
 . . . 
H
 . . . 
I
 . . . 
L
 . . . 
D
 . . . 
R
 . . . 
E
 . . . 
N.

‘Children!’
we all gasped as one, searching each other’s eyes for the deeper meaning of this. Then it continued on.

S
 . . . 
T
 . . . 
O
 . . . 
P
 . . . 
N
 . . . 
O
 . . . 
W.

We paused and stared at each other, quite terrified. I broke the spell.

‘I
don’t like
it!’
I said, my voice rising with fear.
‘I
don’t like this
bit!’

And we all jumped up and ran to the front door to leg it into the square outside.

I have absolutely no explanation for what happened there. All those who were present can confirm the events as recorded, and even if you rationalize the coin revelation as mere subconscious chance, none of us can think of a single reason why any of us would have concocted the mundane yet petrifying phrase that followed it. It really happened and there it is.

Possibly I should have brooded upon this bizarre incident more and allowed it to influence my world view from then on but it was soon made light of and only many years later did we all start to question what we experienced that afternoon. Thankfully, none of us have drawn a single spiritual conclusion from it and, quite sensibly, keep the story in a box labelled Derren Brown rather than a crystal ball named Uri Geller.

Anyway, the point of all these diversions into the fifth dimension is to tell you that on the day I was offered a job on BBC Radio 1 a pigeon pooped on my neck. This, coupled with the fire at my parents’, the collision with the cellar beam and the later caravan tow-bar trauma lead me to believe that many of my career turning points have been presaged by portentous omens, although it wasn’t until I set them all down in these pages that I recognized the inescapable pattern.

I may add that when we came to record the third series of the daytime game show
Win, Lose or Draw
, my schedule required that we record all twenty-eight programmes in four days. For the slower at maths among you, that is
seven TV shows a day
. And on the crucial evening I flew up to Edinburgh to start this lunatic undertaking the cab taking me to the airport broke down and I missed my plane. I grant you that I may be looking a little too hard here for mystical signs and that that the engine on a Peugeot 405 hardly qualifies as some kind of portal between worlds, but I insist this stuff all adds up when you look back over an eventful, if uneven, career.

The job at Radio 1 was never really a good fit and came at a two-pronged tipping point when the new boss at the station, a beleaguered Matthew Bannister once more, was attempting to haul the network out of its ageing complacency at the precise moment the British public began to feel that I was popping up a bit too much
in their lives and might want to think about fucking off for a bit. In fact, the shows I did for Radio 1 on Saturday and Sunday lunch-times were among the most peppy I’ve ever done, with an audience ready and willing for the more
‘stunty’
end of aural broadcasting that would include such feats as: