Paul OGrady - The Devil Rides Out

Paul OGrady

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Epub ISBN 9781409094043

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First published in Great Britain
in 2010 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Paul OGrady 2010

Paul OGrady has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of Paul OGrady. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBNs 9780593064245 (cased) 9780593064252 (tpb)

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

In memory of
Buster Elvis Savage.

The greatest canine star since Lassie.

Also by Paul OGrady

AT MY MOTHERS KNEE
AND OTHER LOW JOINTS

S ATURDAY NIGHT . THE BIG NIGHT OUT, THE ONE YOU STARTED preparing for the moment you opened your eyes on a Saturday morning, asking yourself, as you contemplated the pattern of cracks across the bedroom ceiling that looked like Barbara Castle in profile, What am I going to wear tonight? This question would later prompt a trip into town to buy a new top, a garment that would invariably turn out to be a skin-tight, Omo-white, cap-sleeved T-shirt, exactly the same as all the others that lay in my wardrobe drawer. Didnt matter, there was something about a brand new T-shirt that made you feel dressed up and dazzling.

There was a hysterical queen on the club scene known as Suicide Lee, so-called for the many wrist-slashing escapades and overdoses of paracetamol he put his body through each time he was dumped by the latest boyfriend. Since this happened every other weekend, the sight of a comatose Lee being carried out of a club by a posse of agitated queens became quite a regular feature on the late night streets of Liverpool. These futile suicide attempts never took place in the privacy of his own home. They were always carried out in public, usually in the toilets of a pub or club where he knew that he would be quickly discovered by his long-suffering friends and saved yet again from the jaws of death. He probably got off on the adrenalin rush of all this high drama and the subsequent attention, which he mistook for sympathy when in reality it was ridicule and piss-taking on a grand scale.

One Saturday teatime he awoke on a friends bed from a drug-induced coma, the result of another attempt at self-harm the previous night, and asked his anxious pal wanly, in his best Camille voice, what the time was.

Half six, came the gentle reply.

Oh my Christ, Suicide Lee screeched, sitting bolt upright in the bed and springing into action. What am I going to wear tonight?

I never socialized with Suicide Lee I couldnt stand him, to be honest, and thought he should abandon any further botched attempts on his life and instead entrust the task of dispatching him to one of the many people, myself included, who would be only too happy to volunteer for the job but in a way I sort of empathized with him when I heard the what am I going to wear story. Even the debilitating aftereffects of an attempted suicide couldnt stop this queens primeval urge to find the all-important something to wear and get out there clubbing. Every self-respecting young person went out on a Saturday night regardless of circumstances. To stay in was unthinkable; it meant you were a social outcast, a disgrace, a complete loser forced to sit in his bedroom listening to records and fretting while the rest of the town was out clubbing and having a ball.

I was going out tonight though and looked friggin gorgeous, or so I believed. My skin-tight jeans had been freshly washed in the bath that afternoon and then spun and tumble-dried in the launderette on Church Road, where sometimes, in my haste to get ready, I forgot to ask or rather to grovel pathetically before the unpredictable pit bull who ran the launderette for her kind dispensation to use the drying machines. This faux pas would result in my being shown the door with a sharp reminder that the use of dryers was strictly for those who had done a full load in the shop previous. Like a mantra she read this out from a handwritten sign sellotaped to the wall over the spin dryer, as if it gave her declaration some sort of official authority. It was just one of the many rules and regulations written out on the inside of empty soap-powder boxes and then stuck on machines, walls and even windows of the launderette that either she or the other fifteen-stone piece of officialdom similarly encased in a uniform of polyester overall and battered slippers who ran the show when she wasnt there had conjured up between the service washes in their little cubby hole that they grandly referred to as the Office. A refusal to be allowed to use the dryer meant running home to perform the laborious ritual known as ironing your jeans dry, a process that was never 100 per cent successful and meant enduring a damp crotch, arse and pockets all evening.

No damp jeans tonight though: a brand new pair of brushed denim Sea Dogs were about to make their debut, as was the ubiquitous cap-sleeved T-shirt bought that afternoon in Birkenhead Market. Hair blow-dried viciously until the top resembled a guardsmans busby with back and sides nicely curled under by torturing my naturally wavy hair with a round hairbrush. Any imperfections such as a pimple, spot or love bite would be amateurishly disguised with a generous daub of Rimmels Hide and Heal that was the colour of magnolia emulsion and glowed unnaturally under the fluorescent lights of a club. After checking myself in my mas dressing-table mirror I descended the stairs, leaving an eye-watering smog of Aqua Manda for Men in my wake. My mother, sat on the bottom step talking to my aunty on the phone, scrunched up her face and fanned it frantically with her hand like a panto dame whos just found out that the slipper fits Cinderella.

What in Gods name have you covered yourself in? she moaned. It smells like a gas attack, and I hope youre going to wear a coat, youll catch your death going out like that.