If you meet Gunka James and you don’t like him, you’re a dick.
My brother and my sisters and many of our cousins think of him as the person who first got them interested in something, sparked their enthusiasm about stuff, even though being passionate about anything other than soccer left you open to derision from the ever-present bitterness of many of the Scots I grew up around.
we whittled the options down to two: the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper or a Monkees album called Headquarters. To my eternal shame, I chose the Monkees. This was because I was only eight and the Monkees looked cheerful and friendly on their album cover, whereas the Beatles had beards and my father had told me that you couldn’t trust a man with a beard because you didn’t know what he was hiding.
I’m not much of an upchucker. I can and have eaten pizza on heroin.
My brother Scott was a fourth-year who wore desert boots and listened to Zeppelin. His hair was long and he had a girlfriend with breasts. He was busy.
you could tell which passengers were American before they spoke. They looked so different, with their strangely white teeth crammed together with no gaps and their gum-chewing and gregarious friendly natures not fired by alcohol.
James has always said the reason their marriage has lasted so long is that he knew early on he could never do better,
American women seem to be attracted to the Scottish accent for reasons I have never understood but remain grateful for.
The people themselves were different colors. Black people, brown people. (My dad once told me about a black guy who lived in Glasgow but I had never seen him.)
From this moment on I would dedicate my life to rock and roll and take as many drugs as possible.
Strip clubs don’t appeal to me for the same reason. If I was inclined to seek the company of a bunch of angry drunk women who hated me, wanted all my money, and were determined to tease me but not have sex with me, I would just open a bar in Edinburgh.
Sometimes we would just sit on a wall and spit.
All of these so-called wines tasted absolutely fucking terrible—like syrupy-sweet cough medicine—but no one was drinking them for their flavor or how nicely they complemented a fine Camembert. They were drunk straight from the bottle to “get the job done.” The Scots are born engineers, even in matters of intoxication.
You have never heard “Anarchy in the U.K.” butchered until you hear it with a clarinet solo.
I had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I wanted to be a rock star, lauded and adored and worshiped, drunk, laid, gorgeous, and dead by the age of twenty-five, but that was too Byronic and romantic for a Protestant,
We’d been taught from an early age that sex was shameful and bad, that men wanted it all the time because they were slaves to their appetites, and that women were good, they didn’t like or want sex but would allow it in order to have babies, or because they were drunk, or English.
Robbie loved his new gay buddies, and I thought it was very cool and daring to be homosexual. I would have tried it but could never find a man I wanted to have sex with, they all seemed so…not womanly enough.
Robbie for some reason kept turning into Adam Ant. I asked him to stop but he said he couldn’t help it.
I borrowed a thousand dollars from my ever-patient Uncle James for the deposit and first month’s rent on a tiny apartment Anne had found. (I will never forget the look of genuine surprise on his face when I actually paid him back a few months later.)
The auditions were being held in the back room, which doubled as a dark place for anonymous gay sex during the week and a genteel off-off Broadway theater on weekends. Woe betide you if you arrived on the wrong night, you might inadvertently have to sit through a horribly amateur performance of Our Town when all you wanted was a strange man’s penis up your arse.
He had us improvise scenes he conjured up, which always seemed to end with guys fighting each other or making out with girls. If this was what being an actor was all about, I wanted the job.
Eventually, and rather unwisely in my opinion, George chose me to play the lead,
Chad explained to me that this rum tasted so good to him that he suspected that he had been Captain Morgan in a previous life—his last name was Moran, after all—and proposed that we drink the stuff until we fell down and talked like pirates all day. It sounded like a decent plan to me, so that’s just what we did.
I only realized some years later that Chad was not crazier than me, just a few stops ahead of me on a train going nowhere.
All the festival shows get reviewed in the local papers, but given the sheer volume of performances that have to be covered, hordes of local journalists who don’t usually cover the arts are drafted to help. Therefore you may have a review of a serious play written by the fishing correspondent, who will moan about the show having a disappointing lack of trout,
I have seen this a million times since in show business. In TV, movies, and the music business you get executives who start out with a radical notion, but as the moment of truth approaches they lose their nerve and go back to what they are familiar with.
I told Jimmy that not only was I going to stop drinking and get myself right, I was going to quit smoking and lose weight, too. He pulled into a gas station and bought me a carton of Marlboro lights and some candy. “In case you change your mind,” he said as he tossed them to me.
“Nice ride,” she said. “Hey, I was looking at a map on the plane. It’s not that far to Africa. Just a few hundred miles. Let’s drive there.” I told her that would be a little scary. “Really?” she said. “I had no idea you were such a girly-man. I sometimes wonder if fear isn’t just God’s way of saying, ‘Pay attention, this could be fun.’”
An inexplicable bolt of terror shot through my system. Then I remembered what Rock and Roll Susie had said, that fear might be God’s way of saying, “Pay attention, this could be fun,” and I said aloud to whoever was out there, even if it was only me: “Between safety and adventure, I choose adventure.”
When I saw Dean a few months later at some Hollywood event and thanked him personally for his kindness, I couldn’t help telling him that his reputation as a ruthless Machiavellian hardass was unfair. “Oh no,” he insisted, “it’s fair. I don’t think I was being nice. I made a perfectly sound business decision. The way I see it is you may have a future in this town whereas the sitcom you were on clearly doesn’t. If you become a big star I don’t need to be remembered as the asshole who fucked you over.”
I’m not evil enough to love money, but I am naughty enough to fuck around with it, spank it, pull its hair a little bit.
As I cut the umbilical cord, Milo started to cry and shiver. One of the nurses, a dour Russian woman who had bossed Sascha around a little too much for my liking, said, not unkindly, “Oh, baby, life is hard.” “Shut up,” I snapped. She looked at me with astonishment. “He just got here. He doesn’t need that shit yet,”
I didn’t watch what the other guys did, it would have been like watching someone else kiss your girlfriend, which was bad enough, and maybe doing it better than you, which was worse.
Then a few years after that I had called her from Bangkok airport, where I was waiting to change planes on a long trip to Australia. I had partaken liberally of the free booze on the flight from London and was staggering around the airport when I spotted a Tie Rack store. For some reason I decided to buy a yellow tie with little black skulls on it. Because my drunken brain believed that buying a tie
Then a few years after that I had called her from Bangkok airport, where I was waiting to change planes on a long trip to Australia. I had partaken liberally of the free booze on the flight from London and was staggering around the airport when I spotted a Tie Rack store. For some reason I decided to buy a yellow tie with little black skulls on it. Because my drunken brain believed that buying a tie in Thailand was somehow significant, I had to tell someone.