THE CHIMNEY SWEEP
‘Good luck will rub off when I shakes ’ands with you . . .’
– from Mary Poppins
As I deliver the punchline, I run a finger across my chest, describing an imaginary slogan on a T-shirt.
Then I tell the audience, ‘That wasn’t really a joke. I just felt like touching my tits.’
They fall about. I seem to have found their level.
‘Well,’ I continue, ‘if you want something done properly . . .’
Another roar of laughter and a round of applause. I’m not actually being funny. I’m just exploiting the fact that it’s 2 a.m., everyone in the club is drunk and a female stand-up comic is a bizarre curio, like a talking monkey. Throw in something rude, and they’re in your pocket.
It is a good feeling. It seems unfair that butchers and doctors and electricians don’t get applauded for doing their jobs, too.
♠
I have just left school and I’m so happy I could kill myself. Now to work out what to do with the rest of my life. I’ve been writing a ‘teenage newspaper column’ for a couple of years, and an agent got in touch to ask if I’d like to join a stand-up comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Why not? I’m immortal. Nothing could ever frighten me again, after walking into the school hall every lunchtime and wondering who to sit next to.
So I have chanced my way into this strange, counter-cultural, late-night community. It is a pure meritocracy: you can hold your own or you can’t. London’s little circuit of subterranean comedy clubs, packed and hot if there is an audience in double figures, is utterly seductive for the insecure. You can hide in a private world and prove yourself publicly at the same time.
It seems to be thought of as a man’s business, with very few female comics in these clubs, and the idea that ‘women can’t hack it’ is irresistible.
When I’m sitting around with a bunch of comedians in a room above a pub, after the shows are finished, drinking and listening to stories, I feel, for the first time away from my family, an epiphany of belonging. All the school rules are overturned. You can be fat here. You can be short or short-sighted, Jewish or Asian, useless at sport, baffled by sex – it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re brave and quick-witted.
In fact, the worse your social skills, the more you have to talk about.
♠
I play poker occasionally. Some of my brother’s friends know a couple of people who run a private cash game in Archway, so I visit a couple of times. They are a nice, funny group. A couple of them are famous: Ross Boatman, who’s in London’s Burning, and Jesse Birdsall, who’s in Eldorado. The others are just gamblers who haven’t got to grips with life yet: Barny Boatman, who works for P&O; Chris Colson, who doesn’t seem to do anything much; and Patrick Marber, a stand-up comic who’s thinking of writing a play.
The games are Omaha, seven stud and hi-lo split. But the stakes are a bit rich for me. I love poker, but I’m bad at it. I lose £200 or £300 every time. I’m currently making £210 a week working in a shop, and £25 a time for comedy performances. The only way to learn poker is to go to a casino (far too scary) or get fleeced in these expensive live games. I can’t resist stopping by every so often for the fun, the scathing banter and the takeaway pizza, but I can’t afford it more than once every few months.
♠
I tell my parents that when the year comes to an end, I’m not going to university. I think I’ve found a sort of vocation in comedy. I love the underworld, I love the screwed-up people, I finally fit in and I am happy. I’m not going to give it up to study T.S. Eliot and The Wife’s Lament. I can’t bear to re-enter the misery of my school years. And I sense that I’d never go back to comedy if I stopped to be a student for three years. I’d lose my nerve, and I can’t risk that. Something finally feels right to me. I’m on my yellow brick road. So, I’m going to write to the admissions tutor at Oxford and say thank you very much, but they should give my place to somebody else.
Then I look at my father’s face. I love him more than anyone in the world.
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I was only joking.’
♠
Having saved up all my shop and comedy money, I have managed to swerve the expensive poker games for long enough to build a travel budget. Most of the girls from my school have gone to India, where they all seem to be getting spiritual and getting food poisoning. They consider this a big plus, since most of them try to throw up after meals anyway, but it doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
I have no interest in ‘discovering myself’. I want to discover America. My father travelled there in 1960 and spent two adventurous years studying American fiction, dating American girls, driving American cars across American landscapes, eating hamburgers and going on civil rights marches. From him, from the cinema, from Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick and Dallas, I am in love with America, too. I keep a giant folded map in my bedroom, and take it out to stare at the redolent, romantic names: Hawk Springs, Dead Man’s Gulch, Looking Glass Falls.
Over two tightly budgeted months, my friend Nicky and I take Greyhound buses all round the southern states, up via New York to Massachusetts and on across the country, all the way over to the west coast through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado. We hop aboard a shaky twin-prop flight to Alaska, taking the first train of the season from Anchorage to Fairbanks. We rent a car and drive around the Painted Desert, New Mexico, Arizona and the Grand Canyon. All there is left that we really want to see is Wyoming, the Dakotas and Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, we start in Las Vegas. I write in my journal:
Sunday 2nd June
Nevada is amazing. Right over the state line, in the middle of nothing but dusty hills and sand, there are huge pink and yellow casinos, and nothing else at all. After driving through empty hot landscape for ages, you think you’re imagining them, that they’re a mirage. It’s like that old cartoon where the cars keep driving past the hotel and the man in the fez is standing outside saying, ‘I knew we shouldn’t have built it in the middle of the desert!’
Then Las Vegas is BREATHTAKING. Millions and millions and millions of neon signs and shiny hotels and pink plastic flamingos and adverts for famous people and sparkle and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT. We were going to stay at the Las Vegas Hilton where The Four Tops and The Temptations are appearing nightly, but the Desert Inn has Joan Rivers.
It’s AMAZING what hotels give you for the money here. The Desert Inn said they’d charge us $75 a night if we agreed to stay two nights, and for that we’ve got a STUNNING room with its own bathroom, seven free drinks each and millions of ‘Buy 5 get 5 free’ tokens for roulette and poker chips. It’s so weird and amazing after all the youth hostels. They valet parked the car!!
Couldn’t resist the casino and they couldn’t resist us either – business is so slow that they only asked for ID once and my fake student card held up fine. So I was able to lose $5 on fruit machines and $47 on roulette. I was doing all right at roulette, but decided in advance that it was OKAY to lose all my winnings for the fun of playing. Tonight I’m going to try poker.
We never make it to Wyoming and the Dakotas.
♠
You wouldn’t think there was anything especially character-building about eating cheese sandwiches and reading Milton under a tree. But my college is ambitious, heavily male-dominated, and our tutors approach English Literature with military discipline. They specialize in reducing new students to tears, stripping away our confidence, then gradually bestowing approval as we work longer and longer hours, until we hunch over the books all night with an obsessiveness born of Stockholm Syndrome.
I