A risky move, considering he looked like he could batter me, but that’s how angry I was.
And not long after that, he was gone.
Lassies
As you’ve maybe been able to tell so far, I wasn’t very good with my feelings when I was wee. Well, that was especially true when it came to lassies.
I was down in Millport once, when I was nine, wandering about by myself, and I bumped into a lassie from my class, called Helen. We played about for a bit, even though I never really spoke to her in my class, and she never spoke to me.
Then, one night, when we were in the arcade, she asked me to get off with her. I don’t know if you yourself are familiar with the term ‘to get off with’, but it means to kiss. To snog.
Anyway, I shat it.
It wasn’t just because I was shy. There was more to it than that. When I was in primary school, I got mixed up about one or two things. I overheard things and saw things, and I think it fucked with my head.
First of all, I’d see older boys talking about shagging. I must have just been in primary two or three. There would be older boys either in my school or on the street that I stayed, talking about lassies, fannies, poking, shagging, licking out, sluts, cows, whores. I can imagine that most of the boys were virgins, really, but I think it made them feel more grown up if they talked about lassies like that.
Any time I heard about shagging or anything sexual, it was from a boy’s perspective, and the sexual thing was something that was done to the lassie. You didnae do it with the lassie, you did it to the lassie. And then you slagged her off for it.
These boys would do shagging motions, they’d have these scowling faces, they’d make it seem nasty and minging. One of them talked about some lassie’s fanny bleeding, either through shagging or poking. They’d say all this minging stuff, right in front of me. Nobody said, ‘Here, we better talk about this somewhere else, wee Brian’s here.’
All this stuff was going into my head, all this sexual stuff. It sounded abusive. It sounded aggressive. It sounded like you had to be a bad person to do it, you had to not care about the lassie, and then later you’d slag the lassie off, you’d laugh about her. And in some way, the lassies liked it.
It was a horrible way to be confused.
But what’s that got to do with Helen asking me to get off with her? Well, I’d somehow got it into my head that ‘to get off with’ meant to shag.
I didn’t even really know what shagging was. It was something to do with putting your willy in their fanny and moving about. And that’s what I thought she was wanting me to do, or something like that. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary, because I’d heard other boys and lassies my age talk about getting off with each other, so I thought they were all at it. And it fucking horrified me. It was fucking nightmarish.
So I said to her, ‘No.’
I remember that I was playing a game in the arcade at the time, and I was trying to ignore her. But she kept asking me. ‘Please, Brian. Pleeeease!’
I went from one game to another to get away from her, but she kept following me. I started playing another game, hoping she’d go away. I was petrified. Petrified with a beetroot face. I remember ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ by Deniece Williams was playing, and it made me feel even more petrified. In the song, she was singing about some boy she liked, and here was this Helen following me about.
She put her hands on my waist, and I booted her.
I kicked behind me without looking back. I kicked her leg.
And she went away.
I was fucking shitting it to go back to school. I thought that when I went back she’d be harassing me there as well, or telling everybody that I didn’t get off with her, and they’d all laugh at me. Why would I not want to get off with a lassie? What was wrong with me? Did I not know how to do it?
But when I went back, fuck all happened. I saw her about, but she didn’t even seem to notice me, like it was no big deal because she did it all the time and she couldn’t even remember my face amongst the many. Thank fuck.
As I got older, I realised that to get off with somebody meant to just kiss them. But that feeling still stayed, somehow. That fear. And the feeling that to do something sexual with a lassie, you had to be a cunt. It manifested itself in my teenage years as the phenomenon known as ‘fanny fright’. But I’ll get round to that later.
My First Computer Program
As a bit of a loner type that was scared of lassies, it goes without saying that I was into computers.
My first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Before that, we had the Atari 2600, then the Spectrum, but the Atari was more of a console, and the Spectrum was considered to be my brother’s. Whereas I thought of the VIC-20 as mine.
After that, I was never without a computer. The VIC-20 was replaced by the Commodore Plus/4, which was replaced by the Commodore 64C, then the Atari ST. After that came the consoles and the PC. It must have cost my mum and dad a fortune, but that’s all I was into. And it’s what I’ve always been into, more than anything. Computers. And I later became a computer programmer, of sorts.
I remember my first computer program. The first program that wasn’t just me printing my name all across the screen.
It was done on the VIC-20, when I was eight or nine, and it was adapted from a tutorial in a book that I had. The tutorial taught you how to make a program that presented the user with a series of options that they could select from, with each option giving a different response. When you ran the tutorial, it asked the user what they would like to eat, from a choice of three items. The user would press 1, 2 or 3, and the computer would respond with something like ‘Very well, sir’ or ‘I’m afraid there is no more soup.’ It gave me a wee buzz seeing it work. But I had an idea of how to adapt it.
I changed it so that it was a lassie telling me that she liked me, and one of the options was her asking me if I wanted to feel her legs.
I can’t remember what the other options were. I can’t imagine at that age I put in the option of feeling her boobs or her fanny, but it was something sexual, and I definitely remember the thing about her legs. I think I was into legs because I’d seen the music video for ‘Dead Ringer for Love’ by Meat Loaf, where Cher was dancing on the bar with these guys feeling her legs. And I wondered what it was like, to feel a woman’s legs.
Whatever the options were, when you selected them, I made the virtual lassie reply with something like ‘Oooh, feels good’ or ‘I like that.’
I don’t know if it gave me a hard-on at that age, but it turned me on in a way, and I kept looking over my shoulder at my bedroom door in case somebody walked in.
I was ahead of my time.
Proddies and Catholics
I’ll say one more thing about lassies, but this time for a different reason. This is something else that was wrong with Carnwadric, and Glasgow in general.
Not far from where I lived, there were these lassies that stayed across the road from my auntie Jean’s house. These sisters. I can’t remember if there were two or three of them, but one of them looked about the same age as me, which was about eight or nine years old, and one of them was a few years older. I remember being over at my auntie Jean’s house, and sometimes seeing these lassies across the road. I’d look at them for quite a while. I didn’t like them. It wasn’t because of anything they’d done. I hadn’t spoken to them. I didn’t know anything about them.
The only thing I did know about them was that they were Catholics. And that’s why I didn’t like them.