“My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.”
LEONARD COHEN
It has been said that your first crush sets the tone for the rest of your romantic life. So think back to your very first crush. Who was it? For me that crush was Tin Tin from Thunderbirds. What was this chemically aloof Socialite even doing on Tracy Island? I always presumed she'd been trafficked. Living out her days in a different outfit for every meal, drinking to forget.
I developed an attraction to crazy, feral, homeless women with personality disorders. They would at first seem intelligent and artistic. But turn out to be belligerent and autistic. White girls in dreadlocks and a face tattoo, possessing mystical names that invoked just how spiritual they were. Amazon, Rain, Taliban.
Before you prolapse with outrage at my rampant misogyny, these women were not only crazy, some were abusive too. When one woman asked to meet me in the park where she waved around a knife like Crocodile Dundee and had to be tasered by police. I never saw her again because she’d been sectioned.
No self respecting woman had any business being anywhere near me and soon decent women who had their shit together made themselves scarce. Rightly so. I was a neck tattoo and a voice like a tramps pocket. That never bodes well for anyone.
Nevertheless I was a fucking good time and that always worked a treat. My desperate need to feel wanted appeased when women looked at me like I was a sandwich.
In 2012 I was trapped in a relationship. The only common ground we had was our mutual abhorrence for one another. Turning up the heat to see which one of us broke first. When I broke and ran I moved to Castleford to celebrate.
Not that I remember doing so. I woke up there with a social worker and a council tenancy agreement, all of my furniture was either stolen or donated. But you don't need an oven or washing machine when you're medically testing the limits of consciousness.
As a man I hate to admit that I was vulnerable.
Vulnerable in the way that mangy, stray cats are vulnerable. Vulnerable In a scream at traffic kind of way. That puts blood in the water.
I had all the confidence in the world but no self respect. That's a dangerous combination when you add cocaine.
For the sake of giving my lawyers a holiday I have gone to ridiculous lengths to protect the identities of the parties mentioned below.
Inevitably it was going to end in tears. Right on cue, 2015 opened like a bad game of Jumanji. Immediately I treated myself to a blonde, all inclusive mistake in Blackpool.
For the sake of anonymity let’s call her Amazon.
I didn't know it at the time but Amazon had been married for less than a year. Had she told me I probably wouldn't have cared. She pursued me which made me feel wanted and I liked it. Love-bombing me with napalm, demanding unsettling things in the bedroom before disappeared into the ether like Keyser Soze.
Another woman… “Rain” had walked out on a date with another guy to meet me in Leeds bus station. She'd been at a rave but it turned out she dressed like that all the time. She came back to the flat and practically moved in, loitering around the place for weeks like an alcohol dependent house spider in frilly knickers.
To kill time I'd take her to the pub so she could start crying and tell me how much she loved her ex boyfriend, drink all night before demanding that I find cocaine on a Tuesday morning before slipping out quietly one afternoon never to return.
Every rejection felt like a cardiac arrest. The more a mistake hurt, the quicker I was to make another. A bad moon was rising.
I don't know if you've met Satan. But the devil wears Primark.
Trouble has multi-coloured mermaid hair and absolutely no impulse control. Let’s call her “Taliban”.
One Saturday night Taliban interrupted a night out in Wales and instructed her friends to drive her to Yorkshire to meet me for the first time.
One lad looked like Cat Stevens and the other was one of those gingers that borders on albino. I fed them a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and tell them to go for a drive. They comply and have a psychedelic, paranoid freak out at the local McDonald's.
This is junky love. A life without boundaries. Nobody wins.
It will have you practically move into a Wetherspoons hotel in Newport and ruin yourself in a rock and roll fantasy you can't afford. Round and round on a pyrotechnic mistake until someone's kidney fails.
Day drunk into the night. Living in memory like the static from old televisions. Narcissism always looks good under neon light.
As the saying goes It takes two to tango. So you dance like no-one is watching. And you drink like no-one is watching. But they are and they've called security. So you're out on your arse feeding cocaine to the pigeons. Drinking through the flu but the pills you bought from that wizard in a public toilet really take the edge off. There may be blood in your vomit but it really feels like your life is coming together.
A drum beats like a panic attack. Summer screams past in a drunken joyride up the midnight motorway past the leafy oaks in a land where you don't belong. The upset stomach of time bending to the hue of August ready to reject me like projectile vomit in a disabled toilet.
I woke up months later in unspeakable carnage. The hotel room is a visceral horror of smashed glass and torn curtains. The floor had become an ashtray. Strewn with the debris of a hundred nights of senseless pigfuckery too sordid to imagine. The broken window did nothing to abate the offensive funk within. A portable television tuned in to a Pentecostal preacher over dubbed in the Welsh language, half obscured with white noise. Rum and unidentified chemicals were mulched into a thick paste and painted across across all the fittings. Evidence surely of the worst attributes of psychological violence.
What sweet, bastard psychotic had allowed this to happen? There can be no penance for crimes such as these. We'd have to leave the country.
But first we'd have to learn how to walk.
The escape is expedient but Taliban squats against a wall, begging me not to look at her. Then proceeds to put the relationship out of its misery with a sledge hammer.
The pavement grass casts long, shadow soldiers in the rising sun.
I sat stewing on a bench for hours in the centre of Newport, round the humdrum of straight people going about their straight lives among the market stalls and street entertainers.
Let me assure you there is no more mocking a soundtrack to failure than a Peruvian flute band.
What were we doing to ourselves? What we doing to each other?
The party was over. I tried to restart the engine but the wheels had fallen off. The drugs were no longer working. Pushing to the brink of fatal overdose just to take the edge off. Attempts were made to curb the habit but the habit curb stomped it.
I'd fucked and I'd fucked until I literally couldn't give a fuck any more. I didn't want it. I don’t think I really ever did.
When a prenatal scan appears on Taliban’s Instagram page my stomach lunges out of my sphincter at a speed that creates a sonic boom that can be heard as far away as Zambia. What would you do in that situation?
Personally I did nothing. just waited for the phone call. But it never came.
I do hear from Amazon in Blackpool. Breathing down the phone and clearly masturbating before hanging up the phone without so much as a hello or goodbye. It's not the call you expect to get while hunting cheese in the all night Asda.
Everything leads to nothing. Nothingness without end. I'm reduced to my last three friends who sit around doing coke talking about other times they sat around and did coke.
I’ve become that guy that women message when they’re lonely and bored on a Friday night. I was the fuckboy who’ll dance with you in your living room and listen to you cry. I’m the guy you’ll force yourself upon after four bottles of wine and ghost me three days later. I’m the guy you later cringe when you think about. Admittedly I was that guy. But fucking hell I was good at it.
A year passes watching Taliban through the black mirror of Instagram. Waiting to see if that kid looks anything like me.
To break the monotony I book a trip to Amsterdam.
I'm in Leeds Bradford Airport when Taliban posts a picture. In Amsterdam.
What sick bastard joke was fate playing?
The temptation was too much.
A phone call ensues.
She tentatively informs me that the child was not mine. Her father was that Cat Stevens looking motherfucker I drugged into ruining a Happy Meal.
She admits to posting the scan to keep me enthralled from afar. She apologises. She doesn’t mean it.
She says she's bored with her relationship. He's taken her to Amsterdam for Valentine's Day and invites me to crash the party. I crash it like Princess Diana and it poisons my blood. All my instinct screams to escape this situation but Im a slave to my impulses.
Two weeks later I see a picture of her in Barcelona with another guy and I collapse in hysterical laughter and cried in the bath like Bridget Jones.
What the fuck was this? To hell and back was a long way to go to feel something warm and pretty in my bed. What an incredibly stupid fuck. Would I ever learn? How far would people go to disassociate from themselves?
I was lost.
Cut adrift on an ocean of self destruction. Bound by the whims of the tide, thrown into the wash by one storm after another. Marooned on yet another island. Hoping at last, that this was the one on which Tin Tin lived.
Scream If You Want To Go Faster: Part Three - Coming Soon
I’ve made my posts all free to subscribe for the time being to reach a larger audience and petition for more support while I prepare for my summer run of gigs. This chapter in Mein legal Kampf may be over but I still have a testicle crushing legal bill to cover. Please continue to support free speech in the arts and allow me to perpetually be a problem by donating to my Crow Justice Campaign or by buying a fabulous piece of hatewear designed by The Famous Artist Birdy Rose.
Jay Mack Crow Justice Campaign.
I saw a publisher online who only wanted to see the first couple of chapters before deciding - seemed pretty genuine but this is too good for that. Don't take offence but it's far superior to Mr Nice! Keep the fictional stuff carefully too - funniest stuff I've ever read. Post yourself copies, sign them (a poor mans copyright ) don't open it and if anyone nicks it from the net, you've got something to fight with.
I sincerely hope this is turning into a book