The bachelor herd was an interesting place while it lasted; the stench of testosterone and fear, jogging along in unison avoiding soiled memories of people and places long vanquished. As we all aged it dissolved, like an increasingly smaller pill in the blood of an animal. It became embarrassing, grown men in clubs, trying to pull birds ten years younger. So we left the herd for foreign parts, married ourselves off, and began to grow slowly senile. Middle-age; will we vanquish that, too? People used to believe the brain ceased to function properly around age 42, but that’s bollocks. It’s not that it’s stopped working; it has simply exceeded its working memory, and like a shit computer requires an extra four seconds to retrieve facts and formulas. In a freakish twist, midlife seems to dish up distant memories much more readily than yesterday’s, from the compendium of games stuffed back there. Like the time we twisted the steel supports under our entire row of seats at the City Ground when we knocked Forest out of the FA Cup in ’90. The 3-5 against West Brom in December, 1978. Or the Goodison Park semi-replay later that season. How proud I was to bring the match programme into school the very next morning. No-one else in the entire school could prove they’d been to Goodison, and I was only a second-year. I’d actually been given the programme by a bloke I discussed football with on my way to school who walked his dog round the flats, and who’d actually been to the game. I could have gone, but my old feller went ballistic when I asked him. Said the geezer was a fiddler and no way. But I’m pissed as I write this confession and a blackout may lead to embarrassment later. Maybe I’ll even claim attendance at that game in a future UWS. It’ll be my tough shit, and I’ll be crucified by the anorak-hoolies of these weird times. Worse things happen.
It’s a funny thing, middle-age; back when my mates were keeping pickaxe handles, table legs and baseball bats behind their doors and under their mattresses, I was too blissed out to feel the need for one. But now, as the darkness comes, I consider a steel box in a drawer by the bed. There’s a black Smith & Wesson .40 in there, similarly chunky to what Hutch used to carry back in the 70s. Automatic, with an illegal 15-round clip. Only cops are allowed clips holding greater than 10-rounds, and it was indeed a police officer who sold me this one. Any cunt decides to come in my house tonight will be in for a nasty shock, especially if it’s an OK Corral job and he’s counting off my bullets. Then I give my swede a wobble and snap out of it; surely I could never own a gun? But what turned me from an acid-drenched scally to this balding psychopathic Walter Mitty? Time.
Aye, the FA Cup run of 1979. It all ended in tears, literally, in my case. The pickaxe handles, baseball bats, and designer gear were waiting right around the corner. Along with mobs of nutters and working-class paragons of cool. Midas was one such chap. Midas is an old boy I bump into once in a blue moon. Been to middle-age and back again. I met him in Torquay. A proper rum cunt who’d crack a beer at 9:00 am and start the storytelling nice and early. Told me he lived on a vicious council estate till he was 7. Came home from school one day to find his mother crying. His old man sitting in silence. On their bed upstairs lay thousands in cash, a lot of beadage back then. The old man had robbed several local electric and gas payments gaffs in the same day. With his gang. Balaclava and shotgun still lay in a fucking hold-all, from which Dad had conjured a cash blizzard all over the bedroom 10 minutes before Midas arrived. His mother needed weeks to get over it, by which time she was installed in a nice semi somewhere not council. She got over it.
He was a Mad Dog, and travelled for years down the skin cancer corridors and scally flight-paths us wanderers are apt to trammel. Made the proper shoplifting transition from designer gear to alcohol and books on shamanism as the 80s progressed and he neared middle-age; one step ahead of the herd, as a survivor should be. But once back in Manchester Midas moved into a tower block (I like towers and was often found kipping in them back then. Sometimes it was Salford and sometimes somewhere else; for instance Bredbury Brian from the signwriting course at East Manchester College introduced me to the Collyhurst towers in 1988. We scored some wild (natural) herb from the pub in the flats and adjourned to a high abandoned pad with great hard acoustics. We skinned up and enjoyed a nice infusion while surveying town, preparing for a night on the piss. Our soles’ shuffling deliberations on the cold floor while the tower threw white light onto Oldham Road clucked with each raucous expectation: We were having a fucking drink. A vacant flat so close to Band-on-the-Wall could come in very handy, where you could crawl on all fours if necessary {you can sleep on council plastic tiles when you’re 23}). Midas didn’t have a pickaxe handle behind his door. He preferred the chrome-plated wonder of General Electric; a section off a vacuum cleaner hose with well-sharpened ends. Said it couldn’t be classed as a weapon if the filth steamed the gaff. Hollow aluminium; oh-so rapid to swing. Cookie-cutter ends to jab faces with. Very nasty. I introduced him to some friends of mine. Tommy from Eccles, a top chef who once accidentally killed a feller. Knocked him out cold as he fell into a canal. Tommy used to snatch factory wages, but he ruled that no-one could be harmed under any circumstances. Broke a bloke’s legs after he hurt someone unnecessarily, he reckoned. I shagged Tommy’s niece, who was married to a mate of his, and we all had a little “talk” in a club in Swinton about that. I didn’t shag her again. Tommy’s brother Steve was at the talk. The two of them were never matchgoers but knew every fucking detail of every game and person connected with the club and football in general. Q1 to the core. Steve invited me down to Torquay one dog-crazed summer in the early 90s. Met me off the National Express with Tommy and a Scouser. I had 29 quid on me; under the impression Tommy had found me employment in a hotel kitchen. Steve and Scouse asked me to accompany them, immediately, to a pub on Dartmoor which they planned to rob. Sunday afternoon takings were massive, apparently. Tie the couple up who owned it and back across the toy prairie. Not too many roads going in and out of that target, I immediately concluded. Very easy for a helicopter to locate the vehicle of interest. None of us were sailors, but I had learned how to tie a knot or three in Miami when doing the yachts. I declined, and got the beer in again. Then cigs. The triad would not include me. Within an hour my money was gone, I‘d no job, and had lost the respect of those with evil intentions. Story of my life, really.
That’s when I met Midas. Driving round Torquay in a Jag, selling snides to Scousers, while Steve was hoisting tons of slate, brick, and various metals. Grafting his bollocks off wasn’t Midas’ cup of tea. He was around the same age as Tommy, but kept himself up to snuff with plenty of exercise. Hardcase in his mid-40s. Midas had a season ticket all those years ago, which was pretty rare then. He used to go to OT in style, while we were swilling second-hand ale in the Scoreboard End or K Stand. The first time I saw the car we were out for a drink. He turned the key and Hot Chocolate’s “I Believe in Miracles” exploded from the speakers. Never batted an eyelid and I never said fuck all about it either. Then I realised it was not the radio but a tape, and I said fuck all about that an all. I was still getting over the car. It was a very nice one.
But middle-age, it’ll make yer buy a daft car and talk shite. Cling to things long gone; there’s a bloke in Jizzington with 1200 pairs of Adidas trainers. He owns over 600 Lacoste items. Buys them on EBay off other “collectors” around the world. There’s a feller in Twatley has an entire room in his home dedicated to wardrobe space for his 980 pairs of shoes, leisure shirts, and other designer gear. It’s almost finished his marriage; his missus is left high and dry many a week ‘cos he’s blown his wad on a couple of Fjallraven jackets and a pair of rare Clarke’s hiking shoes discontinued in 1982. This is important news because people can malfunction and they need to be able to spot the danger signs. Why am I telling you this? I’m not sure, but it’s something to do with knowing you’re closer to death than life. The hair withers in its follicles, the belly grows by an order of magnitude, and the mind (what’s left of it) begins to grasp at distant straws. Like that bird, nemmed in a pub in Sedgeley Park in 1987. Got her in the shithouse and yensed it while sapheads pissed on’t’ stones oblivious feet away. Or the redheaded fiancée that would phone me and arrange to meet in a local park. 1991. Long coat and fuck all under it but susssies and the full issue. Going at it in the bogs, while citizens walked their dogs outside and chatted about the weather. What a turn-on on an unemployable Tuesday afternoon. I missed the Cup Winners Cup Final through her. Watched it on telly in The Ostrich.
But that was a long time ago, and irrelevant. Since then I’ve left the urban and immersed myself in the rural. It’s a trip, and I can’t make my mind up which is best. City v Country? I have an inverse relationship with the two as I travel north or south from Manchester. As I go north I want to live more in the country; barbarians can only be tolerated in low-density populations. As I go south I want to live more in the city; see above. But I went west, which is a whole other world: Sprawl; neither one thing nor another, but loaded with mad canines on motorcycles.
Do I attract speed-dealers or are they everywhere? Nutters have always been in my life and America is rich in midlife head-the-balls. Take Danny for instance. The two of us painted houses together for three years. He’s almost killed himself too many times to remember. Nowt to do with United, like. Full of scars from mad wheelies and corkscrews on his Harley or his quad. 51 years young. Danny showed me his guns one night not long after I moved into town. A locked steel toolbox, accompanied by another, unlocked and plastic. The guns were in the toolbox and the ammo in the plastic. There was a silver Brazilian Cortes revolver with a wooden handle. 9 barrels instead of 6, but it was only a .22 – very quiet and enough to simply injure rather than maim or kill; a stainless-steel Luger with adjustable sights. A .45. You could see your face in it; a semi-automatic .40 black Smith & Wesson cop gun. No safety-catch no nothing. Illegal 15-rounders, bought off a cop; the “Cannon” as Danny called it. A silver .38 revolver with an inlaid wood handle, a giant version of the Cortes, but a six-shooter. Smith & Wesson again.
It wasn’t a bad collection, as the times we spent firing them proved. You couldn’t miss with the black cop gun. 15-rounds of solid hammer, like a comet exploding over the New England taiga, blasting eardrums for a considerable radius. That and the little Cortes were my favourites. Danny offered the Cortes for sale when he saw how much I liked it. But the Cortes had one weakness; a hair-trigger. A man who imbibes of myriad drugs and booze on a daily basis as I do should never own a hair-trigger, even if it is only a .22. A gunsmith could sort it, but somehow the hair-trigger seemed part of its personality, and I couldn’t bear to force change. But this was all my arse; truth was, I didn’t like the idea of having one in the house. It’s all part of being grown-up, I mumbled. But then I got old. Needed to prove something to myself.
We had mental barbeques in his backyard. Fifteen choppers parked in a line and blokes having motorbike jumping contests over a massive fire. Plus shooting contests; plastic milk containers full of luminous dye blasted off the fence after sunset. The fence trailed with multicolour rivulets the following acid-hungover morning. You can do that when you’re way in the woods. You can’t in Prestwich Clough. Danny had more guns, which he showed me in time. Several frighteningly automatic shotguns, and a couple of what he called “antique” shotguns (AKA “shotguns”, if you’re British). Foxworths. He also had a customised Ruger 10/22 rifle, a scary one. It resembled a fully-automatic machine gun, and I got quite giddy. It was a semi. 50-round banana clip, folding stock and everything. Firing that thing was fulfilling but expensive; the cost of ammo was similar to other guns, but the rate at which you discharged it was not.
Guns are evil, though, and should never be part of your life, unless you’re a Harley-riding meth trafficker. Why paint yourself into a corner; buy a house, get paranoid as fuck, buy a gun to defend it, there on the frontier? Better to live as a nonentity, like I did back in ’87 with Tez H. No work, no dole. A proper mystery. His sister moved out of her Rainsough council flat and we moved in, without telling anyone. There was a couch and a mattress, what more d’you need? We painted a giant mural on a wall in the lounge. Took us a week, but it was a cracker; wild animals in vibrant colour arranged amid lush foliage. Our artistic competitiveness drove the thing to another level altogether. Exotic plants and animals always fascinated us Brits. It’s like a deficiency that must be filled. Tez fucked off to Alicante to avoid a court appearance and I stayed on. Just made it out the window one morning when some dolled-up bird from the council came in the front door, showing it to a prospective couple. I always wanted to knock on their door and ask what they thought of the mural. But I digress. The late-80s weren’t the sanest of years and I was often absent without leave. Working on the roads in London, or grafting oil paintings on the beaches of Spain. Running with the shrinking bachelor herd, the stinking, terrified clutch of young lads who ranged across the globe from our various headquarters to avoid being mangled by that hoax called marriage, mortgage and sprogs. We collectively recoiled from responsibility, always heading into the sunset on the Magic Bus to Greece, the non-stop to Bangkok, or across the Atlantic to points weird. While you were all sorting your lives out, we were staying beyond the curve, forever young.
And then one day we woke up and looked in the mirror. Our faces were lined and weathered. But we had homes and nice cars, which we lacked as kids. Some of us were in Sydney, some were in Cyprus and some were outside radio contact. I was in the USA. Much spacetime had come between me and the city I love and I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had somehow married an American girl, a keeper of the evil Sicilian eye for when I misbehaved. The Manc accent was still there but the sensibilities had fragmented and drifted apart like a primeval landmass. People are the same wherever you go, they say, but that isn’t completely true. The personalities are all there, but the ratio of those personalities is vastly reconfigured. This is what gives cities and regions their character, and by fuck I miss Manchester. There’s nowhere on earth with that particular blend. Like a rare whisky or a new protein constructed by genetic engineers. Take four scientists and give them a trundle-wheel apiece. Send them to the four corners of Great Britain and Eire, and have them proceed to walk inward. They’d merge at the centre-spot at OT and all their dials would display the same digits to nine decimal places. Manchester is a reverse organic maelstrom where the cream has progressively expelled the dregs through some slanted centrifugal cycle. That’s why I’m not there anymore; I failed to make the grade. Or I loved her too much. Take yer fuckin pick.