( I wrote this a few years back for an online sci fi magazine I quite like it)
Both of my parents worked when I was younger, they ran a bar in the east end of Glasgow. For those of you unfamiliar with the “East end” it’s a place where the life expectancy is 10 years less than that of a person living in Baghdad… needless to say I spent a lot of time in front of the television or reading books; upstairs above the pub, listening to the ruckus but sheltered from it, alone, learning film lines or poems off by heart. I knew every word and action in Chris Columbus’s “A night on the town.” Or “Adventures in babysitting” as it was called here. It had a great scene where a little girl finds her favourite super hero in real life. And If I wasn’t watching that, I was watching musicals, again learning every line and shimmy and Yee-Haw: Mum used to say I was a gay man trapped in a little girl’s body.
On Sundays I would take my musicals down to the bar and perform them for the drunks and bums, men who spent more time talking to me than they did their own kids. I would jump up on the bar kick my legs and sing about the deadwood stage, Gordon my Manny would sometimes slide me along the bar like Dorris Day!
And then the show ended, in a bizarre and some might say Dickensian twist of fate my grandfather died and forgot to write his will down, I lost everything, my house, my tiny bedroom and the murals my mother had painted on the wall, my pub where I performed on a Sunday, my family, my friends… and along with everything went Doris, Fred, Judy, Liza, Frank and Ginger and all the other smiling, singing and happy people who represented the golden years of my childhood. Before Daddy went to bed for three years, before mum became angry, before I hid under my bed and ate whole loafs of bread to fill some void inside me.
And that’s where my new dad comes in, he wasn’t a real man my mother found to replace my father who still found it difficult to get out of bed after all six of his brothers betrayed him, because their father hadn’t loved them. William Shatner entered my life bringing with him Star Trek and a new bunch of smiley happy and most importantly fair people, people who knew the difference between right and wrong. William Shatner has been my role model, through High school, university and even now as I work my way up the ranks as a Writer. I print mini homage’s to him in almost everything I do. Strange as it may seem, a sex addicted space ship captain/ kinky cop/ lusty lawyer shine out compared to the special needs, emotionally stunted bank robbers I grew up with.
And with William Shatner came a whole legion of spacemen and women, from television and film and books. Strapping men with big chins who would arrive and take me away from the little space under my bed where I hid and ate bread. Captain Picard re-sparked my interest in Shakespeare; Margaret Atwood took me to a future that terrified and delighted me, Arthur C Clarke had me looking up into light polluted skies in the hopes of an alien race who’d set my world to rights. And then Harry Potter… Harry Potter who was never a space man but was the same age as me technically, and whose world was torn apart like mine, I wept when I didn’t receive my Hogwarts letter.
When I was 13 it was pretty well established amongst my teachers that I wasn’t going to be a brain trust or a super sports star, they all accepted for some bizarre reason that I would be a performer. They were actually quite pleased about it, when the school had charity auctions of the pupil’s art work, teachers would clamour for my hideous renditions of chalk chickens in the hope I’d one day be famous and they could sell them on. Chalk chicken nest eggs!
As a precocious child who likes to perform there’s a lot of pressure on you to stick at it and become famous. Even to this day, even though I no longer harbour dreams of playing Evita, I still feel the grinding, bone curling pressure to do well. To succeed in whatever it is I’m doing, because that’s what people expected of a chubby 13 year old girl who knew every word in Calamity Jane and could do an eerily spot on impression of Sir Alec Guinness.
So with all the raising I needed, gotten from an over wrought mother who wanted to be a comedian of all things, a father who had changed his ways and now slept a lot rather than constantly and good old uncle/dad/pappy William Shatner tucked in my brain, I dreamily entered my first career meeting with Mrs Nobbs and saw the huge pile of applications for RADA and RSAMD and LAMDA and lots of other places with D’s and A’s in their titles and I panicked.
“And what do you want to be when you grow up?” Mrs Nobbs asked as if she were just going through the motions.
Mother had already told me not to say “owner of a rollerblading transvestite restaurant” not because she thought it was a bad idea but because I’d already told my teachers that was an ambition and had started a fight with a born again chemistry teacher.
“A space man.” I replied, having forgotten the word astronaut.
I’ve never seen Mrs Nobbs look so shocked, and she once walked in on a group of teenage girls watching Hard-Core gardening porn in her office. She choked on a breath mint that wasn’t really working and looked at me waiting for me to utter the punch line.
“I want to go to space.” I repeated tentatively, the stress of other people’s expectations making my spine curl.
“You dropped physics and… and you don’t take part in any physical education.” She uttered a look of shock etched in her dull face. “You need physics and… Ashley you can’t go to space.”
“oh.” Was all I could muster. To be honest at 14 how can they expect anyone to know what they want to be when they grow up? I’m 24 and I’m still not sure, some days I think I want to write for HBO and other days I think I’d like to be the person who washes elephants at the zoo and at 14 I still thought that Alec Guinness impersonator was a viable career path… I had dreams of being hired to stand in parties and say things like “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and “In my experience, there's no such thing as luck” In my best Guinness voice and be paid for my service, unfortunately there’s no section for that in the job centre.
I continued to live a relatively isolated life, lost in my own world of space men and wizards, I got too tall to fit in the cranny under my bed which for the longest time had served as my escape pod. The years dragged on, my school shut down and I got moved, I started to make “friends” and went out to bars where I’d nod and smile and drink and secretly wonder what I’d do if a Klingon walked in. I wouldn’t say it out loud though, I’d just smile and not say anything and let my “friends” kiss men with teeth missing in bars like that one in Star Wars “Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” Obi Wan Kenobi’s words would roll in my head.
My father at this point had managed to cut his sleeping down to only half the day, and I discovered that he was not only depressed but that he also had Asperger’s and now an excuse for his bad behaviour. One Sunday morning at around 3am I came home, later than my curfew dictated but to be honest my mother was on the other side of the world making people laugh and dad… well what was he going to do? Go to his bed in a bad mood? I stumbled into the living room, the TV was on and William Shatner was standing there, old and fat and shouting “Denny Crane!” my dad paused the recording and beamed up at me.
“He’s got a new TV show!” he exclaimed excitedly, smiling for the first time in years as if his depression had not been the result of financial ruin and a thieving family but instead because of William Shatner’s flagging career.
“That’s good,” I said as I stared at my now aged father both on the screen and off.
“You got a letter yesterday.” He said indicating a thick envelope.
“I’m going to university.” I said taking off a pair of hideous high heels.
“You gonna be a space man?” dad laughed remembering the worried letter he’d received from my career counsellor 4 years before.
“no… I think I’m going to write about them” I said and pressed play on the paused TV show ready to see what my pretend dad was up to.
