Nine Foot Tall Read online

  No, man, I don’t like these thoughts. Stop it, Gaz, she’s not like that, she’s sweet, she’s loyal, she’s faithful.

  I hope.

  The taxi pulled up outside my gaff and I looked up to the windows. All the curtains were closed, bedrooms and everywhere.

  Aw man, this doesn’t look good. It’s one thirty in the afternoon, she can’t be still in bed. Can she?

  I paid the taxi gadge, who by the way didn’t say please or thank you or kiss my arse, grabbed my shitty, see-through bag and walked slowly to my front door. It was open, so I snuck in really quiet, to surprise her, praying to Good Jesus and all His Angels and Saints that she wasn’t in there getting annihilated by Big Winston or someone. That would not be nice.

  At all.

  I gingerly walked down my hallway to the living room. I could hear the telly, nothing else, just the telly, not Big Jamaal or Heaven knows what sort of scenario I had in my head. I burst the door open and shouted, ‘Surprise!’ and there she was, lying on the sofa, in her white bathrobe, watching telly, some sort of woman’s romantic comedy. Not getting porno stabbed by the rugby team!

  She looked surprised, half a smile at first, shock probably, then she jumped up and hugged me.

  ‘I didn’t think you were back till Monday, you little get.’

  ‘Thought I’d surprise you, didn’t I? Here you are, love.’ I passed her the roses, then pulled her back to me and, ‘I’ve missed you, love, you don’t realise,’ and squeezed her tight.

  She dropped her robe, pulled me onto the sofa and, well, you can guess what happened next. I’d just spent nearly seven months splodging into a spunk-filled, fungus-ridden shower tray, so, yeah, you can guess.

  Was it like the Thunders of Odin and the Raging Seas of Hardcore Porn? Er, no. Barely a minute had gone and it was all over! Oh well, it had been a long time.

  Katie didn’t seem that bothered though, very not bothered. It was almost as though she’d done it out of duty rather than love and excitement. She just wiped herself on the bottom of her bathrobe and then, instead of ‘I’ve missed you. Do you want a drink?’ or any such sort of thing, she came out with, ‘Listen, Gaz love.’ She looked serious now. Aw man, she was gonna tell me that she’d been ruptured incessantly by a muscle-bound tennis coach or summat. No. Not that.

  She didn’t.

  ‘Gaz love, don’t say anything yet, let me speak. I’ve done some thinking while you’ve been gone, real thinking. And it’s like this. I don’t wanna be with you anymore.’

  I was wiping my cock on the bottom of her robe and started to pipe up to say something but she carried on, ‘Gaz, let me finish, please love, I don’t wanna be with you, not as long as you’re like this. It’s not you. It’s just not. You’re not a jailbird, you’re a nice guy. You’re not a drug-dealing bad boy, not really. Everyone says that you’re a womaniser, but I know you’re not, not since you’ve been with me anyway. So, Gaz, here’s the deal, love, I don’t wanna be with you, unless, unless you change. I want you to stop going partying all the time, I will too. I want you stop taking drugs, I will an’ all. I want you stop selling drugs, and I want you to get a proper job. And that’s that. If you can do those few simple things, then, and only then, Gaz love, have we got any sort of future. Gemma loves you like a dad, but I don’t need her growing up around all that shit, Gaz, I really don’t. I want you to stay, I love you, but they’re the rules, so there you go.’ I looked at her, tried to pull her close but she pulled away, ‘I’m serious, Gaz, I can’t take it like it was before.’

  I perched myself in the armchair and paused for a few moments, taking it all in, then:

  ‘So, baby, does that mean you don’t want me to DJ anymore?’ I was mortified at the prospect of not DJing. I’d always planned to hang up the mic when I was forty. Nobody wants to see a silly, grey-haired old cunt prancing about like Mick Jagger when they go on a night out. Unless you’re off to see the Rolling Stones.

  But shit, man, I’m only thirty-two, I can’t hang up the mic just yet.

  ‘No, don’t give it up, Gaz man, not altogether anyway. Just get a proper job and DJ at the odd wedding or birthday here and there. If you get a residency you’ll be back at it every weekend, Gaz, drugs and all that bollocks. You know you will. Do it, do it for me.’

  She was right. If I returned to DJing full time, I’d be partying like it was 1999, which it was, but you know what I mean. I’d be back on the drug and club scene in no time, Steve or no Steve.

  Yeah, fuck it, I can do that, what’s to lose? I can be settled down, man, just me, Katie, my three kids, Dom, Jake and Daisy, and not forgetting little Gemma. Yeah, I can picture it, it’ll be like the Little House on the Prairie.

  So I did, I made my love promise to Katie, to change, to live a “normal” life, and I was gonna set about it the very next day.

  But first, where’s that bag of Charlie I hid before I went away?

  6th March 1999 – The Very Next Day

  Whether I agreed with it or not, this was a good time to go “normal”. Between 1999 and 2005 Leeds was like Baghdad, man, it was the Wicky, Wicky, Wild, Wild West on steroids, people getting shot up all over the place, man. Prominent crime figures were being killed centre, right, left and up and down. It was crazy. I was glad, very glad, to be out of it. There were almost five thousand murders in the UK during that period, half of those drug related, and half of those in West Yorkshire. Fuck that crazy London Town, they were pussy cats compared to the mad bastards up here. Although I had only ever been small fry in the criminal underworld, in no way a big player, it was still scary to think you could easily get caught up in the criss-cross blast of stray bullets with no particular names on them. All you had to do to maybe get accidentally shot was be in the place that these arch felons frequented, and in the past I had. I’d sat with them, laughed with them, snorted slice with them, slurped the finest cognac with them. And now, they were dead. Murdered. Shot. Stabbed. For God only knows what. Money. Skanked. Disrespected. Fuck knows, no-one really needed an excuse to blow someone’s shit away in that crazy time. But you wanna know the real reason everyone was going all Al Capone on each other? I’ll tell you.

  Coke.

  Cocaine. Sniff. Snort. Snozz. Bugle. Slice.

  Whatever the fuck you wanted to call it, it fucked everyone up. No-one was happy anymore, not like with Es and whizz, no hugging now, man. No wanting to cuddle your neighbours, nah man. Everyone just wanted to be Tommy Ten Men. Everyone wanted to be Tony Montana mang. Fuck Gaspar Gomez and fuck the fucking Diaz Brothers! It was a common mantra. Everyone in the underbelly of Leeds wanted to be Scarface. Well, not me, man, I was only small time, and I was getting out. Going straight. Being “normal”. It was the only way forward. Wasn’t it?

  So here I am, suited and booted, headed into town to get a “proper” job. And I did. Within twenty minutes of reaching the city centre, I was the proud owner of a new position in Suit Land.

  Yep, I got a job as a suit salesman. Katie was chuffed, she loved me again, and I got to sell suits, measuring fuckers up, inside legs and bollock-cupping. Listening to my co-worker, Mad John, who was allergic to bees and wanted to retire to Barbados and eat “untold fruit”.

  It went on, and on, selling, measuring, cupping, listening, Barbados, fruit, bees, cupping…

  All day.

  Every fucking day.

  And that was that, man. Three weeks later I jacked, left. It wasn’t me, man.

  It just wasn’t me.

  April 1999

  Katie was cranky that I’d bailed on the Suit gaff, but I assured her I’d sort summat out.

  And I did.

  Next job, barman at the Rail Station Arms. It was okay I suppose, for three weeks. Then I jacked.

  It just wasn’t me.

  May 1999

  Katie was cranky again. What the fuck’s wrong with her man? I’ll get another jo
b. And I did.

  Next stop, Bryce, Quarterhouse and Ropers, a world leading accountancy firm. I blagged a job with them, boring as fuck like, typing, filing, staring at charts, staring out of windows, looking at porn on the new invention that was the Internet, talking to cunts who’ve never been kissed, listening to even more cunts who’ve never been kissed, looking at more porn and general dogs-bodying, but in the words of my dad, Hulk Dad, “a proper job”, the kind of job he always dreamed for me.

  For three weeks.

  Then I jacked.

  It just wasn’t me.

  June 1999

  I tried everything, man, butcher and baker and fucking candlestick maker, nowt was for me though.

  I did the occasional DJ spot – weddings, funerals, birthdays, kids’ parties, kids’ fucking parties! But I missed having a regular spot, a place people would associate with me, with DJ Gaz. Now I was no-one. Gaz Nobody. Wherever I lay my P45 that’s my home.

  It just wasn’t me.

  Something had to give. I’m a firm believer that “All Good Things Come To Those Who Wait”.

  And it did.

  I landed a job as a bank manager!

  Ha! I’m not shitting you, man, I blagged the application form, said I hadn’t been in trouble and what not, and next minute, there’s me. A bank manager. Fuck me, three months ago I was locked up with bank robbers! Funny how shit works out.

  To be fair, it wasn’t initially as a manager, and it wasn’t quite a bank. It was as a telesales cunt with a car insurance firm that was owned by one of the biggest banks in the world. But in the eyes of Katie, and of Hulk Dad, I’d finally “made it”. I had the proper job that they’d hoped for me, and I was bringing in proper, regular, normal wages.

  I lasted a lot more than three weeks in this bastard though. I was determined, even though it wasn’t really me, to make it work.

  And make it work I did.

  Within three months I was the top salesman in my department. Like the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali said, “Whatever job you do, be the best, whatever the job. If you’re a boxer, be the best boxer. If you’re a toilet cleaner, be the best toilet cleaner.” So I did. I became the best.

  One Year Later – July 2000

  Still the best. Bar none.

  Earning shitloads of bonus each month, going on sunny holidays three times a year.

  Bored out of my fucking brain.

  Another Bastard Year Later – September 2001

  Still the best salesman, so good in fact that I was promoted to manager. I was now officially a “bank manager”, of sorts Anyhoo.

  More money, more foreign holidays.

  More boredom.

  Even watching the Twin Towers coming down on the television in the office canteen was going over my head. A world-changing event, occurring right in front of my eyes and all I could think was, I’m bored.

  I continued to write to Steve in the nick, telling him how I’d changed, got a good job, stopped taking drugs, stopped partying and blah blah cunting blah.

  He wrote back, same as always:

  “Gaz man, you’re full of shit.”

  Summer 2002

  I’ve always said that “only boring people get bored” and I still maintain that to this day, but you know what? I was bored, I was bored and I was boring.

  Steve got out the nick, but he was trying to follow the same route as me and keep on the straight and narrow, so I very rarely saw him. We had the occasional blowout together, but those occasions were very few and far between, man.

  I bumped into some girl in Leeds City Centre after work one day. I didn’t recognise her from Adam’s apple, but she knew me, sort of. Her words to me, in my suit and with my business briefcase, were:

  ‘Hey, didn’t you used to be DJ Gaz? You used to be cool, man.’ And off she fucking trotted, as though she hadn’t just shattered my world, with not a care in hers.

  I wasn’t cool anymore.

  This definitely was not me.

  But it would be, for four more years.

  Four long, dreary, grey, albeit fairly affluent, but still long and bastard monotonous years.

  August 2003

  Katie asked me to marry her! Yep, SHE asked ME! I said yeah, we got married, and the plan, as with all marriages I expect, was to live Happily Ever After.

  We didn’t.

  I was bored.

  She could tell.

  She was bored.

  I could tell.

  Boredom, as shit as it is, can be very contagious. But still we carried on.

  Summer 2004

  Still a manager, still at the same firm, still married, still in a life-draining quagmire of soul destruction.

  I was just sat about, as John Lennon said, “Watching the Wheels.”

  Winter 2005

  This is fucking killing me now, Katie too, we can both see it, we just don’t say it. The kids are blissfully unaware of anything, they’re kids. They get taken nice places, they get nice shit, they love life, they’re kids. But so am I, a thirty-eight-year-old kid, trapped in an adult world. An adult world with responsibilities and shit that I don’t like.

  It is NOT FUCKING ME!

  Summer 2006

  We’d been living in the flat now for over twelve years, a nice flat, of course, but the neighbours were horrible, smack heads and skanks and pimps and God knows what else. We had a few quid now, we both had good jobs, horrible jobs but fairly well paid, so we moved. We moved to a great big fuck off detached house, a dream after living in the flat, detached with no neighbours, no cunts to destroy our “idyllic” Little House on the Prairie life.

  As lovely as it was, it didn’t alter how we felt towards each other. Sure, we loved each other, but it was getting more like sister and brother every day, she wasn’t really interested in “eroticism” anymore. Didn’t bother me, she was my wife and that’s the way it is sometimes. Isn’t it? You love each other and get on with shit. Bored or not.

  But I was like a caged lion, man, a caged lion that was fuckin’ sick to death of bastard IKEA!

  Then, one day, out of the blue, or as Bob Dylan would say, a Simple Twist of Fate, an old friend of mine, Barry Westlake, rang me. He’d just bought a pub around the corner from our house, The Naughty Nun. Anyhoo, the day he called I was feeling particularly bored and down. Even though I had the good job, the gorgeous wife, the model kids, and the big detached house, I was feeling pretty worthless. Something I had never felt in my life. Ever.

  It was nice to hear Barry’s voice.

  ‘Hi, is that Gaz?’ He sounded cheery.

  ‘Yeah man, is that you, Barry? Long time no hear, my old pal, what you up to?’ I got a little cheery too, hearing him. He was a funny gadge.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Gaz pal, I’ve just bought The Naughty Nun, do you know it?’

  ‘Yeah course I do, Barry man, it’s just round the corner from my house. How’s it going, bud?’

  ‘It’s going really good, Gaz man, can’t complain at all, pal. Only thing is I need a DJ, a good DJ, every weekend. I heard you’d retired but thought I’d give you a try anyway. Know what I mean? Anyway, Gaz man, I can’t pay a lot of dough, we can discuss that, but it’ll be a laugh, you’ll get free beer, and, and, it’s full of fanny! So, what do you think, Gaz? Do you fancy it?’

  I paused for a few moments. I was sitting on my sofa. I looked across the room and Katie was staring into the telly, half watching some shite or other, painting her toenails with one hand, glugging wine with the other, oblivious to my very existence. Gemma was out with her pals. Dom, Jake and Daisy were with their mother, and I was here, with this proposition from Barry.

  I was only silent for a few seconds as I looked around my living room, at Katie, at the shite on the fifty inch telly, at her toenails, at my expensive, overstuffed leather furniture. My mind’s eye wande
red, a rush came over my whole body. It felt like 1985 all over again, like Monday nights at Tiffany’s, like the long, hot summers of childhood, like the church disco, like me and Mel, like me and Steve, like the crazy fucking ’90s, like the thousands of faceless women, like the boy that never grew up, like, like, The Legendary DJ Gaz.

  ‘Do I fancy it? Fuckin’ right I do. When do I start?’

  Epilogue

  Have I got any regrets? The dictionary definition for “regret” is “distress or sorrow following a disappointment, repentance or remorse felt for one’s wrongdoing or mistakes”.

  So. Have I got any regrets? What’s the point?

  You can’t change the past, can you?

  You can only learn from it.