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Pete: My Story. Pete Bennett
Читать онлайн.Название Pete: My Story
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007280186
Автор произведения Pete Bennett
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
We had a couple of friends called Lizzie-Anne and Kaye. Lizzie-Anne was in the process of changing from being Alan. It seemed a bit wild to be changing sex in order to have a lesbian relationship, but variety always makes life a bit more interesting. They were lovely people and they used to look after me sometimes when Mum had stuff to do. We met them through Poofy-Cousin-Marcus, who had known Alan when he was a man, and actually believed he might have been the reason Alan got a bit confused about his sexuality in the first place, finding him wandering about the house in women’s shoes after their first night together. Lizzie-Anne was working as an usherette at the Palace Theatre and got us free tickets to go and see Starlight Express – great show, I thought, but a crap storyline! A theatre critic already and hardly even out of short pants!
After I’d been staying with Lizzie-Anne and Kaye one time they spotted something funny about me and asked Mum if she’d ever noticed that I seemed to have little absences, where I would just drift away from the world and not seem to hear or see anything for a few minutes, almost like I’d gone to sleep with my eyes open but the lids drooping. I think the official name for such attacks is ‘petit mals’ and they are little seizures. I hadn’t realized I was doing anything odd, just thought I was a bit of a daydreamer I suppose, because I still liked to live inside my head much of the time.
Apparently they’d woken up in the night to find me standing bolt upright at the bedroom door, being a bit strange, like Damien in The Omen – ‘Pete the Anti-Christ’. Anyway, whatever they told Mum got her thinking a bit and she decided to take me to the doctor just to check there wasn’t anything she should be worrying about. The doctor didn’t seem to have much idea what was going on either and suggested it might be some mild form of childhood epilepsy that I would grow out of in time. I felt fine, so I wasn’t worried, perfectly happy to have ‘little absences’ now and then.
I had a thing about the parting in my hair at that time. The line had to be exactly and perfectly razor straight before I felt I could safely leave the house. People used to call me ‘Peter Parting’ because it became such an obsession. It was just the tiniest warning rumble of the storm that was soon to come, so quiet and small that nobody, including me, took much notice. These things were just part of being Pete. Now and then a faint suspicion would flit across my mind that there might be something different about me, but I wouldn’t have had a clue how to explain it to anyone, or ask for help, and none of it gave me any problem, so why worry? If the doctor and Mum weren’t worried, then there was nothing to concern me, was there?
I was about nine when Mum got pregnant. I liked the idea of having a baby brother or sister, especially with Dave there to be our dad. I was always going on to Mum about getting one, as if you could buy them in the same markets as the baby rabbits.
When she had Alex it was great. I had my own baby brother and I instantly loved him to death. We had become a proper family unit, Mum, Dad and two kids, like something from the television ads.
I didn’t have any trouble getting friends at that stage, particularly girls. I had a best friend from school called Sarah and we used to spend hours making tapes for our own radio station. It was our version of Capital Radio, which we listened to a lot, and we called it ‘Completely and Utterly Ballsed Up Piece of Birds’ Droppings, Mixed up in Beaver Sweat Sauce and Totally Crappy and Unorganized Big Turd Radio’ – catchy eh? It was a great jingle. We would record all the links and interviews and make up our own songs on the spot on a Casio keyboard or any instruments we could find, even though neither of us could play any of them properly.
I was the host of the show, and most of the guests as well. I would use different voices to interview myself, then I would use two tape recorders together to overdub myself over and over again, so there would be a great big group of me to interview, hundreds of mad voices all interrupting and talking over one another, a bit like they did inside my head most of the time. I think I imagined I would work in the music business when I grew up, maybe as a producer or something.
I wanted to spend as much time as I could fiddling about in the studio and to create a whole album of my own songs. I didn’t have any particular musical taste at the time. I mostly just liked whatever group Mum was playing with and whatever music I was exposed to as a result. I had a period where I was really into The Prodigy, who had come out of the underground rave scene and also did hard-core techno at the time. Their song ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ had caused a bit of controversy. But I could just as easily trip out to pre-packaged stuff like the Spice Girls. I was open to anything, having been brought up on all the different sorts of music Mum was involved in. I was in the choir at school and I could hold a tune, although to be honest I had a bit of a shit voice.
As well as the radio station, I was also creating my own world in cartoon form, making up the sort of stories you would normally find in magazines like Viz, which I read avidly. Mum grumbled that I was obsessed with turds and poo, but aren’t all small boys? I was always writing poems about things like that, and drawing little cartoon illustrations of talking turds with flies buzzing around their heads.
‘Why can’t you write poems about nice things?’ Mum would complain, but that just made me laugh. Where would be the fun in that? Turds were hysterical, weren’t they?
She might have tutted and said grown-up things like that from time to time, but Mum still liked to sit and watch Beavis and Butt-head with me and I often caught her laughing at the jokes. I thought those two guys were so cool. The jokes were so good, and the words like Assmunch, buttwipe, penis breath, schlong, dil-hole, dil-weed, asswipe and butt dumpling brought me endless hours of sniggering happiness. Ren and Stimpy, the cat and the Chihuahua with a fiery temper, brought me the same kind of joy. Their writers seemed to see life from a whole new perspective, catching me by surprise but at the same time saying things that summed up exactly how I felt about things.
Big laughs come from the unexpected; the unexpected prat fall or unexpected slant on something familiar. I think that is why I am sometimes able to make people laugh, because I take them by surprise. Half the time I take myself by surprise with the things that plop out of my mouth, or the positions my body arbitrarily falls into. I loved to laugh and I loved to make other people laugh. I wanted to be as funny as Beavis and Butt-head, I wanted to draw them and write for them and be them. I wanted to be a genius like their creator, Mike Judge.
The feature film that obsessed me the most was Alien; everything about it, from the soundtrack to Sigourney Weaver, from the model making to the plot, was faultless. The Alien films are the perfect thrillers and one of the first things I bought myself when I came out of the Big Brother house with a bit of money was a model of the Alien’s head. It’s like a collector’s thing in a glass case. Really cool.
Sometimes I had a suspicion I could sense some sort of alien living inside me and I worried that one day it would come bursting out of my chest, just like I’d seen it come out of John Hurt’s, and reveal itself in all its grinning horror before scuttling off into a dark hidden corner to plot its next move. As it turned out, my suspicions weren’t so far from the truth; the alien’s eggs were hatching somewhere deep inside my nervous system, preparing themselves for the battle to come.
Dave and Mum got married and it was a great wedding. Mum had seventeen bridesmaids and I was the only pageboy. With my incredibly straight parting and my even straighter suit and tie I looked more like Macaulay Culkin than the offspring of a couple of hippy-punks. We may have looked like a surprisingly straight family for the day, but some of the congregation still looked more Rocky Horror Show than Little House on the Prairie. Half of them were poofs because Mum knew so many. Poofy-Cousin-Marcus, Lizzie-Anne and Kaye all came dressed in black, like three crows in a row, silently registering their disapproval at the cuteness of the whole