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And then when my mum died ten years later, again I remember such clear weird little details of it: I was out drinking the night before and woke up in the most drunk sleep pose ever (entirely face down, face entirely enveloped by the pillow, and surrounded by a tacky pool of your own saliva, and honestly sleeping for six hours in that position I don’t know how I’m not the dead one) and the first thing I did was look at my phone because I am a millennial and I remember it being early, even for me – in the 6 a.m. hour, still, an hour I am incredibly unfamiliar with – and I had three missed calls from my sister and so I knew already what that means, and I called her quickly – still face down, somehow, I did not turn over for this phone call – and she said ‘Yeah it’s your mum she’s—’ – and a little pause – ‘—she’s gone, mate’, and I remember saying ‘okay’ and crying exactly one tear – such a pathological number of tears, it was out of my left eye and I remember it dropping with a soft thump onto the pillow beneath me – and I said ‘okay,’ and then, ‘what can I do?’
And it turns out one of the major things I can do is buy a ‘sorry you had to find my mum dead!’ beer basket for the neighbour. I am searching online for somewhere that delivers next day, and I cannot decide which beer basket seems more appropriate – the £35 version, eight craft beers and one tube of salted snacks, or the £55 version, all that and more? I am torn because obviously finding an actual corpse is probably quite a bad shock but also I am poor and 25 and my parents are dead and now I’m the only one left to provide for me and also I have a funeral to pay for and £55 for some beer and some ribbon is a lot. I spend like 15 minutes hovering the mouse between the £35 option and the £55 one. What, truly, is the price we put on the act of finding our mother dead in her bedroom on a mild June morning? I sigh and I click. It turns out it is £55.
My parents are dead and so I can tell you from experience that literally nobody alive knows what songs you want playing at your funeral, so if this is important to you then put some sort of system in place now, because here’s what happened with my dad—
‘What … does anyone know what music Dad liked?’
‘What CDs does he have in his house?’
‘He literally has one CD and it’s Eric Clapton’s Greatest Hits.’
[Extremely tedious half-hour while everyone tries to remember out loud a single instance of them seeing my dad enjoy a song]
‘I think he liked jazz so let’s bang some Miles Davis while we lower him into the pit.’
‘Cool.’
And with my mum—
‘This again. What’s in the CD pile?’
‘Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews from Catatonia, Baby It’s Cold Outside CD single.’
‘Inappropriate.’
‘Jiggerypipery, the self-titled album by Jiggerypipery, who are a local tour band who make what the back of the CD describes as “fun bagpipe music”.’
‘A hard no.’
‘And U2, The Joshua Tree, on tape cassette.’
‘I do not understand how someone can live sixty plus years and this is all they have to show for it.’
We ended up playing the soundtrack from the musical Sarafina! for reasons I cannot recall now. For the record, I see my funeral as the only time I can force my friends to sit and endure my music tastes – the AUX chord is always snatched away from me at parties because obscure lyric-less drone music does not exactly get the vibe popping, so I literally have to wait until I die to take it – and so I want Ratatat’s Germany to Germany/Spanish Armada/Cherry movement from the first album, Rome from their fifth album, then whichever 14-minute-long Fuck Buttons song is in my Spotify most played library when I die. Follow these instructions to the letter or I shall haunt you all forever.
My parents are dead and suddenly the home I grew up in has shifted, imperceptibly enough to feel alien, to feel like a house, now, rather than a home, to feel like four cold walls and a roof. The fridge doesn’t work. There’s no food in. The cats are not pattering about. My sister, deranged with the repetition of administration and grief, has gone back to London to work. It’s just me, alone here, padding around this place I own now, feeling as if I’m a ghost.
I got trapped in a wardrobe, here, once. This was when my parents were alive: I remember, actually, it was a rare moment of peace for them, a searingly white-hot day and I watched them, out of their bedroom window, my face and nose pressed tight against the net curtain, and they were chatting and repotting plants and seemingly both in a good mood, so I left them to it – I was, like, six at this point, maybe five – and so I turned around and went to play imagination games in the spare room at the back of the house, and ended up clambering into this old wardrobe – my mother, a sort of amateur seamstress, had stuffed it with old plastic bags of rags and fabric ends and half-done pieces of knitting, which were sort of slippery and fun to climb – and then the whole thing started to creak and tip and long story short it collapsed on me, vacuuming me entirely to the floor.
Now: a normal child, in this situation, I imagine, would scream. Yell or something. Thump on the wardrobe panels. Beg for a fraction of help. But I think I just accepted that hey, I guess this is how I die, swaddled in dozens of clothes bags, trapped in pitch blackness beneath a wardrobe. It was about 20 minutes before they came inside and found me, muffled steps up the stairs turning to quick sharp noises of alarm before my dad heaved the wardrobe off me, and I remember both their faces staring down at me, and the light pouring in, a combination of extreme did-my-child-die and just bafflement, and my mum just said: ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ and I replied: ‘I just didn’t want to be any bother.’
I just remember that story a lot because whenever I try and recall my parents being together in the same room and not mad at each other that’s all I can ever think of. Me politely resigning myself to living the rest of my life out as a wardrobe boy, RIP, 1987–1992.
My parents are dead and I’m shopping at Tesco for vol-au-vents. Planning a wake is like planning the most vibeless party in actual existence: all the same motions as planning an actual party (invites, finger foods, the chilling of drinks) but none of the buzz or excitement, extremely low chance of anyone getting laid. In my trolley is: a tray cake, feeds 15; a number of 3 for 2 party foods, including cocktail sausages; a light and refreshing mix of own-brand lemonades and colas, as well as a respectful two (two.) boxes of beer. My sister is off in the far reaches of the shop buying lasagne supplies – my mother had this tradition where she would throw a party every Christmas and invite everyone round (and she was the exact type of woman to call such a party a soirée, to give you a bead on my mother), and for whatever reason her showstopper party food was ‘a lasagne’, she would make like four or five of these great, heaving lasagnes for people to eat great huge cubes off from slowly oily-going paper plates – and my sister intends to honour that tradition, God Bless Her Soul, by making her own lasagne, which everyone will tell her at the party in a quiet voice – it’s a very good lasagne, thank you – but with all the unsaid context being but it’s not Hazel’s lasagne, and I think my sister knows this, deep down. Anyway we are politicising the lasagne.
The point is that I am tired, so tired, it has been two weeks of admin and grief and sorting and nothingness and it’s still not over, yet, and I am taking a brief moment of respite while my sister weighs up beef vs lamb mince to lean on the trolley and stare at the freezer aisle and sigh, and someone says Joel, they say Hello, they say, How Are You.
It’s the mum of a girl I did not really know at school (she, the girl, was a good five or six rungs up the attractiveness ladder than me – I was an extremely obese smooth-faced 40-year-old mum-of-four looking kid for most of my adolescence, with a voice that seemingly took five years to break, and school hierarchy is defined by exactly two axes – who is hot, or at least if not hot then who get tits or a beard first; and who is hard, and the hard boys get with the tit girls and form these sort of royal allegiances, and kids like me get Really Into Videogames And Robot Wars And Metal Music – and so despite sharing a classroom with me for five consecutive school grades did not, in fact, know who I was) and also a former colleague of my mother’s, which is why she half recognises me more than I do her. ‘It’s Jackie,’ she says, ‘I used to work with your mum.’
And her face crumples and she goes: ‘I heard about the cancer.’ And I nod. And then she goes: ‘How is she doing?’ And I realise she does not know that my mother is dead.
And so now I am stranded here with a trolley full of wake food and a dilemma. Do I, really, want to do this in the middle of a supermarket freezer aisle section? Do I really want to have to explain what all the food is for, and how and why? We can pretend that I went through this – that I, like a lightning flash, rapidly weighed up the pros and the cons and decided logically on an outcome. We can pretend that happened when it did not. Instead, instinct kicked in and
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not so great.’ Technically this was not a lie. And Jackie said: ‘Oh, well,’ and said, ‘give her my best.’ And I walked away thinking: that was a very strange thing that I just did. That was a very unusual thing to do.
My parents are dead and there is always cake at the funeral. It’s weird eating cake and being sad: at my dad’s, his ex-wife, Annie, had made one of the most astonishing cakes I’d ever eaten, a dense low chocolate cake with a mirror-finish ganache that shone like glass, and I was two slices, maybe three slices in – I was, as aforementioned, an especially large shapeless teenage boy with a sweat problem – when one of my mum’s cousins who I had never met ushered me over to his armchair. And he said, do you not think you need to lay off the cake? And I thought: today of all days, dickhead. Today of all days you come and tell me this.
Funeral guest lists are unusual affairs: you are as surprised by the attendees as the non-attendees. A throng of my sister’s closest uni mates – all in the first great flush of their early twenties and ostensibly with better shit to be doing than this – were at my dad’s; his lifelong best friend, Don, left the voicemail we left him telling him the news unanswered. At my mum’s funeral, none of her side of the family attended, including her closest cousin, Josie – but clearly she was popular at work because an entire office’s worth of people lined up to shake my hand and tell me what a good laugh she was. Only after death do you see facets of the living you once knew through the eyes of those who knew them away from you: you learn who thinks them kind, who considers them wise, who considers them a best friend. They, all of them, line up to tell you how they were capital-G Good: we are, all of us, washed of sin when we die. When we live we are jagged and complex and fucked up and we oscillate between joy and despair, and all of that is flattened out in death, all of those wrinkles uncrumpled. We go into the ground as saints.
My parents are dead and forms; forms, forms; forms, forms, forms. There is a form to declare death and you have to pay for each printout, which means you have to predict exactly how many corporations and banks and agencies are going to ask for certified proof of death and then pre-emptively pay £12 for them to have it, and we umm and ahh and ask for four (you need two, at most: if you take anything from this, just know that everywhere takes photocopies, and save yourself £24). Then you have to, as in our case where there is no will (while I am here handing out advice: if someone draws you up a will and you go through the hurdle jumping of defining exactly who gets what in a will and how the will should break up, and where everything goes after you die, and all you have to do to verify that will is sign it, exactly once, please sign it exactly once, and do not leave it, unsigned, for two years, on the table next to you among a big pile of post, Mum), jump through the various hoops to invoke probate, a sort of de facto all-of-this-dead-person’s-shit-now-belongs-by-blood-to-you ritual where I had to go to a local family court, get knife searched on the way in, then swear godlessly on a sign of the cross to say that I am the one true heir to a £90,000 terrace near Sheffield, nobody else may make claim on my land. The bank wants to know she’s dead, the electricity company. I stop chasing the £800 left in her building society account because the constant administration of it was too exhausting. The government sends me a letter to tell them they overpaid her pension, i.e. made payment into her account exactly once post-death, and now they would like that money back, now: I tear the paper up and scatter it into the bin. I am warned that people might wheedle out like cockroaches from beneath the family fridge: someone, somewhere, some distant cousin, might try to make a claim on what thin gruel there is left, and to be prepared for it. They mean legally, but I want it in blood: I am angry, so angry, I am ready to meet anyone head on, if anyone even steps to me and tells me they want a penny of what’s mine I will tear at them until they are just a mashed pile of red, I will punch and punch and punch, I need this, I need them to come out, I want so bad somebody to take this out on, I need it.
My parents are dead and one day, three years later, I go back there, to the house, after we’ve sold it. This is a mistake: I’m watching from sort of afar, in case an old neighbour sees and recognises me and we have to do a whole awkward thing, and everything feels juddery, at once familiar and not. The house looks more or less the same – steam rises from the exhaust vent on the boiler we had put in a few years ago; the smoke bush my dad planted 20 years ago still looks somehow both fragile and overgrown in the front garden – but it’s not. It’s late October, cold but not freezing, and, on the doorstep, there’s a pumpkin, carved for Hallowe’en. We never left a pumpkin out, even once. And then suddenly I am overcome with the realisation that this isn’t mine, now; that another family exists in this space, fills every corner of it with their own existence, their own sofa positioning, their laughs echoing on the walls they now own, their voices shouting upstairs for dinnertime, their crap filling the basement. I feel like a ship on the sea with endless deep blue beneath me and nothing holding me up. No anchor, no home. Someone else’s pumpkin makes me lose my entire mind.
My parents are dead and my friends are trying their best. My friend takes an afternoon off work and drives me out to the countryside, out far away from the grey jagged misery of the town, and I wind the windows down and let the warm June air rustle my hair, and I inhale bugs and lungfuls of green, wholesome air, and I put my hand out of the window and wave it through the wind, and then we stop at a pub overlooking green rolling hills, starched yellow almost in the sunlight, and we both sit down with amber ales and he tells me he thinks he has cancer.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
And he sits stiff-backed in double denim and says: ‘In my bowels. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’
And I say Jesus, I say Jesus Fucking Christ. What is with everyone getting cancer?
And he says I know.
And we drive in silence back to the town and we line up more beers in another pub and meet some friends and he tells them he thinks he has cancer (‘In my bowels,’ he says. ‘Blood. Bad blood, that black blood. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.’) and he starts crying so much the landlord very quietly asks us to leave the pub, because quote, unquote we are really bringing the vibe down, and then the next pub we go into we are also asked to leave because of the crying thing, too. And at the funeral a week later I ask him if he’s coping okay and he says a cheerful ‘Yep!’ and then proceeds to not ever mention cancer or die over cancer at any point over the next three years, and I figure there is something, about death, there is something that brings out the weird little crevices in all of us.
My parents are dead and it’s a year or so later and everyone thinks that I’m fine including me. I’m cat-sitting for my sister, my boys, my big beautiful boys, but there’s something wrong with Boz: he’s thin when he used to be plush, he’s quiet when he used to be loud, he keeps coming up to me, shaking and feeble, just leaning on me with all the little weight that he has. One morning, before I leave for work, I find him after calling him for breakfast, and there he is, shaking under a shelf: I coax him half out, bring him a small plate of biscuits, swaddle him with a towel. Boz has been my best little mate since I was eleven and he was six months old, and now I look into his huge orange eyes and I know that he is dying. Moww, he says, and I say moww back, and I cry, and cry and cry and cry, and kiss his little head, and cry and cry and cry, and I’m crying now, and I cry and cry and cry and cry, and I suppose that’s when it all hits me – me, on the floor, cat biscuits on my fingers – that’s when it hits me most of all.
* * *
My parents are dead and I’m starting to get to the age where my friends’ parents are dying, too, and I feel I should know what to say to them. And I never really do: instances of grief, I have found, are unique, two never coming in the same shape, and they can be piercing and hard-edged and they can be like passing through deep dark treacle or they can be like a long, slow-passing cloud, it can make everything grey or everything sharp, it can hit you like a truck or it can hit you like cholesterol. There is no one single catch-all solution to dealing with the worst life has to throw at you because life has such a habit of swinging you curveballs.
But what I do always say is: oh man, this is going to suck.
And I always say: you need two fewer death certificates than you think you need.
And I say: snakes will come up from the grass and you will want to hurt them.
And: at one point you are going to become keenly aware that everyone is judging you for the exact way you outwardly behave when someone close to you dies, and I need to tell you that that is a nonsense. You are going to feel a dirty little feeling of guilt. If there’s a long illness involved, there might be this horrible, metallic-tasting feeling of relief, one too hard and real for you to admit to yourself is there. You will do weird things and behave weirdly and not even know it is happening. You will offer up a portion of your psyche to the grief gods and say to them in the rain: take this and do what you want with it. Suddenly your body is not your own, your mind, your home. There’s no right way of dealing with it but there are a thousand differently angled wrong ways. You’ll cycle through all of them.
I’m on my fourth Christmas without parental guidance now, and I suppose I am okay. There are still times when I feel unutterably alone – times when all I need is my mum’s roast, or a voice that knows me on the other end of a phone to tell me things will be alright again, or what I need to do to make things alright; times when I’d give anything to go for one pint with my dad, or drive around in his smoky old Volvo listening to Fleetwood Mac. It’s weird what you miss: every holiday we had, when I was a kid, was foreshadowed on the morning of travel by my dad getting the shits – every single time, without fail – and our journey to Cleethorpes or Scarborough or Whitby or Filey would be delayed by Dad, in the bathroom, making the air sharp and sour, groaning through the door, and Mum, on her tenth or eleventh furious cigarette, hissing, ‘Every. Bloody. Time. Tony! Every. Fucking. Time.’ through her teeth, and I don’t know. Holidays don’t seem the same without this consistent element of intestinal chaos beforehand.
I picked up his camera, recently. I think a lot of people my age and of my generation get this delayed obsession with film – that gauzy, blurry, physical quality of it, haunted eyes reflected back from a flash bang, a fraction of a second of light that could have exploded – just for a moment – a day ago, or a week, a year, one hundred, more a frozen moment in time, somehow, than anything digital – and I asked my sister to dig out his old Nikon. I turn 30 this year, a moment that will be marked with me living more of my life without him than I ever did with, and it was curious, looking into that bag, reminding myself of a time left behind me: an old emergency pack of Rizlas, the gnarled old piece of tights material he used as a lens cleaner; the ephemera of a life left behind. The bag smelled of him. I held the camera up to my face, put the eye where his eye had been, nestled my nose where, years before, he would have squashed his. Click. You wonder what they would make of you, now. Click. How they might be proud of what you’ve become. Click.
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Dad taught me how to make a prison bomb once. I do not think my mum ever knew about this. This was not on the family curriculum. But we were playing cards one day when I was ten, and, ‘Oh,’ Dad said, as if recalling some vital lesson all fathers teach to their children that he had somehow neglected, ‘right: you know you can make a bomb out of this?’ And I said: I’m listening.
You can make a prison bomb out of a pack of cards, Dad explained, if you cut all the little red pieces out – the hearts and the diamonds, and any red ink-like paste that might be smeared on the back – and mush them into a wet paste, which you cram down a radiator pipe or some such. When the pipe heats up – it’s an inelegant art, and results vary, so don’t, like, sleep close to it, especially not head-first – some chemical reaction will happen, which causes it to explode, dismantling the wall behind it and through which you – he motioned me in a very confident way, as if to say, ‘You, my sweet large son, are destined for prison’ – through which you escape. And that’s a prison bomb. And that’s rummy.
I didn’t really question this at the time because dad was always talking about war stuff and cannons and stuff, and also because he went to prison once. This, again, was one of those strange things that was never explained to me as being abnormal – Dad got stopped for drink-driving once and given a warning, and then he was stopped again and given a fine, and seeing as we were poor and couldn’t pay the fine he did three weeks in prison, one week maximum security and then another fortnight – after they realised how truly meek and unthreatening he was – in an open prison somewhere near Leicester. ‘How was prison, Dad?’ I asked, when he came back again. He said: ‘Not bad.’ He genuinely looked quite healthy. Prison wore well on my father.
We didn’t talk about prison much after that, mainly because it was such a pathetic stretch he did – I mean I never even had to draw a heartbreaking crayon-coloured picture of our family, labelled ‘MUMMY’, ‘DADDY?’, ‘ME’ about it – and also because Mum very strictly forbid us talking about it (she was really mad about that time he had to go to prison). But one day I answered the phone – one of my pathological childhood obsessions, for a while, was snatching the phone up and answering it in my politest sing-song – and a strange voice on the other end growled: ‘Is that Joel?’
Yes, I said.
‘Hello Joel,’ he said (imagine the voice is more prison-y than that. You are not reading it prison-y enough, and I can tell). ‘Hello, Joel,’ the prison voice said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Is your dad there?’
And I said sure, who is it.
And he said, John.
And so I yelled up the stairs, D–AAAA–D, JOHN’S ON THE PHONE.
And my dad appeared before me like death had learned to shit his pants in fear.
‘Yeah,’ my Dad said, shakingly, as I watched. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yep. No I’ll— yeah. No I’ll come to you. Yeah. Yep. See you there.’ And then he hung up and turned and swivelled into a crouch down next to me and said, Don’t Tell Your Mother.
I’m not saying who told her but she found out.
It turns out Dad had made friends, in prison, as he was wont to do as he was a very mellow and agreeable man, especially friends with his bunkmate, John, who murdered someone. ‘Yeah come over,’ Dad said into the bunk above him, confident this man would never be released from prison ever in his life. ‘We’ll get a drink. Kip on the sofa until you sort yourself out.’ And then John fucking got parole, and instantly called the only phone number he had on his person, which was my Dad’s, and asked if he could stay with us, promising not to do a murder again. The row between my parents that night – the Red Corner fighting ‘can a murderer stay on our sofa’ and the Blue Corner fighting out of ‘absolutely fucking not’ – went on so long our neighbours kept flicking their bedroom lights on and off in a really passive–aggressive way, slamming their flat fists against the shared wall that ran over our alleyway.
John never stayed, in the end – ‘Because of the murder,’ I imagine my dad saying, over the pint they eventually shared, at a pub far, far away from our house, and I like to think John was a gentlemanly murderer who waved his hand and said ‘I understand’ – but I always like that my dad even tried it: that he thought a murderer could stay with us, for anywhere between one day and six months, really says a lot about him, his gentle trusting nature and his inability to operate anywhere within the sensible laws of society.
I often imagine how I would do, in prison. Quietly, I think I’d thrive. The Boys there would at first be suspicious of my smart mouth and bookish ways, and look to teach me a violent lesson, but I think after the first two or three beatings they would take a begrudging shine to me – ‘He does reading,’ they will say, proudly, to their bunkmates, ‘He’s helping me write a letter to my lawyer’ – and that, over time, would evolve into a quiet sort of respect. One day a young upstart would try and beat me with a metal pipe on his first day to prove some sort of point, and the more seasoned inmates would jump to my defence – ‘Leave him alone!’ they’d say, ‘He’s just a harmless little soft cunt!’ – and I would say Thank You, Lads, dusting my prison uniform off, going back to my eccentric little hobby of cutting all the red bits out of cards. And then one day, just like Daddy taught me, I’d blow every one of those fuckers up to kingdom come, and sprint off into the night, hooting and hollering with delirium, until the police shot me to death with Tasers. But I still wouldn’t fucking invite a murderer to dinner, would I? Because I’m not mad.
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I got to tell you that there is something singularly amusing about watching a Dutch teenager swear in a flurry of American slang. Fucking shit bro, fuck man. Jord is swearing. Fucking shit man, my mom. Jord just got down to the last five of the game – 100 players whittled down to a handful over a grinding 35 minutes – and the circle draws ever tighter, pushing those last few remaining players in, and they are all concentrated on this one small patch of bushgrass, and Jord is just lining up his shot, he’ll go through the back of the head of this guy then hop over and loot his ammo then use it to take out the final two players a little over the ridge, this is a very high tension thing – and then his mum stumbles in and the mic is abruptly muted and we watch, thousands of us, in silent horror, as Jord’s entire head is shot to pieces while he pliantly talks to his mum. He turns back to the screen and sees himself as a mess of blood and ammo. Fuck man, my mom, he explains. Fuck. He rubs his eyes and regains composure. No man, she— I don’t mean that. She means well. Exit to Lobby, new game, the tide washes in with the moon.
OR: JASONR needs to piss. It is midgame – that gauzy time when the initial flurry of desperate gun-hunting and easy-pickings inner-city kills have quietened down, and so now it is a case of picking your way through the expanse, picking up improved helmets and gun sights and vehicles, taking tactical positions up on hills and the roofs of houses – and he is swimming across a small river to get to the other side of the island. But he isn’t: Jason has left his character automatically swimming – ‘I gotta pee, man’ – and everyone in the chat is deliriously tense in his absence. I seen Jason die like this, one chatter says. Another: it’s a long shot but he can take him out. Jason’s teammate, some guy a thousand miles across the country, pings to no one on the audio chat. Jason? Jase. Jase. He’s gone a really, really long time. He bobs in the water. When he returns from his piss I am once again allowed to breathe.
OR: Shroud is falling apart. ‘My eye is twitching guys, I don’t know why.’ The chat moves so fast you can hardly see it: it’s caffeine, the chat says, or you need special blue-lens glasses to play in. Shroud is hardly watching because he is focussing on just ruining the brains of the schoolyard of players who have landed around him, so his fans take it into their own hands: donations of $10 or more get read out over the screen by a robotic voice, and they use it to communicate with their god. ‘I’m not buying those blue glasses,’ he tells one donor. Another message flashes up on screen: you have a magnesium deficiency, it says. You need to buy supplements. Shroud mulls this over while he kills two guys, perfect headshots, boom. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He stares at the screen without blinking for five more hours. What sustains him also kills him.
OR: Shroud, again, mid-game, again, and he’s talking about his living arrangement. How he couldn’t rent this place – he gestures around him, the immaculate unfurnished flat wall behind him – because he had no credit history. But it turns out the landlord’s daughter knew who he was, how he made money, how much of it he banked, so they agreed to let the apartment to him, figuring he wouldn’t make much noise anyway. Boom, pshht, headshot out of nowhere. ‘Well, didn’t see that,’ he says, reloading the game all over again. Piss, eyes, moms, rent. Heads exploding without warning. Periodic reminders that our gods are still mortal.
#1.
I have to tell you that I am really into watching people play videogames now. I want to be clear about this: I own the means with which to play videogames myself. I have a console and a controller and a TV and games. I can, if I want to, play the videogames. But that is like saying I have a football in my garden, so why do I have to bother watching Messi. Yes, I can play videogames. I can take back the means of control. But also I am very bad at them, in a way I cannot communicate to you. I can play videogames, but it is actually far better to watch people who are good.
Twitch is a website where you watch other people play games, and I did not understand it until I got Really Into Watching Other People Play Games. The game I am obsessed with watching is Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, which Jord and Shroud and JASONR are fantastic at, and I am appallingly bad. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, in short: a 100-man battle royale set across a digital island, where you parachute in and loot empty buildings until you find enough guns and lickspittle armour to mount an attack on your fellow players. The game’s active area slowly shrinks – this adds a vital layer of urgency to proceedings, to stop people camping out and games lasting eight to nine hours each – until, after about 35 minutes, the once island-sized game map is crushed into the size of a single field, and it becomes a kill-or-be-killed hellscape. The first time I played it I died within one minute and proclaimed the game to be ‘bad’ or ‘shit’ (I forget which). Second time I made it until about three minutes in, before I was cleanly dispatched by an uzi for an overall ranking of around #89. My friend Max then took over, and came #2 overall, after a 40-minute stand-off, a Jeep chase, an exquisite sniper takeout and this one time where he threw a grenade into a room. The final battle saw him and one other fight for supremacy around the edge of a hill, and he was taken out by a single bullet to the side of the head. Here is an impression of me, sat on a computer chair at Max’s shoulder, trying not to breathe too loudly and so put him off his aim: ‘[Hands held over mouth, breath held, voice coming out strangled and high pitched] Fuck! Shit shit shit! Fuck!’ It was the most exhilarating gaming moment I had ever seen. I mean, Christ man. I live a relatively empty life. It was possibly the most exhilarating anything moment I had ever seen. So you see now how instantly I was hooked.
But as we have discussed I am terrible at the game (my simple mind cannot, however way I try, get my head around the W–A–S–D keyboard movement system, and for now PUBG is PC-only), so instead I watch Jord play it on Twitch. Or: I watch Shroud on Twitch, because his American time zone means it’s easier to watch in the evenings (at weekends, when I want to wake up and watch someone playing videogames who isn’t me, I watch American streamers who stay up deliberately late in their time zone to catch the European early morning audience, and they all wear caps and have obnoxious catchphrases, and I universally hate all of them). I watch some guy called JASONR sometimes, and though I don’t like him as a human, I respect him as a player: all three of them have this preternatural reaction time, a kind of hardwired cold-bloodedness and resistance to panic, unerring accuracy with digital rifles even over long distances, and also this relentlessness: they wear their rare losses lightly, so when their heads explode in the middle of a grey-brown field they, instead of wail and gnash with the sting of loss, boot up the game and go again. Essentially: the mindset of highly tuned professional athletes, but in the bodies of slightly awkward nerd teens. Twitch is a curious beast: a YouTube-shaped streaming platform that technically can be used to broadcast anything but is almost exclusively used for showing people playing games, Twitch was bought for $970 million by Amazon in August 2014 and is now worth an estimated $20 billion, with its own sub-currency tipping system – the ‘Cheer’ – slushing around its network. Fans of streamers can pay $1.40 to buy 100 ‘Cheers’ which they then donate to their favourite gamers through various in-chat messages (the gamer themselves will get around $1 for every 100 cheers – Twitch needs to take its vig) and emoticons: for a sneak peek at the future of capitalism, there is a single emoji that costs $140 to enact. Alternatively, fans can donate directly to streamers – tipping the odd $5, $10 here and there, or subscribing for a fee every month, thank you bro, thanks for the sub, thank you guys for the donnoe – with more money going directly to the gamer’s coffers. So to reiterate: Twitch is a website where you can watch someone else play a game and, if you really want to, you can pay the person you are watching to let them let you watch them play a game. At no point in this interaction do you, personally, get to purchase and play the game. You only watch. Some Twitch streamers are multi-millionaires. It has previously been impossible to tap into why.
#2.
I know why, and I and I alone have figured out why. In the adolescence years 13 thru 17 – a four-year long feeling of emptiness and antsiness and crushing, overpowering horniness I am going to nominally refer to as Wanke’s Inferno – I would go to my friend Matt’s house and watch him play videogames. It wouldn’t matter what time I would go over there – 2 p.m., 10 p.m., 2 a.m. – Matt would be awake, and playing videogames. This is because Matt was a goth, and goths are always up playing videogames. Also his mum was a nurse who worked nightshifts so his house was always best to scratch at the window if an existential crisis hit at 1 a.m. and you just needed to be out of your house and in the vague presence of some company, which very often happens when your body is pulsating with the dual needs to i. grow, constantly, in every direction and ii. be so horny your head might explode. Everything seems happy and sad at the same time when you are a teen. Psychically it’s like putting your head in a washing machine, for eight years.
Here’s what the back of Matt’s head looks like: an at-home dye job is growing out, so at the crown of his head is a digestive biscuit-sized circle of his natural hair colour, somewhere between blond and brown, while the rest of his hair was dyed black (see: goth) with a stripe at the front that was electric blue (also see: goth). The stripe didn’t last long, actually – it is hard to maintain an electric blue stripe of hair at the best of times because it requires bleaching the hair and then dyeing over the top of that bleached hair in the colour of your choice, and bright colours wash out quickly, and being a goth on pocket money is the exact polar opposite of the best of times, so after a while the blue fell out and there was just a sort of pale blonde streak remaining. I remember all of this vividly because for an entire summer of my teens I looked fixatedly at the back of Matt’s big goth head while he played Quake 4, Unreal Tournament, and, for some reason, this extended six-week period where we linked a SNES up to an old CRT TV and compulsively played Dr. Mario until the sun came up through the trees.
I mention all this because going to a friend’s house and watching them play videogames is exceptionally nourishing to teen boys. I mention all this because all those half-conversations I would have with the back of Matt’s head while he coldly racked up headshots were some of the best and also least consequential of my life. I would lay on his black bedsheets (goth), play with a skull candle of his (goth), flap at the blackout curtains (goth goth goth), occasionally disassemble an old Warhammer model of his (nerd) or read a comic (nerd) by Jhonen Vasquez (goth), and Matt would still be that, spine curled, hand on the mouse, headshot after headshot, while I unloaded. It was as close to therapy as two teen boys can get: chatting, and chatting, and chatting, every worry and every gripe, every girl we liked and every hope for the future, who we wanted to be, what we feared, how scared we were to grow up: all without a scrap of eye contact, conversation occasionally just falling into a lull, of grunts and occasional laughs, as heads exploded and arms came off in geysers of blood. Occasionally I would fall asleep on a Sonic beanbag on his floor, and have to be wearily stirred awake again at 4, 5 a.m., when I would wander home in my shirtsleeves through the chill. As I grow older, I am more deeply aware than ever that, essentially, a very large part of me has always wanted to retreat back into the nerve-jangling terror womb of adolescence, whether in search of a hard reset, or a time when life was consequence free, or just to be 17 again and actually learn to drive this time. I feel most men, given the option to go back and revisit their teen years with an adult mind, would for some reason jump at the chance. It was a time when your body is lithe and willowy and full of potential, and way less hairy. The most exciting thing that can happen to you is you can distantly see a girl you are in love with – and who is unaware you are alive – at the mall. It is a horrible, terrifying, high adrenaline time to be alive and I miss it with every atom of my body. Watching my friends play videogames emulates that feeling of distorted comfort all over again. Doing so with some Dutch guy called Jord over Twitch allows me to wallow in a black bedsheeted pit of nostalgia from the comfort of my desk at work.
#3.
Twitch taps into a new media landscape that makes absolutely no sense to fucking anyone, but that seems to be the way things are going, and Twitch is only one strange facet of that. Example: I recently had lunch with a friend and he told me about his obsession with Dr. Sandra Lee, or ‘Dr. Pimple Popper’, a woman with an immaculate bedside manner and a preternatural gift for lancing cysts, who lives both in her doctor’s office and also on YouTube. Every video she has ever done goes like this: a floating, eerie mid-zoom of the boil or zit or massive tumour-esque mass she is about to explode, which she prods at with rubber-coated fingers, purring and describing it in a cheerfully clinical tone. Then: then a jump-cut to the boil or whatever swabbed in surgical cloth. And then, using either her fingers or precise metal tools, she slices it open and squeezes out all the yellow gunk inside. It is horrible and fascinating: watching poison ooze out of humans, thick custardy torrents of it, then stitched neatly up and dabbed over with surgical spirit. My friend, a neat freak with OCD, says it taps into his compulsive need for things to be clean, tidied, free of chaos. ‘I watch them while I’m eating my breakfast,’ he says, the maniac. ‘Muesli, yoghurt, zits.’
OR: I found myself in a cab recently having one of those conversations you only seem to have when you’re shouting from one end of the car to another, and in it I was explaining the concept of ASMR. ASMR, or ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’, is this tingling effect some people get in their ears when they hear certain sounds – paper crinkling, soft finger clicking, whispering – something close to synaesthesia. YouTube has thousands of hours of videos dedicated to ASMR triggers, and a small-but-dedicated audience hungry for more, but obviously it’s very hard to just whisper for 30 minutes straight, so you find these performances quickly veer into something very weird – they are all recorded at 4am, when outside static noise is at its lowest, and the performers all do these weird drama class ad-libs, talking to themselves through various whispered scenarios. So like: one guy does this bit where he is an extremely rude waiter, talking down to you about a reservation you didn’t make uninterrupted for 40 fucking minutes. Or: there is this one guy, Toni Bomboni, who looks sort of like a LazyTown villain come to life, and I once watched a video of him in the scenario of ‘a gum store’, where he would chew and taste various bubblegums on your behalf to help advise a very serious gum purchase you (the viewer) were going to make, again something that went on, whispered, for like three-quarters of an hour. So I mean go to TV and say, ‘Hey: I’ve got a half-hour video of a lad chewing gum to himself and urgently whispering. You uh … you want that?’ and TV will say: no thank you. But the Internet has carved out its own weird niche of anti-media. Some people just like watching people do mad and boring shit. Some people like to watch skin erupt, or maniacs whispering. I, for example, I can only relax to headshots.
#4.
As best I can tell there are four or five species of Twitchers (I do not know if ‘Twitchers’ is a word or the accepted term: we are just going to have to assume that it is), which can be categorised as thus:
— Extremely Hyperactive Kid Who You Just Know Got Put Bodily Into Some Lockers At School: these are of course my least favourite Twitchers, because they are boys who fundamentally did not fit in to the intended hierarchy of the world of school or work – they were down at the bottom, punching fodder for jocks and so on, not smart enough to be genuine nerds, not physically dextrous enough to fight anyone off, doomed forever to be henpecked and unhappy – but then who found their niche (streaming videogames to an audience of millions) and so jumped up through their expected social stratas and became as obnoxious as possible in as short a period of time, so they have adopted the sort of bro-y discourse of actual bros, and say things like ‘fam’ and ‘you guys’ and ‘wuh–POW!’ and ‘[every single irritating sound effect a human being can make with their mouth]’, and gurn to the camera, and develop their own little catchphrases and routines, and behind them is a plethora of sort of wide-tyre nerd culture ephemera – anime posters, figurines from popular adult cartoons, Monster-branded green neon-lit mini-fridges, extremely complicated gaming chair/gaming headset set-up – and then they act in front of it, and they are extremely annoying, these people, on the surface, but also very much you can see not even very deep within them to see the vulnerabilities and frailties within, and I just know that every single one of them I could make cry with an accurately timed ‘your momma’ joke, and that’s no way to respect another adult, is it—
— Quiet PhD Student Type Who Just Loves Exploding Digital Heads: these ones are my favourite, because they transcend the idea of performative streaming – i.e. the idea that streaming videogames is about anything other than the videogame and the skill they possess at the videogame – that being a personality is secondary, tertiary, to having quick mouse response times and unerring accuracy with a sniper rifle, and these are the guys who take it closest to a sport. There is a narrative, in sport, of showboaters and not: the lads who have hot new hairstyles, and tattoos, and take selfies on Instagram, and still ascend to the very top of the game (in football: Neymar, Beckham, C. Ronaldo), and they infuriate your dad because of it, and then you have those who don’t, head-down-and-score-a-lot-of-goals lads (again football: Messi, Shearer, Xavi), who your dad adores. That’s the split in sports: that being good at sport – at being one of the five very best people on the planet at kicking a football – but also having ego around that, at being happy to be nearly supernaturally good at something, is somehow profane. In sports, I love these showboaters: when it comes to watching them play shoot-em-ups, they tire me out. Give me a quiet Dutch lad who is killing 40 minutes before he does his homework any day of the week.
— ‘The Character’. Some streamers dress in wigs and wraparound shades and eighties-style leather jackets and the like and maintain all these catchphrases and go-to sayings and stuff like that and in one way I very much admire them for developing a character and sticking to it, unbreakably, like a mid-eighties American shock jock, and in another far deeper way I cannot watch even one minute of them playing videogames, holy jesus, I am never in a thousand timelines going to be wired-out on Red Bull enough to find that funny—
— Girl Streamers, who unfortunately have this horribly uphill battle to Prove Themselves To Be Sincere, the gamer boys who are so primed to watch girls in like calf-high socks and pigtails and full-face anime-inspired make-up kill dudes in battle royale settings and do kawaii peace signs to the camera being sort of bait as well as red rags to these dudes, dudes both wanting very much to sexually conquer them – the chat that runs alongside Girl Gamers being, essentially, pornographically explicit – as well as mad at them for liking their safe little male thing, intruding into their world, so Girl Gamers are seen as a sort of strange curiosity in a male-dominated sport (even for male-dominated sports e-sports is a male-dominated sports), but also I find the associated energy that goes after them fundamentally fatiguing, so I cannot watch them for very long, and that is my cross to bear, sorry ladies—
#5, OR: THE AUDIENCE WILL EAT ITSELF EVENTUALLY
Like religion, the audience makes this something bigger than it is. Without a flock, preachers shout to an empty room, and Twitch is similar: streamers have a symbiotic relationship with their audience, they shape them and are shaped by them, a constant feedback loop with a clear hierarchy, gods and believers. The geography of the classic Twitch screen goes a little like this: down to the left-hand bottom of the screen, you have a fixed three-quarter view of your chosen gamers face, blank with concentration: to the right, a chatbox trickles constantly along. In the middle of the screen, prime real estate, is where the bulk of the gaming action happens, and occasionally our mighty overseers will flick their eyes over to the chat – ‘What we saying, chat? Where’s that sniper at?’ – but mostly they are fixed on their jobs, which is to explode people’s digital heads. And so there is this sub-economy of attention that goes on: for subscribing to their favourite gamer, fans’ names are briefly displayed on-screen, where they often earn a shout-out; by donating five or ten bucks, they can have a message displayed in the middle of the heads-up display, right where their hero is aiming, as close as they can get to god. So here’s where you get these weird little one-sided conversations, as followers yell praise to on high: ‘Thanks Shroud, you’re the best!’ they say. Or: ‘Hey Shroud: what hair product do you use?’ (They want to be him the same way kids want to be Ronaldo, the way men want to smell like David Beckham.) You see how weird humanity can get when left alone for too long in the same room. ‘Hey Shroud,’ one donor says. ‘Noticed your submachine gun shooting rhythm matches the drumbeat to an intro on my favourite anime.’ This person is insane. ‘That deliberate? :)’ Or: you gain insight into who is watching, and where, and why: ‘Hey man,’ one donor writes. ‘Stationed in Afghanistan right now and missing my games. Watching you keeps me going. Rock on.’ In many ways, Twitch is a long-distance friendship simulator, the humming sound of male bonding. A big ding, an animation, a series of catchphrases and in-jokes, long developed with a community that is at once guarded and open: someone has donated $3,100. The gamer reels back in his chair. ‘Wow,’ he says, barely flickering with emotion. ‘Hey man, wow. Thank you.’ Without the audience, the Twitch streamer is nothing, and they run the gamut from fanatical to removed, but always, there, there is this bubbling economy: in a world where artists struggle to sell honest-to-goodness CDs, and where movies are torrents and books are downloaded, Twitch streamers just sit there and shoot, their own little sub-niche of entertainment, and their fans are breathless to hand them money for it.
#6.
And so obviously, I pay to watch a man shoot. I’ve been watching Shroud for weeks, the grace of his movements, the way no ounce of motion is wasted, as slick and refined a professional gamer as it is possible to be. I watch highlight reels when he’s not online and find myself re-watching explicit kills on my lunch break. One day, I see Shroud, midway through a seven-hour stream, do the most audacious move: he throws a grenade from about 200 yards away then runs into the building just as it tinkles to the ground and explodes, slipping through a concrete bunker window and violently wounding the two players inside, who he finishes off with a single one-two pelt from his shotgun. I literally go into work the next day and describe all this to the IT guys as if we were talking about a football game. There is something hypnotic, about it, something soothing – something that takes me back to the womb of adolescence, sitting in a room silent but for the occasional jagged explosion sound, the pierce shrill of digital screaming, a punching noise run through two cheap portable speakers – takes me back to 15, staring at the back of a head, rapt with it. Twitch, on the surface, very much doesn’t make sense – the entire model of it seems wholly unsustainable, like selling one-way tickets into the heart of the sun – and that maybe in five years, or ten, gamers will have to drop their handles, go by their real names, slink into the corporate world of work. Or maybe it’s something else: a weird cusp of a mega-economy, one that will create celebrities and gods for generations to come. All I know is, I sign up to connect my Twitch account to my PayPal account. And that I wait for the right time when Shroud is looking at the screen (a lull between two games, when, after a top-three finish that ends with an outta-nowhere sniper kill, he clicks back to the lobby to reflexively find another game). And then I push the button on donating $10. ‘Hey Shroud,’ I say. ‘Thanks for the headshots.’ And he turns to the screen and reads my name aloud. And I feel like I have been touched by god.
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Show me a boy who didn’t once between the ages of 13 and 21 try and suck his own dick and I will show you a liar. My method, which I was convinced was the one to finally crack this case, was to lie on my back lengthways against my bed and, raising my back and my legs against it, slowly push my lower half against the solidity of the bed frame, slowly folding myself in half like a dick-sucking sandwich or falafel wrap. I mean obviously this did not work. All it really did was left a perfectly straight purple bruise perpendicular to my spine that didn’t go away for weeks. But I think I tapped into something, there, in the grey-dark of my bedroom at night, desperately trying to press my dick down into my mouth: I unlocked a certain spirit of adventure, the same one that pulsated through more heroic men before me, the ones that unlocked pyramids and discovered America. The same yearning to push myself to the very limits to see if I could suck myself off is, in many ways, the same urge that first sent man to the moon.
In secondary school my friends and I passed the same tattered biography of Marilyn Manson around between us, because we were all similarly obsessed with the curious black-and-white streak of a man shocking America top-to-bottom at the time. This was around the time Manson released his mainstream-puncturing Tainted Love, which feature him in an electric-blue hot tub – one eye milky and blind, long wan body, jet black bob, arms longer and more slender than any non-horror movie human deserves to be, winding those limbs and hooking them beneath the shoulders of the hottest video girl ever committed to film, a girl who was all kohl eyes and double-Ds and who stuck her pink tongue out luridly when Manson touched her, possibly the coolest and most erotic image I had ever seen, then, and probably still have to date – and we longed both to be him and know all about him. And, too, Manson was the recipient of a rumour that passes like a torch down from generation to generation of schoolkids who just discovered cumming for the first time: that he, surgically and at great expense and cost, had four of his ribs removed so he could better suck his own dick.
A part of me misses the innocent version of myself that could believe this rumour. (Prince, purportedly, did the same thing; Cher supposedly had hers removed to have a smaller waist; if you are a lithe pop star, just know that schoolchildren are going to speculate about the length of your ribcage.) Now I know more about human sexuality and the sheer allure of rock stars and/or anyone famous and creative, I know the truth of the matter was: Marilyn Manson didn’t need to suck his own dick because he had so many people willing to suck his dick for him. Sucking your own dick, conversely, is seen as some great feat of sexual braggadocio, when actually it should be seen as similar to being one of those IT nerds who upgrades his usual handjob technique to work in a Pocket Pussy
: ‘I have given up on convincing another human being to touch my junk,’ the Pocket Pussy
owner is saying, ‘the touch of this rubber fuck toy is the only joy I will ever know.’ A cursory glance at the search string ‘do you have to remove your ribs to suck your own dick’ paints a bleak, stark truth of the rumour. ‘Manson did not get that done,’ reddit user zaikanekochan says plainly. ‘Grow a bigger dick.’
I was at university the last time I tried it – my method this time was to bob my head down towards my crotch at great pace, like a sudden cobra strike, hoping to catch my body off-guard and accelerate straight from head to dick – but sadly, obviously, it didn’t work. I had another realisation, there, stripped to my pants in the grey light of my bedroom, neck cricked down towards my crotch: talk to some girls, maybe, go outside, stop expecting flexibility to somehow secretly develop within you, maybe convince someone else to take this job on. Ribs are there to protect your heart and lungs, obviously, but they also act as a sort of built-in rev limiter: without them, mankind would become a dick-sucking ouroboros, dick to mouth and mouth to dick, and we wouldn’t talk to women, or procreate, or do anything, really. If I could suck my own dick I wouldn’t be writing this, right now, because I’d be too busy sucking my own dick. In the Bible, Adam gave his rib up to create Eve, and there weren’t any explicit passages about her sucking dick but you have to assume it happened at some point. That’s the sacrifice, there: God showed us the way before we even knew it. And, I suppose, this is what I’ve learned about myself: that I’m glad I’m not Marilyn Manson, ribless and pale in the smoked-out back of a 1999-era tour bus. That I’m glad I have so many ribs. And hey: I guess this is growing up.
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In no particular order:
I.
