I'm Not a Real Person

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Estimated Reading time: 15 minutes.

In a week when NY Times and Sunday Times bestselling author and journalist Peter Lloyd tweeted this…

…I finished something a bit different from my usual stuff.

Hang on, “usual stuff” doesn’t really apply. Apart from me writing them, they just go where they go - mots et choses. And that is a beautiful thing.

Here we go…

I didn’t worry about money as a young kid. We had none, but it wasn’t my job to find any. I had a bed, a house, and occasionally food. My job was to learn how to talk, plop in a bum-shaped bowl in front of my mum and her friends - their glasses of wine and Silk Cut snouts giving it a poo-party atmosphere - and stand upright.

Once I’d perfected those - although standing upright has remained a lifelong challenge, often thanks to that evil bastard Dr Ugs and his minions, supplying substances I demanded for money. On the phone, it’s all ‘bro’ and ‘mate’, but in person, when they saw me, a piss-streak of a man, they were only too happy to assist my further decline. And for what? Money. Whatever happened to chivalry?

Strap yourselves in, people, this is going to be shit.

A few more years and a few more pence came easily. It was all I needed. The financial demands on an eight-year-old in the late 1970s weren’t substantial. I didn’t need an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch 2. A toffee apple and a few coins for some faded bubble-gum balls from the faded machine outside the faded corner shop were enough.

“Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” — John Betjeman

To my credit, I had to Google ‘modern home games machines’ to get that Nintendo Switch 2 reference. I started with NES, which I discovered stands for Nintendo Entertainment System and embarrassingly sits under ‘Collectables and Retro Consoles’. What does that make a ZX Spectrum? A relic? How old am I?

The Nintendo Switch 2 is the fastest-selling console ever. But its predecessor, no doubt described by any spoilt child who owns the upgrade as the ‘Nintendo Shit’, sold over 155 million units, making it the best-selling console ever. That’s so many that you could probably bring down Western civilisation just in time wasted. But I’m sure that would never happen.

A few years later and my financial needs took a shocking turn, the psychological impact of which still probably comprises a fair chunk of what I loosely call my personality. I left primary school a popular, happy kid, with pretty girls skipping through the daisies and my Action Man tearing the guts out of The Hun. Within hours of secondary school, it turned out I was smelly, a gypsy, and piss-stained. Nice.

Having just one shirt and one bath a week - in the same water as my dad, mum, and brother before me - there was nothing I could do about any of that, but I did learn the meaning of life. No shit. In the short time between birth and death, there’s only one thing worth doing: distracting yourself from the real conditions of your existence. You are going to die. That is not acceptable, and dwelling on it must be avoided at all costs. Life is distraction. You can’t spend your days pondering your gypsy piss-stained smelliness.

Remove the distractions, and you’re left with about five things: talking, plopping (in a bigger bum-shaped bowl), standing upright, eating, and working. Sleep doesn’t count. No one gets a decent night’s sleep anyway. It’s nature’s distraction, and once it was enough. But the Culture Industry realised they could crank the fear of death up to eleven.

Culture, being a bastard, monetises this fear. If you have the money, you can pay to be taken away from it. The more money, the further from the truth. Well, death. But they’re much the same thing - as I’m trying to convince you by drilling a word-hole in your head and gobbing the phlegm of meaning into it. You’re welcome.

“Man is the only animal that knows he is going to die, and he knows this only through experience.” — Blaise Pascal

Now I knew the meaning of life, only a fool wouldn’t take action. Here’s a selection of ways I made money as a kid:

Nicking Things: The initial buzz of procuring something above my pay grade felt good, but guilt quickly kicked in, giving me wet-the-bed nightmares. Later in life I lost the guilt, but that’s another thousand stories. Most of them involving Dr Ugs. I still haven’t nailed the not-wetting-the-bed part.

Carol Singing: Trying not to laugh was the best bit. My friend Matt would often puke mid-song. Once I laughed so hard I fainted, coming round to find him still singing, snot hanging off his face, muck down his coat. Nothing like adding a touch of horror to someone’s festive period and asking to be paid for it.

Car Washing: More like charity. They’d usually end up washing their own car and chatting with us. A simple comment about the size of the cahoobers on the bird at No 12 would have us lying in the street, giggling like twits and waiting to get run over.

Touching the Goat Skull: Aged five, my nan’s boyfriend Bill gave me a goat skull. I put it under a tea towel on a table in our front garden. Five pence to see, ten to touch, twenty to hold it, as long as I held your arms so you didn’t nick it. It went well until some older boys did nick it. I loved that goat skull. I still regret pimping it out.

Years later, when a girlfriend suggested sex work to stop the heroin withdrawals eating further into our bones, I saw the goat skull floating in the air, like a scene from Donnie Brasco, gently shaking its horned regret. It was a ‘no’ from me. I meant Donnie Darko.

The Quasi Paper Round: Free newspapers like The Dartford Informer and The Extra meant that if you were prepared to break your still-developing spine and deliver six hundred unwanted rags, you’d get two poxy quid. The utter shame if I saw a group of girls coming down the road. Bent double, out of breath, the strap pulling my arm off, trying to shuffle forward without my knees snapping. Once, one girl gave me a little poke in the shoulder, which sent me into a tailspin that didn’t stop until I hit the pavement. They stood and watched in tears of laughter, me on the ground like an insect struggling to get back on its feet. And failing.

One day, while talking to a kid trying to get his bag of papers over his shoulder without decapitating himself, I learned something about work:

“You don’t actually deliver them, do you?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“You’re off your head. Chuck them over the fence by the train tracks.”

Excellent. I’d collect my bag, drag it halfway down the road, then dump the lot over the fence by the train tracks. An easy poxy two quid.

Until 1983, when the unemployment crisis hit, and about 12% of the workforce was out of a job, meaning adults started taking the free newspaper rounds, putting them in little carts they pushed along, and actually delivering them. Almost certainly for the distraction rather than the money. Civilisation hits a point of no return when the work itself becomes the distraction.

Scrap Metal: We’d break into the scrapyard at night, nick lead and copper, then sell it back to them a few days later. Until we got caught and they threw us in the river running through the Burroughs & Wellcome chemical plant, shouting, “Next time we’ll chop your fucking hands off.” It worked. Hands were becoming increasingly important, especially when there was a distinct lack of girls’ hands offering to perform certain essential tasks.

Being chucked into the chemical overspill may have had its perks. I have a very high IQ and a huge penis, and my mum has neither, so it can’t be ruled out.

People in my street would ask my mum if they could throw me through their bedroom window because they’d lost their key, and they’d give me a couple of quid for the pleasure. And a pleasure it was. If the wife was a hottie, after getting through the bedroom window, I’d lie on the bed for a few gloriously sensual minutes, feeling the softness of the sheets, inhaling the perfume from the pillow, imagining her coming in, ‘Oh, young man, whatever are you doing on my bed, and me, with just my little white panties on!’

When I left school, I went straight into selling drugs. Earning more than my dad - well, he was dead, but if he hadn’t been, I would have been. Then I got on junk, and a new level of desperation meant a new low in procuring money. Stealing anything not tied down, petty, hideous sex work - all while on the verge of crying, puking, shitting, coated in an alien-like milky sweat, and wondering what the fuck had happened to my life.

If you could buy heroin from a pharmacy in a little brown box, without the Velvet Underground and all the other unbelievably successful efforts to glamorise it, I doubt it would have taken hold. Heroin is 10% using and 90% drama. And what do both give you? Distraction, at a confusing 9:1 ratio in drama’s favour.

I was getting pure morphine amps from The Stapleford Centre in Belgravia. This was before their rapid rebrand after getting their bollocks chewed by the GMC. My scripts were written by Dr Kindness. Really. Dr fucking Kindness. He had a platinum disc on the wall of his consultation room for a few hundred thousand sales of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica.

To show Dr Kindness I knew how to inject, I had to do the first one in his room, with him watching. I came round twenty minutes later on the examination table, him checking my pulse. me, not knowing my name.

“Do you really want to go through that three times a day?” he said.

“Yes, very much so.”

Living in Soho, I’d bump into Bobby Gillespie now and then, and once I mentioned Dr Kindness.

“A drug dealer, just a drug dealer,” he said, which made me realise the platinum disc might not have been a gift as I’d previously assumed.

Once I had a supply of morphine amps, I didn’t have to go out grafting, didn’t have to get involved in the street hassle – in short, no drama – and it was unbelievably dull.

So I’d sell them.

Because the point of using wasn’t the drugs. Well, not just the drugs. It was the distraction. Not wake up, shoot up, and sit there watching my life float pointlessly by in a haze of antiques programmes.

After about ten years of that – countless busts, arrests, and insanely dangerous attempts to outrun police who had the unfair advantage of occasionally eating and sleeping – I realised something: Yes, drug users die. But so do racing drivers, rock climbers, cave divers, wingsuit flyers, mountain climbers, base jumpers, all that extreme sport nonsense – and they make documentaries about how brave they were and their lust for life. Junkies, not so much.

It’s not that there’s an element of risk to such pursuits – the risk is the pursuit. It’s max distraction. That sounds like a male porn actor. Max Distraction. Are men really acting in porn?

Base jumpers don’t enjoy jumping off tall buildings and parachuting down. It’s silly. What they like is ‘taking a risk’ – a phrase which is odd in itself, it’s possessive, like the risk is something you could take from a shelf. But it isn’t. Risk is a slippery, invisible probability cloud, more a question: what if this goes tits up?

The words “extreme” and “sport” should only be used together by people who are in a passionless swamp of a relationship and whose children hate them. And, mercifully, in my experience, they usually are.

Then I built an e-commerce business at a time when, to most people, you had to explain what e-commerce was. My mate Mark donated a computer and got me on dial-up internet. Within a few months I was taking around four grand a day. For a junkie, that’s not normal. I didn’t know people could pay me via the internet, so that four grand landed on my mum’s unwelcome mat in a stack of envelopes. Mark sorted that out, too, blowing my mind by installing PayPal.

Because of that business, I haven’t worried about money for the last twenty years. I bought five-grand suits and two-grand shoes. I’d see (‘see’ lol) two or three whores a day, sometimes at the same time, and I landed my childhood dream of an apartment in Soho.

Had I played it differently and invested just a fraction of what I spent, I’d have retired five years ago with no money worries at all. Instead, I assumed it would just keep coming, and that I’d happily keep working in e-commerce, even as it quietly meant sacrificing the only thing I actually cared about: writing. No amount of whores and bespoke suits replaces that.

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” — Samuel Johnson

I left that business last year, which freed me up to write full-time, release my second novel, and finally get down to editing the one I’ve been working on for ten years. This isn’t distraction. This is the essential business of time and mortality, and for the first time in a long while, it feels like I’m living authentically again.

As Walter Benjamin put it, “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” Stories help us make sense of existence in light of its finitude. Now that I’m writing for a non-negotiable six hours a day, the claws of the Culture Industry haven’t quite let go of me, but they’ve certainly loosened their grip. Lovely.

There’s just one problem. I’m skint, guv! I’m back to square one, but with no goat skull. Oh, and the small matter of not being a real person.

Literature YouTube is full of some of the most unbearable, narcissistic, self-satisfied bastards alive, churning out literary content like corporate smugness machines. But they all agree on one thing: Threads is the Golden Goose for writers.

There’s not much I’d rather not do than pretend to give a shit about more social media. I love my YouTube channel and the Scrubs community, who, in their own charming way, have effortlessly managed to stop it growing. My Substack has done well, though. That should be enough. Apparently not.

So I made an Instagram account so I could make a Threads account - that’s how it works. I turned my YouTube shorts into readings from Love in the Time of Nudie Mags, and set up a TikTok account to do the same (what have I become?). But here’s the thing. You can show half-naked women bouncing their tits around on these platforms. You can show people getting their heads stamped on. But read about a teenager’s growing interest in sex? Not allowed. Based on what I’m allowed to read, you wouldn’t be far off renaming the novel Nothing in the Time of Nothing.

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” — François de La Rochefoucauld

Instagram - hideous. Threads - lovely. I dropped a few Derridian bombs like ‘What’s the difference between editing and writing?’ and was getting a thousand views per post, easy. People loved watching me pull the rug out from under the self-aggrandising ‘I’m a writer’ types. And the ones who got it? They bought my novel. I was shifting a couple of units a day in that first week. I’d found a social media cheat code, and I was ramping it up daily.

I was even accidentally shifting a few on Instagram, following old friends, comedians, people I hate. I was on a social media roll, a direct-to-consumer funnel that worked. What could go wrong?

‘We have temporarily disabled your Threads account. We need you to prove you’re a real person.’ Something like that. ‘Please give us your telephone number and take a selfie. It usually takes about a day to confirm.’ No worries. Real number supplied, real selfie taken. No lies, no deception.

Three hours later: ‘We have disabled your Threads account. You cannot appeal. You may no longer use Threads.’

Weirdly, my Instagram account is still up (dangerfieldwriter), and just to piss on me, it still feeds me Threads notifications. But I felt a piece of me die - a digital, prosthetic part, yes, but as we become more digitally prosthetic just to make a few ripples in the world, that’s quite the sacrifice, especially when you’re a writer.

A decade ago, ‘social media’ named a distinct category of online platforms. Now most socialising happens online, the ‘media’ part has collapsed. It doesn’t describe a subset of life anymore; it describes life itself. ‘Social media’ has become simply ‘social’. And when the shitcunts accuse you of not being you and ban you from that corner of it, you have to lump it.

Paul Virilio said, ‘When you invent the aeroplane, you invent the aeroplane crash’. When you invent social media, you invent unsocial media. All those cliques at school - the popular kids, the unpopular kids, the pretty girls, the not-so-pretty girls, the hard kids, and kids like me. I sat next to a kid in history with a fucking beard before my voice had broken. But you got on with it, found where you had value, something to say.

Now the rules have changed. Not only does the machine declare you not real, but by doing so, it makes you not real. Because what counts as a person has changed. Remember the typo at the start of Gilliam’s movie Brazil, where a fly causes the machine to mistype ‘Tuttle’ into ‘Buttle’. Bureaucracy doesn’t fail dramatically, it fails mundanely, through something as stupid as a mistyped name, or whatever the fuck it was about a real selfie and real telephone number that unpersoned me. What happens to people like that, like me? We fade, like the colour on cheap 1970s bubble gum, and become the smelly, dirty, piss-stained gypsies of social media, that is, of society.

EPILOGUE
If you struggled to follow this piece, cut me some slack. I’m on me uppers here, mate.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Be lucky

Chris Dangerfield.