Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny. Limmy

everybody else seemed to take things in their stride but it felt harder for me, I wanted to send a message to people, I wanted to send a message to myself, I wanted somebody to help me, I wanted me to help me, but there was no reason for me to get special treatment and I was sorry for everything and I was angry, angry at myself and angry with people and angry with how things were, but it wasn’t normal anger, it was something else, it was a sad type of anger. I didn’t know what it was.

      So I’d cut up my arm.

      By doing that, it was like I didn’t have to put my feelings into words. I didn’t have to write it down in a diary, or write a letter to somebody and somehow find the words for what I was feeling, because fuck knows how I would begin to do that. So I’d cut my arm. It would be sore, and I’d like it. It was a relief. I’d see the cuts and the blood, I’d see this horrible thing I was doing to myself, and it just made sense. That there, that mess I was making of myself, that’s how I felt.

      I don’t know why I was like that, I don’t know why I’ve always been a bit like that. All bottled up. I remember being like that in primary school. I remember this one wee incident in particular.

      I was in primary one or two, sitting at my desk, doing a drawing. It was around Christmastime, so we were all doing drawings of Santa and things like that, while the teacher put tinsel up.

      I was drawing away, when the teacher walked up to me and put some tinsel around my neck. I didn’t know what she was doing to begin with, then I saw what it was. She was smiling, she was a good teacher, maybe my favourite. But I didn’t like it.

      Everybody turned around and looked at me, and some of them started laughing. They weren’t all pointing and pissing themselves, but they thought it was funny. And my face went bright fucking red. I didn’t know what to do.

      I pulled at it to get it off, but my teacher had tied it in a double knot. I tried pulling it over my head, but it was too tight. And the class was laughing.

      I pulled it really hard against my neck to try and snap it, till it started to hurt. I saw that the teacher looked concerned. So I kept pulling it against my neck to show her I was hurting myself, to show her how much I didn’t like it.

      I didn’t know how to just ask her to take it off, or how to handle any of it. She rushed over and cut it off with scissors, and asked if I was alright. But I just went back to my drawing, embarrassed.

      That was like my first instance of self-harm, if you like. Maybe I’ve always been like that, or maybe the tinsel incident planted a seed, fuck knows.

      I remember my last instance. I remember when I stopped.

      I stopped because there was this lassie I was going out with for a few weeks in school, a while after breaking up with that lassie I moved school for. One day she asked me back to her house during lunchtime, because it would be empty, and I was scared that she wanted me to shag her or something. I went back with her, though, but we just talked. I didn’t even get off with her, just in case it led anywhere. I was scared of being intimate. I just couldn’t shake off that feeling from earlier in secondary school, that low self-confidence, and that feeling that went all the way back to primary school where I felt out of my depth. I just couldn’t break through that barrier, as much as I wanted to. If I was drunk I could have a go at it, but not when I was sober, no way.

      So I started cutting up my hand. I didn’t do it there and then or anything, but later in the week. It was partly for self-loathing reasons, but partly because I wanted her to spot it. She did spot it, and asked why I did it. I don’t know if I said why. I probably didn’t even know myself at the time. It was maybe a way to get some intimacy, through her worrying and talking to me. Maybe she could work everything out.

      One night, she said she wanted to show me something. She took off her glove, and she’d cut up her hand. It was all scratched, like mine.

      And I just fucking stopped.

      My First Acid

      I took my first acid when I was 16. It was during that summer after fifth year, when I knew I’d fucked up my exams. I don’t know if that had anything to do with me deciding to take it, like I’d ‘turned to the drugs’, but that’s when I took it anyway. It was 1991, and everybody was taking it.

      The acid I got wasn’t like the acid I saw on the news. It wasn’t a square bit of paper with a cartoon on it. It was something called a purple microdot and looked like the head of a match. I was told that it was better, it was stronger, it had more acid, it would knock my fucking block off. And that sounded good to me.

      I think it was a Saturday night, and we were just going to get a carry-out and hang about round the back of Arden Primary School, we weren’t going to a club or anything. So I got a drink, and took this purple microdot, and waited. I felt like I’d be safe with my mates, because they were the mates I was with when I slashed my wrist, I’d been through all that shite with them. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting anything too mental. I was expecting all these funny visuals like my mates said, like seeing Pac-Man, or seeing these trails when I moved my hand. A couple of hours of visuals, something like that.

      But what happened was this.

      It turned my head inside out.

      It turned it inside out, upside down and back to front.

      There were the visuals, but that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the thing. My mates never told me about all this other stuff. They never told me about the thoughts I was going to have.

      How can I sum up my thoughts? If you’ve never taken acid, or if you’ve taken it but you’ve never experienced it in the same way as I did, how do I explain it? Here’s an example of one thought I had …

      My dad is just a guy.

      That might mean fuck all to you, reading that. It’s obvious that my dad is just a guy. But to me, my dad is my dad. I don’t call him ‘Billy’. I don’t say, ‘Billy, what time’s it?’ It’s my fucking da. There’s a reason I don’t call my dad by his first name, or why I don’t talk to him about certain things. There’s some reason that I can’t explain. There’s some invisible barrier, some invisible wall.

      What acid did was it took away these walls. All these walls that kept everything in their place.

      You know how you get comedians, observational comedians, that ask the audience if they’ve ever noticed some peculiarity about daily life? It was like that, but with everything. It was like that with the thing about my dad, my mum, people in general, faces, eyes, blinking, hairstyles, the bricks that made up the school, speaking, words, money, pals.

      What are pals?

      I was thinking all sorts of shite. It was like that thought I had about the Glasgow boundary along Carnwadric Road when I was younger, that sense of wonder, that puzzlement, but constantly, with everything, with everything I saw and thought about, with no thought reaching its conclusion, just one overlapping another.

      After a few hours, things started to calm a bit in my mind. I was still tripping, but my mind had simmered down. It was getting late, and a few mates said they were heading home. But I didn’t want the night to end.

      A couple of them said, well, they were staying out, but they were going to steal a motor.

      That was another thing that was big back in 1991, as well as acid. Joyriding. My mates said they did it, but part of me never believed it. It was hard to imagine. So when they asked if I wanted to go, I said aye.

      We walked up to this wee cul de sac, it was maybe about 2 or 3 in the morning. All the lights in the houses were off, everybody was sleeping. One of my mates said we should keep an eye on a certain house, because there was an old guy there who was known as a curtain-twitcher. But it looked like he was sleeping as well.

      Within a minute, we were in a motor with the engine running using nothing more than a screwdriver and brute force. And we were off.

      The mate who was driving could