Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [48]
My voice took years to break. For years I sounded exactly like my mother. Every time we picked up the phone at home, callers would get us mixed up. A classmate of mine once called, my mum picked up and they had a five-minute chat about Latin homework. Steve once phoned from work, I picked up and he told me he couldn’t wait to come home and have sex with me.
The worst part of all these hormones running around my body was my spots. I would go so far as to say acne. I would get horrendous clusters of spots appearing anywhere on my face. Just when one would leave, another would show up. My face looked like a pepperoni pizza with extra pepperoni. What really wound me up were the products like Clearasil that were supposed to help. The advert would say, ‘It gets rid of your spots in just four days.’ Just four days? Four days is the amount of time it takes for a spot to heal on its own. Spots last four days if they are untreated. So all Clearasil does is make you stink of Clearasil.
I, of course, made things even worse than that for myself. I chose ‘skin-tinted’ Clearasil. What you may have noticed from looking at the faces of your fellow human beings is that they all have different-tinted faces. There isn’t one skin shade for all. I’m sure there’s someone in the world with the exact skin tint as the skin-tinted Clearasil. This product is like a miracle for them; they put it on their face and the spots literally disappear behind this medicinal product that’s working hard to rid their face of the hidden blemishes in just four days. Unfortunately for everyone else, and me, the skin-tinted Clearasil makes you look worse than before. I would wipe this beige goo all over my spots, leaving me with what looked like bits of somebody else’s face on my face; and it stank.
There was also a dandruff situation. Mine was by no means the worst in the school. There were so many white speckles on school blazer shoulders that when my grandmother came once to watch me play cricket she thought it was part of the design. All this came at a time when I first started to have sexual desires. Before adolescence, girls were soft and made me feel funny inside; now, I wanted to ravage them, a lot.
Unfortunately, these new feelings coincided with me looking horrendous. I would see girls from local schools on the overground Metropolitan Line Tube I took to and from school. I had hair under one armpit, spots covered in skin-tinted Clearasil occasionally with dandruff stuck to it and the voice of a posh girl. I was so embarrassed by my appearance that I would dread any schoolgirls getting on the same carriage as me. I would seriously panic that the species I was so desperate to attract would literally laugh at my appearance.
Every day I took the fast train to school. The fast train missed out certain stations. It was fun to see the other teenage school kids waiting on the platform thinking the train was going to stop and then jumping out of their skin-tinted skin as we whooshed past. The trains were pretty old and rattly. When the train reached its top speed, the sound of the rails screeching was deafening and the passengers would be bouncing up and down in their bench-like seats. I preferred the fast train, not because it was quicker, but because it didn’t stop to let in teenage schoolgirls. The only stop between Finchley Road, where I got on, and the school, Northwood, was Harrow-on-the-Hill.
Sorry, I’m going to interrupt myself because I’ve just remembered a little story about Harrow-on-the-Hill. I was once trying to get there on a bus and I asked the West Indian bus conductor where the bus was going. ‘Herne Hill,’ he said. Herne Hill is nowhere near Harrow-on-the-Hill. But if you say Herne Hill with a West