Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [7]
Within hours they both got back to me. Billy, it transpired, was in Vermont for the summer. A mere three hours’ drive. A few hours later, there was a knock on my hotel room door and standing there was my father’s son, Billy McIntyre. Billy was an all-American kid. He was twenty years old, the lead singer in a band and good-looking. In short, nothing like me. We shared a special few days together that I’m sure would have meant more to our dad than me sitting alone in his favourite deli.
I was in Montreal primarily to work, so Billy came with me to a number of my shows. I introduced him to my fellow comedians as ‘my long-lost brother’, not realizing that this seemed dubious to say the least. It soon got back to me that the word was I was a homosexual. It looked for all the world as if I had picked up a local rent boy. It never crossed my mind how strange it seemed that I was suddenly hanging around with this young American kid who was also sleeping in my room.
All of the comedians were staying in the same hotel. Billy and I would walk past a gaggle of gagsters who would stop their conversation and stare, muttering to each other about the shameless exhibiting of my new sexual direction. To me, it was an emotional reunion; to everybody else, it was like a gay version of the film Pretty Woman.
On my last day of the Festival, I was in the lobby saying goodbye to Billy and slipped him a few hundred quid. It was the big brotherly thing to do, but at this very moment Frank Skinner walked past and gave me a knowing nod. I must admit; it didn’t look good.
3
Now, older readers all remember the year of my birth. Not because my entering the world made international news headlines:
CHINESE TAKEAWAY!
BRITISH PARENTS TAKE HOME
ORIENTAL BABY
It’s because 1976 was the last baking hot summer. It has become a legendary year, referenced by middle-aged Brits every time there is a heat wave (two hot days in a row), a mini-heat wave (one hot day in a row) or a micro-heat wave (the sun comes out between two clouds). This just winds me up as every spring I, like you, yearn for a long hot summer that never materializes. Well, it turns out I was actually alive for the best summer of them all. London was scorching and everyone was brown (although I was yellow due to jaundice). It was my first experience of weather and it was fantastic. I thought I lived in California, my mother didn’t need to buy me clothes for eight months, my first word was ‘Nivea’.
Me, during my brief stint as an East End Crime Lord.
In truth, the heat wave of 1976 was probably greatly exaggerated. In future years when we talk about the winter we’ve just endured, we’ll probably add a few inches of snow and deduct a few degrees from the temperature and the wind chill factor. When our grandchildren are longing for snow, we will wax lyrical about the snow of 2010 (of course, when I am a grandparent, I will then look almost exactly like Mr Miyagi so I will ‘Wax lyrical ON, Wax lyrical OFF’ about the snow of 2010… This joke requires the viewing of The Karate Kid, the original film starring Ralph Macchio.):
‘The blizzard lasted six long weeks. Sixteen feet of snow fell solidly. They were using a blank white sheet of paper for the weather forecast. Cars, houses, entire villages, disappeared. The whole country was housebound apart from Torvill and Dean, and Omar Sharif, who had experienced similar conditions during his portrayal of Dr Zhivago.’
I think Sharif would also have coped well in the heat wave of 1976, thanks to his sterling work on Lawrence of Arabia. Anyway, this isn’t Omar Sharif’s autobiography, it’s mine, so let’s get back to it. I’m born, it’s hot, and I move into a tiny flat with my parents in Kensington Church Street, London. My birth certificate states that at the time my father was