I’m reading Royston Vasey’s
autobiography at the moment. Most people will probably know him by his stage
name, Roy “Chubby” Brown.
Now, I’m actually a fan of Chubby.
I used to listen to his shows on bootleg tapes as a kid in the seventies and
eighties. Yeah, his language is foul; his humour can be bordering on the
racist, homophobic and misogynistic at times. However, that’s all it is;
humour, and there are times when Chubby is very funny.
Although I’m only a few chapters
into the book, I have to confess to a few misgivings with it. The first is how
he starts every chapter by talking about his battle with throat cancer. I
watched my dad die of that horrible disease, so I’d never dream of trivialising
it or understanding the devastating effect it can have on people’s lives. But
by reminding us about it at the start of every chapter, it feels like a
desperate attempt to garner sympathy before he tells us more tales of what a
little shit he was. There’s no link between the cancer stuff and the chapter
that follows. I’ve tried to make up my own, but these attempts have been
tenuous at best, and required viewing the language used in its broadest terms.
The names of the chapters
themselves don’t really fit either. For example, the one called “mother love”,
has precious little about his mother in it. It just starts with a bit about the
cancer again, then a few passages about his mother and how she walked out on
her family before we get more tales about what a profoundly unpleasant kid he
was.
If you wanted to put a positive
spin on it, you might say that at least he’s honest. He’s giving it to us,
warts and all, even if it does paint him in a poor light.
But I’m not sure I believe
everything he says. There seem to be discrepancies – like saying he lived in a
2-bedroom house, and when his dad moved his girlfriend and her 5 kids in, the
kids had his room, and he had the box room. So, where did his dad and his
girlfriend sleep? He talks about “honour among thieves”, and “fair game”, and
then tells us how he systematically stole from one of his friends. Also, he
seemed to squeeze a lot into his fifteenth year, such as trying to join the
army, running away from home, getting and losing at least half a dozen jobs,
buying a car with his friend and driving it to Redcar; and when the car ran out
of petrol they left it, saying they would go back the next door with a can of
petrol and pick it up again. We’re then supposed to believe they didn’t know
that they’d left it on a railway track. Also that year he ended up in a
children’s home; got a job driving a dump truck around a building site; driving
an old ambulance with which he ferried workers around another site. I could go
on and on, and I’m not even halfway through the book yet.
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