Patrick Kay, whose work you may remember from Street Carnage, never learned the value of money. Which is surprising, because unlike most people of his generation, it sounds like his parents didn't spoil the shit out of him, the little brat. He explains why in the piece below.
How do we learn the value of money? I’ll tell you how I learned. Through soul-crushing disappointment.
1987. My aunt had given me four pounds. I was five years old. Sterling pounds are uniquely satisfying coins – thick, weighty, compact, and a snazzy shade of greenish-gold. We went into the town centre (why do people go shopping when they visit other countries? How boring is that?) and passed a busker. Dumbly copying people I’d seen on telly I threw a pound into his guitar case. In the toy department of John Lewis I picked up a small box of three Lego spacemen. I wasn’t some stupid kid who liked playing with Lego; Lego was more like a part-time job. I didn’t fuck about – I built hotels, rows of terraced houses and post offices. I scorned Lego medieval with its insultingly pre-fabricated castle walls. I liked building things brick-by-brick. I needed those spacemen. I had three pounds. There was a 3 on the price tag. The whole thing said ₤3.99. I was good to go.
“You don’t have enough money,” my mum said. I wordlessly extended my palm containing the three discs, showing her I was an enfranchised member of our society. Power and status were in my hand.
“That’s the same as a pound, honey,” she said, pointing at the nonsensical “.99”. I suddenly realised I had thrown away – literally – a pound. The busker. He was probably rich and lived in a castle. A Lego medieval castle which he had built very quickly. Without skill. I started to cry. “I’ll give him a pound” my aunt said.
“He needs to learn,” my father said.
July 1992. The SNES had been out for a month in the UK. Still playing our ancient NES, my brother and I burned with frustration at the sheer shitty unfairness of our lives. Our only topic of conversation was the SNES, or more specifically our lack of one. Everyone at school had one. No-one in recorded human history had ever suffered as much, for as long consecutively, as the Kennedy brothers had. My brother’s birthday was in July but he had been categorically told that a SNES would not be forthcoming. Too expensive.
Pain turned to happiness on his birthday. It was a glorious Sunday. Danny was given a promisingly rectangular present. Excitement turned to delirious joy for both of us as he unwrapped a SNES alongside F-Zero and Super Tennis. I literally kicked the NES aside in our haste to plug it in. How could one block of grey plastic bring so much joy? There had been one small fly in the ointment.
Mother. She had issued a chilling proviso, a horrifying caveat: “This is for both of you. This is Patrick’s birthday present too.”
I heard the words and dismissed them. My birthday was over two months away. I wasn’t worried - she’d made the decision unilaterally. It was doubtless illegal to do that; she hadn’t asked me if I was prepared to enter into such a bargain. You couldn’t just decide what birthday present you were going to get someone without consulting them. She was out of her fucking mind if she thought she wasn’t getting me a present. I would get the police involved if necessary. Anyway, she’d forget. Like I said, my birthday was two months away.
Two months? In two months I’d have a mortgage and kids.
September 1992. I woke up on my birthday – also a Sunday. A dark, gloomy Sunday. The weather was matched by the uneasy shadow across my heart. Mum had told me several times that I would not be receiving a present. Just like she’d said all that time ago. She seemed pretty resolute, but nonetheless in the preceding weeks I had provided her with the titles of the Fighting Fantasy game books I wanted. A Transformers Sky Hammer Ultra Pretender figure would hit the spot nicely, too. I didn’t for one minute believe that the woman who had given birth to me would do anything so cruel as leave me hanging on my birthday.
Oscillating wildly between fear and desperate hope I woke my parents up. They wished me a happy birthday and started to make breakfast.
I should have learned from Legogate. There was nothing.
Nothing.
My brother – an unemployed seven year old bum, a loser – had of course not got a present for me either. I didn’t cry; I wandered through the day in a cold, dark void of lovelessness, wondering why I had been singled out for such an unusually cruel fate. I actually wished I was dead. There was my favourite chocolate cake for dinner. It turned to ashes in my mouth.
July 2001. I’d finished my A levels and was looking forward to a lads’ holiday in Spanish puke-point HQ Magaluf. I’d never been away without my family before and couldn’t wait. By this point my father was dead – years of silent fury, of choking down acrid bile into his gullet as he fumed at everything in creation, had finally resulted in death from astonishingly aggressive pancreatic cancer a few years previously. I imagine I’ll die in a similar grimly apt way; perhaps a brain hemorrhage as my cerebrum finally explodes, burnt out by a lifetime of obsessive self-absorption and disgusted narcissism. I’d paid for the holiday and also saved the princely sum of ₤300 by working in a university cafeteria. Few people on the face of the earth had ever worked as hard as I had, driving my body through punishing five hour shifts three and sometimes four times a week. I was Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. I was Alexey Stakhanov. I was John Henry. Two days before I was due to leave my mother asked me to drive her to the gym.
“Walk,” I said. “I thought you were trying to get fit?”
“Drive me,” she said. Unfairly she escalated the confrontation indecently by using her “do not fuck with me” voice straight away. (You had to pay for parking.) Fine. Buckled with impotent rage I slipped into the driving seat and reversed the car out of the garage. Straight into the van of a workman painting our neighbour’s house.
The grinding crunch of impact spelt one thing and one thing only: money. I had been doing about 4mph. There was one small ding in the van. The painter came out, circumspect, a man of the world. Around ₤800, he reckoned, to have it fixed. The excess was ₤280. She made me pay before I left, refusing absolutely to shoulder any moral or fiscal responsibility. I still went to Magaluf. While my friends partied until daybreak I sat in the hotel room and ate tinned tuna. There wasn’t even a television. I came back from holiday paler than when I left.
“He needs to learn,” my father had said all those years ago. Oh, I’d learned. Learned that my parents were dicks.
--PATRICK KAY
--PATRICK KAY
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11 comments:
TLD BRO
Read my dick. I remember the first time I got a Ninetendo. The regular one I guess. It came with Duck Hunt maybe? Jesus that was a long time ago. It was probably the greatest moment of my life. All down hill from there. I never learned the value of a dollar either though and I was a pretty spoiled cunt.
The bums lost! The bums will always lose!
Put it on your tombstone &c
Thanks, Luke. This Kay fella is good and funny.
@ Anonymous: tell that to the philistines over at Street Boners. And most of my friends and family.
-Patrick K's mom
@ Anon: mum.
An Open Letter to the Detractors on behalf of PK.
As a drug addled American anon commenter, I find Mr. Kay's work a breath of fresh air. Who knew the Irish were so sensitive and hilarious? (Don't say I read it on PTSOTL though. Behind the thick wrists, Rollins's style tats, and Don Johnson stubble, LuOn ((not a shitty ATL rapper)) is another tender cat descended from the Emerald Isle.) I say he is Ireland's most fantastic export since Lara O'Shea's magnificent milk white titties and stylishly coiffed red bush. 1916 is a poor facsimile of this man's "Troubles". In closing, dear reader, please heap praise unto him so we may get more of these writings. I'm looking at you, Mum.
That's either the best comment I've read here in a while or the worst. Either way, don't call me Irish, because that shit is racist.
N word please. You're like every dude in the HoP Jump Around video.
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