Ain't There One Damn Song That Can Make Me Break Down and Cry

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 41-year-old who will never play The Dane. In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, ‘menk’ is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal." MENK 37: AIN'T THERE ONE DAMN SONG THAT CAN MAKE ME BREAK DOWN AND CRY My plane takes off from Gatwick at 7.05AM, meaning I need to be there by 5.30AM, meaning I need to leave my house at 3.30AM, meaning there’s no point in going to bed. I mean, I could go to bed, but I’d just be lying there in the dark sweating, running through various disastrous scenarios in my head, all of which end with the kind of impact that bursts your eyes, drives your skull into your pelvis and leaves one of your legs up a tree, half a mile away from your body. Imagine Goya’s Disasters Of War, but with Adidas trainers and socks from Next. Better just to stay up all night listening to Bolt Thrower and reading Twitter. There’s an obvious joke to be made here about easyJet’s Speedy Boarding scheme, but I won’t cheapen either of us by making it. I can’t remember a single thing about Gatwick, even though I’ve been through it countless times. Will Self said, quite rightly, that airports are designed with utter mundanity in mind. They serve the main function of making you forget exactly what it is you’re doing. He claimed that all of these buildings should be like Gold Mayan temples and that all aeroplanes should be completely transparent, so that all air travellers would realise exactly how remarkable what they’re doing is. Normally – in fact, under any other circumstance – I’d be completely up for a visionary like Self having some sort of powerful government job overseeing architecture in the UK, but in this case I’m glad that heroin, anti-authoritarian tendencies and withering cynicism mean it’s highly unlikely he’ll ever get to instigate this as public policy.

In a few hours’ time, when I arrive at my aptly named terminus, it will look like a grey concrete mausoleum. The last building I will ever enter. (Alive and not in several bags on gurneys, that is.) With each passing minute, the fear is beginning to take hold. I can feel my eye sockets go really cold and the increasing surges in adrenaline make my entire body feel like a surgical glove filled with hot tomato soup, so very soon I will reach for mankind’s greatest invention, a strip of diazepam in tablet form. And within 20 minutes I will feel like the Fonz. I’d never travelled by plane before my 21st birthday. We always took caravan holidays in the UK when I was younger as plane travel was prohibitively expensive for our family. But then Hoover UK – a company that no longer exists – offered two BA flights to America for a fortnight in exchange for buying one of their vacuum cleaners. My girlfriend at the time, Flo, bought one for £110 and sold it to a friend of ours for £90. The friend had recently undergone a sex change. She’d been a train driver and had a really rough time after someone had committed suicide by jumping on the tracks one day. She always seemed pretty upset, poor woman. That said, she loved the Hoover. Flo, being smart, kept photocopies of everything and sent all the correspondence recorded delivery, so it didn’t matter how many times our paperwork “got lost”, eventually they had to sort us out with some tickets. I kind of knew I was afraid of flying before we got to the airport and was sure of the fact the second we got there. Standing next to a soldier with a large automatic weapon across his chest, I looked out of the big window at a jumbo taking off and started crying. It was 6AM. Lois said: “Well, you’ve got an hour to get drinking…” On the plane, many whiskies later, nothing was any better. As we taxied on to the runway, I thought about the train hitting the suicide jumper. I thought about the film Alive! I thought about Lockerbie. I thought about how stupid I’d been to sell the Hoover – I could be at home now in Hull, vacuum cleaning and not about to die. And then as the plane accelerated and took off I emitted a high-pitched shriek. Several people started laughing at me. “Doran!” hissed Lois. And it was literally only the fact that she was giving me the look, that stopped me from crawling on my hands and knees to the cockpit and begging them tearfully to turn the plane round and take me home.

New York in 1992 was amazing. I can only guess how good it was in the 70s or 80s. I’ll tell you how good it was. I saw one of Shellac’s first ever gigs and relatively that was the most boring thing that happened to me in a fortnight. In China Town, a chicken in a machine beat me at noughts and crosses – tic-tac-toe, I guess – eight times in a row. Flo was getting annoyed with me because she wanted to do something a bit more cultural: “Doran, why is this bird beating you all the time?” I was cross because the answer was obvious – it always got the first go, the game was rigged in its favour. In the traffic on Broadway, a man on rollerblades, dressed only in Lycra shorts and a feather boa, stretched out flat holding onto a TV stand with castors and shot past us through the lights. At the end of the two weeks I had to be cajoled back to JFK and on to the plane. And then, safely back in Blighty, it would be nearly a decade before I got on a plane again. Back in Hull, over much sherry and cannabis, I told Albert and Rich that I’d seen a man with a brass face. On a train platform in the Bronx, he had a piece of brass which formed his nose and upper lip, attached to his ears like a pair of glasses. Albert said that was nothing. In New Orleans he’d seen a man with a wooden hand. The solid wooden prosthesis had a hole drilled between two of the fingers so he could place a cigarette there. Mahogany was ideal; not only was the man African-American but the wood is notoriously hard to set alight. It would have been ridiculous for him to have a balsa wood hand. Rich, who was seriously fucked, had the wrong end of the stick and started getting agitated: “What do you mean he had a wooden head? I don’t even understand how that would work…" By the time I get to the gate at Gatwick, the Valium is kicking in. There is no screaming as the plane takes off. Well, not from me anyway. The business trip or holiday always starts early for me now. If there’s a more luxurious experience than nupping out on valium while listening to Young Americans on a pair of good headphones, then I’m yet to experience it.

Previously: Menk, by John Doran - Trudging Slowly Over Wet Sand

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.