Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Read online

  Joel Golby

  BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT

  Joel Golby is a staff writer for Vice, where he is among the site’s most-read contributors. He has written for The Guardian, ShortList, and the BBC. He’s more of a cat man than a dog man, but he sees merits in both. He lives in London.

  www.joelgolby.co.uk

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, MARCH 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Joel Golby

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following essays originally appeared, in slightly different form, on Vice: “Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead,” “24 Stories from the Middle of the Desert,” and “A Can of Lager and a Three-Course Meal, or A Guide to Dinner Parties, If You Are Sort of in Your Twenties.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Golby, Joel, author.

  Title: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant brilliant brilliant : essays / Joel Golby.

  Description: New York : Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018030398 | ISBN 9780525562771 (trade pbk. original) | ISBN 9780525562788 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6107.O423 A6 2019 |DDC 824/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018030398

  Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525562771

  Ebook ISBN 9780525562788

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  Cover photograph © Max Siedentopf

  Author photograph © Bekky Lonsdale

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  This book is dedicated to Sacha Fernando,

  who gave me an iPad once.

  This is the deal. We are even now.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface: Hello, America!

  Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead

  The Murderer Who Came to Tea

  Twitch Dot TV

  Ribs

  List of Fears: A List

  Adult Size Large

  24 Stories from the Middle of the Desert

  Swish

  PCM

  Hot Sauce Capitalism

  A Can of Lager and a Three-Course Meal, or A Guide to Dinner Parties, If You Are Sort of in Your Twenties

  That Time I Invented Sitting Down

  I Have the Monopoly

  Party Hard

  I Will Never Be as Tough as Pitbull, or Chasing the Masculinity of the Greatest Cuban-American Crossover Pop-Rapper in All of History

  The Tao of Dog Piss

  Why Rocky IV Is the Greatest Ever Rocky Film and Therefore by Extension the Greatest Film in History: An Imaginary TED Talk

  Eye Mask: A Review

  I Went to Barcelona and All I Got Was This Handjob from a Sex Robot

  Hey: Am I a Leather Jacket Guy?

  All the Fights I’ve Lost

  At Home, in the Rain

  Mustache Rider

  Running Alongside the Wagon

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  HELLO, AMERICA!

  “Gurn,” my editor is saying. He is on the phone to me from America and the line crackles across an ocean. We have never met, but we speak like this. He does not know what gurning is. “Gurn. I had to look up what ‘gurning’ means.” You don’t have gurning in America? I say. You don’t have a weird annual country-fair-style championship where ugly men hold a weird horse brace over their shoulders and pull a contorted face? “No,” he says, delicately. And I say: Huh. We make them famous over here. On the magazine shows of my childhood, gurners were a regular feature. You don’t have gurners? He clarifies: “We don’t have that.” Huh. Huh!

  America, you and I are different, but we share more similarities than you know. I just looked up gurning on Wikipedia and found possibly the two most British paragraphs ever constructed, and now I think I understand the uneasy boundary between us. On one side of the ocean: you, glossy and blue-white gapless teeth, a hardwired confidence; plus everyone knows the words to your national anthem. On our side, this:

  Those with the greatest gurn capabilities are often those with no teeth, as this provides greater room to move the jaw further up. In some cases, the elderly or otherwise toothless can be capable of gurns covering the entire nose.

  Peter Jackman became England’s best-known gurner, winning the world championship four times, beginning in 1998 with a face called the “Bela Lugosi.” He made numerous TV appearances, including an appearance on They Think It’s All Over. He had his teeth removed in 2000 to make his features easier to manoeuvre.

  Is it weird that you don’t have that? Or is it weird that we do? Listen: we’ll never agree. The point is that there is a cultural chasm between us, and this is me reaching out to you across it, grasping your perfect North American hand—which is full of roast turkey, for some reason?—and telling you that shh, shh, we can get on if only you let us. Here are some facts:

  America, you and I share a love language, and that love language is snacks. Every time I go to America (twice!), I spend at least a morning but sometimes an entire morning and a bit of an afternoon in the largest supermarket I can find, looking at snacks. You do some insane things with pretzels, and I enjoy every one of those insane things. You have something called Twizzlers, which I don’t understand but always seem to end up buying a hundred-pack of. One time for dinner in America I just chain-drank a case of LaCroix and had like six different versions of Reese’s Pieces and watched some news hosts shout at each other for a pretty constant forty-five minutes. Next time I fly over there I’m penciling out a whole day in my itinerary to go spend it in CVS, bulk-buying Ambien and Cheetos, which I am going to eat in front of Wendy Williams, who as best I can tell is a very glamorous woman whose job it is to very slowly explain the news. I like that you have that.

  America, you take Halloween exceptionally seriously, and I respect that. I should love Halloween, because spiritually I am reasonably goth and I really love snacks (see: above, about snacks) (I really do want to make it clear to you how much I enjoy snacking!), but my first experience of Halloween was a bust, and from there I’ve never really recovered. Picture the scene: I am five years old, so essentially exactly like I am now but smaller. My mother has diligently sewn me together a skeleton costume, a full one-piece fashioned from an old blackout curtain with stenciled paper bones pinned to the front. I am told to go four doors up my road to knock on the door of Annie, a friendly neighbor my mother has already phoned ahead who agreed it is fine for me to trick-or-treat. She welcomes me in, and I sit in an armchair the size of the moon. “Well, I don’t have any sweets,” she says, gazing into her cupboard. “But I do have: peanut butter, raspberry jam, strawberry jam, damson jam, a tin of condensed milk…” (For reasons of a limited word count for this entire book I am going to pause the listing here, but essentially imagine a seventy-year-old woman who has never thrown long-life food out
ever is telling you literally everything she has in her cupboard, including all the variants of syrup, a process that lasted probably ten to fifteen entire minutes.) “…and lemon curd, do you want any of that?” And I nodded and said, “The last one,” and she said, “Lemon curd?” and I said yes—I have to confess to you that I did not know what lemon curd was at the time, but I nodded along to be polite—and she said, “Well, okay then,” and handed me a half-used jar of lemon curd. I trudged home as a skeleton and handed it to my mum, who made some toast and spread it on that. That was it. That is my lifetime Halloween candy haul, in its entirety. This would never happen in America, and that’s why it’s a better country than ours.

  Do you guys even have lemon curd? Should probably have checked before I put an anecdote that completely hinges on the concept of lemon curd in an opening preface in which I am meant to endear myself to the American public.

  America, you only get ten vacation days a year, but you also have a far healthier pancake culture inside of you, and I’m still weighing up whether that means you come out ahead or behind. Like: it says here that the average European gets twenty-five paid days of leave every year, but when Europeans make pancakes, they come out thin and doily-like, and we call them crepes. Meanwhile, Americans only get two weeks paid off work each year, which seems nuts to me, but you can walk into essentially any shop or diner on any street in the country and get a big, big, violently large stack of pancakes, with fruit or cream or syrup. You might not see the correlation here, but I do. Like: I enjoy having days off, but I also can’t find a good pancake here at all. For me a pancake needs to come out like a thick circular sponge that can absorb half a pot of syrup. I need to be able to melt an entire pat of butter on top of it and slice down through a stack of them with the edge of a fork or spoon. If you slapped me in the face with a properly dressed American pancake, in my opinion, it should be hefty enough to leave a bruise. Am I willing to work myself down to the nub in exchange for the easy pancake access your country provides? You know what, I very truly think I am. I’m downloading the visa application as we speak.

  America, none of your national games make sense, but none of ours do, either. I don’t understand what baseball is—it seems to be the only sport on earth you can never really get too old or too out-of-shape to retire from, because it’s just dad-looking guys wearing helmets that only cover one ear (???)—but then is that really so far away from cricket, a sport where thousands of drunk sunburnt men assemble to watch twenty-two guys in formal white trousers crack cricket balls out to the boundaries over a course of three days? Basketball seems beyond my comprehension—your country’s giants compete to see who can score a hundred points first, and they have to play a game like once every two nights, which seems too much for me—but then we also have rugby, which is a game where Britain’s Largest Boys run into each other at pace, and ball play seems to be an afterthought. During my last trip to America I was lucky enough to catch the Super Bowl, which was not something I understood before it unfolded (All the play goes through the quarterback and every other man on the pitch is either there to protect or attack the quarterback, is that right? All of them end up bankrupt, somehow? Is that a game mechanic?), but then I slowly got drunk as I watched the game unfurl and I got it: the constant adverts; the men in wireless microphones shouting; the peculiar violent ballet of an American football game, where walking a yard is inexplicably as important as actually scoring a point; a weird hyperathletic war of attrition that Beyoncé sometimes sings during the middle of. After that I went upstairs and ate potluck food while people talked about the president, and I felt closer to your people than I ever felt possible.

  America, essentially every time I walk around your pavements, streets, restaurants, hotels, and shops, I believe myself to be in a sitcom I have already watched for years from home, and an odd cognitive dissonance occurs, and I start to wonder whether what I’m touching, tasting, and seeing is real—really real—or if I am experiencing some kind of brain death and actually I am still very firmly at home, just slipping slowly into an irreparable coma, imagining myself here in the shapes of the things I’ve seen before. Literally the only evidence I have that I am alive and present is that the Seinfeld bass line isn’t constantly slapping in the background every time I try and catch the subway in New York.

  Don’t really understand tipping in the same way you do, but I honestly do try.

  But other than that, America, you and I are the same. Listen, this book is basically about universal themes anyway: love and hatred, death and life, whether the M&M spokescandies could beat me in a fight, admiration for the pop artist Pitbull, a borderline-erotic obsession with the fictional boxer Rocky. We can all agree on all of those things, and finding similarities in a minefield of differences is what keeps us—humanity—together. Am I saying this book is the most important document in over 250 years of Anglo-American relations? Yes, I am. Thank you for picking it up and reading it. Thank you, America, for—in your own little way—falling in love with me. I love you, too.

  Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead

  My parents are dead, and all I can think about is how to sell this house that they left behind. It’s me and my sister in a room without curtains—we had to take down the curtains to decorate, so the sunlight is pooling in, and nothing looks more naked than a house stripped and moved around when the person who lived in it died, and no more is that so than in the cold white light of the day—and we are painting every wall in this fucking place white, because my mother went decoratively insane before she died and discovered the Dulux Color Match service and went absolutely ham on that thing. And we’ve had three separate estate agents come in, with blazers that bunch around the buttons and a clipboard or iPad and a special laser tool to measure the size of every room, surveying the corpse with cool detachment and weighing each pound of flesh for gold, and they say—all of them, in turn—they say:

  “It’s going to be very hard,” they say, “to sell a house with a pink kitchen.” Which I admit is true.

  My parents are dead, and the kitchen is pink, and the dining room, where she always used to sit, each morning, with a pale cup of tea and some cigarettes, is a sort of terra-cotta orange, with a gold line of paint stenciled around it at approximately head height. The front room is a looming maroon, a deep dark red the kind you haven’t seen since a Twin Peaks hell scene, and upstairs the spare room is brown with bronze swirls crawling up the wall in the vague approximation of a plant. The house was always her project: whenever I would go home, she would explain with extravagant hand gestures, not moving from that dining room chair, smoke spiraling through the air, what the hallway would look like when she was done, and what she’d really like to do with my room—now a spare room—and what she’d do with the spare room that wasn’t my room, if she had the money, and then ideally the garden, and then of course the kitchen, but—

  And then she was dead and we had to paint over it all white to sell it.

  My parents are dead, and now I don’t know where to spend Christmas. Like, can I go to Dad’s? No. Dad’s is out because Dad now resides on a golf course in Wolverhampton, a golf course that has no official idea about this because when we sprinkled him—a gray, dreary day in February, the first of his birthdays without him—the family neglected entirely to go through any legitimate ash-sprinkling channels, which is why we had to take two cars and kind of sneak down this side road and park nearby, hop through thick grass on a hill, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, passing around the big ice cream tub that had Dad in it, sprinkling that, and so of course he went everywhere, big billowing clouds of Dad all around us, sticking to boots and trousers, clots of gray Dad on the ground. So: can’t go there.

  Mum’s is out, because Mum is a slick of gray dust, long since lost to the waves, that was last seen poured into a shallow hole on a beach in Filey. This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, g
etting rid of six and a half pounds of ground Mum is a nightmare. Firstly it is never in an urn: the crematorium always presents it to you in a practical-looking if gray-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as a rudimentary spill insurance. Then you have to get the old band together again, i.e., get all of the family to one chosen place to reverently pour dust on the ground. My sister did the hard work of organizing this one, getting my two cousins, my aunt, my cousin’s two children and his dog, my cousin’s son’s girlfriend who I don’t think ever met my mum so why she’d want to come to a beach in Filey to dispose of her I don’t know but by then we really needed to up the numbers, a couple of Mum’s old friends, and also me to a beach in eastern England, the sky so white it was gray, not a scrap of sun, not a scrap of it, and we spent two hours in Filey slowly walking down to the beach, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes urn (someone had to carry that thing for half a mile, swear to god), then fish and chips and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion.

  So anyway, yeah: Christmas is tricky.

  My parents are dead, and my dad died when I was fifteen and my mum followed suit ten years later. I had “completed the set” by the age of twenty-five, and they managed to split up somewhere in the midst of it, too: they never married, but they argued as if they had been, separating when I was thirteen. “I am an orphan!” I now say to people, as a joke, and they go, “You’re not an orphan, don’t be sil—” then realize that yes, actually, I am, and just because I’m not some grubby-faced Oliver-style orphan, flat cap and itchy tweed asking a man for oats, doesn’t mean I’m not an orphan. I’m an orphan. Look it up. I am the dictionary definition of an orphan.