Phone pranks were what we did back when the telephone was the only available means of anonymous instantaneous communication. It involved calling up a complete stranger and giving them a hard time in a way which seemed amusing, particularly if you recorded the call for later playback. People who try too hard have since attempted to dignify the undertaking by terming it phone phreaking, emphasising the anarchic aspects, often in relation to anonymous calls used to strike back at large corporations; but it's rarely anything so ethical and is otherwise something you hopefully grow out of.
My first prank call, undertaken at the age of fourteen, was to a person with the surname of Rainbow which I'd found in the telephone directory. Mrs. Rainbow answered the phone and I asked to speak to Geoffrey. When she explained that no-one of that name was to be found at that address, I asked to speak to either Bungle or Zippy. Geoffrey was the presenter of Rainbow, a popular children's television programme featuring characters called Bungle and Zippy. I could barely get the names out because I was laughing so much. Despite the obvious hilarity, the exercise felt mean-spirited, pointless, and not a little retarded, thankfully curtailing a career of calling up random drinking establishments and asking to speak to Mr. Hardcock - who was certain to be in the bar somewhere and whose first name would naturally be Ivor.
Oh my sides!
A few of my friends filled tape after tape with prank phone calls. I made copies for myself because they were hilarious at the time, although listening back from this side of the millennium, they're revealed as mostly fairly boring, albeit with infrequent flashes of brilliance - usually occurring where surrealism eclipses the more traditional abusive element. One example of this was my friend Graham making lengthy and detailed enquiries about the cost of having a rather naughty picture tattooed upon his person - as he describes it in an exaggerated camp voice - a picture which he's far too embarrassed to identify, much to the general bewilderment of the tattooist. Such examples might almost count as performance art to my way of thinking, although even in such cases, my memory of the recording tends to be funnier than actually listening to it.
A couple of years after I grew out of what little appreciation I'd had for prank phone calls, they began turning up on mainstream radio shows in typically witless form. The most surprising thing for me was the realisation that this was apparently something which everybody did at some point or other. I'd assumed it was just me and my little pals, but mainly my little pals because they were funnier.
At some point in the early nineties, I was in correspondence with John, the editor of a fanzine dedicated to pranks, including this kind, specifically a fanzine taking the view of pranks as a means of striking back at authority by an otherwise disempowered populace - although not quite so dry as that may sound. John sent me a tape of prank phone calls made by a friend of his, someone called Noel who lived in a small town just outside of Dublin. Noel's phone calls were truly peculiar and very entertaining, rarely abusive, more often bizarre and preposterous foreshadowing the sort of thing for which Chris Morris became known. He'd call up a branch of Tower Records to complain about the Satanic backmasking on an Enya album and what it had made him do, or - and this one remains my personal favourite - answer a postcard placed in a newsagent window by someone who had found a pencil case. What made this particular call so fascinatingly odd was Noel playing the role of a person who quite clearly didn't own the pencil case, but hoped to obtain it by deception.
Noel also produced a fanzine called ZGB, standing for Zippy, George and Bungle, characters from the aforementioned Rainbow. The thing was chaotic and incoherent, not so much a fanzine about Rainbow as one peppered with frequent mystifying references to the same. It seemed like the work of a man having a fight with himself. Noel and I eventually ended up writing to each other, exchanging tapes and the like, although I can't remember who first wrote to who. Our correspondence was conducted with some caution on my part because he seemed a little scary, and certainly unpredictable. I didn't want to find myself on the receiving end of one of his phone calls. His letters were very funny, and often peppered with references to his having discovered the phone numbers or addresses of various celebrities.
In September 1995 he visited London, simultaneous to a visit by the aforementioned John, the fanzine guy, who stayed on my sofa for a couple of nights. I was still a little wary of meeting Noel, but having just split with my girlfriend of the time, I was keen for distraction, and John being there would, I hoped, reduce the possibility of awkward or otherwise weird silences.
Whatever I expected, Noel was something else when I met him - genuinely warm, funny, and erudite. He was good company and in a way which seemed consistent with the impression I'd picked up from his tapes. If there was any element of malice or anything mean-spirited in him, it was nowhere near the surface. Against my expectations, he served to alleviate the tension of hanging out with John who was a nice guy but reserved and awkward.
The two of them went into central London, as tourists do, and came back with bags of goodies. John hadn't bought much, but what he had bought seemed earnestly countercultural. Noel on the other hand had been to the Japan Centre in Leicester Square for Godzilla related materials, but had also picked up VHS tapes of Blake's 7 and Ben Dover II.
We watched an episode of Blake's 7, which was ropey and nothing like so enjoyable as it had seemed when I was twelve. It was slow and took itself far too seriously for something so heavily reliant upon suspension of disbelief.
Ben Dover II, the second in what I'm sure must have been a long-running series, was an independent art cinema production aimed primarily at a male audience wherein the eponymous Mr. Dover travels the corner shops, petrol stations and rural post offices of England engaging in impromptu sexual acts with the women he randomly encounters along the way, acts which are recorded by his assistant, a man with a portable video camera. The likelihood of randomly encountered and generously breasted women dropping them for a stranger with a video camera suggests these engagements to have been staged, despite effecting to appear otherwise.
I've never had a particularly heavy pornography habit, but the general concept of watching a bluey with two other men in the room seemed to defeat the point. Noel was nevertheless insistent and admittedly I probably didn't put up much of a protest. Ben Dover II was surprisingly entertaining, rather than being just embarrassing to watch in the company of other single men. Ben himself came across as strangely likable in his enthusiastically rogering his way across the British Isles, and everyone in the video seemed to be having a genuinely good time. The moment which has stayed with me occurs as our leading man suggests that a young lady with whom he has recently become acquainted might additionally provide oral stimulation to the bloke holding the video camera as Ben himself attends to her other end.
'Oh,' we hear the cameraman exclaim as he pans down to the front of his own trousers. 'This is indeed an unexpected bonus!'
John went back to Wales, Noel went back to Ireland, and we all carried on with our lives unhindered by sexual partners, improbable though that may seem. I became increasingly frustrated over the next five years and even attempted unorthodox means of entering a relationship, to little avail as I explained in a letter written to Noel dated to October, 2000.
So far I've had a total of one response to my classified advertisement in a rude magazine. I politely declined the offer as I was looking for someone under fifty, and who had actually been a bird from day one, so it's back to the drawing board.
This was around the time of my trying to write Hueyteteotecuhtin, an exhaustive if potentially cranky summary of pre-Hispanic Mexican mythology. I'd maintained a sporadic correspondence with Noel, fuelled by our shared love of Brookside and rap music so naturally I mentioned Hueyteteotecuhtin in passing. He told me that he too had been writing a book, specifically a novel, for which he required an agent.
The four fuck ups left the service station, not before Iz Insayne entered the public toilets, took out a pornographic magazine (pocket size, Japanese), jacked off all over it and left it on the downturned seat for some unfortunate to find or some junkie to sit on or some stressed businessman to have a meal with. Iz did this quirky thing a lot. He didn't know why.
Soon they were on their way, halfway to Dover. Say was speeding at over the ton, Missile Tips and Mikester were talking about periods. Iz was bored.
'Hay Say, pull up alongside some speeding juggernaut will ya?' he asked.
Say took three minutes to catch up with an eighteen wheeler doing eighty.
'Steady as ye go,' cried Iz.
Iz wound down his window and took out his Luger and expertly fired at all the nearside wheels on the huge motherfucker of a truck. One shot took out each wheel. The juggernaut veered to the right, so Say braked and then quickly moved to the left side. Iz leaned over Missile Tips and opened her window. He then shot off the remaining tyres. Say floored the Merc. Iz looked behind and the juggernaut overturned and jack-knifed at the same time, smashing violently all over the motorway.
There was a forty-two vehicle pile-up, nine dead and thirty-three injured badly. There was also a pile-up on the other side of the motorway as ghoulish voyeurs slowed down to look at the carnage, and it was car-nage.
Iz couldn't stop laughing. 'I enjoyed that!'
Should I be able to find a publisher, Noel proposed, I could have 10% of the royalties. The novel was called Iz Insayne after its lead character. I assumed Noel was taking the piss but diplomatically pretended otherwise just in case he wasn't. He sent me the full manuscript, 110 pages thematically indistinguishable from the above aside from occasional passages featuring an increased level of sex, violence, perversion, or ethnic slurs meted out with casual abandon. I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do with it given that I had trouble reading the thing, so I passed it onto my friend, Paul Woods, then working for Plexus Books.
'Is he taking the piss?' Paul asked over the phone.
'I'm not sure,' I said truthfully. It seemed like a lot of time and energy had gone into Iz Insayne, perhaps too much for it to be no more than some elaborate wind up; but maybe that was the point. Noel's preferred form of social intercourse seemed to be to look you right in the eye with a big and absolutely sincere smile on his face as he figuratively probes a hand down the front of your pants and tells you - in a voice ranking high on the Val Doonican scale of warmth - the most preposterous shite you've ever heard. He creates a sort of cognitive dissonance between the quality of the act and the perceived sincerity of his intention. It's difficult to know quite how to react given that fuck off would be the most logical response, and yet you're not going to say fuck off to someone who so clearly means it.
Years went by and we tunneled our way slowly into the initial decade of the century, our correspondence sporadic but still bringing the occasionally bewildering enquiry as to whether Paul had yet bothered to take a look at the manuscript of Iz Insayne. Noel took an evening class, learning to paint in oils. He took photographs of his work and sent them to me. This one is called Zippy, Frankula and the Lollipop Lady. The writing on the reverse of the photograph proposes that it was painted whilst on crack.
Personally, I think it's amazing - terrible and yet brilliant at the same time, compensating for its blunt aesthetic with sheer force of insane energy. I suspect this may have been a clue as to the artistic sincerity - or otherwise - of Iz Insayne, the possibly unpublishable novel, and even calling it outsider art means you don't get it.
In 2005, I interviewed for a relationship with Marian and my application was reluctantly accepted in the absence of more suitable candidates. Noel congratulated me with a letter of which the centrepiece was a crudely rendered, pornographic, and possibly illegal biro drawing annotated this is the sort of bitch you want to fuck, or similar. Being in the first throes of admittedly poorly-informed love, I couldn't help but take offense. It really did seem as though he was taking the piss this time, and the guesswork had become exhausting. I threw away the letter and didn't write back.
Noel resurfaced a couple of years later on the internet, specifically on a bulletin board of which I'd been made administrator. The owner of the board had angered more or less every single one of the three-hundred or so regular users, who had accordingly logged off never to return. The place was looking empty so I zipped off invitations to whoever I knew with a working email address. Next day we had five new members, one of whom had chosen the username SASKWAW in upper case, like the word Sasquatch as pronounced by a hillbilly. He made a few comments - mostly amusing bordering on illegal - then posted some anime image which looked a lot like Japanese kiddy porn. He gave no response when I sent him a personal message asking, is that you, Noel?
He was banned, which I suspect may have been his intention - a complete fucking mystery to the last. More than a decade has passed and I have no idea whether Noel still exists. I have an email address but I'm too scared to investigate, to find out whether there's still anyone at the other end. On the other hand, nothing lasts forever and maybe it doesn't matter, and what matters is that our friendship, our acquaintance - or whatever it was - had me laughing my ass off on a number of occasions and prevented my slow transformation into the sort of boring lump of shite which many of our contemporaries have seemingly become.
There probably isn't any single tidy conclusion to this story.
