Christian O’Connell - The Men Commandments

It was during the hell of PE and games that I got my first real sense of rejection. At school you just want to be part of the gang, to have some sense of belonging. You don’t want to be an outsider. You want to be in the school football team. My problem was that I was very bad at football. My toe punt had killed several kids and therefore I never got picked. At break time I was always last – chosen after the asthmatic kid, the fat kid with tits and the kid with a sticking plaster over one of the lenses of his glasses. I don’t think I’ve ever got over the feeling of rejection of not making the school football team and maybe it’s that that made me want to sit in a little room each morning talking crap between songs. I am still looking for the approval the PE teacher never gave me. All the awards, they don’t help the pain.

While we are on the subject, what’s the deal with PE teachers? Psychos. Why did they hang around the showers checking we were going in naked? And, of course, like every other school, there was this kid who hit puberty at eleven and had an enormous cock that quite obviously scared/fascinated the PE teachers. I never understood why the PE teacher had his own office. All that was in there were tennis rackets and porn mags, or so my young fertile mind would imagine. Watching too many Porky’s films polluted my mind.

After the sporting rejection I decided maybe the world of school entertainment would prove to be my calling. So I auditioned for the school production of Bugsy Malone . With the promise of after-school rehearsals (mainly with girls), I was on to a winner. It would also keep me away from my penis and my masturbation habit, which was threatening to overtake my life.

The only small obstacle in my way was the audition. Simple. Sing to the Head of Music any song you wanted. As a huge Elvis Presley fan, I went for ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. I now regret this. What justice could a spotty 13-year-old with a breaking voice do to The King?

I was to stand behind the music teacher – ‘Just call me Dave’ – while he accompanied my powerhouse of a performance on the piano. I set off at a blistering pace full of vim and vigour that The King himself would have been proud of. This was soon derailed by the shaking shoulders and head of ‘Just call me Dave’. At first I thought he was getting lost in the powerful vocal performance from yours truly, giving it some Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano. But no, he was shaking with barely concealed laughter. At me. And in a way at Elvis. I kept going until the end like a pro and quickly made my excuses and left. (Hey, ‘Dave’, I hope you’re living alone in rented accommodation now while I talk to – no, enthral – an audience of 17 each morning. FUCK you!)

The next day the cast list went up on the school noticeboard by the staff room where we all thought the teachers had orgies. I was cast. As Knuckles. Who was a heavy. Cool, I thought, they cast me as a hard man due to my rugged presence. Like the future man I would become, I was developing a keen sense of denial and the ability to kid myself. I slowly realised Knuckles was also a mute. I learnt another valuable lesson. Only gay boys do school musicals.

It’s at school we get our first taste of authority figures. At primary school (or whatever it’s called now) there was that most terrifying form of humanity: the dinner lady. No word of a lie, I once saw one slap an unruly kid who was having a really bad Brussel sprout tantrum and had made the mistake of kicking a dinner lady in the shins. The resulting smack lifted him off his feet and sent him through the air. I heard that those Chinese nutjobs who guarded the Olympic flame when it came to London were trained by dinner ladies.

It’s also at school that our young man minds first get filled with the low background chatter of sex. A lot. As little boys our willies are things of fascination, and they remain that for the rest of our lives. With puberty, the fascination becomes an obsession. Most men grow out of this – unless you’re an MP or a professional footballer.

Its size, measuring it, playing with it. Our lives revolve around our own special friend. I remember an assembly which was all about sexual reproduction. The girls were told all about the changes they would be going through, and us boys got cheap thrills at the slides of breasts in bras. Then the woodwork teacher walked out and started telling us, and I’m not making this up, how to correctly measure your penis. The woodwork teacher. He said, as only a man could, that looking down at your penis was an inaccurate way to determine its length due to depth perception. A tape measure was best. I was now trying to work out how I was going to smuggle my mum’s tape measure out of her sewing kit.

‘What do you need that for, darling?’

‘Just going to measure my cock.’

‘OK, don’t forget your tea’s almost ready.’

My journey into self-pleasure coincided with something that I now look back on as some kind of cruel trick played by my parents. They had done my bedroom out and pretty damn cool it looked too. The problem was my bed sheets. They were black.

Well, black with what resembled snail trails everywhere. I remember my mum’s look of surprise as I started to do my own washing – but just the bed sheet. I almost had to get help to break it in half to get it in the washing machine. The evidence, trail of evidence, was there for all to see, and it prompted my mum to say ominously, ‘Your dad’s going to have a chat with you about all that.’ Yes, it was time to have the birds and bees chat. Oh God.

It was a very brief chat, short on detail and anything of any use. Just a ‘You know about it all, do you?’ and that I was to use a condom. Which I was already. For making water bombs. Did they have any other use?

Thankfully, one of the kids at my school had the business acumen of a young Sir Alan Sugar and had started selling pornographic magazines. Where he got them from we never knew. If you were really lucky, though, you would find a free one in a hedge. You don’t seem to see this so much any more. I often wondered how this started. Was it someone’s remote storage place? Were they hidden there by the publishers, trying to get us hooked? No one knows. These days hedges have been replaced by the internet.

I did eventually have to buy one (the hedge supply had dried up) and I have to be honest and say it actually scared me. The nudity and images were too much too soon for me and I disposed of it in the neighbour’s hedge. A lovely old man lived there with his wife, and he did have a heart attack shortly after my hedge gift. Was my copy of Razzle (with its ‘3 Bum Special’ feature) to blame in any way?

Things went into hormonal overdrive every Friday night with a new TV series called Dempsey and Makepeace . Move aside The A Team and The Rockford Files , Glynis Barber has arrived! By now I had a TV in my room and I would say good night to my parents a full ten minutes before it started – much to their surprise. What kid when finally allowed to stay up late goes to bed early?

Saying I was tired and needed to go to bed, I would leg it upstairs to get ready. I needn’t go any further other than to say that the TV needed a good wipe down on a Saturday morning. Those snails had been on the move again…

I think our fear of the dance floor stems directly from the experiences at the school disco. I’m sure the French spend their youth grinding up against each other to soulful ballads but in my experience all you used to do was skid on to your knees across the polished gym floor, push the nerds into the girls and pogo around like an idiot to Adam and the Ants.