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Goodnight Steve McQueen
A Novel
Chapter One
Do you remember the quiz show Winner Takes All? It had a top prize of one thousand pounds. They kept it in a Perspex display case. A thousand crisp green notes. Right there. Right under your nose, and it was real money as well, not like those cheques they wave about on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
I can't remember anyone winning it, though. Not ever. Most of the contestants seemed happy with fifty quid and a slap on the back from Liza Tarbuck's dad: a weekend for two in Blackpool if they were lucky. And you knew it would rain the whole time they were there. And you knew Peter from Wilmslow was secretly gay so he'd have to take Beryl, his arthritic nan, instead of Rita, his imaginary wife. And you knew he wouldn't be able to go backstage and have his picture taken with the Nolan Sisters after all, because he'd have to be back at the Grand Palace B&B before the ten o'clock curfew.
Thanks, Tarby. Thanks very much.
I mean, what a con. Talk about massaging the truth. It should have been called Loser Takes All. It should have been called No-Hope-Rubbish-Hair-Crap-Job-No-Prospects-Lousy-Boyfriend-Loser Takes All.
I can't help thinking I would have done rather well.
My name is Steve McQueen and I'm a very bitter man. What on earth were they thinking of, calling me Steve? Didn't they realise it would ruin me? Didn't they know I'd be tortured? Didn't they understand it would be impossible for me to live up to? Did they hell. It was my mum's fault, of course, she was obsessed with him. The only reason she married my dad in the first place was because of the name. It didn't matter that he was a geography teacher. It didn't matter that he was bald at the age of eighteen, fat at the age of twenty-two, and dead at the age of thirty-three and a half. Mum had what she'd always wanted. She'd married herself a genuine McQueen.
I was three years old when my father died -- he had a heart attack on a field trip to an ox-bow lake -- and for a long time I actually thought Steve McQueen was my real dad. I remember my mum sitting me down to watch The Towering Inferno when I was five -- spooning down my second helping of Heinz spaghetti hoops -- and feeling really proud. We both clapped at the end. What a guy. He'd even managed to save Fred Astaire and the cat. What a guy. What a dad.
There were pictures of him all over the house. Steve driving his Porsche 917 from Le Mans, Steve flying through the air in his 1968 Mustang from Bullitt, Steve being chased by Nazis in The Great Escape, and a giant scrapbook filled with press cuttings that she kept in a bruised leather suitcase under her bed.
"Who's this?" I said, flicking through her scrapbook one afternoon. "Who is this?"
"It's Ali MacGraw, the lady out of Love Story."
"What's Love Story?"
"Oh, it's so sad. Oh, I don't think I can talk about it. Not without crying."
And off she went, off to fetch a hankie from the dressingtable drawer, and all I could think was, Why is Dad doing that? What is Dad doing kissing Ali MacGraw?
I suppose things were okay to begin with. I was a great-looking child. I looked like the Milky Bar Kid only cuter: white blond hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, and the cheekiest, wide-mouthed, gap-toothed grin you've ever seen.
She was dead proud of me. I could tell she thought there was hope: that I might grow up to be a movie star or a Formula 1 driver or a teenage multimillionaire, and for a few precious years (apart from finding out that my dad was a dead geography teacher instead of an A-list Hollywood star) I was blissfully happy.
I brought home crayon drawings of racing cars and Mum stuck them on the fridge next to her collection of Steve McQueen quotes. I built models of doomed Apollo rockets out of cornflake packets and Mum put them on the sideboard next to her picture of Steve McQueen's house: 27 Oakmont Drive, Brentwood, California-- we knew the address by heart. I collected model motorcycles, built planes out of balsa wood and elastic bands, and I even went to martial arts classes on account of my namesake being a thirddan black belt in karate. I was rather good at it. I won the club's under-tens trophy in 1979. It was a great year. The same year I won a Blue Peter badge for my papier-mâché Shep.
And then it all went wrong.
"What's this?" I said, pointing to an angry red lump on my forehead. "What is this?"
"Acne."
"What's acne?"
"Oh. It's so awful. I don't think I can talk about it. Have you been masturbating, Steve McQueen?"
Of course I'd been masturbating. I was thirteen years old. My life was one long shower. I was the cleanest teenager in the whole of Woodford Wells. I masturbated so much I worried that my cock would spontaneously combust from all the friction (spontaneous combustion was very big in the eighties), and anyway it was supposed to make you go blind, not cover your face in deep-pile acne vulgaris. I didn't wank again for almost three years. I didn't dare.
I tried everything I could think of. I gave up chocolate, stopped drinking milk, painted my skin with foul-smelling potions that made my skin peel like a sun-baked onion, but nothing did any good. Every morning I'd wake up in a pool of nocturnal emissions, half my face stuck to the brushed-nylon pillowcase, desperate for a wank and a bowl of Coco Pops ...
Goodnight Steve McQueen
A Novel. Copyright © by Louise Wener. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.