Escape Route

By John Parker

What is an escape route? An escape route is essential if you want to stay scot-free and not end up in prison or worse. This is a story about myself and the many tight spots I have got myself into and how I managed to escape scot-free. Indeed I am a Scot and know the origin and meaning of the expression. So I have always known to make sure that I had an escape route to prevent me from ending up in the quicksand.

In the course of this book, I intend to give you my outlook on life, how Ive spent it and my opinions on many subjects. The vast majority of this book is true and the few exaggerations I have included for a laugh, you will be able to spot, but there are very few. I will not be caring if I offend anyone nor will I be politically correct in any way. If you are easily offended, dont read it. I was born in the sixties, so my sense of humour came into being in the seventies when things werent quite so politically correct as they are now. Those were the days when Warren Mitchells character Alf Garnett was the biggest comedy star on the television, so the sense of humour in this book will not be to everyones taste. But if you enjoy a good laugh . . . read on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477226216

John Parker

John Parker is Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa at SOAS, University of London, and coauthor and coeditor of African History: A Very Short Introduction and The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, respectively.   Essays by David Wengrow · Rahmane Idrissa · Cécile Fromont · Olatunji Ojo · Habtamu Tegegne and Wendy Laura Belcher · Muhammadu Mustapha Gwadabe · Wayne Dooling

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© 2012 by John Parker. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   10/01/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2620-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2621-6 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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John Parker was born in 1964 an Ayrshire farmer’s boy in the West of Scotland and educated at Gateside school and Garnock Academy, Kilbirnie. He studied at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing and became an engineer in the gas industry where he’s still employed. Preferring to tutor himself now, he has learned various languages to assist him while travelling and is fluent in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Gaelic. After leaving his home village of Gateside by Beith in Ayrshire in 1983, he moved to Troon, and in 1995 went to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and lived in the town of Stornoway until 2005 when he returned to Gourock where he is currently residing. After having back-packed and travelled all over the world, mainly by himself, he now prefers to divide his time travelling between his home in Scotland and his house on La Isla de la Juventud in Cuba.

His interests are writing comedy, travelling and photography. This is his first book and would make a good travel companion for the solo pilgrim traveller. It’s about the life of an ordinary man who has seen the world for himself, pulled a trick or two and never got stuck in the quick-sand because he had an escape route. That’s the appeal of the book, a companion for those of you who want to travel the world, broaden your horizons and make life a playground for enjoyment.

One thing is certain; you will have a laugh if you read on.

Interior art work illustration

By John Thomson

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inchains

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Quahna

CHAPTER ONE

Scot Free

What is an escape route? An escape route is essential if you want to stay Scot Free and not end up suffering under the law. This is a story about myself and the many tight spots I’ve got into and how I managed to escape Scot Free. Indeed I am a Scot and know the origin and meaning of the expression. So, I’ve always known to make sure that I have an escape route to prevent me from ending up in the quick-sand. If I’m in shit that’s deep enough to swim in, I know what stroke to pull and how get the fuck out of there! I’m always certain that there’s still that last bullet in the chamber. That is my ace card!

The reason I’m writing this book is for the humour. I intend to give you my outlook on life, how I’ve spent it and my opinions on many subjects. The vast majority of this book is true and the few exaggerations I’ve included for a laugh, you’ll be able to spot, but there are very few. I’ll not be worrying if I offend anyone nor will I be politically correct in any way. I was born in the sixties, so my sense of humour came into being in the seventies when things weren’t quite so politically correct as they are now. Those were the days when Warren Mitchell’s character Alf Garnet was the biggest comedy star on the television, so the sense of humour in this book will not be to everyone’s taste. But if you enjoy a good laugh… read on.

Anything I write which is controversial to some people may be a broadening of the mind to others like me. So, if you don’t like what you read, put it down and buy a book that a liberal, self-opinionated ponce would like; don’t think I’ll be giving a rat’s arse about it. But if you do buy this book, don’t let other people read it, as this is your book to learn from. If other people want to read it, tell the scrounging cadgers to buy one of their own!

I like the sense of humour that books written by Tom Sharpe have. ‘Riotous Assembly’ being his first book I read and his best. He’s witty in a very clever way, doesn’t care about political correctness, and passes off the characters in his books in such a way that it makes me believe that he has based them on people he knew. The comedians who make me laugh are early Billy Connolly, Chic Murray, Frankie Boyle, Hector Nicol, Bernard Manning, Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse. All for different reasons, some have better material, some have better deliverance, some are dry, some are sick and some are racist. But to me, it’s about being funny and making people laugh, so someone has got to get stick! I think people should be thick-skinned enough to realise that, and not go to race relations or some other board of a minority group for the green ink brigade to complain to over something which is no more than a little persiflage. All they’ll do is drive the humour underground with a more sinister side to it. Humans will never stop humans being humans. After all, we’re only separated from our primate ancestor by a few genes. We’re just not adapted not to slag each other off nor have we developed sufficiently enough to stop doing it. Basically we’re fickle, a good old Scottish word.

Many of the stories in the book remind me of a cartoon I watched when I was a boy about Wyle E. Coyote and the Road-runner. In the cartoon Road-runner always had an escape route and Wyle E. Coyote always got mind-fucked, but that’s in the cartoon. I hated that and always wanted that fucking little bird dead and Wyle to have been the one who did the deed. I’ve found life is more fun to emulate Wyle E. Coyote. Indeed he reminds me of myself in many ways. Only unlike the cartoon, I get off with my devilish ways. I always have a premeditated escape route planned to be my saviour and enable me to wiggle my way out of a catastrophic situation like a slippery trout. Escape route, the title of the book, is a lesson I had to learn in life. If you’re going to do something bad that might get you into bother, always have an escape route.

Are you Wyle E. Coyote or the Road-runner? Are you the one being fucked or the one who’s about to be fucked whilst trying to fuck someone else. What will your escape route be to avoid getting fucked?

There’s a photo of Quanah Parker at the start this book. He was the last Native American Indian to surrender to the white man. It wasn’t Geronimo, it was Quanah Parker. He was a Comanche chief and the son of Cynthia-Ann Parker. She was a Scots/Irish American who was kidnapped by Indians at the age of nine and assimilated into the tribe, then forwarded on to the Comanche chief Peta Nocona to be his wife. Within time they had a son whom they named Quanah. Peta Nocona was a drunk, so on his father’s demise Quanah adopted his mother’s surname and he became chief. He led the powerful Quahida band of braves to the very last American-Indian battle of the Great Plains. He was the last to surrender and was taken to an Indian reservation where he became a wealthy rancher and preacher. He had seven wives and twenty-five children. Who knows how many more descendants we have in our Parker clan now from his siblings. Quanah was the true master of the escape route, the King of Chameleons, and remained so until his dying breath.

The purpose of the book, if there is any purpose, or story, is to change the way people think about life and turn what could’ve been a dull and boring existence into one that’s full of events that people will talk about when you’re gone. I want to teach you how to be the bad boy and get away with it, how to travel cheap, where to go that’s cheap but still live like a rock-star and survive to tell the tale. This is not about teaching you how to get rich quick! This is about how to get the best out of life no matter how little you’ve got! How to be working class and still beat the rock-star’s lifestyle with the memories you have in your life. Always remember, if you want to feel good you will, if you want to feel sad you will, but if you have good memories, it’s hard feeling anything apart from satisfied. Such is life!

I’m also going to write about the characters and people I’ve came across on my travels and in the course of my life, although their true identities I’m going to keep disguised for their privacy, as they all have once been a friend mine. It’s the characters that I’ve met in life that gave me the memories, and the people, who are only people, the ones who made me want to weep. I’ve worked doing different jobs, travelled to different countries and moved home to different areas all my life. I’ve always found that I’m best to move on to a new meadow when the grass in the one I’m in starts losing its taste, and through living my life like so has given me a library of memories I want to write about.

I began writing this book after I read Frankie Boyle’s book, ‘My Shit Life So Far’, and sorry Frankie, I think you’re a good comedian, but you are right! Your life has been shit and so was your book! I laughed at one of the jokes in it about Susan Boyle, and the only story in it that happened to Frankie, that he himself had thought funny, was a story about an American tourist that came into a bar in Ireland and asked for a non-alcoholic beer.

Fuck me Frankie! Is that the best you can come up with now? The jokes in your book had about as much effect on my sense of humour as a plectrum has on an air guitar.

Anyway, he ought not to be making fun of Susan Boyle after what she has done in the fight against terrorism. When Susan emerged on the scene and made those Muslim suicide bombers realise what an actual virgin looks like, they’re not so keen to blow themselves up any more and get to paradise to meet sixteen virgins of their own. She kind of made the penny drop for them to start asking themselves some logical, realistic and radical questions. Like, by the time a good looking woman from planet Earth is about to enter paradise… She sure as hell won’t be no virgin.

So, I thought that I would start writing material to send to Frankie, as his pen seemed to be clean out of ink and his ideas for new jokes had obviously become as rare as rocking-horse shit. While I was doing so I found I could not stop and I just kept going and wrote until I had enough written to publish this book of my own. I think it’s a shame that after people like Frankie Boyle have earned their fame, they take it for granted that their name of fame will sell their product. Then they let the quality of their product slip, and don’t care as they know they’ll make money because their name is on it. Shame on you Frank, you’re just as full of shit as the people you made jokes about in your early career to give you the fame you have now. Fun-boy Frankie Skinner is better than you Mr Boyle.

I’ve often been told by people who know me that I should write a book and I think a book about the life of an ordinary man who gets up to a trick or two is an original idea. It’ll allow me to convey stories that others like myself can appreciate and understand as they’ve done similar things themselves, and sort of reminisce about some good times or bad times. After all, a lot of ordinary working class people have had much more eventful lives than a so called celebrity has had. Which is why I think, and hope, this book will be suitable to men of any age. Younger men could read it and learn what they could be getting up to in later years, and older ones can reminisce about the same sort of things I’ve done. Or maybe kick their own arses for not living the wild side of life.

I’d like this book to be a good read for someone going on holiday while they’re on the plane. One thing is for certain though; this will be my only book about my life. Simply because I’m almost fifty now, and it’s more or less a kind of autobiography of my life up to this point. That’s unless my next fifty years are just as interesting? Unfortunately my next fifty can only be half as interesting, as I may only have twenty-five years left in me. The way I’ve lived my life, that being, work hard, play hard, makes me think that I’ll be lucky if I see my seventy-fifth birthday!

Getting old is something I’ve always dreaded, and I’m feeling it now. Sometime between the ages of thirty-five to forty, I started to feel that I was getting old, not young anymore anyway. I knew this through two reasons; The first was because police officers, who’ve been trying for a very long time, to put me away for a very long time, started to look like young jumped-up punks in my eyes. Whereas previously, police officers resembled old hard-liners who were similar to, and as old as my father. The second was that Terry Wogan was beginning to become amusing and sometimes even funny, then I knew I must be getting old. I just don’t understand these people who say that life begins at forty. If that’s so, it must be because they never lived in their youth, which is the biggest mistake someone could make in life. The only thing you once had in life that you can’t buy back with money, is the years that you leave behind, you can never get them back, so don’t waste them!

The biggest mind-fuck I have about getting old is the fact that young beautiful women appear as gorgeous to me as they always did. But to them, a man like me who is almost fifty resembles someone old enough to be their grand-dad and there is no chance of sleeping with them. In my younger years young women would’ve seen me in a different light, and I could’ve, and would’ve, slept with them. Don’t think me a dirty old man if you’re a woman, as a man’s testosterone level is the only thing that does not degenerate with age. A man of one hundred sees a beautiful woman with the same amount of sex drive as he did when he was sixteen. Every man out there will probably know this, but don’t let it depress you, read my book and learn how you can still pull the girls and get laid at any age.

Firstly I’ll write about my travels, the people I’ve met, the places I’ve been to, the nationalities I’ve met along the way, the laughs I’ve had with them, the tight spots I’ve got into and how my escape route got me out of them without a scratch. Then in the second half of the book I’ll write a little about myself, my youth, my school years, my work, places I’ve lived, where I live now, my opinion on life and my outlook for the future. The book is meant to be funny, so I hope everybody who reads it will see the funny side to what I’ve written. It tells the story of the real Wyle E. Coyote.

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CHAPTER TWO

Travel

I love travelling and seeing other cultures and countries. I changed a lot when I was able to see people and places abroad and learn about the world from the ground level of being there. Nothing else can teach you about life in a way this can, not television, books nor listening to other travellers. Experience it for yourself. Travelling is my real escape route from the humdrum monotonous existence I endure in my daily routine, you know? I get up, make a coffee, smoke a fag, go to work, come home, get drunk and go to bed, day upon day. It’s like a river that flows round and round in circles and eventually the water gets stale because it has not been replenished by fresher water. Travel stops me from going stale and is my escape route to salvation. Travelling makes the water in my river taste like whisky and I just dive right in and never come up again.

I’ve read travel books about countries I’ve been to and they’ve not matched up with the country I was in. They’re about as much point as a photo of an Islamic chick wearing a double layer niqab face veil, hijab burka and a butterfly farasha desert dress; they don’t let you see what’s underneath! I think these kind of writers travel with local guides who only let them see what they want them to see. I can remember reading one and the author of it had been to Cuba. She was an Irish author and wrote that the average Cuban could live off $4 a month, and then went on to explain how they could do it. It made me angry as this bitch would not expect her fucking cat to live at a standard of living like that, but there she was, expecting a Cuban human being to live at such a low standard of living. The sad thing was all she went on about in her shit book was how kind the Cubans were to her and how much help they all had been. Then the fucking rancid Irish cow comes home and writes a book about how the Cubans don’t need money, as they can live off of $4 month. I wanted to shoot her in the fucking head.

Although she was correct, a Cuban can live on that small amount of money, but it’s no more than a dog’s life, basically. Tourism helps the average Cuban with the next meal he’s going to eat, they live off tourism and tourist’s money, as their government pays them peanuts. I’m not going to write about what those other travel-writers write about. I’m writing this book to tell you how to get fucking laid, where the best places are to go to eat and drink, and how much you should pay. I’m going to tell you how to save money and experience a foreign country, but still earn respect from the people of the country you’re in, not the pile of bile these other travel writers put in their books.

About getting yourself laid, I’m going to tell you a trick or two about how to pull a 10/10 bird. You know the ones I’m talking about? The ones that would make a dead man come in his coffin! If you’re too scared to go for a 10/10 bird because you think you’ll get a knock-back, or rather, know you’ll get knocked-back before you start, don’t think it! This is why! Women are the female of the species; same as vixens, hinds, cows and mares. They all come into season at particular times in the year and have an instinctive urge to reproduce with their respective male, sexual adversary of the species; that being a fox, a stag, a bull or a stallion. In our woman’s case, she’s in-season once a month, or twelve times a year. Once a month there’s a stage in the female’s menstrual cycle when the egg in her ovary is at a point when it’s most likely to be successful in being germinated. Basically, she’s on-heat, in-season or a-bulling, however you like to put it, just like hind deer are during the rutting season. The secret is to know what day in the month she’s at this stage. Unfortunately our women’s pussies don’t swell up like a female baboons does to alert the male baboons she’s ready to mate, nor have we the powers of scent that a fox has to smell a vixen in season half a mile away. Fucking pity this ain’t so though, it would save us a fortune on vodkas and coke. Anyway, not a problem, this is how you single-out the in-season 10/10 bitches… If you see four stunning 10/10 women walk into a bar, the law of averages means that one of them will be at this menstrual point, as Mother Nature deems them to be in season one week out of four. This is how you spot which one out of the four she is. These are the in-season signs our female species have to let us males know their ready to mate!

She’ll be the one with the spermaholic look on her face, whose eyes are searching the bar, kind of agitatedly, looking for someone