Free American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson Page A

as you took that Friday-night saunter into the darkened church hall where the girls were already dancing in little circles around their handbags.
    The Y disco was run by a well-meaning but pragmatic social worker called, I think, Stuart. Half the population of Scotland it seems is named Stuart, most of them men. Y-Stuart was one of those altruistic poet types that are produced by slightly upper-class family life and a liberal education. Y-Stuart actually wanted to live in areas like Cumbernauld so that he could help the local teens. He was a genuinely good man, but we considered him odd, and even libeled him heinously amongst ourselves as a predatory pederast, which he was not. He did have some strange ideas, though. Y-Stuart gave all the teenagers free rein once they got inside the hall. He didn’t stop people making out or fighting, he just sort of let it happen. If things got out of hand he’d call the cops, but things never really did. We all knew that if the cops were called too oftenthe place would be closed down, and nobody wanted that. Y-Stuart didn’t let everyone inside the hall. He would insist on smelling your breath first, figuring this was the way to detect if anybody had been drinking alcohol or partaking of the only other mood modifier available, glue. Glue sniffing was wildly popular among a small group at that time. It was still a few years before the British working classes discovered hashish, which would come in cheap and plentiful supply from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon, and it was way before heroin arrived and took the whole fucking thing ten notches lower. In the mid-seventies, kids who wanted to get high would buy a bag of potato chips and a tube of Evo-Stick. They’d either eat the chips or throw them away, squeeze the glue into the empty chip bag, cover their mouth and nose with the bag, and inhale its contents deeply, quickly, and often. The effect was hallucinatory and was speedily followed by a strangely ethereal, giggly buzz, but with the nasty side effect of killing people every now and again. It was seen as kind of low rent, so only the real wackos did it.
    However noble Y-Stuart’s motives were for smelling the breath of approximately one hundred teenagers every Friday night, the result must have been foul, all that boozy or gluey breath covered over with gum or cough drops, not to mention the fact that Scottish dentistry in the seventies was borderline medieval. The guy must have destroyed his sense of smell and caught every virus going, but there he was every Friday.
    “Smell your breath.”
    “Haaaaaaaaah.”
    “In you go.”
    The music my friends and I listened to in those days seemed incidental to dancing with or staring at girls. It was just background noise, the same tired old crap that had been around for years. Every Thursday night on the BBC’s Top of the Pops we’d watch the usual bouffant-haired crooners in bedazzled jumpsuits singing aboutMandy or Boogaloo or Rainbows and shite like that, accompanied by session guys playing Fender Rhodes pianos. There was some good stuff, of course. Everyone loved Bowie but he seemed too strange with all his songs about aliens, and he was way too effete for us at the time. Zeppelin rocked, and The Who were adored, but they also had that long hippy hair that implied, if not homosexuality, then certainly sensitivity, which was just about as shameful. The Beatles had broken up years before, and the Stones were already consigned to the dustbin of middle age. We would listen to the music because we had nothing else, but we didn’t identify with the groups. They were distant, rich, and smug bearded fuckers who belonged to our older brothers and sisters, or the younger cooler teachers. Not to us.
    The music I really loved at that time was the old stuff Gunka James and my Auntie Betty had listened to when they were younger. Fifties-era rock and roll from the U.S.—Eddie Cochrane, (young) Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Gene Vincent,