The Rube Boy

Rube once told me that he suspected his dentist of deliberately drilling holes in his teeth. The rationale for this was that Rube would have to keep going for treatment, and the dentist would make more money from him. I said, that sounds terrible, why don’t you change your dentist? He said, o he’s handy, he’s only ten minutes down the road.

Rube’s folks died within eighteen days of one another just before Christmas. I’ve been concerned about his welfare. His greatest fear, as he expressed to me often, was to be left alone to cope without his parents. Rube is fifty-seven and has never lived outside the family home.  His mother was a bit of a monster and his father feigned deafness so he wouldn’t have to listen to her. If Rube was over at my place he’d have to give her the phone number, she’d phone up drunk and drugged on pills shouting that she would burn the house down if he didn’t come home. She could cause a row in an empty house. Phyllis and Monty – what a couple.  Poor, anxious Rube. They locked him up in Goodmayes mental hospital once (he wrote a song about it called ‘The Mogadon Shuffle’), he had suffered a total breakdown the likes of which I had never witnessed before. They said he was ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ but I think that was what they tagged everyone in there. I wrote a letter to his psychiatrist advising he should perhaps take a look at Rube’s mother if he wanted to get to the truth of Rube’s condition. I never received a response.

He relies now on the support of cousins, none of whom I have ever met. He attends the Mental Health Support Centre in Ilford where he plays pool with the other attendees. When I speak to him on the phone I refer to this as his ‘Nutter’s Club’ and he laughs. He regularly sees a psychiatrist and he is on strong medication which tempers his ‘disorder’. Rube is anxious and tense to a greater or lesser degree depending on how life impacts upon him. He walks an emotional tightrope which factors either leave alone or prod at him making him fall off. His mother was the greatest of these ‘prodders’ right up until the end. In the last days of her life she revealed to Rube in very bitter tones that Monty had cheated on her with some woman he had worked with (good for old Monty I say) and she had harboured this resentment for years, and now she was shouting and goading her husband of fifty-odd years from her very death-bed. In death, as she was in life, a manipulative and poisonous hag. She would never admit to Rube having any mental or emotional disorder, which left him as just a weak disappointment in her eyes.

 I could tell by the sound of him if he was feeling ok, or if he was anxious, and nine times out of ten the source of the anxiety was his mother, and sometimes, by association, his father.

I visited him recently on my trip to London, and I’m pleased to say I can’t remember him looking healthier or happier, though he is concerned about Iain Duncan-Smith’s new Work Capability Test which could well see him pronounced fit for work. I cheer him up by suggesting that no employer in his or her right mind would ever consider employing the likes of him.

This was a ‘transcendent’ Rube. Though, still shell-shocked by recent events, there was something in his demeanour which suggested he was in an emotionally healthier place. He was better groomed than I’ve ever seen him; hair cut neatly, Leyton Orient supporters jacked zipped up smartly and, astonishingly, no nervous tics or the irritating clearing of the throat every twenty seconds which used to drive me nuts. He actually seems relaxed. I made him laugh uproariously five or six times, he’d found his old nutty sense of humour again. Admittedly he was laughing at my description of his general ineptitude and social incompetence, but it was a good, healthy laugh. I even asked him if he had suicidal thoughts at all and he said ‘Naaa, I wouldn’t try that again’. So, maybe there’s hope for Rube. It was good to see my old friend in this new light, with a new lightness about him.