Rube

Dear Squinty

You mentioned in a private correspondence it was people reading my poems instead of my penis (both words start with the letter P you see). You asked how I would describe myself and I will – cynical, cunning, cowardly cute, circumspect and cunt.

Hope this helps

PS Can wee perhaps meet sometime at a cliff edge and jump off?

PPS I wish I was Frankie Fraser

Rube – Howard Rubens – is the man in the ill-fitting Orient replica shirt. He hopes they go down this year as it’s an easy trip to Dagenham & Redbridge in the lower division. I say ‘man’ but he wouldn’t think of himself as such. A penis hanging off a poor excuse. He’d spent a lifetime dodging around this low opinion, and not always successfully.

A creature of borderline-Autistic habit he shuffled his way to his morning breakfast at the unadorned, unwelcoming café at the bottom of Cranley Gardens, where he’d have a bland roll with fish filling and a cup of tea.

Gants Hill/Newbury Park stark and featureless. The Great Eastern Road offering a fast way out to Southend and then jump in the sea and swim for France. Rube has lived here nearly all his life since early childhood in the same house where he still lives alone and parentless. Both taken within three weeks, his life-long dread realised. Yet, it wasn’t so bad. There was actually a lot of good in it. Free of the tension and quite a lot of the guilt. He couldn’t admit this though. Not as himself. But, sometimes after exactly three pints he almost rejoiced in this new-found freedom, as if he’d discovered someone inside himself that had hibernated for decades.

He didn’t often have his pints though, unless the coin had called it. One could have too much of a good thing.

Rube sang a song at my door thirty eight years ago and it’s been virtually downhill since. He knows every Greg Lake lyric there is and remains frozen in 1972 (there’s almost no-one else left in the East of Eden fan club). He still buys the albums, but they are all made by bands and artists who had hit their peak in that year or thereabouts – King Crimson, James Taylor, Babe Ruth. It’s where his head is happiest.

Many of us live lives of unreported, virtually unnoticed torment. Lives of dramatic subtlety- the stuff of Ackroyd and Pinter. Rube once told me he believed his dentist was drilling holes in his teeth deliberately. When I asked why, he said to make him go back for more treatment. I said, if you believe that why don’t you change your dentist. He said, ah, he’s handy, he’s only ten minutes down the road.

His mother, Phyllis, claimed to be on speaking terms with the noted classical actor, Derek Jacobi. How this unlikely relationship came about was never clear, though one could imagine her forcing herself upon such a person at some Jewish fund-raising function in the area.

It appeared to me that his mother was Rube’s chief tormentor; I once wrote to his psychiatrist expressing this opinion. Though, who am I to know the ins-and-outs, the intricacies of such a relationship? She just seemed to make things harder for him.

He would visit me at Clays Lane and receive phone calls from her urging him to come home before she burned down the house; that sort of stuff. She’d be drunk on cider and God knows what sort of medication she was on.

His father, Monty, pretended to be deaf. Rube does this now too. ‘Pardon’ he says like a deaf person, just like old Monty.

Annoyingly, after all these years, he still makes out to have trouble with my accent.

English bastard!

I took him to France once, hitch-hiking, boozing and busking on the Paris Metro. Fair freaked him out. Only weeks before he’d been an inmate in Goodmayes loony-bin. Proper loony he was too - none of your malingerers. He’d proved this by swallowing seventy-odd pills and the ambulance folk only just managed to save him. Now here he was in this wee Spartan room screaming and wailing and generally acting the cunt.

Ray and I went to visit him and he was clearly out where the buses don’t run. Making grabs at his father’s groin he was, clearly trying to express something of a very primal nature.

Someone made the bizarre suggestion that a day out to Southend with his parents and Ray and I tagging along would be a good idea. What an odd collection of souls took to the road that day. The ever-bickering Phyllis; the deaf-pretender Monty; their raving son Howard; and the two of us. Ray was a lump of a bloke from Berwick, disciplined by six years in the army (a form of induced Autism?) and totally bewildered by anything other than pristine mental health.

Rube requested I sing a song. I had often busked with Rube down the London tubes and had learned some songs from him. He loved the Irish folk band Planxty and, of course knew all their songs. It was for this reason that I found myself singing Spancil Hill the old Irish lament of exile in the back of a car heading for the coast. Phyllis eyed me nervously and somewhat cynically like I’d been revealed as an active member of the I.R.A., Monty pretended not to hear.

Only weeks later we were in France trying to catch some sleep in the ruins of an old castle just outside Calais.

It should be known that, while a patient in Goodmayes, his creative urges still functioned. It was there he wrote the sadly unheralded ‘Modecate Shuffle’ named after the powerful tranquilizers he was on and their effect on one’s gait. He wrote many songs and poems. Another was in tribute to Zbigniew Boniek, a notable east European footballer of the nineteen-seventies who he referred to as ‘a pretty funky Pole’.

Rube shambles back home worriedly. He mumbles to himself and clicks his throat anxiously. It’s a nervous habit and is more pronounced on his ‘bad days’. He needs to get to the nutter’s club by one for the pool tournament and he’s worried he won’t fit in lunch before then.

All in all, he’s gotten through thus far, just gotten through….