Wee Howie in Perspective

Mental illness needs better PR! If Jesus was around today he may well be branded as suffering from Narcissistic Delusional Disorder and The Daily Mail would scream that he was a loony leftie even more injurious to God-fearing worthies than that madman Corbyn.

All that stuff about helping the poor. They’d slaughter him.

After all, mental illness and its causes tell us much more about the human condition than merely being ‘normal’ and well-balanced. Talking to the latter can be so boring that it may actually lead to mental illness. Too much conversation about house prices and efficiency of expensive cooking utensils will have anyone with a semblance of wit reach for the Prozac.

Take my mate Howie. Many diagnoses have been ascribed to him by psychiatrists over the years. Paranoid-schizophrenic (he liked that one) then through a spectrum of mental exotica to his most recent: General Anxiety Disorder.

You don’t need to be a doctor of the mind to realise quite quickly that Howie is an anxious individual. 

Why he is that way would probably take you a little longer.

He seemed to fret his way through life like a little hand-wring vole fearful of new methods of extermination.

“What about this new spontaneous self-combustion, Dave? No warning just BOOM!!”

He wore the masks od comedy and tragedy simultaneously. His comedy bubbled, the smile of it dragged down to a frown by the terrible weight of his depression.

“I think my dentist drills holes in my teeth so that I’ll need more treatment”

“You sure Howie?”

“Yeh, happens every time. Bastard leaves holes”

“That’s terrible. You should change dentists”

“Ach, he’s only ten minutes doon the road. He’s handy!!”

Howie is the only child of two immigrants, one from Poland the other Russia. Now that I’ve written that sentence it’s struck me that he must have at least a modicum of that East European gloom in his blood which he’s constantly at war with: like he’s Poland trying vainly to repel the bigger nations around him. That’s it! He’s Bi-Poland. At last, a proper diagnosis. That’ll make a change for them up at Argyle House at his next medical assessment.

“He says he’s Bi-Poland. What in the name Christ is that?”

“Maybe he’s Lithuania! That’s by Poland. How many points do you get for being Lithuania?”

One time he was in the loony bin proper. Royal Ed. Proper stuff. Terrible state he was in. His folks, auld Monty and Phyllis hadn’t a clue what to do for him. Phyllis never accepted that her only son had a mental illness: she couldn’t stand the imperfection of it and the shame she perceived it brought on her own little branch of the family. Monty pretended to be deaf so that he didn’t have to respond all the time to her shrieking, but he could hear when he needed to.

He’d taken eighty-odd pills – not sure which kind – and he’d nearly achieved his goal when he’d been saved at the last by a friend who’d found him and phoned an ambulance.

And now here he was in this rubbery room mewling like a child and trying to scratch his Dad’s eyes out. Where’s Sigmund Freud when you need him?

This was how the day out transpired.

Maybe a consultation between his parents and his psychiatrist, maybe one or the other, but a ‘day out for Howie’ was proposed. A wee drive up the coast to Fife. Deaf Monty, Mad Phyllis, zonked-out-of-his-skull Howie, myself and Raymie. Raymie was this strange, gentle Highlander who’d had five years in the army and had continued thereafter to live his life by rote. Launderette at same time, same day week in week out, shoes always polished to a high sheen. He even ironed his jeans and maybe even his underpants for all I know, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Before Howie’s suicide debacle, we’d all – the three of us – journeyed over to France to busk on the Paris Metro. Couple of trains down to Ramsgate and a hovercraft to Calais. Then what? We’ll hitch to the capital, nae bother.

Under a falling sun and with the three of us passing a duty-free bottle of whisky around it was unlikely that any sensible driver was going to grant us the favour of a lift even only the twenty miles or so to Boulogne so we decided we’d need to spilt up to have any chance of free transport.

Howie and I watched our friend climb the shallow incline and head toward the fading light like the soldier he was. His robust silhouette shimmered as he became smaller and smaller in the distance, his backpack bobbing with his efforts like he was back on manoeuvres. We waited beside the dusty road, 

Howie now exhausted and frightened no doubt that he’d been left with a semi-drunk seventeen year old whose big idea this whole caper was. The night before I’d had us sleeping under the stars in what looked like a ruined abbey among ancient gravestones and tonight was looking like another outdoor job if we didn’t get a lift and soon.

Then, all of a sudden a storm of biblical proportions opened up the skies and I couldn’t tell if Howie was now weeping or if it was rain that was pouring down his cheeks. It was probably both.

Now, I didn’t understand to any mature degree the nature of my friends mind. I knew it appeared to be in some sort of disarray at times and under certain pressures gave way altogether. Once, I was peeling an onion in Howie’s presence and for some reason the smell of it sent him into somewhat of a panic, so much so that he left the building altogether, not just the kitchen, the entire building. Was his mind ruled – or misruled – by entropy, a brain full of wild, zany thoughts interspersed with black depressions and bewilderment, or was it so tightly wound that any deviation threatened to unwind it like a coiled spring let loose? Maybe the onion smell reminded him of some early trauma.

Whatever the answer, I worried now in the eye of this Gallic storm, that Howie was about to unravel in some perhaps unique and alarming way.

A blessing then that a green Citroen stopped for us right at that point.

Howie is blabbering a little manically and the French driver – turns out he’s a social worker – is a little perturbed by Howie’s manner. He’s asking him ‘voulez-vous’ questions and with every one he changes the descriptive word at the end of the sentence.

“Voulez-vous mangez mon pantaloons?”

“Voulez-vous mangez mon derriere?”

“Voulez-vous mangez mon internal lodgement fittings?”

Howie is Milligan-esque with his humour. Spike was never big in France.

The kindly driver laughs along the first couple of times but after about the seventh you can see it dawning on him that at least one of his passengers might need a check-up from the neck-up.

No doubt with a sense of relief he thoughtfully lets us off at the gates of a camp-site just outside the town of Boulogne. By this time it’s like a hurricane is occurring and all we have is sleeping bags. 

Only thing for it is the campsite toilets.

I don’t know if you’ve ever spent a night in a campsite toilet? But it’s as uncomfortable as everything you can possible imagine about it.

Ordinary folk, as a rule, don’t like you slumbering nearby as they perform their noisy ablutions.

Raymie made it to Paris through the foul winds and rain and we met him toward mid-day under the Eiffel Tower as planned. He was slightly dishevelled having consistently been moved from bench to bench by nightshift gendarmes but he seemed pleased to see us. What he never knew to his dying day was that Howie and I had enjoyed a continental breakfast and the comfort of a fast train from Boulogne to Paris.

The five of us are in the family saloon and heading over the Forth. Howie is yodelling quietly to himself in the front seat next to his father who is driving. Phyllis is hunched like a rancorous mole back-seat left, Raymie sits next to her staring vacantly toward the big red over-engineered yet iconic rail bridge. I occupy the remaining berth wondering how strange life is that it can put you in these situations.

It has been agreed beforehand that I should sing some of Howie’s favourite songs along the journey to help keep him amused and calm (and maybe even stop him yodelling).  He loves the Irish folk band Planxty and particularly Christy Moore so as we leave the bridge and enter Fife I begin to sing Spancil Hill, a song of immigration and an Irishman’s longing for his homeland. To Phyllis and Monty, who are both profoundly Jewish, I may as well be singing a Martian folk song about the uselessness of crop rotation on their home planet for all the sense it made to them but, to Howie, this type of music was his own rebellion against type. He liked it because it was so alien and had learnt every word and intonation to all the Planxty songs and as I sang the first lines his little faced beamed like I’d just told him that there was indeed a God and he was firmly on Howie’s side.

‘Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by

My mind being bent on rambling to Ireland’s isle did fly’

All woes and anxieties dropped from his slender shoulders and he joined in melodiously with the heart of a devout Guinness quaffer.

His resurrection from life’s lonely doldrums was impressive to behold. Only his mother managed to mar the occasion “not so loud, not so loud” she screeched. A joyous occasion dowsed by a mean spirit.

Poor woman! What made her that way? That’s the eternal question for everyone who ever lived: What made you that way?

We stopped in Kirkcaldy where Howie’s parents wanted to treat us all to a meal in a Chinese restaurant they’d heard was good. Everything went well until the end of the meal when the fortune cookies came with the bill. Everyone had a smile reading the bland, mystical sayings within. All except Howie who began yodelling in panic when he read what his said. It said..

“There will be a time when you have only one sock…!”

The meal was a fraught tense affair and Howie was doing his usual nervous gulping and leg-bouncing, his mother ‘tut-tutting’ and Monty ignoring everyone blissfully. Raymie pipes up with ‘at one time this whole town smelled of linoleum’ but, as usual, no-one paid him any mind. This was a man who’d been trained to kill and had once done a ‘tour’ of Northern Ireland and had raided the Divis Flats on the Falls Road looking for republican gun-men. This man’s life had been on the line and God knew what stories he could tell and yet no one was ever interested. No-one asked ‘why linoleum?’ so he didn’t tell them. He was the only half-way content looking person at the table and no-one was remotely interested why.

No-one, that is, except Howie.

You see, the good thing about being one of life’s ‘outsiders’ is that you get to meet so many wonderful people who fall into the same category until, in fact, you’re not an outsider at all. You find yourself among the delightful community of ‘folk with interesting things to say’.

Things went badly for Howie that night we spent on the floor of the Boulogne campsite toilet. Bored, frightened and unable to contain himself Howie, as I had sub-consciously feared, asked a rather rough-looking chap who was wearing what looked like biker clothes a question. One of those ‘voulez-vous’ one’s with a rather personal descriptive noun which hung in the somewhat foetid air for several seconds before the trouble started.