Mad, Bad and Dangerous in Paris

If you’re ever truly down-and-out and in need of the price of a meal either stick your head in a bucket upside down on Princes Street or do what I saw a guy do once in Paris.

We were busking, Me and D and Rube and Ray outside the Pompidou Centre, right on the plaza where all the culture-vultures assembled, the Tower of Babel voices jarring sonically with what the likes of us were banging out, some Irish dirge that Rube knew from his Planxty albums.

Such songs seemed to relax Rube, like their rebelliousness struck a chord within him. Maybe being Irish and bold and romantically heroic in the face of the foe (the English) was better than being Jewish and depressed and being helpless in the face of the oppressor (his mother).

Only a matter of weeks before with Rube in Goodmayes, his doctor suggested it would be a good idea to take him on a trip to Southend, that old-style holiday resort on the Essex coast. His parents further suggested that it would be a good idea to take Ray and I with them. So, there we were all in Monty’s family saloon coasting down Eastern Avenue toward the sea: a madman, his mad mother, pretending to be deaf father, Geordie Ray and me, the seventeen-year-old and seemingly in charge of it all.

“Sing a song, Dave”

“Eh, aye, Rube, what kinda song?”

“An Irish one, Dave. Sing Spancill Hill”

“Oh no, please no” moans Phyllis.

Spancill Hill is a song of exile, a dreamer dreams of his home town in Ould Ireland. Not one of us in the car is Irish but I’m the closest to it.

I sing for Rube.

“Last night as I lay dreamin’ of pleasant days gone by

My mind being bent on ramb-i-lin’ to Ireland’s isle did fly..”

Phyllis knows little of Ireland, it’s culture, it’s music or probably even its location and for all she knows what I’m incanting is some anti-Semitic, pagan, devil curse that her nutcase son has summoned down on her as some form of Freudian retribution. Or maybe she just doesn’t like the song!

She signals her discomfort by huffing her shoulders and talking all the way through it. Monty is oblivious in his mock-deafness. Ray sits mute. Rube is transfixed. In his tranquilised haze he is the exiled dreamer who “awoke in Californ-i-a, many miles from Spancil Hill”.

Just mere weeks later he is standing with us observing a very unique street-entertainment indeed. A man has drawn a crude circle with chalk and in the middle of this makeshift arena he rants and raves in a fury at passers-by and those stopping to spectate.

The act is that he dares them to set foot within his domain and if they do he chases them out with Gallic curses, not quite touching them but in a very much threatening-to-do-so manner. This causes great hilarity among his fast-growing audience as they play along with his game, daring over the chalk and then racing back into a lovers arm as the madman careens across his circle in a storm of outrage. The money rains down on him in his circle as the crowd express their enjoyment for this unexpected spectacle.

The irony is not lost on me that we have an actual certified madman in our wee busking gang and we barely make a centime between us.