SEVEN SPASTICS (Part One)

Self-Explanatory Short Story Selection

Due to Substack’s word Limit this is in two parts. There’s a link to Part Two at the end.

ONE: Speedy Davros

Feeding Amphetamine Sulphate to a spastic isn’t easy. I watched clear and clearly surplus saliva spill from his mouth, down his chin and along my thumb as I tried to keep his head still long enough to get the half gram of powder - wrapped into a cigarette paper or two - into his mouth. The sulphate bomb is a risk at the best of times, and this wasn’t one of them. Should the wrap break and the ghastly taste of speed invade his mouth, there’s no washing it down, you simply can’t get it down, it’s a one hundred percent puke situation, a retch – maybe multiple retches – and then, as the caustic chemical finds its way to every part of the mouth and tongue, the body responds in the only way it can, the right way, it ejects - the vile bile flows forth. I only just managed the saliva on my thumb; a coating of spastic puke over my face would have found my limit. But could he even puke? Did he have the necessary motor control (or motor uncontrol) to puke? If not, that’s just going to be torture, Sulphate just sitting there dissolving – itself and anything it touches - and I can see myself yanking back his head to give his mouth a good scrubbing with a bog-brush. However, my new semi-electronic friend, wobbling and twitching in his mobility scooter, one claw-like hand hooked around the salt-in-the-wound named ‘joystick’ and the other arm, from the elbow down in a world of its own, jerking and pointing to places on a map deep, deep, down in his palsied unconscious, screaming in a sign-language that no one else knows, for liquid – and quickly. He knew the risks, it seemed.

I’ve got to act quick, and grab my warm can of Tennent’s Super (or ‘Super T’’ as aficionados (pronounced ‘alcoholics’) of premium strength lager lovingly refer to this most unpleasant yet effective of beverages) and pour it into his face as I tilt his somewhat resistant head back with my other hand. We’re all good. He’s swallowed it in time, and at some point in the next hour or so, during Cambridge’s annual hippy shit-fest, ‘Strawberry Fayre’, he’ll be spinning donuts in the grass on his mobility-scooter, burning out the battery as his plate-sized pupils take in the spinning horizon, giving him everything and nothing to think about as his perception of space-time takes a power nap.

He's not done yet though, and as a faint sense of conscience (almost certainly awoken by the look of absolute horror on my friend’s face) breezes across my mind, Speedy Davros says “Gorrash?”, “Gorrash? Er….maybe?”

“This is nuts!”, says my mate, “You can’t give a spastic speed!”, “In fairness, it was more he took speed than I gave it to him”, “Gorrash?”, “Eh? Gorrash?”, “No, you definitely gave it to him, without you, he didn’t take speed today”, “Without me, you didn’t take speed today either”, “Hayo gorrash?”, “Have I got hash?” And he rapidly drives his mobility-scooter back and forth to create a nodding of his eighty-degree, dribbling, tilt of a head, communicating a ‘Yes’, and causing yet more saliva to run down his chin.

I grab a lump of hash from my pocket and hold it up to his face. He smiles, I smile. Paul, my mate, surveys the locale, the families and crusties, the ravers and the students, the hippies and those yet to hang their identity onto something stable, all enjoying Strawberry Fayre in their own way. Speedy Davros takes his claw from the joystick and scrapes at his pocket. I get the idea and put my hand in his pocket and pull out a few five-pound notes and some kind of identification card. His name is Scott. I take a fiver for the speed and the little lump of hash I put in his lap. It’s the only thing I did that separated him from anyone else I have and will sell drugs to today. Speed costs next to nothing anyway, but I’m a bit gutted I felt sorry for him. He didn’t want that, he wanted what most people here want today, to get off his head and enjoy himself. Hash in claw now and he just looks at me, so I get out my little shot-pipe, burn a bit of his lump onto the gauze and pop it into his mouth. “What did you do this weekend? I watched my best friend feed a spastic speed and hash”, “Go on Scotty lad, get that in you” and even though it appears to take every bit of motility and energy he’s got in him to adequately inflate his lungs, he manages to grab a good hit and burn it down to the gauze. I pop the ID card, the remaining hash, and rest of his money back into his pocket and shake his claw. “Have a good time mate, that speed will hit you in about fifteen minutes”, and off he went, like a really rubbish Dalek, but stoned, and about fifteen minutes away from something - for once - more cerebral than palsy.

We saw him later, taking full advantage of the special privileges that a life of low expectations had afforded him, flying along at full pelt, dragging what seemed to be the local knitting society tent behind him and a shrieking bevvy of old biddies screaming for it back. Either that or he was trying to do the off from a gaggle of bitches to whom he’d just given a good seeing to.

TWO: Still Winning

Watching him skillfully control his low-grade nineteen-seventies wheelchair through the pizza boxes, empty methadone bottles, and associated trash of the good life that littered his bedsit carpet, one-legged Ray – or ‘Spastic-Ray’ – as the local junkie community creatively named him, (and what qualifies his inclusion in this dubious diegesis) made his way across the room to grab a shabby, old, shoebox from the sideboard. I say ‘skillfully’, but he pretty much just clunked over any debris or allowed the wheels to nudge it out of the way. It was like an act of defiance; Ray wasn’t going to let a pizza box, a damp and well-used porn-mag, or a half-eaten sausage stop him from getting what he wants. And what he wants is benzodiazepines running through his veins, and in the shoebox was the means to make that happen; his works: His syringes, his spikes, his cotton, his spoons, his life.

He was a good customer. Happy to glug back his 120ml of Methadone daily, rather than spunk his entire disabled living allowance on smack, he actually had some money to pay for the three-hundred 10mg diazepam tablets he bought every week. He spun around and wheeled back over to me, the open shoebox on his demi-lap his way of requesting the pills without actually asking. I pulled the bag out of my pocket and handed them over. “You beauties” he said, kissing the bag before pouring about ten into his grubby paw and starting the laborious and time-consuming process of getting them into his bloodstream.

First, he had to crush them into a very fine powder, not so easy with the snide Thai diazepam he was working with because with no consistent hardness they went from almost self-powdering to the virtually unbreakable, occasionally pinging across the room to never be found again amongst the grizzly shag-pile of filth, possibly living creatures, and various spills, also distributed across a spectrum of brittleality. I’d previously suggested he got a pill-grinder, an actual thing that exists to grind pills to dust for ease of consumption should your life have become so not worth living you can no longer achieve the difficult feat of ingesting a tablet.

I found out about pill-grinders after I broke and confessed to a key-worker (a bottom of the barrel counselor that junkies have to see once a month to ensure they get their methadone or buprenorphine scrips) that I just stashed my sublingual buprenorphine pill at the back of my upper gum where there’s not enough saliva to break it down, and when the pharmacist checked my mouth, it looked like I’d taken it. It’s called ‘supervised consumption’ (supervised deception) which is just great in your hometown with your mum’s friends waiting in the queue behind you to pay for the corn-plasters they’re nervously fiddling with as they witness something they don’t understand but instinctively know is unpleasant and has failure written all over it. Stashing your buprenorphine thus allowed you to then sell it and buy some of the heroin it was supposed to be keeping you from using. Anyway, I told my key-worker about the pill stashing, he told my pharmacist, and when I asked him for my pills, he put the little yellow cylindrical object on the counter. “That, is a pill grinder” he said, before inserting my two, eight milligram buprenorphine pills into a hole in the top and turning the two sections in opposite directions, causing a fine, white powder to fall out of the bottom like a cunning mist that should have put an end to my cheeky wrongdoings. Alas, like most junkies I had a well fingered and dog-eared copy of the BNF, the British National Formulary, a pharmacist’s and prescribing doctor’s guide to the pharmacology, advice, cost, and other information regarding all the drugs – including those of the ‘controlled’ variety - available in the United Kingdom. In pre-internet days it was the illicit drug-users must have guide on how to blag what you actually wanted from your doctor (as opposed to what he was likely to give you), to identify any tablets you’d find in the street, people’s handbags, people’s houses etc., and check any contra-indications you might experience when mixing different drugs. Now, having spent quite the time reading my beloved BNF, I knew it was against the law for a pharmacist to change the form in which the medication was delivered, for instance from a pill (or two) into a powder. “That’s very kind of you Andrew, but I think you’ve just broken the law, or at least are in contravention of some medical shit”, he looked at me with an expected but ineffective expression, one of half sadness, half sadness. “I’m trying to help you!”, “I know you are, but it’s help I don’t want, which makes it not help, but hinderance, so could we just go through the usual palaver of me stashing the pills and you letting me out of here as quickly as possible so I can sell them and get some heroin?” I felt bad for Andrew, he was a nice bloke and had been serving me opiates of various types for years, and for a while, even a script for Ensure, a milk-type drink for old people dying of cancer to give them some kind of nutrition. I’d get a twenty-four box crate every two weeks. Although looking at the coffin-dodger on the carton in her nursing home cardigan and carer’s advertising smile looming over her as she served up the palliative flavour, milk-less milkshake somewhat took the edge off what could have otherwise been an acceptable – and free - liquid lunch.

One Friday, when I went to Andrew’s pharmacy for my methadone, which was served in those brown pill bottles with the white, child-safety cap, he came out with my 60ml script, in said bottle, but instead of the lid, one of those tiny umbrellas, and an olive on a cocktail stick, “Something for the weekend, sir?”

When explaining the pill-crusher to Ray, I told him the story of Andrew and the BNF to which he answered, “My chemist is a Paki, nice bloke though” and that was that. Junkies have their routines, their rituals, their way, and getting them to change them is a largely pointless endeavor; like stopping using, for instance.

Once Ray’s pills were a pile of fine blue powder, he’d plug a 3ml syringe with a lump of cotton-wool to make a crude filter, through which he’d push a water and benzo-powder mixture, before injecting the ‘filtered’ product into his one remaining femoral vein, a process which incidentally cost him his other leg. “I guess that’s why God gave you two” he once said, which was a fair point, and as I was about to suggest he just stuck it up his arse, having seen nurses in various rehab centers administer diazepam rectally when a patient is having – or pretending to have for this very reason – a seizure. I realised there was no point. What if he did lose his remaining leg? Legs aren’t really much use in the singular, I can’t imagine it would be too much of a loss to his quality of life to have them lop the other one off.

And so, after the crushing, after the filtering, and after the pulling it into another syringe and affixing a twenty-one-gauge, fifty-millimeter spike to it, the longest and thickest spike I’ve ever seen - for personal use - he set about opening his jeans and digging about in the open wound above his femoral vein. It was then I first noticed his tattoo, which for whatever reasons I’d never noticed before. On his upper left arm he had a homemade tattoo of a syringe with the words ‘STILL WINNING’ underneath. And as I watched Ray’s head fall forward, saliva hanging off his bottom lip, his hand still holding his cock and balls to the side, blood slowly pumping out of the hole in his leg, the syringe to one side, with the needle still deep in the vein, I thought, there’s absolutely nothing worth stealing in this shit-hole, except perhaps a few of the diazepam I’d just sold him, but that would be proper dirty, and even considering it made me feel dark. So, I left him floating around in a world where perhaps he had a hot girl, a nice flat, and maybe two legs. Bless his cotton sock.

THREE:  Edward’s Day out

The darker it got the less chance I had of getting a score. Waking up rattling is one of the most hideous ways to start the day, compounded of course by the sun going down and most people, wholesome, decent, hard-working people are approaching the end of their day. Seeing them making their way back to their functional lives and functional relationships that happen wrapped in happiness in functional homes and non-dependent lives, is harrowing. It shines a light, a magnifying one too, on the addicted darkness you try not to – in fact take drugs not to – see. Luckily, there’s no time to actually think about it in any significant way because you’ve got to score, and once you’ve scored you can’t think about it, because heroin is a pain-killer, and thought without feeling is no real thought at all. What a trap!

Fate would at least to appear to be on my side. A slither of such. I found a pound coin on the top of the stairs at mum’s house and bet it on a dog race, earning (earning!) four quid. (Two-Dog, always back Two-Dog) and put that four quid on another dog, (Two-Dog) at seven to two and walked out of the bookies with enough money for a bag of skag and some tobacco. Nice. I bunked the train over to Abbey Wood and started walking around looking for a score. There was no going to the pikey site at this time of day, and the two numbers I usually relied on didn’t have their phones on. I needed to find a junkie and hope they’d help me; I’d have to split the bag with them, but half a bag is a lot more than none of a bag, and none of a bag wasn’t an option. And then there was Edward.

I’d never met Edward before but I could tell by his dirty, shabby, and ill-fitting clothes, his aura of complete failure, and stench of piss and month-old sweat that he was a junkie. Everything about him was waving the flags I was so desperately looking for. But more. Or less. He was also heavily spasticated. His right arm was continually bent up at the elbow, with his slack at the wrist hand hanging down by his sternum. His right foot was turned about a hundred degrees inward left, and kind of scraped along the pavement sideways as he walked. His mouth was classic spaz, turned down to the right and leaking saliva, explaining the dark, wet patch on the inner elbow area of the hooked arm. His oversized tongue filled all available oral space, meaning his breathing was exclusively nasal, and loud, and snotty. I noticed very quickly that the pink and furry sores across the top of his upper-lip came from him continually licking the endless stream of watery snot that flowed from his nose, probably caused by the endless demand of having to breathe through it and it alone. His left shoulder was pulled up near to his ear, occasionally rubbing it with a bit of help from his head, like the lobe had a constant itch. The rest of his left arm hung down with little going on but his hand hanging out of the end was making like a permanent wanking gesture. I guess this is care in the community.

“Are you scoring?” His eyes widened, the right eye not so much involved in the looking process though, twisting around seemingly uninterested in the situation the rest of his face was at least partially involved in. “Gnea!” he said, nodding his head. Repeatedly. Still going. And more. I even considered stopping it, getting the feeling he’d have appreciated it because that can’t be intentional. It only takes one nod – maybe two for emphasis – to make a point in the positive, and he’d done that. But I didn’t stop it; it would have been like those spiteful bastards who finish the sentences of people with a stammer; taking away the precious remnants of speech they work so hard on to just be somewhat normal. “Here, let me help you with being you.” No, he can keep nodding for the rest of his life for all I care. “Gnea!” he said, and we started walking, painfully slowly as he pretty much moved sideways, like a crab, a crappy, two-legged one, distracted by anything that moved, was shiny, or loud, or simply engaged his – thankfully not too effective – senses. “How far have we got to go?” I asked, considering dumping Edward and finding someone else, since the lack of speed in a race against time was frustrating my withdrawal to the surface, making me weak. Making me weaker. Making me like him. Less than the sum of our parts. Junk logic. No logic. And right now, no junk.

We walk off the main drag and into the estate, some kid shouts ‘Spastic’ from somewhere and another shouts ‘Junkies!’ Pretty standard in these parts, to be identified. Edward’s shoulders open a door, letting it slam into me on the back-swing and nearly taking me off my feet, so unable am I to take much more than a slight breeze without hitting the deck. I manage to get it open and walk into the stairwell of some flats, and there’s Edward, a crisp packet somehow adhered to his dragging foot, making it louder as he walks. He didn’t care. I guess he knew from experience that trying to tread it off with the other foot would cause a pirouette type action leading to a tumble that could possibly cost him some ribs, some teeth, a spine – who knows? And how he’d get up I don’t know. How he got on in life I don’t know. How he survived as a junkie I don’t know.

He nudges the first door on the ground floor with his shoulder, like he thought it would be open. He gives it another nudge. Nothing. “Is this the score?”, “Gnea!” I knock on the door, giving it three loud raps. Edward looks confused. More confused. He looks at the door behind us, the one useable eye straining to focus before dragging his foot over to that one instead. For. Fuck. Sake. I don’t wait for him to nudge it, and give it three loud knocks with my knuckle. Nothing. Edward gives it a heavier nudge, then a heavier, heavier nudge. From nowhere he is achieving a strength that betrays his entire failed physicality, like he’s drawing it from the Earth, like he’s finding it because he needs it. Junkies have these special powers, but can only access them when really required.

The door busts open, the cheap little rim-cylinder latch popping out of its housing and allowing the door to swing open. If the score is here, I can’t imagine him being too happy that we just busted his door. But no one comes, no one in the property seems to bothered their door’s just been busted open.

So, we walk in, Edward’s crisp packet foot jewelry having acquired a strip of cloth, some dirty white, rag-like thing, maybe a handkerchief. And yet alongside the crisp packet it seemed to have found a home; all things have a place in the world, and this thing’s place was dragging along with Edwards foot, much like me. I hand Edward the ten pounds, there’s no way of him getting out of here without me. I think it’s fair to say Edward didn’t pose much of a flight risk. He went into the front room and closed the door behind him. I heard nothing. Nothing anywhere in fact, like the whole block was sleeping, or abandoned, like the sound of my wheezing lungs were the only sounds in the world. I waited for some time and then just cracked. Fuck this. If that spastic has climbed out of the window and left me stranded with no money, I’ll track him down and. Well. I marched up the corridor and opened the door to the front room. Only it wasn’t the front room, it was toilet and Edward was trying to pull his trousers up as the stench of shit, spasticated, junkie, shit, nearly knocked me over. I leaned on the opposite wall. “Where’s the fucking man?”, “Gnea!” I thought so. I helped him pull up his trousers and tied the string that appeared to be keeping them up. My fingers felt some kind of tubing that I didn’t want to investigate any further and pulled him out of the toilet. He looked confused. And on his one working arm started counting, his thumb touching the tips of his fingers, then another grunt, “Gnea!”, before starting again and counting from the thumb again. He dragged himself past me, his ‘good’ foot now dragging about a meter of toilet roll behind it. I tried to step on it a couple of times but really didn’t have the energy - or reason, when I thought about it - to make any effort in cleaning up his act. He started walking up the stairs, his streamers and crisp-packet trailing behind him and me thinking this is not a Two-Dog, I’ve backed a rank outsider here, slow out of the trap and bumped out of the race on the first corner.

I waited on the stairs as he nudged another door. “Gnea! Gnea!” and the door opened. I stayed out of sight as he went in, sliding down the wall at the bottom of the stairs and sneezing six times, each one rattling my body like electric shock untherapy, loosening every bone, shuddering every muscle, and twanging every tendon. But worse, your body finds new ways to hurt you when it’s payback time and parts of me I never knew existed, muscles I’d not used in years or organs coming out of a stupor – they all ached, they all moved, everything was violent. Everything is pain coming to life as the killer of pain leaves. It’s exponential, withdrawal, it gets worse, quicker, it gets harder, faster, it hurts more acutely, abruptly. I knew I didn’t have much time left before I’d be puking, shitting myself, bent double in agony as my guts suddenly realised how badly they were twisted and tangled and taut and stuffed to their limits with week old cakes.

He came out of the flat. At last. It could have only been minutes. I heard the voice of a woman, an old woman perhaps, but not what she said. I heard “Gnea! Gnea!” but angrier than before, frustrated perhaps, which was expected I suppose, whatever state his withdrawal was in, because of all the other stuff he had going on. He negotiated coming down the stairs at such an ultra-slow speed I just wanted to kick him in the balls, nick the gear and get the fuck away from here, him, and the ever-increasing litter he was dragging behind him. “Have you got works?”, “Gnea!” he said and lifted his good arm, pointing to Abbey Wood village, and presumably the Pharmacist. I can’t imagine them being open but it was worth a shot. I wasn’t going to smoke the damn stuff. Half a bag on a foil wasn’t going to touch the sides. Having said that, I could just get the bag, roll a tube, and when he managed to sit on the floor, just get up and go. I haven’t made my mind up. See if I can get some spikes first and I’ll decide what kind of a cunt I am then.

“Is the bag big? Or is it some pissy little jail-joey?”, “Gnea!” Thought so. I tried to help him up the bridge over the train tracks but he wasn’t having any of it. He was getting quite cocky now, knowing he had the skag and knowing how much I needed it. You really have to get down in this game, and I’d been down low, but this was a new low. Not because he was a spastic, but because I wasn’t. I saw the pharmacy, and – as we approached - the lights flickering out. They were closing and Edward was a good minute away. I ran as best I could, my feet shuffling not unlike Edwards, but at speed. I’d found my secret power when it was needed. As I got to the Pharmacy door the woman looked quite shocked, the way I must have appeared out of nowhere, like I was going to rob the place like so many others had. ‘Wait, wait, wait!”, “We’re closed!”, “No, no, no, no, no, NO NO no no nononononoNONOno.” I decided to use Edward, to play the only hand I had at my disposal. “Look! Look!” and I pointed down the road to the slubbering figure of Edward, who managed to pick up even more debris that dragged behind his feet. It was like a fucking joke now, and I questioned for a minute whether this was a blag, that Edward wasn’t a spaz at all and it was his game, his spiel. At some point when I thought I had the upper hand he’d just chin me and walk away, and as I slowly fell to the ground, my heart pumping rapidly and the periphery of my vision fading out, like I was going to faint, I’d see the slow transformation from a spastic to just a standard cheeky bastard who’d just knocked me for ten quid.

The pharmacist opened the door and looked down the road, “OK” she said and we both waited in silence as he dragged himself up the street and to the door. He smiled at her; it was the first different expression I’d seen on his face since I’d met him. He looked quite sweet for a moment, the kind of thing you focus on when you’re entering into the naked and prostalgic emotions of withdrawal. He walked into the Pharmacy, the woman closing the door on me as I said “Two mils, get some two mils.”

She locked the door and walked with Edward to the back of the shop. I put my face up to the glass and cupped my hands around it so I could see. Good boy, she’s giving him the bag, I might have to pull the spastic routine myself one day should such a situation require it, he’s certainly getting special treatment. If I didn’t have a spaz on the firm, spikes I would not be getting. He signed the book, which took a while and I watched as a long drip of saliva went all the way from his bottom lip to the floor, vibrating like the string of a double bass and just as jazzy.

When Edward comes out, he’s kind of smiling, and the woman seems very friendly with him. He’s charmed her with his crippled walk, his trainers trailing enough litter it’s like his feet are ‘just married’, and so much saliva down his front he might as well not bother having a bottom jaw. I grab the spikes from him, more of a snatch really and he looks quite concerned. But fuck him, he’s got the heroin, I’ve got the spikes. We need each other. “We’ll go up to the house, yeah?” ‘The House’ being an abandoned council building that junkies regularly use to shoot-up, sleep in, shit in, and occasionally lay in wait for people just like me and Edward to steal our drugs. But this late at night I can’t see there being anyone in there now, and if they are, they’re in the land of nod and will barely notice our presence, or their own for that matter.

And after everything, when my withdrawal is right on me and I’m using what little energy I have left to hold the mountain of shit pushing hard at my anal sphincter, and the vile taste of air is making me gag with every breath, a police car pulls up, onto the pavement too – two doors opening before it even stopped. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. There’s no chance he’s going to get that heroin into his mouth before they grab him. But they don’t. They know him, they call him Edward and one of them even puts a comforting arm on his shoulder. “Your mum called us, Edward, she said you went to her flat, she was worried. Then Janet from the Pharmacy called, so we knew you were here. Come on, we’ll take you back to the center”, “Gnea!” and Edward got in the back of the car, the police got in the front, and they drove off down the road, leaving me with a bag of spikes and fuck all to put in them.

I shuffled slowly back to the station, knowing there were no more trains back home but so I wasn’t just standing there which might have caused me to cry, or just collapse where I stood, probably both. I decided to look in the bag of spikes, on the off-chance Edward put the heroin in there. But there weren’t even any spikes. It was some sweets and a packet of tissues. It was then I realised I’d spent two hours ‘scoring’ with someone who wasn’t scoring, with someone who wasn’t even a junkie, with a man who was just wandering the streets because someone probably left the gate open at the madhouse where he lived. And he had my ten quid. I’d been ripped-off by accident by a spastic who’d just got lost.

I climbed over the train station fence and flopped onto the tracks. I took a deep breath, managed to stand up, and started shuffling the eight kilometers home.

FOUR: A Few Seconds More

A true friend is the one who, after sharing about three-hundred magic mushrooms with me at an art-college party, managed to procure a screwdriver so he could open the toilet door from the outside to inform me the girl whose naked legs I was betwixt and preparing for entry, had Downs Syndrome.

FIVE: Insane Attraction

‘John’s Not Mad’ was a late eighties spaz-porn documentary broadcast into the homes of British people by the BBC’s science-lite program ‘Q.E.D’. With their actual science program Horizon, actually requiring a bit of thought and consideration being relegated to BBC2, ‘Q.E.D.’ gave us science without the thinking, actually without the science, and ‘John’s Not Mad’ (just extremely funny) is a classic example of that.

It was the UK’s introduction to the exceptionally dubious and always unconvincing Tourette’s Syndrome, an affliction where the Tourettee exhibits ‘tics’ which can be anything from sudden twitches, bizarre movements, screaming, self-harming, blinking, biting, and in the case of John, who is ‘Not Mad’, swearing, and saying the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate time. Couched in the context of primetime BBC televisual entertainment, ‘John’s Not Mad’ was like science-fiction in its out-of-this-worldness, it was like a trick in its ‘Is this real, or are we being hadness?’ But most of all it was comedy gold, with families up and down the land (bearing in mind they only had four channels to choose from and four of them were shit) laughing their dinner off their laps as sixteen-year-old John from Galashiels in Scotland (the broad Scottish borders accent only adding to the lolz) would tell his care-worker to ‘Fuck off’ and called him a ‘big-nosed wanker’, and a ‘stupid cunt’ after he spilled some soil while demonstrating to John how to pot seedlings.

Q.E.D didn’t waste this opportunity, having already showed John fishing, alone, relaxed, he barely said a word, so the production team, probably over a few spritzers, decided to put him in all manner of situations that would cause him the necessary stress to keep us all glued to our seats, and our cheeks aching from laughter. The library scene stands out. A fucking library! ‘Oh, you’re claustrophobic, are you? Step into the coffin while we shut the lid, for science’. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, indeed.

Wherever you went the day after this now cult-classic was aired, all you could hear were people swearing, in the same, rushed and slightly ashamed pace of not mad John, and giggling themselves silly when other details like the way his family had to put covers over the food at the dinner table because John also had a habit, sorry, a ‘syndrome’ of spitting into other people’s food. Rabelais would be proud, because it has to be said, John was not a figure of ridicule, schoolkids up and down the country were not laughing at John, neither were they laughing with him. Rather they were tapping into – probably for the first time – the whole idea of mental illness and the weaponization of normality. The episteme creaked as schoolkids everywhere knew that not only was John not mad, he was a hero!

The BBC caught up with John thirteen years later with the documentary ‘The Boy Can’t Help It’, which was, like a more hardcore version of the original. We saw a now thirty-year-old John in his Tourette’s weekend therapy session where he and a few others with this comedic affliction, would interrupt the therapist with outbursts like ‘Your dog’s got tits!’, “I’m up to my knees in fucking cow-pat’, and ‘I’ve got gay-porn in my house’ all the while, John at least, smacking himself in the face.

We’d been prepped for John though, in the early eighties, when children’s TV show Blue Peter, known for being more school after school when you really wanted to watch Grange Hill or Asian martial arts legend Monkey, surprised us all and played a blinder by introducing us to a barely legible, barely able to move, sixty-year-old Joey Deacon, a legit, 100% spastic.

Deacon, born with severe cerebral palsy was being laughed at. As the patronizing and wholly dislikeable presenters wheeled Joey out in his Christmas cardigan, they also brought out a certain Ernie Roberts, who somehow – probably (definitely) lying – said he could understand Joey’s grunts and groans and would interpret for the giggling kids at home – he even wrote a book for Joey, if my memory serves this story correctly.

Like some proto-Stephen Hawkin but without the ability to think straight or communicate like Radiohead, Joey would sound like a cheap whore with her face pushed in the pillow and Ernie would turn to the presenter and say “He said I am going to write my memoir, I’ve had an interesting life and I feel it will help people understand my condition’. No chance. This was either scripted or just plain lies. I don’t care how long you spend with someone; you cannot get twenty or so multi-syllabic words from a bloke who has just four grunts; a short one, a long one and then the same two again but with a bit more pain as he struggles to push them out of his all but closed mouth. It was a fiasco, it was utterly unconvincing, and children can spot that even if they can’t name it, and the upshot was that calling someone a ‘Joey’ whilst slapping the back of your hand became part of the language of the playground, and still rears its adequate and occasionally appropriate head today.

I never met Joey Deacon, and I didn’t do LSD with John, but I did meet a girl with Tourette’s Syndrome once at a party and noticed quite quickly how she only bleated out something bizarre, or slapped the side of her face when she wasn’t getting too much attention. I said to her ‘Have you ever thought that you might be lying?”, “About what?” she said. “About having this syndrome. Have you ever though the syndrome itself is you lying to yourself and you’re actually just choosing to say rude words and slap yourself as it benefits you, because you get something out of it?”. “Fuck you!’ she said, putting her hand over her lips afterwards. “Fuck you!” I said, putting my hands over my lips afterwards. And then we talked for about ten minutes about her rats, that were called Biscuit and Pillow, with not a tic of any sort occurring for the entire duration of that rattus rattus chattus. I then asked her if she ticked during sex, thinking it might be quite the exciting fuck, but she said “I don’t want to talk to you any more”, which was fair enough. I guess there’s something a bit repulsive about a man who wants to fuck your mental illness.

(Click HERE for Part Two)