That guy and me

Let's face it, everybody, and I mean everybody, had issues with him. I loved the guy, love him still, but sometimes I have thought, "Why am I getting this?" I am the one who defended him, still defends him, all the time, everywhere. (Sometimes too much, they say, and, yes, I have to admit sometimes I have given his activities a generously positive spin.) 

Defending him, I can tell you, was a full-time job. No-one was really safe from his barb if he thought a line had been crossed. Certainly not me. He once bawled out the lead player himself, for goodness sake! Our chief, his chief, the Head Guy!  In the square, in public! Why? Because he had crossed the line!  Ah, you say, as we all said, but who decides where the line was to be drawn? And who says you have crossed it? Well, who do you think?

So there was always going to be a need for a good PR operator to smooth the many ruffled feathers, paper over the cracks, present a supposedly united front. The sort of thing I can do.  Otherwise, well, we would not be here. So that was my job, and most people thought I did a not-too-bad a job. Not only are we still here, we are very decidedly on the move. Thanks to him.

What stuck, and it still sticks, in a the craws of a  lot people is that he just popped up out of nowhere. Well, no, not exactly nowhere. Everybody knew him. He was hard to miss, but, I tell you, you would not have been impressed, at least at first sight. He looked like, oh, an out-of-work sax-player, maybe, or even a tramp. He was shortish, balding, had a snub nose and spoke with a stutter, which he tried unsuccessfully  to control. Later on, after he had joined us, or rather, forced himself on us, it was an embarrassment, sometimes a real torture, to hear him speak in public, or try to speak, I should say.

He was good at shouting, though. He had been well-known to us, heckling the group at every performance in our early days. He obviously saw us as the main rivals, or even the enemy, trying to get people to turn us away or refuse us bookings. It could get pretty hairy sometimes, I can tell you, and he was never far away whenever the worst happened. I remember one particularly bruising incident. He had not actually taken an active part in the fracas, but there he was, standing  at the corner of the street, eyeing us silently with dark concentration. Was that venom in his eyes, or was it his emerging, typically intense, but strangely puzzled curiosity? He was forever threatening us with the cops, though goodness knows what the charges might have been. He would have thought of something, no doubt. After all, he had that famous legal background. Or so they said.

Our boss had gone away not long before he turned up. I don't think he had even known our boss, though they were both about the same age and it is not exactly a megalopolis we live in.  Clearly, the boss and his life were pretty fantastic by any measure, even if not everything he was supposed to have done or said can be taken at face value. So it is a surprise that our new friend never, ever, during the years that followed, mentioned anything about the enthusiastic crowds, the fantastic atmosphere, the cheers, the chants, the stories or anything. We were always swapping reminiscences of the great exploits we had lived through, but he showed little interest  in any of it, except, of course, the final days. Some said he had been abroad, and that explained it.

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when he just turns up, telling the guys excitedly that he had had a call from the boss, said he had been made an offer he could not refuse and here he was ready to do his bit to promote the group. Well, the boss himself had set up his own team, led by his main man, the chief, to look after things while he was away. He had been in contact himself a few times since, I am told, but there had been no mention of any new core member. Now this guy barges in, saying he had a special commission from the man himself. The boss had done many crazy things in his time (hence his temporary departure) but, we thought, there was no way he was going to entrust even the tea-making to this guy. It turned out we had underestimated both the shabby sax-player-turned-heckler and the boss.

He was absolutely convinced that he possessed a clearer vision than anyone else, including the core group, and even the chief, of what the boss wanted and what needed to be done, and done urgently, if we  were ever to move forward. As the years were to show, nothing could shake him from this certainty. This, and his amazing determination, struck you immediately, in the first minute, and somehow, after a while, this certainty was transferred to you. Anyway, that's what happened to me, originally a skeptic about any mysterious, personal call from the boss to a scruffy, fanatical ex-enemy.  You have to remember, though, that, despite his appearance, and the stutter, he could be, actually normally was, very charming too. No, that is not the word, he was mesmerising, and very solicitous and affectionate, always asking after everyone and sending his own love and good wishes all over the place. So long as you did not cross the line.

Ah, the line!  This was probably the cause of so much of the tension between him and the chief, indeed between him and the original team. As he admitted himself, he tended to say different things to different people, depending on the circumstances. He did not believe in following arbitrary rules. He would often say, airily,  "These are not important!"  Some of the rules which he seemingly found so unimportant meant a great deal to the chief and the core team, and to me too, if I am honest. But then he would suddenly go bonkers over some really, really trivial thing.  Remember his explosion over haircuts?  Wow, that really set him off!  "So what was an arbitrary rule?" , we asked him, smirking and winking at each other, remembering the boss's wayward hairstyle. Well, that was one of his finest moments, when he seemed finally to speak freely and from the heart, unleashing a stream of pure oratory, without a single stutter, from that little bald head. I remember every word of what he said. Who could forget it? "We were certain the boss would be back soon, right?" he said. If we all agreed with that, then we should all work single-mindedly as a united team to prepare for that event. Anything which stood in the way of this, or caused uneasiness or dissension in the team should be avoided. ("Hark at him!" , some said, afterwards, when the speech was reported to them.) I think he was being sincere, though. Some people were a bit over-precise about rules, it is true, but others went too far the other way, and brought the whole enterprise into disrepute among our public, which was our target audience after all. That was his point about haircuts, and it is also why he was prepared to be relaxed in some areas and be seemingly so frustratingly unbending in others.

Was it all to do with sex? I honestly do not think so, though, naturally, given his passionate nature, there were many whispers. He certainly had no end of lady admirers, to put it mildly. They adored him and he seemed totally himself in their company.  He obviously saw them as equals, which annoyed some, and even gave them key promotional roles in his part of the enterprise, which outraged others. People used to wind him up because he was unmarried, but he always seemed pretty reasonable, or rather practical and laid-back, to me, as when the issue about whether I should get married or not came up. I don't think he was gay either, though I might be wrong in this. He certainly had no time for overly-frisky people of any sexuality, gay or straight. Those types, like those who over-indulged in drink or drugs, or anything really, just seemed to show a lack of self-control. How could they be an example to anyone? And they provoked serious jealousies and strife in the community!  In other words, they distracted attention from the single enterprise that should be everybody's main concern. The boss's return.  No, I do not think he had any fear of sex, or of anything, or anybody, for that matter.

These days, of course, everybody wants to say they had always agreed with him. Even the current core team claims to speak with his voice. This is curious, because I can tell you the original team never did come to terms with what they saw as his "cavalier" attitude to what he said were "unimportant" rules. There was a big meeting, and some compromise was cooked up, and a few "red line" issues were laid down to signal the authority of the core team, but otherwise he was to be allowed free-rein in his own territories. These, by then, were, of course, much larger than the home base.  He stuck to the red lines, but only when they served his wider purpose. Others he quietly ignored, which was typical of him, and this really annoyed the leadership. It did not bother him. For a guy who was capable of, shall we say, "adjusting" a fairly clear, explicit instruction from the boss himself, the core team held no fears. Things have developed a lot since then, of course, and I do not see so much of him.  I think the current core team have regained the initiative, and they are more political than he ever was (which is why they - and we-  are still here). Had he approved of all the "clarifications", as they are called, they have been issuing over the years in his name? They certainly sound like him, though some of the tightenings-up sound, well, a bit arbitrary to me. I honestly do not think he would have approved the new restrictions on women, for example, but who am I to say?  We are much bigger now and we have to fit in with the wider society we want to change, so we do not want to cause any unnecessary scandal or feed any prejudices. Look what happened to the boss!

Perhaps my bizarre , snub-nosed friend did grow more reactionary in later years, or perhaps sex did cause him more problems than I had thought.  I really doubt it, but, as I said at the beginning, I always have had issues with him, everybody does. Everybody always will. So, Paul, you old Pharisee, when we meet again in some better place, no doubt you will be able to "clarify" some of your more outrageous (reported) comments. How is the boss's hair, for example? So long!