by Danny Baker
This he continued going over and over until he’d convinced himself the scenario sounded totally plausible.
‘So do you want to get straight to the airport?’ I asked eventually.
Paul snapped his head towards me and gave an astounded look as though he had no inkling of how a) I could have possibly heard him and b) how I could have arrived at such a preposterous idea.
‘Do I, fook! I’m starving! Where’s that hamburger place we went to with your kids that time?’
And so to Ed’s Easy Diner on Old Compton Street, Soho. A glass building that might have been made with the paparazzi in mind. I think it was here, and I can’t totally swear to it, that he took a swing at one photographer and chased another one up the street.
After an hour of this we decided to cut our losses and just go back to my house in Deptford. Chris opted to stay in Soho, where his own choices were still varied and appealing.
The rest of the day was blissfully and thankfully mundane with Paul – his shoes and shirt removed immediately upon arrival – chatting happily with my family and neighbours, doing magic tricks and gags for the kids and making a series of long calls to Walter Smith until he felt he really had it all smoothed out. He slept as he always preferred to – on the sofa. That way he could just keep watching TV all night with a few fitful bursts of oblivion rolling in until the sun came up. As soon as dawn broke, he’d stand on my doorstep smoking, having lively conversations with every early-morning riser who came by, offering them sweets and cadging further smokes. Once, before I was up, he rode for a few streets with the milkman, making deliveries alongside him.
The morning after the day described, the photographs of the ‘Three Muska-Beers’ were in every paper alongside tales of long thirsty sessions and all-night hullabaloo. Chris was seen leaving a bar at two a.m. and the clear insinuation was that he had left Gazza inside. That same morning Paul went with me when I took Sonny on the morning school run. Photographers outside my house took their shots and when these appeared later in print, Paul was invariably described as ‘bleary-eyed’.
And he would see every snap, read every word. He was incapable of passing a tabloid newspaper without vigorously leafing through the pages to search out his coverage. Then, settling on it, he would devour the copy, reading aloud in a see-sawing mutter, as though he were being nagged, punctuating it with his own oaths, curses and threats. Invariably the rag would end up in a crushed heap several feet away.
Chris and I soon tired of pointing out the obvious cure for such self-torture: Just don’t read them, mate.
‘I have to,’ he’d argue. ‘All of it. I have to know what they are saying. The lads will slaughter me when I go training, so I’ve got to know what they’ll be talking about.’
I had been aware of the crushing peer pressure that the squad mentality generates ever since former Chelsea player Pat Nevin told me why he always had to buy two copies of his beloved NME each week. ‘The lads thought all the music I loved was a bit suspect,’ he said. ‘If they saw something with Echo & the Bunnymen on the cover they’d rip the piss out of me and throw it in the showers. So I got to buying two every Wednesday. One I’d hide and read later, and the other was for them to “find” and tear up.’
It may have been typical of Paul, so acutely aware of his ‘otherness’ that, like the spare NME, he created the mother of all red-herrings in offering up his prankish ringmaster of a public persona for his cohorts. I promise you, the gurning thicko you saw wearing the false plastic boobs on the open-top bus was not Paul Gascoigne. That was ‘Gazza’.
So what happened?
How did the warnings and prophecy become so shockingly fulfilled? What caused the cartoon tabloid Gazza to become the actual Paul Gascoigne?
Well, his period in Italy didn’t help. Signing for Lazio was very serious. Grown-up. The big room. But they wanted Paul Gascoigne, footballer, full stop. This was entirely reasonable, because Lazio were splashing out a huge fee on the greatest property in the world. Somehow though they failed to notice that this house was on fire.
For Paul, just being a footballer was OK up to a point. When he was ‘on’, in the theatre, he was fine. But football as a culture bored the living bejesus out of him. He loved Italy and the Italians and learned the language within a couple of months. However, I noted that he would choose his fluency depending who was at the table, always wary of another pro chiding, ‘Ooh, listen to you . . .’
When the injuries started piling up, so did the calls begging friends to come out and stay in the big empty house on the Tiber. Despite Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardener’s Herculean sacrifices – and Jim had always been a totally loyal Jeeves to Paul’s Bertie Wooster – sooner or later Paul would be alone in Rome, a physical isolation to accompany the emotional one. It was in Rome that Paul discovered wine, which he also began to learn like a language, and from wine came the numbing ‘benefits’ of getting sloshed alone.
Once back again in Britain, this time at Rangers, I think Paul had realized that his use for football and its use for him had reached a plateau. Sporting genius, his one great ally in staving off the everyday, was showing the first signs of starting to fade.
He remained a tremendous asset to any club, but whereas other pros might enjoy these later seasons of industry respect and entitlement, Paul could see nothing but the yawning abyss of decline. He started to talk more of the frightening and unmapped years beyond. When the world no longer saw Gazza, he felt, they would have to accept Paul Gascoigne instead, and he truly believed that that incarnation of himself would not be acceptable to them. He would disappoint. Be found out.
That dreaded moment finally came, in Paul’s mind, when, in one of the most notorious decisions ever stage-managed by an eclipsed star, the then England manager Glenn Hoddle inexplicably decided to leave Paul Gascoigne out of the England 1998 World Cup squad, a side that everybody else, including the rest of the players, knew he had every right to be part of. It was a shocking decision that utterly destroyed Paul’s confidence and allowed his most destructive inner demons to gain the whip hand. Even though his greatest playing days were behind him at the time of France ’98, there simply wasn’t a team in the world who, had the scores been level with fifteen minutes to play, wouldn’t have drawn breath had they seen Gazza warming up at pitchside ready to battle against them. Purely from a morale point of view, he should have been in the squad – the sight of Paul Gascoigne running on to a pitch sent an electric charge through crowds the world over. But Glenn Hoddle wanted to make his splash. In the event, it turned out to be just the latest in his long line of managerial belly flops – and one with catastrophic repercussions for the player.
From that point on, Paul’s off-field stunts became more implosive, the self-loathing blossomed and his obsession with stopping the clock filled his every action.
Never quite having the faith in himself to buy into life when he was a global success, when ruin became an option he embraced it as if it were his destiny. He had been the greatest triumph in the world, now he would show how good he could be at failure too. Failure, ruin and despair – why not? It’s something to do.
Initially, there was no shortage of volunteers willing to ‘cure’ the bad Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne – the broken person Paul has always thought he must be – and Paul has been an attentive and, I suspect, lucrative patient. In those first years after retirement from the game, pyschobabble and clichéd self-discovery became his new Italian. Then, in more recent times, the need for rescue and redemption became all too physical, real and acute.
My phone number has never changed and yet he never calls, probably as part of the latest twelve-step programme or through a misguided embarrassment at what he later became. The last time we met up we went to a restaurant near my home and, while he didn’t exactly wolf down his steak, he looked good and drank nothing but water. I drank wine and told him how sweet it tasted. His eyes twinkled because he knew how wrong and therefore appropriate a joke that was; an appalling jest
that only very close friends can dare. The sort of joke nobody tells around him any more because he has supposedly become a tragedy, a walking cautionary tale. Except he hasn’t quite, thank God.
That night Sonny, now old enough to hear and understand Paul’s unexpurgated stories, came with us to witness his silly stunts and japes at those on surrounding tables. All the old traits were present and correct, and Son laughed, I noted, like nobody else – and I have to include myself here – has ever made him laugh. The kind of laughter when breath becomes exhausted and you make a genuine request for your tormentor to stop.
That is something that, in my life, only Paul Gascoigne can do.
More than anything in this world, I would wish Paul to get well and realize, once and for all, how widely loved, respected and important he is. Though these books may include many notable people who have punctuated our pop culture over the last forty years, nobody comes close to making the impression on me that Paul Gascoigne did.
I have never met anyone like him and certainly never expect to do so again.
Ain’t It Grand To Be Blooming Well Dead
One of the few traits I haven’t inherited from my parents is a belief in crackpot superstition, although some of the more widely held gags in this field I will go along with because they are bordering on tradition and often a lot of fun to perform anyway. So I’ll walk around ladders, place unwanted mirrors carefully on to skips so as not to break them, throw salt about and open both front and back doors every New Year’s Eve. The only exceptions to this are a couple that come directly from the old man and that I have never heard of being adhered to by anyone else. Therefore, so as not to let these loopy tics die out because of my sluggishness, I will never watch a light go out, and if I see an ambulance I will hold my collar until I chance across a four-legged animal. Dad lumbered me with these when I was about six. The first I remember was delivered to me as we walked along Rotherhithe New Road and one of the streetlights went out as we approached it. ‘Fuck it,’ Dad barked. ‘You should never see a light go out. It means a death in the family.’ He then carried on casually talking about something else while I, now completely freaked out, tried to process this dreadful new information. To this day I will look away when flicking off a table lamp, look back and watch it come on again, then look away once more for its final extinguishing. I even blow out candles with my eyes shut. As for the ambulance/four-legged animal thing – and here Spud had warned me that if I ignored the ritual it would mean ‘something really rotten is going to happen’ – I have to say I am a little more flexible. If I am driving and see the flashing blue lights of a hospital emergency, I do allow myself to simply trap my shirt collar under my chin. This counts, as far as I am concerned, although it does make you look like you are at the wheel with a broken neck. As a further concession, I include insects as part of my release from the deal because they do technically have four legs and a couple of others to spare. Nowhere in the rules does it say the freeing creature can’t have more than a leg-quartet and I believe my loosening of the regulations is an overall sign that I am maturing. Against this, if I am walking my own dog and see an ambulance, he won’t be allowed to count and I must source a fresh one.
Actually, let me begin this chapter again.
One of the many traits I’ve inherited from my parents is a dogged belief in crackpot superstition. The first time I became aware of these unseen forces that control all our lives was at about the age of five when, just before a trip to the park with Mum and Dad, Spud said he was going to nip into James Lane, the local turf accountants, to put on a few bets. This bookies was only a ninety-second walk from our flats but we had barely begun to make our way up Debnams Road when the old man suddenly exploded with rage. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake Bill!’ he stormed. ‘What’s the fucking matter with you? Silly bastard! If I lose money ’cos of this, I’ll go off a-fucking-larming!’ Going off alarming was Spud’s favourite phrase to illustrate any kind of uproar or fuss. Looking to find out what had triggered this fury I saw our near neighbour old Bill Pitts mooching toward us. Dad and he were old friends, but they seemed to be having heated words.
‘Fuck me, Fred, I have to go out mate,’ I recall Bill pleading, to which Dad replied something about why, if this was so, could he not find alternative routes.
Sensing my concern, Mum leaned down to let me know what was going on.
‘It’s y’father,’ she explained. ‘He was going to put some money on a horse race, but now he can’t because he saw Bill and he thinks it’s bad luck to have a bet when you’ve just seen a boss-eyed man.’
Like any five-year-old, I accepted this bizarre data completely without comment and mentally placed it right up there with the shape of the earth and the ocular benefits of eating up all my carrots. There could be no doubt that Mr Pitts had jinxed Dad’s intended wagering, for when it came to being cross-eyed, Bill was an undisputed leader in the field with a strabismus equal to, or arguably greater than, the great silent comedian Ben Turpin. Everybody called him Boss-eyed Bill Pitts, even Bill himself. When he would come to our door to ‘order’ whatever goods Dad had liberated from the docks that week, should the old man not be in, he would say, ‘Tell yer dad to put me down for three of the ladies gloves he’s getting. Tell him they’re for Boss-eyed Bill, he’ll know.’ In fact, everybody knew.
‘One home, one away,’ was the most common way of describing his condition, although neither of Bill’s eyes could technically be said to be ‘at home’, given that they both settled toward the inner recesses of their sockets. ‘Fuck me, Bill,’ people would say, ‘can’t you stop looking at your hooter for five minutes? It’s not that fascinating.’
‘Buckle-eyed’ was the other term for it, and if Dad ever saw Bill on the street, providing he wasn’t going to place a bet, he would shout a hearty, ‘Aye-aye, Buckle! I’ll be round the Duke of Suffolk later! If you see two of me I’ll be the one in the middle!’
Before modern sensibilities lead you to start a campaign to get retrospective compensation for Boss-eyed Bill, I should point out that he had a popular wife, five kids and a temper that was a boon to glaziers who specialized in pub window replacement. Perhaps if he’d been living in the suburbs nobody would have mentioned how boss-eyed he was and even given him charitable status. Doubtless today there would be corrective surgery readily available or else he might better be known as Ocular Different William, but back then he was Boss-eyed Bill and just got on with being Boss-eyed Bill. It was only in taking walks near betting shops that he found his challenging way of looking at the world to have its drawbacks.
The point of all this concentration upon superstitions will soon be revealed, but before we move on I must record a story that goes beyond a belief in mere luck into a dimension beyond. In the late sixties there was a great revival in populist occult imagery, the most notable exponents of which were probably bands like Black Sabbath, Black Widow and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. TV also fuelled this craving for the unsettling in strange, creepy series such as Mystery & Imagination, The Liars, and Journey into the Unknown, whose haunting whistled theme tune over scenes of an abandoned midnight fairground totally mesmerized me.
Children were given their chance to get in on the supernatural fad via Waddington’s Ouija Boards, sold in all good toyshops. These wooden slabs emblazoned with the letters of the alphabet, numbers one to nine and the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ allowed all junior mystics to get in touch with the more garrulous sort of ghost, and newspapers of the time were full of stories about sessions that had begun by timidly asking ‘Is anybody there’ and ended up with people leaping possessed from high windows or sacrificing close friends at the centre of hastily drawn pentagrams. As a result, every kid wanted a piece of that action. Nobody I knew had a proper Ouija board but it was soon discovered you could achieve much the same results by writing all the necessary information on pieces of paper arranged in a semicircle with an upturned drinking glass through which to channel the spirit’s message. I imagin
e a rumbled Waddington’s wanted to suppress such infringement of copyright but soon everyone was at it. The problem now was that, when you’re ten or eleven, waiting for longer than twenty seconds to engage with a chatty wraith tends to test one’s patience, so most kids would give the sessions a bit of a helping hand by shoving the glass around the letters themselves while feigning shock and panic. You could always tell when one of your mates was manufacturing the mystery because whatever phantom they were pretending to be would have a penchant for words like ‘bum’, ‘bastard’ and ‘tit’, coupled with a curious eagerness to point out who around the table was, in fact, a secret homosexual. Thus 99 per cent of these initially sombre séances rapidly descended into farce.
Thus one day in Stephen Micalef’s house, Mark Jeffries, Tommy Hodges, Peter King and I all promised, promised, promised that we wouldn’t fake it and no matter how long it took we would wait until the glass began to move purely guided by an unseen force. After a few failed attempts at this avowed discipline – I believe a Mr John Arse put in an appearance at one point – we were off again with all our index fingers atop the beaker as it slid around the letters. The name George was forming up and, as usual, as the fourth letter revealed itself we were all noisily accusing each other of ‘pushing it’ and creating the kind of racket that might dissipate the chances of any drifting ghoul wanting to stick around. After the glass came to rest it was decided to ask a question that would flush out any charlatans, but we were momentarily stumped as to what that might be. Our ethereal chum waited patiently while we thrashed this out. Then I came up with the idea that I should remove a coin from my pocket and hold it in my hand without looking at the year engraved upon it. If the spirit guessed this date correctly then we knew we had a live one. I took a penny, one of the pre-decimal large ones, and without so much as glancing at it put it in my back pocket and sat down again.