Ramble Book

by Adam Buxton

I was thinking this might be the wrong thing to say as I was saying it, and it turned out I was right. Dad got angrier than I’d seen him since I was 12 and I made my sister cry by excluding her from a game of Cheat with some children we’d met on holiday. And no wonder.

  Whatever hang-ups I had about our relationship and his ogling tendencies, he was a man in his mid-seventies being asked to engage in buffoonery for the cameras from morning till late at night, often in an environment that was just about bearable if you’d had an E. The only pills Dad was popping were for his blood pressure. As if to prove how unfair I’d been, the next couple of days were spent filming Dad at a Club 18–30 resort where he joined in with activities that included go-kart racing, swigging Schnapps on a packed coach as the passengers cheered and a karaoke party that ended with about 100 semi-naked revellers chanting, ‘BAAADDAD IS OUR LEADER! BAAADDAD IS OUR LEADER! LA LA LA LA! OOH! LA LA LA LA! OOH!’

  The truth was that whether he was joining in with a plastic-bottle battle in the mosh pit for the Foo Fighters at V97, being taught to rap by Coolio or being coached to become a Young British Artist by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Dad never let us down and was 100 per cent professional. OK, let’s say 95 per cent.

  None of that changed his opinion of the show itself, however, or most things I did professionally from then on, which he referred to as ‘pretty rubbishy, on the whole’. He disliked the bad language and the toilet humour, and it didn’t help that whatever I did was usually stuffed with references he didn’t get. Despite that, Joe and I managed to capture a few moments that supplied everything I’d hoped for when Dad started helping us with our TV nonsense.

  We had a segment on The Adam and Joe Show called Vinyl Justice, in which Joe and I dressed up as policemen and ‘raided’ the homes of music artists in search of ‘criminal records’ in their collections. I always thought of it as an excuse to meet a few of my musical heroes and over the years we spent strange afternoons filming with Thomas Dolby, Nick Heyward of Haircut 100, Tim and Lætitia of Stereolab, Mark E. Smith of the Fall and, most exciting of all for me, Frank Black of Pixies, whose music, once I’d stopped being intimidated by it, had become as familiar and important to me as Bowie or Talking Heads.

  We did Vinyl Justice with Frank at his Los Angeles home in late 1998, but earlier that year when he was in London playing some shows with his new band the Catholics I asked our producer if she could get us some time with him. It wasn’t practical to do Vinyl Justice while Frank was touring, so we decided it might be funny if BaaadDad interviewed him instead, and ten years after I’d cycled round London listening to ‘Here Comes Your Man’ for the first time, Frank Black was sat opposite Dad in the front room of Joe’s flat in Clerkenwell.

  Frank and Dad got on famously, chatting about wine, Armagnac and their favourite stretches of road in France, which would have made a great segment for a show about indy music and European travel aimed at Telegraph readers, but it didn’t fit in The Adam and Joe Show. I was just excited to meet Frank Black, so I didn’t care, but I felt bad about wasting his time, so when we were finished we took him for tapas across the road at the newly opened Moro restaurant (then co-owned by our friend Mark). ‘I wish all my interviews were like this,’ declared Frank, beaming at Dad.

  A few weeks later Frank got in touch and asked if Joe and I would be interested in making a video for his new single ‘Dog Gone’. Joe thought of doing an E.T. parody with Frank as the extra-terrestrial, munching Reese’s Pieces in a garden shed, but Frank was still on tour, so we suggested using my dad somehow. ‘Perfect,’ said Frank, going on to explain that, whether or not it was useful for the video, ‘Dog Gone’ was written from the point of view of a meteorite on a collision course with earth. We decided that Dad would play not only the meteorite, flying through space as he sang, but a character a bit like Stanley Green, the man with the ‘Less Protein’ sign who we used to see wandering the West End of London in the Eighties.

  I made a sandwich board for Dad that said ‘THE END IS NIGH’ on the front, and ‘I AM HERE’ on the back and printed out flyers with Frank Black’s face on them for him to hand out. Then we spent a couple of afternoons filming around the West End and outside Brixton Tube where Dad fearlessly interacted with members of the public as they ignored, tolerated and abused him. Unfazed, Dad would look over to where we were filming from time to time, sing a few of the lyrics to ‘Dog Gone’ and get on with his Prophet of Doom duties, looking for all the world like just another crazy old irrelevant guy.

  Chances are you haven’t seen the video, and even if you look it up on YouTube you may think, ‘I liked Adam’s dad better when he smoked a joint at that music festival,’ but the finished video for ‘Dog Gone’ is one of my favourite things Joe and I ever did together. I love the reactions of some of the people we filmed – the young woman in Brixton who takes a flyer from Dad then smiles sweetly at him; the wiry homeless man who dances round playfully taunting Dad with a toy dinosaur; even the bloke in the lift at Covent Garden Tube who responds to Dad’s offer of a flyer by flicking a ‘V’ sign at him, a gesture Dad accommodated with a look of weary resignation. Mostly, though, I love seeing two worlds so important to me collide as Dad sings along to a song by the lead singer of Pixies.

  Speaking of worlds colliding, in early 2016 I made a podcast about the way myself and others had reacted to David Bowie’s death, and one of the people I spoke to was Dara O’Kearney, an Irish fan who had become email pen pals with Zavid. They corresponded regularly from the late Nineties onwards and would talk about what they’d been listening to, reading and watching. It turned out Bowie had watched The Adam and Joe Show. His favourite part was BaaadDad.

  CHAPTER 22

  CHECK-OUT TIME

  I’m not worried about death. There are times – when I’m arguing with members of my family, falling out with friends, watching the news or looking at Twitter – when non-existence seems rather appealing. It’s the actual dying part I’m sadder about, and since my pa died I think about it a lot more.

  Mainly I wonder how it’ll come about, which makes me think of my health. In all likelihood, whatever is going to finish me off is lurking inside already; deadly sleeper cells radicalised by genetic scriptures or years of attacks from booze, biscuits and tobacco, waiting to bring down the short, hairy Tower of Buckles. I could wage war on these internal terrorists with exercise, self-control, cutting-edge diets, chanting, magnets, tea made from my own urine, etc., but even then, all it takes is a few disgruntled actors and it’s curtains for my corrupted empire.

  Or maybe the universe will clobber me another way and all the time spent worrying about my health will have been wasted. Perhaps I’ll drive into a tree while attempting to pair the car stereo with my phone, or get pushed in front of a train during an argument with a rail official at Cambridge station, or the Russians will inject one of my Revels with a nerve agent, and in my last moments I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh no! I could have had way more doobies.’

  One of my main worries about dying is the lack of control. Regaining a shred of autonomy is presumably one of the main factors when people consider voluntary euthanasia. Arranging the exact time and nature of your exit has a lot of advantages from the point of view of tying up loose ends. I’m not talking about suicide here, by the way. As far as I can see that just creates a lifetime’s supply of loose ends for the family and friends you leave behind. I’m talking about organising a nice farewell that eliminates the randomness, the surprise and the meaninglessness of so many deaths.

  For example, when I felt the time was right, I could return to St Cuthbert’s parish church in the cathedral city of Wells, Somerset, where in 2006 Edgar Wright directed my death scene in Hot Fuzz, and here, as part of a moving ceremony, someone I’d chosen specially (an old enemy I wanted to make peace with, or a competition winner perhaps) could topple one of the church spires and explode my head, as in the film. If Simon Pegg was experiencing a career slump, he could officiate. My family would probably not attend (unless they
really hated me by that time), but for film fans, gore hounds and those who appreciate grand gestures that defy the arbitrary nature of existence, it would be a day to cherish.

  My dad was determined to tie up as many loose ends as possible before he died. He didn’t want us to be burdened with too much admin when he was gone. As he had no other assets to speak of, his hopes for leaving something behind for his children were pinned on selling his place in Newhaven where he’d lived by himself for his last 20 years, and he didn’t want to pop off before the sale was finalised.

  The house was eventually sold a few weeks before he died but brought in a fraction of the already modest sum my dad was expecting. He went full gloomy about it, as if cancer wasn’t enough to be down in the dumps about. My sister, my brother and I never expected to inherit anything from Dad (other than some grumpy genes, a lot of books about the Second World War and various lengths of string), so we didn’t care about the money, but he took it as another indication that he’d failed somehow. In his last days his face fixed into an expression of worry. I asked if he was frightened. ‘No,’ said Pa. What was he fretting about then? ‘So many things,’ he replied.

  Watching TV with my wife and Rosie one night in mid-November 2015, my phone rang. It was Dad calling from his bedroom across the way. ‘Adam? Something extraordinary’s happened.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know who I am,’ replied Pa.

  My chest elevator dropped a few floors. I had been so focused on Dad’s physical deterioration, I hadn’t considered what might be happening to his mind.

  Over in the flat I found him sitting up in bed looking worried. ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said, all the hardness gone out of his voice. ‘I woke up and I no longer had any sense of who I am.’ I went and fetched a family photo album and found that he was able to recognise and identify everyone in it, so the problem wasn’t with his memory. Instead, it was his sense of self that had short-circuited. It reminded me of my Warwick magic-mushroom experience and the clone I’d seen in the mirror. ‘I bet you this is a side-effect of the morphine,’ speculated Dr A. Buckles.

  We went and sat in the living room. I made some tea and set it down for Dad with a couple of milk chocolate Hobnobs, hoping to refocus his mind on a simple pleasure. ‘Have you ever dunked a biscuit?’ I asked, prepared for him to tell me that dunking biscuits was vulgar, barbaric or grotesque.

  ‘Of course I’ve dunked a biscuit,’ he replied.

  Dad dunked his Hobnob in the tea and for a moment I worried that he would fail to take it out before the submerged portion detached and sank, but luckily he withdrew it before it came to that. ‘It’s great to dunk a biscuit, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Pa softly before continuing, as if to himself, ‘Occasionally I feel that I’m absolutely irrelevant.’

  OK. Time to shift to a conversational gear I hadn’t used with Dad before.

  ‘Who is relevant?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, that’s the big question,’ said Dad, still not really looking at me. ‘That is where it starts to be frightening.’

  ‘Why would you be frightened by it?’

  ‘Because we spend so much time and effort making sure that the state of our being is what it ought to be, and it becomes very unsettling if you start suspecting that it doesn’t very much matter.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t much matter. But that’s why we make things and organise things, isn’t it? Otherwise, of course it’s all meaningless.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘I feel much better now,’ said Dad weakly, ‘but only because you’re there.’

  I didn’t like to see him vulnerable and frightened. On the other hand, it was preferable to seeing him crotchety and impatient. At least I felt I could be of some use to him when he was in this state. Then he asked, ‘What have you done with the black briefcase?’ I told him it was safe. ‘Do you know what’s in it?’

  I did know what was in it.

  Several weeks earlier I’d complained to Dad about his commandeering of salad bowls for use as piss bottles (ignoring the carefully-washed fabric softener containers I’d provided for just such a purpose), and the conversation had escalated until he’d snapped, ‘Perhaps it would be best for everyone if you just put me in a home then.’ I said I’d look into it. Sat at my desk trying to regain my composure, my gaze drifted from the browser window where I had typed ‘Norwich best care homes’ to the black briefcase on the corner filing cabinet. ‘Screw it,’ I thought. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  It wasn’t hard to get it open. I forced the catches with a screwdriver and they flipped up perkily as if to say, ‘Hey! What took you so long?’

  There was a gun inside. A Luger.

  ‘It belonged to an SS officer,’ said Dad, and I dunked a Hobnob. ‘I took it off him when we liberated a POW camp on the outskirts of Hamburg. You would have known if you’d read my book.’

  Copies of The Road to Fleet Street, the autobiography Dad had been working on in various forms for years and had finished just a couple of months before, had recently arrived in Norfolk, but between family, failed pilots and Dad commitments, there hadn’t been the time to sit down and read it all. Also, at that point, I just couldn’t face it. There were so many things I wanted to know about Dad, but, leafing through the book, I could see he hadn’t written about them. As for what he had written about, I felt I’d heard most of those stories before. Maybe not the Luger story, though.

  ‘I was thinking,’ continued Dad, ‘I might ask you to bring me the gun and I could just blow my brains out.’

  I replied that I’d rather he didn’t blow his brains out. Clearing up after the spectacular Code Brown in the bathroom last week had been bad enough. Dad ignored me and continued, ‘I think the reason people shoot themselves is that they don’t belong anywhere. They don’t have any reason to be anywhere.’

  ‘Or they’ve made such a mess of things they can’t bear to think about it any more. Or they’re mentally ill, but that’s not the case with you, Dad.’

  ‘The case with me is, I have no relevance. If it weren’t for the fact that there would be a response from you, I wouldn’t speak. Because that would remind me that I was the only person left in the world and that would remind me that I didn’t exist.’

  I asked him if he felt panicky. ‘Of course. I’m panicky because I don’t belong anywhere.’

  ‘You belong here,’ I said, and for a while neither of us spoke.

  When I was confident that he was OK and through the worst of the morphine fugue, I asked if he’d like me to put on a film for him. ‘What would you put on?’ he asked. I tried to think what I would want to watch if I were in his position. ‘Have you seen Air Force One with Harrison Ford?’ Dad liked Harrison Ford. We watched Raiders of the Lost Ark one Christmas towards the end of the Eighties when Dad was beginning work on his novel, The Proving Ground. ‘That’s who should play me when they turn my book into a film,’ said Dad. I put on Air Force One and headed back to Rosie and my wife.

  After Pa’s bad trip he made me promise I wouldn’t let him wake up in the night feeling like that again. I told him if he took his sleeping pill every night, he should be fine, but that was easier said than done.

  He’d stopped eating solid food by this point and was only drinking fluids with difficulty – an indication, said the GP, that the end was a few days away. His sleeping pills were tiny but getting one into his mouth and washing it down with some water had become like a Mission Impossible interrogation scene.

  At the end of one particularly difficult day when I was looking forward to a beer, a podcast and a few hours of undisturbed rest, I placed the pill in Dad’s mouth and offered him a glass of water to wash it down. He waved it away. ‘Have you swallowed the pill?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied after a while.

  ‘Well, have you or haven’t you?’ Pa opened his mouth and the pill fell out.

/>   There followed around ten minutes of unsuccessful attempts to shift him into a position where he could more easily swallow the pill, every move accompanied by more of his blood-curdling groans and cries. It felt as though he was no longer helping me, even actively resisting my efforts to help him swallow the pill, but I refused to give in, reasoning that once it was down we could both get some undisturbed rest. After all, neither of us wanted a repeat of Lugernacht.

  Exhausted and agitated, I was ready to throw up my hands and say, ‘Sod this, I give up,’ when I remembered the heavy little shot glasses I kept as souvenirs from my bartending days.

  * * *

  RAMBLE

  I liked it when Dad would come into the bar while I was working. With a nod from my manager, I’d pour us a couple of shots of the most expensive Armagnac we had and Pa would beam at me. ‘Golly, this is the really fancy stuff! I had a flask of this when I walked the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska and it saved my life on more than one occasion, let me tell you.’ He had told me many times.

  * * *

  I crushed the sleeping pill into a powder and transferred it to the shot glass, which I topped up with water. Back in Dad’s bedroom, I tipped back his skinny head and supported it as I lifted the glass to his lips and poured in the sleeping draught.

  Once it was finally all gone, I told Dad I was heading to bed myself and wished him a good night. As I turned to leave, he murmured something I couldn’t understand, except for the phrase ‘sleep tonight with a clear conscience’.

  ‘What’s that, Daddy? Are you saying you don’t have a clear conscience?’

  To which he replied clearly, ‘No, you!’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I have a clear conscience?’ I asked, my heart beginning to thump.

  ‘Because you’re a bully.’

  I considered this for a few moments, wondering if he might be right, thinking about times I’d been impatient with him, with the children, with my wife, with Rosie, thinking about all the ways there are to be a bully even if you think you’re a good guy, a loyal son, a FUN DAD.