Yellow Dog.
“You look like Bob Geldof though innit, d’you know that? You look like Bob Geldof.” I nod and trot out my current line of how I recently met Johnny Turnball who, as well as being a Blockhead, also plays with Sir.Bob and he didn’t make the comparison the once and so perhaps it’s not as true as people suggest. This falls on deaf ears, the guy is already in a revere.
“He doesn’t comb his hair. You know? He’s like Tony Blair. He doesn’t comb his hair. It must mean something. You know? It’s like a – what does it mean? It’s an omen. Isn’t it? What does it mean? They don’t comb their hair. Bob Geldof and Einstein – yeah – mad professor hair – it must – like – it’s an OMEN. What does it mean? Bob Geldof, Einstein, Tony Blair – the three of them. Yeah? Why do you think that is?”
Patiently I explain that it probably doesn’t have any outside significance beyond that obvious image that each man is trying to project. Einstein is a good case in point and I’ve actually read (somewhere) someone making the very point that actually the image of Einstein we all know and love, wild hair, tongue out, twinkle in his eyes, was the carefully constructed end point of a man at the end of his professional career and at massively at odds with the hot new thing in his field. When Einstein propounded relativity he was a neatly combed clerk in a smart suit. I even ventured into the dangerous territory of out and out disagreement by pointing out that Tony Blair does comb his hair and generally looks very smart.
He stares at me – for a moment there is that same dangerous spark he always has and that always worries me about our train conversations – then he laughs “Ah man. Tony Blair, Bob Geldof, Einstein. I’m just chatting shit at you. Fuck man, here I am just sat here and Yellow Dog comes out and talks rubbish, I’m sorry blood.”
I don’t know his real name so I’ll call him Yellow Dog because it suits him. I meet him semi-regularly on the train I take between my house and my girlfriend’s. He is younger than me and clearly not all right in the head but I have no natural defence against men like him. I find it almost impossible not to attempt to reason with him. Unlike many he does listen, even if I generally just push his thoughts from one ludicrous conclusion to the next.
The first time I met him he staggered down the train carriage and asked me if I could answer him a question. “Who’s right? The Muslims or the Christians? ‘Cos like, you know brother, they tell me I shouldn’t drink, but I’m not sure.”
He then sat down opposite me and fixed me with a stare that was not openly aggressively but was neither entirely friendly. This is, I realise now, his mode. There is always something on the edge of violence about him. Even the way he laughs at himself, he seems so aware that what he says is unhinged that I keep expecting him to turn out to have been playing some massive practical joke and then hit me for having been taken in.
Eitherway, not wanting to provoke a fight, I did my level best to expound upon him a workable theory of the differing sources of morality, those based on religious conviction and those on cultural values and left him with the thought that it was, perhaps, the task of the individual to decide which source was of most importance.
On one level this worked, I talked so much he couldn’t even get an word in edgeways and was reduced to lolling back in his seat and making dark sucking noises with his cheeks and tongue. However I’d clearly become his friend and so now every time he sees me he slops down onto the seat beside me with “Alright brother -” and then usually something filthy about polish women.
He has too main obsessions. Polish women and how everyone else in the world has got it wrong. Not that he quite goes as far as to say that he’s got it right, he’s often very open about his struggles to get things together… but he is also very keen to point out how ludicrous he finds everyone else.
“These commuters are like monsters,” he grins “they like growl at me, like, get out of my space I’m going to work, and I’m like – you know blood – it’s not worth it. What’s the point of money without happiness? You know? I don’t want that. What’s the point of money without happiness? You know?” he stares at me, this is clearly a big concept and he doesn’t expect me to have grasped it yet “What’s the point of money without happiness?”
Today he told me was going to go to Hollywood. “May be in ten years time. You don’t think that’s leaving it too late do you? I just, I know things have got to be done in the right order. You know? I know that you’ve got to do it right. So I’m like, yeah, ten years, go to Hollywood and marry my Polish Princess.”
He is probably right to leave it ten years, though when you think of the number of films in which a man like him is used to expound heartfelt natural ‘truth’ about the wrongs of modern society I think he may have more success than you’d first imagine.