Banyan Crescent!/ Tony

Wednesday 9:00 p.m.
                                 I'm a bit distraught. Tony died on the 29th of September, so if I'm going to do some juju for him, that's seven weeks from there. Of course, I don't really believe in any of that, but I'm going to ..what else can you do? Well, I can write about what I knew about the guy. That's what I'm going to write about for the next seven weeks, or maybe just for this evening.

                                There's a stairway in the school and at the very bottom of the stairs, there is a wee bit further down and down there you can sit on the pipes. Just slightly below ground level and then there are hot water pipes. I started sitting down there when I was in third year probably. Folk from Viewpark sat there. I was thinking today how fit these joes were as kids.
                                Jim Muir was one of them. Jim went into train at Parkhead maybe a year later. John Doyle ended up playing for Celtic. Peter Longworth was much better at football than any of us, and the paradigm of a well brought up kid, but football scouts look for the terrier in kids, and Pete was a very nice guy. There were a few other folk sitting on these pipes, but I remember those pretty well.
                                It was called mocking. Taking the piss. It's vocabulary. It's resonance. It's being really smart with your mouth. Sometimes folk would leap off the pipes and retort. These are really joes with the smart rejoinders. Once you lose the accent a bit and start toadying to the evil bourgeois, you won't have that anymore. You have moved on into inarticulateness.
                              So that's where I found Tony, before we went to the dancing, down there in the slightly underneath where boys were being boys and mocking each other and being smart and taking the piss.
                              After we'd been going to the dancing once or twice, I visited him in his home, which was in Banyan Crescent. This is right down at the bottom of the Laburnum Road, which goes from the top and takes in the bottom of Viewpark. So you get the bus from Bellshill and walk down the Laburnum Road, and turn into Banyan Crescent. It's kind of exotic. Banyan Crescent. I think a banyan might be a tree.
                               In the living room were sitting his granda and his grandmaw. His maw and his da were nothing in comparison. They so acknowledged and were so giving to the granda and the grandmaw. The granda had a moustache, a kind of big European moustache.
                               So, we're going to go out to the dancing and Tony has  to get by his granny who is appearing for us in the kitchen. Tony is wearing a white polo neck, bri nylon horrorshow crew neck jumper, which we think it totally cool, but his old granny starts pulling at the front of it and asking Tony if he's wearing a vest. Are you wearing a simmit?
                               She's a dwarf and the most gorgeous old josephine you have ever met in your life. A cake left out in the rain. So I says to her, what was Lithuania like? She says it was flat and full of potato fields. Every time I saw her, I really fell in love with her. She checked to see if Tony was wearing a simmit. Well, he wasn't. Hmmm? So she told him to go out and find a nice Jewish girl.
                               His grandad went back to Russia during the First World War and worked in the salt mines. He came to Bellshill to work in the pits and then went back to ... take my hat off to such a joe!
                               Sometimes I went down there to visit Tony. We sat in the kitchen. Tony was recording things off Radio Luxenbourg. He had a tape machine and a screw driver. So he's  sticking the screw driver into  the tape machine and I'm wondering why, what's all that about.
                                Of course, he listened to John Peel as well. A kind of listening to Radio Luxenbourrg, Radio One when it happened kind of a guy