Author's Notes Pt. 7 - The Dopest Ghost in Town

Isaac's origins date back to 1999 but the first time I started entertaining him as a character seriously would have been around 2001-2 while I was working on my novel ‘The Disease of Dancing Cats’ and I was trying to figure out what one of the peripheral characters was like.

This character had a minor but important role and I was trying to figure whom to base it on. The character was meant to be funny and full of life but with a hint of tragedy about him.

I was sitting in a bar above the now defunct Free Butt pub in Brighton (a bunch of scenes in ‘TDODC’ ended up being set there) where my buddy Tazz worked. In a fit of drunken inspiration I alighted on him.

“Dude, I’m writing a novel and I am going to base a character on you.”

“Cool, what’s it about?”

I started my scripted ‘it is an existential novel, inspired by Albert Camus, think Kevin Smith meets The Addiction’ speech and then broke it off with:

“It is about Vampires.”

He snorted a half laugh and a ‘Cool’ and gave me the look that everyone gave me when I mentioned the V-word. I persisted and explained the story a little more. Tazz relented.

“What do you want to be called?” I asked.

Without hesitation he responded:

“Casper.”

“Casper? Why Casper?”

“Because he is the dopest Ghost in town.” Tazz knocked his voice up an octave and made it nasal. “Cos everyone loves Casper, he is the dopest Ghost in town.”

The name was perfect, why wouldn’t he want to be named after one half of the fucked up skater duo from Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s film “Kids”?

It was from there that Casper took shape. Goofy in nature, but with a listlessness throughout its scenes that I felt nailed what I knew about Tazz, or at least what he allowed me to know about him.

I imagine there are any number of punk songs that Tazz would have preferred but the essence of Casper was “Tears of a clown”. 

The first time I met Tazz was a couple of weeks before the Millennium at a party in Seaford – a town about 30 minutes from Brighton – hosted by a girl named Liz. 

He was a floppy haired blonde kid who was into skateboarding and Pop-Punk. He had this infectious, electrified enthusiasm that he seemed to be bursting with.

I got really drunk on a constant stream of cheap beer and some old Jamaican Rum that, when spilt, took the varnish off the table. I vaguely remember some obnoxious girl taking the piss out of me for being really shit faced and me just laughing at it.

Later I crawled into one of the spare rooms – up a ladder in an attic – where my girlfriend was asleep and cuddled up to her. 

I woke up with a cracking hangover and my arm over Tazz. It was awkward for about 30 seconds and then it became a joke. Apparently my girlfriend had got up a few hours earlier and Tazz, coming from a night time tryst, had drunkenly climbed up into another room. 

On the train back Tazz cracked jokes and generally acted like a hilarious doofus. We managed to convince him to come to our New Year’s Eve party in the dive of a bedsit we lived in at the time.

He showed up, drank his weight in booze and smoked weed late into the night. He made me laugh with his shenanigans and his random slurring. There was a vibrancy to him and energy to the way he spoke – it was as if he would take a deep breath and then barrel through each sentence. That or he would roll over several of the syllables and then gallop through whatever thought he had going.  

And after that I didn’t see him again for almost a year. 

The next time we saw each other was pretty prominent as it was the same night that I saw my mate hook up with three Goth girls without having to do much more than sit there and smirk. 

I was drunk as usual and standing at the bar and Tazz came up to me and said hello. I grinned and asked him how he had been. He looked at me solemnly and then half smiled:

“Honestly, I’ve been a little depressed.”

I didn’t know whether to take him seriously in his bluntness, so I laughed. He joined in but I still had this uneasy feeling that he was being sincere. 

We ended up chatting for a bit and then I ended up proposing he become my housemate. 

I could write about how we ended up competing for the award of “Worst housemate ever” but really that is a story for another time. Instead, I’ll write about the late nights of drinking shots of Tuaca and watching CKY2K; playing hours of Dreamcast games while listening to Dub Reggae and DJ Shadow.

His two catchphrases, at the time, were “Rad” and “Congratulations” (the latter said in creepy Freddy Krueger manner). I’d frequently crawl out of whatever alcohol induced coma I’d put myself into to hear him singing along to Pop-Punk songs – always in an American accent – when he thought others weren’t around.

I have two potent mental images of him at the time.

The first is of him bouncing on his bed laughing like a goon while The Bloodhound Gang’s “Going Nowhere Slow” played loudly in his room after we had just spent a hedonistic night out at the local metal club. 

The second is of him riding a kid’s Micro Scooter at full pelt in an attempt to outrun us (we were in a car) after going on booze run between my off-licence and our house. His face had a fierce look of concentration as he hopped curbs and pumped one leg to keep up speed. This was contrasted with the wide, toothy grin he gave us when he was only about 30 seconds behind us. 

Sadly, it didn’t last but even despite everything I still really liked the guy.

So, after we had a falling out, he approached me in a club and apologised for his part in it and explained:

“I’d planned to just send you rude texts and harass you on your phone but then I had a few Carlings.”

It all made a lot of sense in the moral code he had set for himself. It was also impossible to stay angry at him for very long. 

For his part he was forgiving and had a big heart. The moments of warmth I witnessed from him, well, it is unsurprising that he ended up working with kids. He also seemed to know everyone, one time when I was living in a room in Hove he ended up drunkenly coming back to mine to play Soul Caliber and instead we ended up chatting to my neighbours, who he had known for years(of course), and drinking beers.  

Oh the drinking; there were some spectacular sessions after that. We went to see Battle Royale and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie together; hours were lost in pubs with random philosophising and on one occasion I blacked out and woke up with a dislocated thumb that I still cannot explain. 

At the same time I get the feeling that the stink cloud of depression always seemed around the corner for him.

He made plans to leave Brighton, to get away from whatever was bothering him – apart from his dead end bar staffing job – but returned not long after.     

       

When he got his job with kids he still spoke of anxieties that plagued him, it was delivered in a sincere manner but with a jovial, half smile that meant that I never knew how to react, only listen.

Casper took on that shape, dopey and playful but always with hints of something darker, sadder even, lurking underneath. 

Isaac, the character from Neurons Like Brandy, was born during a three month trip to Portugal I took in 2004. Since the house that it was set in was based on the one we had shared, it made sense to make the sensitive stoner housemate a facsimile of Tazz. In contrast to Casper, though, Isaac was more of a fantasy version of Tazz. He has little of the hinted at depth (although his personal chapter gives him some) and none of the humour. 

I don’t think he ever knew about the link with Isaac but I would love to know what he thought.

After I got back from Portugal, we still hung out a bit but we started to drift apart. I ended up in another country while he remained in Brighton and became more Punk than skater with a band called The ASBO Retards. 

I saw Tazz one last time. It was outside a restaurant in the restored part of Brighton near the North Laine. He seemed pretty much the same under the Mohawk, leather and studs. He still had an energy and method to his speaking. He told me that he was engaged and we reminisced about the old days before I wandered to the nearest pub.

I restarted Neurons Like Brandy a year and a half ago and while re-writing Isaac’s final chapter, as well as doing the Author Notes for Alistair I tried to track down an old co-worker. It was Friday the 22^nd of 2012, I drunkenly went to Tazz’s Facebook page to check out if he was still friends with the guy (he was) and then passed out drunk.

The next day I went on Facebook and started to see a stream of messages offering their condolences to Tazz, confused, I posted on his page asking if this was some kind of joke. 

No one knew what was going on exactly, only that he had passed away in his sleep, possibly having died of a nose bleed. 

It was hard to articulate it all; at the time all I could really say was:

“To Tazz, the only person who could be indirectly responsible for splitting open my skull, breaking 4 of my toes; directly responsible for cracking 3 of my ribs and still able to make me really like him.”

I should have added ‘next time stay off the Carlings’ but I don’t think it would have been appropriate.

Some nine months after that, this was posted to his page:

“On Friday 22nd June, Tazz arranged to meet a friend who, by that time, was at the flat of a third person. Tazz had met the tenant once, and this was the first time he had been to his flat. The man is on a methadone programme; he has a methadone safe, and he picks up two sets of prescriptions a week. Tazz was not aware of this, as far as we know. Tazz met his two of his friends there, and a lethal dose of methadone. Not a bit; not a taster; a dose that would kill anybody. It was taken shortly before he left, as a dose that large would have started acting fairly quickly, so it rules out earlier in the evening. At 11.30 Tazz went home, as he had work the next day, and didn't want a late evening. He got home at 12.00 and went straight to bed, without speaking to anyone. At some point, he sustained some injuries - a cut nose, a bruised forehead, and graze injuries to the palms of his hands. He lay propped up on pillows on his bed, trying to clean up his nose, which had bled. He had also lost an item of jewellery.

The mention of methadone was met with incredulity by his family and friends. All of us knew how he felt about opiates - he hated them. He would party with a choice of other drugs, but wouldn't touch heroin or methadone. The circumstances didn't make sense, either. He wasn't having a party night - he left as intended at 11.30. He had a new band, a girlfriend he adored, a happy house to live in with great housemates. Quite unlikely, at that point in the evening, to decide that now would be a good time to try a new drug. Not impossible, but unlikely.

At the inquest, we heard that within a few minutes, he would have fallen deeply asleep. Shortly after that he would have lapsed into unconsciousness, swiftly followed by coma. It took about 12 hours for him to die, as methadone works by depressing the respiratory centre of the brain. His breathing would have stopped many times - each time it stopped, fluid entered his lungs, so although he would resume breathing, lung function was compromised as more and more fluid built up, until he stopped for the last time - around mid-day on Saturday. At no point could he have been saved. Even if he had been found 20 minutes after he got in, it would have appeared that he was asleep, not comatose; if an ambulance had been called, they would not have administered noxolone (which only works if administered within around 30 minutes), as nobody knew that it was opiate poisoning.”

It still cuts me up to think that is how he went out and what a senseless waste it was. 

I think that a fitting end to this article was Tazz’s wake: a fantastically silly affair in which everyone was obliged to wear underwear over their clothes, or on their heads. There was a hell of a lot of drinking and it was meant as I imagine he would have wanted it. Wandering around with a pair of white-skulls-on-black boxers over my trousers a saw a lot of smiling, some tears but a lot of laughter mingled in with them. 

So long Tazz, you will definitely be missed.

Also, you would probably have hated this song but what the fuck:

 

And just for fun: