Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (29 page)

This was when Gazza got out of the taxi.

Chris and I watched him walk up to the bus driver’s roadside window and reach up to shake his hand. In an instant, most of the bus passengers became aware who was paying a visit. Cars in the jam began to sound their hooters in salute. Paul acknowledged all this but was carrying on a pretty intense dialogue about something with the driver. Whatever was under discussion was taking some thrashing out, but its purpose became clear when Gazza grinned triumphantly and then hauled himself up into the driver’s cab alongside his new friend. The bus driver had to really budge up, but soon they were both in there
 . . . 
with Paul’s hands firmly on the wheel.

In fits and starts Paul Gascoigne drove that bright-red double-decker London bus right along the Bayswater Road. Sometimes he came dangerously close to the rear of the cab Chris & I were sitting in, now helpless with awe and laughter.

When the bus eventually trundled up to Marble Arch junction we figured the fun was over and London Transport would get their bus back. Marble Arch is as dangerous a circuit as the capital has to offer. Vehicles are coming at you from all angles. It is not for sky-larking amateurs.

Arriving at the intersection, our taxi awaited its chance before quickly accelerating out into the mayhem. We turned to see what the bus was going to do and, Sweet Mother of Mercy, there it was – right behind us, picking up the pace and honking its horn. Paul, still at the wheel, was shouting something at us, pantomiming an irate motorist. As the bus careered across the junction, he even shook his fist.

Let me say this. Whenever I have told friends this story I inwardly wonder whether, like most men’s tales, it has become polished and embellished over the years. But it hasn’t. With Gazza stories, you don’t need to. Paul Gascoigne really did drive a London bus full of people around Marble Arch in broad daylight. And
still
he wasn’t done.

He brought the bus to a stop about fifty yards into Park Lane, where the traffic had once again solidified.

Jumping down from the driving seat, he pumped his sponsor’s hand and then stood, arms spread wide, in front of the cheering passengers – none of whom I believe had any idea that he had actually been driving the thing and dicing with their very lives for the last ten minutes.

Jumping back into our cab, Paul’s face was giving off sparks. It was clear the world had once again become his playground and that he hadn’t felt so alive in ages. We all spoke at once but, within seconds, he was off once more, this time exiting through the other door.

What he had seen were a gang of council workmen digging up the pavement.

The group greeted him explosively and once again Paul quickly outlined to them his latest idea. After a brief consultation, on went a high-visibility vest and ear-protectors and one of the chaps hauled a huge pneumatic drill his way. Thundering the thing into life, Gazza began randomly digging up sections of London several feet from where work had commenced. I remember thinking that was as close to the philosophy and antics of Harpo Marx as real life ever comes. In a communal panic, the men eventually guided him toward the area that needed excavation and for a couple of minutes Paul concentrated intensely on his task.

He stopped. Chris and I, watching breathlessly from the sluggish cab, thought this might signal his return to us. It didn’t. Gazza was merely negotiating a cigarette. One was provided, lit, placed between the lips and he was off drilling again. Gas mains would have to look out for themselves.

It was here, for the first time, that the driver of our taxi remarked upon the surreal events unfolding behind his back.

‘Your
mate,’
he said drily,
‘he’s
not all there, is
he?’
Then, narrowing his eyes toward the drilling, confessed,
‘You
know, that’s the one thing I’ve always wanted to do – what he’s doing now. Fair play to
him.’
Plainly the whole bus-driving episode was a bit down-market for a cabbie.

Deciding to walk the rest of the journey, we paid him off and crossed to the far pavement where Paul was hammering away. The watching workmen proffered both Chris and I some power tools too, but we politely declined.

‘What
shall we do
now?’
Paul asked, curtailing his shift. We reminded him of the awards show thing.

‘How’re
we getting
there?’

I told him that as it was barely half a mile along Park Lane, we were walking the rest of the way.

Paul’s face registered that he felt this answer was a complete abdication of the better and more readily available options.

‘Howay!’
he announced and strode out into the traffic again. What had caught his eye this time was an enormous old-fashioned Rolls-Royce, of the type you will see decanting brides at weddings. We called after him but it was no good.

He strode up to the car and tapped on the darkened rear passenger window. It opened a little. A conversation ensued. Then the door open and Paul disappeared inside.

Amazingly the traffic immediately began to loosen up and so began a farcical period wherein Chris and I, now walking toward our destination, were continually parallel to the Rolls with Gazza at its window smiling and waving, heckling the pair of us as
‘peasants’,
‘riff
-
raff’
and much worse. The four people sitting inside with him found the gag as hilarious as Paul did. Only he could manage this sort of thing.

Thanks to some aggressively red traffic lights, we arrived at the hotel just ahead of the Rolls. What happened next we really should have predicted. Instead of it stopping and allowing its stowaway off, it simply glided on past us, heading towards distant Piccadilly, Gazza’s hand regally twirling away in our direction.

Now what?

Chris and I sat down resignedly on a patch of grass and waited for our careering loose cannon to return. Or not.

Ten minutes later he was back, this time in a Toyota, driven, he informed us, by
‘an
Everton supporter called Tom’. He’d
asked Tom to join us at the awards, but Tom had to get back up North.

And so, at last, in we went and
 . . . 
boom. A blitz of camera flashes, not unlike when a high-profile defendant arrives on the court steps, ricocheted around the foyer.

If you study that notorious photograph you can see that both Chris and Paul have simultaneously started to realize what a terrible idea this was. I am actually in mid-sentence, saying to one of the photographers,
‘Snap
away, matey, you’ve missed the scoop. You should have been with him the last half-hour
 . . .’

Now the fun had well and truly stopped. Paul had by far the most to lose by being seen lotus-eating the day away at some brash show-biz booze-up in the West End.

He was supposedly injured. He was supposedly in Scotland. He had promised,
promised
, his boss Walter Smith that he was going to stay put at the lodge by the lake that Rangers had rented for him, doing nothing more physically strenuous than channel-hopping.

As a table was made available and we shuffled our way toward it, Paul kept up a self-berating dialogue, albeit with several bursts of cathartic laughter.
‘I’m
finished, I’m
finished,’
he’d splutter.
‘I’m
dead!’

At one point he grabbed a waiter and told him that on no account must there be any alcohol visible on our table. This was done. But never underestimate a good Fleet Street photo editor. What there was on the table were several bottles of Highland Spring water. With a little cropping of the shots, the distinct tapering green-glass top of these bottles can look an awful lot like copious amounts of white wine just waiting to be quaffed. No further questions. Your witness
 . . .

Within five minutes of sitting down, and with every camera trained on our table, Chris made the obvious executive decision.
‘We’re
going to have to run
away,’
he said. Rising as one, we made for the exit again before the ceremony had even got under way. For once, Gazza’s magical feats of persuasion with car drivers had a practical edge. Trotting up to a waiting chauffeur whose client was obviously inside for the duration, he negotiated our getaway.

In the back of this commandeered Bentley – and by the way, don’t ever try this spontaneous method of getting around town, it is exclusively a Gazza thing – Paul, as usual, looking out of the window and mentally miles way, let us all in on his continual inner dialogue.

‘I’ll ring Walter. Ring him. I’ll say I had to come down to give you an award. Charity. You’d asked special. Presenting an award. Forgot to tell him. You’d asked me and I flew down on the spur of the moment. Just for the morning. Flew straight back
 . . .’

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.