What a way to go
Posted on | March 21, 2006 | No Comments
“Did you hear about Mental Mel?” asked Jimmy when I strolled into Ron’s last night.
“No, I thought he went to Canada.”
“He did, he’s dead now though.”
“Oh, what happened to him?”
“He was out in the forests doing some hiking or some shit ‘sport’ like that and he got raped to death by a moose.”
“You what?!”
“Seriously, the Mounties say that the imitation Yves St Laurent aftershave Dirty Dave sent him for Christmas mixed with his own body odour made the moose think he was a female. Penetrated his sensible corduroy pants and everything. They said the wounds were greater than anything a party guest at Michael Barrymore’s house could expect.”
“Poor fucker, he was always set for a strange ending though.”
“Aye.”
We called him Mental Mel because his name was Melvin and he was mental. He was just one of the guys in the area who we’d see out and about drinking. Him and Dave were good pals because they shared an interest in the Greek comedies of Aristophanes.
We first realised he was mental when he would get angry for no reason whilst on the piss. He would never take his anger out on another person but he would punch things like walls, trees, fences, owls and doors. I once saw him pummel a pebble-dashed wall for 10 minutes. For the next 4 weeks his hand was swollen like a balloon and the cuts became all infected but he wouldn’t go to a doctor. He said doctors were ‘lecherous elephants who didn’t know what they were talking about’. I didn’t quite understand the elephants bit. Or the lecherous bit. The not knowing what they’re talking about bit struck a chord though. Eventually he got septicemia and went into a coma. His hand was like a giant spot apparently and they squeezed a pint of pus out of it.
Another time he hit his head after falling over outside McDaids and for the next three weeks was convinced he was former Olympic athlete Daley Thompson. He just went around the place running, jumping, throwing and hurdling things non-stop which was fine until he went into Switzers (as it was then, Brown Thomas now) department store and destroyed thousands of pounds worth of Royal Doulton china trying the pole vault. Luckily he was so fit after all the running he was able to get away from the security guards.
His most mental episode was in July 1987 at Slane Castle. David Bowie was on his ‘Glass Spider’ tour and after taking a bus from Dublin and dropping two acid he was convinced the spider was talking to him. Somehow he got backstage and after the final encore he ran up to the Thin White Duke and tried to convince him that he was Iggy Pop and that the two of them had to return to Berlin to hunt down a transvestite assassin who was about to launch a campaign of terror and mass murder against all their fans.
The mad thing is him and Bowie spent 5 months in Germany and took out 13 trannies until they found the right one.
RIP Mental Mel.
Similar posts
Comments
Leave a Reply
