Turps and the Attraction of Dereliction

Turps was someone who I spent a fair bit of time with but never knew too well. I remember seeing him walk across our school playing field dressed in the rags of my tribe. He was a close friend of Paul, who I knew much better and interested me more. Paul was an artist, even back then. We both were and I saw connections and similarities that I could not find in Turps. When I left home and school I lived with Turps and others. He was a divisive person. Always looking to scape goat weaker people. We would join in. It tightened our gang bonds. These were special days. Our psychedelic honeymoon before things got darker and we all span off, hurled from the centrifuge. I spent a year in Cornwall and when I got back he had changed. Alcohol affected him far worse than anyone I had known. I grew up around alcohol. I knew what it did. It changed Turps in to a paranoid wreck. Where once his intelligence had been used for entertaining it now just hurt people. Being closer to others than me I saw his deterioration from a distance. He was deported from Amsterdam, along with other Brit tramps. He stayed a week or two with his parents before out staying his welcome. He spent his last month on the streets of Leeds. I heard from other street people that he was a face on the homeless scene. Finally he had a hit in st georges crypt, overdosing on heroin. He was an alcoholic. The two drugs don,t mix. Looking back now I find it hard to see how an intelligent lad from a stable, wealthier background than me should go down that route. There was volition to his descent. He was not just a stick in the stream. He was curious about street people and had a fascination wraith dereliction long before he found himself there. This and a very low tolerance to the psychoactive affects of alcohol. I went back to Weds some years back, to find his initials carved in a tree. The photograph is somewhere deep down at the start of this blog. Why he came back to me I cannot say. Maybe it came from the thoughts I had last year. Knowing that but for the grace of god it could be me out there. Melting in to the dirt of the city. When you walk past a tramp, filthy, hairy, lost in his own mind, begging for a drink, it may be someone you know well. A friend from school. The disguise is a good one. There was a period, under Thatcher, where the line between the homeless tramp and a youth fashion, some off shoot of punk, became very close. I recall traveller girls, from middle class homes, sitting with the tramps drinking cheap cider.