Gonzo

I don't think this is a happy tale – but it's true. Now I have never had much of an interest in taking drugs. I have come to many a fork in the road but never taken that one. When I was at Birmingham Rep everybody seemed to smoking dope – shit, they called it. I would just pass it on to the next person so as far as Bogarting the joint I stuck to my Guinness.

I remember one time, during the same period, everyone in the room was passing around Benelyn!

Another fork was when my wife went back to the UK when we first moved to LA; we were staying in an hotel in Santa Monica as we hadn't found an apartment and after I saw her off I parked the car and went in to the bar next door.

I got to chatting, which is easy when standing at the bar, and my pal, my best pal for that one and only evening was the postmaster – the boss man of the local post office and I met quite a few actors in there too and obtained a load of information which I used whilst living there for the next seventeen years.

A guy with a very red face came up to postie and they disappeared so I went to the loo – but that's where red face and postie were and when I came in postie was handing red face a load of money.

When red face disappeared, postie said 'do you want some cocaine?'

Well there was one theory gone, I thought he would call it Charlie or candy or blow or something. The thing is they never used Charlie but blow which I always thought was marijuana but no they called that Mary Jane.

'No' I said and then he wanted something to shove it up his nose and I gave him my Harrow Borough Library card – which I ripped to pieces later. As we got back in to the bar he had the white powder on the end of his nose which the bar tender wiped away.

That was the only time I ever saw cocaine so when we moved in to our apartment in West Hollywood/Hollywood Hills in 1997 I didn't notice that Gonzo was an ex coke addict. Something in his behaviour, some kind of paranoia and impatience.

Gonzo was a grip; that's the job in movies where you push the heavy stuff around, the dolly that holds the camera for tracking shots etc they usually have to run along and they're usually built like Brick Shit Houses, as was Gonzo. Also they're called Tex or Brad or something like that even in Britain. But never Gonzo! Gonzo was the name of a kind of bizarre exaggerated kind of journalism founded by Hunter S Thompson who, I seem to remember, even gonzoed his own death. Johnny Depp played him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which seems unlikely and he is famous for the quote When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Gonzo lived two floors down and he would wear, on occasions, those kind of shorts that Jeff Bridges wore in The Big Lebowski and at other times shorts. He was always ready to go to work as that's what grips wear in LA.

He had lost a lot of his hair and the bits he had were kind of platted.

But he had this thing with drugs and paranoia – he got to know a well known drummer who lived on the ground floor who only seemed to have the Porsche from his wild previous life. But the drummer gave Gonzo the cold shoulder, as he was on some rehab inspired life, so Gonzo would go and turn himself on with a Scotsman on the second floor. Those two guys liked me and respected me and once in a while Gonzo would say 'I'd love to turn you on, man.'

It always seemed very sexually ambiguous to me but I suppose I'm wrong.

There was an Navajo Indian in the parking lot once who wanted to know if I was any relation to the Englishman upstairs – I didn't know who he meant and he said 'I send him a lot of young girls' - I didn't like that particularly as the young girl with him was only about eighteen, if that, and the Scotsman, which is who he meant, was in his fifties.

Being a grip Gonzo was good at making things and fixing things and would long for a little work shop of his own so he could get on with making his equipment. He kept his tools in a lock up, next to mine, and one day someone broke in and stole a lot of his stuff and some LPs from mine. So we had to go to court, where the thief was put on trial, and we went with the building manager who was another drummer and stood at about 6'6” - and just like Big Bad John weighed two forty five. But he had emotional problems too.

When we sat in the courthouse, and just before the case started, Gonzo told us he was planning to attack the thief by rushing him as soon as he came in to the court. I thought he was joking but he wasn't and we persuaded him to the contrary.

'I don't mind drug dealers but I hate a thief' he said.

Wow - when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

So he was a bit of a hand full old Gonzo – how old? About fifty I'd say.

The time came when the building needed a handy man and the management offered it to Gonzo. After all the years, and we knew him for many of them, Gonzo got his workshop. He moved a lot of his tools in there, made coffee, gave you a cup if you visited and was as happy as Larry.

But things got a bit too hectic for him – too many repairs, the building was falling apart, in some places: too many people had stupid complaints, wanting a bulb changed, a leak fixed, the shower mended and one night Gonzo got his bag of tools and flung them as hard he could on to the floor – this was late and people wondered what the commotion was. It was too much for him and the following day he had a stroke.

We came back and the ambulance was taking him away.

When I went to see him he was in tears and I was trying to get him to speak; it wasn't too bad so I knew he would get it eventually. He had previously had surgery on his shoulder and called me in one day to try and help him put the bandages back on and he always blamed the stroke on that surgery. When his mother came up from Florida to see him he was in tears telling her I had helped him; I felt as if I was the only one who ever had.

Of course the stroke stopped him working; he managed to drive his truck, although he was told not to, and he was running out of money because the management of the building wouldn't reimburse the money he had laid out for things needed for the building – maybe he bought them without permission or something, I don't know.

But the manager was adamant and wouldn't pay – one day Gonzo attacked the manager, biting his legs and trying to gouge out his eyes. The day came when Gonzo was evicted. I went to see him and he told me he wasn't going quietly and I could see the baseball bat was still by his front door.

When the day came he just went – didn't say goodbye to anybody and I never could get him on the phone.

He was homeless for a while then went to live with his parents in Florida. I don't know who he fell in with or whether he really got in to drugs again, but he became a Sovereign Citizen which is a ridiculous movement who do not believe in paying taxes, do not recognise American currency and don't believe in a lot of laws – you'll have to look them up, if you want to know more.

He was stopped by the cops in Florida and was fined for a traffic offence – he tried to pay in his own kind of Sovereign currency of which he had millions of dollars – counterfeit, of course and this led to the cops coming around to where he lived to arrest him for some kind of forgery.

When they came he wouldn't let them in and he told them he had a gun and if they came in they wouldn't see their families again. The cops managed to get his parents out of the house and then they heard a shot being fired 'I got a gun' he shouted.

They fired tear gas in the upstairs window to where he was so Gonzo smashed all the windows with his pistol.

They told him to put the gun down and come out and the stand off lasted some hours before the cops went in to see Gonzo at the top of the stairs where he pointed a gun suddenly at three of the cops who all fired and killed him.

The verdict was suicide by cop – Gonzo just took that wrong turn.