Sunday 21 June 2009

Lost friend

I ought to say something. Buffalo Johnson is 50 today. We were friends from the age of 10. At the age of 29, he married my little sister, his second wife. Today, estranged from me as well as her, but not their three, fantastic teenage sons, Buffalo Johnson is half-way through his fourth divorce. They say he looks like Henry VIII. He’s certainly acting like him. Two wives to go. Fortunately, nobody has been beheaded. Except, perhaps, Buffalo Johnson himself – who has suffered from severe depression throughout his adulthood, but these last ten years in particular. It cost him his career. It’s lost him three wives. And our friendship. But, then, I was never a very good friend. Any more than he has been a very good husband. It all makes me wonder…how we come into each other’s lives and what purpose we serve there. According to his father, I was a kind of beacon of achievement for Buffalo Johnson at a time when he was going off the rails. Buffalo Johnson was certainly a kind of leader for me during my teens. He seemed to know his own mind when I never did. He had the well-paid Saturday afternoon job at Tesco while I went to see Wolves. He could afford all the David Bowie, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums. I had to record off the radio. We attended our first music concerts together…Status Quo, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Genesis, Rolling Stones, Reading Rock Festival, Knebworth. Dated our first girlfriends together. Ironically, I ‘lost’ him when he chose the risky membership of a local Punk band rather than University. He chose a new clique. I had to find new friends. Including the best-looking girl in the sixth form, who also shares Buffalo Johnson’s 50th birthday today (happy birthday, Lesley, wherever you are - I know that you, too, like Buffalo Johnson, were suffering mentally, even in your early 20s). By the time I had made my way into Punk at 17, he was too deep. I went to University. He got married in December, 1979. It all went quiet. Then, in early August 1979, I met him and his wife at an Adam and the Ants gig at Newport, Shropshire. The next time I saw him was in the summer of 1981, when I had given up life as a trainee chartered accountant and was about to spend a month travelling around Europe on Interrail with Sparky and Blind Ray. His first marriage was over. Buffalo Johnson had plaster casts on both forearms and I never twigged. When I went to live in London with Sparky and Ray, I’d pick things up with Buffalo Johnson during Christmas breaks back home in Stafford. It was all heavy drinking and slot machines. By 1984, Buffalo Johnson would occasionally come down to London for the weekend, kipping on the sofa, much to Blind Ray’s objection. Things were not right. Buffalo Johnson was describing himself as an emotional cripple, then drowning the thought with twenty pints a night. Being his size, he could take it. At the bar, he’d order one to drink, while waiting for his change, then bring back the round. I couldn’t keep up with him. I rarely tried. When I did, it ended in vomit and stitches. I still have the scars to prove it. Then everything started to go right for him. I was stuck in Brixton, on the dole, writing hopeless novels, working in a Nigerian grocery, six nights a week till midnight and not getting paid. He had been snapped up by an up and coming IT company. He was a hot computer programmer, someone who could take new systems into companies and bed them in. It was 1987, big bang. And, for Buffalo Johnson, big bucks. The next thing I knew he was marrying my sister. For our friendship, it all went downhill from there. Big houses in Twickenham and Manchester. Buffalo Johnson never there. My sister bringing up young boys by herself. I have this particular memory of Buffalo Johnson going berserk at my little sister because she had folded over a pair of his socks at the top, so that the elastic was going. He had lost his sense of priority. When my sister divorced him early this century, we all wondered if he would survive. He has hospitalised himself in a sanatorium more than once. I don’t know how he has managed to persuade two other women to marry him since. His close relationships have been a disaster. But his sons, my nephews, are fantastic lads. The eldest, Sam, now studying sound engineering at Bolton University, looks like a perfect cross between Buffalo Johnson and me. It’s uncanny. Like I said, I don’t understand what we bring to each other’s lives. And then I see Sam…I feel like I also ought to say that Ray Davies of The Kinks becomes a pensioner today. Many more lazy Sunday afternoons to you, Ray. But my thoughts today are with Buffalo Johnson, in California with his brother, though we may never speak again for years.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

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