Johnny The Hick Goes Down With A Bang

Johnny the Hick was living the life until the night Sergio with the raspy cockney accent and the notoriously short temper punched him clean off his low bar stool.

As Damon Runyon might have said, you’d get plenty of 9/5 on Johnny The Hick avoiding serious injury after he hit the ground — but he did. Must have been the drunk man’s absence of tension as his body hit the wooden floor with a thump. He never did see the punch coming.

The two guys and one of their girlfriends bent over him could see he was conscious. Dazed and stupefied, but conscious.

Johnny The Hick’s crime? Drunk out of his skill, he had started chanting ‘Sergio, Sergio, Sergio-o-o-o’ — in a raspy Cockney accent — when Sergio arrived into the light night cafe pub.

Sergio was already well on the angsty side, even the slight grind of the bar door seemed to annoy him as he bustled in, alone. Rocking from one beetle-booted foot to the other, even his moustache seemed to be bristling, and the jumpy dark eyes in that swarthy mush were sweeping the room, as he told Johnny The Hick to shut da fack up.

The pair usually got on well enough, had even shared the odd spliff outside the pub, and Johnny The Hick at least had been warned. Not like several others who had pissed Sergio off before. So everyone there feared this wasn’t going to end well. Everyone except Johnny The Hick.

He was too far gone. Wearing his trademark going out light blue denim shirt, and perched upright on his stool, with his aquiline schnozz and those high bony shoulders, except for the hinged right arm clutching his beer between long, almost dainty quaffs, he looked like a big blue pirate’s parrot.

His eyes half closed, like an old sean-nós Irish traditional singer, he was only warming up, refining the rhythm of his delivery … ‘Ser-gi-oo, Sergi-oo-oo, Ser’ … smack!

A swift, sharp crack of Sergio’s fist and Johnny The Hick was down, on to the flat of his back and staring upwards. The stool had remained upright and the Hick’s nearly empty glass hadn’t broken, and it rolled in under the old radiator behind, out of harm’s way.

The sprawled out Hick, raised one knee, but said nothing to the three, on their hunkers beside him, asking was he ok. He just lay there for a second or two more, his narrowed eyes fixing on an overhead light as he felt the dribble of claret spit on the right side of his lower lip as if trying to work out where he actually was. Maybe even who he was. Shaking off the offers of assistance, he picked himself up, slowly, rising to his feet.

After one slight step back, like a gymnast after a particularly adventurous routine and dismount, he steadied himself, and standing there for a few more seconds, still no words forming, as grey in the face as the flecks already liberally speckling his thick, neatly trimmed straight dark hair, he smoothed down his shirt — always worn with smart black  jeans — and oblivious to all further enquiries as to his wellbeing, after one more wipe of the side of his mouth, he made for the door in one sudden straight lunge, and was gone.

I wasn’t in the pub that night, but my pal Ciarán was, and he had described the scene well. A peacable dude — and well sussed —  Ciarán had turned back to his own circle once he knew Johnny The Hick wasn’t seriously hurt. The bar music seemed to go up a notch — or maybe it was the conversation went down, as everyone was just trying not to be shocked — and to avoid eye contact with Sergio.

Sergio himself, most likely on speed, and always easily bored anyway, looked both still angry and shaken by what Johnny The Hick had made him do, and before big Geert the barman could reach him, he shot out the door. The same Sergio-oo-oo hadn’t even bought a drink.

The ghost of John Hickson’s past, present, and future had come to visit him that night in a late night Dutch bar of all places, all in the small but wiry form of Sergio. As we were to find out soon, The Hick Revolution was over, and his two-year stay in this town was at an end.

Went back to Dublin as soon as he had sorted everything out. No fanfares or hugs and very few goodbyes. Just gone.

Not unlike the way his good mate Joe had similarly abruptly upped sticks, soon after his German drinking buddy Jurgen had kicked him down the stairs of the shambolic flat they shared right beside our regular pub, around the corner from the Grote Kirk, a beautifully elegant sprawl of a gothic cathedral in the old town centre.

This wasn’t a violent town, or at least, like anywhere, you usually knew the black spots to avoid, but now and then violent things did happen.

A good auld Dub, from the more earthy north side, good-humoured Joe, with his thick reddish Brillo-pad hair, tangled russet eyebrows and matching sideboards, and always, it seemed, in the same red and white checked short-sleeved shirt, had gone up the musical chain from the Dubliners and Planxty maybe slightly since his arrival the previous year, alighting at Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell.

Obsessed with it, he was. And sure wasn’t that how he had left town … like a bat out of hell …

‘Stick on Meatloaf’ he would say to Thon, the thick-bearded Dutch barman in the same breath as he would order his first schooner of beer after work in some factory or other. Like most of us there. And Thon might smile and roll his eyes, but if there was nothing else playing, he would indeed stick on Meatloaf on the stereo.

The tiny but perfectly formed cafe pub, with its squeaking wooden front floor, and raised cushioned seating area at the back, was our regular drinking haunt. Not for us the pissy little third of a litre glasses the Dutch preferred, our receptacles had to hold a pint, or a half-litre anyway.

Early on, the straight-talking, almost literal Dutch staff would mutter in disbelief to each other — and to us sometimes — about how the Irish customers, in particular, would arrive in of an afternoon, or after work, and happily down tankard after tankard of pilsner, the chat decibels rising, but things rarely getting out of hand, until closing time, which was way later than our own strict 11pm (11.30pm at the weekend) in Ireland at the time. But the merry jingle and slam of the busy cash register, and our generally light-hearted carry-on, won them over soon enough. And I think they even came to enjoy us, and grew really fond of some of us. And we of them.

Yvonne was the owner, a beautiful petite Thai woman, well into her forties, but you wouldn’t know it. Soft spoken and usually smiling, you didn’t mess with her, as herself and her brother Ronnie, were handy at the old martial arts. We had only heard about Yvonne’s temper, until the evening daft Limerick Paddy, who seemed old to us, though he was hardly 30, and was usually harmless but definitely a bit sarky with drink on him, annoyed her one night.

Well … Yvonne’s dark almond eyes sparked venom as she reached across, grabbed Paddy by the jumper and nearly pulled him over the counter to her side. His shirt was torn, and there were scratch marks visible under his throat. Paddy’s partner Maggie sat there open-mouthed for a second, before intervening, and in a cartoonish swirl of handbags, jackets and scarves the rapidly sobering pair scrambled for the door.

We didn’t see Paddy or Maggie for a few weeks, and when Paddy did return, he knew better than to give any more guff to the bar staff.

As we regulars hugely appreciated, you could bring your own records or cassettes to the cafe and add them to the stuff already there. And Thon, Annie, or Yvonne would play our music on request. It was where I discovered the proper Genesis (Peter Gabriel as lead singer), Pink Floyd, Bowie, Yes, Van Morrison, The Cure and so many others. Ciarán was a talented guitarist and busker (when he had to be), and he and our pal Gerry from Belfast knew their sounds, and were happy to educate me.

And I was happy to be educated. Maybe I was ready by then. Hanging around in my early teens after school with a couple of friends who would play their Deep Purple and Beatles records, and discuss them with a passion they never showed for double maths of a Tuesday, I was only faking interest, really, and much keener on the idea of getting this pair outside for a kick around. Good footballers they were too, but they no longer had much interest.

No flags were flown defiantly outside the windows of Johnny The Hick’s top storey bedsit across from the river, and there would be no revolutionary speeches from his window or blaring anthems.

Just the soothing waft of his beloved classical music late into the night, behind the permanently closed windows.

But it was a revolutionary’s den alright, and the leader — and sole member — slept through the early morning, before easing into the day with a nice cup of Barry’s tea around 3pm. That was when the usual skivers and chatters, including myself regularly enough, would roll around.

I would listen in great amusement as Johnny The Hick refined his manifesto. Chief among them was a complete and total aversion to paid labour of any kind. Six years working for that motor insurance company in his native Dublin was enough for him.

No, he had left Ireland to pursue a life of leisure and pleasure — his. It would be dedicated to refined reading and cultural appreciation, highbrow BBC radio or classical music playing in the background as this rebel in his mid-twenties expressed his contempt for enforced routine and poorly paid slavery.

According to Johnny The Hick, work was an unnecessary evil and easily avoided — when you knew how.

We just enjoyed his witty posturings on the degrading lunacy of making someone else rich, for not much more than you would get on the dole, sacrificing your freedom and so much of the precious, finite time available to you — not to mention the horrible daily stress and strain of this work malarkey.

Laughing along with him, we slaves to the tyranny of paid labour gave little thought to the idea that our taxes might be funding this particular top floor revolution.

Johnny The Hick told me one afternoon, still in bemused disbelief, how a Dutch social insurance official had rang on his doorbell “in the middle of the night, around 9am”, and he had to drink two cups of tea to recover after the guy had left.

Having done the minimum amount of factory work necessary to qualify for the very generous Dutch dole, The Hick signed off on work, and on for a genteel boulevardier’s life of afternoon tea and chat, the occasional spliff, only surfacing for a spot of shopping, or doing a bit of laundry uptown. And his late night sorties.

Every single garment he wore, apart from the black jeans, was a shade of blue, and he cared less for fashion fads, rock music or long hair. He never wore T-shirts, only shirts. Amid all us sloppily attired, shaggy-haired and more often than not bearded ones, he stood out with his meticulously daily-shaven frontage and neatly ironed clothes. I myself hadn’t seen an iron since I had left my last rented gaff in Dublin.

One evening, in his gaff, Johnny The Hick looked contemptuously across the room at the three beret-wearing lads from Sheffield who looked well past their wash-by dates, and were knocking back their large pils and rocking to the heavy metal offering they had insisted to putting into the cassette deck. ‘Fucking cave men”, Johnny The Hick sniffed under his breath, only loud enough for me to hear.

The only popular music he would concede had any merit whatsoever was that of the Beatles. We reckoned this was because with his slightly sloping eyes — though grey — and hairstyle he had been told more than once he looked like Paul McCartney — notwithstanding sarky Sam from Leeds’ snorting addition that it must have been Macca ’on a fucken’ really bad day’.

With his ever so slight occasional stutter — more like a hesitation, really — and sly Dublin wit, The Hick was hugely popular, and drew the most unlikely sorts to his little top floor eyrie.

A regular was mad-eyed Davie, from Glasgow, who spoke through his teeth, in such a rapid, intimidating Gorbals accent, I would catch, at most, two thirds of what he would say. He loved a joint, did Davie, which did at least reduce his talking speed to something approaching the normal.

Davie was actually the nicest guy, maybe a bit crude in his allusions to the ‘Dutch bird’  he was living with, but dead sound.

One of Johnny The Hick’s many endearing qualities, apart from his welcoming grace when you would drop in, was the way he would often refer to himself in the third person.

Reckoning he was maybe coming to the end of his dole entitlement, one of the lads told him about a night watchman’s job going at a builder’s yard, assuring him it would be dead cushy and all he had to do was sit in a hut through the night, listening to his Bach and his Beethoven and reading his beloved Flann O’Brien.

“Yeah,” snorted a less than convinced Johnny The Hick, “And some junky with a knife comes around in the dead of night — sorry, lads, The Hick won’t be risking life and limb for 100 guilders a bleedin’ week!”

But in his heart of hearts Johnny The Hick probably knew this one-man revolution could not go on forever, and in the run up to the Sergio debacle, a few of the lads reckoned he had definitely been drinking more, and had not been as breezy or unruffled as before, and even the smooth charm he could produce when he was tanked up enough for the Dutch women he would usually inveigle back to his gaff, had started to wane too.

And there was the jolting Freudian possibility that Johnny The Hick, on the fateful night that Storm Sergio hit, had subconsciously hastened the end of his sojourn in that ultimately foreign country, with its ultimately foreign sensibilities. Stuck between staying on, and continuing with his schemes and manoeuvrings there — and the increasing likelihood that it would all end in disaster — or get back on Éire firma … and make some kind of new start, before it was too late, and he was too old … get some kind of not awful job and maybe study in the evening … for what exactly? But still …  

So maybe Sergio’s punch had made the decision for him, that nutjob’s haymaker a brutal punchline to a joke that had worn thin, and now Johnny The Hick had to act, to get out and get going again.

Johnny The Hick’s Revolution was ultimately doomed, and would not even be a footnote in any annals of revolutions anywhere. But the revolutionary in chief made quite the impression on all of us who knew him and he left behind. Viva La Hick Revolution.

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