Who the hell is CrazyPJ?

CrazyPJ

Who's CrazyPJ I hear you ask. Well, I could just say that when I came to register for the forum, it was the first thing that came into my head but then that wouldn’t really explain anything. So now that you have enquired, allow me to give you a more precise account of how that event came about.

I grew up in a remote Irish rural village in the early fifties. Its a lost world now and its very likely that some here may not even know what it was like for us then. Televisions, telephones, lavatories and the accoutrements of modern kiving had yet to arrive, only a few people had electricity and computers and mobiles hadn’t even been heard of. Life revolved around an axis of birth, agriculture, Public house, Catholic church and death. The priest warned us that sex outside of marriage was a mortal sin and practices like oral sex and homosexuality were perversions, only practised by hoors in Dublin and English politicians respectively. However there were other distractions for the good folks of the village and this is where Paddy Joe Duffy comes in.

First time I saw him I was four. All the kids were running after him, prodding him with sticks, teasing him in a sing a long “CrazyPJ’s on the porter, he’s going to sleep upon the bothar” over and over. He would suddenly make as if to go after them, all the kids would run away from him in mock horror, he'd give up and the pantomime would start all over again. CrazyPJ was drunk today and the world was a happy place for a few hours. He was a insect of a man of about 5 foot, and weighed no more than 6 stones. He wore a tattered old coat, a hob-nailed boot and had a blue mans scarf tied around his head with a knot under the chin. Describing him in more detail is a bit more difficult. His body was wracked with deformity as a result of a breached birth and childhood polio. His useless right leg was withered and hung from the knee like a discarded rag doll. To offset all this imbalance he had developed out of necessity and with the use of his arms, an ingenious rolling hobble which appeared funny to us kids and gave him the name “CrazyPJ“.

However, it was a weird facial deformity that really set him apart. During his cataclysmic birth it was as if a glacier had moved over the structure of his skull and shifted its topography for ever. The event had pushed the left cheekbone up, forcing the eye socket up into the forehead and extending his skull 2/3 inches past its normal proportions. The nose had been bulldozed into the skull and only the tip remained with both nostrils facing the viewer. Somehow or other in all this seismic shift, the right side of his skull was forced in the opposite direction forcing his other socket in the opposite direction and which nearly aligned with his nostrils, somewhat like the stars in Orions belt.

During all this upheaval the upper eye had been forced out of its hiding place and it bulged with a naked intensity. Meanwhile the lower eye seemed to have been sucked back into its socket as if it had retreated into a watery cave where it resided in solitary contemplation. His mouth was all twisted in the upheaval, and he could only mumble in a heartbreaking stutter. When I first saw his face I grabbed at mothers skirts for protection. If he smiled the whole face shifted and contorted into a nightmarish gargoyle which used to scare the younger kids. Poor PJ would then get rebuked for frightening them so he avoided smiling when us smaller kids were about.


CrazyPJ was what people nowadays would call the village idiot but I never heard that term used about him. To the village people he was just CrazyPJ. I was to learn as I grew that he had a special function in the village. When he was sober it was a different story for the wretch. He was withdrawn and had the look of a beaten and abused dog about him. He lurched around head to the ground lost in another world. If he was startled, he would curl up in a cringing foetal ball gasping for air, to the bemusement of the kids and the discomfort of the adults. Sometimes, out of sight of the grown-ups, some of the bigger kids would kick and beat him viciously, almost as if it were a rite of passage, and rain such verbal abuse on him that, it would make you think he must be the lowest form of life on earth. But he was incapable of resistance and would lie there bleeding and whimpering like a pitiful animal.

Then one day CrazyPJ’s destiny took another twist. A young man called Burke from the village was arrested in Dublin for attempting to transport a bomb to London on behalf of the IRA . Under Garda questioning, the young volunteer broke and told them CrazyPJ Duffy was the man who was going to plant the bomb and blow up London Bridge. Thinking they had a ruthless terrorist with a name like that, an armed Garda unit was sent to the village at speed. When the Guards discovered that they had been fooled, there was great amusement all round before they went back to question young Burke again. CrazyPJ was transformed into a minor celebrity overnight and the village folks had a great crack with him. Every time someone made a quip to him he would do a comical little dance which had people in hysterics and his devastated face would light up with a huge contorted smile. Even though he still frightened the younger kids he was immune from rebuke now and he was enjoying his moment in the sun.

Then a week later someone stole Mrs O’Shea’s bicycle, CrazyPJ came under suspicion again and everyone had a good laugh. Shortly after that Finnerty’s sheepdog was killed in mysterious circumstances and someone said that CrazyPJ had done the deed. And so it evolved into a joke the whole village was in on. From a fart to a bad storm, people would mutter heavily under their breaths, "CrazyPJ's up to his tricks again". Even the priest incorporated him into the confessional, warning me once if I didn’t stop having impure thoughts and pray harder I could end up looking like CrazyPJ.

But he tired quickly of the new turn the joke had taken and with each new calamity heaped on his shoulders he would smile less and less.
Then he began to fall into rages, where he would jump about in an impish explosion of muttered expletives and flailing limbs which seemed even funnier to some people and so they taunted him even more. There was part of me that wanted to join in all the fun too, but my mother, being a devout Catholic disapproved of such conduct and would have battered the living daylights out of me, had she caught me tormenting him. However that did not stop her, when she broke a cup or burnt the dinner, exclaiming accusingly under her breath, "tch, CrazyPJ again".

Then one night of a great storm he disappeared, never to be seen again. Most folks thought he had drowned himself in a boghole and his body would never be found. It never was. He was 29.

I left that village 40 years ago but the CrazyPJ joke still persists in some households. By all accounts on 9/11, as sombre as the occasion was, the first thing that came into the older peoples heads was; well, you guessed it! A number of emails were sent to relatives in America citing the prime suspect. A few of these were intercepted in the weeks after 9/11 by Homeland Security agents and questions were asked before the joke was uncovered and the hunt for Bin Laden resumed.


Alas, time passes and I had long forgotten CrazyPJ. However, when I came to register for this forum and it asked me for a screen name, I was stumped for an instant. A little flutter of anxiety rippled up from the unconscious depths, wormed its way at the speed of light through a process beyond my comprehension and ended up released on my keyboard thus.

Tread carefully reader,
it’s a bog out there.

TerrorFirmer

A very entertaining read...simple but well written, and an indication of a bigger set of memoirs with a lot of potential. Any further plans, or just a once off?

CrazyPJ

HavoK wrote:

A very entertaining read...simple but well written, and an indication of a bigger set of memoirs with a lot of potential. Any further plans, or just a once off?

Thank you very much Havok. I have been ill for a while so I started to write little stories to pass the time. I enjoy it very much so I will probably do more.

PJ

shiv

Hey there,

You write very well! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it myself. Very absorbing. Keep it up!

WiredMan

Sorry, wrong topic.