Jim Welsh (Largactil) 13/3/1964—6/10/2012.

I didn’t go to Jim Welsh’s funeral. I didn’t hear about it until later, and I think it was Sharpie that told me. I wasn’t upset, just sad about the way he’d died.

He just appeared one day in our pub, sitting on a bar stool, with those teeth looking at you. His second name was Ewing and was much the same age as me. Born when Beatlemania hit Scotland, much like the Bay City Rollers were to hit us later, but without the tartan. But Jim favoured cotton button-at-the-neck tartan shirts and denims. Unlike me, Jim was a bit of a mop-top, like late John Lennon with scraggly hair. Back then the Queen was always nipping up to Scotland to open something such as the Forth Road bridge, with motorists queueing up bumper to bumper to test drive it; Rangers were Scottish champions again, and blizzards caused road chaos. Everybody had teeth like Jim you could pop out and put in a glass or have special ones made for eating. Fancy teeth you could put in for talking to snobby folk with so they didn’t slip in your mouth and give you that thhhhhh sound and spray folk with salvia, and give off the wrong signals that you were going to kiss them or eat them, and you hadn’t yet decided which. Dallas was in Texas, a place where John F. Kennedy was gunned down, and not a television programme where the stars had a plateful of gnashers that made them look like they lived on a different planet from the rest of us. Jim’s teeth appeared first then the rest of him appeared with the hoot of his mad laugh.

Elaine was managing the Drop Inn, or she was the licensee, I’m not sure which. Jim just lived across the road from the pub, in a tenement flat above The Canton Wok.  He could fall into the pub and fag smoke would hold him up. And from the first day, he only went home to go to bed. He was there when the pub opened, supposedly helping out, and he left when it closed with a Bittersweet Symphony or something from U2 or the Kaiser Chiefs booming out.

He was originally from somewhere in Rutherglen and I think he had a sister, but he was really an outpatient—care in the community—from Gartnavel. Case closed.

I think it was Danny Doc that christened him Largactil, and we used that as a kind of shorthand. When buying drinks, you’d point at Jim and say to Elaine or Anne, or whoever was working in the pub, ‘And one for Largactil’.

In the beginning, Largactil had money, paid to him because of his ongoing illness. ‘Geez a loan of twenty-quid?’ was his cry when he spotted you at the weekend hovering over the pool table.

‘Fuck off.’

‘A tenner then?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘A daft fiver.’

Largactil could work a room like Billy Graham at a revival meeting. I gave him a loan of twenty quid a few times, then a tenner, then a fiver. He always paid me back, but then it was the law of diminishing returns. You’d be at the bar and you’d turn around feeling him breathing down your back.

‘Geez a loan of twenty-quid?’

I just bought him a pint and would shove it over to him. ‘Any fags?’ he’d ask and give you the grin and the laugh.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I’d tell him.

But he never listened.  Perhaps he thought I was like those doctors in Dartmoor Prison in the interwar years who prescribed cigarettes to calm prisoners’ nerves, or nurses in the drying-out-wards in Gartnavel in the seventies that poured my brother and his cronies a brandy late at night to stop them having fits.

‘Well, you should fuckin start then, shouldn’t yeh,’ he’d tell me, give me a flash of his teeth and rock with laughter.

There was no arguing with his logic. Agnes Pickering took him home for dinner and a good drink on New Year’s Day. Then the following years we’d lock-ins overnight, with the Black Eyed Peas, Rihanna,  and Kings of Leon on the jukebox, pub grub—as much as you could eat, and I did try—and   Largactil’s grin to contend with.

Largactil went downhill fast. He’d picked up hangers-on like Ghillie, who’d stolen cash and keycards from his so-called mates, and hung about waiting for Monday morning and for Jim to cash his book.  

If you’ve been in the locked wards you know it’s often the same faces re-appearing. Jim went backwards and back to Gartnavel. He’d lost all sense of home. Only to make a later appearance, having escaped. He huddled up in the close where he once stayed. Shapie, who stayed up the stairs in the top landing, spotted him and took him upstairs to help clean him up. He’d shat and peed himself.   

I missed Jim’s funeral, but I spent time with him. I wasn’t a carer or paid friend. I didn’t say I was going to be there for him, because, obviously, I wasn’t. But for a short time in his troubled life I think Jim was almost happy. Lots of folk said they wouldn’t drink in our pub, because it had a bit of a reputation—but not for a rough kindness, and caring, as it should. Jim was one of us.  RIP.