Jimmy Henderson RIP. 26th June 2023.

I picked Teresa up last week, Thursday. She'd her brother's funeral today. She was carrying two plastic bags, stuff from the Coop and Jimmy’s medication from the chemists. She stood waving her arms, standing at the clock across from Dalmuir Library. I tooted the horn and parked at the traffic lights.

‘I thought you were a taxi,’ she said.

Teresa is scheduled at the end of July to go for a cataract operation. Then she said I was an angel. I’ve never been an angel before, but I was, briefly, an altar boy. One eye at a time, sweet Jesus. Then she told me her elder brother had died. He was five years older than her. He was born when Scotland still had rationing. A treat was mushy peas with vinegar. Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation at Westminster, ushering in the Elizabethan era. People stood outside the shop windows and watched it on the telly. Until a beat cop came along and cried, ‘Hi Jimmy, move on!’  

Teresa was worried about her Jimmy. He couldn’t breathe. COPD. She’d hardly been out of the house the last two years except to nip up to the shops and chemists. Her sister was coming to visit before the funeral. She picked up her bags and shook her head. ‘She’ll be in for a shock,’ she said.

‘Because he’s so handsome,’ I said.

Teresa liked that. I never knew Teresa without Jimmy. But I knew Jimmy without Teresa. They were married at a Registry Office in Glasgow in 1977. A good, caring, Catholic girl, not even pregnant. About an hour before the Queen arrived for her Jubilee Celebrations, nationalist slogans were removed from George Square cenotaph. Jimmy had an alibi and other promises to keep.

For a Drumchapel man, he’d done well. Half a bungalow and six acres of reclaimed swamp land for a back garden. He’d worked hard for it. Underground connecting pipes, but never passing underneath a picket line. When public life became Thatcherism, and every man for themselves, he knew it was time to get out. He never drove, but always worked, getting up at whatever ungodly hour, he and to get out of the house to get picked up.

Money was the entry fee to having a laugh. He could get out his guitar, chased immortality in song and danced till dawn. Make nights and the weekends stretch to eternity, or at least Tuesday. Not many remember Jimmy as being an athlete. Like most of us, he played fitba. Because he was wee and fast, he played as a winger. But by fifteen he was burnt out, ready to leave school and start real life.  I guess it started as a joke to run a marathon.

There used to be two Jimmys. His big mate, Jimmy, had a moustache. Open-neck shirts. Flared denim. Shiny shoes. Sharp dressers. A wad of unspent wages in the pocket. Wee Jimmy had a matching ginger mouser. Their party piece was running naked from the old Club Bar and into Macs, where good men went missing, or went bad. Not that you’d get any sense out of either of them. It was the old joke, I didnae recognise you wae your clothes on. They wore mismatched clothes home. And there is a story about what wee Jimmy found in one of his oversized pockets.

They trained for a marathon. One pint for every mile. Hard to believe that when Jimmy couldn’t get a breath, he’d run three marathons. I think in one of them he was dressed as a chicken. Jimmy Saville smoked a cigar.

His old pal, the other moustachioed Jimmy, died of cancer a few years ago Wee Jimmy kept a bike in his garden hut. Gary Forbes and him went out along the cycle path and got to Bowling. Jimmy had a fag. Then went to the pub. His biking days were over.

During Lockdown, when Boris Johnson having unofficial parties at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country house, Jimmy had parked his electrical bogey at the stairs besides the tunnel, cutting under the canal, and into Singers Road. They weren’t protesting or investing in conspiracy theories.  Gary Forbes, DJ and Jimmy had their hats and coats pulled tight as they shared the patter and a carry-oot. I got offered a can, but I was out on my bike.

Later that week, the battery on Jimmy’s bogey gave out. We wondered how we would get it home. Get Jimmy home.

‘I’ll walk,’ Jimmy said.

But we knew he couldn’t. It wasn’t that far, not for us. DJ and me had him sit on the cushioned seat, and we pushed him from the rear end, up onto the metal bridge. Down the slope towards Glendevon and home. The battery on the bogey kicked back in. Like the old days, when every second car on the street used to be bump started on a hill. I’d like to say Jimmy powered away, but he didn’t. We walked beside him.

There was a stack of funerals at that time, we couldn’t attend. Jimmy could manage out less and less. Housebound. He claimed even the ghost of Charlie Mac no longer haunted him. Throwing up in his living room. Smashing his head off the glass table and breaking both, while claiming the blood on his hand wasn’t his, and what the fuck! When we had drunk ourselves to beyond the point of no return,  Jimmy’s like has gone, but we’ll be there for Teresa. Thursday, 20^th July, 3.30pm. RIP, Jimmy.