A Poisoned Mind

Poison need not be the plot device of an Agatha Christie mystery nor the mere mechanism of melodrama. There is a poison in and of the mind that is insidious, that seeps, that corrodes, that clouds the thought and distorts the judgement, that will take over entirely if left unattended. I speak as one who has tasted the bitter cup; from late 2014 to mid-2015, I was myself beset by poison, at first slow, then running rampant through my brain until my entire identity was in peril.

These poisoned thoughts were never suicidal but delusional. It seems I could not tolerate the life I was living and took refuge in ever more extravagant fantasies to compensate. Sometimes I felt joyous but just as often I could and would explode in uncontrollable rages, furious at the idea that I had to slow down and explain myself, that nobody around me could keep up with the train of thought nor hop on the wavelength of the increasingly elaborate charade I played.

It hinged on the idea that I had been sold a lie about everything, that I was not Sam Coll and I was not 25 years old, I was not unemployed, I was not unpublished, I was not nobody. Everyone around me had an alias, and, more often than not in my skewed view of things, did a bit of acting on the side. For instance, my friend Andy was either Ricky Gervais or Simon Pegg; my friend Sean O'Rourke was Jim Carrey (nor was I the first to remark on this similitude); my collaborator EWY was sometimes Herbert Lom; a glamorous former co-star was Meriel Forbes (wife and widow of RR – see below); my own father might be Michael Gambon; my mother was Danny DeVito in drag – of the '92 'Penguin period'.

Starstruck and gullible, I saw celebrities everywhere (the Jameson International Film Festival took place around this time, so just maybe a few of these sightings were real...) - there was Omar Sharif with a suitcase in O'Neill's. I saw Nicole Kidman serving behind the bar in a Thomas Street pub, looking royally pissed off. I spotted Charlotte Rampling sunning herself in the smoking area of Toner's. I saw Ronald Pickup and David Attenborough strolling around by Grand Canal Dock. I accosted Michael Keaton in another smoking area and told him he should have won the Oscar instead of Redmayne. At a Hodges Figgis book launch, I fell into conversation with a man I took to be the late Paul Scofield – of course, he denied so being. I saw Helen Mirren and Kevin Spacey playing pool in the beer garden of The Longstone – the former had given me a Valentine's Day autograph some weeks earlier (signed 'Helena' – this much was genuine, I carried it about for weeks and months like a pathetic lobscouse), the latter affected a Dublin accent and asked me 'You playin'?' (I did not play pool with him.)

As for me, depending on the day, I could be anyone I felt like – anyone but Sam Coll. A glance at a picture of some long dead bit part player was enough to set off a chain of associations culminating in a newly minted nonsensical identification. The fact that so many of the assumed personages were dead (for hundreds of years in some cases) mattered not a bit and did not deter my belief. I postulated supernatural resurrections, Voodoo rituals, reincarnation, metempsychosis, forged birth and doctored death certificates, government plots, false or implanted memories, conspiracy theories galore. It seemed sometimes like the city and all its strangers were in league with me, egging me on toward the truth my tortured and suffering family would have me deny and keep hidden – what a cover-up I envisioned!

But anyhow, at one time or other (some delusions lasting days, others quickly cast off if they were found dull and a more exciting alter ego came along), I variously thought that I was Ralph Richardson[1]; George Bernard Shaw[2]; Grigori Rasputin[3]; Laurence Olivier[4]; Peter Sellers[5]; Nandjiwarra Amagula[6]; Basil Sydney[7]; W.S. Gilbert[8]; William Shakespeare[9]; James Joyce[10]; Samuel Beckett[11]; John Stanislaus Joyce[12]; Charlie Chaplin[13]; James Clarence Mangan[14]; Charles Richardson[15]; a forgotten son of a clandestine union between Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren[16]; Mark Twain[17]; Walt Disney[18]; Donald Wolfit[19]; Trevor Howard[20]; Vivian Stanshall[21]; Satan[22]...and others too numerous to enumerate, beyond the scope of this study.

To all of those names I could append a lengthy codicil and beyond containing my convoluted and ridiculous if not deranged explanations as to why and how I was them and not me. (Those footnotes I have attached are brief summaries of what little I can remember of some of the many lies I told myself – they might suggest how far gone down the rabbit hole I was.) But perhaps the climax and tipping point of this horrible period of deep-seated Quixotic delusion came when, in about March 2015, I met what I thought was my granddad's ghost.

It was in the Lombard Bar on Pearse Street one sunny afternoon – I sat in the corner by the window nursing a pint – I was nowhere near remotely drunk, but perhaps I had already started to dream while awake, the legacy of insomnia. At the counter I espied a bald old man in a flat cap and coat – the resemblance was startling, even down to the glasses and the soft Northern lilt and mumble of the mild and gentle voice. He saw me gawking at him, made eye contact, seemed to recognise me, and shuffled over. We shook hands (that alone might have tipped me off to the truth – for the hand was very solid and warm – and are we not told that ghosts are, if not translucent and see-through, at best insubstantial shades and weightless as air?). We spoke cordially and casually for about five minutes or so. It all felt very natural and not in the least otherworldly or spooky. He kept repeating 'I knew who you were!' – which I took to be a reference perhaps to his days of dementia in the nineties when he could not speak nor string a sentence together save for mumbles, but yet could tell who was who. Or even, that all along, whiles he played dumb and senile, he alone had known that I was – [insert name of any of the aforementioned false and famous identities listed above].

I was charmed, amused, delighted: I told him I had found love at last (a lie), and gave him the mobile phone number of my father/his son, telling he'd love to hear from him. Eventually he tottered away to talk to another customer and I left the bar, only then remarking, as I blinked in the sunlight and shook myself, on the oddity, the incongruity, the seeming impossibility of having just carried on a light-hearted chat with a man ostensibly fifteen years dead and buried in Galway. But I was not chilled – I felt instead happy, almost free – immortality was possible after all – death was not the end, merely a casting off of one costume and the donning of another – and so I was an ancient and an old soul myself, after all.

But it was all the confirmation bias of a deceived and poisoned crank. Looking back in a state of sadder sanity, it seems I had merely encountered a man who was an uncanny doppelganger of the dear departed – that in itself is eerie enough, and needs no paranormal decoration nor amplification. He was just some doddery old drunk who happened to resemble Granddad Coll. And in his wasted wisdom he had gamely decided to humour me and play along with my prattle. It cost him nothing – what he made of the scribbled number I gave him I can only guess – thrown out with the used tissues, no doubt.

If ever I tried to tell this story in subsequent days I was shouted down in horror and disbelief. I cannot bring myself to dwell on some of the other awful details of those months of mania, of how I tossed coins around the streets and filled pages and pages with meaningless anagrams; of how I once went missing and walked around the city in my socks; of how I ripped up books and shoved abusive notes under doors; of Facebook rants that went on and on and on; of how a fit of howling fury in the toilets of the Players Theatre saw me banned from Trinity College; of the incessant and sickening drunken binges, perhaps a subconscious attempt to self-medicate and slow down the pace of thought, swilling joyless gallons of a more literal and material type of poison; of the pain and grief and agony at home, the tears, the wails...

The situation had gone far enough. I started a course of therapy. Doctor Pat prescribed pills. Bipolarity was spoken of. The manic season was over now. Depression set in. A long grey spell of drabness followed. Withdrawal symptoms from the poison, perhaps. Gradually the plots and conspiracies crumbled and faded. I accepted the truth. I was who I was. The dead did not walk the earth. My birth certificate did not tell a lie. Dull or not, at least it was real. So be it.

Footnotes

[1]Ralph Richardson (1902-1983): My favourite actor – perhaps it was only a matter of time before I started claiming ancestry and later even his identity. At first I speculated that he was my grandfather and Michael Gambon (his unacknowledged heir) was my father; then I decided that I was the son of Ralph, called Charles (see below) – and finally decided that I was Richardson himself, full stop. I imitated his voice and mannerisms. I devised a crackpot theory that he had run down the real child Sam Coll in a motorbike accident sometime in the eighties, and had entered into a sick bargain wherein he would take the boy's place to appease the stricken parents (the mother was hostile, the father, though grieving, admitted to being a fan of his work...), and so succumbed to second childhood – putting out a media hoax that he had died of a stroke. But the plan began to falter when he saw himself onscreen and began to recognise himself and wanted recognition again for being who he had been and was (if the syntax is confused, it mirrors my own confusion!). I could fill whole volumes with the self-justifying rubbish I concocted, thinking myself Pinocchio to Richardson's Gipetto, a windup toy he breathed life unto, deep in the dark basement...

[2]George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): I had been told more than once, ever since I let my beard grow longer in 2012, that I bore a marked physical resemblance to him – enough to arouse my paranoid suspicion. In Back to Methuselah, he wrote about super humans living longer and longer until eternity was the next stop – cf. Act V: 'As Far As Thought Can Reach'. Maybe he himself had stumbled upon immortality and the Philosopher's Stone too. The fact that he was teetotal and that I was decidedly not did not matter a jot and was neither here nor there. In this incarnation he/I liked his glass and took it.

[3]Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916): In my lopsided view of things, he did not die when they threw him into the icy waters, post-poisoning. He survived and thawed out and was brought to Ireland and treated like a child – me. Why else should I write at such length of 'The Mad Monk'?!? Was this my memory coming back to me? We shared a dislike of washing. Not much else.

[4]Laurence Olivier (1907-1989): I was nothing if not deeply immodest, even deeply megalomaniacal, in some of these identifications. The so-called greatest actor of the (last) century? Yup, why not. He didn't 'die' in 1989 – he was smuggled underground and kept quiet – perhaps in his senility they told him he was just a schoolboy called Sam, and he believed it until the need to get onstage started again to dominate him in his centenarian state. How does one explain his miraculous health? His adopted family was full of doctors, I reasoned. And if I was Larry, it might also explain the fixation on Ralph, like the subconscious recognition of one old friend for another. Bollocks.

[5]Peter Sellers (1925-1980): He claimed he died for seven minutes or so in 1964, the year of his Hollywood heart attacks. According to his biographer, Roger Lewis, he afterwards became increasingly messianic, and was certain that he was going to live forever. Officially dead in 1980? He was mad enough to fake such an event – lie low in a coma for 9 years and then – hey presto! - second childhood and rebirth under the incognito of 'Sam Coll'. He also complained a lot of an identity crisis (such as I myself would appear to have been suffering, based on the evidence of this essay). His last dreadful film was The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu – I was brought up in Japan and China – memories stirring? Furthermore, one of his finest (and least heralded) screen performances was as a rundown old busker who shared my name, Old Sam in 1973's The Optimists of Nine Elms.

[6]Nandjiwarra Amagula (1926-1989): A DJ claimed the rhythms of a prose piece I read out at Lilliput Press reminded him of an Aboriginal chant. For a very brief period I fancied myself the tribal elder in this scene – never mind our difference of colour, he 'died' the year I was 'born' (or dragged away from Australia kicking and screaming and morphing), let magic take care of the rest:

[7]Basil Sydney (1894-1968): Claudius to Olivier's Hamlet in the 1948 film, perhaps his finest hour onscreen. Can't say much else other than that he was another random bearded ham I decided to temporarily appropriate as 'myself'.

[8]W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911): During a previous 'mental episode' in 2010-11, I had displayed a marked inclination towards nonsensical rhymes. I looked at an old photo of the topsy-turvy librettist and saw myself. My collaborator EWY must therefore, by that crooked logic, be Arthur Sullivan, the musician of the partnership.

[9]William Shakespeare (1564-1616): I was balding and bearded. A barmaid remarked on a faint likeness to the balding bearded Bard. And so I envisioned having been trapped in a bottle for hundreds of years, like Morpheus in Gaiman's The Sandman, let out at last in 1989, a Will of the wisp dragged into the future bawling like a baby.

[10]James Joyce (1882-1941): In school in 2007, my misanthropic Romanian friend Tibi Matei had told me that I looked like him. That would do. His was a musical prose I had ever aspired to. Perhaps he too, like Shaw, had found out how to live forever, smuggled into H.G. Wells' Time Machine and cast out into a future he barely credited. He didn't die in 1941 – he left Nora. Did a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of acting, a cameo here and there – why not?

[11]Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): Died the year I was born – good, good – same name – good, good. Ralph Richardson turned down Waiting For Godot and regretted it for the rest of his life. I extrapolated that my father was RR and had somehow contrived to kidnap and keep alive the playwright whose works he so admired yet could not comprehend (I flattered myself by taking the role of my namesake). And gradually and begrudgingly the captive scribe became an ardent fan of the actor he previously despised. The pair of them would both be inexplicably antiquarian according to this stupid scenario. In 2014, Ralph would have been 112 and Sam would have been a slightly chipper 108.

[12]John Stanislaus Joyce (1849-1931): If not the son, then why not the father? The old mad feary father, the sinner, the reprobate, the wet wit, the drunken brawler and manic disrupter, a praiser of his own past. I fancied sometimes that he and Ralph Richardson were one and the same – and that they both combined were doubly me, ancient and weathered and older than the oldest living tortoise or tree. I walked the Phoenix Park with can in hand and imagined myself the elder Joyce, magically and madly still alive in spite of all, puffing like a grampus and combing his mustachios, dodging the deer and fearing the arrival of a cad with a pipe who might agitate his serenity, the genesis of Finnegans Wake. His favourite book was LeFanu's The House By The Churchyard – a goddamn wonderful book.

[13]Charles Chaplin (1889-1977): I had a childhood memory of imitating his wonky walk and twirling an imaginary cane in the nursery. I retrospectively reinterpreted this memory as the centenarian Chaplin (his death a hoax of course – and his grave was robbed in real life), slowly coming out of a coma and indulging in a reflex. Nonsense.

[14]James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849): Our poete maudit – someone at a reception said I reminded them of him. And so I ran away with the idea that poor Mangan walked the streets again, tipsy and tottering and doomed as ever.

[15]Charles Richardson (1945-1998): If not the father, then why not the son? If I was Charles, that would make me 69 years old in 2014 (notwithstanding the death in 1998). Little is known about the younger Richardson (seems to have been a television stage manager and did not outlive his mother, sadly), and the father's few comments on the subject are not encouraging: 'If my son Charles died tomorrow, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to me'. Here's a photograph of the two of them out on the piss together in the 70s somewhere – the younger man has the faint look of a lecher as he eyes up the lady who stands between them:

[16]Conceived on the set of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. This is untrue.

[17]Mark Twain (1835-1910): Whose real name was Samuel Clemens – the initials, the initials!

[18]Walt Disney (1901-1966): There had been rumours (referenced in The Simpsons I believe) that he had arranged to have himself cryogenically frozen. Perhaps he/I had been put into deep-freeze in 1967 (the date of his 'death') and 'woken up' in 1989 (the date of my 'birth'). The style of some of my cartoon characters could be said to bear a passing resemblance to his. I also had a weakness for sentimentality, like him. Go figure.

[19]Donald Wolfit (1902-1968): The ham actor to end all ham actors – despised by Richardson and described by Gielgud as 'a joke', hailed by others as the best Lear of the lot. He is memorably evoked in Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, first played by Freddie Jones onstage and later by Albert Finney onscreen. I watched a few clips of Wolfit and saw myself in them:

[20]Trevor Howard (1913-1988): Someone joked on Facebook that I could play him in the biopic. That was enough to set me off. Trevor Howard, for heaven's sake! What's not to like? Even Sellers said: 'Who gives flawless performances? Trevor Howard. Trev is a wonderful actor.' He also played Sir Henry Rawlinson, which tied in with the Stanshall angle – see above/below.

[21]Vivian Stanshall (1943-1995): Someone claimed they thought my work resembled his surreal jingles. I looked him up and saw enough similarity in the gingery redness of our beards to be convinced that he was me/I was him for the space of a week. Some drunk in a bar (who I thought was Kevin Spacey in disguise, donning a goatee and ponytail and dark glasses to deceive) also muttered to me something like: 'I'm a bit of a fan of yours – Sir Henry?' Sir Henry Rawlinson – played by no less than the aforementioned Trevor Howard in the 1980 film – yes, yes, it all fitted into place – or rather, it didn't. I just wanted it to. Here's a link to the film anyway – it's a beguiling slice of special madness:

[22]Satan: A drunk in a bar (it's always a drunk in a bar, isn't it?!?) told me in no uncertain terms that my father was Mick Jagger and that I was 'The Devil'. Such was my suggestible state that I did not dismiss this as the poppycock it so patently was, but actually believed it and started to identify with the original Enemy (my Devil was no super-villain but rather a pitiable sniveling wretch who aspired to a goodness he continually failed to attain). I went home, a poor stricken Satan with forked tail between the legs, and mutilated my novel by scrawling all over it stuff like 'This is the work of the Devil. I am the Devil. Do not believe a word I say, etc'. Madness, madness, utter madness.

Illustrations by Sam Coll