Herschel Potter and the stoner philosophy

There is a word in Hebrew, 'Halakha', which refers to the collective body of Jewish law, incorporating the 613 mitzvot (commandments) from the Torah, subsequent Talmudic and rabbinical law (amounting to a sort of Jewish corpus legis, or case law) and the prescribed customs and rituals of the Shulchan Aruch (meaning 'prepared table', but in fact pertaining to much more than the alignment of cutlery, crockery and coasters).

This immense and growing body of law is ancient, beginning - in the view of most scholars - as long ago as 700 BCE. When the Christian Fathers assembled, on the whim of Emperor Constantine, for the momentous First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the Jews could already celebrate (but did not) a thousand years of written Judaic history and tradition.

And to be clear, 700 BCE is merely the earliest date for which archaeological documentary evidence exists; the Jews were busy pottering about in Canaan - too busy, in fact, to bother preserving their diaries for posterity in reinforced bell jars - from as long ago as 1200 BCE, in that turbulent age when iron implements were de rigueur and bronze breastplates were tragically passé (but not, permit me to stress, sufficiently passé to be retro cool).

Halakha, returning to where I began this rambling lecture, translates to English as (approximately) 'the way to walk', or 'the right path', a metaphor for 'living proper', as codified by a thousand thousand jurists, prophets and kings, and the combined weight of their authority is both oppressive and majestic.

Why am I telling you all this? I am telling you because when I heard it first, I choked with surprise on my extra-strength cider. More than a year later, following a period of intense study and examination, I was accepted by a Rabbinical court as a sincere convert (unlike some other Abrahamic faiths, the Jews have never sought followers en masse. The routes into the Jewish faith are few and far between, and the worldwide population is a mere 15 million (it would have been more, but for one Herr Hitler, filthy menuval). Christianity and Islam, having existed for barely half as long, have nearly 4 billion adherents between them).

For you see, I was not always Herschel Potter, sidecurled pedestrian of the righteous path...

My story begins in Manchester, England, in the mid-1990s. I was a rambunctious (read: criminal) lad of fourteen years-old, living in the care (read: neglect) of my aunt and "uncle", Tabitha and Darren. They had taken me from a foster home where I had spent my first nine years in, if not precisely Arcadian bliss, then something approaching it. The staff at the home were kind but inattentive; we waifs, strays and orphans had the run of the place, and besides the odd broken bone and shoplifting misadventure, we lived happily and at peace with the world.

My aunt and uncle (the former my dead mother's sister; the latter her on-and-off life partner and soulmate / fuck buddy) were unkind and inattentive. They plucked me from the home shortly after Uncle Darren's disability allowances were stopped - his tennis elbow no longer considered an impediment to his resuming work as a supermarket security guard - in order to access additional child benefits. They had a son already, Gareth, a great juggernaut of a boy and pale as an albino. Demonstrating - albeit poorly - that whiteness is only skin-deep, he was at that time a neophyte "yardie", emulating with great care the local Jamaican gangsters. He spent hours in his bedroom smoking weed and listening to reggae and dance-hall compilation albums, and even plaited his hair to resemble dreadlocks. As a consequence, in fact, he resembled a very camp, obese pirate.

His claim to be known locally as "Eazy Skankin'" was particularly dubious, but there was no doubt he enjoyed a degree of fear and respect on the streets. His huge frame and eccentric appearance was frightening to many, and his gang, the aptly named "Dem Belly Full Boyz", roamed the neighbourhood with impunity, and it did actually contain a Jamaican. (His name was Asafa and, somewhat ironically, given Gareth's Yardie pretensions, he was one of better-behaved and more scholastic gang members.)

I was not scared of Gareth exactly - my own gang had in its time doled out the odd light beating - but I did not know him well, and he treated me with undisguised contempt. I was a scrawny interloper to his (un)happy home; another mouth to feed, and since Tabby and Darren weren't going to stretch the food budget, that meant less to go around.

We shared a bedroom. He, being the incumbent, the elder and the larger, got the bed. I slept on top of a rolled out yoga mat which Tabby had stolen from a local health centre.

Early one morning, after a particularly hellish night's sleep, I was standing in the bathroom, urinating studiously and with both hands massaging my sore lower back. All of a sudden, the door crashed open. I had bolted it, of course, but the bolting mechanism was itself merely blue-tacked to the door and frame. Any resistance against intruders was token and fleeting. Standing in the doorway in his fraying white underpants was Gareth. This was surprising. Since Gareth and I shared a bedroom, it did not require a great leap of the imagination to work out where I must be at 6am if not there, asleep on the yoga mat, and to have reached the bathroom (a rather grandiose term for a small, mouldy, window-less chamber which lacked a bath), he would have had to step over (or more likely, on) the space which I normally occupied when sleeping.

But I digress. Gareth was a cretin, and he may well have been a pervert too. In any case, having burst in on me, rather than react (or, pursuing the roving pervert theory, pretend to react) as a normal human being would under the circumstances (i.e. apologise profusely and leave), he stared at me for a full five seconds.

I continued to piss bewilderedly. (I have consulted a dictionary to confirm the adverb exists, and it does.)

"You finished?" he said at last, somewhat redundantly. It was clear, as it would have been to anyone standing a yard from my penis, that I had finished. I nodded, pulled up my pyjamas and slunk wordlessly past him, back down the hallway to our bedroom.

"Fat Bird?" asked Tony, referring to a much-frequented council estate pub, actually called 'The Swan'. None of its clientele had ever seen a swan in real life, up close, and to be fair the faded pub sign portrait did resemble a kind of fat, white chicken. We were packing our bags at the end of the school day (or, more precisely, at the end of our school day - it was 2.30pm and we had had quite enough).

The walk to the pub, a little over a mile, was relatively scenic. Many of the boarded-up terraced houses had overgrown front gardens, which were a haven for sparrows, starlings and the odd rat, although the latter tended to keep inside the buildings themselves, beyond the reach of marauding tabbies. In the near distance stood high raise tenements blocks, quite beautiful in their own way, windows winking in the sun like the flashing scales on some reptilian colossus.

Tony kicked an empty beer can. It leapt off the pavement and grazed the hub of a parked car, the geriatric owner of which was lounging in a deckchair in his untidy front yard (one of just two occupied properties on the street). The man gave a half-hearted rebuke, and was shown the finger.

"Cocky prick," muttered the old man. Tony shouted something obscene in reply. He was normally economical with words, preferring to brood and speak only after a long consideration of what he would say, but in this instance it was a knee-jerk reaction. Swearing when sworn at was like flinching when hit, or recoiling from a hot implement.

We reached the pub a short time later. It was, like most council estate drinking holes, a poorly lit and generally quite depressing affair. The air inside was thick with smoke and dust, and the linoleum floor was sticky with spilt drinks. The corrosive tang of cleaning products wafted through from the toilets. (At least they used cleaning products, I suppose - better than the smell of the toilets themselves.)

"Usual please, Smithy," said Tony, and the skinhead behind the bar nodded moodily. A minute later we had our respective palms around two pints of snakebite, each with a dash of what the publican claimed to be blackcurrant cordial, but which was in fact Ribena decanted from a child's half-empty carton.

We drank for the most part in silence. This was not unusual; neither of us were especially chatty. I considered mentioning Gareth's blundering into the bathroom, but decided against it. In spite of being the pervee to Gareth's perver, the whole curious episode was one I preferred to forget.

Eventually Tony piped up. His sister's boyfriend's sister was having a party that evening, he said. Should we go? I mulled it over.

"Not sure if I want a late one," I said. "It's a Tuesday, after all."

"So?" said Tony. "Bunk school, have a lie-in."

It was an attractive prospect. Tabby and Darren didn't really care whether I went to school or not. Their task was merely to ensure I survived in order that they could claim benefits in respect of me. To be honest, even if I did die, I wouldn't have put it beyond them to continue collecting benefits - a bit like those stories you hear of Japanese families continuing to draw their grandfather's state pension, years after he's given up the ghost. I read somewhere that one family had effectively mummified the corpse in the old boy's bedroom, telling prying officials that he was very ill and in no condition to receive visitors. There was, I suppose, a kernel of truth in the statement. Or perhaps not - being dead doesn't mean you can't receive visitors; it simply means you won't contribute much to the conversation.

Tony and I arrived at the party at a little past 9pm that evening. We were with the preposterously-named Darth (his parents were Star Wars fans, and hadn't grasped that, in the SW universe, "Darth" is an prefixed honorific for Sith Lords and not a name in itself; the approximate equivalent of naming a child "Mister" or "Reverend"), from whose house we had recently emerged. Darth's brother, called Spotty Luke (although not to his face), was a local dealer and had sold us a small amount of weed at marginally preferential rates. We had smoked in his bedroom until his mother came home, at which point we moved into the bathroom, where the ventilation fan - Darth explained - would help to extract the smell. What his mother imagined we three were doing crowded in the bathroom, I don't know.

The door was opened by an Asian-looking girl of about nineteen.

"Yes?" she said, giving her most sullen, proprietorial stare. This was Naeha, Tony's sister's house-mate. She invariably pretended not to know us.