by R J Dent

When he was drunk, which was often, Maxim was loud and obnoxious. When he wasn’t drunk, he was still fairly loud and obnoxious.

Normally, this would have been a severe problem, but with Maxim, it didn’t really matter because he was very good-natured and very funny. He would help anyone. He would also think up jokes and funny stories on the spot and relay them with perfect timing, sound effects, appropriate voices and wonderfully hilarious punch lines. He was good to be around.

A lot of people claimed he could have had a phenomenal career as a stand-up comic, and although this was often suggested to him, Maxim always self-deprecatingly turned the idea down flat – as though the suggestion was meant for someone else, not for him.

          When I met him, he was living in a small town, working in a shoe factory and drinking heavily most nights. I’d wandered into The Saracen’s Head Hotel, the one mentioned in The Pickwick Papers, and Maxim was standing at the bar, entertaining a handful of rapt listeners with a new story.

This one was about how a traffic jam had made him late for liaison with his lover at the railway station and how he’d had to abandon his car in the traffic, running over traffic jammed car roofs, racing across the town, hurdling hedges, veering around people with dogs, vaulting kids, spinning pensioners around on their zimmer frames, kicking cats out of the way, etc, etc. Despite his efforts, he (of course) arrived at the station late, pushed through the double doors (which swished shut behind him like batwing doors in a western saloon), only to find the station empty, the platform empty, his lover gone, and nothing but a piece of litter, rolling tumbleweed-like in the breeze across the rusting tracks.

          As I bought myself a drink, I listened to the story’s conclusion. It was a good story, funny, entertaining and told in a characteristically loud and foulmouthed way.

          I stood nearby, then applauded along with everyone else when the story ended. I bought Maxim a drink and by the end of the evening we were conversing on (of all things) the discrepancies between the moral principles of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo.