MAZ & THE BARBIE DOLL BATTALION

"The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad." - American Photojournalist (Dennis Hopper)

"Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter." - Capt Benjamin Williard (Martin Sheen)

In writing about today's subject from the Stroud archives I feel much like Captain Williard sent to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, only this is no heartless attempt to dishonour the man I will describe, rather a mission of mercy to lay to rest a conflicted and troubled soul who, regardless of his own heart of darkness, actually was a gentleman beneath it all.

If you were to combine Brando's Colonel Kurtz and Dennis Hopper's American photojournalist from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now in a Frankenstein-like laboratory mutation experiment, you would probably end up with Maz.

Who's Maz? Even to this day I'm still not quite sure. He reminded me for some reason of the Chinese Conjuror from Rupert the Bear stories. Although he certainly wasn't Asian, he did, however, have small, thin wisps that rested on his upper lip resembling some vague form of a moustache that made him appear oriental, ancient and wise.

While he was neither ancient or particularly wise when I knew him, Maz was, however, well read in miltary history (especially strategy) which held an obsessive fascination for him, particularly the conflict between France and West Africa during and after World War 2.

He was, in truth, the very definition of human madness, locked in a tortured soul and held prisoner inside a broken body which had suffered considerable trauma ever since a terrible automobile accident had left him with permanent spinal damage.

Perhaps when you've come face to face with the 'man in black' at such a young age as Maz had done, you might quite understandably spend the rest of your life paralysed by the fear of realising just how fragile your existence is on this earth.

Maz, haunted by the spectre of his own brush with death, forever lived on that razor's edge between life and death, and in the end, death was the side he volunteered for, too uncomfortable with existing anymore.

I remember once asking Maz how he survived an inhumanly compressed spate of personal tragedies beginning with the death of his father (heart attack), followed by his own discovery of his mother hanging in her clothes closet, and culminating in his wife walking out on him and their marriage.

"A fur coat."

He went onto explain that the only thing that stopped him from killing himself at that time of immense grief was the fur coat belonging to his ex-wife. Every night he would sleep with it, clutching onto it for dear life as it gave him the only comfort he now had to hand. It somehow brought to my cultural referencing mind the objectaphilia of a coat by the poet Colline in Puccini's opera La Boheme and the overtly emotional way he said goodbye to it in Act 4 when forced to sell it.

I often wondered if Maz had brought the fur coat with him after leaving the city for the country, which is how I came to meet him as he circulated around the various independent cafes of Stroud looking very much like a super cool extra in a late 80's Luc Besson movie.

When Maz was sober he had a polite, almost continental demeanour about him and displayed great etiquette, wearing some beautifully tailored clothes. I could have almost imagined him in a French embassy in Vietnam keeping cool from the oppressive heat with a gimlet cocktail.  However, at his worst, when he was drunk he became like a possessed shamanic demon, spitting fire and fury at anyone who dared to question his considerable, pent up wrath. His party trick was biting into his wine glass and breaking a sizeable chunk off with his teeth with the same relish as Gary Oldman licking the blood off a razor in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992).

By some miracle, Maz managed to never quite be outrageous enough to find himself ostracised from the community in which he lived, nor dangerous enough to the public at large which was, of course, a very good thing for those of us who often leapt to his defence.

Sometimes I think the town of Stroud as an unofficial asylum which has the unique ability to subsume mentally unwell people effortlessly into its environment. Everytime you think the glass ceiling of insanity has been broken here, a new level of insanity often ups the ante in the guise of some new human manifestation of it.

Back then, Maz broke not just his wine glass, but the glass ceiling of his own fractured mind and we who were fond of him in his own uniquely mad way, observed his descent into hell whilst continually offering him a path toward the light which he steadfastly refused.

Those who bore witness to his most aberrated moments probably felt akin to the two army men who come to fetch Captain Williard from his hotel room whilst he experiences his nervous breakdown/freak out.

The reality was that Maz was only ever a danger to himself and no amount of persuasion from others would stop him from his ultimate quest to carry out his final mission further up the river.

After a few years of getting to know him quite well personally, it became clear to me that Maz was increasingly deifying women in his mind, seeing them as both idols to worship and replacement figures for his late mother and ex-wife.

No-one would ever have imagined their replacement would take the form of a legion of Barbie dolls.

One by one they began to appear around the town and often in strategic, secret locations that you would only notice if Maz himself had given you a heads up on his co-ordinates or if your eyeline just happened to chance upon them.

Some were in trees, some in plant boxes, others hiding under street benches. He had begun Operation Mattel without any word of warning to his enemies, whoever they were.

Possibly invisible to us, but definitely not to Maz.

As he wandered around the town from cafe to cafe, Maz was like a great general carrying out casual reconnassaince for his troops on the ground. At mess, he would always have a Barbie captain or two accompanying him, typically tucked upright into his folded arms before he'd continue with his daily territorial review, planning his next series of locations as to where he would deploy his soldiers.

Oscillating between garrison manoeuvres to occasional guerilla style flanking assaults, Maz was versatile in attacking options with his Barbie army who were growing in numbers by the day, sometimes by the hour. Often I would find him unboxing new volunteers and preparing them for battle whilst taking sips from a over frothed cappucino in the sunny courtyard of his most frequented cafe.

These military exercises felt like Maz attempting to stake out some control of his own mind. The Barbie (occasionally Cindy) warrior protectors were his way of feeling secure externally, whilst the war inside him continued to rage on.

For deep down we all knew (Maz included) that no amount of camouflage could ultimately conceal the pain that persistently stalked him.

As for the locals unaware of Maz and his personal life story, the bizarre sight of these meticulously dressed combat Barbies overtaking the town would just be yet another typically eccentric feature of a place that absorbs insanity like a sponge.

On the rare occasion any of his female troops would go missing (stolen by taunting crackheads), he would ask for help from his most trusted friends in recovering them.

This paternal attachment to his plastic battalion was most affecting, even if some of his human relationships were being sacrificed at their expense.

As Maz expanded operations, it was becoming ever clearer that this military decoy was theatre to deflect from the bigger picture that he was refusing to address.

Slowly, as the Barbie army grew to unmanageable proportions, Maz found himself overwhelmed by his own gargantuan military ambition and he increasingly struggled to remain nimble and fleet in his approach on the ground.

And for all his final few victorious battles in the town, they would sadly prove to be Pyrrhic as the ongoing war of his life was slowly being lost.

For when all the smoke had cleared from the battlefield and the brief illusion of peace appeared before him, Maz's final undefeatable enemy emerged.

Himself.