Belinda McKeon remembers the outlandish heart of street theatre in Galway, whose going, like most things he did, defies belief. How could a road accident have beaten him?
We had headed to Galway for festival weekend, my boyfriend and I, planning to catch up with John. To Aengus he was an old friend, riotous and ever reliable; to me he was a whirlwind of droll wit and manic energy I was just getting to know. Strangely, text messages had gone unanswered, but it was the busiest time of the year, so we thought little of it. We would come across him somewhere along the way. Perched 10 feet high on a unicycle, he was hard to miss. But heading down Shop Street in search of him that Sunday morning, and glimpsing the throng at his pitch outside Nally's barbershop, we found not what we expected - John, as Johnny Massacre, transforming the faces of children and demolishing the affectations of adults. Instead there was the shock of flowers, photographs and notes saying goodbye. "Thank you, Johnny, for making me laugh lots of times," read one, painstakingly printed in a child's large hand. John Doran had died, two days earlier, in a three-car collision on the road west from Kinnegad. He was far short of the 38 years given as his age by reports of his death; his 30s were an uncharted decade, yet to be charged with the colour, the verve, with which he lived his life.
Longford was where he came from, but John eagerly adopted Galway as his home four years ago, when he announced his decision to become, as he put it, a clown. Not, as someone pointed out at the funeral last week, the easiest thing to come home and tell your folks. And few could have foreseen what a job he would make of it; few, perhaps, except those already acquainted with his propensity to stake out his dreams and see them through. Fresh from his Leaving Cert, he had established a music night at the local rugby club. Dionysius, as he called it, brought the underground bands of the mid-1990s to the grateful youth of Longford. Afterwards he got into band promotion and, in England, still in his early 20s, turned his hand to managing a hotel. And clowning, real clowning, was the next challenge. He had seen, on his travels, what could be done. He knew the power of carnival, its potential to enchant and enrich; he understood that to present people with what they had imagined impossible was to open eyes and minds and to give children what they so deserved: proof that magic was real, that everyday streets could hold wondrous things for them to be a part of.
And then, of course, there was that lethal wit. Even if he had not made a career out of tossing heavy machinery into the air above his head, still the name of Massacre would have attached itself to John; his eye for the little pretensions we all assume, for the masks behind which we hide in daily life, was razor-sharp, and nothing escaped his acerbic tongue. His influence can be seen in the routine of the comedian known as Dave McSavage, who verbally butchers the airs and graces of passers-by on the streets of Dublin every weekend: straight-faced, blunt and painfully funny. John coaxed his audience into laughing at themselves for a moment, invited them to relax the act for a minute, to stop taking life so very seriously.
All of which has rendered the task of grieving for him, in the past 10 days, quite puzzling. If there's one thing Johnny Massacre would disapprove of, it's wallowing in sorrow. And if there's one place where the wonderful sense of farce and irreverence he stood for would be difficult to accommodate, it's at the funeral of someone whose death was a needless waste of a vibrant young life.
But his spirit has made itself known in the sadness; his legacy to us, to keep a sense of humour handy in everything, especially the most solemn affairs. I noticed it that thunderous Sunday morning in Galway, as we struggled to come to terms with the news of his death. An image flashed into my mind of bewildered gardaí and ambulance crew coming face to face with an array of chainsaws, fire tools and straitjackets in the back of John's car. It probably didn't happen, but it made me laugh for a moment to think how he would have relished their confusion. And I knew that was allowed.
It was the same at his funeral in Longford. There were moments when wry smiles rippled through the heart-crushing sadness of the day, things at which we knew John would have thrown back his head and laughed out loud. Like the sight of so many of his friends in the unfamiliar setting of a cathedral, hopelessly trying to work out when to kneel and when to stand and never quite getting the hang of it.
Like the priest's struggle to reconcile the need for funereal tones during his moving sermon with the absurdity of what he had to say as he remembered what John was about, "juggling knives, eating fire, hammering four-inch nails up his nose". Or the sight of another priest, at the burial in Cullyfad cemetery, four miles outside Longford town, handing the reins over to Luke "Ming the Merciless" Flanagan, of all people, who set in motion a eulogy of many voices that seemed as though it would never end. And at the thought of the Cullyfad locals, wondering why, in the name of God, all that clapping and whooping was coming from the graveyard on a funeral day. It was a final standing ovation, a fanfare. Johnny Massacre was accustomed to nothing less. And, as ever, it was difficult to turn and walk away.
