Nine-One-One Christmas

I’m staring out the window of a Malaysian restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown at 11:00AM on a drizzly Christmas morning.  Outside, Washington Street, the once-upon-a-time spine of the Combat Zone redlight district, does its dreary impression of pathetic fallacy. Inside the dimly lit space of a woody-ropey-Malaysia-in-Massachusetts, I’m sitting across a bare-wood table from a friend indeed. 

“I tol’ t’fucken ambulance guy ta stop, but does he listen …?” he holds up a forkful of noodles interrogatively.  The food is so spicey-hot that my Irish eyes, raised on boil-your-food-to-within-an-inch-of-its-existence, start to tear up. 

“NO HE DON’T!” he says way too loud for a Massachusetts-Malaysian restaurant on Christmas morning. 

A few heads amongst the surprisingly large number of Christmas morning diners stiffen at the sound of a raised voice.

My friend stuffs noodles into this mouth by way of punctuation.

I watch his face distort as he chomps the foot and get saddened by the fatigued-yet-still-burning-anger in his eyes.  I look down at my untouched, I-had-to-order-something plate of deep-fried tofu and bean sprouts.

“So, I … ya know … I had ta … pertect my space,” he mumbles through a mouthful of noodles, spices and chicken.  “Aint that what the shrinks an’ them know-it-alls down t’meetin’s tell ya ta do, right?  Create a safe space … an’ stay inside it.”

He’s mansplaining to me how he got the heavy limp I noted when I picked him up an hour earlier limp-pacing in front of the South Station taxi-rank.  We drove to every diner on Google’s list of diners open on Christmas Day only to get Googled and end up shuffle-limping around China Town trying to predict which Asian food might cook breakfast eggs.

“People…do…not…listen!” he stabs the air in front of my face with his fork, then plunges the tines back into noodles, chicken and peppers-from-hell.

“Let me guess,” I say to be saying something and not just taking incoming all my fractured Christmas morning. “You tol’ him he was makin’ you anxious, he apologized profusely, backed up an’ offered a cigarette.  What’d the cops say anyway?”

“Sorta,” his black Celtics’ hat nods from side to side as he twirls yellowish-brown noodles onto the fork.

His face shoots up fast, eyes burning with anger. 

“I kicked that fucken stretcher right back at t’prick of an EMT, or … I tried ta.  I did kick t’fucken thing, but them bitches is heavy; crushed my whole foot.  Tot…ally crushed it.  The cop, t’nice one, he says, ‘hey dude why don’t ya get up on the stretcher now for yer broken foot.’”

He grunts out a laugh but his eyes still burn with anger.

“I almost did get up on t’stretcher, figuring, forget about t’fucken sectionin’, I needa take care a my foot!”

His mouth opens too wide as he forces out a too-loud-laugh that spins hijabed heads of three young Asian women at a table ten feet away.  The grumpy-jowly faced, thirty something Asian man with them, rests his elbow on the wooly-roped-wooden fence pole next to their table and scowls at us over a sip of his bright-yellow Christmas morning cocktail.

“Anyways, that’s how life goes, ya gotta keep yer safe space, ya know!” my friend says in the phony voice he uses for pointless lies. 

He keeps his head down, twirling-twirling-twirling noodles.

“Even if stayin’ safe hurts a little, but, … ya know,” his sudden change of tone tells me he’s back to reality.  “That aint even the worst one.”

He raises his black Celtics’ hat to show an inch and a half long, bristly red scab running along his forehead and disappearing into his greying hair.

“Oh Jaysys,” I say, my stomach drawing in.  “Ya gotta … ya can’t … ye’re not a young man, I mean, … even if ya were ….”   

“Relax, relax, I wuz takin’ an Uber ta t’hospital for this one,” he points at the gristly forehead scar, “it’s nuthin really, just headbutted a nice old stained glass door when t’house manager wouldn’t let me, I mean wuz all fucked up an’ shit, it’s not like it wuz his fault,” he’s talking fast, which is how he delivers actual, terrible facts, “but ya know, my head hadda hit sumptin an’ then I got inta a fight with t’Uber driver who called the cops who called t’ambulance, I don’t even remember what I wuz fighting t’Uber driver over, some stoopid shit, an’ then ….”

He keeps going, shoveling noodles into his mouth, and mumbling out rapid wave after wave of crazy stories that crash into my psyche.  Occasionally the consequences of a brutal fact spray over the emotion-proofing I’ve built after showing up silent and grim for too many late-nights-early-mornings to move him and his black-plastic-bag luggage from one shitty maybe-sober house to an even shittier, yet more expensive, maybe-sober house.

Resorting to my second form of self-soothing, my gaze flicks away from the yellowish noodles spinning around the tines of his fork to scan the room:  The Asian Muslims at the table closest to us, yet still ten feet away, are sharing colorful food from large serving plates in the middle of the table: One plate has blueish colored rice, fried something crackerish and orangish chicken legs.  The women eat and talk rapidly, their chopsticks distractedly grabbing miniscule quantities of rice.  Between long sips of his bright yellow cocktail, the man’s teeth tear at orangish flesh on chicken legs.

Our waitress, a gaunt, short, sixty-something, yet still high energy, Asian woman, swings by our table, a stainless-steel jug of iced water bending her thin wrist. She sloshes water into my barely touched glass and asks distractedly; “Everyfing awrights?”; but keeps going without waiting for an answer.

As the ongoing saga of the kicked-stretcher devolves into despairingly low stakes pettiness, my mind, grasping for distraction, is drawn to the front door where stands a tall, white-haired woman in a full-length brown fur coat glaring at the empty host station.  She turns to scan the restaurant, lips pursed, the tight-shiny skin on her high-cheek-boned face giving way to lively, dark eyes.  Standing behind her, a black-haired, twenty-something mini-me version of the older woman in a three-quarter length fur coat, surveys the room with a bright-white-teeth revealing smile. 

Our waitress swoops in, sloshing her stainless-steel jug onto the tiny ledge atop the host’s station, grabs a pile of menus and with rapid hand wave-directs the two women toward the table just inside the door.

The older woman’s head shakes deliberately from side to side as she rejects the table offered.  Our waitresses’ head nods fast; her lips move rapidly; her bony finger pointing at the next table two feet away: This produces a barely perceptible nod from the white-haired woman. The pile of menus are slapped on the top the rejected table, as our waitress stoops her diminutive body and pushes the rejected table until it hits the chosen table - thus creating enough seating for a group of eight.

“Ya know I saved a guy’s life,” my friend’s sharp change in tone from petty braggadocio to seeking to raise himself up breaks into my eavesdropping.

“Oh, really,” I ask with a smile.  “How’d that happen Clark Kent?”

He’s a good person at heart, but somewhere on his journey through life circuits got flipped in his brain that produced a seemingly uncontrollable need to sooth himself with chemicals.  That chemical soothing has stolen from him his family, his home, his career and most of that good heart. 

“I’m sittin’ in the livin’ room watchin’ TV,” he taps the base of his fork off the wooden tabletop, “now this part’s actually funny, cause see we wuz watchin’ Cops.  Then Dirk, sorta outta nowhere, says ‘call nine-one-one.’”

He doinks the fork and knife butts off the tabletop.

I’m wondering if I need to clarify just who is Dirk, but let it go.

“I’m thinkin’ Dirk’s so fucked up on his,” he nods and winks, “medical … marijuana that he’s thinkin’ t’real cops on the TV show needa call nine-one-one, … but they fucken is nine-one-one!”

He laughs too loud, again turning heads, but now it registers, and he stops laughing.

“Then I realize by how he’s huffin an’ puffin’ that he aint just fucked up,” he slowly twists noodles until no more will fit on the fork.  “He’s a fat guy, sixty-seven-years old, livin’ in a sober-house, need I say any more,” he nods knowingly, “anyways, his face is turning kinda blueish an’ his hand is twitchin’, so I’m like fuck this, I actually gotta do sumptin this guy’s in trouble; so I call nine-one-one.”

He drops his cutlery with a clang onto the wooden tabletop, picks up his phone and starts stabbing his forefinger at the spiderweb-cracked screen.  My whole torso tightens as for a few seconds I’m full sure our Christmas morning is about to take a sharp left turn; that, so excited by telling this story, he’ll inadvertently summon an ambulance, which will be beaten here by the pissed-off crew of the nearest fire truck, probly accompanied by a I-got-nuthin-else-happenin’-cop who’s legit, but assertively asked, questions will whirl us up out of Massachusetts-Malaysia and fully into my friend’s crazy world. 

Now desperately seeking distraction from anxiety – another old friend – I turn my head to scan the room: Across from the host’s station, fur coats have been carefully lain across the backs of two of the chairs next to the wall; while the two women, individually striking in their retained and youthful tanned-high-cheek-boned good looks, use their full forearms to flatten the backs of their pine-green holiday dresses and take their seats with backs to the aisle; heads twitching occasionally toward to the front door.  My eaves-gazing is interrupted as the thickset Asian man with the hijabed women raises his cocktail glass, now emptied of booze but still full of ice, to our waitress, who might be the only waitress on duty this Christmas morning.  She glides over to his table, stainless-steel in hand, her head constantly scanning the room.

“Nudder?” she asks, sloshing iced water into the hijabed women’s glasses.  

“So, t’ambulance shows up, I mean they’re there like five times a week, someone’s always needin’ them an’ ….”

“The cops!” my anxiety blurts out, “do they come a lot too?”

“Nah, everyone’s spent.  No one aint got t’energy ta be makin’ trouble no more,” the brim of the black Celtic’s hat wags slowly from side-to-side, “plus t’house manager’d kick yer ass out in a heartbeat, just so he could keep whatever rent ya paid an’ then he’ll jam someone else inta yer bed.  Nah, it’s a sober house, I mean, we’re tested every Tuesday evening, gotta piss into a plastic cup.”

“An’ what happens with t’cup a piss?”

“Fucked if I know, some idiot, or eejit … as you call ‘em, tests it,” he’s all buoyant now, his mischievous smile curling up the corners of his mouth, years fall off his prematurely-aged face. “I mean I never actually seen anyone get thrown out causa piss, a course ya gotta remember, if you got a medical card fer pot, then there’s nuthin they can do ta ya, cause that’s medicine, right?  Pot’s just like any other medicine them fucks a doctors tell t’courts ta make ya take.”

Down at the front door a high-mileage, fifty-something woman caked with makeup and with the same high cheek-boned face as the two fur-coated women, stands stare-scowling at their table.  The scowling woman, in rumpled tan khakis, a shiny, Kelly-green Celtics jacket and a black wool hat, wrings one hand through the other as our waitress swoops in grabbing a single menu from the host station. The scowling new customer points for the waitress at the backs of her two lookalikes, but the younger woman has already picked her up in a head-twitch and immediately stands up.  The young woman takes a moment to reset her dress, then steps gingerly on high-heels towards the scowling woman, who attempts a weak-smile.

The waitress gestures repeatedly with her open palm for them to sit, but the two women embrace lightly as the still sitting white-haired woman, her pine-green clad shoulder’s falling heavily under a sigh, stands up.  She carefully straightens her dress, brushes off her shoulders, purses her lips.

“So, Dirk’s like two-fifty, two seventy-five, maybe three-hundred pounds an’ the house is yer typical Boston three decker, ‘cept the middle floor is where the livin’ room is.  All t’other livin’ rooms is walled off inta three-guy rooms.  An’ t’EMTs, who are probly awready sick a this house, has ta come up ta two ta get Dirk’s fat ass outta there.  Mind you now, I called it in as a heart attack, cuz that’s what ya gotta do.  Always call nine-one-one in as a heart attack ta get better service, but we probly over did that at our house cause ….”

The white-haired woman straightens her dress, pulls back her shoulders as they rise from a deep inhale and steps closer to the other two women who are now lightly holding each other’s hands.  The older woman leans forward slowly, and with her hands on top of the Kelly-green shoulders mock-embraces the new arrival.

“… so t’EMTs have ta use the chair ta get Dirk out, an’ they ….”

“Wait a minute, hold up,” I’m back in our conversation.  “They’re gonna carry him out in the chair he’s sitting in?”

My simple mind is imagining a double-sized Archie Bunker overflowing from a greasy-tweedy armchair, his body twitching through the last moments of life.

“Nah, nah, what fucken planet do you live on?” he laughs a genuine laugh.  “They got this like stretcher chair thing an’ they strap t’fucken shit outta ya ta keep ya from fallin when they’re goin’ down stairs.  See, that’s t’only way they gonna get Dirk down the twisty stairs specially if he starts freakin’ out, which I guess happens when you’re dyin’.”

“Ohhhh,” I say, talk of death turning my gaze back to the front tables but it’s partially blocked by our waitress delivering the bright yellow cocktail to the grumpy-faced Asian man.

“On’y problem wuz t’EMTs decide taday’s the day they’re gonna teach the new chick how ta do t’stretcher chair – with four-hundred-pound Dirk in the middle of his heart attack.  Now grant you, this wuz his third heart attack this month!”

“You’re joking, surely that can’t be legal?” my middleclass indignation at the plot twist in his story overcomes my anxiety. 

Still, I do catch a glimpse of the oldest and youngest woman carefully straightening the backs of their dresses again to sit back down, the middle woman – a daughter of the white-haired woman? the mother of the youngest woman? – drags back a chair, flops down, swiping her black wool hat off her head and from her seat starts to struggle out of her jacket.

“It aint illegal!  What are you, a fucken Karen?” he plunges his fork into the remaining noodles.  “They gotta do their job, gotta get tra...ined how ta do their job.  It wuz just Dirk’s bad luck,” he looks up, his face hardening, “it just wasn’t his day, you think they give a shit?  You’re just another delivery ta them.  Plus, they’d come for him sooooo … many times awready, they gotta be sayin’ ‘what t’fuck dude, how many times we gotta lug yer fat ass down these twisty stairs!’”

Involuntarily my head turns away. 

Our waitress is sloshing water into glasses at the three-generations-lookalike women’s table.  Her head flicks a little; she plops the jug on the table; whips her order pad out of her black apron; slides the Bic from behind her ear.

“But I will admit this trainee EMT chick shoulda gone ta t’gym a few times before she joined up.  I mean she’s short as fuck an’ fat, not like Dirk fat but, but … ya know, bowling ball roundish, not tenpin, … candlepin probly.”

He shovels the last of the noodles into his mouth and talks through the food.

“But she wuz nice, she liked my Celts hat.  I mean she didn’t have ta say nuthin ta me, I’m just a two-bit loser in a sober house watchin’ Cops in the middle a the day, but ya know, she says, ‘nice hat, good win Thursday.’ I don’t even watch the games no more, it’s just squeak-squeak-squeak, three pointer, whoosh, squeak-squeak-squeak.”

He reaches for his glass of Coke.

I cast a glance at the three-generations table.  The middle generation is out of her seat standing, fighting with the Celtics jacket snagged on the chair, her too-red lips pursed, edges pointing downward, forehead pushing down over dark eyes.  The youngest generation’s hand reaches across the table trying to touch her arm, but she leans away to avoid it, letting go of the jacket.  The oldest generation takes a sip of water and stares straight ahead.

“Hey, you gonna eat that shit?” my friend words take me back to my world. 

He’s pointing his fork at the deep-fried tofu stuffed with bean sprouts.

“Eh, you can finish it.”

“Finish it!  Ya aint even touched it.”

“Well, it’s not exactly Christmas morning fare, now is it?” I snap; immediately regretting the words.

“Yeah, I know, it’s … I appreciate ya leavin’ yer family just ta, ya know, it’s all, it’s just, ya know….”

He doesn’t finish so I rush in with:

“Yeah, yeah, no worries, no worries,” I dust over our failed attempt at emotions and fearing their return fire out a question:

“So will there be dinner back t’house later?”

Something turns my head, and I see the Kelly-green jacket disappear out the front door.

“Yeah, Dirk’s cookin’, that’s his thing, he can’t cook for shit, it’s all Stouffers crap he heats up in t’oven.  But I help him lift t’heavy pans an’ stuff.”

“But wait a minute, he’s back, he didn’t … you know, they got him …,” I nod my head side to side.

“Do you listen to a fucken word I say, I just tol’ ya I saved a guy’s life,” he spears a wedge of deep-fried tofu from my plate.

“Oh yeah,” I fake contrition as my mind and gaze wanders back to the two lookalike women at the table by the front door.  They’re busy reading the menus; the younger woman’s eyes blinking-blinking; the white-haired woman’s lips pursed, her shiny skinned forehead trying to press down over grim eyes.

“Yeah, Dirk come back t’next mornin’ on the bus, the docs turned him out in the middle a t’night, but he didn’t have no money for an Uber, so he slept on them shitty ER chairs until the buses started.”

“An’ he’s ok?”

“No he aint ok, none a us ok, not you neither, mister in con-fucken-trol a everythin’!” his eyes fill with despair.  “We’re all gonna die an’ be the fuck better off dead.”

“Wow,” I raise my overfilled glass of ice water, “Merry fucken Christmas!”

Vignettes

I walk into the locker room at the gym on the day after Massachusetts’ Primary Day.  There’s a short, seventy-something guy holding court, his finger wagging, his spindly-fish-belly-colored legs sticking out of wrinkled, khaki shorts.

“My guy won last night,” he’s saying, squinting from behind thick glasses.

His index finger stabs the air emphatically at a thickset, Hispanic, seventy-something man sitting on a locker room stool struggling hard to pull a black-and-grey, knee compression brace up over his calf.

“Oh yeahs, who’s dat?” the thickset guy says; his efforts with the knee brace rocking the stool backwards.  “Who’s wonned?”

“I … dunno, … can’t remember, but he’s wuz the best a t’lot, he’ll do the best.”

“Good, good, we needs someone’s as can beat t’Indian.”

They’re talking about the Republican Primary: “T’Indian” is Elizabeth Warren who Trump calls “Pocahontas” as she has cited her partial Native American heritage.

“Yeah, we needa ta take back control a this country, it’s goin’ ta hell in a handbasket.”

“Whose did he beat?”

“I dunno, I dunno, there wuz three of ‘em,” the skinny guy, puts his foot up on a stool to tie the laces on his scuffed-off-white sneakers.

“Three!  Three’s too manys, why so manys?”

The skinny guy stands upright, his hand shooting out to steady himself against the lockers. 

“I dunno, but you know one of ‘em wore a baseball hat at the debate, I mean …,” he purses his lips, shakes his head slowly.  “I mean, I just … didn’t like that!”

—————————————————————————————————————

Taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, in the elevator at a big downtown hospital, a rangy, fifty-something, man with a scuffed-electric-blue backpack lashed tight across his chest shares, unbidden, that he’s had a heart transplant:

“Yeah man, got me a secondhand heart, works pretty good … pretty durn good,” he says nodding a lot, smiling a lot. “Low mileage, heh…heh, walked here, but just from North Station, not the twenty-two miles.”

The only thing you can be sure of in a big hospital is getting lost, so I do.  While waiting, outside the wrong clinic, an eighty-something woman, hair immaculate, cheeks heavily rouged, picks her way along on a shiny-black cane, her sixty-something, mini-me daughter linking her arm.

The elevator dings opens and a corresponding, but ten years younger, mother-daughter couple emerge.  The daughter is tall, heavily made up, hair dyed vibrant red, eyes manic.

The older women’s faces light up with smiles of recognition; they shake hands; exchange greetings in a language unknown to me.

Mid conversation, everyone talking simultaneously, the redhead blurts out: “My daughter has brain cancer!”

The eighty-something woman peers up at her with panic-stricken eyes as she fishes blindly in her bulky, black handbag.

“An’ … an’ … my husband has a girlfriend,” she holds up her blank wide-screened iPhone.

They lapse back into their language, all talking at once; the eighty-something dabbing her eyes with a tissue, the product of her fishing expedition.

“Let me show you his girlfriend,” the redhead’s forefinger swipes across the phone screen.

“Yeah, my brother, he loves me, he’s showin’ me ‘round his condo building; a door opens an’ who walks out … but my husband … in a bathrobe!”

She shakes her head rapidly, finger swiping wildly.

“There!” she turns the screen for the other pair to see. “My … husband’s … girlfriend!”

The older woman keeps dabbing her eyes, soaking the tissue, fishing for another.

“An’ I have breast cancer,” the redhead says.  “It’s under control, I just come here every six months.”

The three other women all talk simultaneously in their language. The redhead glares at them one by each.

“And … Antonette,” she says loudly, silencing the other three.  “She couldn’t walk on Tuesday, then she can walk on Thursday.  I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on with that girl!”

 ————————————————————————————————————

I’m lacing my sneaker at the gym, foot up on the locker room bench, when from behind I see a white cane sweeping over and back, headed my way.

“Can I help in any way,” I ask the jowly-red-faced man with one inert eye, the other bleary but highly active.

“No, but thanks, I aint fully blind, I still sees a little.”

A few feet away, readying themselves to workout, two young Afro-Hispanic men banter:

“Man, you should have a snook,” the shorter thickset guy says enthusiastically. “I mean if you aint for a few weeks, when you hits that pipe man, ye’re gonna feel sooo goooood!”

“No way man!” the taller guy stands upright, shakes his huge Afro, scowls at his friend.  “I can’t man, I got t’union exam comin’ up an’ I gotta make a clean blood test.”

“Man after a few weeks, you take one snook, ye’re gonna be hiiiiigggghhh!”

“He’s right ya know,” the blind guy shuffles himself around to face the two younger men.  “I did all those drugs in prison, started in there, never took a drug before prison, but I’m clean sixteen years now, done fifteen inside, drugs all the time.”

Time freezes for the silence for his inbreath.

“I lost two brothers an’ a sister ta drugs, even that didn’t stop me, not when I wuz inside, but I stopped now, clean sixteen years.  We useta give ourselves breaks, cuz we didn’t have any money, have any drugs, then when you’d get a hit!”

He raises his hand to his face, kisses the tips of his fingers and waves his open hand toward the fluorescent light.

————————————————————————————————————- 

I’m waiting for a free sample of Glendalough Gin at my local liquor store.  In front of me a squat, fifty-something, goateed baldy holds an empty clear plastic sample cup up to his nose.

“I aint so nuts about gin usually,” he says, his scraggly goatee flapping up and down. “I’m more of bourbon man maself, but this is purdy gud!”

He moves the tiny plastic vessel from one nostril to the other.

“Would you like one?” the forty-something, bleached-blonde marketer asks over his shoulder.

“Please,” I smile back.

“See now Beefeater’s a bit too smooth for me,” baldy starts up again, “but this has a nice … bouquet … I guess.  I thunk t’Irish on’y done whiskey an’ that gawd awful black beer.”

“Actually, …,” the marketer pauses, swipes her hair from the side of her face and leans forward for emphasis, “Irish gins are the fastest … growing gins in the … the world, I guess.”

I take the sample cup she offers, swallow the clear liquid and suppress my beer drinker’s grimace.

“What is gin made out of?” I ask, inhaling a deep breath.

“It’s a grain alcohol, basically every white spirit starts as a vodka an’ then you add berries,” the marketer offers, “of course for a gin you have to have ju….”

“Juniper,” baldy cuts in. “It aint gin if it aint got juniper.”

“Yes an’ do you know that at our distillery in Ire…land our forager hand picks all the plants within a … hundred and … fifty miles of the distillery!”

“Course Tanqueray’s the gin I’d buy if an’ I was buyin’ gin, it won like t’Oscar for best gin!”

 ————————————————————————————————————-

I’m battling sciatica and the New Yorker article on Alice Munro as I sit on a shitty chair in the Natick Mall concourse the day after the day after Christmas.  The Mall is thronged with fast-walkers unsated by the just concluded orgy of consumerism that is Christmas.  My daughter, a late-late Christmas forager is lost somewhere in the bowels of the mall bargain hunting.  If she hunts anything bigger than a pair of socks, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to fit it into the house, at least not until we get recycling Mount Everest hauled away to careless-middleclass oblivion.

I hard-fold the New Yorker and lean closer to my sadness at Alice Munro’s family dysfunction.  This Nobel Prize winning short story writer stayed married to an unrepentant predator for decades as he destroyed her family, while she digested their lives to bring back in her fiction.

At the table next to me the first date that started just a few moments before with curt hellos and forced smiles starts to melt down. 

The woman, heavily made-up, thin faced, hair ruthlessly ponytailed, sits straight-backed in her shitty chair, arms folded tight in front of a still-buttoned, three-quarter length black coat.

“I think my profile’s pretty clear,” her ponytail wags. “I aint inta sports, like not … at … all!”

The man, dark, deep-set eyes in a pale complexion that hasn’t been shaved since at least Christmas day, white sweatpants, unzippered Celtics jacket showing a washed-out blue “Pats VI” tee shirt, lounges back on his shitty chair – a luxury sciatica stole from me forty years ago!  His arms rise to clasp behind his unruly hair, then retract so he can doubly emphasize his point slow-tapping the soft-sides of both hands on the black metal-mesh tabletop.

“What’s not ta like ‘bout sports,” he says, hands gently rising and falling. “First ya got yer Celts winning World Titles, then the Pats is just a few players away from comin’ back, an’ the Bruins, … well maybe the Bruins is just a few lobotomies away from winnin’?”

The back of my left leg yowling with pain, I suddenly get up from my chair, fast-turning two unhappy heads.  I make a fake apologetic face; stuff the Munro family’s sad history into my back pocket; and walk off into the mall, hoping that movement also fixes despair.

The Mocsow Circus

I’m sitting on a rubbed-smooth-by-many-arses blue wooden bench three rows back from clouds of sawdust erupting from the giraffe’s massive hooves.  The wild animal, seven thousand miles from home and barely contained by the electric-yellow rope lassoed just beneath its huge jaws, lurches in fear at the searing circus lights and the big top echoing of children’s screams and adults’ loud-nervous guffaws.  The giraffe drags the ring mistress, and her strapless, black velvet evening gown, at the other end of the yellow lasso around the sawdust covered circus ring: Her eyes transfixed with panic-inducing panic.

The waxy red apple she had been holding to lure the wild animal into the ring, streaks to the sawdust as she grabs the lasso with both hands to prevent an escape.  The first row of seats jammed full of jostling twelve-year-old boys, their faces smeared with Curly-Wurly toffee-chocolate, bolts backwards, arms flailing, into the scratching-hair-pulling ten-year-olds in the second row.  The giraffe’s hooves, the size of a side-plate, stamp the sawdust until particles of pine glint in the too-bright circus lights. 

My eyeballs, struggling to stay in their sockets, dart from the enormous hooves to the ring mistress’ panicked eyes as my arms enfold my two children who are on their feet ready to flee.

Arriving to the ever-growing cloud of brightly lit wood dust, the clown, his pasty white face and bulbous, fire-engine-red nose aimed up at the giraffe’s big head, joins the ring mistress in attempting to pull the enormous animal towards the back of the tent.  A third man arrives and grabs the rope; beneath his skintight tank top well-defined muscles ripple; but his lack of height forces him to line up behind the ring mistress. 

Together all three bend the giraffe’s head toward the sawdust.  The African animal’s long, beautiful neck arches as they drag it toward a charcoal-grey blanket that separates circus ring from the rest of the planet. 

The hand of an unseen circus person yanks the charcoal blanket open at the last second as the three humans drag the giraffe out of sight.

Emerging moments later from behind the blanket, grabbing the microphone, shaking its cord straight, the ring mistress, the hem of her black velvet dress fringed with sawdust, strides to the middle of the circus ring.

“Sorry ‘bout dat folks,” she says in a strong Dublin accent, her voice languid despite moments before being a mere trip away from releasing a thousand pound, fourteen-foot-tall wild animal to charge across the fields of Mayo looking for some to get home to the Serengeti. 

Wiping a bare forearm across her brow, she continues:

“Loike I says, we’s de on’y circus in de whirled currantly havin’ a giraffe act, but he’s on’y a pup, so does a get a bit frikened.”

The crowd of maybe twenty-five people, three of them over the age of twelve, take a collective deep breath, settle back onto the blue wooden benches and munch into their high-fat-sodium-sugar snacks.

The day before, while engaging in the time honoured Castlebarbarian tradition of stopping for ice cream in Westport on the way home from the beach, we saw a sign on a light pole for “The Mocsow Circus.” 

Laughing a bit too much at the printer’s honest, if funny, mistake, we thought what better way for our children over from Boston to experience Ireland with their cousins other than an Irish, or potentially Russian, circus. 

Raised on steady, but lean, circus diet of the Big Apple Circus every January, one failed Circe De Soleil (they fell asleep) and Barnum & Bailey’s specials on television, our children were excited for another big top experience.  But the bar for Irish circuses got set low when my eldest sister recounted a story about, as young girl, attending a circus on the fairground in our mother’s home village of Dowra.

“Ah, sure the ring master, a big fat fella, was dead drunk.  We couldn’t hear a word he was slurrin’ – wah-wah-wah!” she threw her arms and head back in carefree laughter, “an’ the poor ould white ponies dashin’ round the little ring an’ their bellies splotched with brown circles from where they had them lying in their own shite in some tiny pen out the back.”

“Is dere clowns in Irish cir…cusses,” our five-year-old daughter asks with tentative anxiety.  She’s a decidedly ambiguous fan of the Big Apple’s Granny the Clown.  Sometimes she loves him but is oft times scared as this renowned master of the clownish arts appears suddenly in the audience playing the role a confused-bemused-belligerent grandmother in a fire-engine-red dress, frequently mock-hitting people with her-his huge handbag.

“I’m … eh, probly,” I say searching for words that won’t have her worrying, “but you know how everyone in Ireland is fierce silly anyway, so the clowns here would just be even sillier, not makin’ fun a other people.”

The Mocsow circus’ pasty-white-painted-face-bulbous-red-nosed clown dressed in raggedy royal blue pants and a too-busy-stripey red shirt proves me badly wrong and right at the same time.  He mercilessly sprays children and adult faces with way too much water from an oversized flower stuck to his shirt, then exhorts them in a thick Eastern European accent to “step yours zilly crya…ings!”

But he is also impressive with his acrobatics, his repeatedly dunking himself in barrels of water, his habit of sneaking up behind the ring mistress mimicking her ring mistressy slow-dramatic movements with eerie perfection.  His boundless energy fills the substantially empty big top, as he single-handedly creates moments of the wondrous make-believe world that we unreasonably expect for £3 admittance, £2 for children from the circus.

The Serengeti quadruped safely back in its ten by fifteen-foot pen out back, excuses for its near rampage behind us, the ring mistress gets down to circus business:

“An’ … now ladeees an’ gentle…mens, buys … an’ gurls, I presents ta youse, all de way from Rhew…may…nia, de outstandinest best excellent trapeze act in Europe an’ de world, unmatched fer dearin’ an’ verbs an’ never de likes a seen before west a de Shannon!”

She gasps out her last words, slowly and regally drawing back her pudgy bare arm to call onto the sawdust the next act.

From behind the charcoal blanket emerges a slight, muscle-and-bone woman in a once-upon-a-long-time-ago white leotard and way too much makeup for ‘west a de Shannon.’  She walks on her toes like a ballerina, though the puffs of sawdust from each drag of her toes impedes her attempts at elegant movement.  Walking behind her is the short, muscular man in a tight white tank top who was part of saving my family from a giraffe trampling just a few moments before.  He also attempts, and fails, at strutting elegantly across the sawdust.

Together in the middle of the ring, they hold hands and take three slow-deep bows, two of which are unfortunately to empty rows of seats.

From the darkness of the big top drops a slender swing held by two ropes. 

The man extends his arm ushering the woman over to the swing.

Slowly, on the tips of her toes, she struts to the swing, sits on the slender bar, reaches out and grabs hold of the ropes.  She smiles to the audience, making a slight bow with just her head.

The swing starts to rise above the sawdust, initially in a smooth ascent, then with jerking movements that send my eyes roving.  There in the back, just to the side of the charcoal blanket pulling on a thick rope that runs through a pulley is the clown, the ring mistress and a thickset, middle-aged man, a cigar jammed between his teeth and dress shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. 

Each of them pulls individually and irregularly on the rope, creating the jerking movements of the swing.

The trapeze artist, a smile frozen on her too-red lips, waves one hand at her paltry audience below as she moves high above us.  Next to her, on a different thick rope that had dropped in unseen, her partner, legs and torso rigid, arm muscles flexing, pulls himself up to a swing fixed high in the big top.

For the next fifteen minutes they transfix their open-mouthed audience with their balance, dexterity and split-second timing.  Little clouds of chalk dust puff from their hands as he grabs her tumbling body mid-air, hands grasped together he swings them across the big top and sends her flying through the tent back to her swing which comes into her range just as she arrives.

We all gasp, clap and anxiously stuff so-bad-it’s-good food into our faces.

Their act completed, adulation granted, her swing lowers to the sawdust in jerking movements, while her partner, with brisk hand swaps on the rope, returns to terra firma.

On the sawdust, their bodies sheened with sweat, radiant smiles on their faces, they execute three deliberate bows.  Jogging off they pass the ring mistress as she rouses the microphone cord out of the sawdust with a violent sweep of her arm, raising tiny wood particles into the air.

She takes a few steps, stops, balances on one foot while she pulls up the sawdust encrusted hem of her black dress and with a grimace, adjusts a very tall, high heeled shoe.

“Now ladeees an’ gentle…mens, buys … an’ gurls” she huffs into the microphone, pauses, stands upright, brushes her hand down the velvet and continues as she confidently strides towards the middle of the ring:

“Youse is in fer de treat a treats, de greatest, most excellent, fascinatin’ an’ onbelievable show on de planet, youse’d have ta go ta Mars ta see bitter,” she stops for a breath, swings the unruly microphone cord out of the sawdust to give herself freer movement.

“In just a few minutes, dey’re finishin’ up a cuppa, youse’ll see de whirled famous packyderm, de grey mammoth a de east parformin’ tricks an’ movements jus’ fer yours entertainment … ladeees an’ gentlemens, buys … an’ gurls, I gives ta youse de famous ellyphants Topsy ‘n Turveeeee!”

She tries to jog off, but the high-high heels prevent rapid movement.  She stops and retreats before she’s trampled by an elephant who lumbers out into the ring followed by a second, saggy-baggy, sad-eyed pachyderm, who doesn’t even bother to lumber but instead plods along, its one visible eye roving over the audience.

Behind the elephants prances the cigar totting, thickset man, now in a rumpled top hat, his dress shirt barely buttoned but cinched closed with a bowtie and partially covered by an ill-fitting black tuxedo jacket with two long scraggly tails.  He’s using a pole with a large hook on the end as his walking stick.

He waves impatiently at the ring mistress who’s still trying to effect her escape, but is impeded by the circus ring’ small radius relative to the two elephants size and long footsteps.

The sight of these enormous animals, controlled only it would seem by the hooked stick,  ambulating along just twenty feet from my tiny human offspring releases a wave a panic down my body.  I suppress the urge to grab my children’s hands and leave.  But when I look at their smooth-skinned little faces, mouths open, eyes widened at the sight of these majestic creatures just three rows of seats and a two-foot-high red-painted-plywood ring enclosure away, I realize the problem is mine alone.

The elephants move gracefully around the ring, their enormously heavy limbs seeming to move with ease.  The lead elephant’s frying-pan-sized footpads disappear into the sawdust with surprising speed and regularity.  But the following elephant halts occasionally to deepen its survey of the audience; the circus lights reflecting white of its one visible eye buried in the folds of grey skin. 

The saggy bulk of the elephants, frightening thick trunks, puny-scraggly tails; the handler’s square-jawed mouth flapping open and closed like some cartoon-goon; his rumpled top hat, cigar smoke billowing out above his triple chins; his dress coat wrapped girth; the frazzled black tails dangling behind him; it all adds to the sense that what I’m witnessing is not reality.

But real this is!

The handler jams the cigar between his teeth, barks out an unintelligible monosyllable and gaffs the recalcitrant elephant with his dastardly hooked stick.

The elephant’s massive body doesn’t flinch, but his reflected-white eye flinches and he immediately returns to motion.

As the elephants repeatedly circuit the ring, closely followed by the handler with his stick held threateningly, the clown and the male trapeze artist appear from behind the charcoal blanket carrying a sparkly-red-metal circular platform.  The trapeze artist, now in a black sweatshirt with PARIS in thick pink letters on the front, scowls distractedly while the clown’s clownishly exaggerated steps, further accentuated by his long-wobbly red shoes, raise and lower the heavy platform. 

Passing by the elephant handler, the clown impishly reaches out and slaps the handler’s top hat into the sawdust.  The reach he made to hit the hat being too far, the clown drops his side of the metal platform onto the end of his long shoe.  The trapeze artist, dragged sidewards and down, swears in Rhewmaynian.  But the clown has already moved into pogoing around the ring on one leg, holding his wobbly crushed shoe in both hands, his overly rouged lips turned down as he mock-bawls in mock-pain.

The elephant handler grabs his sawdust encrusted top hat off the ground but doesn’t have time to clean it off as the recalcitrant elephant has taken the opportunity to almost turn itself fully around.  The handler not-so-mock whacks the clown across the head as he rushes over to the get the elephant back on track.

The trapeze artist, Rhewmaynian swears still bubbling from his lips, sighs visibly and rolls the metal platform to the middle of the ring and mock-jogs off with the mock-bawling clown hopping along behind him on one leg.

The elephant handler has barely turned the recalcitrant elephant back to follow the other, when he executes his first trick: Barking harsh monosyllables and prodding both huge animals he turns them fully around to walk in the opposite direction. 

Now it’s the turn of the former lead elephant to develop curiosity about the audience.  As the majestic animal turns its broad grey head to survey the humans staring back at it, its head twists so far that the bright circus lights catch its iris, illuminating their beautiful amber hue.

More prodding, lumbering, clowning, scowling ensues; all in a sawdusty haze until there’s a second circular red-metal platform in the ring, placed ten feet from the first one.  The elephant handler stomps around the ring, manipulating his charges with his dastardly little stick and barked commands that we barely hear but know have been issued by the changing colour of the cigar smoke propelled from his mouth.

“Ladeees … an’ gentlemens …,” the ring mistress voice boom out of the speakers, though she herself is unseen, presumably somewhere in the back of the mayhem that is now the circus ring, “buys an’ gurls, get ready for de greatest … most magnificent an’ spellbindin’ packy…durm act on de planet, de great Gustavo an’ he’s two Asian gurl ellyphants TOPSY … AN’ TURVY!”

The handler barely stops to turns to the audience, gives a small rapid bow, careful to remove and replace his sawdusty top hat and with anxiety provoking speed returns to prodding the elephants.

Is all that protects my family from two rampaging elephants the handler’s verbal threats?  The dastardly stick is surely just a distraction.  Of course, there is that two-foot-tall painted plywood ring enclosure which should slow down an enraged Topsy and Turvy for about five seconds.

Bathing myself in anxiety, I return my attention to the ring.

The handler, standing in the middle of the ring, halfway between the two circular metal platform, stops Topsy and Turvy, one on either side of the ring, both facing him.  He touches the dastardly stick on the top of the platform to his right.

Topsy or Turvy, it’s impossible to know which, steps cautiously forward.  The handler’s horizontal mouth keeps flapping open and closed as he taps the stick off the flat metal platform. 

“UUUPPP!” the handler positively screams, his mouth a cartoon black circle. 

My shoulders twitch at the suddenness of his rage.

The elephant tentatively approaches the platform, stutter stepping tiny advances until it finally, with great caution, places one of its frying-pan sized footpads on the flat metal.

The handler spins around to the other elephant whose eyes, now completely black, stare back; her head moving from side-to-side, like a boxer approaching her opponent; her trunk swinging pendulum-like exactly opposite to her large-flat-grey forehead.

My whole torso tightens.

The front row of twelve-year-olds is out of their seats, standing transfixed, hands whitening against the red two-foot-tall wooden circus ring enclosure.

The dastardly stick taps the metal platform three times; the handler takes a few steps backwards, turning to bark something unheard at the other elephant who stays with her two pads still on that platform.

The swinging trunk approaches the platform, one huge pad after another sinking into the sawdust.  More barked instructions take the elephant slightly past the platform and turn her until she’s facing the audience head on, her rear end, puny tale swinging over and back, aimed at the platform.

Now the dastardly stick swings into action as the handler hooks and prods the elephant backwards, the huge head bobbing and weaving to avoid the hook, its trunk flailing wildly; its pads dragging through the sawdust; the handler barking louder and louder with each step backwards he forces the elephant.

When he has the elephant’s droopy rear end hanging over the metal platform, he steps in fast toward his enormous charge, slashing the stick in front of her eyes, waving his free hand to make himself look, larger.

The elephant, its back pads touching the platform as it tries to back up some more realizes that it has nowhere left to go but up: And up it goes. 

Her back legs buckle at the knees, her rear end flops down onto the platform as her massive torso rises, thick-round front legs clawing at the air.

It can’t be up for more than a few seconds but it’s enough to get my kids, eyes widened, mouths open, out of their seats next to me.

“LOOOOK AT … DAT LADEEES an’ gentlemens!” the ring mistress’ voice rings out of the speakers hanging above us.  “Poor ould Topsy got a bit tipsy taday an’ had ta take a seat.”

The handler spins around fast, gravity almost getting the better of his bulk, but a fast right foot saves him; he bows rapidly, then turns back to Topsy and Turvy.  He doesn’t need to wave them out of their poses as they’ve already broken them and stand swaying their huge torsos and trunks.

He screams a few monosyllables, aims the stick and his free arm at the charcoal blanket, toward which both elephants start to trot.

“LADEEES an’ … gentlemens, buys … an’ gurls,” the ring mistress reappears, her step a little lighter, her face forced into a broad smile, “tanks ta youse all fer comin’, we’d ‘preciate youse tellin’ yer friends an’ family about de greatest show on urth!  We’re here again tanite for ours last show in dis town.”

Without a word, my daughter jumps in my arms, hugging my neck.

“That was the bestest circus ever daddy, can we come back tonight, please please!”

A Short Trip

 I’m dodging foot-deep potholes on a half-mile-long looping driveway that takes me past a clutch of abandoned red-bricked buildings.  A man in jeans and a grey Patriots’ sweatshirt limps along the sidewalk holding onto a blue nylon rope that barely restrains a German Shepherd the size a small pony.

“YOUR DESTINATION IS ON THE RIGHT, YOUR DEST…,” Madame Google anxiously insists that I stop moving.

I roll along, staring at a long, four storied, red-bricked building with regularly spaced, dusty-blank windows.  It’s clearly newer than the other buildings along the driveway: They all have that washed-out redbrick-slate public building look that says they were opened with great pomp and aspirations in the early 1900s and then left to rot.  Now the rot has clearly won out over hope and the four storied building is one of the few in the sprawling complex that isn’t condemned with large white “X”s painted on a red background.

“YOU’VE ARRIVED!” the Madame announces as I slowly bring the car to a halt.

I’ve come to this old state mental hospital on a mission of nicotine-mercy for an friend who’s drying out in a detox somewhere in this confusing complex.

Seeing a VISITOR PARKING sign, I pull in and park before the Madame can reboot to start giving me new, precisely annoying directions.  Across the lot there’s a thickset-baldie-goateed security guard pacing around the entry, clouds of vape smoke swirling around his shiny fat head.  

I walk-run toward the clouds of smoke, images flashing through my mind of being chased down by a merciless German Shepherd, dragging his thirty-foot-long blue leash.  Making it to the entry without suffering a No Country For Old Men canine mauling but breathing heavily and having almost lost my mercy-cargo of four packs of Winston, the security guard has vanished and the doors won’t open. 

Presuming a simple door malfunction, I push my fingers between the sliding doors where the weather stripping has perished and pry them far enough apart for me to enter.  Careful of rampaging German Shepherds, I put extra effort into pushing the doors closed.

Inside I walk through a lobby devoid of any sign of humans and into a long, dimly lit, puke-green corridor.  At the other end of the corridor, the long red glint of the exit sign on the shiny tiled floor is broken up by the security guard’s bulky frame as he ambles along.  From one side of his belt a large set of kegs dangles from the other flashes the tiny green LED of a walkie-talkie.

With no else around, I yell:

“HELLO! … Eh, do you know wh….”

He spins around so fast I know this is not going to end well.

“HOW did you get here?” he snaps, his hands instinctively reaching to the keys and walkie as he covers the ground between us surprisingly quickly for a big man. 

Even in the dimness and him moving fast, I can make out the intensity of his scowl.

“This building’s CLOSED, what are you doin’ ….”

“Eh, the detox, I’m lookin’ for ….”

Instinctively, I engage my well-honed skills in becoming an instant asshole.

“This BUILDIN’S closed.”

“The doors aren’t locked,” I say deliberately quietly, “an’ there’s no sign, how would a MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC know it’s CLOSED?”

“Well it i…, what the doors aren’t locked?”

“Yeah, how’d ya think I got here?  Down a chimney?”

With lots of sighs and muttered grumbles, he accompanies me back to the not-quite-sliding doors and deposits me, with a goatee-curling scowl, on the other side, mumbling vague directions that the “main entry is down t’other end.”

My asshole-ometer cranked well above fifty percent, I stomp along the long redbrick, blank-windowed building until I can glare at a set of crumbling concrete steps that probably lead to another entry.  I stomp on up the steps and into an overly bright, shiny-tiled floor lobby. 

Behind the front desk sits a, tanned, bald, uniformed policeman, his golden-yellow sergeant chevrons shining in the brightness.

Trying to recover my nicotine-mercy-mindset, stuffing my assholishness back in its case, I smile as I approach the desk.

“Eh, I’m lookin’ for the detox,” I say, holding up four packs of Winston.

“Aint we’s all!” the sergeant says in a heavy Hispanic accent. 

He adds a chuckle and pops up out of his chair.  He’s so short standing, that I’m shocked how by short his legs must be.

“Less me shows yous how,” he walks spryly around the desk, the shortness of his legs giving a staccato sense to his movements.  “Inside a thees ‘ospital is … vury confusin’,” he shakes his head a bunch, “but outsides … all good an’ easy.”

With short sharp steps he heads back to the door I just entered.  Reluctant to get dispatched to yet another entry in this confusing complex, I stand still.

“Cum, cum,” the sergeant waves me on impatiently, his short steps quickening.

A stair door bangs open into the lobby.  My security guard friend bustles through and sigh-groaning stomps over to slam his walkie on the sergeant’s desk.  He issues me an obligatory scowl, then immediately averts his eyes.

Rapidly considering my options, I scurry across the lobby to catch up with the sergeant. 

“Thee archeetecks makes ‘ospitals vury confusin’, but I doan mind, gives me a more chances to halp – right? Right? Halp ones anudder, so Jesus he say in thee Bible, only halps ones anudder.”

We walk past a navy blue, electric Ford Mustang and a black Explorer both with State Hospital Police crests on their door.  The grounds are pleasantly, if parsimoniously, landscaped. 

“I’m just bringin’ a friend a few cigarettes,” I explain my mission of nicotine mercy.

“No you izn’t, cuz you justa drop one box,” he stops and points back to where one of the four packs of Winston has fallen from my pocket.

“Cigar…ettes is spenive, don’t leave a lyin’ ‘round, some a these,” he waves his hand in a circle, “will take.”

  As we round the corner, I see a busy smoking shed built on a concrete pad in the middle of a grassy area.  The shed’s plexiglass walls start about eighteen inches above the concrete and stop just above the smoker’s heads, a foot below a flat rusty-corrugated metal roof.  Through the fogged plexiglass panels, grey shapes move around in Brownian Motion; the jerky movements of their sweatpanted-legs and sneakers visible at the bottom; from the top gap waft clouds of blue-grey cigarette smoke.

“Now you a see that door,” the sergeant aims his short arm at yet another entry, which it seems to me, with my admittedly judgmental yet geometrically inclined brain, is just down the corridor from the front lobby.

“You a go in there, thee door it doan worken good, but you a pulls hard,” he makes a little frown and mimics yanking on a door open, “an’ at t’ends a thee corridors, … on thee right, ring a doorbell an’ they take yours cigarettes … give yours friend.”

“Thanks, thanks!” I offer genuinely appreciative, and start heading toward the door only to be stopped in my tracks by the huge German Shepherd bounding after the most frightened tennis ball on the planet.  His owner, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, the blue rope coiled in his hand, focuses on the dog’s legs, as, in tight pairs, they almost touch, then fully extend in energetic bounds.

“Hey surs!” the sergeant waves a short arm in the dog owner’s direction, “remembers, no a smokin’ ‘cept in thee puff-puffs house.”

He moves his arm to aim at the smoking shack.

I walk on, trying to pay no heed to the German Shepherd at it races across the grass chasing the grey-green tennis ball.

At the door there’s an unambiguous large-bold-red-lettered sign that prohibits my using this particular entry:  EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE ONLY – ALL OTHERS USE MAIN ENTRY.

 I stop to consider my options: 1) Enter my friend’s world through this portal in flagrant violation of the written rules, 2) Go back to Main Entry, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not feel good about yourself, 3) Leave and bitterly blame the system, the man, the men – baldie and shortie – when tomorrow morning at 6:00AM my friend makes one of his increasingly desperate calls for nicotine.

Fuck this, my inner asshole takes over.

I hit the worn smooth stainless-steel “PUSH HERE TO OPEN” door paddle.

Nothing happens.

I grab the handle hard and yank the door open.

Walking toward me down the corridor is baldie: He grits his teeth, shakes his head, looks away. 

He passes me like I don’t exist, not even emitting a sigh.

I stride down the corridor, the four packs of Winston jammed into my left hand, my right hand ready for a doorbell to ring.

The sign for the TREATMENT CENTER is unmistakable: Finding the doorbell not so easy.  Finally, I see the kind of white-plastic-doorbell one would find at a typical house.  Presuming this what I need, I press on it for a respectfully, short few seconds: If the terse tone my friend calls in is any indication, then this probably a stress pressure cooker.  The staff are likely busy helping people and I don’t want it to appear like I think my time is more important.

I wait ….

I stare down the long and lonely EMPLOYEE ENTRY corridor.  In the opposite direction the corridor leads to a bank of three elevators, all but one of which have a yellow WARNING – WET FLOOR sandwich board signs leaning against the elevator doors.  Another longer corridor heads, per my reckoning, back in the direction of the Main Entry lobby.

I press the doorbell for a longer, bordering on obnoxious, time period.

And wait ….

The EMPLOYEE ONLY door gets yanked open and a heavy middle-aged woman, fully filling sky-blue scrubs, a bulging, pink Fjall Raven backpack slung over one shoulder, rushes towards me down the corridor.

Timing myself for maximum opportunity to get her attention, just as she’s outside the range of normal speaking, I say loudly:

“EH, SORRY, is this the deto….”

“I can’t help, I can’t help,” she shakes her head, won’t even look at me and keeps moving fast toward the one working elevator.

I lean into the doorbell for fully two minutes … all sense of decorum gone.

And I wait ….

Baldie returns, jingling keys, tuning the walkie, not even flicking an eye at me.

A man in his seventies, linked by what appears to be his daughter, emerges slowly from the Main Entry corridor, his orthopedic sneakers scuffing the shiny-tiled floor.  They shuffle over to the elevator talking in loud, terse whispers.

I wait …, and as often happens, I’m just about to leave when the door suddenly whips open.  A tall thin, African American man, balding, bloodshot tired-eyes stares out at me for a few seconds before he says.

“Yeah, … what?”

“Oh, I brought these for ____ ______, he’s been in here a few days an’ he as….”

“Wait,” he says those fateful words and closes the door too fast for me to stop him.

Again, I wait ….

A few more clinical staff in scrubs hurry down the corridor slung with backpacks, eyes carefully curated to avoid contact.

Yet again, when I’m on the verge of giving up, the door shoots open and the bloodshot, tired eyes are back.

“Yeah, … I’ll take ‘em.”

He holds his hand out.  I put the by now very warm packs of Winston onto his palm.

“Eh, … an’ is, eh … how do I know he’ll get them?” I ask, shocked at the sudden ending of my heretofore complex delivery.

“Cuz I’ll give ‘em to him.”

“Good, … good, …good,” I answer staring him in the eye.

“He’s doin’ fine,” he nods, closing the door.

“Awright, awright” I say, but the door is already closed.

Staring down the long corridor that probably leads back to the Main Entry, I weigh the chances of getting lost in this confusing complex.  My new, short-limbed friend would surely have never left his desk if the path here was as simple as my simple mind imagines. 

I start down the Employee Only corridor, then immediately get a vision of the rampaging German Shepherd.

I stop.

Choices.

Is life the sum of our choices?

Post Colonial Driving Lesson

I’m walking around the back of the unmarked Gard’s car, eyes down, cheeks burning red with embarrassment.  I focus on Da’s blue socks inside his black leather sandals as we pass one another at the boot.

Across from us, a pig lorry, muck splattered, whiteish-pink flesh bulging out between wooden slats, rumbles along slowly past the cut-stone wall of the mental hospital, shaking the blue Cortina. 

We open the front doors and sit into the squad car.

The car doors slam.

I sigh heavy-silently as I try to relax in the driver’s seat.

“Ah, sure you’d a never ben able for the streets in the town.  The traffic there is too much for a first timer,” Da steals the wisdom of my stoney refusal to reverse the squad off the bridge in front of our house and just magically start driving through town on my first ever driving lesson.

 He fast twist-nods his head, clenches his bushy eyebrows together and scowls at me.

“Take her handy now, even if it ‘tis t’offical car, we still hafta give her back in wan piece,” he aims a finger at my face.

He forces out a dry false laugh.

“An’ sure Westport’ll be there no matter how fast nor slow we go … it t’always is.”

I turn the key in the ignition to a harsh grating metal sound.

“Sure the … bleddy … engine is awready on!” Da slow-snaps.  “Did ya hear me turn it off? Huh? Huh?  I don’t know what sort owa driver ‘re you going ta be atallatallatall!”

Burning with shame anger; eyes on the tiny cars speeding along in the side mirror, nearly jamming the clutch through the car floor – as previously instructed – I grab the gearstick and slam it through all four speeds then back to first.

“Now inda…caa….”

The Cortina lurches into the gap I’d spotted in the row of tiny cars whipping along within in the mirror.

“Awright, awright, Janey-mackers, that was vury fast, take her steady now, steady, steady,” Da says, the angry edge from his voice supplanted by his ever-present anxiety. 

He spins around to look behind us, then settles back into his seat.

“An’ did ya ever hear tell a them things called in…daa…kators?” he adds bitterly.  

Eyes hard on the car – DIZ 479 – crawling along in front of me, I can sense Da lean-lurching forward in his seat, his legs flickering desperately for nonexistent pedals.

“We’re in traffic now, take-her-steady-take-her-steady, give that fella in front a ya some room … ora would ya looook … at who it is?” he sneers, “that bleddy fecker, sure he was tol’ be t’judge on Wednesday not ta drive ‘til he came inta the barrack with a doctor’s letter.  Watch out now, watch out, if he spots ‘tis t’unmarked behind him he’ll think we’re pursuin’ him – he’s got that big a notion of himself.  He might notice it ‘tis you behind t’wheel an’ make a fuss above in t’barrack.  Go azy now.”

We follow this bleddy fecker for a sweaty-twisty-turny-forever, me gripping the steering wheel like it ‘twas the life-side handle of death’s door. 

Finally, without indicating – “look at him, I bleddy well should …” I sense Da gritting his teeth, twist-nodding his head – the bleddy fecker turns up a boreen that I never noticed before in my twenty-one years of been driven over and back to Old Head.

With your man gone and with him the fear of getting caught driving the Gard’s car, I let my shoulders fall down from my ears, relax my death grip on the steering wheel.

The road is straight, no one in front. 

I push on the accelerator, feeling the low vibrations of the engine’s thrum through the sole of my right foot.

“Ah, sure this is azy enough,” I say, sighing, focusing on the road ahead.

“Go handy now, just cause ya have t’open road in front a ya, doesn’t mean ya have ta ate it up.  Take her handy now, slow an’ steady, that’s how you get through life, sloooow an’ steaaddyy!”

I drive on. 

It’s easy: Just keep your foot steady on the accelerator and look: The car goes where you’re looking all by itself.

“Go azy, go azy will ya!” Da snaps angrily.  “Yer the typical new driver, ya know how many cars with ‘L’ stickers I’ve pulled outta ditches in my time?”

I ease my foot off the accelerator, we slow down.

“Sure, if ya jus’ pay attention,” I counter.  “How would end up in the ditch?”

“Ohhhhooo, let me tell ya, that’s t’vury attitude a t’fella that ends up within in t’ditch!”

I give him a bitter twist-nod and drive on.

We’re zipping along past the Halfway House, me thinking of when it was an old, thatched pub before they modernized and went broke, when Da’s bitter voice bursts in:

“Oh, I see now we Stirling Moss behind t’wheel!”

“Wha… who do ya mean?”

“Will ya slow down will ya!” he nearly yells.  “Some farmer’ll come racin’ out owa field with a load a hay an’ t’ whole shaggin’ lot of us’ll be kilt!”

He slaps his hand off the dusty dashboard.

I slow down a bit, then a bit more as the sighs keep coming from the passenger seat.  Driving on, I adjust the heaviness of my foot on the accelerator in accordance with the number and strength of sighs.

Coming up over the top of Sheean, I get an odd sense of sweaty victory: There below me, as a result of just my tapping every now and again on the accelerator, is Westport nestled in below Croagh Patrick’s looming grey-black-triangular profile.

I breath out and relax my grip on the steering wheel.

Driving’s not as difficult as Da made it out, warning me about knocking down pedestrians and crashing into cars.  You just look and the car goes there.

“Now you’re drivin’ into a town,” Da’s anxious voice breaks in.  “Watch out, there’s no end a fools drivin’ around the towns a Ireland.  If that’s t’oniest thing ya learn from yer first drivin’ lesson, then you’re doin’ awright.”

Driving down Sheaan, a bit taken back by the power of gravity, further bolstered with passenger-sighs, I keep tapping the brakes.  The Starlight ballroom crawls past on the right; Knocknaranny House on the left; then on the right, the oddly named Father Angelus Park. 

The road twists suddenly, narrows way too much and there’s too many cars badly parked on either side of the street – their arses sticking out into the road.  Two young fellas in short pants burst out the door of the yellow sweet shop, dinging the Calor Gas sign dangling from the gas cylinder, they fire brown and white Choc Ice wrappers onto the ground.  An ould fella on a black bike wobbles along taking up so much room that when I go to pass, I cross the white line.

“What are ya doin’?” Da yelps.

“I’m … I’m or I wuz….”

I take my foot off the accelerator. 

The car shudders, lurches.

“Clutch!”

I jam in the clutch and the engine goes back to normal.

“Now go handy!  Will ya be able fer Westport atallatall?” I sense him twist-nodding hard.  “Go handy now, don’t forget which pedal is which or ya’ll run over some eejit staggerin’ outta the Castlecourt.”

We crawl down Castlebar Road.

From a side street darts a hefty woman on a Honda 50, a bulging black donkey-jacket wrapped around her torso by a piece of blue-nylon rope, her grey-blonde hair flailing out from under a red helmet.

“Stay back from that German wan, she’s as daft as March hare!” Da snaps.  “An’ a divil fer the courts she is too.  I seen her below in Achill givin’ judge Brennan a lecture on the law, an’ sure no wan could unnerstan a bleddy word she said, let alone the judge.”

I take my foot off the accelerator.

The car shudders, lurches.

“CLUTCH!”

I sink the clutch.

Smoothness.

Jaysys, I might get good at this!

I relax my shoulders as I drive the car up over the humpy bridge over the Westport river. 

The Westport crowd are bit too proud of their town, always putting out flowers and bunting to make it look special.  I mean it does look nice and orderly but that’s only cause the Brits built it specifically to look nice.  In Castlebar, the Brits hid the river in people’s back yards to get it out of the way, but in Westport they made the river all cutesy and part of the town.  When we got rid of the Brits down here in 1921, the Irish government probly shoulda knocked Westport down and then rebuilt it all fucked-up like other Irish towns.

I oh-so smoothly drive up Bridge Street.  As always, there’s rakes a tourists in Westport.  The French sneering out over their cups of coffee; Germans looking-at-but-not-buying the rain gear and gaudy plastic beach toys hanging outside of shops; Americans, hands on flabby hips, about to devour some restaurant.

All the way up Bridge Street I’m king behind the wheel, seven or eight miles an hours and not one shudder-lurch, though me left leg is getting fierce tired from pumping the clutch.

I nearly hit an Irish mammy dragging a screaming child behind her as they cross towards the big clock at the top of the street.  Now, the clock is nice, I mean Castlebar should get a clock like that.  We have a clock on Protestant Church, but I don’t know if it even works; there’s hardly any protestants left around to wind it up.  Anyways, we can’t be seen copying Westport and sure we all have watches.

I drive down Shop Street: That’s a stoopid name, couldn’t they think of anything better.  But I suppose our Main Street is kinda-sorta stoopid, even Chapel Street.  For sure, people should do more thinking before making stoopid street names.

Brimming with driverly-confidence, I pull up to the Octogen – now, this is taking the biscuit altogether.  Every other town in Ireland has a raggedy ould Market Square, but the Westport crowd had to go and double that, with four extra sides making an octogen. 

I mean it is much nicer and everything, but still – cop on!

There’s a fierce traffic jam cause the Council, who we can consistently rely upon to make good-fucked-up Irish stuff, turned the Octogen into a messed up round-about. 

There’s lost-looking tourists gawking out car windows for a pub and a strong drink after the twisty-turny roads out west; a Gateuax van, the driver’s arm dangling out the window, a cigarette jammed between his fingers; cranky Coveys scowling out the windscreens as they try to get home; a farmer pulling a too-wide-and-heavy-load a hay behind a battered-and-splattered, red Massey-Ferguson.

“Look at that fella now, no roll bar,” Da grits his teeth.  “An’ his wife’ll be above in the ‘ospital complainin’ t’doctors can’t put him back tagether when goes topplin’ down the side owa bog road! 

I wait and wait, not sure how to let the other drivers know I need to get the fuck through before my left leg gives out with all the clutching.  But there’s no end a cars and lorries.  Even a bunch of bony-tanned foreigners in full rain gear on bicycles with bulging saddlebags won’t let me in.

“Go on, go on, them bleddy tourist’ll never let ya in, just drive inta them!”

“Them foreigners on the bikes!”

“Not atall, not them, the cars, just nose her out there an’ sooner or later some fool’ll let ya in.”

Being tired-legged, I not so good at nosing and clutching, but eventually a white Hiace van stops for me.

“Oho, the boyos’d stop for an unmarked awright!  They’re well useta seeing this car pull up at the campsite!” Da snort-laughs.  “Gwan around this circle an’ go straight for the hill, don’t go right.”

“Not ta Old Head?”
“No, no, go straight I said!”

I drive up the fierce steep hill, keeping my foot heavy on accelerator.  

It feels good to have control of all this power: The rapid vibration of the engine transmitting into the sole of my foot.

“Pull over now,” Da says like as if pulling over is just a regular thing. 

“I…I can’t … I mean, it’s fierce steep, the car’s achually goin’ very fast, how would I do ….”

“Just turn the bleddy steerin’ wheel inta them open spots an’ put your foot on the brake.”

Disbelieving, I direct the car under my control into a place on the side of the street where no one’s parked cause it’s all double yellow lines.  The engine slows fast as I ease foot my off the accelerator.

The car shudders and lurches heavily.

The vibrations coming through the sole of my foot stop. 

The low two-storey houses beside us confusingly move up the hill.

“BRAKE!” Da yells and handbrake croaks.

“Good God almighty did ya think cause ye’re such a great driver that yer exempt from gravity?” he snaps.  “The minute … the car stops, pull the handbrake!”

He slaps his hands together.

“It doesn’t matter where ya are, up a hill, down a hill, on the flat – what if a train ran into the back a ya?”

He wags a finger in my face.

“You’re responsible for where your car ends up.  Handbrake on, ev…ury time!  I don’t care what else ya learn today, but that’s the most important thing about driving – the handbrake, ev…ury … time.”

Sweat gushes out every pore in my skin.  But at least the houses stopped moving.

“Now, come on, come on, we’ll do a hill start.”

“Well, I haven’t done a start start yet, what’s a hill start?”

“Come on, come on, it’s exactly what it says, I’d a thought a lad fresh outta UCG could understand plain English,” he snorts out a fake laugh.  “It’s a matter of balancin’ the clutch against t’accelerator.”

He holds up both hands and slowly moves one forward, the other back.

“‘Tis like a dance nearly, let the clutch out,” he moves his left hand back, “an’ tap the accelerator, just the tiniest bit.”

The right hand just kinda-sorta moves without moving.

“Now come on, come on, what if a cattle lorry comes up t’hill  and sh… stuff splatterin’ outta it an’ us stoppin’ it from gettin’ outta here?”

Blindly, like I seen cops do on the telly when they jump into the squad to chase the bad guys, I grab the key in the ignition and turn it.  The engines coughs to life, the car jumps forwards, then slams back, the engine dead.

“Will ya put in the clutch, in … the name a God will ya!” Da snaps angrily.  “Sure, that’s the first thing ya need to do.  Clutch, key, petrel … well that’s t’accelerator.  Come on.”

Pushing down the clutch with one foot, the other just barely on the accelerator I turn the key.  The engine springs to life and the now familiar vibrations return.

“Now let out the clutch sloo….oowly.”

I hear a click and squeak-croak from the handbrake – Jaysys, what’s going on with that?

Keeping every ounce of mental energy focused on the soles of my feet, I ‘dance’ with the clutch and the accelerator.  As the car moves forward a foot, I hear the handbrake croak.  In we pull to the open space.  Letting the clutch all the way out, I push the accelerator harder.

“No-no-no!” Da snaps.  “Stay here.  Hit the brake, clutch!”

I hear him pull the handbrake.

The car stops moving, the engine thrumming through my foot.

“Now, you do it all, includin’ t’handbrake.  ‘Tis just like what ye’re doin’ with yer feet, only now ya add in t’handbrake, jus’ let it off slo…owly. ”

“Nah, we can … I’ll learn this some other day.”
“Naaah!” he shakes his head a rake.  “Oho, no, ya won’t be burnin’ out my clutch!” 

Dangerous Curves – Part II

I’m carrying Rory in his cage around the Collooney graveyard.  He’s squawking, green and yellow wings flapping like crazy.  Davy’s providing cover, both hands making a pistol, there’s no trees for sticks in the graveyard, in case we get ambushed by the Germans.  We almost finish one patrol, Davy racing from one mossy-grey Celtic cross to another, before Da’s roaring and waving at us from below in the car park to come back or we’ll get left behind.  He always says crazy things that you know he’d never do but somehow, they still make you scared.

The minute we’re all door slammed into the car, Da’s head is shaking:

“Sure, that bird’s a bleddy ould age pensioner … ohhhhh,” his head does an awful heap of shaking over and back.  “I knew that fella with the pet shop in the back of his filling station was a pure crook.  Sure, he saw poor ould Auntie comin’ a mile off!”

After it turned out the Rory wouldn’t talk, not even with a real-pretend gun pointed at his head, Da bought two budgies from the pet shop on Capel Street in Dublin when he was up for some court case. 

Dublin’s kinda like the North, the roads are still fierce bad, but you can get nearly everything good there, plus they have television from England which is way better than RTE.  English telly starts in the morning when you’re eating your cornflakes and at night they have all new episodes of the American detective programmes.  RTE doesn’t start until four o’clock with Sesame Street and stupid wee wans’ cartoons that nothing bad happens in; then it’s all News, the Angelus and fellas selling cattle.  We do get Rockford, so I suppose RTE is not completely rotten.  

The onliest problem with English telly is that everyone has English accents, of course, and they’re always blaming us for the Troubles up the North, when it’s Paisley and the British Army that’re causing all the killing.  But the really good thing about the BBC is that there’s no ads to be interrupting Rockford right at the minute when he’s about the grab the bad fellas. 

It was with the Dublin budgies, who we never tried to teach to talk, nor even gave them names, and definitely never pointed a gun at, that Da started the breeding.

He just puts two budgies in the same cage; in the beginning they just seem to hop over and back from perch to perch; flapping their wings if you make a sudden movement.  Nothing ever seems to happen between them.  Then one day the hen budgie pushes herself through the tiny hole in what Da calls the “nesting box” and lays four or five eggs.  Da had to send off to England for the nesting boxes.  Even the Dublin pet shops, there’s only two of them, don’t have weird things like nesting boxes.  The pet shop man whose one of them the-tide’s-gone-way-out-bald fellas, but with heaps of hair coming down his nose and out his ears, wouldn’t budge on ordering nesting boxes all the way from England.

“Ahhh no, no, no, we doant have an account wid dem crouwd,” he said, shaking his head, but his eyes never stop moving.  “No, de boss’d never allow dat, we’d hafta sent over a cheque, an’ den d’English fella’d hafta make sure de cheque wuz gud an’ ….”

“Awright so,” Da snaps, turning and walking out, waving me and Davey behind him, and the pet shop fella still rattling on, his eyes darting around.

Pet shops are weird-interesting places; full of the sounds of strange-colourful-wild-eyed birds whistle-squawking, hamster wheels squeaking and the musty smells of something rotting.  In a pet shop, with Da above at the counter grilling the pet shop man about how to breed birds, you could be fierce bored-staring into what looks like an empty cage and suddenly some little lumpy little thing scurries along half covered by sawdust, scaring the living shite outta ya. 

First of all, Da built his own nesting box outta plywood, but something was wrong with it cause the budgies would kill their babies inside it, within in the darkness.  After that, he sent off to England for a real nesting box.  He had to get a Postal Order from the Post Office cause he doesn’t go near banks.  With the English nesting boxes you can slide up the end wooden wall and behind it is a piece of glass that lets you see how many eggs the budgie laid. 

After the eggs hatch, Da’s all nervous-happy.  Snapping at us not to scare the budgies, he lets us stand on a chair to stare into the nesting box through the piece of glass.  All you can see are disgusting bald-pink-flabby-skinned chicks opening their tiny beaks to make the blackest hole ever seen.  After a while they stop being so disgusting, grow feathers, come out of the nesting boxes, and start hopping from perch to perch like their parents.

What’s even more disgusting than the chicks’ bald-pinkness is that the mammy budgie feeds them by vomiting up her own food into their mouths.  When I seen that, my mouth filled with twisty-turny-road puke water.

It turned out breeding budgies is easier than making them talk, cause in just one year Da had rakes of chicks bopping from perch to perch inside the cages.  That’s when he sold some of the chicks, so he could go up to Molloy’s and buy plywood, wire, nails, glue, everything to build all the big-long cages within in the garage.  Then he bought more budgies up in Dublin for breeding.  Soon we had so many budgie chicks that other people’s ma’s and da’s started coming from all around to buy them.  Da had to ask the shoe shops up town for shoe boxes for when people came to buy but didn’t bring a cage.

Having all these birds around, Da decided to build and aviary which is kinda like either a huge cage that people can stand up in or a special shed that birds live in with walls made outta wire fencing.  Ours is stuck between the wall of our house and the wall that keeps us outta the Lees’ yard, so we only need two wire fencing walls.

After he had so many budgies and selling so many of their chicks, Da started getting canaries and breeding them.  It’s funny that you breed budgies for their colours and canaries for their singing and you can never tell ahead of time which ones will come out which way.

The budgies and canaries fly around in the aviary in sorta-half-circles, fluttering down onto the branches Da tied up as perches.  No one thought of this, but cats do come and sit in our backyard staring at the colourful birds trapped in the aviary just a few feet away from them; probly imagining they could ate them for dinner.  Every now and again a cat will make a dart at the wire fence wall, climbing up it with their razor-sharp claws.  The budgies and canaries go berserk with the cat hanging off the wire-wall.  The screeching and squawking is so bad you’d think they were already getting ripped apart by the cat’s teeth.  One time a mustardy ould canary got so scared it dropped dead.

That made Da fierce mad.

If we ever see cats, we’re told to scare them away, which is fine with me.  Cats is odd, how they do stare at you, like they know exactly how you’re thinking. 

After the ould canary died, Da went up to Molloy’s hardware and they had to send off to England for twine netting that took weeks to come.  Da tied the netting to the roof of the aviary and weighed it down to the ground with stones.  That way it’s hanging a few inches away from the aviary’s wire-cage-wall so if cats run up to it, they get all tangled in the netting and can’t hang off the cage-wall frightening ould canaries to death.

That worked to keep the cats far enough back to not frighten the birds, but then one day a hawk flew by and all the bright colours of the canaries and budgies bopping from perch to perch got his attention. Probly got him thinking: ‘Jaysys, there’s me dinner!’  

The hawk stood on top of the post at the end of Lee’s backyard that holds up their clothes’ line.  He stayed staring at the aviary for a long time.  I thought the hawk might be so strong he could crash with his sharp beak through the cage-wall. 

“Not atallatallatall, he’s just blinded be all the bright colours an’ the notion of an easy meal,” Da said, “he probly can’t see the cage-walls or nettin’ from down t’end a Lees’ garden.  He’ll realize he’s mistake an’ clear off.”

But he didn’t clear off.

He kept coming back. 

Sitting on the post in the Lee’s yard: Staring, staring, staring.  

All the time staring at the aviary with them hawk-eyes!

Da borrowed a shotgun from his friend Mick the Gard, who’s always shooting and fishing.  Wan time Da went to the back door, raised the shotgun up to his shoulder, aiming it at the hawk down on the post in Lees’ yard.  I was for sure he’d shoot, so I jammed my fingers in my ears like I see Belfast ma’s doing on the News and them out doing the shopping when they get caught in a ‘RA ambush on the British Army.

He lowered the gun and I said, too loud cause the fingers were still in me ears:

“Go on shoot, it’s goanta kill the budgies!”

“Too bleddy dangerous,” he said, gritting his teeth, twist-nodding his head.  “Ah, some ould biddy back the road’d phone t’barrack an’ t’Super’d want to know who in t’hell was dischargin’ a firearm within in town.”

He broke the shotgun in half over his knee, the reddish-orange cartridge flying up to exactly where he held his hand.

The hawk was winning!

A few days later, we were kneeling down saying the Angelus with the tea, Batchelors beans on toast, still cooking in the scullery, when we heard the budgies squawking sumptin ferocious.

Da jumps up offa his knees, me beside him, and races for the back door, his slippers slapping of the kitchen tiles.  All in one go, he grabs the shotgun from just inside the back door, breaks it in two, fishes in his baggy trousers’ pocket for a second, pulles out an orangish-red cartridge and slots it perfectly down into the barrel of the shotgun.

I stare at Da’s eyes as they narrow to slits. He clicks the shotgun closed and slides off the safety nib.

I’m full sure today’s the day I’m going to see sumptin shot!

He rips open the back door, jamming the shotgun hard against his shoulder like he’s a cowboy sheriff bursting outta the JAIL into a dusty street to blast away the bank robbers.

On the ground up against the aviary, the hawk is tangled up in the English netting.  Most of the wild shriek-panic is the hawk himself on his back, near scared to death,  curved-sharp claws grabbing like crazy at nuthin; wings whack-slapping against the dirt; whiteish-brown-flecked belly twisting over-n’-back-over-n’-back; tiny black eyes wild with the fear of death.

Da aims the shotgun right at the hawk.

Expecting a Belfast-bang, I jam my fingers in my ears.

Da stands there, the tip of the shotgun barrel moving just slightly and I’m thinking how could he miss from here?  The shotgun pellets will blast the hawk into pieces.  I better stand back knowing it’ll make a fierce amount of blood, meat and feathers.

I only take a half-step back cause getting splashed with blood is worth seeing the gun get shot.

But Da never shoots.

Instead, he breaks the shotgun over his knee; the barrel dangling useless; the orangish-red cartridge looping up outta the black hole of the empty barrel and into his perfectly placed palm.  He slides the cartridge into his trousers pocket and without looking hands me the empty shotgun.

I often handled Da’s pistol, always unloaded, and even cleaned the barrack’s Uzi a couple of times at our kitchen table, where it was definite it wouldn’t be shot. 

For just a second, I pretend I’m holding the gun that’ll kill the hawk who’s trying to ate our birds; but disappointment immediately wipes out my pretending.  

Da’s not letting me shoot; no one’s shooting. 

Instead, he’s foostering around with the English netting. 

The hawk is a ball of anger and scaredness.  His curved claws, sharp as blades, slash at Da’s hands.  Da stoops over the whole mess, face reddening, hands getting scratched, lips puffing out breaths as he tugs and tears at the netting – driving the hawk even crazier.

The weight of the shotgun draped across my arm feels good.  But it’s empty;  just a lump of metal and wood.  If I could get the orangish-red cartridge from Da’s pocket, then I could turn it into an actual weapon. 

I’m never allowed to hold a real weapon.

The budgies and canaries are pure mad fluttering and squawking; the hawk is screeching, flapping and clawing; Da’s huffing and puffing.

I could stop all this terribleness if only I had that little orangish-red cartridge.

“Stan’ back, stan’ back,” Da snaps, as if I’m the problem here.

Still the hawks looks sorta luvly up close.  You can tell by how it moves on its back that it’s all muscles and bone; fit and strong, ready to kill with them razor claws and hooked beak.

Da turns, runs back in the house but before I can even close the shotgun, jam it into my shoulder and pretend to cover the hawk, he’s back with the breadknife, slashing at the English netting.

He slash-slash-slashes until the hawk is able to get upright and try flying away, except that one claw is still snagged in the netting. 

The hawk is flapping like mad a few feet in the air, but not able to get away.  Da makes a wild slash with the breadknife.  It seems like half the netting goes off with the hawk. 

Its wings whoop-whoop-whoop.

The hawk, with a heap of netting hanging from is claws, gets higher and higher into the sky.  The netting drapes down like a bit a wooly rope until halfway down the backyard it slips off the hawk’s claw and falls on top of where Da planted potatoes. 

The hawk’s wing-flapping slows down and evens out.  He strong flaps a few times, suddenly kinda-sorta shiver-twisting in the air, shaking every feather on his body.  Then the strong-slow flapping comes back, and he disappears over the trees, out of sight, leaving me confused standing with a unloaded gun.

Immediately, the birds in the aviary calm down.

Da’s hand shoots out for the shotgun: His eyebrows clench down over his pale blue eyes as his glare silences the complaining coming up outta my throat about the gun not getting shot.

Dangerous Curves Ahead

I’m lying on the top bunk in the lad’s room staring out the window at the rain clattering down.  It’s been raining for days now, the dark-grey clouds up there like the ceiling just a few inches away from me pushing down.  There’s no going out to play in this weather.  This morning, dead-bored walking around in the rain with a busted umbrella, the Green was a swamp of cold-muddy puddles, the swimming pool overflowing its white-painted concrete sides; even the swimming pool’s barbed-fence to keep us young fellas outta was dripping raindrops. 

Anyways, I’m too old for playing up the Green. 

The ten and eleven-year-olds won’t let me join their soccer games, saying you either have to have two thirteen-year-olds, one for each team, or the thirteen-year-old has to be the ref. 

But reffing them young lads, with no whistle, is hard work.  The last time I ended up having to batter Johnny Walsh so I could let the other team take their penalty from where Johnny handballed to stop a goal.  With someone’s cousin from England lining up to take the penalty, his eyes so intent you’d think it was the FA Cup Final, bloody nosed Johnny slinks off home crying.  The penalty goes over the jumper-goalpost and now I’m fighting with the other team, when Luke’s mammy comes screaming outta their house with a wooden spoon waving up over her head, and her wanting to give me a battering.  I ran away to hide down the palm trees by the river so she couldn’t make a holy show of battering me in front of all the young lads. 

“I’m goan to go dowen an’ tell yer fadder!” she yells after me, the wooden spoon wagging above her head.  “He’ll settle ya, … ya, ya little pup, hittin’ my Johnny!”

The onliest thing worser than getting a battering from someone’s mammy up the Green is waiting for Da to come home and give me a battering.

             So, what do I care if the Green is flooded; what do I care if the whole world is flooded.

I turn over on my side and stare out the window at the rain pelting into the thick wall of pine trees that hides the Old Folks Homes they just built from our back garden.  Why don’t the old people want to see our back garden?  And why did they knock down the tree Plantation that useta be there just to build little houses for pensioners and then plant more trees to hide them houses from us.  I like being able to see out our window what the neighbours are doing.

Now, Da makes us close the cloudy-curtains that you can kinda-sorta see through from the inside but not from the outside at all.

“Them poor divils worked their whole lives an’ don’t need ta retire inta watchin’ ye four savages killin’ one another in here!” he says yanking the cloudy-curtains across  the window every day.

The four savages is me and me brothers.  I’m the youngest so I get the most killing of all; but I’m getting better every fight.   

Everything always changes, even when you especially don’t want nuthin to change.

Like them building the Old Folks Homes.  One day, I woke up to roaring chainsaws knocking down the Plantation pine trees as easy as we useta snap each other’s pencils in school.  After that the Plantation looked like a giant’s unshaved face until a yellow bulldozer pushed all the tree stumps away so it looked like a regular brown field.

Why do things have to change?

One time we even thought the Troubles from the North was coming down here, when some RUC men sneaked down from the North fishing for our salmon but the ‘RA found out and shot them; nearly kilt them!  

See, everyone around here is mad about fishing cause the rivers and lakes is bursting with salmon and trout and pike and even eels. 

I hate eels: They’re always squirming so it’s nearly impossible to be sure you have them kilt. 

People are weird.  Most of them says the fishermen coming to catch our fish is good cause they’re tourists, which means they’re richer than us and will spend their money on anything, even stoopid stuff.  But even Da, who was furious with the ‘RA for shooting the RUC men, and who’s a great fisherman himself, he caught four salmon one day and two on another day a week later, is never done complaining about “them bleddy Germans!  They’ll fish out every lake in t’country if the fools above in Dublin let them.” 

The Germans that Da complains about aren’t a bit like the German soldiers in Where Eagles Dare.  No, new Germans is either short, fat and pink, or tall, skinny and blond; they stay in hotels and guest houses with their fishing rods in special locked roof-racks on top of Mercedes estates; and they roar in German across Main Street to one another when they’re going to the pub after catching all our fish.

But no one ever thought RUC men would be sneaking down here for our fish; not with the batterings they’re always giving Catholics.  And no know for sure thought our ‘RA men would shoot guns.  

But they both done what no one here never even thought could be done. 

The pretend-fisher-RUC-men got shot going home as they drove round the corner at the Gaiety Ballroom back the Westport Road by pretend-farmers- ‘RA-men.  

No one died, but Castlebar hospital was on the News; looking not a bit like itself atallatall, but like as if it ‘twas another hospital somewhere up the country.   

That’s the problem.

People, even hospitals, is always pretending they’re someone else. 

Animals never pretend.  

Like birds, they’re the animals we know the best.  Birds just do the same thing all the time: Singing, eating, shitting, and fluttering away when you make them scared.

That’s all birds do, whether they’re the wild sparrows and starlings in the back yard, or the budgies and canaries that Da breeds in the garage.  I don’t know why Da breeds all them bright coloured birds except that he done it when he was a child and probly he likes slobbering with building and fixing cages.  He built all the cages he traps the budgies and canaries in by himself.  The cages are big-long plywood boxes with wire fronts.  Then with a fierce skinny bit of plywood, he can separate the long cage into smaller individual cages for the bird-parents to make baby birds.   

Da decides which two bird-parents will make babies together based on their colours.  Breeding budgies is all about getting good colours and breeding canaries is getting good singers.  Even though you can teach budgies to talk, they’re just repeating sounds they hear, and so no one really buys them for the talking.  The budgie we keep in the kitchen, the first one we ever had, Rory was the name we gave him, never learned to talk, but he could imitate the knocker on the front door.  You’d be sitting watching telly and think there was someone at the door. 

It's weird cause me and Davy really tried hard to teach Rory to talk.  We were just little then, maybe eight or nine.  But he wouldn’t say back any of the words I kept repeating to him.  Davy made me say “Up the Gunners” cause he’s an Arsenal fan, and actually that did sound better than “Up Leeds” who I support.  After a few days of trying to teach Rory to talk, I got tired of him not saying any words and stuck our real-looking German Luger toy gun in through the bars of the cage.

“Svay ‘Up zee Gunners’ you shvine-hunt or I vill shoooot yours stoo…pid head off!” I yelled in my best evil German-soldier accent.

Ma burst outta the scullery with the wooden spoon and battered me ‘til the back of me legs was red with wooden spoon wallops and me face drenched with tears.  She took the Luger and I didn’t see it for weeks.

Da said the reason Rory never talked was that Auntie bought a glugger.   

“Ah, in this world if you want sumptin done proper, ya hafta do it yerself,” he sighed, staring into the cage at Rory.  “If he’s like them other fellas from up t’North, he’ll never talk, but hopefully he’ll be gud for wan thing anyway!”

 See, Auntie bought Rory for us in a pet shop above in Enniskillen.  I mean you can’t just get budgies anywhere: You have to go to a special pet shop.  The nearest pet shop to us that sells budgies is all the way in Dublin. 

There’s a bad pet shop in Galway that sells hamsters who die in their sleep a few weeks after you bring them home.  After the second time that happened, the pet shop fella wouldn’t even talk to Da about getting his money back, cause he said we must be feeding the hamster wrong – even though it ‘twas from him we bought the food.  On that drive back to Castlebar, and us hamster-less now, Da done a fierce pile of teeth-gritting and head-shaking.  

Auntie crosses over the Border every day to go to her job as a science teacher in Enniskillen and Da says that cause up the North is kinda-sorta like being in England; they have everything good that you can’t get easily in Ireland.  

As soon as she brought Rory home to Granny’s big house in Dowra, Auntie got scared she’d kill him, cause she didn’t know how to take care of budgies atallatallatall.  At least not like Da does, fussing with them, giving them cuttlefish bones for their beaks and gravel for their gizzards: It’s fierce tricky, they’re not like hens that just live.  

Auntie could probly take care of hens.  People out the country can always take care of hens.  Wan time I seen Auntie kill a hen with her just gloved hands on a special killing stone at the side of the house.  Some fella who Granny taught way-way back when all good things useta happen and she was the teacher in Dowra school, came into Dowra for the August fair and gave Granny an alive hen as a gift.   

The hen was clucking and scratching within in the cardboard banana box Granny’s old student left it in; one wild black eye staring out through the holes the bananas do breath through as they’re coming in ships all the way from Africa to Bests Supermarket.  Auntie was furious with the fella for giving Granny an alive hen, cause she’d be the wan that’d have to kill it: There’s no way Granny would do any killing. 

All of a shot around six o’clock, Auntie pulles on her gardening gloves grabs the hen by the neck outta the banana box and tucks it in under her arm.  The squawking is sumptin ferocious: Wings clatter offa Auntie’s side: Four long-curly-nails scrape against her blue-flowery housecoat.  

With the hen making a holy terror in fright, Auntie rushes outta the house and up the side alley that leads to the old bicycle and bedrame graveyard behind Granny’s house.  There in the wall of the stairs that goes up to the back garden, where Grandad, who’s been dead since before I was even born, useta keep bees, have apple trees and grow potatoes, but now is just a heap of wildness, there’s this wan killing stone that sticks outta the wall by a bunch of inches. 

Auntie, her arms straight like they were made of wood, slaps the hen’s body against the killing stone; one wing gets pinned-flapping up against the wall; the other flailing against her housecoat; the hen’s long nails scratching and grabbing a hoult of Auntie’s housecoat, bunching up the blue-flowery nylon.

Auntie’s head and shoulders lurch forward and sumptin big happens. 

The nails keep grabbing the housecoat but the wings stop mid flap.

Auntie stays like that, even though I could tell, and me standing well back, that the hen had died.

“Get inta that house!” Auntie yelled, her face all scrunched up, when she turned and saw me watching.

“Wait, wait, bring out t’big knife, t’wan you’re not allowed to touch, wid t’black handle … an’ be careful or it’ll cut t’hand offa ya!”

She took the knife and went off into the garage, that useta be the stables for English policemen, cause once upon a time Granny’s house was an RIC barracks.

With Auntie afraid to keep the budgie, that Saturday we met her at the graveyard in Collooney.  We only meet there cause it’s kinda-sorta halfway between Castlebar and Dowra: I mean it’s not actually halfway, cause we have to drive a heap more miles to get there, but the road from Dowra to Collooney is so vomity that we call the graveyard halfway.  We had to stop coming home from Dowra that way cause we’d be twisting-turning on that road for half an hour, everyone ready to vomit and then you’d see the sign: “DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD!”

When I see that sign and realize there’s even worser twisty-turny-vomityiness coming, and heaps more forcing burny-stomach-water back down my throat, I just go ahead and puke.

Auntie was waiting for us in the gravelly-dandelioney car park outside the Collooney graveyard.  Sometimes we go playing hide and seek in the graveyard, but not if Granny’s there.  She thinks playing in a graveyard is a sin, but she thinks nearly everything we do is a sin.  Anyways, me and the lads, when we were littler, useta play war up in the Castlebar graveyard all the time and no one ever stopped us.  It’s actually a great place for war, cause from behind any gravestone you can be a deadly sniper.

When we saw Rory for the first time in a real birdcage in the boot of Auntie’s new royal-blue, Austin Morris, it was kinda weird.  He had the same wild eyes as the hen in the banana box.  He kept hopping from perch to perch, his yellowy-green wings starting to flap but never getting to a full flap.

Granny hadn’t come with Auntie, so me and Davey wanted to take Rory into the graveyard so he could be part of a quick game of war.  Da wouldn’t allow that atallatall, and anyways, there’s no sticks to use as guns near the Collooney graveyard.

Instead, we took Rory in his cage for a walk around the graveyard. 

Rory seemed to like that.  We’d never actually seen a budgie up close before; they’re just sorta small parrots. 

Here in the dreariness of Collooney graveyard’s splotchy-grey gravestones and dark green Yew trees, Rory’s bright-green yellowyness, bopping like crazy over and back between the two perches in the cage looked almost too alive.

Granny woulda ben furious!

To be continued …

Grass Grows on the Weirs – Part II

I’m zagging and zigging through Galway Friday afternoon early rush hour traffic, drawn inexorably by my navigation point of the red and black Guinness sign above the door to Cullen’s pub.  

The two lads, their elbows pumping as they bustled on ahead of me, have already disappeared through the vortex that is the operable leaf of Cullen’s half-glass doors.

Car headlights, already lit to bolster the gloomy-short December day, glare off Forster Street’s wet tarmac.  Christmas lights wrapping the door of the kinda-sorta supermarket next to Cullen’s throw a red and green hue across the cars’ wetness and the shiny pavement.   

Fantasizing that a cure for my throbbing hangover will be delivered by that first pint, I veer in front of the barely moving Galway-Derry Expressway Bus.  The driver, probably upset at experiencing such stupidity and him barely into his five-hour ordeal, not counting the waiting at the Border, stops the huge bus with a brake screech.

He gives the horn a loud blast.

“Gud man, gud man,” I turn and wave with fake recognition to the bus driver’s dashboard lighted face.

He twists that face into a snarl as he leans both hands on the centre of his steering wheel. 

“I hafta get back …,” I mouth through the cacophony of the bus’s booming horn, “… ta confusin’ drinkin’ for livin’!”

I dart in front a red-and-green-hued white Ford Escort as it rolls slowly towards Eyre Square.  The Escort’s sagging faced driver puffs clouds of smoke up in front of her shock of frozen-in-place grey hair as she lights a new cigarette off the one already jammed between her lips.

I scurry up to Cullen’s front door: The half-glass vortex which facilitates “me” getting banished by “pub-me:” A far more interesting edition of myself – one that can better fake happiness.

Through the doors’ frosted-glass, I can make out the billowy shapes of the lads already plonked on barstools with Josie the barman’s bulk looming behind them.  I barely push open the narrow door leaf, jam my head inside, and stare around the empty pub with a moidered face.

“God bless all here!” I declaim loudly.

Josie’s normally forbidding face softens into a smile as I walk in holding one hand to my stomach, with the other held up in mock-prayer to the god of hangovers. 

Josie responds with head-shaking mock despondency, his massive torso quivering.  He suddenly shifts his centre of gravity from leaning back against the till and in a few short-rapid steps grabs a third pint glass.

“Oh, de tree wise mens is all ‘ere now, fer deir hairs a de dog,” he lisps, thudding the pint glass under the black Guinness tap.

“Dat poor ould dog’ll be balds soon!”

“It’s a new fucken stomach I’m lookin’ fer, not dog hairs,” I groan, drag-clanging a stool back from the bar.

I climb aloft the stool’s cushioned seat, take a quick view of the world; which right then is the tan tiled floor and shite-brown seats of Cullen’s Pub.

I sit and stare silently, my sick-stomach pre-soothed by the sight of settling Guinness.

Behind the bar the counter is lined with sprightly labeled bottles of spirits.  On the wall, fading yellow and gold floral wallpaper is interrupted by two banks of optics, the inverted bottles of white and brown spirits reflecting the bar’s bare fluorescent tubes.

Raidió Na Gaeltachta gurgles from a tan and brown transistor sitting on the counter next to the till.

Josie plops one, two … and three pints of black porter topped with creamy heads onto the bar.

Sighing in unison, we embark on a cure that will surely end worse than the disease.

“Dere’s bad trouble abroad in Leetrom taday,” Josie says, nodding his head at the transistor.  “Prolly sumptin wid dat kidnappins.  D’Irish army is shootin’ deirs guns.”

He rolls his eyes back in his head and pumps both pudgy-fingered hands rapidly toward the ceiling like they’re six-guns.

“Ah, sure this is t’greatest little fuck up of an island in t’world,” I say, embellishing with an expletive something I’ve heard my father say many’s the time.

“‘Tish gittin’ vurry bad dese days,” Josie says.

He slowly shakes his big head. 

“Vurry bad.”

On we drink to “vurry bad,” emptying our glasses in quarter-pint slugs.

In line with my omniscient prediction, it does take more than the aforementioned dog hair, but about four pints into the session we return to something akin to normal humans.

Knocking back pints, we jawbone about the college term just poorly limped through and anticipate the craic before-during-and-after the Married vs. Singles rugby game on Saint Stephen’s Day.  We’re happily exaggerating exploits of old when the skinny door to the pub slams open with the timbre of rattled glass. 

No one enters. 

Cold air balloons in as traffic groans past the open door.

Groaning deeply at the inconvenience of instinctual curiousity, we labour around on our perches to see why the door remains open.

The squat body of the poetry reciting homeless fella from up in Eyre Square fills the narrow doorway.  Just last week, with it raining sideways, I walked-ran past him sitting on a park bench cradling a bottle of cheap sherry, drunkenly reciting Yeats.

Now his rotund shape, in a tattered, navy-blue suit and a white shirt, blackened at the collar, props open the skinny pub door as he glares at Josie from under tangled eyebrows.

Always attracted to conflict, I spin around to see Josie glaring back, his eyes narrowed to slits, a determined scowl on his face as his head moves from side to side threateningly.

“‘Twuz down be t’Sally Gardens, my luv an’ I did meet.”

“Gwan outta DAT!” Josie half-yells.  “GWAN!  Git outta my’s house!”  

“She past t’Salley Gardens wid little snow-white feet, she tolt me take luv azy ….”

Josie’s huge corpus skirts down the bar in short-rapid steps, his torso jiggling.  As he lifts the flap and rounds the column from the “Lounge” the pub door slams closed.

Josie stops in his tracks.

“Ah t’poor ould divil, we should let ‘im have wan drink, ‘tis nearly Christmas,” I say with costs-me-nothing charity.

“An’ will youse be t’wan dat cleans up when he pisses heself all over my’s cushions!” Josie glares at me, his eyes burning with anger.

“Fair point, fair point,” I immediately submit, retreating into the solace of my pint.

We drink on in silence.

The Friday evening traffic outside on Forster Street grinds to a sludge with the metal-on-metal squeal of double-deckers’ breaks and the occasional car horns tooting.

Josie leans back against the till; his ear cocked slightly towards the transistor; his eyes up on the ceiling; broad face expressionless.

Out the tan speaker Raidió Na Gaeltachta gurgles.

His lips purse; head shaking.

He snaps off the transistor.

“‘Tis on’y gittin’ worser up dere by de border,” he sighs loudly.  “I tink dat supermarked lad might not do too good, an’ him wid no gun!”

“Why, what’s happenin’ now?” Paul asks.  “They were just in our flat searchin’ for Tidey.”

“In yours flat?” Josie’s jowly cheeks tighten as his mouth opens.  “Sure dem bleddy Egl’ngton street foools couldn’t find ‘n elephant in a field a shnow!”

“Could we find a pint behind t’counter there?” Rory asks, tapping the base of his empty pint glass off the counter.

“Lets me see,” Josie holds his hand up perpendicular against his forehead scans the empty pub, finally lowering his eyes to the counter lined with clean pint glasses.

“AHA!  Dere’s dey is, de tree wise men’s gifts!” he laughs and grabs three pint glasses, “‘cept an’ its my’s Christmus gift to youse.”

He gives us three pints on the house for Christmas.  We swell with pride at this symbol of our Irish-manhood, and lorry down the free pints.

Josie reaches into a carboard box with “XMAS” scrawled on the side in purple crayon.

“I thinks dis Santa lad’s a bit offa chancer,” he mock complains, shaking his head as holds up a honey-combed-red-crepe paper Santa.

He stretches to pin the frozen-in-a-jolly-smile-faced Santa on the wall between the banks of optics. 

“Huh?  He on’y works de wan day a de year an’ all he does is slip down people’s chimbleys an’ ate christmus cake, but on’y d’icin’!  Why cannnit I git dat job?”

His smile dissolves into a frown as he pushes the thumbtack hard through Santa’s ruddy forehead, through a dulled-gold wallpaper flower and into the plaster.

The plaster resists the tiny brass stem of the thumbtack, but the force of Josie’s determination wins.

“Well,” he says with a self-satisfied grin on his face.  “Dat’s de dec’ratin’ done for dis year!”

Lubricated by pints, afternoon slips into early evening.

From the dimness outside I can see the sun has truly gone home and we’ve returned to the world of darkness pushed back only by electric light.

Around five-ish, the office crowd swagger in wearing shabby-dandruffy suits.  Tommy-the-Talker from the insurance company gulps down two pints, sucks in four cigarettes, all the while head-shake-complaining about “t’stoopid fucken boss an’ his cunt owa secr’tary.” 

Then fake-hurrying to get home and change for a night on the town, he makes time to swallow a third pint in two slugs.

By now the afternoon’s pints have washed away the dark-hangover thoughts and replaced them with the false hope of an evening of yet more pints.

Around six-ish the professional drinkers, led by the Sean Nos singing lorry-driver, dock one by one at the bar.  They silent-sullenly order shorts and pints with hand gestures that Josie decodes.  Walloping down their first drinks in record time, they settle into the arduous work of getting Friday-night drunk. 

We try to synch with the professional’s pinting, but are quickly left behind.

An hour later a fiddle case pokes in the door, followed by Mickey Finn’s bearded to the point of inscrutability face.

“‘Til be gud here tanite,” the lorry-driver says in a low voice.  “Dat ladeen has it.”

“Has whot?” I whisper half-drunk-conspiratorially.

“Ah, ya know, ‘tis within in him, the, … the mu…sic, ‘r the … t’sphirit.”

He moves his thick fingered hand through the air that’s already hazy with cigarette smoke. 

“He jus’ has it!  Whatever ‘tis, it makes he’s fiddle sing t’ways as if an’ it ‘twuz a hu…man vice singin’.  I can on’y sing wid me troat.  Mickey can make he’s elbow sing.”

“An’ where did you learn ta sing?” I ask with genuine curiousity.

“Ah, sure ya don’t be learnt ta sing atallatall.  No, no, no, ya jus’ start singin’…,” he purses his lips, shakes his head a lot.

“… ya know, within in t’kitchen owa winter’s night an’ yer fadder’s friend or a uncle’d tell whot ye’re doin’ wrong an’ how ferta make it better.  Then when ye’re older, ya know when ya’re doin’ it right when t’eyes of everywan in t’pub is drinkin’ in every word a t’song.”

“T’eyes!” I scoff a scoff that would wither another student.  “Ya mean t’ears?”

He purses his lips tight and again shakes his head slowly.

“Ahhhh, ‘tis not as simple as ya think.  Ladeens taday tink ‘cause they see all sorts of killin’ an’ bombin’ goin’ on above in t’six counties that they know ever’thin’.”

He shakes head a bunch, stopping only to gulp down the last of his pint.

“Sure that supermarked fella’s prolly in bog hole as full a bullet holes as t’spud strainer hangin’ above t’sink in my kitchen.  But watchin’ that sorta vilence on the telly’s not t’same as when ya get pulled inta it yoursell.”

 The lorry-driver waves his empty glass in Josie’s direction, who’s looking the other way.  He plonks the empty vessel loudly onto the counter and turns his stare to me.

“Don’t ya see wan time, I wuz above in Dublin ta pick up a load an’ it turnt out this day, didn’t I hafta stay t’night.  An’ as long as I ben drivin’ me lurry round t’roads a Connemara, I never didn’t git home ta me own bed.  But this Plastic Paddy from witout in Bearna.”

He waves his hand in no particular direction; his eyes roaming for Josie’s eyes to get a new pint.

“Ahh, he’s fadder made a bleddy fortune o’er in Blighty, an’ he wuz doin’ up t’ould place, there on a bad corner out in Bearna.  Anywayz, he hired me ferta go ta t’ferry in Dublin an’ pick up a load a buildin’ materials he wuz bringin’ over from England.  An’ like any rich man he knew howta take care of he’s money.  Oh, doors an’ windaws, an’ luvly marble tiles, if ya seen them.  ‘Ttwoulda cost a bleddy fortune ta buy t’same fancy stuff witout in Coens.”

He slaps his thick hand off the counter, making Josie turn his head, to which the lorry-driver frowns, nodding at his empty pint glass.

“But wuzn’t t’bleddy ferry from England delayed be a storm witout t’Irish sea.  Don’t ya know, t’Irish sea is wanna t’worstest, most dangerous sea a sailor ever wants to drive he’s ship in.  Sure, apart from t’ferocious storms, didn’t ya see where t’Ruskies, or wuz it t’Sasanachs’ themsell, had wan a their submarines drag a trawler outta Waterford or Wexford down under t’water.”

He bends at the knees, dropping his whole torso a few inches, slowly shaking his head.

“Young fella, ya cannit believe haf t’stuff as goes on this wurlt.  Anyhoo, with t’ferry not there, an’ not ta be there ‘til t’morning,” he arches his back and nods his furrowed brow at the floor.  “I hadta find a place to stay an’ me poor lurry parked balow on t’North Wall all by hersell.”

He picks up his empty glass, looks wistfully into yellowing Guinness foam.

“I wuda slept witin in t’lurry, but some lad in a pub, a Jackeen, but an awright fella, ya can tell how a fella is be how he takes his drink an’ talks ta ya.  Jus’ an ordinary fella like you or me.”

He taps my chest lightly with his knuckle, initiating me into his group of ordinary people.

“He said t’polis wud arrest a lad fer sleepin’ in his lurry.  Now, I don’t know why they’d do that,” he puckers up his narrow lips, shakes his head slowly, “prolly, they’re gettin’ free pints off t’hotel managers ferta be forcin’ lurry men ta rent their hotel rooms at a ferocious prices.”

He taps his empty pint glass off the counter and frowns at Josie, who frown-nods at the row of pints still settling for their second fill.

“I went on down t’street an’ inta a church, not that I’m no holy roller.  No, no, no, but in there I seed a fella, an’ him pushin’ a pair a near wored out black rosary beads betwixt he’s fingers.  So, I axed him, ‘where wud I get a chape room fer t’night?’”

He takes a deep breath, nodding a lot. 

“Don’t ya know that sort owa holy fella’d be honest wit ya, an’ our Lort God above in Heaven starin’ down at him!”

He twists his head and sets his jaw.  

“Anwayz, t’holy fella says go ta such an’ such street, an’ ya get there be turnin’ this way an’ that way.  An’ than I’m ta look fer a green door; on’y he calls it ‘a Hibur…nian green door.’  Sure, what sort owa carry on is that?”

He furrows his brow, shakes his head.

“Who’s ta be sayin’ what name green should be calt?  Grass is green; t’canal goes green of a hot summer; a sick cow skitters green.  Thems t’on’y greens I know. Hiburn….”

He shakes his head rapidly, raises his arm, brings his hand down hard onto the counter.

“In my opinion ‘tis all a pile a shite, God fergive me, an’ him a holy man, but sure, green is green is green, who says they can be makin’ other names for green?”

Josie sets his pint on the counter with a dull thud.

“Anwayz, I got ta t’roomin’ house wid t’green door, an’ paid fer a room.  T’landlady wuz a Northern wan …,” he closes his eyes, “wid a face on her that sharp that it coulda sliced ham.  An’ a vice that wuz sharper.  But her room wuz chape, chape-ish compared to what the skinny-tashed Jackeen above in t’East Wall Inn wanted ta charge me.  Well, I thought it ‘twuz cheap, but little did I know what it would cost me.  Anwayz, I go out fer a pint, like I do ever’night, just two or three, ‘cause I had the big drive home the next day.”

He lifts his pint in honour of pints drank and miles driven.

“An’ I get back ta t’roomin’ house, but see t’Northern wan hadn’t said nathin about t’other fella she was rentin’ t’room ta too!  Oh yeah, nary a word said she, ‘cept writin’ in the ledger I seen she put a ‘2’ in wan a t’columns.  I mane, I seen t’second bed, but I never thunk there’d be another man sittin’ on it when I got back.  But there he wuz.”

The back of his hand wipes Guinness foam from his lips.

“A Cork fella, sittin’ there on the bed, windin’ his watch, ya know, ta be lookin’ like he had no heed a me.  Oh, a skinny-miserable-bastaard owa Cork fucker, God fergive me.  I knew he wuz good fer nathin, but I couldn’t tell yet how bad he wuz.”

He nods a few fast-nods; his eyes losing their focus as he stares out over his pint at nothing.

Behind us Mickey Finn’s bow liberates sound from taut fiddle strings.  

I start to think, regretfully, that the melody may have finished the lorry-driver’s story, but no, he speaks loudly over the music:

“Anwayz, I went ta bed an’ I musta ben vury tired ‘cause I slep deep, an’ I never thunk I woulda.  An’ thinkin’ t’whole thing through later, I couldn’t remember t’last time I didn’t sleep in me own house.  It musta ben as a gasúr goin’ belaw ta granny’s in Mount Belloo fer a few days in t’bog.  Even fer granny’s fun’ral, I drove t’lurry home that evening, an’ hersell bullin’ ta miss t’party!”

He nods again, smiles, lifts his pint and takes a huge draft.

The lush sound of fiddle, guitar and bodhran music fills the air.  Cigarette haze wafts across the pub.  The roars of fellas ordering drink peaks above the music.

The lorry-driver gives his Guinness-creamed lips a back of hand wipe and wags a thick finger at me, continuing louder again:

“Let me tell ya young fella, I woke in t’middle a t’night an’ the Cork fella wuz stuck ta t’door tryin’ ta open it.  See, he didn’t reelize I had locked t’door an’ me wit t’key under t’pillow.  An’ didn’t t’fucken tievin’ bast…aard, God fergive me, have me wallet in he’s hand, an’ him pulling an’ twistin’ t’door handle.”

He gives his dry lips a hurried back-of-hand wipe.

“I turned on t’light, an’ it took me a minute awright ta unnerstan what wuz happenin’, … but then ….”

He grits his teeth, raises a clenched fist of thick fingers. 

“I battered t’livin’… shite … outta that Cork fucker!”

His fist shakes from the intensity of his clenching.  He stares silently at his fist, sadness coming over his eyes.

I draw in a fast breath, wondering if I want to know what happened next.

After what feels like too long, he breathes out so heavily I can feel the air around my face moving.

 “I’ll tell ya t’God’s honest truth,” his unclenched hand wipes down slowly across his face, “but I took me wallet from him, an’ blood on it, he’s blood.  I went down an’ pulled t’lurry around in front a t’green door, waitin’ fer t’Gards ta cum an’ arrest me for murder.  I thought I’d killed the bas….”

He’s shaking his head with a faraway look in his eyes when Cullen’s front door slams open in a surprisingly familiar manner.

I spin around and before I can see, I hear above the music and the thrum of pub talk:

“‘Twuz down be t’Sally Gardens me luv an’ I did meet, she past ….”

The squat, dark-suited figure of the poetry reciter fills the doorway; his lips moving rapidly but succinctly as he enunciates the words through the fog visible in his eyes.

I turn my head to see if Josie is onto him, but the corpulent barkeep is too busy distributing pints along the counter.

“… t’sally gardens wid little snow white feet, she toult me take luv azy, as the leaf grows on the tree, but me, bein’ young an’ stoopid, ….
“GIT OUT!” Josie bellows from down the bar.

The pub-thrum dissipates.

Fiddle-guitar-bodhran notes drop from the air.

“Who is it, who is it?” I hear Mickey Finn’s gravelly voice ask urgently.

The crowd parts.

“Gwan, git outta ‘ere!  Lave dese peoples alone,” Josie snaps, his eyes narrowed to slits as he glares at the poetry spouting face.

 “… wid her would not ah…gree,” the poetry stops as the reciter’s shoulders rise under a deep breath, his eyes clamped on Josie’s.  “In a field balow be t’river, me luv an’ I did stand, an’  ….”

“I SAID GET OUT!” Josie bellows, turning fast and starting down the bar towards the flap.

“Lave ‘im, lave ‘im,” Mickey Finn shouts, “he’s near done.”

The Guinness wants me to say something to help the poetry reciter, but I know Josie’ll get fierce thick.

The bar flap thuds up and Josie fast-fills the opening.

“Aragh cum on, lave ‘im alone Josie,” Mickey Finn drawls.  “Gwan on boss, let her out t’gap!”

“…leanin’ on me shoulder she put her snow-white hand, she bid take life azy, like t’grass grows on t’weirs.”

“GET OUT!”

Josie barrels through the crowd.

“LAVE ‘IM!” Mickey yells.

I slide off my stool and walk slowly towards the toilets, blocking Josie’s path to the front door.

His girth brushes me aside.

“… but I wuz young an’ stoopid an’ now am full a tears!”

Grass Grows on the Weirs

 I’m perched on a stool in Cullen’s Bar, the long notes of Micky Finn warming up his fiddle sluicing through the pub-hum of a Friday after-work crowd.  Behind the counter Big Josie moves in short-rapid-steps as he shovels up pints upon pints of Guinness in between sudden-swivels of his prodigious gut to jam whiskey glasses under the Paddy optic. The counter is lined with what we students spittingly characterize as those most dreadful of all human beings: “Workers.”

These “workers” are at least ordinary people who take a pint … or ten …, make jokes and, more importantly, laugh at our jokes.  As students we tolerate wasting our lives away in the company these ordinary men’s presence better than having polyester-suited deputy-assistant-trainee managers stride into the Lions Head at the end the workday, barely suppressing a tut as they glare at us perched on what they believe to be their hard-earned stools.   

Next to us at the bar, his thick-fingered hand lean-whitening on the edge of the counter, stands the lorry-driver, Sean Nos singer.  His mouth opens a little then closes in anticipation of the impending pleasure of his first pint of the weekend. 

He’s a heavyset man, with a square jaw and short, yellowish-brown teeth.  The glaringly bright lights behind the bar glint off the smudges on his thick eyeglass lenses as he slides a tenner across the counter to Josie.  He lifts the pint in front of his forehead, as if in offering to gods of drunkenness, then eyes narrowing, jaw muscles tremoring, drinks deeply.

“Here, d’ya want this stool?” I ask, sliding off the stool I’ve occupied for two hours already, offering it to the considerably older than I lorry-driver.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he answers shaking his big head, the back of his hand rising to wipe Guinness cream from his lips. 

“I’m sittin’ t’whole day in t’lurry lishenin’ ta that shaggin’ radio,” he shakes his head again, but slowly. “Terrible goin’s on above in Leitrim taday, huh, huh?”

“Ohhh,” I answer, cluelessly and trying to sound like I’m oh-so-who-gives-a-fuck, I continue: “I didn’t hear.  Our nonexistent radio mustn’t be workin’, or maybe our ears aren’t workin’?”

“Oh, yeah, serious stuff taday above in Ballinamore. Guns firet an’ ever’thin,” he circles his lips and blow-whistles out for effect.  “An’ let me tell ya, ‘twasn’t no foxes they were shootin’ at!”

“Oh Jaysys,” I nod with respect for the news.  “It must be sumptin ta do wid the Tidey kidnappin’.”

“Aye, aye, aye, aye,” he nods a bunch.  “T’radio says they have ‘a ring a steel’ around some woods above in Ballinamore.  Whatever t’bleddy hell that means.”

He shakes his head slowly. 

“I thought fer sure that poor Tidey fella was buriet somewheres in t’bog.”

He takes another deep draught of his pint and turns his head as the fiddle springs fully alive withMickey Finn’s elbow dancing as he works his way into a reel. 

Next to him, the shaggy-haired mandolin player has the fingers of his left hand set delicately against the strings, his right hand poised, eyes closed, as his lips silently mark time for him to enter the reel.

The fiddle bow stops mid-note.

Mickey Finn’s heavily bearded face grimaces.  He shakes his head slow-widely, his longer than shoulder length hair snagging behind him on the bench-seat cushion.

The mandolin player’s eyes snap open.  He stares confusedly at the fiddler.

The lorry-driver lifts his glass for Josie to see, nods an affirmation and drains the second half of his pint.

“I need a drop a medicine,” Mickey Finn says.  “It ‘twas a long night last night.  Remind me ta stay well back from that shaggin’ Connemara poteen.”

He lifts a short glass filled to the brim with a double Bloody Mary; stares for a few second at the thick, red liquid; breaths out deeply and raises his short glass.

The lorry-driver’s creamy-empty pint glass clinks off the marbled-brown Formica counter.

When I look back Mickey Finn’s substantial moustache is swamped with Bloody Mary; his bottom lip reaching out and up to capture the errant alcohol.

“Either I’m gettin’ oult,” Mickey Finn says, “or hangovers is gettin’ worse.  I never remember needin’ t’Cath’lic Queen’s drink this late inta t’day.”

I turn to the Sweet Afton clock to measure a fiddler’s definition of late in the day.  It’s twenty past seven. 

About four hours ago, we plomped ourselves onto stools here in Cullen’s Bar trying to escape the upset to what had been up until then a standard-issue, dreary December Friday. 

Had been, until I opened the flat door to three Gards.

We’d spent all of Friday morning sleeping, and then half of the afternoon nursing a ferocious Thursday-night-Salthill hangover.  Sitting in the kitchen, staring at the grimy tiled floor, just the sound of the kettle’s snout touching the tap made me wince.  My stomach heaved when the fridge door opened; the sight and thought of food being too much. 

Still, we sit on in near silence other than the lads crunching through buttery toast; me counting the flutters of blood coursing through the vein where my nose attaches to my skull. 

A knock on the flat door freezes Rory mid-crunch; Paul stops the teacup halfway up to his mouth; I lose count of my vein-flutters.

We stare at one another in a state of shock that anybody would find our flat door worthy of knocking upon. 

If it’s a friend, they’d just walk in.  It could well be the landlord coming to check on us.  He’s not a bad fella; he stops in everyone now and again to make sure we haven’t totally destroyed his property.  We offer him tea, and he answers: “On’y if it ‘tis near the pot!” 

Standing up from my cup of untouched tea, I swing open the flat door sighing the heavy sigh of persecuted humanity. 

A towering, burly Garda Sergeant looming over me, the silver buttons on his bulging greatcoat glinting in the hallway’s darkness, throws me for such a hangover-shock that my knees buckle.

“Good day … son,” the Seargeant says staring with standard issue Garda suspicion.

Then in his deep voice he immediately starts reading disinterestedly from a piece of folded-up paper in his hand. 

“Pursuant ta special … order five…wan…tree…two … issued be t’Minister fer Justice, we is autor…ized ta search all places of abode, an’ their ‘purtenant out buildin’s, fer evidence purtainin ta a kidnapping purpurtrated in Rathfarmnum, County Dublin on November twenty…fort, nineteen … eighty-tree.”

With a tightening of his lips and the sudden focusing of his eyes back on mine, he lowers the sheet of paper, stands aside and extends his great-coated arm towards our filthy kitchen. 

Two young Gards, not much older than us, one of them still battling acne, dutifully march past his outstretched arm into our kitchen. 

The young Gards’ heads turn slowly around as they absorb the mess. 

They stop in the middle of the now vastly overcrowded kitchen.

“In t’back lads,” the Sergeant clips, nodding to the young Gards but then suddenly raising his voice and one huge hand he adds:

“Hoult on!” 

He looks past his two searchers at his three listless searchees.

“Eh, lads, eh… ‘tis required that we look in ever’ room.  ,” his hand comes up to his mouth.  “Now in them back rooms would there be any young ladies in a state of undress?”

“We fucken wish!” comes the chorus.

“Awright, awright,” the Sergeant smiles, sliding a leatherbound notebook from a pocket deep inside his greatcoat.  

“Go on lads,” he clips, “an’ we’ll check this shi… wan offa t’list.”

The two young Gards stomp through the bedrooms and back out in a matter of seconds. 

The Sergeant’s eyes narrow as he glares at them for facial expressions of evidence uncovered that a kidnapped supermarket executive is malingering in our damp and drafty bedrooms. 

Satisfied from his young charges’ clueless expressions, his face relaxes.  He waves his huge hand for them to evacuate.

Just as they turn to go, the still spotty-faced young Gard’s eye falls on the door to the shower.  With clean, well-lit showers up at the Uni, we almost never use this shower, with its light that works erratically, tiles disintegrating on the walls, and the ceiling coated with a virulent strain of black mold that endures nowhere else in the universe.

“Haha!” the spotty Gard gasps, lunging at the door, yanking it open, releasing billions of mold spores to which no human lung should ever be exposed!

The Sergeant and the other Gard breathe in audibly: Their lungs paying the price of their colleague’s sudden energy.

We, with the gift of knowledge, clamp our lips closed and slide our heavy, navy-blue jumpers up over our noses.

The spotty Gard peers into the dark chasm of the shower. 

He tries the light, which today decides on flickering and then takes a step inside, before backing up fast, his face contorting in disgust.

“He’s snot in dere,” he shakes head rapidly.

“Awright so lads,” the Sergeant sighs, waving impatiently.  “We’ll lave ye to it.”

His charges stomp out, their back and shoulders rigid.

“Nathin’ Tidey here!” the Sergeant snorts a derisive laugh and slams the door.

We all look at each other, our heads shaking in disbelief.

“I need the cure,” I gasp-sigh, eliciting nods all around.

As we emerge blinking from our man-made-cave onto Forster Street I’m struck that the sun is already commuting home while our day has not yet started. 

Lagging behind the two lads, carefully picking my way down the two front steps, I see the Gentleman Beggar standing at the iron railings in front of our flat.  He’s leaning backwards against the railings; the threadbare elbows of his tweed greatcoat propped between the sharp-pointed iron railings; his gaze trained on the passing traffic.

When the lads bustle past, his head of curly grey hair snaps to attention, his arms tighten propelling him off the railing. He raises his head and shoulders, drawing in a breath to issue his typical sonorous request for money.

But the lads are gone.  They move with admirable singularity towards their navigation point – the red and black Guinness sign on Cullen’s – walking obliviously out into horn-beeping Friday afternoon traffic fleeing Galway.

I attempt the same brisk departure from the front steps, but I’m stopped by the Gentleman’s clearing his throat.

“Excuse young man, I’m wondering if I might eh … inconvenience you?”

His weather-and-world-beaten, yet still cleanshaven, face contorts into a pained expression at the necessity of this ‘inconveniencing.’

“By requesting ten pence, of course twenty pence would be of even greater utility, but today I could suffice today with a ten P bit, … given my current situation.”

Labouring under the delusion that the Gentleman’s begging for pennies so he can soothe himself with rotgut sherry is wrong; while my need to soothe myself, via a gallon of Guinness, is justified as I have a few of Da’s pounds in my pocket; I self-righteously deny his paltry request.  

I stuff my hands deep into my Wrangler’s pockets and shake my head by way of lying about my having the ability to share one tenth the cost of a pint, even as I’m embarking on a good gallon-plus session.  Instead of sharing, with deliberate, and pointless, care I close our building’s unlockable iron railing gate.  All the while I keep turning down the ends of my mouth in lying-sympathy with the Gentleman who has already gotten over my refusal as he shoots a finger upwards at the low hanging clouds.

“It’s dangerous stuff, you know.”

Involuntarily, I look up at the light grey sky.

“What …?” I ask anxiously.  “What’s dangerous?”

“Living!” the Gentleman retorts, standing fully erect; shoulders back as he draws in a deep breath; his hand rising to the lapels of his tattered greatcoat. 

“There’s nothing more dangerous than living young man, it does not … end well!”

“Oohh, …,” I stare at his fine featured but weather-and-world-beaten face.  “That’s all, I thunk ya were … eh ….”

I run out of words.

“Awright so,” I suddenly find a twenty pence deep in my pocket and hand it to him.

Thank you kindly sir,” he palms the twenty pence and buries it deep in the pocket of his greatcoat, then he reaches a hand out gently onto my shoulder.

“Young man, young man,” he says in a loud-husky-whisper, “do not mix up drinking with living.”

He clears his throat like a lecturer up at college about to issue a great fact.

“It happens a lot, in my… humble opinion.”

I turn from his penetrating gaze and look longingly at the red and black sign across the street.

“Of course,” he sighs a heavy sigh, hands rising back to his lapels. 

“Equally, do not mix up living with drinking.”

The Foulness of Thee – Part III

I’m pissing curly black pubes around the urinal in Cú Chulainn’s jax, the melodic air of “Back Home in Derry” sluicing around my alcohol-addled brain.  Finished expelling kidney-processed Guinness, I wash my hands with drunken overly careful care to avoid snagging myself on the sink’s assortment of broken pint glasses.

“In ay…teen…oh…tree, we sailed out … ta sea,” I mutter-mumble-sing, “out from t’sweet town a Derree.”

I turn, shake my hands dry and, with sneaker toes jutting up from lake piss-and-beer, head for the door.  Halfway there, I’m stopped in my watery tracks when the jax door wallops open, cracking hard into the wall.

In the open-door flies Round Rory’s ‘cushion!’  

He fast-shuffles backwards splashing through the flooded floor, his hands balled into white fists, his arms flailing wildly at the ‘perfessional boxer,’ whose arms and fists easily deflect the ‘cushion’s’ flails. 

The ‘cushion’ backs up against the toilet stalls and unable to escape any further, he stretches his right arm way behind him, the fist squeezed close and throws a huge round-the-house-mind-the-dresser haymaker.

The ‘perfessional’ boxer easily brushes off the ‘cushion’s’ haymaker.  Then the ‘perfessional’s’ fists flash: One, two: One, two.

The ‘cushion’s’ head snaps back twice; his knees buckle; he slumps to the ground; then crashes face first into lake piss-and-beer.

“Ahhh Jaysys, why’d ya hafta do that in here?” I hear Fintan’s voice, as he crushes in past the ‘perfessional.’  “Sure, we’d a put him out inta t’carpark an’ ye coulda battered t’shite outta him out dere like everyone else does.”

The boxer doesn’t answer but his eye, surrounded by a purpling blackeye, sparkles. 

He raises his fist to his mouth; blows across the knuckles; turns and walks out.

Fintan and I, trying badly not to get contaminated with floodwater, extract the ‘cushion’ from lake piss-and-beer.  The dead load of his barely conscious body is too heavy and Fintan gives up on staying dry.  With a barman’s expertise, he eases his head under the ‘cushion’s’ arm to get him fully upright.  Following suit, I prop up the other side, feeling his damp-nastiness soak into my faded-green Ireland rugby shirt. 

The waters of lake piss-and-beer part behind us as we drag the ‘cushion’ back into the bar and jam him in between a barstool and the counter.  His eyes flutter open but are wildly unfocused; his face expressionless; the front of his soaked through blue-and-white-striped dress shirt clings to his skin.

Last call has come and gone.  The bar’s blindingly bright fluorescent lights subdue the smokey haze, erasing the darkened sense of intrigue that was likely never there.

Round Rory, gripping the bar hard with both hands, gives his cousin a hard look over and then eyes rolling up into his skull, tosses his head back. 

“Ah dis fookin’ fool an’ dat drink mouth on ‘im!  He’ll be fooken kilt wan a dese days.”

He releases one hand from its hard grip on the counter to imperiously wave away his barely conscious ‘cushion.’

“Dat fella does look fer de biggust, tickust fella in de bar,” Rory says, spit flying from his mouth. 

He leans too far forward toward me, loses his footing and grabs the bar again with his free hand.

“An’ den dats who he hasta fight: De worstest fella in de bar.  Ahhh, he has he’s mudder an’ my mudder’s hearts broke.”

The ‘cushion’ starts to slump down between the barstool and the counter. 

I half-heartedly try to save him, but gravity easily wins.

“Cum ‘ere,” I grunt at Rory.  “Let’s move this gobeshite over ta that seat.”

I nod at a vinyl bench-seat up against the wall, then pull the stool back to get at the ‘cushion.’  Rory starts toward me but immediately trips over the stool, saving himself at the last minute by grabbing the counter with both hands.

 “Sit down on that stool, ya fucken leibide!” Fintan scoots in past Rory and slips his head under the ‘cushion’s’ arm.  Together we deposit the ‘cushion’ onto the bench.

“Let me flip ‘im sideways, that ways he don’t choke on he’s puke,” Fintan says.  “What sorta a fucken world did we make where that’s what we hafta do for lads?  Stoppin’ them from chokin’ on their own vomit, huh, huh!”

His head wags from side to side as his strong hands grab the ‘cushion’s’ drenched shirt: Nasty-water seeps from the grabbed-fabric, as he tussles the ‘cushion’ over onto one shoulder.

“That fucken fella with you earlier, in t’shorts an’ Ireland shirt, like yours.  He’s a fucken nutjob that fella, so he is!” Fintan snaps at me, pretend-laughing but his eyes don’t smile. 

“Tom’s more of a nut…job than …,” I slowly wave my hand around the bar.

“Well, stoopid then, or some fucken ting,” he says, frowning hard.  “I hadta pry t’fucken car keys outta he’s hand.  An’ I tol’ t’fucken stoopid bollix, a drunk drivin’ charge’ll cost ya wot a fucken hundert taxis home’d cost!”

He wags his finger so close to my eyes that I blink.

“He’s keys is behind t’bar, he can get ‘em in t’morning, with a hair a t’dog.”

I nod a lot and turn to the butt end of my pint.  Swirling the once creamy, now tan, top of the Guinness around inside the glass, I survey the bar:  A few other lads, falling-down-drunk, slobber the last of their pints; streams of beer streaking across their cheeks; the BIA window rapid-shovels out the last few servings; greasy bags get ripped open, chips tumble to the floor; bared teeth rip ravenously into crusty-brown chicken legs.

My mouth waters as my impaired senses absorb the sight-sound-smell of protein, carbs and fat.

Involuntarily, I start for the BIA window.

“We’re done luv,” the matronly, red-faced Dub says, issuing me a fake-sympathetic smile.

“Ya wouldn’t haf an ould burger back there, wudya?” I drunkenly negotiate, forcing a forced smile into my barely responsive face muscles.  

“Not if we’re done now luv, how cud we?” her fake smile fades; she stares at me with sober-fed-up-with-the-drunks’ eyes.

“Just t’wan burger, that’s all.”

She sighs and flicks a look over her shoulder. 

“How ‘bout a coldish chickun box?”

“Soult!”

I reach for my wallet but almost topple from the sudden movement.

“Take it azy dere luv,” her red face softens as she snort-laughs. “Or youse’ll end up like de fool as bot dis chickun box de first time.”

She circles her index in the air.

“Dowen on yer arse, wid de stars circlin’ round yer head, like dey do in de car…too…ins.”

I transact badly, and with my mouth watering, slouch back towards the bar.

“Awright Fint…tan, I’m off,” the cop walks in the door from Dorchester Ave.  “That fighter guy’s got some punch.  I don’t think he should be usin’ it outside the ring.  It don’t seem like it’s actually safe fer reg’lar people ta get hit that hard.”

“Ah, that fella has me heart broke,” Fintan sprays himself an ice filled pint glass of Coke, shaking his head.  “After every fight there’s weeks a t’lot a them on the rant up an’ down Dorchester Ave..  An’ sure sooner ‘r later the skelpin’ starts.  It’s near a’ways wan a their own, so I suppose that’s the on’y gud part, we don’t want udder lads….”

“Sure, sure, I’m sure whatever yer sayin’ Fint…tan is the Gawd’s honest truth, the Irish Gawd that is,” the cops smiles bemusedly at the still rambling barman.  “Anywayz, I gotta go, Seamus has a little league game in the morning.”

“Ah will ya not go in a haf a drink within t’office?” Fintan intones.

“Nah, tamorrow’s a mess for me: It’s first mass at Saint Joe’s, then little league, then off ta her parents in Norwood for a barbecue.  Tamorrow night I’ll have a few.  Tanite, I needa get some sleep.”

“Awright so Aidan, we’ll see ya tamorrow night so.  An’ de first wan’s on me.  Course I won’t be here, it’s me night off, I’ll be balow in Nostalgia’s, there’s a great singer out from Ireland, T … R … sumptin ‘r udder – ‘oohhh, who shot JR Ewin’….’”

He laughs a barman’s who-gives-a-fuck-laugh, slapping the cop on his shoulder.

“But ya can tell that tight fucker O’Toole that I said t’furst wan’s on him.”

The cop laugh-nods and heads for the door.

“He’s an awful nice fella that Gard,” Fintan says, nodding a lot.   “He’s mudder’s from Cork, … Bantry I think, an’ de ould fella’s a Dub, but ya’d never know it.”
He bunches up his eyebrows for emphasis.

“Nicest cop they ever sent us, stays t’whole night, causes no one no harm, just threatens them with a night balow in t’station.  That settles t’most a them, an’ a wee crack in t’jaw settles t’other fuckers.”

He looks at the crowd still struggling with the last of their pints, opens his mouth wide and yells to no one and everyone:

“CUM ON, CUM ON, finish up there ta fuck!”

I lean hard against the bar, fighting gravity and drunkenness, while my teeth satiate their craving to rip into the cold-crusty-greasy chicken.  Beer driven ravenousness assumes full control, as gasping between chews, I stuff my mouth with handfuls of soggy chips.

 Fintan, bored with clanging barstools upside down onto the counter, wanders over to the open front door and stands hands-on-hips gazing out onto Dorchester Ave 2:00AM. 

A balding, pudgy-faced barman stops his half-hearted sweeping around the tables and, standing well back, delicately prods the ‘cushion’ with the broom handle.

“Cum onta fuck, haf ya no home ta go ta!” he growls at his one-punch-and-way-too-many-pints comatose customer.

“Lave ‘im alone,” Rory speaks up from his gripping the bar to stay upright.  “In a coupleea minutes, I’ll shovel ‘im inta de Caddy an’ ….”

He trails off to focus on the work at hand.  With his last full pint seeming inordinately heavy, he slowly raises the glass to his gaping lips, flicks his wrist and pours Guinness into his mouth.  He downs half the pint, his throat glugging in and out.

 From the bar’s open front door, the sound of screeching rubber, the crunch of metal collapsing and the pop of a windshield dying turns drunken heads.

“Ahh Jaysys, for fucken fuck’s sake!” Fintan yells and disappears out the doorway into the darkness.

I stumble for the door using the counter and stools as crutches against the pernicious effects of gravity.

On the opposite side of a rain drenched Dorchester Avenue, the front of Tom’s big blue Chevy is crumpled around a light pole; the windshield sprayed all over the street and footpath; from under the engine eases thick, dark liquid.

Fintan is across the street at the car, pulling open the driver’s door.

“Git out ya fucken ludramon,” Fintan tries to pull Tom out the open door. “How in t’fuck did ya get this ting goin’?”

He’s pulling hard on Tom’s arm when Aidan the cop’s red Ford Taurus hisses along the wet street and jerks to a stop.

“Awright there Fint…tan?” the cop asks out his open window.  “Do I needa call this inta District 11?”

“Aragh no, no, no, not atall,” Fintan says with a forced laugh.

He puts his hands on hips, looks up at the streetlight. 

“No, no, sure that pole’s as right as rain, ‘tis just this lad’s a wee bit sleepy is all.  We’ll get him inside an’ pour some coffee inta him, an’ sure then he’ll be as right as rain.”

“Ok, but no more drivin’ for him tanite, ok, you got it Fint…tan?”

“I do indeed, we’ll keep him locked within in t’office ‘til he sobe…, ‘til t’sleepiness goes offa him.”

“I seen him down on he’s knees takin’ a key outta he’s hubcap.  First, I thought he was prayin’ ta get home safely, then I figured he’s just a knucklehead.  Ya know t’only thing I really learned from nine years bein’ a cop is that ya can’t beat humans for stoopidity!”

He wags his finger out the window at Fintan as he pulls off down Dorchester Ave.

“Cum here ya fucken ludramon,” Fintan yanks Tom out of the driver’s seat, the door complaining with loud metal squawk.

The pudgy-bald barman, hands jammed into his pockets, stalks across the street to help.

“Grab a hoult a this fucker,” Fintan says, one of Tom’s arms over his shoulder.

They pick their way across the street, Tom supported by the two them.

“Git de fuck outta me way!” Rory’s voice comes from behind me.

I turn to see he has the ‘cushion’ in a similar arm hold headed out the door.

Stepping aside, they barely make it past me before they both fall face first onto the footpath. 

A couple of smokers grumblingly help them back up.

The ‘cushion’ moans in pain.

“Cum on Rory, git t’fuck outta t’way,” Fintan barks from the edge of the street. “Jaysys Christ will I ever git home tanite.  Cum on, cum on Rory, an’ lave that gobeshite owa cousin a yours home t’next night ya cum in.  He’s a fucken holy scourge on t’place.”

“Aragh, we’ll be awright now,” Rory says, nodding way too much.  “Sure in de morning no wan’ll remember a fucken ting!”

He stutter-lurches a couple of steps, badly fighting gravity on behalf of his-drunken-self and the ‘cushion.’

“Awright, cum onta fuck, git outta our way.”

Rory and the ‘cushion’ lurch-stumble down Dorchester Ave towards Rory’s big old Caddy parked at an angle with the front wheel well up on the footpath.

“Goodnight now lads,” Fintan yells after them.

“We’ll see ya tamorrah night,” Rory yells back.

“Ya won’t,” Fintan says with a smile.  “I’ll be balow in Nostalgia’s dancin’ me ass off ta, ‘who shot J…R Ewing?’”

Fintan’s lilting voice rings out over a shiny wet Dorchester Avenue competing with the hissing of a taxi rolling slowly along the street.  The cabby’s elbow rests on the open window, his pale, sagging face obscured by the smoke from the cigarette dangling from his mouth.  Slowly the cabby turns his eyes from the Chevy buried in the light-pole to Fintan, Tom and the barman filling Cú Chulainn’s doorway to Rory and the ‘cushion’ stumble-lurching to their Caddy.

The Foulness of Thee – Part II

I’m trying to inject excitement into an ebbing the-rugby-crowd-gone-home-Saturday-evening as I lounge in the fatigued luxury of the Kerryman’s twenty-year-old Cadillac respirating Rizla wrapped South American herbs.

“Put on yer satebelt dere, or ‘ou’ll be floating up an’ hittin’ de roof a me luvly Caddy,” the Kerryman says, squealing his piggish-laugh.

“‘Ere,” he adds, “we better let a bit a dis smoke out in case de ‘Merican Gards do stop us.”

His window electric-whines down, letting in a rush of cold spring air.

“Ah bollix,” he slaps the sheepskin steering wheel cover.  “I tot…tally forgot dat cuntawa winda dushn’t go back up.  Now I’ll hafta spend tomorrow balow with Red Sean, pourin’ drink inta him ferta git it fixed afore work on Mondah.”

He clicks the Caddy into drive; we lurch into the darkened side-street.

A string of red lights run, two hard-on-brakepads stops, and three door slams later we’re back perched on Nash’s barstools watching three of Guinness settle. 

Rivulets of creamy-brown bubbles stream out of the darkness as the stout resolves.

The pub starts to bustle with dark-pants-and-suit-jacketed ould Irish fellas; smiling eyes; tongues hanging out for a traditional “Saturdah night fayst a pints!”

“Come on,” I say, tugging at Tom and the Kerryman’s sleeves.  “We’ll go up ta Cú Chulainn’s.  Up there’ll be a bit more craic.” 

“Yeragh, I doe…n’t like … dat place,” the Kerryman says stoned-slowly.

He shakes his head too much.  The back of his hand rises and languidly wipes the Guinness from his upper lip. 

“‘Tish too fucken fancah.”

Cú Chulainn’s isn’t “too fancah” for anyone to pass comment on Tom and I walk-stumbling in wearing our faded-by-too-many-washes Irish rugby shirts and grass stained white shorts, legs smeared with muck and blood. 

We order pints from Fintan, the barman; a friend from back in Ireland. 

“What in the fucken fuck were ye gobeshites up ta taday?” asks Fintan, setting down two pints of Guinness.  “Did ye get de start balow on that big new tunnel downtown, huh?”

He laughs a barman’s-who-gives-a-fuck laugh, grabs a white cloth from beneath the counter and executes a few rapid-circular wipes. 

“Pat Murphy as works balow in City Hall says they’re goin’ ta call it the Big Dig!” he polishes the counter with more rapid circular swipes.  “Sure, all ’tis goin’ ta be is a big dig into our fucken wallets!”

He sets the elbows of his white shirt on the damp counter.

“Sure, what do I care?” a mischievous smile cracks his face.  “‘Tis gobeshites like ye, workin’ for big companies that’ll do all de payin’!”

“Welllll …,” I say, before picking up one of the new pints, “I tink ye barman should stay here haf the night countin’ yer tips ferta make sure the taxman gets ag…xactly he’s share.”

I deliberately lean too far forward and pour some of the Guinness down inside the cuff  of Fintan’s white shirt sleeve.

“What the FUCK!” Fintan yells jumping backwards.  “Ya’re some fucken bollix with drink on ya, so ya are!  A right fucken bollix.”

He flicks his bar-cloth, the tip of the white cotton fabric spitting water and spilt-beer into my face.

Slowly, Dorchester’s three-deckers empty into Cú Chulainn’s; one old Caddy full a Paddies at time.

The bar’s bright lights dim lower and lower; red, yellow, and green beams of light flash from behind the stage through the smoke-choked air; the band’s bearded guitarist tortures his red electric guitar through a warbling tune; a cacophonous drum solo snaps back drunken heads, before the singer, head down, microphone cradled in his fist like an ice-cream cone, screeches:

“AAYYE … REMEMBER … that summer in Dublin ….”

On we pint … and pint … and pint. 

The coloured light glances through the smoke into the fissured ceiling tiles, resolving the rectangles into satisfyingly smooth shapes as viewed through the bottom of a pint glass.

The bands rattles through:

“Don’t Forget Your Shovel;”

“Ordinary Man;”

“Dirty Ould Town.”

More pints.

More Caddies full a Paddies jostle into the pub, beaming thirsty smiles.

The Aran Islanders arrive, already wild-eyed-drunk from pinting their way down Dorchester Ave.  They started at noon in the Lower Mills Pub, then stormed the Ashmont Grill for a “fade a steak n’ potatoes,” before repairing to Fields Corner “fer a real drink!”

We chat with Round-Rory and his cousin whose name he never provides.

“Watch dat fooken bollix offa cushion a mine,” Rory screams over the music.  “He’s an awfell man altagether; he’d fight with he’s fooken toenails he wud!”

 On what passes for a stage, the singer mortally wounds “Song for Ireland;” rasping through the interminably long verses, bottoming out badly on the high notes.  He quickly covers his tracks with two-in-a-row rabble rousing renditions of “The Fields of Athenry,” at the end of which we’re all primed to go dig up muskets and start a rebellion.

“Look at who’s over dere,” Round-Rory nods across the bar to a short, powerfully built man, with a shock of black hair, his face dominated by a broad, purpling blackeye.

“Ah, dat oul’ bleddy schrapper from Cunnumara,” the ‘cushion’ throws his head back in disgust.  “I tell ‘ou, if he’s reelly a perfessional boxer then he’d be better off doin’ his thumpin’ in t’ring, an’ not in t’pubs a Dhorchester! He’s a ….”

The ‘cushion’ lapses into rapid-fire-Irish, that I have no chance of decoding.

“Do not, do not, stad anois!” Rory yells, rolling his eyes, tossing his head way back, curving his whole spine.

That I can decode, and my body tightens.

The ‘cushion’ takes a huge swig of his pint and pushes off through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.  

The kitchen at the back of the bar fires up: The smell of the deep-fried flesh of any animal that walks, flies or swims wafts out the too-bright opening in the wall under a large hand painted “BIA” sign.  What passes for a queue forms around the window.  Drunks clamber over one another’s shoulders, waving beer-sodden cash in the window hoping for bags of blisteringly hot food.

With Tom lapsed into a too-many-pints silence, I try to talk to Rory over a soulful rendition of “I Don’t Want to See Another Town.”   

Rory’s too drunk to talk. He slur-yells over the music, lapsing in and out from mangled-English to too-rapid-Irish, confusing my already-confused-by-seven-hours-drinking brain. 

I give up and gawk around the pub searching for familiar faces through the haze of smoke illuminated by shafts of green-yellow-red light.  Mostly it’s young men in their mid-twenties, just like me, crowding out the bar, laughing, reaching for drinks, wolfing down pints of Guinness or hoisting bottles of Bud over their open mouths. 

One tall, bone-thin woman, probably more like mid-thirties, scowling face thick with makeup, stands by herself at the bar.  Cradling a vodka and coke, she glares up into nowhere in front of her eyes, pulling so hard on her cigarette her cheeks dimple. 

As my gaze consumes the length of the bar, I see the ‘cushion’ on the other side of the bar, a half-finished pint of Guinness in one hand, in the other a cigarette jammed hard between thick fingers.  He leans forward to say something to a round-faced, heavily made-up woman perched on a barstool, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.  Whatever he says makes them both throw their heads back, laughing wildly.  His teeth show as his mouth opens wide: Her hand shoots up to yank the falling cigarette from her guffawing mouth. 

The ‘cushion’ emerges from his laugh with a strangely sour face. 

He arches far backwards and downs his pint, streams of Guinness running from the sides of his mouth.  His cigarette hand rises to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. 

The woman’s big eyes flick toward him.  She takes a drink from her tall glass, smoke snakes up from the cigarettes in the overflowing ashtray.  

The ‘cushion’s’ shoulders rise as he takes a deep breath, then he lurch-leans in over the counter trying to order more drink, his cigarette hand flapping impatiently.

I turn around and stare at the band. 

The singer’s face glistens with sweat as, closed-eyed, he works through a gritty-impassioned version of “I Wish I was Back Home in Derry.”  The guitarist and drummer both focus intently on their instruments, paying no attention to the crowd in the bar drinking, smoking, guffawing, occasionally slapping hands and stomping feet to the music.  There’s not one person on the tiny dancefloor in front of the band.

When I spin back around the ‘cushion’s’ nose is inches away from the ‘perfessional’ boxer’s face.  He stabs a forefinger into the boxer’s barrel-chest.  The boxer’s shock of black hair angles backwards making me squint as I anticipate his thick head lunging forward, butting the ‘cushion’ unconscious. 

But no, the boxer’s broad face just breaks into open mouthed guffaw, increasing the rapidity of the ‘cushion’s’ finger stabbing.

With an afternoon behind me spent kinda-sorta fighting with a Canadian rugby team, in the much safer environment of a rugby pitch – with nary a pint glass within a hundred yards of our scuffles – I take this as my cue to hit for the jax. 

As I’m edging my way through the throng of drinkers, the bright-white lights flash three times to note last call.  Those sober enough to register the ominous warning launch a frenzied attack on the bar. 

I push open the toilet door; too-bright light spills into the bar’s smokey dimness, blanching already pale faces, overpowering the hue of the coloured lights, exposing the night’s underbelly of fatigue.

The toilet floor is a half-inch flood of water, beer and piss, littered with a few broken pint glasses, one soggy, half-eaten chicken box and a massive wad of blood-stained toilet paper. 

I walk toes upright, soft rubber heels pushing hard against the tiles to keep my runners from soaking up anything from lake piss-and-beer.  The sink counter is littered with empty Bud bottles, the jagged butt end of a broken, Guinness-stained pint glass, a chicken box empty but for a few gnawed wing-bones. 

I splash past two fellas in tar-blackened workbooks standing in the middle of lake piss-and-beer staring into an open toilet stall.  I stop and look to see why they’re staring.

Inside the stall there’s a half-naked man face down in the nasty flood; his blue jumper soaking up the floor; Wranglers tangled around his ankles. 

On the narrow rim of the white toilet bowl clings an enormous brown shite.

“Jaysys fucken Christ!” laments one of the starers, sighing loudly.  “If on’y he had ta shite on t’floor itself, sure it twoulda ben sumptin.”

Hands on hips, they both slowly shake their heads at a job poorly done.

To be continued….

The Foulness of Thee - Part I

I’m relying on the bar in Cú Chulainn’s to spite gravity and keep me standing.  It’s closing time on a watery May Saturday night and I’m still in my mucky, grass and blood-stained gear after a slugfest above in Franklin Park against a Canadian team that kinda-sorta passed for rugby. 

In the corner of Cú Chulainn’s, on a low-ceilinged stage, a big-bearded guitarist and a bigger-bearded drummer back up a gaunt, sweat drenched front man as he wallops out his third rendition in a row of “The Men Behind the Wire.”  

The men behind the bar, in black pants and beer-spray stained white shirts, dart from cooler to counter with fistfuls of long-necked Buds feeding the flailing hands of voracious last-callers. 

In the back corner, deep fried food is shoveled out the glaringly bright “FOOD” window in exchange for damp dollars that just a few minutes ago woulda been tips for the barmen had not the smell of fried everything consumed the customer with alcohol induced ravenousness.

By the open front door, a Boston cop sits on a barstool sipping an ice-filled pint of Coke, his blue uniform and angular hat incongruous amongst the throng of GAA and Premiership jerseys. 

A barman walks in from the street, his white shirt splattered down the front with blood.

“Jaysys I wen’ out for a fag an’ that bollix Mahoney took a swing at me,” the barman complains to the cop.

“Mah…honey’s a fag as well as a fucken douche bag!” the cop retorts, furrowing his brow, swirling the ice in his glass.

“Nah, nah, nah, not that, not that, ever’thin’s not that!” the barman shakes his head a lot as he unbuttons his shirt.  “He’s a fucken holy scourge Mahoney is with drink on him.  An’ a nicer fella ya wouldn’t meet the length an’ breadth a Dorchester when he’s sober, but then a course he’s never sober!”

The barman whips off his bloodstained dress shirt revealing a white tee shirt with a graphic of a muscle-rippling Cú Chullain gripping a hurl in one land like he’s there to start, or finish, a fight.

With one hand grasping hard at the bar, I look around for more of Tipperary Tom.

We landed here after a long Saturday evening’s drinking that started on the touchline after seventy minutes of ourselves and the Canadians battering the living shite out of one another in the muck.  From Franklin Park we repaired to Nash’s, another Irish bar further down Dorchester Avenue.  The Canadians, down from Toronto for a thirsty weekend walloped down the soup, sandwiches and pints of piss-water beer we provided them as our sometime combatants but now guests, before the whole pub settled in for a wet-Saturdah evening feed a Guinness.

“Whare iz ye’se from?” one of the Canadians asks in strong Northern Ireland accent as he  sets his pint of Guinness down on the counter,.

“Mayo.”

“Tipperary.”

 “Bangor.”

 We variously answer.

 “Oh aye,” the Canadian-Northerner asks, his eyebrows raising, “Bangor N’orn Irelan’?”

 “Yeah,” Ian answers, looking away.

 “Ah Jaysys, I thought it ‘twas Bangor-Erris up in north Mayo you were from!” I say, my non-confrontational side re-emerging after an hour and a half of unmitigated confrontation.

 “An’ did ye’se play for Bangor?”

 “Oh aye, never fer the fursts, but all thee ways up through thee youth teams.”

 “Oh aye,” the Canadian-Northerner stands upright, raises his shoulders, stares each of us in the eyes. 

“I’ played fer thee Civil Service.”

 He stares from one pair of eyes to the next.

 “Ohhhh aaayyye,” I say, cutting into the rising tension.

 “I’n surprised that a rugby club’d bring us tee a pub,” his lips tighten, eyes harden, “with ‘up thee IRA’ an’ ‘fuck thee queen’ written all over thee jax walls.”

 “Gud pint,” Tipperary Tom says.  “We shoulda got dem to carve sumptin about de UVF in dere too.  Maybe dey can just scribble it in after de queen?”

 The burly former Civil Servant’s brow furrows, his eyes narrowing to slits.

 “Here Johnny,” I raise my pint at the barman.  “Will ya give this man a pint a Guinness, he doesn’t appreciate your shithouse artwork, but sure rugby lads don’t fall out over artistic differences.”

 Johnny, his black barman’s trousers halfway to his nipples, raises one bushy eyebrow while staring out from under his other hedge-brow and breathlessly issues:

 “Well Jaysys he better be gone bafore Chewsdah night when t’Wolfe Tones come in they’re playin’ McAnespies in a, in a … in a boxin’ match below in Flatley’s field ferta warm up bafore t’season starts an’ t’Aer Lingus cavalry flies in from every bleddy GAA clubhouse in Ireland ferta steal their places.”

 The Civil Servant’s eyes dart nervously from Johnny to Ian to me.

 “Relax, relax,” I say, trying to sound older than my twenty-five years.  “Have a few pints, go downtown, no wan down there could find t’fucken border, let alone tell ya who lives on what side of it.”

 “Ach aye,” the Civil Servant stares at me, then glares at Ian.  “Thee boys upove in Tow…ronto said Boston wuz a dodgy town … an’ right they ware, right they ware!”

 Still, he stays for the pint Johnny quickly sets on the counter for him.

“They’re ya are now, mudder’s milk, that’s what that is mudder’s milk,” Johnny says peering out under his hedgerow eyebrows.

The Civil Servant nods, picks up the pint and says with a smirk:
“Cheers, an’ God Bless thee Queen!”

We switch the conversation to safer topics like how many drinks the captain of the Exxon Valdez musta drank before that fierce parking job; who was to blame at Hillsborough; and we all lower half a pint to Fly Mannion’s try in Cardiff Arms Park.

“All dat wuz between us an’ de wooden spoon!” Tom says, holding his foam lined, pint glass up to the rugby gods and the cigarette smoke-stained ceiling. 

After a couple of hours, our new best friends from Canadia slap backs, swallow stray pints with chin soaking gulps as the work their way toward the door, leaving to prepare for a real night out.

 “Aye, aye,” the Civil Servant, his eyes watery now with booze, comes up to say his goodbyes.

He leans forward and whispers in a conspiratorial tone.

“Did ye’se ever hear about the time a wee mon got pulled intee an alley in Bell…fast an’ a gun got put up again he’s forehead, an’ thee gunman askes: ‘Are youse Cath’lic … or Prodestant?”

Out of nowhere he loses his footing and lurches for the bar to save himself.

“‘No, no, no’ says the wee mon,” the Civil Servant leans against the bar, a grin plastered across his face.  “I’n nayther Cath’lic nor Prodestant: I’n a Jew.”

He nods emphatically at this unforeseen plot twist.

“‘Oh aye, that’s all gud ‘n well,’ says the gunman, ‘but are ye’se a Cath’lic Jew or a Prodestant Jew?’”

The Canadians depart, taking with them a heap of Saturday night energy.

We drink on until enough of our teammates with families to go home to drift off.  Each swing of Nash’s back door siphons off more of the Saturday evening energy. 

Still, Tom and I cling to the bar.   A couple of pints later the cavalry bustle in: Some Irish friends, faces razored shiny, out for a nuthin-like-startin’-early Saturday night.  We drink guffaw and drink again with them until an always-up-ta-sumptin Kerryman waves us out to his car.

“Will we git a bit smoke lads?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

We pile into his enormous, rust eaten Cadillac Fleetwood.

“Jaysys I a’ways taut de rugby lads wuz fierce posh, an’ look at ye, ye don’t evan have showers.  De luvly seats in me oul Caddy’ll be ruined,” he jokes, careening the huge car out onto Dorchester Ave to the blare of horns from both directions.

“We’ll go up now ta Darchester Donnah, he does always have some gud stuff of a Saturdah night.  Mind ya now, ‘tis t’on’y Saturday that I’d go ta him,” the Kerryman expounds sagely as we whip past brightly lit storefronts.  “Ya cudn’t be like dem ‘Mericans smokin’ it all day long on de job, an’ dem like wombies with deir ould dreamy eyes.”

We park on a dark part of a particularly dark street on Ashmont Hill and walk back half a block until the Kerryman suddenly ducks down the side of a three decker and into the cellar door well.   

The Kerryman pushes open the cellar door.  A bare hundred-watt bulb light floods the tiny hallway with white light.  Just a few feet from the cellar door is another door, a solid metal slab with no hardware on the outside except four fisheye peepholes: Two at standing and two at sitting height.

The Kerryman raps on the metal door.

“Howaya now Donnah, ‘tis yer ould pal from Castleisland,” he calls out loudly and turns to Tom and I.  “See, Donnah’s wan a de Farranfore crowd; sure ‘ou know dey go.  Anyways, he does a’ways be givin’ me shite about some lad as wuz a soldier below at de for on Castle Island, in Southie like.  Not de real Cashelisland back in Karry, an’ dis fella, he wuz within in de cashel, a soldier like, way the fucken-fuck back, … ahh!”

He waves his hand in front of his face impatiently.

“An’ don’t ya see he writ some frightenin’ shite about crows knockin’ on de door an’ all dis stuff, ya know scarin’ de shite outta people.  ‘Mericans do luv scary stuff.  Poh or Poor or sumptin was he’s fucken name.  Donnah does say I’m the ‘Poh from d’udder Cashelisland.’  Ah, he does a lot a talkin’ does Donnah; he’s jawbone don’t git much rest.”

The Kerryman’s ramblings are silenced by the metallic grind of heavy bolts sliding back. The door arcs open to reveal a gaunt thirty-something, with a mane of red hair tied back in a ponytail, in a plain black tee-shirt, sitting in tall-backed office chair.  His long legs push him backwards just enough that we can enter.  He waves us in and points to a small leather sofa, so small that I have to sit on the arm while Tom and the Kerryman flop heavily onto their seats.  As soon as we’re in, Dorchester Donny slams the door shut and drives the bolts home hard.

He tips the chair backwards, flings his hands up behind the ponytail and pivots, bending one gangly leg at a time, eyes dancing across our faces.  The tiny room, lit only by a portable TV screen, is crowded out by the leather sofa, twin four-foot-tall speakers hanging from the wall behind an olive-green metal desk which is itself crowded by a double turntable, a stack of amps, the portable TV, sitting on top a VCR, the tiny TV screen frozen on the bare-chested, cowboyed-hatted helicopter commander scene in Apocalypse Now.  

“Hey my man!” Donny suddenly stops pivot-staring and lurches forward to execute an elaborate handshake, grabbing the Kerryman’s palm, then forearm, then back to palm. 

“I didn’t think you wuz comin’ by, I a’most sol’ all mah cheap shit,” he says in full on urban African American street diction.

“Yerah, wud ‘ou go ‘way outta dat, sure I tol’ ‘ou I wuz goin’ ta siven a’clock mass an’ I’d be by after.”

“Yeah, it’s fucken nine thurty now, that’s what I mean,” Donny’s faint-red eyebrows knit together.  “When I wenta mass, it was over in thurty minutes.  I don’t like people ta show up outside their slot, makes me jumpy, plus the neighbors talk.  You’re gonna haf to stay for a beer now, my nine o’clock just left, this aint no Mc-fucken-Donalds with people pullin’ up for their order.”

“Ah, sure dat’s fine, no bodder atallatallatall, I’ll have a bud.”

“Ya’ll have what I got that’s what you’ll have,” Donny yanks on the desk filing cabinet, which opens to reveal it’s a false front for a dorm fridge full of beer.

“Here,” he hands the Kerryman a Coors Lite.

“Coo…ers Lite!” the Kerryman yelps.  “Sure, dat’s what I drink when I’m off de beer.”

We take our bottles silently. 

As the bottle opener is passed around, I absorb the rest of my surroundings:  Across from me in the low-ceilinged room, a poster of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell covers the entire wall.  The blue hue from the portable TV screen purples Hell’s red and tints the magical motorcycle’s white-hot exhaust sky blue.  Behind the desk the wall is a collage of metal band concert posters pinned one over the other at odd angles with Molly Hatchet covering Iron Maiden covering Black Sabbath.

“So, these dudes from the old country too?” Donny asks, issuing a confident snort-chuckle as he stares with curiosity at our mucky legs, stained rugby shorts, hair jutting out at every angle. “Or are they Eye-rish rodeo clowns?”

“Yera dese two leibides was off playin’ foreign games,” the Kerryman waves his already half-finished bottle at me perched on the arm of the sofa.  “Dey should git a spark a sense an’ pack in dat ould rugby an’ play a bit a football with de Tones or Shannon Blues.”

“Man, I don’t know about that,” Donny’s brow furrows.  “Football’s too much man, when I was at BC high football players got banged up pretty good.  I think the best way to do sports is watchin’ them on TV … from your sofa … with a beer … an’ a toke.”

“Ya cud be right dere, ya cud be right, or ta have ould bet on dem is not bad nayther,” the Kerryman offers with a mischievous chuckle.

“Let’s get some Eye-rish tracks rollin’ for you laddies,” Donny swivels in his office chair.  “I wuz watchin’ Apocalypse Now but I don’t like that fucken elevator music they got on the soundtrack during the beach battle scene, so I turn down the volume an’ play Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs.’”

He slides open one of the desk’s file cabinet drawers that actually is a drawer, and not a front for a fridge, and flicks through albums until he pulls out Thin Lizzy’s “Live and Dangerous”.

“This is gud music,” he nods, scrunches his lips together.  “So gud ya wonder how it aint Amer…, ya know, how it wuzn’t made here.”

He slides the black disc out of the Phil-Lynott-fucking-the-world album cover, and holding the slim disc gingerly between his fingertips drops it gently over the spindle.

“Aragh, sure it prolly was made in ‘Merica, sure dem leibides back at home couldn’t hardly manu…facture a … a ….”

The spindle hiccups and the black disc glides down onto the turntable.

“… a fart if dey didn’t have de ‘Merican food ferta pervide de wind, sure dem fuckers wudn’t …”

Donny’s faint, red eyebrows knit together as his index finger gently raises the record player arm and moves the needle to the second thick groove line on the black disc.  Ever so slowly he lowers the needle into the groove.  The amp lights spring to life; the speakers crackle.

“… work ta warm demselves, livin’ off that bleddy oul EEC money, dey’d nearly git a fucken grant from de Gurmans for de same fart de ‘Merican food made fer ‘em!”

A muscular guitar riff rips through the speakers!

The riff slows just enough to let a rapid drumbeat add rhythmic energy.

The guitar riff ramps up: Then drums: Guitar: Drums: On and on until Lynott’s earthy voice melodically overtakes the music:
“Guess who just got back ….”

“You know this song?” Donny asks.

“Course we do, every fucken gobeshite in Irelan’ knows that song,” the Kerryman says, swigging his bottle of Coors Lite.  “‘Tish like mudder’s milk ta us.”

“Really!” Donny’s long legs push his chair back, eyebrows rising in genuine confusion.  “Thin Lizzy seem so genuinely un-Eye-rish to me.  Mom don’t even like me to play their music upstairs.  An’ that Shin…aid O’Connor, the bald one, after that big sin she done on live TV, I had ta bring her LPs down here.  Ma tol’ me one time it was a sin ta play them.  See, ta Ma Eye-rish music is all … you know the stuff that crowds out yer ears, like there’s like fucken fifty a them in the band, everyone from little shits to old farts, all beatin’ away on banjos an’ accordions, an’ they got like ten thousand fiddlers, elbows flyin’, eyes closed.  It gets ta be so much you can’t even think.”

“Ah, dat’s different,” Tom speaks up, seeming to come to life with the music.  “See dat’s Irish music, ya know like ceile music.  That’s on’y fer like Thursdah night in de pub.  On de weekend ya need a bit sumptin more …. moderner.”

“Mom don’t agree with that!” Donny laughs and points his finger at the whiteish ceiling tiles above him.  “Every Saturday on the Eye-rish Hour, she’s up there cleanin’ an’ cookin’ an’ clappin’!”

“Yeah, yeah, I mane, dat is Irish music, but not music made in Ireland,” Tom says, sounding drunker than he looks.  “Like, ‘tis made in Ireland … but like no one fucken lishens to it.”

Tom looks from the Kerryman to me, his brow furrowing as he shakes his head.

“What in de fuck do dey make that music for anyway?” he asks, his face contorting in confusion.

“Here,” Donny holds out a baggy for the Kerryman who elaborately withdraws a few notes from his jeans pocket.

“Dere, ‘ou can kape de change,” he says with a laugh as he stands to go.

“SIT DOWN!” Donny snaps.  “Like I said, this aint no McDonalds, you’re gonna need to cool your jets.  Fucken sly Maggie Leary’s been askin’ mom about ‘all my friends stoppin’ by for five minutes’.”

He holds his hands up in air quotes. 

“I jus’ tol’ mom that I don’t like ta go out, which is the truth.  Goin’ outside sucks.  People suck.”

We sit through Donny teeing up and playing Gary Moore’s “Back on the Streets” and then, swirling thirst from our now empty bottles, we slog through the Rats “Joey’s on the Street Again.”

“Jaysys Donny, fer a lad who dushn’t like goin’ out, ya surely do like songs about bein’ out n’ about!” the Kerryman laughs.

“Awright, fuck off so!”

  Donny snatches the record player arm so fast it makes a swooshing sound.

  “Oh Jaysys, ya scratched it,” I say instinctively, my older brother’s fists suddenly appearing in my psyche.  

  “Who gives a fuck!” Donny snaps.  “They’re a bunch a fucken Irish fags singin’ pussy music.”

  We file out, the steel door slamming behind us, the bolts shooting home.

“That lad’d want ta go for a gud walk some day,” the Kerryman says, his hands stuck down deep in his jeans pockets.  “Sittin’ in dere all de time floggin’ dis stuff ishn’t gud for him.  I don’t care if it ‘tis goin’ ta make him a millunaire like he says.  He’s mudder is from Farranfore ya know.  Sure, ‘ou couldn’t trust de Farranfore crowd!”

Post Pandemic Wisedom

I’m sitting in an airy Dublin Airport coffee shop trying to caffeinate my way past the counterfeit night’s sleep you get on a trans-Atlantic flight.  A crew of black-pants-white-shirts cleaners surge into the coffee shop, all joke-laughing loudly in a language I can’t discern.  Led by a fast-moving-fit-looking, twenty-something Dub, who stops only to run his hand through his highly coiffed brown hair, they rapidly wet wipe crumbs and wrappers from tables, sweep, mop, and yank bulging black-plastic bags from rubbish bins.  

“HEY KAREENA, KAREENA!” the Dub yells running his hand through his air, but not looking at anyone.

“Her names is Karum,” an olive-skinned young woman says, her eyes smiling under thick black eyebrows.

“Yeah, yeah,” the Dub runs his hand through his hair again. 

“HEY KAREENA!”

“It’s Karum is hers name,” the young woman repeats with laughing confidence.

“Yeah, yeah, tell ‘er she ken go on ‘er break but be back be haf eight.”

The confident young woman stalks towards the edge of the field of tables.

“Hey K,” she yells to a slight, olive-skinned young woman with long black hair. “You kin go on breaks.”

Karum stops halfway through a broad table wipe, stands upright without looking at anyone and leaving the rag on the table, ambles off, eyes down at the floor.

The cleaning crew swarm past me, avoiding my table; their glances noting it for later.

Ten minutes later outside I see Karum on an isolated traffic island stamping out a cigarette, smoking gushing from her mouth and nose. 

I pass her, now it’s my turn to look down and make for the taxi-rank.

As I approach a bottle-green Toyota Camry, a stubby, balding sixty-something bolts from the driver’s seat and limping, deftly opening the back door on his second heavy step.

“Jump in dere now sur,” he says on a loud exhale as he grabs the wheelie bag from my hand and scoots around to the back.

As I sit in, the boot slams closed behind me.

Dangling from the rearview mirror is his taxi driver’s license for.

“Tommy de calls me,” he says, as he drops heavily into the driver’s seat, his eyes catching mine reading the license.  “Me mammy called me Thomas but all the lads calls me dat, since de vury first day a scooell, an’ de brudders batin’ de livin’ daylights outta us.”

“Are you awright there,” I deliberately change the subject, trying to hide my embarrassment at being caught checking his license.  

“That’s a heavy limp you have.”

“I’ll tell ya now de God’s honest trute: A frien’ a mine owens a pub balow in Spain an’ I wuz down ta him two munts back ta spend de few quid I got from Leinster House for de Covid.  Ya know how Meehal Martin wuz splashin’ cash around ferta confuse us all, an’ I wuz afeard de bollix’d take it back if it stayed in me bank account too long.  Anyways I hadn’t seen Larry for munts, so I fly down with Ryanair.  A course de first we done was go on a huge piss up an’ we wuz dancin’ with dese two ould birds in he’s pub.”

He stops for a breath, scratches his head.

“Jaysys I never axed ya where ya wuz goin?”

“Yeah, we’ll just head into town an’ let me fish the address out of my phone.”

“Anyways, balow in Spain all dem pints had me tinkin’ I wuz John Tra-fucken-volta an’ didn’t I fall ohver, pissed drunk I wuz, an’ de side a me knee got kinda twisted on a step.  Don’t ya know down dere de pubs don’t have no inside nor outside, they’re all a bit a boat, an’ de dancefloor was haf in an’ haf out, but I wuz fully out … outta me fucken moind dat is!” 

He laughs a dry taximan-laughing-at-his-own-joke laugh and then twist-nods tightening his grip on the steering wheel. 

“But didn’t I had ta go ta me doctor when I got home, an’ he says ta me, ‘now Tommy tell me de God’s honest trute, whot wuz ya doin?’  So, I tol’ him, but I tol’ him ta say nuthin’ ta de missus.  I mean she’s on’y me girlfrien’ anyways, de wife moved out years ago, but still an’ all we’re sharin’ a flat an’ I don’t want no trouble dere, an’ she has a heap a brudders dat we do run inta when we’re out on de town.  So, de doctor gives me some tablets ferta take, an’ I’m ta come back ta him in two weeks.  Sure, ‘tis on’y an’ me walkin’ out de door dat he says I’m not ta drink wid dese tablets, well on’y have tree pints a night, sure dat’s not drinkin!”

He shakes his head, sighs loudly.

“Wat does dese doctors be tinkin’ when de give ya orders like dat, sure dere isn’t a man in Dublin as cud live like dat, not unless he wuz de driest of de driest a dryballs in de city!”

His head keeps shaking slowly as he plumbs the depths of his disbelief at such foolishness.

“Now a frien’ a mine,” he starts up from nowhere, “just phoned me on de phone dis mornin’ ta say dat he’s new hybrid taxi, I mean it’s a coupley a years old, but it’s new compared ta dis ould warhorse I’m drivin’.  I passed two hundret an’ seventy towsand on de clock a dis Toyoda last month.  Yeah, yeah I’m not makin’ dat up.  When I bot dis car, it had turty towsand on de clock, an’ I near kilt de ould civil serfant dat sould it ta me wid questions on where did he drive an’ how often, just ta be sure de cute Curry whore wuzn’t lyin’ ta me – you’re not from Curry are ya?  Ya sound like a lad from down de country with a bit ow a Yank mixed in.”

“You’re right there, but not Kerry, Mayo … God Help Us!”

“Gawd he’p ye’se is rite, I don’t haf no time for sport tallatall, but as far as I unnerstan’ from de GAA professors below in de pub, ye’se is never done losin’ All Irelands,” he shakes his head, purses his lips.  “Sure, ye’se’d want ta cop yerself’s on an’ win wan just ta shut up all dem GAA professors as does sit in front a every telly in Ireland.  I can’t stan’ dem, how dey knows ever’thin’ … after de match, but de couldn’t tell ya nuthin’ bafore, nor let ya see deir shaggin’ bettin’ slips neither.  Oh no, what a shower a shites dey are.  But anyways, I wuz tellin’ ya about me frien’ wid de hybrid, anudder Toyoda but wanna dem little Preeuz tings, anyways, de battary dies, an’ da ya know how much de garage wanted offa him for a new battary?”

“Oh, I imagine a lot, they’re sayin’ those batt’ries are fierce expensive,” I try to summon up empathy for the unknown taximan.

“Fourteen towsand Euros!” he falls uncharacteristically silent and nods for effect.  “Yeah, four…teen towsand, can ya believe dat?  An’ dat ould fool Eamonn Ryan, he’s tryin’ ta get us all ta drive dem cars with fourteen towsand Euro battaries.  Jaysys, I’d luv ta meet dat fella of a Saturdah night round haf ten … an’ me wid a hammer!”

An hour later, my bag dropped off, I’m quixotically fighting the loss of a night’s sleep waiting for a different mode of transportation: Dublin Bus.

“D’ya know how much this costs?” I ask a round-faced, fifty-something man who’s standing perfectly erect next to the bus stop.

I’ve been reading the tiny words and digits on the bus stop sign for five minutes without getting any wiser as to how to actually pay your way onto a bus.

“Two Euros with yer card,” he answers, taking a half step backwards.

“With a credit card?” I persist.

“Nooo!  With yer Leap card,” he answers, his face clouding with concern as he steps back two full steps.  “De bus doesn’t know nuthin about credit cards … an’ … an’ he’ll charge ya more than two Euros if you use cash, with no change back.”

“Oh ok, … thanks,” I hold up both palms, sorry for having caused him some distress.

“An’ he’s late,” he steps back to his original position and points at a digital sign that reads: “0 MINUTES”

Then he resumes his straight-backed-eyes-forward stance.

The double-decker Dublin Bus arrives.  I drop three Euro coins into the fare machine, climb the stairs, take my seat and peer out at streets upon streets of tidy row houses, their slate roofs snaking off into the distance.  

The bus rumbles on, making me squint each time it’s tall roof whacks the branches of a doubly unfortunate tree stuck on the side of busy Blackhorse Avenue.

A young Asian couple boards the bus and take their seats two rows up from me.

McKee Barracks dominates my viewing.  Ironically, it’s an achingly picturesque yellowish-orange bricked cavalry barracks replete with tiny towers overlooking gateways, garrets for lonely officers far from home, tall, peaked grey-slated roofs.  The Brits, long before they enjoyed Brexiteering, built it back in 1892 as home for the 10th Hussars; who then Hussared Dublin into submission for thirtyish years, slashing down the Irish from the backs of the seven hundred cavalry horses stabled in the barracks.  Originally named Marlborough Barracks for one of Winston Churchill’s forbears, it was rebranded by the victorious Irish, as they exiteered from the Empire, in honour of Dick McKee.  McKee was a planner with the Squad, Michael Collins’ counterintelligence unit within the IRA that killed or badly wounded fifteen British not-so-secret agents on the first Irish Bloody Sunday: November 21, 1920. The future-Brexiteers shot McKee that evening as his body full of broken bones was “escaping” from Dublin Castle.

We pass this puzzle piece of Irish history and stall at another, more puzzling piece: The North Circular Road – the bypass road down which traffic can barely pass.

From two rows up I hear the young Asian woman ask:  

“Do I looks Chineeze?”

“Wot?” the young man asks.

“Do … I … looks Chineeeeeeze?” she repeats with appropriate emphasis.

“Yes,” he nods reassuringly

“I do?”

Her eyebrow raises as she smiles.

“Yes, you do. Koreans no speak Chineeze, can Japaneeeze, speak Chineeeze?” he asks.

“No, just pirtend Chineeeze, you know … to confuse.”

The bus lurches through traffic, brakes squealing just before it devours the cars ahead of us.  Thusly we edge through Stoneybatter and along Blackhall Place.  The massive dinosaur that is a Dublin Bus double-decker lurches and squeals its way through a ninety-degree turn onto the Quays.  Immediately I feel a rush of Cultie-comfort: “If you can find de river, den you can find Heuston an’ de train home” – went the young redneck adage.

I debus at O’Connell Bridge: The statue of the burly Kerry-man smiling sardonically at his own bridge, his head plastered with pigeon shite.

As an unmitigated Cultie (subgenus; rugby, literate) my points of reference in Dublin are the Palace Bar, Landsdowne Road and Easons.  It’s an October Thursday at lunchtime so the first two don’t make sense … not yet.  Either Easons has been corporatized into a second-rate disappointment of a book shop or a younger me’s taste in books was decidedly disappointing.  I repair to the redoubtable book purveyor Hodges Figgis where I spend a respectable period of time picking out a book, which I immediately regret buying.  Then I wander through some National museums, viewing in the Museum of Archaeology what looks suspiciously like Game of Thrones props (complete with a yellowed, fractured skull) and then onto the Museum of Natural History or as the ever concise and witty Dubs have rebranded as the Dead Zoo.

With Landsdowne Road’s Aviva Stadium not open for rugby this Thursday afternoon, I’m left with no choice but to repair to the Palace Bar.  This is the, so genuine you’d think it was made for tourists, pub from which Michael Collins is alleged to have directed operations to assist the Brexiteers in honing their exiteering skills.  The Palace was also haunted by one of Ireland’s greatest poets, Patrick Kavanagh, who ordered copious quantities of pints with his “thick tongued mumble,” occasionally paying for said pints with bouncing cheques.

“A towrist is it y’are,?” the thickset young barman askes, as he sets down on the counter a creamy pint of Guinness.

“Yeah, yeah, sorta, here for a weddin’, down the country.”

“We doan’t see dat many Yanks days, not since de Covid,” he folds his pudgy arms and stares across the counter at me.  “De Covid scared youse off so it did, but sure youse’ll be back, de Yanks cannit survive widout us.”

“Well, I’m actually from here, you know like, … I grew up here, but I have been out there a lon….”

“Ah sure I on’y seen de dollars in yer wallet, dats what says where youse’re from dese days: dollars is Yanks; Euros could be anywan; an’ Sterlin’ … ya never see dat accept maybe some lad back from Old Traffords.  It’s loike hen’s teet dese days ta see a pickgure a Queen Lizzie on a tenner.”

“Interestin’” I say, closely watching this behind-the-counter-sage closely as he grabs a damp cloth and wipes the counter.

“A weddin’ youse’re home fer is it?” his unibrow squiggles interrogatively.

“Yeah, yeah, down the coun….”

“I’ll mark yer card for ya now wid dem weddin’s down de countree,” he leans over the counter and lowers his voice to a whisper.  “Doan’t be askin’ de bar manager when de bar is clowsin’, he’ll lie …” he nods slowly, “an’ tell ya much later than it’s really clowsin’, so youse don’t get ta stock up wid pints an’ keep him dere wid all noight.”

He leans in so close I can smell stale cigarette smoke off his breath.

“Youse wanta ask a young barman, or a gurl, de do have foreign gurls survin’ down de country.  See, de young fellas don’t know no better dan ta tell ya de trute, so youse ken have a haf gallon set up on de table in front a ya at clowsin’ time.”

Over the next twenty fours I soak my mind in this thousand-year-old-city wisdom.  Then I decamp for the hinterlands, where two days later, buttressed by this experience, I survive a “steak-or-salmon-red-or-white” wedding retaining fully half my sanity and a tenth of my liver. 

In fear of both losing my hard-earned status as an amateur drinker and the deadly hangovers that accompany this status, I forgo the unibrowed barman’s advice on creating a strategic reserve of pints at closing time.  When the bar lights flash on and off, and a drunken maul mushrooms at the bar, I drift outside the hotel for some air.

It turns out fresh air is not so fresh at hotel bar entrances as three young women … no let’s be honest they’re probably not even eighteen, belch thick clouds of sickly-sweet flavoured vape-smoke, while a group of older men … no let’s be honest, they’re probably only in their forties and fifties but have been aged decades by alcohol, puff energetically on cigarettes.

I try to step away, but the way forward is blocked in front by a minibus and when I turn to go down the path I’m blocked by a forty-something-going-on-seventy-year-old man leaning heavily on two canes, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smoke gushing down his nose.  He’s stalled out as he tries to catch his breath.

“Sorry dere,” he gasps but appears unable to restart his motion.

I step back not wanting to appear impatient.

“I’n waitin’ fer de bus,” he gasps out a mouthful of smoke, nodding at the minibus.

“We’ll be goain’ now when de rest a dem hoolagans cum outta de bar,” clips a short, stocky man leaning against the minibus.  He’s got a Yankees baseball cap jammed so far onto his head that his ears protrude up past the navy-blue fabric.

“Do I haf time for annudder pint?” starts the man on the canes.

“Ya doan’t,” the brim of the Yankee’s hat moves over and back rapidly.  “We’re awready late, if dem udders doan’t cum out soon ‘til just be you an’ me on de bus.”

“‘Tis turrible,” the man on the canes turns and stares me in the eye.  “De way dis country is gone, we hafta take a bus over here from ours village jest ta get a pint of a Saturdah night.”

“Dats on’y causa dem two publicans we haf in our village,” the stocky fella turns to me, his finger wagging in my face.  “See dere wuz on’y two pubs in our village an’ dey boat shut down durin’ de Covid see, an’ den wan a dem wuz owned be a big farmer, on’y he didn’t bodder his arse openin’ it up agin, just took de free Covid money an’ never said nathin ta no wan.”

He draws in a breath, his chunky torso swelling, shoulders rising.

“An’ d’other wan is pure disaster altagether, sure he cud har’ly run it atallatallatall even when people wuz looin’ for drink he couldn’t make a bob in dere.”

The brim of his hat moves slowly from side to side.

Out of the hotel comes a short man with bandy legs and wild eyes; his right arm fishing deep in his pocket for coins. 

Behind him lurks two more scowling, prematurely aged faces.

The bandy-legged man pulls a two Euro coin from his pocket and holds it up.

“Is dis de bus fer Lourdes?” he calls out loudly, dropping the coin into the stocky man’s hand. 

Everyone, even the underage drinker-smokers, laugh louder than the joke seems to warrant.

“Ya know whot?” he says, slipping a box of twenty Silk Cut cigarette from the shirt pocket of the man on the canes.  “I went ta Lourdes wid wan short leg an’ wan long leg, an’ I cum back wid two short legs!”

The growing crowd peals with laughter.

The bandy-legged man lights two cigarettes and hands one to the man on the canes.

“Will we go so?” the stocky man asks, the brow of his hat surveying the crowd.

“Will ye cum wid us gurls?” the bandy-legged man yells over to the vapers.

The teenagers titter but turn their backs, vape-smoke billowing above their hair.

“Cum on den,” the stocky man says, the door of the bus opening with a slap.  “Mammy’ll be asleep when I get home an’ I can watch a bitta porn on de telly.”

“Jaysys we’ll all go wid you so,” the man on the canes says through a mouthful of smoke.

“Ya willn’t, cause Mammy’ll smell dem cigarettes off ye an’ kill me in de mornin’.”

Slowly they each negotiate their way up the two steps into the minibus.

The door slaps closed.

The bus purrs down the driveway, its red lights shimmering in exhaust smoke.

Out of Fashion

 I’m on the road from Party to Tourmakeady, my father in the passenger seat mime-critiquing my driving; his left foot breaking hard into the rental car’s floor as we veer, at twenty miles-an-hour, into a sharp corner.  

I feign indifference, poorly; my teeth grind-critiquing his not-so-fancy footwork.  

Off to our left, gateways in the trimmed-by-Guinness-and-cattle-lorries blackthorn bushes that line the fields yield us an occasional glimpse of the beauty and expanse of Lough Mask extending its gunmetal-grey watery surface all the way to foreign land of County Galway.

Home on holidays after handful of years in Boston, today my father and I are on a fashion mission.  I would more precisely describe it as a lack of fashion mission, but the fashionistas have solemnly decreed that indifference to fashion is, by their achingly ironic logic, itself a fashion. 

My goal for today is to procure a navy-blue jumper, heavy enough for even a Boston winter day, but light enough that it doesn’t look quite like a suit of armour.  Ideally it would be the progeny of the selfsame navy-blue jumper that I’m both wearing today and have worn in Boston for the past two years, with its clothing-name translated to “sweater.” 

A navy-blue jumper that covers a never-met-an-iron-in-its-life collared shirt, with a pair blue Wrangler straights and black leather, never-in-their-sad-life-polished shoes is the attire in which my fashion-indifferent mind clothes my human body.  The only modifications to this lack-of-fashion dress code are when work requires that I either swap out the Wranglers for a pair of anonymous navy pants or that I swap the never-polished black shoes for muddy work boots.

My simple mind needs life itself to be simple.  And because life is never simple, I exact revenge by keeping anything I can under strict control.

On a previous trip home, I had elected to shop in Clerys in Dublin.  Clerys was the huge shop – or at least in the 1970s was considered huge in an as yet not consumerism-fixated-Ireland – to which every Irish mammy dreamed of visiting to outfit the entire family in one extreme jumper-tugging, foot into shoe squeezing, “be quiet ya brat” back of the head clattering, session. 

There I was in Clerys, my trusty blue jumper cast off as I rifled through the bins of jumpers that Clerys buyers had erroneously thought were “fashionless enough” for strapping young Irish men.  I wildly plucked one jumper after another out of the pile, exasperated at the sight of fashionable designs, colours other than blue, highly risqué collar shapes (probably from France,) until I finally found what I wanted.  Pulling on the perfectly weighted, navy-blue jumper, I felt the thrill of success, only to realize I’d just tried my own old jumper.

 Dejected, I walked out onto O’Connell Street to plead my case with Jim Larkin.

“Now ‘twas out this way that I solved my first case as detective,” my father, his left foot momentarily still, says with a sigh.

“Are ya serious?” I respond with genuine enthusiasm for his opening up.  Perhaps his nervous-passenger stress is prying open his mind.  I know for sure he’s another being who keeps anything he can under control.

“Yeah, ‘twas way back in the early sixties, an’ did ya know that when we’d be out on roads like this, they’d on’y be dusty ould dirt roads.  I’m not jokin’ ya.  There was hardly a drop a tarmac in the county, maybe not even in Connacht.  The only road that was tarmacked out of Castlebar atallatall was the Roscommon road for people going to Dublin.  Everywhere else we were bumping along in old Ford Zephyrs, God bless an’ save us, but they were great ould yokes, them Zephyrs.”

He grits his teeth and throws his head back.

“No road signs nor nuthin, no need for them, sure everyone knew where they were goin’.  We’d get sent out ta find someone, no address nor nuthin, just a name an’ a townland.  Half the people’d be helpful, an’ t’other half wouldn’t even look ya in t’eye.  That’s how it went out here, an’ a course we’d get lost, every road looking the same ta us as t’others.  An’ d’ya how we’d find our way back?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I say, after a decent few moments of pursed-lips, head shaking.

“Telegraph poles.  Nearly every village had a Post Office with a telegraph in it, an’ we knew if we followed the poles an’ wires for long enough we’d end up on a main road.”

“An’ wouldn’t you meet other cars that you ask where they were comin’ from?”

“Orra, hardly atallatallatall, sure who’d have a car in them days on’y t’odd doctor maybe or a teacher who had to drive a ways ta their school, an’ judges I suppose.  Them ould shi…,” he shakes his head fierce fast, “always took care a themselves, an’ them on mileage.  That was a big thing then, ta be on mileage.  Some lassie above in Dublin an’ her maybe from Cork or Kerry pro…cessin’ mileage forms sent in from Mayo.”

He throws his head backwards.

“An’ the poor thing, she couldn’t find Achill on a map, if she had a map ta find it on.  An’ sure there’d be roads washed out with rain an’ a tree blown down could close a road for a day or two, all kinds of reasons why courthouses were tens a miles further apart than a crow would fly.”

He grits his teeth again, stares straight ahead at the sun glistening off the wet tarmac.

“Ah sure back in them days, I don’t know that we even knew we owned the country.  I think the half a them, certainly the civil servants above on cushy numbers in Dublin, were thinking Harold Macmillan would come take the country back any day now, an’ pay all the crazy bills they’d run up.”

“Are you serious?  Did people really think the Brits’d come back again.”

“Naaahh, I don’t think so,” he shakes his head slowly.  “I think some of them above in Dublin as thieved as much they could, they woulda ben happy to have someone come in an’ fix things again.  Sure, there was ships full a people leaving this country in them days an’ the supposed guverment able ta do nuthin about it.  You’d turn around an’ half a village’d be gone.  The best a young lads an’ lassies, all over there in New York, Chicago, London, even Boston.  Sure, you’re the wan that’d be meetin’ them people who left then.”

“I suppose so, you do come across a fair wallop a people who’ve been out in Boston since then.  There was ould fella from Leitrim I met in a pub one night.  He was fierce bitter altagether.  He had never gone back to Ireland, not even once since … I think it wuz sixty … three.  The father had died a few years before he left, an’ then mother died suddenly, a heart attack or something.  Anyways, twoulda taken him a week or more to get home on a ship an’ she’d a ben buried by then, so he never went.  Then he fought with the brother over the farm. The two of them sendin’ nasty letters over an’ back across t’Atlantic.  Course the mother, or father, had left no will nor nuthin.  Anyway, the brother drank the farm in a few years an’ he went off to London leaving nuthin’ but money owed.  So, yer man never went back.  Nuthin’ to go back to.  Isn’t it sad, them sorts a lives?”

“Aaahhh, ‘tis, ‘tis, sure this bleddy country … ya can’t trust it.  When I was a young buck, back in the thirties, an’ Dev takin’ on the might a the British Empire … on our backs.  ‘Burn ever’thin’ British but their coal’ says he, an’ him atin’ three square meals a day above in Dublin.  An’ sure I believe the British barely notice we went again them.  Meanwhile, below in Clare, out in Tullig we’re flingin’ calves over the side of the cliffs ‘cause the farmers didn’t have the grass ta feed them.  Yeah, yeah, ‘twas terrible, so bad that Dev started givin’ a few bob for calf hides to at least stop that madness.”

We drive on, the tires hissing through a huge puddle.  The clouds clear revealing the surprise that a clear, blue sky lives behind their grey-gloom.

“D’ya see up there now,” Da points across in front of me.  “That’s where that Shaw lad lived, d’ya remember him, t’actor.”

“Oh yeah, the fella from Jaws.”

“I don’t know … what he was in,” Da throws his head back in disdain at Hollywood.  “But he was a big shot.  He had ta register with us within in Castlebar as a foreign alien.  I mean not in the way some Pakistani fella’d be registerin’ with his paperwork all upside down, speckled with food stains an’ half the pages missin’.  No, no, no.”

He shakes his head.

“Shaw’d have a Ballinrobe solicitor come in with all the paperwork in perfect order.  An’ it’d barely be on yer desk when the shites above in Dublin’d start ringin’ down ta the barrack ta tell us ta hurry up he was goin’ abroad ta Hollywood.  ‘Abroad ta Hollymount is it?’ says I ta wan them, ‘sure he’s free to motor over there any day he likes!’  I’m glad I’m done with that lot an’ them ringin’ ya on the phone makin’ ya feel like you’re the eejit.”

He turns and stares across me out to Lough Mask as it turns slowly from grey to blue.

“An’ the poor ould divil of a Pakistani tryin’ to make a few bob sellin’ shirts outta the back of his van above in Market Square, all his paperwork’d go down ta the bottom a the stack when a big shot’s pile came in.  Ferranti, the Italian millunaire out in Massbrook at Lough Conn, he was another one.  He had ta register with us too.  But he was wan a them as didn’t like anyone ta have anathin’ over him.”

“An’ why was yer man from England, t’Irish fella that useta be on the BBC, why was he in our house on Riverdale talkin’ ta you about Shaw one time?”

“How did you know Terry Wogan came ta our house?” he turns fast to me, his bushy eyebrows knitting together.

“I brought ye a cup a tea within in the sittin’ room.  My one brush with t’rich an’ famous.  I was in there all ears, goin’ as slow as I could with the tea, an’ he said sumptin about Shaw.”

“Ahh, that was all ould talk.  He was tryin’ ta get Shaw inta some filum, sure the money these fellas’d talkin’ about, it’d choke a horse it would.  How could anyone be worth milluns ta stand in front of a camera sayin’ a pack a lies of a story?”

He shakes his head rapidly in disgust.

“I’ll tell ya, I said ta the lads above the barrack wan time, after I had ta go down ta Massbrook ta get Ferranti’s signature that was missin’ from wan a the forms.  As good as his Dublin solicitors were they missed a form, or maybe we brought in a new form ta confuse them.  Anyways some shite from the Department rang an’ said ta go down an’ get it signed fast.”

He snorts at the memory of the phone call from Dublin.

“An’ sure Massbrook is a bleddy mansion of a house.  Orra yeah, with everything just so, white tablecloths an’ a big ould clock tickin’ away in the corner, glasses for wine an’ … oh stop would ya.  Nuthin, we’d useta.  An’ nice enough of Ferranti he offered me a cup tea or a drink if I took a drink.  But afterwards, I said ta the lads above in the barrack that if Ferranti could see how I lived, it’d be like how I feel when I go into a Traveller’s caravan.  It’d be the vury same thing.  He wouldn’t be able ta live like me any more than I can live like the Hen.”

“But why did Wogan come to you?”

“Aaahhh, he was havin’ a hard time trackin’d down Shaw ferta talk ta him, an’ … I don’t remember who I asked, but someone tol’ me when Shaw was below in the big house for a few weeks.  So, whoever it wuz asked me, I tol’ them an’ Wogan come over from London ta see him.  I’m not sure if anything ever came of that filum, but unless an’ it appears on the telly some evening, I’ll never know.  I certainly won’t be goin’ above ta the cinema puttin’ money in Shaw’s nor Wogan’s pockets.”

“In…terestin’,” I say, remembering not knowing who Wogan was at the time, but knowing his was a big shot because of the sportscar parked outside our house on Marion Row.

I see a roadside sign for a pub serving lunch.

“Will we go in this place comin’ up for a bit a lunch?” I ask.

“We won’t no, no, no!” Da says, surprisingly emphatically.  “I’ll tell ya what, after the wool factory, we’ll go home be Westport; there’s a place down the quays there that has a good lunch, they do great potatoes.  I find a lot restaurants cannit do good potatoes.  I don’t know what they do be doin’ within in them restaurant kitchens, even an ould dope like me can cook a pot a potatoes.”

With the courage of the righteous, we press on to the Gaeltra Wool Factory Shop in a clueless attempt to assuage my craving for a lack-of-fashion.

Our tires crunch in across the Factory’s graveled car park.  Da’s left foot mimes a hard stop as we approach the factory wall and my left foot obliges … but only at the last minute.

We stand out. 

I stretch all four limbs.  My body, not yet recovered from jet lag, and too many nights with too many pints, welcomes the stretch’s release of a wave of fabricated good feeling.

Inside the Gaeltra Factory Shop the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with shelving jammed with thick wool jumpers.  I take one look and know immediately that these jumpers have a distasteful essence of fashion about them and thus fail to qualify for a role in my fashionless wardrobe.  Still, I don’t want to immediately disappoint Da that the trip, his idea, was entirely for nothing, so I start rummaging amongst the dowdiest shelves in the hope they might contain a morsel of fashion despair.

After a few minutes I tire of my dissimulation as an avid shopper and mope around, hands pushed deep into Wrangler pockets, unpolished black leather dragging sideways across Gaeltra’s carpet.  Da, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his anonymously blue pants, is at the other end of the shop, his reading glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose, head cocked backwards to catch the lens just right as he reads the shop’s notice board.

“I think I’m good here,” I say, coming up and standing next to him.  “I didn’t find any….”

Embarrassed to say that I didn’t find a jumper precisely like the one I’m wearing, I hesitate.

“… you know they didn’t … have any … eh … yeah so.”

I mock grimace at the injustices regularly visited by designers upon the fashion-less.

Da turns around, hands on hips, his blue eyes peering out over the top of his reading glasses.

“Ah yeah,” he says, slowly surveying the room lined with floor-to- ceiling shelves full of wool jumpers.  “Sure, there’s no jumpers here atallatallatall.”

“Come on so, we’ll go,” I say hurriedly, afraid we’ll insult the Gaeltra’s efforts to induce fashion in the West of Ireland.

We leave, waving meek goodbyes to a heavyset, customer-indifferent woman perched on a tall stool behind the counter.

Back in the car, I follow Da’s directions up narrow-grass-growing-up-the-middle roads to get to Westport for a high-quality-potato lunch.

“How do you remember these roads?” I ask, shaking my head.

“Ora, … I suppose I wuz up an’ down them enough lookin’ for this fella an’ that fella.  Indeed, now that I think of it, this is the very road them calves were stolen on in the first case I solved as a detective.”

“Oh, my goodness, that would have been way back in the early sixties I suppose.”

“That’s right, we had just moved down from Clones, I wuz barely in the door a the barrack.  The super here at the time was a hard charger, he wouldn’t let nuthin go atallatallatll. That’s fine too, the more you keep after the small criminals, the more the bigger wans pay attention.”

He sighs, stares ahead silently for a moment and then continues.

“Anyway, a fella out this road had three or four Aberdeen Angus calves stolen on him.  An’ the poor divil, that was the whole year for him.  He’d a gone hungry that winter if we didn’t get them back ta him.  He paid ta have the bull come ta his Aberdeen Angus cow, a few pound for that, an’ then maybe a few pound with the vet if anything went wrong, course there was no taggin’ back then, so that wouldn’t be anything to him.  He’d to raise the calves for a few months on the bit a grass he had.  Then he’d then sell them off up the country ta some thief of a jobber who’d mark them up a hundert percent an’ sell them on ta some big farmer up t’country.”

He purses his lips, shakes his head.

“Anyways, he comes out wan mornin’ an’ there are the calves … gone!  Nuthin’ in the field, but whoever took them closed the gate after himself.  So, he wuz either a farmer himself, an’ done that from habit, or it ‘twas some regular thief who done in the mornin’ an’ didn’t want ta bring too much attention ta the fact that the calves were gone from the field.  We tried ta get fingerprints offa the gate but ahhh ….”

I can sense him shaking his head fast

“You know with the rain an’ back then the ould fingerprint kits weren’t great, sure now the lads from Dublin Castle can do so much with hair samples, an’ bits of a fellas clothes.  Abroad in England an’ the US they have this new D…N…A stuff that’s supposed ta be woeful powerful altagether.  Sure, a time will come when them microscopes know ever’thin’ about who done anythin’.”

He stops talking, shakes his head slowly, eyes staring ahead at the grass in the middle of the road disappearing under the car.

“An’ so how did you solve the great mystery a t’stolen Aberdeen Angus calves?”

 “Oohhh, it ‘twas good ould fashioned polis work let me tell ya that.  It took a few weeks but ….”

“A few weeks!” I interrupt.  “Sure, wouldn’t them Aberdeen Angus calves, an’ them as black as night with no markin’s whatsoever, have grown so much even the fella who owned them wouldn’t recognize them after a few weeks!”

“Aahh, that doesn’t matter with ould fashioned polis work.  No, no, no.  See, it ‘twas an awful thing ta do that poor farmer an’ the village knew it.  So, we done a bit a talkin’ ta this fella an’ that fella, an’ with a bit a …” he nods silently, “lookin’ t’other way to coax a lad ta talk, we got an inklin’ as to who might’ve suddenly grown a few calves in his field.  Sure, once we got a name, let me tell me, we didn’t have no D…N…A at that pint!  No, no, no.  We just worried it outta him!”

Nodding his head to unseen people in the past, his eyes stay gazing at the grass middle of the road getting eaten by the car.

“Oh yeah, you can leave the D…N…A stuff at home if you can get a thief worried.”

Reg’lar People

I’m leaning against the top rail of a paddock bristling with spindly-legged black and white calves, brawny quarter-horses and bulging-with-muscles black bulls.  Across the dusty paddock, beyond the verdant woodlands, shimmering in the August heat, rise the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.

“Why is there so many horses daddy?” my ten-year-old son asks, lifting his Red Sox hat to wipe his sweat-sheened little brow.

One light brown horse turns his head towards to the sound.

“I don’t know?”

“Thought you knew ever’thing,” his sister, three years younger, snaps happily, squeezing my hand.

“Maybe it’s recess,” my son laughs.

The light brown horse slowly approaches, backs up and approaches again. He stares hard at us, his nostrils flaring, as he tries to determine if we have treats. 

My daughter, picking up on his cue, stoops, grapples with some wiry, yellow grass, gaining enough to offer the skittish animal a paltry treat.

Again his nostrils flare, his long head bops, his hooves trace lines in the dirt.

“Here missie, this is what y’all need,” says a trim, fifty-something year-old cowboy, complete with broad-brimmed hat, tan shirt, faded jeans, dusty boots. 

He’s about twenty feet down the wooden railing holding out a slender carrot toward my daughter.

She stares at the carrot, flicks her hazel eyes to mine, then back to the carrot.  She grabs her brother by the arm and tries to propel him toward the carrot.  He shrugs her off, scowling beneath the brim his Red Sox hat.

“See, this here is what they all eat miss,” he smiles warmly at her shyness.  “‘Cause they is atha…leets.”

He gently waves the slender carrot up and down.

“Go on, one of you can take it,” I exercise my role as episodic familial executive.

Head down, her hand reaches out limply, but she doesn’t step toward the cowboy.  Her brother turns away, deliberately disinterested.

The cowboy walks the twenty feet toward her.

“Now that there feller’s name is Bob…cat,” he places the carrot in her hand.  “We don’t usual give ‘em names, but Bobcat, he’s a sociable feller an’ he whinnies kinda sharp like some guy offa the TV, so the boys down the yard give ‘im that name.”

He turns, adjusts his hat and looks into the paddock.

“Now be careful, he aint got no aim at … all with them there teeth a he’s,” he forces out a guttural chuckle.  “Juz hold that carrot one end an’ he’ll free it from yer hand pretty durn fast.”

Her skinny seven-year-old arm extends through the wooden rail, the carrot protruding towards Bobcat.  His nostrils quiver, hooves dance in the dirt. 

Behind Bobcat crowd three more quarter-horses, their long faces swimming in the dusty, sultry air.

Bobcat lurches forward.

My daughter drops the carrot.

Her arm shoots back inside the rail.

All of us, except the cowboy, back up from the rail. 

Bobcat stops and backs up in confusion.

The carrot lies on the hooved, dusty ground; a thread of orange drawn in the tan soil.

Another quarter horse rushes around Bobcat, nose to the ground, nostrils noisily flaring.  The new horse rummages roughly in the dusty soil with his nose; the sight of his jaw muscles moving being the only indication of victory.

“Aint they a well nourished bunch,” the cowboy says, with a half laugh.  “There’s lots a people don’t eat as good this bunch, let me tell ya that.”

“Yeeeaaah,” I say, dragging out the word to enhance my concurrence.

The horses are indeed impressive with their perfectly defined muscles, glistening hides and bursts of energy in which one horse takes off at a gallop only to be joined in seconds by the others.  A herd of twenty or so athletic looking animals careening around the paddock while the jet black, bulging with muscles, bulls sit in the dusty dirt, with their jaws sideways chewing the cud, as they look on languidly.  

“There’s no business like show business,” he says with a sigh, “an’ these fellers, including tham there bulls put on row…dee…oh like you aint never seen.”

“Ooohh,” I nod in recognition.

I had seen a retro poster for a rodeo in the ranch restaurant: A canary yellow background with a nutbrown woodcut of a bucking horse at an impossible angle, a cowboy on his back, one hand clasping the reins, the other forcing down a wide brimmed cowboy hat.   

“So, these animals all came in just for the rodeo tonight?” I ask.  “I thought a rodeo would all be just local people with their horses an’ stuff.”

“Oh no partner, no, no, no, there’s some a little a that.  But keeping atha…leets like this is an expensive business, an’ rodeo’s a business, just like any other business,” he shakes his head a lot.  “I ben in this business since I wuz twenty-one.  Started with jus’ a couple a horses, now I gots a ranch out in Iowa, the Three Hills Ranch, with three hundert horses, a hundert fifty bulls.  I got a buyer as gets me them calves, then sells ‘em on when they’s too big no more fer the arena.”

“That’s a long way for these guys to come,” I nod at the busy paddock.

One of the bulls, a block of muscle wrapped in black leather, is up moving around.  He’s calm and inquisitive, his nose down to the dusty ground sniffing at something unseen.

“Don’t they mind that?  I mean loading them up into trucks, those long journeys.”

“Weellll …, like I said, it’s a business … we all do ‘bout twenty shows a year.  This here crew’ll do ten of ‘em,” he takes his cowboy hat off and waves it at the paddock.  “We’re three nights here at the Flyin’ Doubleyah, tanite, Fridah, Saturdah, that being the biggest night.”

He puts his cowboy boot up on the bottom rail, dragging it to clean the dirt off the sides. 

“Then we’ll go on home, an’ when I’m bustin’ mah hump gittin’ ready for the next trip, these fellers’ll be restin’ up in the fields.  They all’ll git a coupley a weeks a loungin’ ‘round afore they hit the road agin.”

He takes a step closer.

“I’ll ya what.  Them thare animals deserve the rest an’ all the high calorie food they can get,” he lowers his voice.  “They’s the real stars a the show.  Cowboys cum an’ cowboys go, but these fellers an’ gals they work so hard in that arena … whay afterwards you cud knock ‘em over with a shove.”

With two fingers extended, he gives my shoulder a gentle shove.

“Well, we hope ta see ya all at the show tonight.”

“Ohhhh,” I start looking for a better excuse than I have, “we’re goin’ to a concert in town, … some kids group, kinda thing.”

“Aint that a durty shame!” he says with genuine regret.  “I’d a luv these little ‘uns ta see the show.  Bet they don’t see no rodeos up in Boston city.”

He points at my son’s Red Sox hat.

“I’n gettin’ a pony,” my daughter says to no one and everyone.

“Gud for you gurl, get a gud one, a quarter horse is the best, learn how to ride for real.”

“Eh, we’re n…, we don’t have really any space to keep a horse,” I say, feeling both ridiculous and cruel with every word.

“I ken keep it my room,” my daughter says to the cowboy.  “It’s going to be white, with a vury long tail, … a pony tail.”

She chuckle-laughs at her own joke.

“Well missie, keep up yer nergotiations with yer dad here an’ you’ll work it out.  Just remember kids, don’t nuthin in life that’s wirth nuthin cum ta ya for free.  Ya gotta fight for ever’thin’!”

We leave the paddock area and head across a yellow grassed courtyard towards the blacksmith’s forge. 

On this short walk, along with the humidity, the dust clogging my sinuses, the horseflies extracting lumps of flesh from my neck, my daughter hammers away with her seven-hard-year’s gained logic at the anvil that is her stupid, stupid, stuuuuppid father’s incomprehension as to how accommodating an equine lodger in her room would be so simple: “He can poop in the closet an’ I’ll just close the door.”

“This is not the Global Warming we’re talkin’ about!” I admonish, generating deliberate confusion. 

“It’s not possible to just pretend there isn’t a pony in the closet!”

Thankfully the blacksmith has a red-hot fire going so we can warm ourselves to full on heat exhaustion in about thirty seconds.  But at least we’re out of the relentless sun, and the horse flies don’t seem to be quite as thick in the dimness of the forge.

The blacksmith is a bulky man, with enormously broad shoulders and forearms modelled on Popeye’s.  For a man of his girth and scowling face, he’s remarkably gentle with the old horse he’s shoeing. 

Gentle but firm. 

The horse he’s shoeing is big, shaggy-haired, white and pensive.  It turns to look at the sudden movement of my two kids dashing forward for a better look at the sole of its hoof held aloft by the blacksmith.

A sixty-something-year old man holds the horse’s bridle, but gently so he can turn.  This man is in a slightly-ridiculous-when-seen-not-on-a-ranch sky blue cowboy outfit, … well, actually it had been sky blue once upon a time, but now it’s kind of a tired blue, with dark clouds of stains on the knees and white threadbare clouds on the stretched elbows

A boney, sixty-something woman, in a matching once-upon-a-time sky blue cowgirl outfit sits on a folding chair, well out of horse kicking range, talking with barely a breath pause.

“Them durn shoes is gittin’ ta be as expensive as mah own shoes,” she furrows her brow; thin black lines of penciled on eyebrows dart toward each other.  “Whay, I wuz down Sears a coupley a weeks back an’ they all had shoes from over Europe way as wuz a gawd awful price, I tol’ the manager, I says ta him, whay in the name a the gud Lord would a person pay near a hundert dollars, one … hundert … dollars ‘Merican …”

The blacksmith’s strong arms cradle the horse’s hoof as he expertly drives home a nail with three quick swings of a shiny steel hammer. 

“… this weren’t no Canada Sears I wuz in, I won’t buy nuthin up there ‘cept mah pills, I don’t know what stuff costs up there, no one does, they got that Monoplee money they use, that aint real, what if I wuz ta try an’ pay you for that there shoe with some a that funny money …”

The blacksmith clips any loose edgings off the hoof with what looks like a huge wire cutters. 

“…a theirs with a photer a the Queen on it, if I didn’t seen her on it I might a thought fer real it wuz from some stoopid game, an’ then they wants ya ta pay them ta takes it back at the border, less an’ ya want to take it home to leave in t’ever’thin’ drawer …”

The blacksmith files the horse’s hoof, the shavings peel off to leave a whitened border. 

“… some little hussy in behind a big piece a glass an’ her speakin’ with hardly no English, I though they wuz a English country, this ‘un she said she on’y speaks Franch gud, well that aint no gud ta me I says, I didn’t drive ten hours ta haf someone tell me …”

When she slows for a breath, the blacksmith snorts loudly and says:

“Turn this ol’ girl round an’ we’ll git the front ‘uns done.

“… what language ta speak, I on’y speaks one language, ‘Merican.  Watch ya’ll don’t trip mah gurl turnin’ her, she’s gitten all a lame on me, sometimes I feel bad headin’ out on the trail, she should just stay home with me an’ her lookin’ in the trailer windah at mah soaps.”

She sighs long and loud, giving the blacksmith a chance to jump:

“This ol’ gurl’s hooves is … o…k, but she’s tender as all getout when I touch them ankles a hers, I’d say ya shud talk ta that vet in town, he’s a German feller, believe it or not, yeah, a German, an’ he knows horses pretty gud, cattle better, but horses fair ‘nough.  He’ll tell ya what ta give her fer that sorta pain.”

“Oh mah poor baby, her legs is hurting, she aint young no more, I aint young no more.  Fer some reason last night I wuz thinking about mah ol’ friend Linda May.  See one time Linda May was stayin’ over in mah trailer, ‘cause her man, Bob, wuz on the town, an’ she was staying over an’ wearin’ mah pajamas, a pair of yeller pajamas.  An’ ya know of course, Linda May was a little rounder in the middle than me.”

She sits up erect on the folding chair and moves both hands in quarter circles in front of her once-sky-blue torso, until they meet with a small clap. 

“Anyways, Bob wuz goin’ at it pretty hard, an’ he come back late, well wasn’t Linda May out back a the camper having her a Pall Mall, that gurl loved them Pall Malls, I don’t know whay, her momma died a lung cancer, but that didn’t stop her none.  Anyhoo, when she heared Bob coming hootin’ an’ hollerin’ up the trailer park, she finished up her cigarette an’ got inside just before he come round the Appleman’s trailer.  ‘Member that Lucy Applemen, what a beee… she had her man git her the first a them big buses as is a trailer.  Well, Linda May thought she got in quicker than she did, cause, the next day, an’ us all sittin’ down for pancakes an’ bacon, an’ Bob with a head on him the size a Texas, he says ta everyone at the table; ‘but durned if last night I didn’t see the big…gest ever canary!’” 

“Aahhh,” the blacksmith says nodding his head but not looking up as his knife peels off hoof.  “So that’s where the canary girls come from.  I remember down at line dancing that’s what they all called you two.”

“Yeah,” she sighs loudly.  “That’s what done it.  Bob seeing Linda May in mah pajamas out back a the camper.  An’ now they’re all gone, all dead, just me an’ Ken left …”

She shakes her head a lot.

“… an’ a course our horses, but we don’t ride ‘em hard no more …”

She purses her thickly rouged lips.

“.. no, no, … no more hard riding.”

Later in the afternoon, when the sun was marginally less relentless and we were still full of equine-excitement, we signed up for a trail ride.  The stable-hand gave me a quick glance and then issued us large moving sofas of horses.  A perky young woman guided our group as our furniture-horses lumbered out of the stable yard.

“Y’all goin’ ta the row…deo tonight?” she asks turning easily in her saddle.

Beneath me Ezra, a broad backed, chestnut with a blonde mane, moves along automatically, my Cossack riding skills barely … actually not at all required.

“No, … no, we’re…,” I answer distractedly as Ezra stoops his head to grab some green weeds on the shady side of the barn.

“We are goin’,” my daughter says from her very comfortable position on top a small white pony with a pink bow on its tail.

“The man said we hafta because it’s a ‘durty shame’ we live in a borin’ city an’ don’t have horses to play with.”

“I guess we’re goin’ ta the rodeo,” I say, resignedly patting Ezra on his, or is it her, ample neck.  “The Singing Puppets will have a few, already paid for, empty seats.”

We trail on across the ranch.

As we pass the paddock full of rodeo animals, all the quarter horses crowd at the rails, snorting and snuffing.  Ezra turns his head to them, snorts loudly and turns his head back to the trail.  The guide’s horse whinnies, its head chucking back, mouth open revealing a row of solid, creamy-grey teeth.

We enter the woods on a narrow trails that opens onto a full width dirt road rutted by years of enormous campers getting towed in for rodeo and other weekend celebrations.  Off this road, every fifty or so feet, the trees and brush are cleared away leaving a bald spot large enough for a thirty foot plus camper trailer.  Some have water, sewer and electric hookups.  Some are just a bare opening the woods.

We lumber along, the guide exciting the kids for the rodeo.  She’ll be doing barrel riding on a pedigree quarter horse her uncle owns.  Interestingly, she doesn’t keep her horse in a bedroom closet; her uncle pays exorbitant fees to have it stabled on a ranch twenty miles away.  Not having the exorbitant stabling fee option available to me, I start to contemplate where we can possibly keep a stock of barrels in our apartment to entertain the horse stabled in my daughter’s closet. 

Ezra takes advantage of my zoning out and munches on anything even remotely green.

We all follow the guide, our horses clearly programmed for such maneuvers, into an empty camper spot to let a battered, black Dodge pickup truck pulling a tired camper pass us safely.  The driver, a seventy-something man with a sagging, unshaved faced, waves his hand and cigarette to us.  Blue smoke rises from the cigarette as his splotchy-skinned arm rests back on the open window, his five-second smile already faded.

“Cum on, we’ll get outta the way of all these campers,” our guide says, wheeling her horse left into a hiking trail. 

“They’ll be comin’ all day an’ all night.  Some of ‘em comes all the way from Long I…land.  They don’t get here ‘til the middle a the night, but it’s worth it just ta get away from the city.”

Sure enough, what looked like woods in the distance is heavily populated with campers.  Old couples sit in beach chairs by the side of the road waving to newcomers.  Grilles are getting set up: Enormous coolers filled with ice and Busch beer: Half empty bottles of Captain Morgan Rum are deposited on picnic tables next to huge bags of Utz chips: Nailed to tree is an old plastic sign: “A Cute Chick and an Old Rooster Live Here!”

Three hours and a few ice-cold Buschs on the front porch of our cabin later, I’m ready for my first rodeo.  It’s quite important to get that first rodeo behind you, so that in testy exchanges in the office you can, truthfully, snap: “This is not my first rodeo!”

After purchasing the standard What-Made-America-Grate high fat, high salt, high sugar snacks and one usuriously expensive bottle of lukewarm, plasticky water, we take seats high enough up on the bleachers that we can observe everything with minimal cowboy hat interruptions.

Across the arena, I can see the rodeo owner busy moving things along with impressive efficiency.

First up are the cowboys, some professional, roping the spindly legged calves.  The terrified calf bolts from a metal railed chute, dust flying where his hooves hit the dirt.  The cowboy, in a cream-colored hat, red gingham shirt and jeans, explodes into the arena on his quarter horse.  The calf’s front and back hooves touch beneath its belly as it careens down the arena, the quarter horse closing the gap at an alarming pace.

The calf is roped around the neck; in an instant the cowboy is magically out of the saddle and next to the calf; the gingham and denim grapples the black and white leather to the dirt; the ginghamed arms execute an elaborate bondage knot that seemingly ties every calfly appendage together into one mass of bovine flesh.

The cowboy stands and slowly waves to the crowd with his cream-colored cowboy hat.

We see this same routine, executed to different degrees of excellence, a lot.

Next up is barrel racing.

We watch for our guide, but every girl has pretty much the same cowgirl look: cream colored hat, ponytail, gaudy colored vest, jeans, cowgirl boots.  They fly through their routines, completing a race circuit in seconds that would take Ezra and I about a week, naps not included.

There’s other events but my daughter is too tired: An overdose of sunshine, junk food and horses.  She nods off in my arms.  I want to stay for the bull riding, so I bribe my son with another ice cream sandwich, but by the time I’ve carried my daughter down there and back, I’m ready a cold shower and a good sleep myself.

But the bull riding is worth the sweat and fatigue.

A silence falls over the arena as the cowboy climbs up the metal rails of the bull pen.  He’s dressed in a kinda-sorta football helmet, a flak jacket and bright red, frilly chaps.  In the arena stand four, extremely brave to the point of foolishness, cowboys in white aprons, florescent yellow baggy shirts. 

Out shoots a ginormous bull – way bigger than the ones we had seen in the paddock this morning.  This bull is fifteen hundred pounds of anger, with horns that look like they could deliver a cowboy to a gorey death! 

The cowboy on his back is desperately trying not to fall in front of the sharp horns and stomping hooves, but he barely lasts the bull’s first rollicking turn.

He’s cast like a rag doll across arena; his helmet kicking up a splash of dirt.

The bull turns, horns down looking for him.

The men with the worst job on the planet get to work in their white aprons and florescent yellow shirts.

They dart in front of the bull, slapping at his face, arms waving.

The bull will not be daunted until he gets at least one run with his horns at the cowboy.

But the rodeo clowns know their job and confuse and enrage the bull such that he chases one of them who goes just far enough that the cowboy can run safety.

The bull’s anger dissipates surprisingly quickly.

I feel my daughter tighten in my arms.

“What are they doing daddy?”

“It’s bullfigh… I mean bull ridin’.”

“No, it is bull fighting an’ the bull is winnin’.”

Iargúltacht

I’m driving down the road to Corraun which like all roads in the West of Ireland, is fit and trim, with nary a wasted inch of width and heavy on curvy excitement.  On either side of the road, stonewalled fields bustle with the green-yellow-orange glory of an Irish summer: Birds flit watchfully from trees to thorny bushes: Black-faced sheep stare suspiciously from the fields, wool coats already shorn revealing their grey-white skin and the pink underside of their distended bellies: One, EU subsidized, cow noses around the field searching valiantly for a blade of grass between the clumps of vibrant green rushes.

My mind has been fully cleared by a week holidaying by Clew Bay; breakfasting with Clare Island looming over the sparkling Atlantic water; lazy mornings over-caffeinating as I ploughed through as many books as my tiny mind could absorb; afternoons lounging on beaches of soft-sand pulverized in place by the mighty ocean; dinners with way too much wine, foolishly followed, mixing grape and grain, by way-way too much Irish craft beer. 

Tomorrow, we leave this landscape and won’t see it again for at least a couple of years.

With everyone else back in the rental house, glued to the television as Belgium and Brazil play the World Cup quarter final all the way in Kazan, Russia, I felt the pull of the local landscape, a longing for a last sensory feast of stony fields overgrown with green-yellow whin bushes, slanting black rocks fringed in white waves. 

So, I got in the car and started driving.  

In the suburban US, a road can literally take you nowhere, as it winds past one split-level ranch house after other, all unique only in how much they’ve amended their cookie-cutter-ness. 

A country road in the stubbornly wild landscape of the West of Ireland is a winding pathway that connects communities, often doing a favour to what was once the wealthy landowners. 

The Corraun road doesn’t do favours; there is no once-wealthy land to be owned.  The road, sinews between stonewalled fields of rushes and whin, the purple blaze of blanket bog and the foamy-white-fringed rocks of the Atlantic coast.

I drive along slowly, breathing in deep gulps of the salty air pushing in my open window, the radio tuned to a station from not-so-distant-across-Clew-Bay Connemara, my eyes open and alert.  Like a patient desperate to heal, I’m trying to absorb as much of this landscape medicine as I can before a three-thousand-mile flight drops me on the opposite side of the Atlantic, where lives a joltingly different world.

“An’ now folks, hope yer weekend’s off ta a won…derrr…ful start,” the radio intones.  “A quick birthdah greetin’ ta Molly-Ann Jiyce from balow in Knocknagallert, Molly turns eighty…eight years young tadah!”

I reach for the radio dial.

“An’ for Molly’s eighty-eight birthdah, we’ll play Johnny Cash’s …”

I pull my hand back, anticipating a confluence of poignant emotions.

“Folsom Prison Blues.”

“Poor Molly, goin’ ta prison for her birthday,” I say aloud to no one on the wild-chance that the black-faced sheep’s ears can catch and decode my syllables.

The radio is local-radio silent for a few minutes as the DJ tees up the CD; his exasperated breath audible over the air.

“Hear … that lone…some whip…poorwill, … he sounds too blue to fly ….”

“Gud on ya Molly, fair trade; Hank for Johnny, an’ ya weren’t locked up fer yer eighty-eight!”

The sheep’s black faces give nothing away.

On I drive; streams relentlessly bleed groundwater from the bogs into the ocean; all around me this year’s crop of sun-blanched rocks thrive in the fields; Clare Island’s unbalanced beauty dominates the blue-sparkling horizon.

At a clearing on the side of the road, a Wild Atlantic Way’s wavy squiggle – formed of self-rusting steel; the metallic metaphor of human existence – announces a point of particular interest.

“I’m so lone…some … I ah … cud crryyy,” Hank Williams intones as my car crunches over the clearing’s stone chips.

The Wild Atlantic Way, a branded path down Ireland’s entire west coast that brings order and system to wandering tourists, has an information board at this site recounting, in dramatic detail, the 1588 sinking of the Spanish Armada … a short four hundred and thirty years ago.  This is a mere blink of time for the Irish who consider it short term memory loss if you don’t know the Confirmation names taken by the barmen in the Dublin pubs Brian Boru binged through the night before the Battle of Clontarf in … 1014.

The Spanish King Phillip in 1588 had been self-defeated in his arrogantly disorganized attack on his heretofore sister-in-law, now sworn enemy, Queen Elizabeth.  Just a few years earlier Phillip had married Elizabeth’s half-sister, who, definitely needing a better agent, got herself branded as Bloody Mary.  One of the Spanish nobles accompanying his king on a sojourn to England, where Philip failed to fulfill his marital duties of siring a Catholic heir to the English crown, wrote back to Spain in disgust at the English aristocracy whom he described as “fat, drunken and pink!”  Mary’s death, after a phantom two-year pregnancy, resulted with no Catholic heir, no more informatively insulting letters home, and ultimately a lengthy war between England and Spain.   

The Wild Atlantic Way story board, half in Irish, which I dutifully attempt and fail to read, gives the necessary basics: Some of the defeated Spanish Armada attempted to round Ireland and sail to the Iberian Peninsula, thus escaping Elizabeth’s fleet.  Of course, they should’ve checked in with some a the lads from Corraun and Achill Island before endeavouring such a gambit.  The vengeful Atlantic, no doubt upset at a man’s using its surface to slaughter one another, threw a vicious gale in their path, destroying about a third of the ships in the Armada, crushing them ruthlessly against the black rocks of the Irish coast.

So goes life: The story board’s just-the-facts dry account is enlivened by a dynamic rendering of Spanish looking types either waving to the shore for help or they Real Madrid backs screaming to the referee to call an offside, or perhaps both. 

On shore the reaction would have been complicated, as is anything involving humans. 

For sure the average Irish person looking on would have seen their fellow Catholic, anti-Queen-Elizabeth, Spaniards as drowning allies.  Plus, the Spanish had been visiting the west coast of Ireland for a long time, trading, as the old saying goes, “warmth on the inside for the warmth on the outside:” Wine for wool! 

There was also that bit a Spanish-Irish interactin’ of a different ilk, done with a heap a gigglin’, behind the reek a hay … thus the “black Irish;” a small subset of the Irish race who don’t contract skin cancer after one sunny afternoon blustering through the heat on the beach.

The English were at the time much more concerned with Scotland, an ally of Elizabeth’s most snobby enemy, France.  As such the English weren’t really paying all that much attention to Ireland, just burning down a few towns every now and again, slaughtering all the inhabitants to let everyone know who’s the boss. 

The local leader of the land, to which the storyboard drowners waved, was none other than Grace O’Malley, a pirate queen and a force of nature all by herself.  Pirating was a legit business back then, with Elizabeth investing her private funds with the most successful pirate of them all, Sir Francis Drake.

Although Grace might be disposed to pirating the odd Spanish freight ship, she did reform herself to help the drowners, to the vicious displeasure of the English hegemon charged with ensuring the Irish suffered just enough such that, later in history, they’d be adequately tuned up to create great art.  I won’t issue this bollox’s name; let him languish in the anonymity he deserves.  Just think of him as the mindless villain in a Netflix series that you stop watching halfway through your first bottle of wine.

Anyway, after the usual storming in and out of drafty castles, scabbards rattling like the tailgate of an old cattle-lorry, Grace did what a lot of Mayo people do in a crisis: She headed off ta London.  Back then, there wasn’t a bus leaving every day from in front of Flannelly’s pub that’d drop ya off at Euston Station for £20.  No, Grace had to sail her own ship over.

Still, the not-so-little lady from Mayo made it to London.  After the standard civil-service hanging around lonesome corridors for days, she finally had a meeting with Elizabeth.  Over a couple of glasses of rosé, the two queens quietly set the seeds of feminism, while in the anteroom, a seething pit of vengeful male civil servants, in white bloomers, metamorphosed into the phenomena that would go on to destroy the world: Angry White Men.

Who knew so much hid behind the Wild Atlantic Way storyboard.

Back in the car, I’m forced to change radio station as the planning for a “kisshin’ contest in Oughterard” produces more snot rattling giggles than is safe for a boring human male’s ears. 

I drive on through Corraun, my musing about kissing contests and colonial injustices getting flushed from my tiny brain when a badger breaks from the undergrowth at the side of the road and scoots along the ditch.  The normally nocturnal mammal’s broad back, grey-white-black and stained brownish from rooting below ground, darts along ahead of the car, and in a flash it’s gone! Down a black hole in the ditch.

Buoyed by the sight of Irish wildlife outside of a pub, I hit for Ballycroy – allegedly one of the darkest places on our planet:  Dark as in an absence of light pollution; not Jim Jones drink this lemonade dark. 

I let my sneaker speed the car along, no more dawdling along the coast contemplating four-hundred-year-old Spaniards perishing on the waves of the “wine dark sea.”

Turning left at a sign for Bangor, the road winds uphill, brash green growth dangling out over the tarmac.  I slow to admire the cut-stone, Roman arched railway bridge of the old Achill line; a train line infamous for its once-upon-a-time carrying the dead, now a tourist bike trail. 

At the top of the hill, the road bursts out upon the coast again; weather-beaten mountains, swipes of purple heather dotted with mint-green algaed rocks, fringed with green-yellow whin bushes.  The colours of the mountain all foiled by the metallic grey of the ocean and sky. 

The car groans along the side of the mountain and up onto the flat plain of the bogs.  Here the growth diminishes, as the bog can’t even support a scraggly bush.  Old barbwire fences, exhausted by time, wind, and rain, sag listlessly. 

The wind ruffles swathes of barely-purple heather between black watery bog-holes. 

In what was once a field hewn from the bog by human toil, but now re-invaded by bog plants, stands the skeletal remains of a small stone cottage.  Only the spiney gable supported by the chimney still stands. 

Long gone is the family, their possessions, their memories.  

The boggy plain stretches for miles and miles.

Long winter nights in a barren place such as this; with rain sheeting in off the Atlantic day after day after day; the wind wailing as it tries to tug the thatched roof from the house; under this kind of relentless pressure, the Irish language forged an alluringly apt word for such a landscape.

Iargúltacht: An isolated, remote land, the loneliness of the wind shivering the soul.

Forty or fifty bog miles north of here, with the Famine eliminating Ireland body and soul, a group of Quakers undertook a survey to determine how to keep Irish peasants from starving to death.  While out on the land meeting the dangerously malnourished people, they were directed to the bog to meet the worst cases.  There, living in watery caves cut into the side of open turf banks in the bog, they met whole starving families.  These people had been evicted by their landlord, who had cleared his land of all humans and human habitation so he could switch to sheep farming.  Raising sheep was considered a less risky endeavour than trusting Irish peasants to successfully wring their rack-rents from the thin soil.  The English Quakers found Irish families languishing in the watery darkness of a bog-hole, parents huddled with shivering, naked children; no one with the energy to seek food; everyone succumbing to an agonizing death by starvation.  

A signpost for the Inis Bigil Ferry makes me turn left and away from the direction of those deadly bog-homes.   A ferry, the change of state that it implies, moving from land to water to land, will move my mind from the morbidity of reality.

The road leading to the Ferry telescopes narrower and narrower, blackthorn bushes bustle in from the sides, grass juts from cracks in the tar.  Behind the blackthorn hedgerows the fields are heavily populated with clumps of rushes and sparsely dotted with boney-legged-black-faced sheep.  Spindly electricity poles, an alien lifeform on this wild and windswept landscape, repeat the only sign of human regularity in sight.

I drive on to the Ferry pier; bushes’ straining limbs whipping the side of the car.

The pier is deserted: A prefab cabin, locked up for the evening, and a metal ramp slicing off the side of the concrete pier to a loading platform the only sign that a ferry operates from modest port in a storm.

I step out of the car and walk down to the pier.

Wind sweeps in off the Atlantic, making me squint, ruffling my hair.

Across the channel, a few hundred yards away lies Inis Bigil.

This channel is known to be particularly dangerous; over the years it has taken lives. 

I stare at the low, scrubby land of Inis Bigil.

We humans are a curious species: Communal, if not herding, by nature, we huddle together in cities, towns, houses, restaurants and bars. 

Yet somewhere inside we crave loneliness.  Not a big heap of loneliness, just enough to let us know we can in fact exist as a solitary individual. 

Through the channel the Atlantic rushes.

I look behind me for the car. 

Pacified by the sight of is solidity and reliability, I clinch the key in my pocket.

I turn and stare out across the channel indulging myself in a serving of iargúltacht!

For a full account of the Quakers’ needs survey in north Mayo, and some particularly disturbing reports on evictions on the Belmullet peninsula see the original report scanned into Google Books:

A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of 1847 - Google Books

Fostering Hope – Part II

I’m fourteen pints, three pubs and a failed-hotel-turned-nightclub into a Thursday night’s studying in the library … I mean, kinda-sorta.  Ya know how it goes: If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to failing exams is a canal flooded with Guinness.

I try to keep myself vertical by leaning against the bar as I’m being unsubtly encouraged to leave by a couple of hard-eyed, beer-bellied bouncers with outsized porkchop-sideburns.

“We’re closed, get out t’fuck!” they keep up their refrain, voices growing more impatient with every yell.

I’m in the once-upon-a-more-innocent-time Lenaboy Hotel that’s been metamorphosed by a coat of flat black paint into The Oasis Nightclub.  Tonight, it’s brim full of drunk students, for surely no “worker” would patronize such a shithole.

The bar, that once tranquilly served Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry to nuns down from the North seeking safety for the Twelfth, is tonight occupied by exhausted legions of pint glasses, browning with Guinness foam.  The dining room, that an eon ago served newly-weds from Mayo their first ever restaurant meal, is now the dancefloor; gone are the white tablecloths and glistening silverware, replaced by a dance floor greasy with beer and puke.  The entire ground floor of this sometime-hotel is fitted with black-vinyl booths now littered with unconscious young men and women.  They’ll be the last to get manhandled onto the street, the bouncers careful to ensure they don’t get befouled by their patrons’ vomit.

Everywhere drunks stumble and lurch beneath the glaring fluorescent house lights; the air filled with stale smoke and bouncers’ menace.

“Cum on ta fuck!  I don’t care if ye’se have homes ta go ta but I fucken do.”

“Cum here, cum here?” I wave over the portly, least-hard-eyed bouncer.

“Cum on ta fuck son, don’t you start or I’ll finis….”

“No, no, no,” I try to sound serious.  “I have a real question fer ya.”

“Lookit, there’s no more drin….”

“No, no, I was juz wondrin’ if ya were aware that nowadays … wan plus wan equals zero?”

Thirty seconds later I find myself standing in the drizzle, my jacket still bouncerly-bunched up under my arms. I rub my temple where it glanced off the door jam and stare down Salthill at the Inferno-esque scene of other nightclubs emptying, forcefully, onto the street.  The bustling clamber for taxis; drunks banging car roofs to get the driver’s attention; shrieks and yells of “FUCK YOU” in disgust at lifts stolen; the last bus, bulging with alcohol bulging drunks, long since dieseled off into the night.

My bitterness and drunken ego contemplate a return to the Oasis to hurl a fist or an insult at the bouncer.  I’m thusly philosophizing when from a crinkle in the Inferno-esque landscape emerge a few of my flatmates.

“Where in the fuck were you?” Paul asks too quickly.

“Stud…rinkin’, see I started studyin’ but that wan plus wan ….”

“Ya near burnt t’fucken flat down ya bollox!”

“Ah go ‘way ta fuck outta that, that sounds dangerously like work, I wouldn’t be gettin’ mixed up with no fucken wor….”

“Ya left t’fucken pot a oil on t’cooker on, an’ when I ran back fer a few more quid I put a 50p in t’meter,” he stops, breathless.

In an attempt to concentrate I purse my lips, but my drunkenness doesn’t want reality.  Instead, I observe the crowds thronging onto the road stopping traffic.

“An’ t’fucken oil is everywhere now, all over t’walls, t’ceiling is as black as a badger’s arse,” he throws his arms up, blocking my view of the crowds, “we’re lucky t’whole place didn’t fucken burn ta t’ground.”

“Ah Jaysys, that’s fucken awful awright,” my fourteen pints say, but what’s left of my mind focuses on the mayhem.

But the pints were right. 

It is fucken awful. 

When we get home, still drunk, and now exhausted after haranguing the last-last taxi to take six of us, our boring old, always-dirty kitchen is such black, greasy and smokey disaster that it’s so far beyond worry, I release a little chuckle.

“‘Tis a bit like t’Oasis, on’y shinier, an’ without t’fuckhead bouncers!”

The next morning the kitchen for sure looked like it had been in a fire. That’s the problem isn’t it, there’s always a next morning, and the grinding reality of reality is that things are never quite the same next morning as they were when you toppled into bed the night before.

It takes two cranky pots of tea for us to complete the forensic examination – which ruefully reminds me that my books are sitting lonesome back in the library.  Eventually the forged-by-hangover-and-tea forensic scientists concur on the following sequence of events:  Party A (allegedly, and actually, me) had the pot of oil boiling when the electric pay-as-you-go meter ran out; thusly the electric ring beneath the pot was set on full heat; when Party B (that is Paul) fed the meter about a half hour later, to facilitate retrieving more cash to continue the traditional Thursday night clean-the-brain-of-all-facts-learned-this-week session.  Thanks to the vindictive reliability of the ESB, the pot of oil reheated – a lot – thus boiling for as long as 50p’s worth of electricity can boil a pot oil: Which, it turns out, is a disquietingly long time. 

Close forensic examinations, using fingernails to measure the depth of blackness remaining caked in the pot, reveal there is approximately a half gallon of cooking oil, formerly residing in the pot, now residing, in an uneven but consistently black manner, on the ceilings and walls of our heretofore merely filthy, but now a public health hazard, kitchen.

The solution was, like cruel Boolean algebra, both simple and incredibly complex: We’d repaint the kitchen.  It was such a small room that a gallon of paint would cover it.  That and a couple of the cheapest brushes in the hardware shop would allow two shifts of two flat mates at a time to sprint through a full remodel of the kitchen.  Two of the lads head off to buy the paint and brushes, while another moves furniture out of the way and I start washing dishes. 

The sink, unused to human contact, puts up some resistance but eventually lets me half fill it with surprisingly hot water; a squirt of Three Hands Washing Up Liquid and we’re off to the races.  The dishes, shocked at being cleaned, take quite a bit of hot water, detergent and scrubbing to move the aged food caked onto the ceramic glaze.

Being so engaged in valiantly fighting dirt, it’s only after a few minutes that I look up and see streaks of grease melting on the wall above the sink and running down in dense black globs.  Now here’s a problem: To get paint onto the walls and ceiling, and thusly fool the landlord into thinking that his kitchen did not nearly burn down, we’ll have to remove all that grease: A task dangerously close to work!

I wipe the wall with a wetted corner of the dishcloth, and it streaks enough that you can kinda-sorta see the paint, but the grease is mostly just moving around.

The lads return with the paint.  With the chairs and table now out of the kitchen we hold a terse standing meeting on my perceived problem of the grease on the walls.

A few theories are promulgated:

“Don’t worry about that shite, just get them fucken dishes outta t’way!”

“T’grease is on’y a problem when it’s warm, open t’windaw an’ paint away!”

“Cum on, lets jus’ fucken paint!”

Taking fragments of all theories, we open the tiny kitchen window, complain about the cold, and start painting.  It’s quickly apparent that our theories are … wrong.  The paint goes on and immediately turns into a soupy-greasy mix that swirls and curls most majestically, but never actually changes the wall colour.  Grease-tinged paint accumulates on the edges of the cheap paintbrushes.  

We retool.

The dishcloth, our only general-purpose cleaning device, is sacrificed in the face of this unholy crisis.  It’s wiped along the ceiling directly over the cooker, removing a small Texas oil well’s worth of grease before the irredeemably blackened fabric is cast into the bin.  It’s clear that at least one bedsheet will need to be similarly sacrificed.

We battle on, recklessly offending the gods of grease, home improvement and common sense. 

Lunch presents us with our first artistic-differences-schism: Some, mere “artisan painters,” prefer solid food; while deathly-hungover-others, more in the line of “Bukowski-esque artistes,” pursue a liquid lunch. 

Thus, splattered with beige paint, we stomp across Foster Street into Cullens Bar.  As we scrape our stools up to the counter, Josie, the corpulent bar manager, is already starting pints of Guinness.

“Wot is youse up ta now?” he lisps in his English-as-a-second language Connemara accent, his head boggling in disbelief.

“Nathin, … nathin atallatallatall,” I lie, badly, trying to somehow hide the … ahem … significant quantities of beige paint on my hands, arms and hair.

“Well,” he smiles his trademark broad smile, stretching his thin moustache across his pudgy face, “den, ‘tis a vury messy nathin.”

We negotiate ourselves into two pints each, so after our third – wan for the road being the governing rule – we return to our own, humble, version of the Sistine Chapel.

Painting with pints is more interesting, if not more productive.  The walls are barely passable, still looking suspiciously like they may have experienced a small fire, but the ceiling, with its nagging addiction to grease, despite two bedsheets worth of scrubbing, looks a newly discovered Van Gogh: “Storm in the Septic Tank!”

Swirls of grey-black grease mix with beige paint imbuing the kitchen ceiling with an energy, excitement, and interest well beyond its lowly origins.  The more we paint and swap out “paint brush operators,” the more flamboyant become the swirls until such time that we fear “‘tis t’divil himself runnin’ dem paintbrushes.”

By now it’s late afternoon, the sun already starting it wistful goodbyes; the gallon of paint as empty as our stomachs; artistic differences starting to get physical.  Thus, we agree to divide and conquer: Two will go for burgers and chips, while two get more paint, and see if the hardware shop has any magic solution for our swirling problem. 

Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the bottle of poteen sitting in the back of the cabinet beneath the sink.  This brown-glass flagon bottle, that once upon-a-more-innocent time housed Cidona, is now filled with fine Glenisland poteen.  It lives its, surprisingly, long life silently in the darkness beneath the sink, bothering no one, never throwing any shapes as to its actual potence, simply there as a seatbelt to prevent us from ever getting fully catapulted into the reality of life.

But reality has a persistence similar to the ceiling’s grease addiction.

As we rip into the, ironically, greasy burgers and chips, the hardware shop team report the grim advice from the paint counter’s toothless oracle:

“Ta paint a kitchen now lads, ya do need to clane it dat good, dat ya cud haf yer appendix out on de kitchen table.  Don’t ya know what I mane … dat fucken clane!”

I eye the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, noticing that it’s missing one hinge: We’ll have to complain about that to the landlord.

“I think we should let t’paint we awready put up dry over the grease an’ then we’ll have a fightin’ chance with t’next coat,” I hear my voice say, but don’t relate to the content of the words.  

“Ok so Michaelangelo!  An’ I suppose we’ll do t’waitin’ in Cullens for it ta ….”

Before that suggestion is finished, we’re up and out, crossing Foster Street to our beloved local pub, as we stuff the last few greasy chips into our mouths. 

Cullens is filling up with both the after-work and the I-wouldn’t-work-for-luv-nor-money crowd.   We sidle up to the bar looking more like human-paintbrushes than customers. 

“Derz a shower out de back,” Josie lisps, rolling his eyes slowly toward the backyard.

“A shower!” Paul retorts, “why don’t ya start be puttin’ a fucken roof on t’jax.”

He isn’t lying: the men’s toilet is an open air drain in behind a white-washed stone wall.

An hour, three pints and a few ballads by the truck driving, Sean Nos singer, later we resolve to finish our Sistine Chapel and get on with the work of enjoying the weekend.  The paint is tacky but at least it doesn’t dance around under the brush. 

Buoyed by the pints, the sight of the grey-black stains finally succumbing to thick gobs of beige paint and the coming-too-soon optimism of youth, we break out the poteen.  We don’t know it then, but three more hours will elapse before the last dollop of paint gets daubed over a particularly recalcitrant stain.

By then we’re drunk again, exhausted, filthy, but triumphant…ish.  The ceiling no longer looks like a lost Van Gogh and instead resembles … a particularly poorly painted ceiling in the kitchen of a nasty Galway flat.  Or as Rory full ta the top of his throat with pints and poteen captures it so well:

“Lookit, ya cannit make a sow’s arse outta some ould fucken pink handbag.  Isn’t that right?”

He hits me hard on the shoulder.  I absorb the shock to avoid spilling any poteen from my now sterilely clean mug.

“I tink t’poteen is finally cleanin’ these fucken mugs,” I hold up the mug so they can see the brownish-grey stains gone from anywhere blessed by the touch of poteen.

“See, see, sure I tol’ ye,” Rory says authoritatively “Every ear has a silver linin’!”

The only the task not yet complete was finishing off the flagon of poteen which we did with toasts to our great work and ingenuity.  By the grace of the gods of excessive alcohol consumption we finished the flagon of poteen in just enough time to send a raiding party out to purchase more alcohol. 

For many weeks I’d seen a sign outside an Off License at the end of Shop Street that read: JOHN BEGG £9.99. 

We didn’t know who or what John Begg was, but we were pretty sure that a tenner’s worth of his whiskey would work for a few more hours to keep reality at bay.

And the John Begg, mixed with tea to prolong its effects, worked so well that the endorphins released by our various successes – not actually burning down our flat, painting over our mistake and getting drunk at the same time – all went to our poor, forsaken brains.  Sometime between four and five in the morning we dispatched another party for more booze.  At that time of the day the only option was to be liberate a keg over the tall, sharp pronged gate of some pub’s alleyway; a task that required more commando skills and sobriety than we would possess for at least several lifetimes.

In our drunken exhaustion, we’d over-reached and failed.

Our failure was not, unfortunately, a complete failure as we did scavenge a stack of Saturday’s Irish Times from the doorway of a newsagent and a five-gallon bag of milk in a carboard box left outside a restaurant.  The Times were immediately savaged, shredded to pieces as West Brit propaganda, other than the rugby news, which was equally shredded, just not considered propaganda.  

The milk sat in its brown cardboard box in its clear plastic bag on the kitchen floor amidst a knee-high pile of badly shredded newsprint as slowly the pints, poteen, John Begg all wear off and exhaustion slowly takes control of what’s left of my brain. 

Then my oldest friend of all, worry, comes for a visit, making me obsess about the possibility of that most fabled spill of all – MILK!   

The five gallons of this particular white liquid now sitting on the kitchen floor, in a mere plastic bag, is a quantity whose spill would definitely be worth shedding tears over.  The chance that someone go after the box-bag of milk as we had done the stack of Irish Times takes over the remnant of my mind.  The smell of five gallons of sour milk soaked into the walls and floor of the kitchen might outdo even the careless almost-fire.

My eyes dart around the room; the lads are starting to nod off but every now and then they’ll bolt upright on their hard kitchen chairs, eyes flashing open as they glare at nothing.  The sun is returning, its ashen winter rays probing the tiny kitchen window until it catches a piece of the newly painted wall and radiates.

Without a thought, I’m up out of my chair, ripping open the cardboard box, pulling out the five-gallon bag of milk, dropping it with an ominous thud into the sink.

“Whatindefuck …,” I hear from behind me.

But I can’t be stopped.

I grab our only sharpish knife, the breadknife, and plunge it into the plastic bag.  The breadknife’s serrated age slips off the side of the bag’s plasticky whiteness, as it bulges against the sink’s browned stainless-steel walls.

Again and again, I plunge the tauntingly blunt breadknife into the bag.

“What t’fuck are you doin’ up there?” Paul asks.  “Butcherin’ a pig?”

“He’s goin’ for Halloween as the Yorkshire Ripper!” Rory squeal-laughs.

I raise the breadknife, grasp a hold of the bag, squeeze the liquid and plastic tight, before I stab the knife down into the tightened plastic.  The rounded tip of the breadknife pokes a small hole in the plastic before the serrated blade slices across the back of my hand ripping open my skin.

I lean forward to purge the milk from the plastic bag.  The white liquid swirls across the plastic with a thin tread of crimson oozing from my hand.

“I fucken got it Boole!” I yell with excitement, staring up at the beige ceiling.

“Shutuptafuckwouldya, I’m tryin’ ta sleep.”

“Wan gobeshite an’ wan breadknife equals zero milk!”

Fostering Hope – Part I

I’m leaning into the wind as it flings fistfuls of rain against my umbrella, wildly billowing the umbrella’s black nylon fabric, warping its spindly ribs, threatening to snap its handle in two.  All this angry energy from Mother Nature lowers my already low resolve to do the right thing.  It’s a Thursday evening in January around seven o’clock, the sun abdicated hours ago as a storm lurched in off Galway Bay, emptying the dark streets, desolating the puddly pathways of Eyre Square.

Only hard cases and students hit the pubs with weather this brutal.

Unfortunately, not only can I not brainufacture even the skimpiest fig leaf of a self-lie to fool my conscience into letting me duck into a pub for a night’s drinking, instead I have a gnawingly persistent backlog of college homework to be submitted, albeit a couple of months late.  Sitting on a desk, with my name a tad ostentatiously showing (on the impossibly-low-odds chance that one of my lecturer’s happened to pass by) in the seldom-entered-but-often-lied-about UCG library is a stack of books, that I’ve finally purchased, filled with mindboggling formulas, theories, nay … even theorems!

I battle on bravely-ishly through the brutal weather, another valiant scholar on the essentially non-existent list of UCG’s Valiant Scholars.  I do find myself distinguished on that diminutive list in that, surely, it’s only I that burn such gargantuan quantities of willpower to balance a near nonexistent desire to learn civil engineering against a fully formed unquenchable thirst for beer! 

I lean into the wind and rain, cursing the weather, my leaky sneakers and George Boole, with his particularly inscrutable algebra, a few confused morsels of which populate my emaciated notes back in the library.  When would anyone, especially a total gobeshite civil engineer like meself, who’s destined for warehousing in some moldy County Council office dreaming of five o’clock pints, ever need to know that 1+1=0? 

Boole for sure shoulda spent more time in the pub or the bog or anywhere other than his desk.  But because of the combined viciousness of Boole’s persistence in using his brain down at University College Cork and University College Galway’s rigid rules on passing exams, I somehow have to understand this mathematical incoherence.  Or at least engage in my version of learning, which is to memorize whole pages of unknowable formulas such that I can mentally vomit up said formula onto the pages of an exam booklet and scrape together enough academic-mercy points to avoid failing.

Thus, on I travail through Eyre Square’s umbrella obfuscated darkness, gritting my teeth with bitterness and fake resolve.  To heap even more bitter upon my bitterness at not drinking my Thursday night away with my not-quite-so-far-behind flatmates, the pay-as-you-go electric meter in our flat ran out just as I was finishing deep frying my dinner.  Without a fifty-pence-piece to slot into the meter, I muddled on in the dark. 

It was a weird experience: Retrieving a plate from the sink, pretending to pretend clean it; fishing the sausages and chips out the saucepan of boiling oil with a perforated serving spoon – last washed back in the Old Testament; splashing my daily sustenance oily-ily onto the fake-clean plate.  The ceremony of cooking and serving over; I sat in the unrelieved darkness of the filthy kitchen eating my perfect meal of processed food cooked for so long and at such heat as to extract from it any semblance of taste.

Undeterred by the weather, the darkness, the world railing against me, I carefully step up the stone stairs in Eyre Square and cross the paved plaza, paying no heed, as one does, to the lanky black cannons, Crimean War surplus now aimed at cars splashing along the street.  Ten years ago on this plaza, as a nine-year-old visiting Galway with my parents, my brother, father and I watched a Traveller as he wrapped his round, bleached-blond wife in a green canvas sheet, then looped a chain around woman and canvas.  

“Laddies, gintlemens, revrent fadders,” the Traveller yells.  “See fer yersells, ‘n beehoult t’greatest ‘scape since Ronnah Biggs cum up oveh t’wall a Wandswerth.”

He continues yelling, but we can’t make out his words, as kneeling down, he  padlocks the ends of the chain together.  His wife lies perfectly still inside the green rollup, a few strands of her yellowish white hair laying on the grey-black paving stones. 

The Traveller up off his knees, looks over crowd, then stoops to pick something up from his heap of stuff.

A bullwhip! 

My eyes bulge in disbelief – I’ve never seen a bull whip before, except on the telly in John Wayne’s hand.

My stomach tightens: Is he going to whip his wife and her lying on the ground?

He doesn’t, instead he cracks the bullwhip a few times as he walks in a circle around wife, canvas, chain and padlock.  

In his right hand he holds up the padlock key.

“Laddies, gintlemens, revrent fadders un’ de lot a ye’se.  See, I haf t’key.  See!  See!  Ken she ever ‘scape?  Pays yer money an’ yese’ll see!  Cum on, pays yer money ta watch her ‘scape!”

A few coins tinkle onto the ground; though none from us, my father being a staunch non-contributor to Traveller street theatre. 

The Traveller, with the key held up in one hand, the bullwhip in the other dragging behind him makes eye contact with us.

“Cum on outta that,” Da snaps, squeezing us on the shoulders.

But curiosity emboldens us to, for once, resist.

We twist our shoulders, escape his grip and stand staring at the Traveller who passes us by, his bloodshot eyes connecting with others in his audience, freeing up a few more coins.

For some reason Da doesn’t get cross and grab us by the ear for not doing what he said.  I don’t know why until I glance over my shoulder and see that he’s staring at the Traveller woman as she lies on the paving stones deathly still.

I turn back to the show. 

The Traveller stands next to his rolled-up wife, looks over the crowd for one last flush of coins, before he fast-cracks the bull whip three times.  Immediately his wife starts rolling and squirming on the ground.  The green canvas and chain twist-roll across the paving stones, clinking and scraping, until we can see enough of her yellowish white hair emerging from the canvas to understand how she’ll make her escape.

“Cum on outta that,” Da snaps again, squeezing our shoulders so hard that we know this time there’s no resisting.

This stormy evening the plaza is deserted other than the tall, dark cannons, the puddles shimmering as they reflect the streetlights.  I cross the plaza and lower my umbrella to watch for cars before I negotiate the street.  I know full well by the route I took that I’m marching my weak resolve through the Valley of the Shadow of Darkness having to pass several of my oft-visited watering holes.  The first of these, the Skeffington Arms Hotel, is just across the street from me, soon to be followed by the Cellar, the Lions Head with the last, duller, barb to be avoided, the Yacht.

The “Skeff” poses a lower Thursday night risk as it’s primarily a weekend evening after-a-rugby-match pub.  It’s unlikely I’d meet anyone in there this evening.  So, like many a victim before me, I lower my guard.  Waiting for the cars to pass, I grit my teeth and wonder, somewhat aimlessly, just how does 1+1 equal 0?

It’s a little-known fact that spy chasers and people who grew up in small towns recognize humans by their gait, our most distinctive characteristic – other than our farts.  Thus, it was that I recognized the man darting jacket-and-umbrella-less up Shop Street towards me.  My weak resolve raises the umbrella, slowly, to cover my face.  But the gods of exam-passing seem to win as he ducks down the alley to the Skeff’s back door. 

I breath out a mixture of relief and disappointment.

But as I lower the umbrella again to safely cross the street, his head, then torso stick out of the alley.

The grin on his bearded face widens as I approach.

“Perfect,” he starts, “I was just headin’ in fer a pint an’ me wond’rin’ who’d t’fuck’d be out on a dog of a night like this.”

“Oohhh noooo,” I struggle to think of a calamity of such enormous proportion that would prevent me from entering a pub at seven o’clock on a Thursday evening.  

“I hafta … eh, I’m in fierce trouble with t’oul studyin’ … I’m … I’m on medicine,” a lie finally comes to me, “I cannit take a drink for a few … hours.”

“Ah woulda go away ta fuck outta that, sure a pint is medicine, what could be better for you ….”

My resolve dissolves.

Standing at the counter in the clean, dry, well-lit bar in the Skeff, waiting for our pints of Guinness to settle, we stare at the owner, a slim, fifty-something woman with uncommoningly black hair and layers of makeup.  Always pleasant and smiling, she’s now staring into the mirror behind the bar, her pale, thin fingers barely preening her hair.

“Is it?” my drinking partner says under his breath.

“Is it what?” I ask too loud, making him flash his eyes, purse his lips.

He puts both hands on the top of his head, jolts his scalp and hair forwards-backwards.

“Ya know,” he says, nodding toward the still preening owner.

The owner’s eyes dart across the mirror to our reflection, catching mine.

“That’s a big question now,” I say nodding slowly to show my pub-wisdom.  

I pick up my pint, take a deep draught until her eyes have on again.  Then wiping the Guinness from my upper lip, I offer:

“But I’ve a bigger question sittin’ on me desk back in t’library; how the fuck could wan plus wan be equal ta zero?”

Old Warriors II

At 6:30AM Bill and I pull up to a dusty stop outside the jobsite trailer.  Already the thermometer lashed to the trailer window’s burglar grill is pushing 75°F: By mid-morning it’s nudging up against the thickened red line that marks 100°F.  It hurts to have those intense rays flaking down on my bare-arms and face.  But out of the too-cold air conditioning of the trailer I must venture to tangle with the bricklayer: Dony Hagerty, a fifty-something Corkman, with that special skill of viewing the world only through Corked-eyes.

I stand with Dony next to his already too-hot-to-touch scaffolding.  Both of us stare silently at the blue metal structure, entirely deserted now, other than small piles of red brick stacked on the planks yesterday by a gang of grumbling, guttural-cursing Connemara men.

“What in t’fuck is goin’ on here?” I aim my index finger accusingly at the mute mixer

The air above the stack of battered mortar pans next to the mixer shimmers and distorts.

“De’re gone is wats gwoin’ on,” Dony jerks his thick head of greying-black hair through a quarter-swivel to further compound his cryptic answer.

“What in the fuck does that mean?” spitting mad, I wave my clipboard in his broad flat-featured face.   “They’re gone?  They’re gone? Did a fucken spaceship kidnap them, ‘cause that’s t’only acceptable eggcuse for not havin’ yer crew here today!  We have a fucken schedule ta mee….”

“NAH, NAH, nah, no focken spaceships, … I wish,” he squints at me for a second from under his unruly eyebrows then turns away. 

“Nah, dat bollix above in de motel, he … he, … he took all de bhoys stuff, like deir clothes an’ ever’thin’.  Even Tommy-Joe’s viday…oh player an’ all he’s porn…oh…graphic filums … ever’thin’.  T’Injun as owns de motel, he done dat.  Took de lot,.

“How cum?” I shake my head, trying and failing to stay out of bricklayers-domestic problems.

“Ah, de bill, don’t ya know, sure.  See, I don’t get paid here for ‘nudder two wakes an’ we’re above in dat motel near a munth awready.  Dem Injun fellas won’t wait for no money ta cum de ways ye fellas pay – thurty days from d’end a de month ye pay.  Sure, a lad cud be dead n’ haf t’gravestone up be de time yer check arrives.”

“You signed t’contract with them terms an’ them fucken bricks aren’t goin’ ta lay themselves!  We need FUCKEN BRICKLAYERS!”

“You needs bricklayers!” he jerks his big thick head violently.  “I needs ‘em fucken worser … an’ gud wans too.”  

He storms off toward his pickup, the thick shoulders on his squat torso bopping up and down as he covers the rough ground fast.

“WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU GOIN’?” I yell after him.

My yelling makes no difference: He couldn’t stop now: Even if he wanted to. 

“We have ta solve this,” I say to no one.

The sun hurts on my arms; drops of sweat run down my back.

WE HAFTA GET SOME FUCKEN BRICKLAYERS!” I yell quixotically into the swelter of heat and dust and fear-anger.

I stomp back to the trailer, boiling with the stress of Dony’s missing crew, the unbearably hot day and the frustration of knowing too well you’re alive but never knowing why. 

Looking to blank my mind, I give the trailer door a fucking-enormous slam.

The windows rattle inside their burglar grills. 

The tepid coffee in the pot ripples.

Caleb, the super, shoots upright from the plan table, a mechanical pencil in one hand, a ruler in the other.

The AC in the trailer is set so low that the sheen of sweat now coating my body chills on contact with the cold air.

“He fucked us, … right?” Caleb snaps, staring out over the top of his cheap, thick-framed reading glasses.

When he sees the expression on my face, he nods so violently his glasses slip down his nose; catching them before they fall, he whips them off the bridge of his nose and aims them at me.

“I need masons on that scaffolding A…S…A…fucken…P.  I got that fucken asshole from hell of a roofer you signed up coming in three weeks.  Them bumpkins outta Central Mass is gonna start roofin’ whatever the fuck is out there, whether it’s got walls or not!”

I stomp over to the wall phone.

“Now we got no choice,” I release a long-overly-dramatic sigh and grab the beige handset like it’s a lifeline.

“Ah…greed, but yer countryman there’s gonna shit a fucken Volkswagen when he hears,” he laughs a dry laugh. “Give me some warnin’ so’s I ken be on a site walk.”

“Well, we gotta make sure they’ll do it first,” I sigh my thoughts out loud.  “Then we have make sure that fucken fool knows it’s his only chance ta not get ate alive be our ….”

I slam the phone back into its cradle.

“Let me see …,” I sigh a long involuntarily sigh, hesitating in the face of confrontation.

I stomp over to the window, push my face against the glass and try to peer through the burglar grill and the enormous drops of condensation pooling on the outside of the window.

“Fucket,” I give up and stomp outside, slowing just enough to slam the door hard.

Emerging from the fabricated cold of the trailer, the dead heat hits even harder.

Through the air shimmering above the site’s broken ground, I see Dony’s black pickup idling in the dirt parking lot.  I amble over to the truck, stumbling on the rough ground as fear-anger sharpens my focus for confrontation.

Dony badly feigns oblivion when I knock hard on the truck’s driver side window.  He turns his big head to look at me, arching his back too much.

I take a few steps back, almost threateningly, so that he knows getting out of the truck is what I’m anticipating. 

His window slowly whirs open.

“Yeh, wat can I do fer ‘ou?” he asks, like I’m canvassing for his vote.

“Come with me inta the trailer, there’s on’y wan way I see for you to not get ate alive in this situation.”

“Aha, I see now, de focken Mayo man is out ta break me balls, an’ me doin’ my vury bhist ta… ta … an’ who are ‘ou anyways ta ….”

“Shut up ta fuck wudya,” I snap, spit flying from my lips.

I step back to the truck and start to lean forward to deliver the hard truth of our contract.  Dropping my palms on the black metal door, I instantly snap them back – scorched.

“Lookit we’ll have no choice but ta bring in another mason,” I rattle the words out rapidly, trying to recover some dignity.

His face is solid, unreadable. 

I pause, shrug my shoulders.

“And … whatever the fuck we do do …,” I pause again, stare him coldly in the eye, “will be at your cost, … on your nickel.”

“‘Ou’d focken do dat ta yer own countryman would ‘ou?  An’ me here with de red a me arse out tryin’ ta git this job done fer ‘ou!  ‘Ou focken Mayo bollox ‘ou!”

His eyes flash with anger, spit flying from mouth.

“I awready took ever’ gobeshite I could find standin’ on de street corners a Dorch…hester an’ ‘em pertendin’ ta be bricklayers.”

He grits his teeth and twist nods his head.

“Haf a dem fockers couldn’t lay a shite down inta a toylet bowl an’ it benate their arsehole.”

Sensing he’s done blowing off his anger, I change my tone.

“Forget about them, cum onta fuck inta the trailer with me, an’ we’ll call them serious lads that wuz here Monday.  We’ll have them send down a fucken hopper full a bricklayers.”

“I aint jynin’ no union,” he gives a half-hearted twist of his head of thick grey-black hair, “couldn’t cover me costs I couldn’t.”

“If I hafta find another mason, you’ll be covering our costs … an’ then some.  That’s what ya shud be worr….”

Thinking I’m going to far I halt.

He grits his teeth, his lips flaring up, eyes staring beyond me down at the ground.

“Lookit, cum on inta the trailer, an’ we’ll at least find out what it costs.”

Two hours later, in the chill of the over AC’ed trailer, Dony tear-angrily becomes a union contractor.  But after we go over the numbers, he realizes that the cost per hour for a Boston bricklayer, with the motel costs and food allowance factored in, is more expensive than the local union rate. 

“Poor oul Tommy-Joe,” he says grinning wildly, twist-nodding his grey-black head of hair. “He’ll never see Tessie-big-Tits agin!  D’oul Injun’ll be in de back room starin’ at dem big nippley tings ever’ night ‘til dey focken fall offa her!”

The Union Business Agent and his scowling, muscular assistant stare from Dony to me to Caleb – who just shakes his head. 

With firm handshakes and no smiles, they depart silently with their win.

The day grinds on, the sun slowly etches its path across the sky, scorching the planet.

At 3:30 everyone on site who sweats-for-a living packs up and leaves.  Job boxes clang closed; truck doors slam shut; engines purr to life.

Around four-ish, Bill ambles into the trailer, his face reddened and sheened with sweat.

“I wuz a buildin’ safety railings at t’loadin’ dock, but I done run outta lumber,” he huffs out the words making straight for the water cooler.  

The five-gallon water jug bubbles and gurgles as he fills one tiny cone shaped paper cup after another.

“I reckon I’ll head on down ta the lumber yard.  It’s late but if Bernie’s on the gate, he’ll let me in.”

He whips down another cone of cold water. 

 “Ya know Bernie wuz with the 26th Infantry back in doubleya-doubleya two, he’s still got a Kraut slug in his right shoulder.”

He smushes his lips together, nods with pride.

Not knowing what’s the right thing to say, I too nod, but with someone else’s pride.

“I tol’ him he’s a drinkin’ too much, ya kin smell it off him when he’s checkin’ yer slip.  But Bernie says, ‘no, no, I ain’t drinkin’ too much, I’m drinkin’ jus’ the right amount!’”

Bill laughs too loud and too fast; then suddenly stops, pursing his lips.

“Ok, I figure I’ll hit the lumberyard, then head on back ta that durn hot box of an apartment,” he winces as he stands fully upright, pulling his shoulders back. “I’m a cookin’ tonight, ‘member we got them good steak-tips.  I still can’t figure what was gonna on fer that woman in the parkin’ lot.  Ya know I wuz thinking out back taday that maybe she’s got too much money an’ wuz havin’ one a them nervous breakdown things?”

He flicks his eyes at mine, then looks away fast.

“Eh, my car’s not here, ‘member I came with you this morning,” I shrug, regretting the decision, born out of a lack of air conditioning in my car, to come to work in Bill’s truck.  Now I won’t have the usual alone time on the hour drive back to the apartment that our company accountant Janet rented way too far from the jobsite.

In the silence of Bill’s planned escape melting, I turn to look at Caleb.

“Oh yeah, my motor wouldn’t start this morning so I hadta call a cab, I wuz yellin’ across the parking lot at you guys but I guess ya didn’t …,” he lets his lie trail off.

Dony, stomping across the broken ground from his truck to the trailer, had spat out in temper that Caleb was done for drunk driving last week.  Since then, he’d been having one of the bricklayers, a red-faced Cavan-man, a martyr for whiskey himself, swing by to pick him up in the morning.  But last night the Cavan-man drove east in the darkness to Boston with nothing but an empty wallet and his dusty work clothes: The rest of his clothes and belongings locked up in the storage room of the Empire State Motel.

“Oh, okay, I … eh … eh,” Bill starts tentatively. “I’ll load up down with Bernie an’ then stop by for you boys, awright?”

 Caleb pours himself a cold cup of this morning’s coffee, frowning, glaring down at the floor.

 “Sure Bill,” I say, nodding a lot, “just honk like you mean it when you’re outside.”

 I take a roll of fax paper spewed out by the machine and start cutting it into strips.

 “That goddam thing broken again?” Caleb says passing by, grabbing his hardhat and  measuring tape.  “I gotta go measure the main entry opening.”

He sigh-groans and slaps his hardhat onto his head. 

“We’re gonna hafta guarantee a dimension to that storefront guy.  He’s been crawlin’ up my ass fer dimensions fer two weeks now but yer new union buddy there wouldn’t lock one in.  Now, he’s gonna hafta live with whatever numbers I fax over ta that douchebag.”

 I grit my teeth and look away.

 “’Re we gonna have bricklayers out there tomorrow?” he digs in a little deeper.

 “I dunno!” I retort, sitting back, throwing up my hands, the unruly roll of creamy-white fax paper jostling in the air.  “You were there, you heard the Business Agent say that if we sign a slip every day for their hours, he’ll send us enough masons ‘ta build a fucken pyramid!’”

 “Yeah, but we need good brickla….”

 I wave him off and turn back to disassembling the unruly fax paper such that I can reassemble it into a stack of dispiriting-to-the-owner Change Orders.

 An hour later, I hear Bill honking outside and start tidying everything into piles, stapling them so I don’t have to recreate everything again tomorrow.  The trailer door flies open and Caleb stomps in, hardhat under one arm, using the other to wipe his flushed brow.

“Man, it’s hotter out there than divorce court.”

He hangs up his hard hat, wobbles a little getting to his desk, then flops down into the chair.

“I could sure use a beer on the way home,” he lounges back, throws his hands up behind his head.

“Bill’s outside,” I studiously don’t answer his suggestion.  “You comin’?”

“Oh yeah, sure-sure,”

We don’t stop for a beer. 

Bill’s not a drinking man, he doesn’t need to, the stories buried in piles of memories inside his brain keep him going.

“I ben in every country known ta civilized man chasin’ AWOL soldiers, course not includin’ ahind t’Iron Curtain,” he sighs and taps the steering wheel.  “They ain’t civilized behind that thing.  There’s Africans down Africa way as is more civilized than them Ruskies.  I never cud unnerstan’ how big fellers like ‘em let themselves git duped by t’reds.  Why in doubleya-doubleya two Russians cudn’t do nuthin but soak up German bullets.  You know how many of ‘em died?  Huh?  Huh?”

He turns in the cramped, stinking of booze-breath, cab of his truck and, paying little attention to the road, nudges my chest with the back of his hand.

“Sumptin like five or six millions of e’m died in the big war, … six … mill…eeons of ‘em.  Ya know how many people that is?”

He presses his knuckles further into my chest.

A Toyota Tercel full of teenagers scurries around us, finger-flipping-honking, cutting us off.

Bill’s eyes are still staring at me looking for an impossible answer.

I shrug.

“It’s a lot, a very lot.  Ok, it mighta even ben more, ‘cause them reds cudn’t tell ya the truth, not even if their miserable lives depended on it.”

We finally arrive back at the apartment building and pull to a stop in our space at the far end of the parking lot.  The hot air above the asphalt wobbles, refracting the image of the dreary yellow brick building.

“Can someone ax…plain ta me why we hafta park over here haf a mile from our durned apartment?” Bill, loving the sound of his own voice, can’t stop himself.  “Heck, I’m almost done fer the day by the time I git ta the truck in the morning.”

“Talk ta Janet,” Caleb snaps, the sweet stink of booze hard on his breath.

“No, she fer sure won’t have no answer fer me, not taday,” Bill replies, opening the truck door.  “Her kitty’s not doing too gud, least an’ all when I talked ta her this morning it tweren’t, the air conditioning makes it scratch itself all day.  Its durn fur starts a cumin’ off after a few hours a scratchin!”

Not too much longer than Bill’s specified “thurty minutes” of corn shucking and boiling, steak sizzle-blackening on the pan – toying with the chirp-happy smoke detector – dinner’s close enough to ready for me to drag the white plastic patio chairs from in front of the rented television up to the rented table. 

I sit down and wait staring around the white-walled, entirely bare apartment.  Sweat beads up on my temples.  My underarms slide together in uncomfortable greasiness. 

A few months back Caleb came up here a week before the rest of us to get the job going.  In between setting up the trailer, fencing the jobsite and directing the bulldozers where to scrap back the planet, he rented an apartment’s worth of the objects that make empty apartments look like humans live there: Beds and mattresses, a TV on a stand and a table for meals.  He checked the wrong box on the form and rented tall kitchen stools.  Janet wouldn’t cover the extra charge to return the stools, so Caleb stacked them in the closet and bought four $3 white plastic patio chairs and charged them to the jobsite.  But the thing he’s most proud of getting past Janet is the two rented plastic palm trees.

“Maybe they’ll fool some chick inta thinkin’ Magnum lives here,” Caleb says, seeing me stare at the trees pushed up against the only window in the living room. 

He waves his very full plastic cup of Wild Turkey and ice at the too-shiny green palms.

“Ol’ mind-yer-pennies Janet wuz like a cat as stepped in bricklayer’s acid when she finally read the third month’s Furnirent invoice … MEEEOOOW!”

He claws the air slowly, chuckling viciously.

“I tol’ her these is like for real; I mean they evens got plastic durt.”

He walks over to the plants and picks up a few brown pellets of plastic.

“Pretty soon we won’t need no more real trees,” he says, rolling the plastic soil around on his palm. “We can jest have these ‘uns, they’re much better behaved, they don’t be blowin’ down on people’s trucks ‘r makin’ piles a leefs fer burnin’ every fall.”

He waves his cup of bourbon at the palm trees, the ice swirling against the plastic.

“But that stoopid broad, she on’y thinks about numbers addin’ up.  She don’t give a shit about ‘portant stuff like this.”
The little beige speaker by the apartment door trills loudly. 

Caleb and I turn to one another in shock; first at a sound we’d never heard before; then at the fact that someone knows we’re here.

“Who the fuck could that be?” I ask.

“Yeah!” Caleb says, worry on his voice.  “Aint no one never stops by here, probly a mistake.  Don’t pay it no heed.”

Bill turns to us from the stove, his eyes darting over and back from Caleb to me.

I frown, squeeze my eyebrows together.

“I mighta tol’ yer countryman, ta stop by, … haf a little dinner.  He wuz awful down earlier, all by heself in some motel room over here in Newburg.”

He stops and looks at the beige speaker. 

“Wouldn’t none a the motels in Poh…keepsie let ‘im rent a room.  Guess them motel fellers meets up fer coffee or sumptin tells stories like a bunch a housewives.”

“Well …,” I purse my lips, raise and lower my eyebrows.  “He’s here, we cannit turn him away.  Go find him at the door willya, this shithole is a maze a corridors.  I don’t think I ever cum out the same door twice.”

Five minutes later, Dony’s squat frame is crowding the apartment’s open doorway, Bill visible behind him in the corridor.

“Jaysys, d’ye have de hate on in here?”

“No, no, no,” Bill says, slapping Dony’s broad shoulders as he forces his way in past him.

“Joe’s jus’ storin’ all a July’s heat in this here ‘partment, so’s he don’t hafta pay ya ta heat the scaffoldin’ next winter.”

We all laugh too much.

“Sit yerself down over there,” Bill waves Dony toward the rented table. “Take the weight offa the floor.”

Dony takes a tentative step into the apartment’s pretend-kitchen.  He looks sheepishly over at Caleb, then at me.

“Howaye lads, nice …,” he trails off.

“Come on in,” I wave him toward the table.  “Here Caleb, offer Dony a drink.”

Caleb effects a fake scowl but immediately flips it into a wide smile.

“Grab yerself some Wild Turkey or a Bud from the fridge, but don’t be letting none a that coolness out, we don’t want no one back at the office ta think we’re living high on the hog out here in hell!”

Dony nods a lot but doesn’t move.

“Come in, come in,” I wave him in.

He takes a few steps in.

“I won’t have no beer, dat stuff is on’y a cod,” he fast twist-nods his head of thick grey-black hair.   “Payin’ fer houses down de Cape fer bar owners, an’ dem on’y laffin’ at us.”

 Bill’s back at the stove and all business.  The huge pot of water, with sunshine-yellow corn cobs jutting over its brim, boils over; the mini-flood whooshing to steam on the red-glowing stovetop.  The pan of steak-tips hisses and sizzles viciously.  Bill stabs at the still red inside steak-tips with a fork, liberating them from the scorching pan, dropping them one by each onto a white Styrofoam plate, that immediately runs red with blood.

“Awright fellers,” Bill says standing upright from the stove, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

“I’d say we’re just about done here, this steak is anyhoo, not fer sure about the corn.  We’re gonna need a pliers or sumptin ta lift the corn out.  Janet wouldn’t pay fer nuthin but that one sharp knife that ken’t hardly cut butter.  Ya know a channel lock’d be best thing ta git t’corn outta that boiling mess.”

“Whare the fuck d’ya think we are?  A fucken jobsite!” Caleb snarls, his eyes tightening as he raises his already almost empty plastic cup towards his mouth. 

“A pliers in a classy apartment like this?”

He laughs too loud at his attempt at a coverup joke. 

Then he’s out of his seat so fast his chair topples to the floor.

“Ya know what, we ken use a couple a branches offa them trees, Furnirent ain’t gonna miss two branches, and fucket if they do, Janet ken pay!”

A minute later he’s at the stove with two large plastic palm branches trying fish the corn from the scalding water.

“Hol’ on, hol’ on, lemme git outta t’way,” Bill says fast, backing up to avoid the splashing water.  “I never seen corn cum outta a pot like that afore.”

Caleb plunges the thick end of the branches into the pot; one by one retrieving the flashing yellow corn cobs; the boiling water wilting the lustrous green leaves; a steaming pile of corn mounting on the white plate, warping the Styrofoam.

“Hell, that beat walkin’ ta Bill’s truck ‘cross that fucken millun degree parkin’ lot, huh?” Caleb says with an emphatic nod, looking around for his bottle of Wild Turkey.

We all serve ourselves.  Dony makes a show of needing to get shooed into the line, Bill demonstrably handing him a Styrofoam plate.  We all sit down, sighing, grunting, dragging the patio chairs tight to the table.

“Eh, … grace … we gonna say…,” Bill trails off, looking up his eyes darting from Dony to mine.

I deadpan him back, giving nothing away.

Dony blesses himself rapidly.

“Bliss us oh Lord fur dese dy gifts wu’re about ta rah…ceive …,” he mumbles loudly.

Bill nods along, his eyes dancing to the words. 

As soon as Dony’s lips stop moving, Bill grabs his plastic knife and fork.

“Don’t be foolin’ yerselves that ye’re gonna cut steak with them goddam knives!”

Caleb snaps from behind his refilled plastic cup.

“We’re gonna hafta eat likes we do when we’re huntin’.”

He forks a steak-tip and holds it up to his mouth, tearing at it with his teeth.

“God durnit but this heat’s sumptin else!” Bill says, flapping his hand in front of his face.  “I’m a gonna hafta take mah shirt off.  Let me know if y’all has any ladies stoppin’ by.”

He hmmphs out a laugh as he stands and whips off his sweat-soaked white undershirt. 

Cutting diagonally across his chest from his left shoulder towards his right hip is an enormous scare.

Bill sees me staring at the thick red scar.

“Heart surgeon done that, little Jewish guy in Boston, saved mah life, he did!” he wipes the back of his hand across his brow.  “Harder ‘an anything I cum across in Koh…rea, lyin’ in that ‘ospital bed seein’ all them nurses in tight-white dresses an’ me not fit ta chase ‘em!”

I look away from his scar, shamed at getting caught staring.

“Come on,” Bill says loudly, flopping back loudly onto his white patio chair.  “Let’s eat this food afore it gits … too hot.”

He laughs for real now, surprised by his own joke.

We all eat; the food is surprisingly welcome despite the apartment’s suffocating heat.

Dony takes the salt cellar, peels of the plastic fill cap on the bottom and empties a pile of salt onto his plate.

“See dat now Bill,” Dony points at the little pile of salt on his plate, almost indistinguishable from the Styrofoam.

“Now ain’t that sumptin!” Bill exclaims. “Give that on over here.”

“Cut out de middleman, dats what I says.  Sure, if I coulda bot dem bricks direct from dat factry above in All…bane, than I’d made a few quid on this focken job.  But ya see dey makes me buys ‘em from de yard in Pow…keepsie.  An’ de yard does marks ‘em up another twenny percents.  Dem focken middleman is killin’ dis country.”

Bill stares back at him, but I can tell that behind his eyes he’s a million miles away.

“Oh durn it, I fergot the pertato salad,” Bill says out of nowhere, waving the steak-tip speared on his fork in the direction of the pretend kitchen. 

“Someone go git it wouldya, I’m plum tuckert out from ever’thin’ taday.”

I stand up fast to avoid all of us slipping into stupid glowering.

“Jaysys it ‘twas some focken day awright,” Dony says with a loud sigh.  “I never taut I’d see de day I becum a union contractor.  Sure, ‘tis on’y de big bhoys as does dat.  Country lads like me, jus’ tryin’ ta make an honest livin’, wud niver a tink a jynin’ d’union.”

From the pretend kitchen, extracting expired potato-salad from the fridge, I pretend I’m not listening until I hear my own voice saying:

“Well, sure at least we’ll finally get them fucken walls up, get everyone paid up, an’ we can start getting’ the fuck outta he….”

“‘TIS ME AS NEEDS GITTIN’ PAID!” Dony yells, his chair jerking loudly.

I spin around, his eyes flash at me in anger. 

I stare back flatly, suppressing a vicious urge to smirk and further stoke his anger.

We stare at each other for too long.

“Brin’ over that pertato salad an’ share it with us ‘Mericans, ya pertato-greedy Mick!” Bill says loudly, but without any of the usual mirth in his voice.

Dony scrapes his chair back to the table and props his elbows up on the tabletop.

“Me gud Ireland suitcase, full a de finest a Missus Bradlees shurts an’ socks an’ jeans, aven me skivvies!  De lot of it stuck below in dat Injun’s storeroom.”

He twist-nods his head and coughs out a forced laugh. 

“An’ me in de same pair a skivvies dis past focken wake!”

Caleb, holding his nose, pointedly drags his plastic patio chair sideways from Dony.

Everyone laughs, but Dony’s eyes are still full of anger when he catches mine. 

This time I give him the bring-it-on smirk.

Bill’s eyes dart between the two of us.

“Cum on over here with that pertato salad; a meal aint a meal without pertatoes.”

I bring over the pint container of creamy-carbs and sit back down.

Bill nods at me, then scrunches his eyebrows and focuses on pushing the stick of butter hard against the steaming corn, melting a slather of animal fats against the cob.

“D’ya knows why we put butter on corn Joe?” he asks, looking up from the butter and corn, his face relaxing.

The enormous red scar slashing across Bill’s chest glistens.

“I don’t know,” I answer, smiling, “but I get the definite sense that I soon will.”

“So’s ya git more salt on there!”

He dabs the corn cob, dripping yellowish butter, into the pile of salt on his white plate.

“Now, … this here’s a real ‘Merican meal.”

“Yer bleddy right dere,” Dony says, twist-nodding, his arm reaching out.  “God Bless Ah…merica an’ all dat, give me some a dat oul’ buther.”

Caleb raises his cup of Wild Turkey toward the fluorescent light above us and says:

“Amen!”

Old Warriors - Part I

I’m sitting on a white plastic patio chair bellied up to the table in an apartment in Poughkeepsie, NY.  The sun flaking in through the don’t-open-cause-it’s-broken sliding glass door and the heat radiating from the pots-and-pans-littered stove in the open plan kitchenette force the apartment’s thru-wall air-conditioner to rattle and complain loudly as it fails to keep us even pretend-cool.

Face sheened with sweat, drops running down my back, I’m all eyes on the pan of sizzling steak tips that Bill, our aged, carpenter-laborer-chef, is carrying over from the kitchenette.  His stubbly cheeks balloon and his lips billow as he issues the trademark sigh of an older, tired, hard-working human.

“This durn carpet’s rougher‘an sandpaper,” he complains as his socked feet build up static against the flooring’s rough texture.

Everything to do with this apartment is rough. 

Our accountant, Mind-Your-Pennies-Janet rented it for us after less than an hour of cranky phone-calls to sketchy landlords willing to rent by the month to a construction company.  When I phoned to complain to her that it was a dingy, nuthin’-works two-bedroom apartment for three people, way too far from the jobsite she responded with her passive-aggressive over enunciation of every word:

“It’s coh…erent with your budget’s projections for housing … and meals.”

“It’s a shithole more than an hour away from the job, we’re wasting half our….”  

“Yoouu,” she emphasizes my role in her guilt, “said the Paw…keep…see area and Herb, the very nice old gentleman landlor, says he considers Newburgh as part of thee Paw…keep…see area.

“Newburgh is its own area, and Herb hasn’t returned our calls about no hot water or the smell of a dead sumptin in the alleged kitch….”

“Please take up whatever problem you have with Herb, just remember in two weeks he’s having cardiac surgery on his heart.”

The click of her phone hanging up completes the finality of our lack of communication.      

Now before me, on the rented, tubular stainless steel and white Formica table lies the makings of one of Bill’s Thurty Minute Feasts awaiting for the main course: The sizzling steak tips.

“If an’ it takes more’an thurty minutes ta cook it, than it ain’t worth spendin’ that much a yer life a cookin’ it,” Bill, with his John-Wayne-clipped-wisdom, had advised me at ten o’clock the night before in the deserted aisles of the Newburgh Price Chopper supermarket.

“Let me give ya some advice Joe, life’s too short fer standin’ at a stove,” he draws in a sharp-fast breath raising his barrel chest, broad shoulders and wild-bushy eyebrows.  “See there’s gals out there as needs ta git laid an’ cold beer as needs ta git drunk an’ most impertant a all, there’s fast cars as needs ta get driven … FAST!”

Down the aisle stocking the spaghetti shelves, a woman of great girth, in a disquietingly red Price Chopper shop coat, spins her head rapidly in our direction, stares suspiciously at us, then slow-anxiously turns back to the shelves.

“What we need is gud food, I see ya eatin’ salads an’ bah…nan…ahs,” Bill snorts and waves his hands at shelves of packaged food. 

“That shit’ll kill ya an’ when they slab ya down the County Morgue, the doctor’ll cut ya open an’ find yer insides aint no more’an a bunny rabbits!”

His thick arms try to shoot up over his head, but they don’t go all the way anymore and stop halfway, leaving him looking like a lost-his-verve-preacher. 

“How’d ya think thee United States of ‘Merica runs this crazy world full a human beans, huh?  Huh?  Like as if we wuz bunny rabbits … HUH?”

The stocker half-turns her head but content that it’s just an old man schooling a young man, she returns to her boxes of linear carbs.

We load up with “gud food:” Steak tips – marked down 60% for reasons unspecified; corn on the cob – 10 for $1; and a pint of store made potato salad – with an expiration date of yesterday.

“Oh, don’t worry none about them expiree days,” Bill assures my food-anxiety, his stubbly jowls trembling.  “Tha’s jus’ the store manager wantin’ ya ta eat more an’ faster, so’s he can git he’s bonus ferta buy heself a new set a gulf clubs.”

Bill leans his thick torso on the shopping cart’s bright red handle as we move along the aisles of alarmingly colorful “gud food.”

“What we all need now is a pile a disposable plates, paper towels, forks an’ such.  Now where intheSamHill would they keep that sorta stuff in a market?”

He stops the cart, stands upright, cracking his back.

“Ooohhh, that felt gud,” he gushes, both hands on his lower back.

We read the signs dangling from the ceiling.

“Household goods?” I turn to Bill, my eyebrows raised hopefully.

“Naw, it’s ta do with stuff we just use t’once an’ then git rid of it.  Disposable, ya know,” he wags a gnarly old finger in my face, his wild eyebrows bunching together. 

“Disposable!  Ya know, gittin’ rid of it.  There ain’t nuthin’ this side a heaven nor hell a human bean can’t do without.  Back in Koh…rea, fer the first few days, when we didn’t have SHIT!”

He stops and looks all around, swiveling his thick torso with remarkable ease.

“Sorry, I don’t mean ta offend no one, an’ I hate ta hafta say it to a fereigner an’ all, no offense, but back then the Marine Corp didn’t know their asses from their elbows.  I mean fer the first few days.  Couldn’t blame ‘em I suppose.”

He stops to wave his hand at a garish yellow and red “TWO FOR ONE” endcap display of Utz Barbecue chips.

I grab two bags and drop them into the cart.

“That’s when ya learn jus’ how disposable ya are … ta the war on commies that is.  See, the reds wuz ready ta fight, but they didn’t git hardly no trainin’, they wuz all gorillas an’ such.  So, when they’d ambush us goin’ down a valley or somewhere, we’d just hunker down in around our trucks an’ jeeps.”

He rips open the Utz bag showering the white tiled floor with flecks of red-tan chemical dust.

“Then our first wave of counter-ambush Marines’d rush ta positions at the bottom a the hill.  The commies’d always git surprised by that first wave.  They never could figure it out.  What’d they think we wuz gonna do?  Stay there like sitting ducks so they could call in artillery.  Course, maybe they didn’t have no artillery.”

He stuffs a handful of chips into his mouth, instantly turning his lips an orangish-red.  He holds out the bag for me; I shake my head.

“Well, the second wave wuz what we cum ta call ‘the disposable wave’ cuz the commies’d finally a woken up theyselves up that we wuzn’t gonna jus’ let ourselves git shot ta shit.  Oh, they’d be ready fer ‘the disposables’ awright, an’ when that second wave cum out from under the trucks an’ such there’d be a MarymotheraGod barrage a shootin’. So, remember ….”

He stuffs another crunchy handful of chips into his mouth.

“Don’ never be a part a no second group in nuthin’.  Course, by the time the third and fourth wave left we’d have them little yellow bastards runnin’!”  

He stands there munching chips, still staring at me but his mind is back Korea in the summer of 1950.  It goes there a lot, either when there’s stress on the jobsite or, like this, out of the blue in quiet moments.

“Oh, it took a couple a years of us whalin’ on them commies an’ then … my day cum. Yeah, I wuzn’t payin’ ‘nough attention an’ I end up in a disposable wave.  Course pretty much all the waves wuz near disposable at that point, cuz even commies learn.  Anyhoo, I took a slug in the shoulder, right there.”

He lifts the yellow and red Utz bag up to his left shoulder.

“No gud commie ammo, weren’t no more’an a bee sting, … well, they did took me to a hospital in Japan fer a few weeks, but then …,” his eyes come back to Price Chopper as, lacking imagination, we have blindly turned into the HOUSEHOLD aisle and see what we’ve been hunting.

“Git some a them plates, the big uns, I’m a gonna cuk us up a Thurty Minute Feast tomorrow.  Anyways,” his eyes drift off again, “eventually good old Teddy Ballpark shows up in the sky, him an’ he’s airplane finished them reds off quick.  They didn’t have no hardware like we had, their factories wuz still set on makin’ shovels an’ buckets an’ stuff.  But they had guts though, the little bastards, they’d creep right up ‘til they could smell the coffee off yer breath, then BANG!”

He index-finger blows my brains out all over the HOUSEHOLD aisle.

He shakes his head, the insides of which is 11,000 miles and forty years away.

“Not them papery plates,” he snaps back to the present moment.  “Git the gud Styrofoam uns, them paper uns can’t hardly soak up no butter nor fat atallatall. Ya know he’s a awful nice feller that Teddy Williams, I bumped inta him one time down Florida.  He wuz signing autographs or sumptin at a hotel in Hialeah.  I seen a sign an’ I pulled up illegal in my big rig, pushed on in past all sorts of fellers in black suits.  I weren’t payin’ ta see, I jus’ wanted ta tell old Teddy that I wuz in Koh…rea with the Old Breed, that’s what we call the 1st Marines.”

Behind his eyes flicks back to Korea, 1953: Bullets; bombs; death; clarity, of a sort.

“Right off Teddy up an’ invited me back ta he’s place way down the Keys fer a steak dinner.  Course I couldn’t go, even if my truck wuz allowed on them bridges down there, I had a load a Canadian lumber as needed deliv’rin’.  A dock manager waiting in Florida City standin’ there with his hands on his bony hips; a clipboard under his arm with my contract clipped to it; an’ a nasty scowl plastered across he’s nasty face.”

He shrugs his shoulders and hitches up his jeans.

“Now we’re gonna need enough paper towels as cud mop up Lake Superior, go on, git the biggest package they got.  My friend Janet’s footin’ this whole bill, tol’ me herself she did, when I brun’ her some a that Donkin Donuts coffee las’ Friday.”

He nods and smiles a telling smile. 

“She’s a nice ol’ gal behind all that huffin’ n’ puffin’ she does.  She never did have that Donkin Donuts brand afore.  I tol’ her it’s good even though it aint.  Tol’ her it’s gonna be the next Howard Johnson’s if an’ ya can believe people is gonna ‘ventually be that stoopid.”

We load up the cart with household goods for the sort of house that can be thrown in the bin the end of day of the day Friday.  Then we turn into the SODA & WATER aisle, wherein the aforementioned Lake Superior appears but trapped in bulging plastic bottles and colored bright orange, electric yellow, black. 

I wave the cart to be stopped as I reach for a 24 pack of Poland Spring water.

“Don’t be buyin’ no water with Janet’s money,” Bill snaps.  “She won’t cover payin’ fer no water as ya ken get fer free outta the faucet.  Go grab a case a Coke, now that’s the freedom drink.  Didya know back in the day, in old Europe the Generals’d order up the buildin’ off a Coca Cola plant in some town fer ta piss off the local commie politicians.  But them sniveling French commies couldn’t hardly complain.  The durn packaging of our freedom drink come in their very own color!”

He laughs too hard at his own joke.

“It’s gonna be a fuc…,” I start but stop myself because Bill complains that we all engage in “easy cussin’, su’prise me next time, spend some brain power on a good insult.’

“… hotter tomorrow than a witch’s fart.  We’re gonna need water for the jobsite.”

“Well, yer gonna hafta splain that ta Janet, she aint one fer bankrolling no perks fer the

guys as is gittin’ well paid fer werkin’ on the jobsite.”

I take a deep breath and stare at the swamp green wall that is the Fresca shelf.  The dead end “must do” logic loops manufactured by the Greatest Generation’s minds tire my mind.

“When wan a the Connemara bricklayers topples off the scaffoldin’ from his hangover an’ heat dehydration, what d’we tell OSHA?”

“OSHA?  Just a bunch a ‘Merican commies is all they is,” he purses his lips and pushes them up against his nose in disgust.

But he does stop the cart to let me load the two cases of water.

“A witch’s fart …,” he nods a big nod.  “Not bad, not bad, but ya gotta keep workin’ that one, I never did give no thought as to whether witches even had holes in their asses.”

Then he waves frantically at the Coke display until I grab a 24 pack of that black liquid to balance out the wastefulness of buying a product freely available by turning on a tap that doesn’t yet exist at the jobsite.

We turn out of the liquid sugar aisle and into the fat and sugar aisle.

“Now this here is real ‘Merican food,” Bill stops and holds out both hands like we’ve attained the summit of some great mountain.

He shakes his head in satisfaction, behind his eyes is now fully present.

“Ding Dongs, Twinkies, Snoballs, an’ look they gots my favryte girlfriend!” he reaches out and strokes a plastic package.

“Suzy Q … do I love you!”

He gazes at the display, his mouth opening and closing, his stubbly jowls shuddering.

“An’ look Joe, they evens have a healthy one that ya ken wash down with that water – a Orange Cupcake!”

“Will Janet bankroll this?” I ask, not without some bitterness creeping into my voice.

“She durn well bitter or I’ll be the one in her office huffin’ n’ puffin’!”

Fifteen minutes later, I pull down the tailgate on Bill’s rusting F150, sling in the plastic bags of disposable household goods, cheap bovine flesh, already spoiling potato salad and slide in the cases of competing-for-legitimacy liquids as the truck engine rattles to life. 

Bill revs hard to keep the truck from “playin’ possum on me;” forcing out a choking blast of exhaust.

Inside the cab he cranks the AC on full.

“Janet’s gotta cover the cost a gas,” he winks.  “That’s awready in writin’ somewhere, so Caleb tol’ me.  Once they puts it in writin’; there’s no more fightin’!”

We’re rolling excruciatingly slowly across the sloped parking lot when Bill manages to jam us to a sudden stop, throwing me forward in my seat. 

He rolls down his window fast.

“HANG ON THERE MAM!” he yells before he even has the window down.

Out his window there’s a forty-something woman holding her cart in one hand and unloading heavy plastic bags of groceries into her trunk with her free hand.

“Jus’ hang on now an’ we’ll take care a that durn cart fer ya.”

He slams the truck into Park and starts to open his door.

“Aint ya gittin’ out too,” he turns and stares at me.

“I … eh, it doesn’t seem … sure-sure-sure.”

I start to open my door but the woman has already spun her cart around to push it up against Bill’s door preventing him from opening it any further.

She stares at us, panic in her eyes.

“Oh, no-no-no …,” I start to say.

“Mam, we can’t he’p ya out wit….”

“… it’s nothing bad, it’s just Bill always offerin’ ta help.”

The woman keeps up her panicked stare; knuckles whitened against the cart’s red handle; her eyes darting from Bill to me and back.

“Honestly,” I raise my hands, shake my head.

“Evur’thin’ awright mam?” Bill’s still got the rusty old door of his truck pressed against the front of her cart.

“We should go Bill, just close your door an’ we’ll go.  SORRY THERE,” I raise my voice, lean forward, hold up the palms of my hands, “we were just tryin’….”

“WhatintheSamHill ya talkin’ about,” Bill huffs, “this here lady needs help an’ you’re fer….”

“BILL!” I snap.  “Drive the fuck away from here, ye’re scarin’ the shit outta that poor woman.”

The silence of unhappy realization settles over the scene, broken only when a few seconds later Bill’s door clicks closed.

He nods one big-slow nod, sighs and staring forward we drive on across the poorly lit parking lot. 

He clicks on the radio.

“Get ready folks, the geeks down the weather office ‘re tellin’ me it’ll be ONE HUNDRED DEE…GREES tomorrow.  Yeah, they couldn’t stop it, don’t have the know how yet.  Just to start the day it’ll be seventy-five, watch for a classic burnt-orange daw….”

Bill flicks off the radio.

We cross the parking lot and stop at the light to get back onto the parkway.  I sense Bill turning to me and glaring.

“Whatinthedurnation jus’ happened back there?”

“She got a fright,” I turn to him, forcing a scowl onto my face.  “It’s ten o’clock at night; she’s in a parking lot; suddenly a truck pulls up….”

“Ta help her cuz she wuz fightin’ that stoopid cart an’ tryin’ ta load her trunk all at once, there’s no way a Marine wirth his salt cud pass that kinda situation.”

“She was scared shitless, how was she ta know it was the marines an’ not two serial killers pullin’ up?”

The light turns green.  

I have to wave at Bill to move forward.

“Well … I … nev…,” he starts but can’t finish.

We motor on through the next light but when the following light oranges and flips to red on our approach, he jams the truck to a stop way too far back from the light. 

He spins around in his seat and resumes his glare.

“That lady haint got no right ta think I’m no Ted Bundy.  HowintheSamHill cud she think ….”

“Bill, she was just frightened, a truck pulls up to a fast stop with two guys in it….”

“Ooohhh, so I shudda tol’ you ta git out an’ then go pull up the truck a few spaces away an’ wal….”

“Look, ya freaked out the woman, ya mightn’t ha’ meant ta but you did, for sure!”

“NO!” he shakes his head rapidly, the red from the traffic light rouging his face.

We sit in silence. 

Bill’s face turns green as the traffic light changes.

Still, we sit.

“We … we better go,” I say, pointing at the traffic light.

“Ya know what it is, that woman musta seed us in the market, I bet she did.  She hadta, you wuz makin’ so much noise about water an’ rabbit food an’ all that fereign stuff.  I bet that wuz it, no offense, but I bet she wuz ‘fraid we wuz a bunch a fereigners!”

“Are you serious?” I ask, stunned by his illogical logic.

“Yeah, no offense, but if she’d a known I wuz with the 1st Marines, there’s no way beneath this God’s sun that she’d behaved like that, unless… unless maybe she’s a commie?”