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?”

The Cast System

I’m spreadin’ an ould Irish Press all t’way ‘cross the kitchen table so where we eat cannit git ruined be the Brasso or Silvo.  If I don’t do a good job, Ma’ll get cranky an’ tell Da when he comes home from workin’ above in t’Gard’s barracks.  Once, I did let the table get stained, just a wee little blackish-blueish stain an’ Da got fierce mad altagether, his face gettin’ redder an’ redder an’ him sayin’ “there’s nuthin’ I hate more in this world, other than them gud fer nuthin’ politicians, except carelessness.” 

Then he gave me a batterin’.

But just a wee wan, ‘cause I done a mistake not a sin. 

Da’s always goin’ on ‘bout how useless politicians is, but every evenin’ after we say t’Angelus he gets all cranky, wavin’ his hands ta shush us so he can watch the News.  An’ sure t’News is just bombin’ n’ shootin’ above in t’North an’ borin’ politicians sayin’ confusin’ words between big-long hemmms an’ haawwws. 

The minute the News is over, an’ us already in the scullery doin’ the dishes, he picks up t’Irish Press an’ reads it so … slow…ly from wan end ta t’other, all the time shakin’ them big pages.  Why don’t they make newspapers like the small books at the front a the library with cardboard covers, an’ not have them big shaky-crinkly pages.  That way, when Da is readin’ the paper, we could hear what the Corporal in F Troop is sayin’ – he’s awful stupid, but most a the time it’s stupid-funny, not like t’News, that’s stupid-borin’.

Still, I love doin’ Brasso on a Saturday morning, an’ we couldn’t do it without them big Irish Presses.  Me first job is ta cover the whole table completely, wan hunderd per … – I don’t know what them things is, but they’re fierce important cause the man on the News uses them ta say how bad ever’thin’ is.  Ma says that ta cover the whole table is a hunderd a them.  If I don’t cover the whole table an’ it gets stained again, this time it might be a sin not a mistake.  Sins do get ya a fierce batterin’. 

See, ya don’t actually get kilt be Ma, she just tells ya that Da’s goin ta kill ya when he gets home.  She can stop ya from gettin’ kilt be Da by not tellin’ him or if he’s goin’ ta do it himself, she can tell him “ta cop on.”  But mostly she’s too busy for that, cause there’s always someone cryin’ from fallin’ or fightin’, or there’s hard homework that needs helpin’ with, or there’s laundry as hasta come in from t’line ‘cause a rain.

When I’m spreadin’ out t’Irish Presses, Davey an’ Cathy is fightin’ over who gets ta unlock the sittin’ room door.  The two a them hafta carry wan a the tubular-chairs outta the kitchen for ta climb up an’ get the key off the nail above the door.  See no wan is allowed inta the sittin’ room ‘cept if there’s someone fierce important in the house, or Granny.  Even Santy doesn’t come in that locked door; course he comes down the chimney. 

Da an’ Ma do keep “all the good stuff that ye crowd’d break ta smithereens” within in the sittin’ room. 

I don’t like the sittin’ room. 

It’s all borin’, ‘cept for the books, but I can’t read them yet, only look at the pictures in the ‘cyclopedia.

Anyways, after they get the sittin’ room door open, they have ta get Ma ta unlock the China cabinet.  See that’s way too easy ta break.  It’s made a glass an’ everythin’ in there rattles when walk apast it.  I’m too scared ta even look at it in case it’d crack an’ I’d be blamed.  

Ma has a secret key for it that she hides down in t’pocket of her apron.  In the China cabinet, behind all them locks an’ doors an’ glass is the on’iest rich things we have: A silver teapot, that’s full a money when ya lift the lid off: A silver crucifix with Jesus nailed ta it, on’y t’nails are just kinda-sorta silver thumbtacks an’ they go through His arms, not his Hands – still He looks awful sad: An’ a silver ash tray, even though no wan smokes in our house.  Uncle smokes, but he flicks his ash inta the fireplace or onta his plate, kinda-sorta ruinin’ the biscuits he hasn’t eaten.  T’ashtray says words written on it in silver.  I don’t know what the words say, they’re in that grownup’s writin’, the sort that the letters do lean up against wan another.

I hafta have the table all pertected before they get back with all the silver. 

Then, I go get the Brasso and Silvo from under the sink.  I hate it under the sink, it’s so dark and smelly, an’ monsters live in there, on’y small monsters that ate mice but they’d ate yer hand too.  I can see the Silvo bottle easy from where the under-the-sink door is kinda-sorta stuck open.

I take out the Silvo an’ the Brasso’s right next ta it, an’ I brin’ them back set them up on the table the way Ma wants them: Brasso on wan side a the table, an’ Silvo on t’other.  

Ma calls this the “cast system.”

I don’t know what cast means, but it’s about good an’ bad. 

“What are ya doin’ now?” Ma askes, all cross.

She’s always cross on a Saturday morning cause there’s so many people movin’ everywhere ‘round the house doin’ their jobs.  The big girls is upstairs pullin’ sheets off the beds for ta wash them, an’ foldin’ the blankets until the sheets come back in off the line.  The sheets’ll be dry this evening if there’s wind an’ no rain. If they hafta wait ‘til the morning, Ma’ll hafta shake them ta get rid a the black insects that sleep in sheets overnight. 

The hoover is goin’ mad over an’ back across lino in our room.  Ma usenta let Gay use the hoover on the lino, but then we go a new hoover – a Nilfisk.  Ya can do ever’thing with a Nilfisk.  Ya can even dry yer hair with it, but Ma don’t allow that.  I tried it once, when Ma was downstairs, an’ it near sucked the hair outta me skin.  Everyone on Marian Row and Riverdale was so excited about our new hoover, that me sisters’ friends was comin’ in for weeks doin’ the hoverin’ for them, just ta be usin’ a Nilfisk.

“I’m gettin’ ready for Brassoin’,” I say, not sure what I’m doin’ wrong now.

“An’ what are ya goin’ ta shine them with?  Yer shirt?” she pints back at the sink.

Oh no! I have go back under the sink an’ with me eyes closed, slap ‘round with me hand ta find the shinin’ rags. 

I stare at Ma ta see if she’ll just get them cause that’s quicker than makin’ me get them, but she’s really cross taday.

“Get in under that sink an’ find them rags, I don’t want ta hear another thin’ about monsters in this house.  T’only monsters I know of are Adolf Hitler an’ Ian Paisley an’ neither a them is in under our sink!”

She gives me shove towards the kitchen.

“I don’t have time for yer ould nonsense taday.”

I try ta slide the under-the-sink-door open a bit more so I can see better.  But it won’t go.  That door hates movin’ more than Granny does, ‘cept the door can’t be askin’ me for ta get everythin’ for it.  

I kneel down, fill up with air, close me eyes an’ stretch me hand inta the darkness that probly is the backdoor ta hell. 

Me hand knocks over bottles a sumptin’. 

I squeeze me eyes shut ta help me know what I’m touchin’.

The tips a me fingers touch sumptin’ cold an’ slimy – probly Da’s comb buttered in Brylcreem.

Me hand runs on an’ on until finally it touches the cold dampness a t’shinin’ clothes.  The Brasso cloth never dries out ‘cause I pour on so much a the slippery greyish-whitish Brasso outta the bottle. 

I pull out the shinin’ cloths.  Wan a them sticks on sumptin’’ but I just get mad, like Da does, an’ pull even harder. Whatever it was is sorry, cause I can hear it bangin’ onta floor of t’under-sink cabinet.  Sure that floor is so full a holes that whatever fell is probly below the rotten wood a t’floor with the mice or even fallin’ all the way ta hell.

By when I’m back with the cloths, ever’thin’ Ma has ever’thin’ set up in the cast system.  On wan side is the brass candlesticks, the two gud wans for Holy Days an’ ta show Santy where the knee-socks are for fillin’ with jelly beans, an’ the two ould wans for power cuts.  The ould wans is all stained with wax burns cause the power goes off a lot.  Ma brin’s in the kettle, which is gud an’ bad.  Gud cause there’s lots ta shine an’ bad cause where the spout a t’kettle wuz fallin’ off, Da took it ta a man, who done sumptin’ called “weldin’” an’ now the spout is stuck ta the kettle with metal-vomit. I hate touchin’ that greenish-yellowish metal-vomit, but ya hafta ta shine the kettle proper.

The silver stuff is fierce fancy altagethter.  Sure, the silver tea pot on’y ever got used the once ever.  Not even Granny gets tea outta that.  The on’iest time I seen it was when Archdeacon Nohilly come ta t’door wan day ta talk ta Da about the Travellers stealin’ from the Child a Prague’s collection box in t’church.  I like the Child a Prague, he smiles all the time, an’ like me he does seem a wee bit sad.

Da said t’Archdeacon cum down ta our house cause he didn’t want ta be seen goin’ inta the Gards Station.

“Altogether too much gossipin’ in this town,” Da said t’Archdeacon told him.

When I brung them a plate a Custard Creams, the on’iest thing I heard t’Archdeacon say was:

“You’re right Joe.”

He was agreein’ with Da who had said, “sure that crowd’ll be with us forever.  Didn’t our Lord say as much once upon a time.”

Ma was pushin’ in behind me with the fancy tray with the silver teapot, the gud milk jug an’ wan cup an’ a saucer from the China cabinet.  The whole lot on the tray wuz shakin’ like they were as scared as me.

Archdeacon Nohilly’s fierce cross, I wouldn’t want him ta ever know I made a sin.  Ta steal from him, the Travellers must be fierce brave.

T’on’y other silver things we have is the knocker an’ the little dooreen the letters come in through the front door.  But ya hafta go out ta them ta shine them up.  If it’s rainin’, which is nearly always, then ya don’t get ta shine them.

I know ever’thin’ about the silver, but I never allowed ta shine silver.  On’y the brass I can do, cause I’m too little. Davey an’ Cathy shine the silver ‘cause they’re bigger.  I could do the silver, sure it’s the same as t’brass on’y it costs more an’ if ya dropped a silver thing, then Da’d kill ya stone dead.

Netty doesn’t really do nuthin’ cause she’s on’y two.  I mean Ma gives her an ould brass thing that Granny brung back from Lourdes that shows Mary kinda-sorta smilin’ an’ her flyin’ above some roofs, with her hands held out, so it has ta be a miracle. 

I don’t think she’s actually smilin’, I think she’s cryin’ but I wouldn’t say that out loud.  What if Archdeacon Nohilly heard I was sayin’ bad thin’s about Mary Mother of God?  

That’d be worse than breakin’ silver!

Anyways, Ma gives Netty the brass Lourdes thin’ an’ a clean rag, ‘cause she’s on’y two so most things ends up within in her mouth.

Then I do all the brass. 

If the rule is that wee lads do brass, then I’m the oniest wan that can shine brass. 

I mean if Davey an’ Cathy are big an’ can do silver, then they can’t do brass as well.  Wan fierce rainy Saturday they tried but there was an awful fight, us wallopin’ wan another, hair pullin’, face scratchin’.   Ma stopped us be wallopin’ all a us with the wooden spoon till there was red lines across the back a our legs. 

I cried for hours that day, above in the bed, cryin’ inta the pillow, no dinner, stuff broken below in the kitchen, sumptin’ even went inta the fireplace, I don’t know what, but I heard it hittin’ the fire-screen leavin’ a big donk in the screen’s sorta metal net.  When I turned lookin’ at that noise is when I got the worst scratch on me face.

Ya couldn’t ask Ma about what happened that day. 

We never talk it at-all-at-all-at-all. 

I stayed in bed until teatime, just me an’ Noddy an’ Big Ears an’ Mister Plod.  Course Noddy was always havin’ gud thins ta eat all the time, an’ me starvin’ ta death within in bed, but I wouldn’t let anyone know.  Noddy’s always gettin’ inta kinda-sorta trouble, like Mister Plod is always sayin’ mean things ta him an’ he even locked him in prison once.  But it’s not real trouble, not like waitin’ for Da ta come home ta batter ya. 

Me plan was ta starve ta death before Da could send me down the back ta break off a sally rod from the tree for him ta use wallopin’ me across the legs.  But then there was boxty for tea an’ I could smell it an’ hear the rashers spittin’ within in the pan.  I could nearly taste all that luvly food in me mouth. 

Anyways, Ma never told Da, so no on got kilt.

After that day, Ma calls it “unmentionable Saturday,” I never use Silvo, an’ on’y me uses Brasso.

The other two is done with the Silvo at the table fierce fast, then they fight about who’s goin’ ta do the front door.  See, if ye’re outside doin’ a job an’ a friend comes along, ya can talk ta them; at least long enough ta complain about the job ye’re bein’ made do.  They think even talkin’ for a few minutes is better than doin’ a job. 

Maybe there’s sumptin’ broken within in me, but I like doin’ jobs.  Sometimes it’s even better than goin’ out playin’, specially when the lads are all fightin’ with each other over who’s the boss. 

Then I cum in an’ ask Ma for a job.

“Go on out ta play, an’ let me have a bit a peace,” she says, sippin’ her tea.  

Ma an’ Da an’ Auntie an’ Granny an’ Uncle are always talkin’ about peace. 

Peace, peace, peace! 

Please God there’ll be peace this year, peace next year. 

Maybe someone’ll come along an’ make peace.

Peace is just borin’! 

It’s just Ma sittin’ be the fire drinkin’ tea, with the telly off, an’ her starin’ up at the cracks in the kitchen ceiling.

I know Ma on’y needs a few minutes a peace an’ then she’ll be back ta her jobs again.  She’s always doin’ jobs, never stops. 

So, I stay, leanin’ backwards but holdin’ meself up by just pushin’ the skin a me hands completely flat against the table.

Then wan hand slips all of a shot, an’ I go backwards onta the floor.

Me head hurts bad, but I can’t cry ‘cause ya can’t cry durin’ Ma’s peace – she’d kill ya!

I stand up an’ walk inta the scullery so she can’t see I’m about ta cry.  There’s silvery-black circles movin’ ‘round the ceilin’ an’ the top a the wall, where the black-dampness lives. 

When the silvery-black circles go away, I have an idea.

“Can I wash the damp off the walls in the scullery?” I ask, me hands together like I’m prayin’.

That’s how ya say ya really want sumptin’.  It’s like as if ye’re askin’ Ma an’ God fer the same thing.  Whenever I see Archdeacon Nohilly bossin’ people inta seats at mass, I do put me hands up like that so he’ll know I’m holy.

I really want ta clean the scullery walls ‘cause it’s so much fun.  Ya get ta climb all over everythin’, even the cooker.  Course ya have ta be careful that ya don’t step on a ring an’ get kilt be t’electric or be Da.  But the climbin’ an’ cleanin’s so much fun.

“No!” Ma says that day.

She’s all cross now that her peace isn’t peaceful.  She drinks all the tea that’s left in her mug, an’ there’s that much I can see her throat gettin’ fat as it goes down.

“Grab the brush there an’ sweep the kitchen an’ the front hall, I’ve ta get yer tea goin’, an’ all that laundry still wet on the line, not a sign of a few windy hours without that cursed rain.”

Cause she’s always doin’ washin’, Ma an’ rain are awful enemies.

I sweep, liftin’ the chairs so the draggin’ sound doesn’t make Ma crankier.  With me down on me knees an’ the brush all the way under table, I pray for the rain ta stop an’ the wind ta blow so Ma’s laundry can get dry enough ta be put in on t’immersion.  Then she could get a bit a peace for the evening.

Sweepin’s borin’, specially compared ta the scullery walls, but me next favourite job is doin’ the Brasso. 

First, I rub lots an’ lots a Brasso onta the kettle.  That’s the biggest shiny thing, an’ I hafta be careful not ta touch the metal-vomit.

Then the Holy candlesticks.  They’re borin’ but easy ‘cause they’re so perfect an’, as soon as they’re done, Ma puts them back in t’sittin’ room. 

Then the power-cut candlesticks.  They’re all wobbly an’ have wax burn marks  an’ cuts from where they ben dropped durin’ the power cuts, near burnin’ the house down.  I do take good care a them ‘cause they’re so old an’ damaged. 

If it’s a week for vases, then I do them, but they’re borin’.  See, they don’t hardly ever get used.  Even the ouldest wan on’y gets a few flowers pushed inta it an’ then put on our doorstep for May Day.  Ma has roses in the front garden but they don’t go inta no vases.  If ya on’y kicked a ball inta the roses, an’ Ma sees it, ya get kilt.

When all the things is whiteish with Brasso, ya get that luvly Brasso smell.  Nuthin else smells like that.  Nuthin’ in the house or even in Mammy Handley’s classroom.  Ya have ta leave the whiteishness ta dry for two cups a tea an’, if Ma’s not too cranky, two slices a batch bread with butter n’ marmalade.  If you’re fierce lucky altagether, then there’d be Roses Lime Marmalade, but it’s on’y at Christmas we ever have Roses.  That’s the bestest marmalade, better even than jam.

After usin’ yer fingers ta clean the last a the sugar from the bottom a yer second cup a tea, then the Brasso is ready for rubbin’ off.  Ya use a different cloth for rubbin’ off than for rubbin’ on.  If the rubbin’ off cloth is new, like new old, it’s always someone’s old shirt that the cloths come from, then ya get the shiniest shine.

Probly someday I’ll be big enough ta do silver.  Even though sometimes I pretend I want ta do the silver, I don’t tell Ma or anyone that I don’t even want ta get that big.  In Mammy Handley’s class if ya raise yer hand an’ ask nicely, then ya can get outta yer desk ta get stuff, like crayons an’ paint or ta sharpen yer pencil.  No wan, ‘cept Marty the Traveller, ever gets slapped, an’ mostly he gets slapped for jumpin’ outta he’s desk an’ walkin’ ‘round without askin’.  When he won’t sit down an’ raise his hand ta ask nicely, then Mammy Handley opens the drawer awful fast an’ pulls out her wooden spoon.  

In Missus Foy’s High Infant class, there’s hardly no paint or crayons an’ Davey does be doin’ hard stuff, learnin’ letters ya never heard a, an’ how numbers do work in sums.  Every day after school he has ta finish awful hard sums that Missus Foy makes him write down in his copybook for homework.  An’ if ya don’t do the homework, Brother David comes ta the classroom ta give ya slaps with a big ruler.  If ya cry when he slaps ya, then the lads do laugh at ya durin’ playtime for cryin’. 

I’m not goin’ ta Missus Foy’s class.  I’m stayin’ in Mammy Handley’s class next year an’ I’ll do jobs for Ma all the time if the lads won’t play with me cause I stayed in Baby Room.

See jobs can be borin’ but if ya know ya hafta do them an’ ya don’t think about missin’ playin’ then the time goes faster.  Still if I on’y had jobs an’ no playin’ I’d hafta like the jobs or else they’d get so borin’.

Maybe it’s worth a few slaps if I can’t do the homework, so I can still play with the lads.  But what if Brother David slaps me so hard that I cry an’ then the lads are all laughin’ at me in the yard, pintin’ an’ yellin’: “Crybaby!”

Marty doesn’t cry when he gets slapped, not even when Brother David comes in an’ wallops his hand hard with Mammy Handley’s wooden spoon.

“Tish on’y me hand that hurts,” Marty says.  “T’rest a me don’t hurt atalltalltall.”

But after Brother David’s done shakin’ his head an’ goes out the door without makin’ no noise, Marty’s eyes do be all watery.

I don’t want homework, an’ I don’t want slaps. 

Maybe when ya get bigger, big enough ta do the silver, then slaps don’t hurt?

But I don’t even want ta do the silver, cause I love the brass.  Ma says the brass “is at the low end a class the cast system,” like that’s bad, but the brass an’ me don’t care. 

See if ya get a new ould rag, shine fierce hard altagether on the Brasso, squeezin’ yer eyes a wee bit closed, then the Holy candlesticks do look like they’re made a gold. 

One Bad Apple

I’m leaning against the Genius Bar in an Apple Store staring at a frumpy, scraggly bearded, fifty-something waving a metallic-pink iPhone around in his left hand as he lurches two steps forwards and backwards, teaching a class on how to use the iPhone13 to absolutely nobody. 

Upon the Apple-cool-but-uncomfortable benches set up for the class sits not a single human arse. 

Still, Nobody’s-Genius is undeterred. 

He just keeps lurching around on his cheap-already-burst-hiking-boots, waving the phone with such Apple-sized-overconfidence that I wonder if it’s a display of public humiliation for my generation; retribution for our inherent just-make-the-fucken-thing-work-Luddite-ness. 

They have him wired up, with a microphone snaking out of his exhausted hair and halfway across his beard, but the Acoustics Gods – still mad that Ear Pods prevent ninety-nine percent of the human population, and four percent of cats, from hearing anything other than what Apple determined was profitable to them – dictate that even though I’m just fifteen feet away, the only audible sound is Nobody’s-Genius’ frequent restart of his conversation with no one in a microphone-breathy: “And again ….” 

Off he mumblingly rambles, eyes maniacally animated, the rose-gold (Apple’s tran$lation of metallic-pink) colored phone arcing in a slow, absurd wave to nobody.

I strain my shamefully Ear-Podless ears to listen to what I hope to be both valuable and generationally understandable advice, as I imagine Apple would only stand up a Genius to teach us how to get full use from a device so expensive that it ranks, an albeit far, second, behind buying a car, in the purchases a regular human makes every few years. 

Of course, these days our planet is home to less and less regular humans.  Indeed, several of the irregularly wealthy humans have started searching elsewhere in the universe for places to build, at minimum wages of course, fancy new digs.

Just then my fifteen-year-old Personal-Genius emerges from the really-smart-if-not-actual-Genius storeroom, a phony sales-smile frozen across his face as he holds aloft a trim, multicolored cardboard box that costs a mere thousand plus dollars.  If you folded up fifty twenty dollar bills you wouldn’t get them all into this box without Andrew Jackson himself shedding a few, exceedingly well earned, tears of his own.

“Now Jo…seph,” he says chirpily. 

We, … well actually I, have tried repeatedly, but the fact that the name on my Apple account is Joseph cannot be overcome and thus Joe gets iconverted to Jo…seph.

“When was the last time you backed up your phone?” he continues in a machine-learningly flat tone.

“Oh Jay…sys!” I say through a long Covid-unfriendly exhale, preparing to, in the way regular humans do, lie and confuse my way out of this one. 

“I think I started a back up last weekend, but then I had to take the dog to his singin’ lesson, an’ there he got bitten be a piranha, who wasn’t there for singin’, the piranha’s a tap dance….” 

The lack of inflection on my Personal-Genius’s face makes it clear, he’s havin’ none of my ould shite talk.

I fall silent, only to be interrupted by a stray “And again ….”

“I’d say it ‘twas a while awright, maybe a mon…year or more?”

“Let us see.”

Being much better accustomed to getting a good old fashioned verbal flailing for my moral shortcomings in not doing something I shoulda, I’m unsure how to react.

“May I have your phone Jo…seph?” he asks, his small, pale palm unfolding.

Reluctantly I hand him my primary connection with the rest of the planet.

What if he disappears into the really-smart-storeroom with it and never returns?

All my oh-so-cool-n’-unique music collection – which used to take up actual space in the house until a trash-bag full of CDs got left outside a Thrift Shop early one Sunday morning – would disappear out the back door the Apple store, never to be heard again! 

My Apps that issue sports results – probly before they actually occur; that’s how smart Apple is – all gone: I’d be in last-to-know sports results hell!

The other apps that tell me the names of birds by their sounds and the names of trees via a simple photograph of a leaf – propelling me to be second place on the Greatest Bore Index after Al Gore – gone because this man-child wants to steal my antique phone!

“Eh, Jo…seph,” his hesitates, his staidness finally rattled.  “This is a rather older model, and the battery is quite low, it may be that ….”

“I’m kind of a rather older model meself,” I nod a lot in vociferous agreement, “and my battery is kinda low too.”

“Oh … yes, I didn’t, eh… mean, maybe we should plug this in … to power, … you know electricity.”

“Yes, yes, I have heard of elec…tricity.  That lad Tesla, he was involv….”

“Oh no Jo…seph,” he frowns, just a little, “Apple and Tesla, though both awesome technology companies are not in any way related.”

The problem with being a confirmed Luddite is that the Luddites lost the war against technology before it began way back in eighteenth century.  Their breaking apart of a handful of mills was barely a bump on the road in the rush to full scale, exploitative capitalism.  Thus, my reluctance to getting dragged clicking and screaming into the twenty-first century is entirely quixotic – yet I persist.  Probably it’s just my inherent resistance to change arising from years of the uncontrolled change known as aging. 

It wasn’t always this way.  I do remember eons ago being excited to borrow a work “car phone.”  This particular piece of technology was the size of a shoebox and required distinctly positive pressure on the dialing buttons for any response.  But as laws about getting distracted by your phone were twenty years in the future, who cared if it took five minutes of nail-whitening stabs at the handset to make one call – the shock on the other end when you said, “yeah, I’m callin’ from the car” was more than worth it.

We quickly moved on from car phones, downsizing to cell phones merely the size of bricks (that came with their own powerplants), with everything getting smaller and sleeker over time.  Though after 9/11, I was issued a Nextel phone that looked and operated like the radios the first astronauts used to speak all the way from the moon back to … Texas?  Or maybe that was something I heard in a bar one morning. 

On and on technology goes, burrowing ever deeper into our miserable existence, often promulgating its own brand of misery.  Long gone are the days when an ould fella sitting in the stands at one inter-county GAA match and listening to another on a transistor radio was considered “a wee bit odd.” 

Now, if we so choose, and I’m pretty sure a few did, we can watch a scoreless FA Cup Final while sitting on the hopper. 

Could it possibly be that the zenith of technological evolution is a human male jammed into a Liverpool shirt, plomped on the throne, expending zero calories on bowel movement planning, as he watches an inch sized Mo Salah not score for two hours?

And if this is the top of ihill, how come none of this got mentioned in the Bible?

Many years ago, when happy Neanderthals came to work, sitting in the corner was a lonely, beige computer, which got fired up only for specifically complex tasks.  If the computer was “down,” which it was more often than not, then this required a land line phone-call that summoned, weeks later, a portly, bald man, with a key of enormous proportions clipped to a belt loop.  This laconic man allegedly had worked for NASA, the CIA or both, was there to fix the computer with impossibly small tools.  Meanwhile we Neanderthals had gotten on with our work, completing in a few days what the computer would have done, perhaps too precisely, in an hour.  No one complained about “the computer’s down” delay or if they did, you just took an extra deep drag of your cigarette and, through a mouthful of exhaled smoke, told them to “go fuck yourself.” 

Before the plague we had “progressed” to the point, that if one’s computer was “down,” then no work got done.  For the sake of coworker morale, it became necessary to wear an I’m-so-bored-waiting-for-IT sour face all day.  Finally, a portly, prematurely balding, twenty-something with a suspiciously large key chain hanging from his washed-too-many-times khakis, shows up, restarts your computer a bunch of times until it “gets fixed.”  All the while, he’s hands behind head, tipping backwards in your chair, talking too much as he recounts how much better things were when he worked at Best Buy. 

During the plague … well, without a computer you simply didn’t exist. 

You were a non-person:  A void in hyperspace:  An “who is dot-dot-dot 2987?  Turn on your camera – it’s like you’re a stalker!”

During this precarious time for human existence, with the finest scientific minds around the world striving to find a vaccine to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, and a portly, balding guy – who allegedly worked for NASA, th… you get it – in Milwaukee trying to extract scientific data from hibernating bears for use in inventing a patented-call-before-the-top-of-the-hour product to prevent bedsores for all those condemned to binge-watching streamed series while horizontal, I fell victim to a computer disaster. 

Rather my ten-year-old Mac fell victim.  Now I acknowledge that in computer years, this Mac is essentially one hundred-years-old and if your one-hundred-year-old grandfather fell down the cellar stairs, you wouldn’t blame the bottle of bourbon he just consumed – right?  Yet I did, with standard human frailty and selfishness, personally blame Apple for this failure.  

As I was not able to get online and bellow to the world about the victimization under which I was being victimized, I had to swallow my fake pride, and real vitriol, and phone Apple’s 800 number.  This was a delicate situation, as the problem was not actually with the centenarian computer but with its … ahem, mouse. 

When did we all agree that this, the oddest, part of the computer experience had to be named after a rodent?  Couldn’t it just be called the handjo…, eh, well, we’ll leave it as mouse for now, but we definitely need to form a “select com…mittee” to deal with this pestilent naming.

Now call center adventures are for another day, another rant, but for today, let’s just say I got a perky, if somewhat gravelly voiced (ten, twenty, thirty cigarettes a day? Does anyone confess to smoking anymore?  Let along the number actually smoked?) African American woman of approximately the same ancient-in-technology-years age as my Luddite-self.

“Now da ya’ll perfer Josuph or Joe?” she asks, in a quaintly human way.

“Joe is gud,” I answer.

“Gud, ‘cause I wuz gonna call ya Joe anyways ‘cause my brother is a Joe an’ we don’t truck with nunna that ‘Josuph’ sh…stuff at…all.”

“Great,” I breath out a relaxing sigh.

“Now, how ken I he’p ya today, Joe?”

“Well, my mouse is not workin’ ….”
“Howdya mean it aint workin’?  I mean does it not move, not click or whot?”

“Yeah, all of the above.  It’s a wireless mouse and this morning it just kinda

disappeared of the screen.”

“Oh Joe, what’d ya do?  Did ya drop it or pour coffee on it or sumptin?”

“I wish,” I sigh again.  “It’s lucky I didn’t fire it inta the wall.”

 “I know, I know, but don’t worry Joe, we’ll git ya up n’ runnin’ in a few minutes.  Now, here’s what ya gotta do, is you ta use t’arrows, ya know t’little arrows on the side there.  Use ‘em to git us to Preferences on your computer, so’s I ken log in an’ see whats ahappenin.”

Together, with shared frustration, we determine that the arrows are not a substitute for the missing rodent, there’s simply too many actions required.

“Ok, ok, Joe, don’t panic, let’s not panic, aint nuthin’ evers a gained by apanickin’,” she breaths in fast.  “Now let … me … see.”

“Eh …,” I start, then stop myself so I can fashion a comfortably confusion lie-question.  “How long should ya keep a computer.”

“Oh well,” she breathes out, happy no doubt for a break in solving my stupid problem.  “Generally, they’re done after five years, but I a’ways swap mines out after three.  Cuz I don’t want no problems like this.”

“Yeah,” I lie-agree, wondering if she can tell from the serial number I provided at the start of the call that together we’re frustratingly trying to solve a problem for a ten year old computer.  

“Ok Joe, how’s about this,” she comes back with a burst of energy.  “Ya’ll got an old mouse anywhere’s else ya cud use?”

“No,” I answer mournfully.  “I mean not an Apple mouse.  I have another species, a Microsoft, ya know, a not-Apple computer mouse.”

 “Oh yeah, that’ll work Joe, Bill Gates wuz cool with Steve Jobs, he shares he’s mice with ‘im.  Jus’ go on ahead plug in.”

I follow here directions and my dinosaur of an Apple reacts to this affront by immediately showing a message: “PAIRING WITH WIRELESS MOUSE.”

Problem solved.

Turns out computers have egos that bruise just as easily as humans: Machine learning is getting a little too good!

“See Joe, I tol’ ya we cud use a little common sense ta solve the problem, course ya’ll know that common sense aint so common no more.”

Meanwhile back in the Apple store, things are not quite as calm and quick-profitable as iCorporate-Culture would like. 

My elderly iPhone is now on Apple-life-support on the Genius Bar.  It’s been lulled to a restful sleep in the moisturized hands of Apple-Geniuses and is now plugged into Make-America-Grate-Again coal powered electricity.  It’s showing some signs of life – though the white Apple wakeup-icon is blinking wildly in distinct defiance of normal SOP.

Nobody’s-Genius is still going strong, blissfully undeterred by the ongoing dearth of students in front of him.

“Eh, excuse me,” I say to my Personal-Genius.

He turns his eyes from staring incredulously at my phone to staring incredulously at me.

“Is this class …,” I nod towards Nobody’s-Genius, “being filmed or recorded or … something.”

I wave at the empty seats.

“Eh, … no, this is a … scheduled class.  It’s scheduled for this Apple Store on Apple-dotcom … but the users are simply not availing themselves of the free education.”

“So, he’s just …,” I shake my head slowly and pay closer attention to what Nobody’s-Genius is saying. 

But the Acoustic Gods are resolute in their vindictiveness and all I get is another “And again ….”

Everything he’s doing with his pink iPhone, gets broadcasted onto the ten-foot by ten-foot wall of screens behind him.  Thus, when he taps Photos on the home screen, the wall of screens immediately fills with a significantly larger than life photo of a blond, tanned, smiling faced, beautiful young woman.  The photo is tagged as being taken over three months ago in … Hollywood. 

I’m not quite sure if that’s Hollywood in Wicklow or even Florida, but my non-iSmart-gut tells me it’s prolly that other wan, ya know, the wan way out yonder on the left coast.

Nobody’s-Genius keeps flicking through his photos, and it turns out he’s busy fella with a … lot of really good-looking young women friends, many of whom like to photographed in environmentally friendly, as in not much fabric used, bikinis in places like Santa Monica, Malibu, Laguna Beach.

I never woulda thunk it!  But now I’m thinking about growing a scraggly beard, whipping out my own old-crushed hiking boots … ya never know!

A little upset to the generally-required-iStaidness of the Genius Bar now gets indisputably registered when my personal-Genius squeaks loudly:

“Oh, my goodness Jo…seph!”

His bony shoulders try to pin back, but … there’s really no depth for them to go anywhere.

“Jo…seph the last back up on this device was literally on the same day that my youngest brother, Nathan, was born.  I remember that day so well, going to the hospital and the nurses being mean.  That was like … seven, I think he’s seven, so that’s seven years ago!”

 “Yeah,” I make my best fake-I’m-concerned-about-this-too grimace. 

“To be honest with ya, I ben kinda busy dealing with a rodent problem.”

Over Under - Part II

I’m staring at meself in the Players Navy Cut mirror behind the counter, trying to force a blank face like the sailor’s on the mirror, so I don’t grin too much at me pint of Smithwicks.  The barmaid, wrinkly-faced, grey hair pinned back, Silk Cut dangling from thin lips, just plopped the pint on the counter in front of me, without any question – though I just turned seventeen.  

I turn my stare to the pint: Thin lines of bubbles stream upward as the brown ale consumes the yellow-foamed head.  

The wrinkly-faced barmaid spins away from us, allowing me to smirk.  With a hollow thunk, she jams a pint glass into the Harp tap, her watery eyes gazing into the glass as it fills.  A minute later, she plops two pints of Harp up in front of the Pa and Basq, spilling lager puddles on the brown-and-white-marbled Formica counter.  

White lines of bubbles stream up through the golden lager.  

“Now, ish dat it fellas?” she asks, the cigarette bopping as she talks.

“Where’s me cider?” Bronx says, eyebrows shooting up his clear forehead.  “An’ me payin’ for the round with the Minister a Defence’s money!”

He slings a fat wallet out of his pocket onto the counter.

“Oh yeah, got paid yesterdah for the first time in a month.  That’ll get me through the weekend so long as I don’t meet no one I owe money ta.”

He laughs too much at his own joke.

The barmaid sighs silently, puts a hand on her hip, leans forward slowly and pulls a flagon of Bulmers off a low shelf.  She grabs a pint glass and fills it, the cider heaving and gurgling out of the brown-glass bottle. 

“Thrung a few ice cubes in there if ya wud,” Bronx says, nodding respectfully.

“We don’t sell ice,” the barmaid purses her thin lips, eyes hardening at Bronx.

“Oh awright so, we’ll I have a pint a …,” he starts.

“Ya’ll have what ya ortered,” she finishes for him, sliding the pint of cider across to the customer side of the counter.

“I will indeed … mam,” Bronx says, nodding slowly.

He grasps the pint of a cider with his right hand, knuckles whitening, hoists the glass up to his mouth and in five long-splattery gulps, downs the pint, his throat pulsing with each gulp.

“There ya go now,” he says in his fake-ould-fella voice, nod-nod-nodding at the floor as he slowly sets the empty pint glass back on the counter.

Then his head shoots upright, eyebrows raised at the barmaid.

“Eh, I’ll have a pint a Harp please,” he says, like he just walked inta the bar.

The barmaid’s watery-eyes flick about for a few seconds, then she turns and grabs a pint glass off the shelf.

I take a good draught of my pint, the taste sharp and refreshing after seventy cold minutes of fighting and rugby.

“What time’s the bus lavin’?” I ask.

“Who gives a shite?” Basq says.  “They can’t lave this many a us behind.”

“Suppose so,” I nod, going at the pint again – better to have it inside me in case she askes our age or runs us when the regulars start showing up.

The door behind us creaks open and in strides the Monivea out-half, a streaky mud-stain still on his cheek.  He kicked the penalty that beat us, after the second half went on for an hour, with them playing downhill.  The first half wrapped up after twenty minutes, us with the hill leading ten to nuthin.  His penalty was the last kick of the game; they won eleven to ten.

“Great match lads,” the rollie-pollie ref pretend-gushed, walking over to shake Bronx’s hand.  “See now, somehows we managed ta get along in t’end.”

He nodded and smiled too much.

“Yeah, yeah,” Bronx, exhausted, nodded back once.  “I’ll buy you a fucken pint inside for not sendin’ me off.”

“Ah, go away outta dat,” the ref laughed.  “If hersell cot me servin’ a pint to an Under 17, she’d castrate me with t’lemon knife.”

“Don’t worry,” Bronx uses his fake-ould-fella voice.  “I have a rake a birth certs balow in t’house.  Wan t’cover every coincidence.”

Still, we knew the ref-barman couldn’t serve the Under 17s he just reffed, so after a pile of ham sandwiches and a few bowls a watery chicken soup, all washed down with pints a watery MiWadi orange, we slipped out in ones and twos before Coach or the bus driver could herd us all back onto the bus and start getting their day done.  

It wasn’t hard to slip by Coach, ‘cause he was still fighting the last penalty with the ref-barman.

“Awright so, I’ll ring it inta t’Branch as a 10-8 win for Castlebar,” Coach says, twist-nodding his head, fast-wiping his finger under his nose.  

“Sure, that last penalty,” he continues, head and shoulders leaning so far sideways he nearly falls off the stool, but eyes glaring at the ref-barman, “was no more a penalty than … than, I’m the fucken man in the moon!”

“Well now, man-in-the-moon, that wash a penn…altee,” the ref-barman twist-nods emphatically back at Coach.  “An’ I’ll tell ya that any young buckeen closin’ his fist an’ whackin’ another fella in the face is a penn…naltee all day long in my book!  A bleddy gurrier he waz punchin’ our fella like dat.”

“Sure, he didn’t hit no one,” Coach’s voice rises, making heads turn.  “There was a fly on yer man’s face an’ he jus’ shooed it away with an open hand.  It’s not his fault your lad moved his head an’ made it look like a thump.  Sure that lad’s father’s a Gard, he couldn’t thump anyone.” 

Coach lurches off the bar­stool scraping it off the tiled floor, one hand hurrying across under his nose, the other held out as he limps along the bar toward the ref-barman.

“Here, here,” he says, pursing his lips, nod-nod-nodding, eyebrows furrowed. 

“Give a handful a five pences an’ I’ll phone it in for ya.  It’s oh-nine-wan, two fou…”

He stops cause the ref-barman isn’t even looking at him; he’s head and shoulders down, fat fingers plunging pint glasses into the black-glass-washer-thing in the sink.

“I knew ya’d be reasonable, sure I let ya swap nearly your whole team at half-time.  This is a league game, ya know, no subs unless someone’s injured.”

“Them ladeens waz injurt,” the ref-barman twist-nods his head.  “I asked dat Injun doctor as wuz walkin’ past with his little spanieleen, an’ he agreed.” 

“I don’t give a shite if that spaniel got up on his hind legs an’ diagnosed them himself, you’re on’y allow ….”

“But sure ye for…feeted t’game be showin’ up here with on’y tirteen lads,” the ref-barman looks up from his glass washing, a sneer-stare pinching his fat face.

“As shmart now an’ all as ye are, ye couldn’t count,” he snorts.  “An’ as stoopid as ye tink we are, we had fifteen young buckeens, an’ then some.”

“Ya never said a fucken word about them made up rules a the Branch, sure if I show up with on’y ten lads, an’ we can bate ….” 

I slip away, holding the pub door till the last minute so it doesn’t slam. 

Out on the street, it’s cold, drizzly, and nearly pitch black cause we’re halfway between the two streetlights in the village; just the reddish light of a Guinness sign lighting the greasy-wet road.  From the even darker darkness behind our bus, a cigarette ash flares bright red.

Thinking it’s the lads after not getting served in the pub across the street, I head toward the red dot in the darkness.

“How’s it goin’ boss?” I hear a familiar-ish voice ask with a forced laugh.

I can’t see his face so I stop a few feet back.

“Orra, our coach’d kill me if he cot me smokin’!” he says, laughing a bit more.

“Ohhh,” I say just to be saying something as my eyes adjust to the darkness.

“Good match today, we near bate them,” he laughs.  “The lads’d never a lit me live that down.”

“Oh gud man!” I say, seeing now that’s it’s Dony, the prop Monivea gave us halfway through the first half so scrums didn’t have to go uncontested after Sid’s eye got burst open.

“I didn’t know what t’fuck ta do when the skelpin’ started,” Dony laughs, pulling ten Major from the inside pocket of his jacket.

He holds the pack out, offering me one, as he slides one out for himself and lights it off the butt in his mouth.

“Aragh, what can a lad do when t’fight starts on’y hape in,” he forces another laugh.  “Sure ‘tis all the wan who ya wallop; tamorrow he cud be yer besht friend.”

“I suppose so,” I say tentatively.

“Aragh, sure didn’t I haveta give me own ould fella a coupleya skelps last night, an’ him as drunk as forty cats,” he forces a dry laugh, broad shoulders rising and falling.  

“Wreakin’ t’house he wuz, firin’ stuff at the wall.  Mam duckin’ n’ dodgin’.  Fuck me says I, he’ll burst the telly an’ I’ll miss The Fall Guy next week.”

He twist-nods like an ould fella, the red ash of his cigarette arcing in the darkness.

“I soon put a stop ta his fucken wreakin’!”

“Jaysys, sorry ta hear that, that’s fier…,” I start but he fast-waves me off, the cigarette ash flashing through the darkness.

“Ah, ‘tiz what it ‘tiz,” he laughs, jams the cigarette back in this mouth and keeps talking, his face red in the light of the cigarette.   

“Sure, I’ll be abroad in London when t’buildings get busy over yonder.  The brether’s balow in Camden Town, a chippy on fifty pound a day.  He’ll ring ash soon ash he has a job for me, an’ I’ll be on the next fucken bush outta Galway ta London.”

He laughs again, but his shoulders don’t move.

“Anyways, thanks for helpin’ us out today,” I say.  “You’re a great prop, hopefully ya get ta stick with it.”

I make for the pub across the road to meet the lads.

“Orra, if ye’re goin’ in there, watch out,” he yells, back to shoulder-laughing again.  “That ould bitch’ll charge ye a fucken fortune if she tinks ye’re underage.”

The pints cost a lot all right, but when you just turned seventeen, you’re happy to get served at any price.  Anyway, Bronx bought the first round.  He’s eighteen and she had to serve him.  That’s how come we all end up sitting at the bar, like ould fellas of a Saturday evening, when in walks the Monivea out-half.

Pa can’t hardly get the pint down from his mouth fast enough.

“DID ANYONE,” he says fierce loud, forcing red-saggy faces around the pub to look up, “see that gobeshite of an out-half for Monivea today?”

Pa scrapes back his stool to stand up, chest and chin out, shoulders back.

The out-half stops, his face curious-confused.

“Huh? Did ye, DID YE?” Pa raises his voice even louder, eyes now glaring at the out-half.

“What a fucken … BOLLIX he is, huh?”

He never takes his eyes off the opposing player, whose confusion has given way to disbelieving anger.  

Breaking out his trance, the out-half’s finger shoots out, aimed at Pa.

“What’d you say?” he demands with hometown complacency.

“How’s it goin’ boss?” Pa answers in such a conversational tone that I tense up even more.

He takes a few steps toward the out-half, arms dangling loosely by his side.

“I was jus’ tellin’ the lads here,” Pa says, turning to nod at us, “how much of a bollix you are.”

His says these words in such a calm, unhurried voice that it takes a few seconds for their meaning to sink in.  When it does, I slide off the barstool and gulp down the rest of my pint; sure now that in a matter of minutes we’ll be out on the street.  

My left heel starts pulsing up and down.

 “What the fuc…,” the out-half starts but then stops, his eyes darting around.

The conversation is so relaxed, the ould fellas at the bar are back to scowling at their pints; one bony, red-faced fella licks the whiskey dregs from the inside of his empty short glass.  The barmaid is trying to keep herself balanced on the lower rung of a barstool clunking the television through a channel change.

“You stay there,” the out-half snaps, eyes narrowed, lips tightened against teeth.

“Well, that was my plan …,” Pa starts to say, Bronx scrapes off his stool making Pa’s turn his head, “I have a pint over there ta finish, but now just cause you want…,” 

“Hey Jonjo-the-banjo,” Bronx interrupts walking right up to the out-half, jabbing him in the chest with his index finger.

“Was that your sister in the next field with the blue dye on her wool?” he asks, his face now an inch from his newfound foe’s face. 

“‘Member the field ya walloped t’ball inta when we got our on’y penalty in the whole fucken game?”

The out-half backs up enough that he can see what he’s up against.

The ould fellas at the bar creak their heads around.  The barmaid, arms folded tight, glares at us, lurches forward to move, then stops, pursing together her thin lips.

“Anyways, tell yer gobeshites we’re here an’ ready to finish things,” Bronx say glaring at him.  “An’ for real this time, that ball-a-shite of a ref won’t be here ta save ye.”

The out-half half turns, keeping his eyes on Bronx as he blindly pushes the door to make sure it opens.  Then his face tightens into a sneer:  

“Youse fuckers will know what it’s like ta git a batin’ when I’m back wi….”

Bronx snaps into a boxer’s stance and scissors his feet back and forth rapidly on the tiled floor.

The out-half blinks a bunch, spins on his heels and darts out the door.

“I’n gettin’ the lads,” he yells over his shoulder.

“Don’t forget ta brin’ your sister too,” Bronx yells after him.  “I could do with an ould shag!”

The door slams closed.

“Is anyone nervous?” Pa asks, a look in his eye that means trouble’s inevitable.

Thinking that being nervous – which I am, my left foot pumping again – is good, I’m just about to raise my hand.

“Well, if ye are, then fuck off,” Pa snaps, his head turning to each of us one after the other. 

“‘Cause bein’ nervous is not goin’ help us win here.”

I lock my heel to the tiles and force my eyes to stare at the slammed door.

“Here, we’ll have another round mam,” Bronx says loudly.  “On’y wan a these bollixes has ta pay for it.”

We climb back up on the stools.  My stomach’s gone now, but I can’t refuse a pint – that’d show that I’m scared shitless.

The barmaid’s watery eyes stare at us, one after the other.

“An’ ye all said yer all eighteen, right?” her gravelly voice says, the cigarette in her mouth bouncing as she talks.

“Course we are, sure ya couldn’t be in t’army if ya weren’t,” Bronx snaps.  

“An’ ya couldn’t be on t’Castlebar Under-17s,” Pa says in a not-so-hushed voice, “if ya didn’t drink!”

The barmaid sighs and turns for pint glasses.

“Now listen …,” Pa starts, but stops when behind us the door slams open.

Without looking, we’re all off the barstools and aiming for the door.

It’s the out-half, Dony and a rake more of their team behind them, so many they can’t fit into the pub.

“Gud man yoursell, ya went an’ got all the gobeshi…,” Bronx starts but is interrupted by the barmaid asking;

“Ish it a Harp or a cidur for you?”

Dony steps out the front, sticks out his chest, letting his jacket slide down his arms onto the floor.

“I’ll take a cider, if you’ll go across the road an’ get some ice,” Bronx says without turning to look at the barmaid.  

His back straightens, fists clench, feet slide into a boxer’s stance.

With sweat breaking out from every pore, heart pounding, eyes on Dony warming up his arms, I feel my feet sliding into the unfamiliarity of a boxer’s stance.

“I’d go across mesell … mam,” Bronx continues in his fake-ould-fella’s voice, “on’y I have a bit a batin’ ta do here.”

Over Under

I’m perched at the edge of a low stool in a Monivea lounge bar, my left knee pulsing like a fiddler’s elbow.  The lounge is long-dark-narrow, a row of fraying-at-the-seams purple-vinyl lounge seats against bare white walls, shadowy tables dotted with ashtrays bubbling over with thumb-crumpled cigarette butts smushed into heaps of ash.  It’s around elevenish on a cold, February Saturday morning.  The sun slants in the yellow-clouded glass windows jaundicing the faces of the Castlebar Under 17 rugby team.

The barman, a jowly, red-faced fella, about forty-ish, with a huge beer belly, made huger by his blue and white striped shirt, is out the back sweeping out the “vhizitor’s dressin’ room,” which was the old pub’s windowless storeroom until business got so good they glommed on the new lounge bar.

“Hould on there now lads n’ I’ll clane out t’dressin’ room for ye,” he said, pleasantly enough, to us when we straggled in, gear bags dangling from shoulders, lost dog looks on our faces.

“Them shnobs from ‘Wegians left it in an awful state lasht wake.”

Then he stopped, hands whitening as he leaned on the bar, while Bronx strode out of our group, eyes and chin alive with nervous energy.

“Di ye have a jax in this place?” Bronx barks the question, his shoulders tightening back, chest pushing out. 

“I was on the piss last night an’ now I’m fulla it.”

The barman nods toward a completely dark corridor at the end of the lounge.  Then he looks us over again slowly.

“Oh … an’ lads,” he stares at Bronx heading for the jax, his voice hardening as he turns back to us. 

“If any a ye goes a near this baar, I’ll flake him within an inch a his fucken life!”

He aims a pudgy index finger at us, eyes flaring with sudden anger.

Shoulders tighten, gear bags, nearly dropped to the tiled floor, are hoisted up.

“I’ll on’y be a minute now lads, where ye’re coach annaways?”

“Oh he’s …,” I start but don’t want to get into the confused story of grown-ups fighting about the best way to get from Castlebar to Monivea, “comin’ along behind us.”

The barman shuffles off.  A few seconds later the back door slams closed, people relax, drop their bags, start moving around.

“It’s fucken freezin’ in this gaff!” Bronx says loudly as he comes out of the back corridor, rubbing his hands together, striding over to the cold, empty fireplace. 

“Do country buffs not have heat?”

Shoulders tighten; eyes dart around; no sign of the barman.

I hear a match scraping down the side of a big box and bursting into flame.

“There, see now,” Bronx says in a voice that lets you know you’re for sure not going to ‘see now.’

“A bit owa fire for us wouldn’t kill these mangy bastards,” he squats down in front of the dark fireplace and rubs his hands together in front of the flames dancing above the two fire-lighters he just lit.  “Didn’t we play this crowd a coupley a weeks ago, huh?”

“Yeah,” Charlie answers, walking over to the fire.  “D’ya remember, out on t’airport fiel….” 

“Gud, we can give ‘em back the fleas they gave us,” Bronx says with a nod. 

“… an’ that big bollix of a second row,” Charlie continues in his laughing voice, “nearly drown in a ruck down the wet corner!”

“Oho, there’ll be skelpin’ awright taday, fer fucken sure,” Bronx wags his head.  “Jaysys, I’m still freezin’.”

He leans forward and carefully places the box of firelighters on top of the flames. 

The back door of the pub slams closed, and the barman appears, stripey-shirted-beer-belly first, behind the counter, staring for a few seconds at the shelves of pint glasses; then nodding to himself, he looks around at us with a smile.

“Dere ye go now lads, t’dressin’ room’s reddah,” he smiles, nodding a lot. 

“On’y mind, wan a them ‘Wegians pups mushta pissed within in the corner, there’s a ferocious stink in dere altaghether.”

He continues smile-staring out at us.

“I’d a opened t’windaw fer ye …,” he guffaws, “on’y there ishn’t wan!”

We all kinda-sorta nod, not looking up, wondering when he’ll notice the yellow-blue flames shooting up his chimney.

“Ahhhh, sure we might change in here,” Bronx says in the ould-fella voice he uses to fool grown-ups that he’s being serious.

Still squatting in front of the fire, he nods and mushes his lips together to look older, hands held out to the flames.

“‘Tis nice an’ cozy here now.”

Eyes dart from Bronx to the barman to the flames.

The barman’s forced smile melts as his gaze moves past Bronx.

“Ya little … fucken bastard ya!” he slams his hand on the counter, eyes hardening.

“Get the fuck outta here the lotta ye!” he yells.  “Where’s the fella wit’ the weird eye that runs ye?”

His bulk disappears for a second, then bursts out the bar door, jowls and stripey-belly shaking.

“Get out ye bastardin’ pups,” he shoots an arm out, fat finger aimed at the door. 

“Fucken gurriers, t’brand new box a Zips, supposed ta last t’whole wake an’ t’lot within in the fire.  Jaysys, hersell’ll go mad.”

 Bronx stands up slowly off his haunches, stretches, yawns.

“That’s a grand bit a heat off a cold day,” he says in the ould-fella voice, nodding at the fire, but grinning at the barman.

“Was it you done dat?” the barman snaps.

He reaches out to push Bronx aside, but Bronx – ‘a trained man’ as the Travellers call him – brushes the barman’s reaching hand off with a boxer’s easy disdain.

“Ya little pup, I’ll break yer arse with a kick!” the barman’s heft stutter steps backward; his eyes burning mad, arms and fists tightening down by his side.

Bronx immediately adjusts himself into a boxer’s stance and still grinning, he juts chin out at the barman.

“What d’ya say there rollie-pollie?” he asks too calmly to not get respect.  “Ye’re goin’ breakin’ sumptin now, are ya now …?”

The barman takes another step back; glances around quickly; his eyes showing fear.  

A few players make for the door, but a handful don’t move.

“Go on, git outta here bafore I phone fer t’sergeant,” the barman says.

“The sergeant?  Is he a gud boxer?” Bronx askes, voice and face flat but eyes dancing. 

“I suppose like any Gard, he’d be a gud boxer when he had me handcuffed.”

The barman takes a full step back. 

Bronx drops his fists by his side, sighs and reaches down for his bag.

“Thanks, by the way,” he smile-nods at the barman.  “Ya know, for the fire. ‘Twas awful nice, as cold an’ all as it ‘tis outside.”

An hour later, after changing in two shifts in the windowless dressing rooms that Coach called a “fucken henhouse not a clubhouse,” we’re on the side a hill that’s kinda-sorta lined as a rugby field.  We all jog in place trying to keep warm.

“Cum in, cum in,” Coach run-limps onto the field, Barbour jacket blowing in the cold wind, both hands waving like mad.

“Now listen here lads,” he throws his gimpy leg in front of him, leans forward over it, and then turns slowly around the circle aiming his index finger at our faces. 

“I know we missed trainin’ for a cupla weeks now bu….”

“WEEEEKS!” our winger, Wing-nut, screeches.  He spent first and second year in secondary school shuffling up and down the wing for Clongowes’ eighteenth team before left there.  Now, in his own mind, he should be lining out for Ireland not Castlebar. 

“We hauven’t trained since Noh…vember, the team hawsn’t anyhow. I’ve been up at Saint Mary’s sprin….”

“Shut up ya gobeshite,” Coach snaps. “Now lis….”

“Noh!” Mick interrupts.  “‘Member, we had trainin’ back at Christmas, but the ground wuz…,”

“SUPPOSEDLY,” Coach shoots in angrily, “frozen an’ so ye all fuck off on me down the Sunflower drinkin’ before I can even get out ta ye from work.”

“Sure, we were trainin’!” Pa says.  “Trainin’ for the after-match session!”

“LISTEN!” Coach yells.  “Forget about all that shite.  Taday is taday ….”

He tightens his fingers into a small, pale fist and waves it around at our faces, his lips whitening, his one good eye blazing with intensity.

“Ye should bate these fuckin’ sheep shaggers by twenty pints because that’s what Castle….”

“Well we won’t have a left winger or a full back, there’s only the thurteen of us, you can count yoursel…,” Wing-Nut starts.

“SHUT … UP, YA FUCKEN GENNET!” Coach screams, lurching toward Wing-Nut, grabbing the front of his jersey with both hands, pulling him out of the semi-circle.

“Shut…your…fucken trap when I’m talkin’,” he releases one hand from gripping the jersey to aim his index finger in Wing-Nut’s face.  “Or we’ll play we’ll twelve, … do ya hear me?”

There’s an uncomfortable, windy-cold, silence while Wing-Nut seemingly deliberates the ultimation.

“Now …,” Coach lets go of Wing-Nut’s jersey, backs up a couple of steps, his good eye roaming across all our faces. 

“Listen up.  When you pull on the Castlebar jersey, you become a member of a team.  It doesn’t matter how good or bad that team is; it’s a team an’ you stick together, you work together; it’s not about you an’ your skills an’ what went wrong or right for you.  It’s about the FUCKEN TEAM!”

He flicks his good eye from one team member to the next.

“I don’t give a shite if we never trained,” his index finger shoots out toward Wing-Nut.  “This is a group of a lads, from a town, who are a team, who’ve got each other’s back no matter what.  Lookit, whatever happens above on the scoreboard, don’t give two hot-shites about it, awright.  When you cum off that field taday, you have to honestly ask yourself, have you given everythin’ you’ve got to this team?  That’s all you need to ask yourself, don’t worry about all the other shite.”

He stares slowly around at us, the wind burning off our legs.

“Or … or, were just fiftee…, or ‘turteen,’ individuals out there with our fucken heads up our arses?”

He holds out his pale hands. 

“Lookit, I don’t give a fuck if ye win lads; I mean I do!” he wipes his index finger fast across his nose.  “An’ ye will win, or I’ll fucken strangle each a ye, wan by each.”

He looks out over our heads at the halfway line.

“Listen up now.  What I want here is to see ye comin’ together as a team, thirteen lads that’d run inta a burnin’ buildin’ to get their teammates.  Awright?  Awright?”

He stares at each of us, his head givin’ a nod.

“Now I haf ta go talk ta this bollix,” he stands upright, hands on hips, mouth turning down at the edges.

Then he spins suddenly and run-limps off toward the other team, his hand grasping the Barbour jacket closed.

“So, what in the fuck are we goin’ ta do about the fucken missin’ backs?” Pa asks. 

“Well, we have ta have a full back,” Mick says.  “Otherwise they’ll just pin us back all day kickin’ every ball in there.  Maybe give us wan player, an’ we’ll just kinda have two fullbacks-ish an’ they cover the wings too.”

“Awright, but when the fight starts, the backs can’t be standin’ back there tossin’ off like ye always.  Ye haveta pile in too.”

“Fuck you!”  Mick says.  “We’re always balin’ ye outta fights ye start an’ can’t finish!”

We start to warm up.  Some lads run or jump in place, careful to avoid mucky puddles; a few move to dry ground, drop and do slow push-ups; Wing-Nut sprint-jogs half the length of the field, hands slicing through the cold air, navy and sky blue hooped jersey tucked inside gleaming white togs. 

After a few minutes the forwards come together and look to bind up in a practice scrum, but we’re missing a prop and a flanker.  Arms up, hands behind my head, I glance around anxiously.  Sid and Pa are over on the sideline with Mick sharing a cigarette, clouds of blue-grey smoke billowing from their nostrils as the cigarette gets hurriedly passed from hand to hand. 

 Coach lurches back in front of our kinda-sorta scrum.

“CIRCLE UP. Circle up,” he yells, immediately leaning forward, waving everyone in, staring around at us one by one with his good eye. 

“Now list…,” he glances around at us again, and shoots upright, “whare in the fuck is Pa an’ Mick?”

From the sideline the smokers break into a sprint-jog, their breath condensing into blue-gray clouds.  They arrive at the circle bringing with them the smell of a freshly smoked Major.

Coach shakes his head and aims a finger at Pa.

“Ya fucken better be hungover ya bollix ‘cause we’re going to need them fists taday.  This is fucken classic McGann, he has about a hunderd players over there an’ he wouldn’t give me wan them!  Not fucken wan!”

He grits the tips of his teeth together, his good eye flaring.

“‘Ooooh no, I have a syst…hem don’t ya see,’” he makes the other coach sound like a stupid-posh-housewife off the telly. “‘All the boooyz take … their turns.’”

He wipes his index finger fast across his nose. 

“Well, I fucked him gud n’well,” he nods viciously.  “No subs today!  The on’y way a sub gets on the field today is if a player fucken drops dead.  An’ I’ll even check the dead fella has no pulse.”

He nods, grits the tips of his teeth.

“His fucken legions a young fellas can stand on the touchline ‘til their balls freeze off for all I care.  Wudn’t give me even a couple a them, … fucken bollix.”

He shakes his head.

“An’ listen they produced some heap-a-shite of a ref.  Looks like they pulled him outta the back of a cowshed.  He wouldn’t know a fucken knock-on from a wank!”

Suddenly his hand shoots out, index finger darting from Sid to Pa.

“Don’t you two bollixes give this ref any reason to send ye off or we’ll be a fucken cricket team before you know it.”

 He stands upright, gazes slowly around at his players.

“Awright men, this is it.  Remember, if you can’t die for Castlebar, at least help your opposite number ta die for Monivea!”

We run-jog-straggle over toward the middle of the field.

Standing at the edge of mucky puddle on halfway, bulging out of a maroon tracksuit two sizes too small, a silver whistle dangling from his wrist as he tries to set the timer his watch, is the barman.

 Bronx jogs up next to me.

“Jaysys, will ya look who the fucken ref is?  Rollie-pollie!  It’s gonna be a fucker of a day for me.”

“Ah, pay him no heed, just play yer game.  Maybe he won’t remember,” I say, unconvincingly.

“Never estimate how much owa bollix a bollix can be,” Bronx says and spits on the field. 

“An’ lookit, there’s that blondie fucker of an outhalf.  ‘Member him from two weeks ago.  I owe him a rake a clatters!”

We organize ourselves into kinda-sorta exploded scrum, but the missing players add to our usual start-of-match-confusion.

“Cashel…bar … reddah?” the ref yells but doesn’t wait for a response, immediately shrilling his whistle.

The ball comes skittering across the muddy grass toward us.

“NOT TEN, NOT TEN,” Wing-nut screams from way behind us, but the ref, rolling his eyes, waves play on.

The ball skids into Sid’s knee and bounces forward. 

The whistle blows.

“Knock-on Monivea scrum,” the ref mumbles, pushing Sid back a few steps and ceremoniously digging his heel into the muck.

We start to form up a scrum.

The ref’s eyes dart around the Castlebar forwards stopping when they fall on Bronx.

“I’n a watchin’ you pal,” he wags his finger at Bronx’s face. “I know your sort!”

Bronx stares back, hands on hips, shoulders back, chin out.

“Ah now ref,” he starts in his ould-fella voice.  “Sure, we’ll let bygones be bygones.”

“You’ll be gone is what’ll be gone the first chan… thin ya do wrong.”

Bronx purses his lips, cocks his head back a little.

“Form up the scrum Cashel…bar or I’ll give ye a penalty for time awastin’.”

We form up.  The front rows slam into one another with groans and grunts and muttered threats.  The scrum waltzes around a bit, then settles down.

“REF!” I hear Bronx call out from flanker.  “How much time left?”

“Thure’s still seventy minutes for me ta send you off in, an’… an’ have ya barred be the Connacht Branch for bein’ dish…ra…spectful ta the ref.”

“Oh, … oh, okay so, I was just wonderin’ how long before ya go back ta bein’ a regular gobeshite.”

Crushed - Part II

I’m standing at JB’s corner with hangover bile flooding up into my mouth.  We’re waiting for the Gentleman Farmer, last seen around midnight slumped over the steering wheel of the Land Rover outside the Punchbowl.  We hitch-walked from Ballyheane in our mucky boots and clothes, the memories of the Cattle-Crush Ribbon Cutting Ceremony fading with every drunken stagger.  

A couple of miles from town, some nutjob from Belmullet, driving home from “boogy-woogyin’ all night with the quare-wan balow in the Valkenburg” picked us up and saved any further falls into ditches.

“This bollix is never gonna make it,” I say after forty-five minutes at JB’s

I look down at the footpath, try to shake the bile back down into me stomach.

Just then God sends the battered ould Land Rover up Main Street – it musta been Himself driving, ‘cause the Gentleman Farmer barely recognizes us, his eyes swimming inside in his head.

“Get in there ta fuck,” he tries to snap, but he hasn’t the energy for a real snap.

Sighing and groaning, we lumber in; without looking he pulls out into the traffic to sound of tires screeching, horns blowing.

“Fucken Tito got out when I came home this morn… last night.  That’s the why I’m late,” he says shaking his head, paying no heed to the horn still blowing behind us. 

“Is he still loose?” I ask, planning ahead to keep a shovel in hand at all times.

“Nah, he was at the front door when she dragged me outta bed a few hours later ta go searchin’.  Hersell’s fucken furious; his mouth was all bloody.  I tol’ her he should be on them sleepin’ tablets day an’ night!”

He hits the steering wheel a whack with the palm of his hand and looks in the mirror to see who’s blowing the horn.

“Sure, he kilt a rake a sheep t’last time he got out.  We paid that bollix up the road for them an’ promised him fucken black n’ blue tid never happen again.  But sure, that’s what he’s a trained ta do.”

“To kill sheep?” I hear my hungover voice ask.

“Well people anyway … or at least all the bollixes in the world.”

When we pull up at the cattle-crush, there’s a cow-shite and dust covered white Merc sitting there, diesel engine thrumming.

“Were inda fock wuz youse?” a tall, ould fella, jumping out of the Merc, snaps for real. “I ben hur this haf hour waytin’.”

“Ah these bollixes were runnin’ late, sure I’d ta near drag them outta bed,” the Gentleman Farmer, always relaxed with the truth, nods at us.  “Ya can’t get no one ta work in this fuck….”

He lets himself trail off before he overdoes it.

“Rind up them cattle lads an’ brin ‘em doun tee the pen,” the ould fella nods at the cattle-crush as he opens the boot of the Merc pulls out a pair of wellingtons.

  “I have ta be in Cavan early this afternoon for tee meet a solicitor.  That won’t be azy on me wallet.”

He’s a cattle jobber from up the North, we know him from around town where we’d see him in pubs and nightclubs picking up drunk or desperate women.  Of Northerner-unknowable-age, his baggy eyes, jowly face and hunched shoulders seem to say sixty-something, but he’s probly more like fifty-something-high-mileage years.  

“Oho, I thought a man of your caliber’d be on a promise from some heifer up the country,” the Gentleman Farmer says, laughing too loud at his own joke.

“Hey…fer!” the Jobber yanks on his second wellie.  “I’d be happy tee bed an ould dry cow at this pint.  Oh, tings is vury bad of late in t’beddin’ dapartmant.  Too busy maken money ta ….”

“Here lads, grab the shovels an’ bring down the herd,” the Gentleman Farmer barks, waving his hand fast, like he’s a bigtime rancher.

“Shevels?  For tee move cattle?” the Jobber’s bushy eyebrows jump up.  “What did youse buy balow in Baal mart – elee…phants wuz it?”

“Ah no, they’re townies, an’ the shove…,” he whips off the tweed cap and puts it right back on, his face stone-hardening. 

“Jus’ bring the herd down ta the pen like I said,” he barks with fake crankiness.

We grab the shovels from the Land Rover and head off.  The cattle are even more suspicious this time and by the time we get them down to the pen the Jobber and the Gentleman Farmer are all talked out and cranky.

“Where in the fock did ye’se go for ‘em lads – Taxas wuz it?” the Jobber scoffs.  “Git ‘em inta that focken pen.  That’s a shockin’ low fence for a crish ye’se a put up thur.  Will it kape ‘em in eet-all-eet-all-eet-all?”  

We have sufficient shovel-power to get the cattle into the pen handy enough, but now imprisoned, they’re shocking nervous; hooves splashing through muck as they charge around the enclosure, bumping into one another, blue-glassy eyes wild with fear.

“Git wan a them down intee t’crish,” the Jobber barks, extracting a huge silver metal syringe from his Barbour coat pocket. 

“Come on tee fock, will ye’se,” the Jobber glares at me.  “Cavan touwn I have tee be at in a few hours.”
            The day before I wouldn’t have thought there was enough cash or pint bottles of Guinness on this planet to get me into the pen with them monsters of cattle, but unthinking-red-faced shame has me up over the pipe scaffold rails in two seconds. 

Before I know it, I’m in the pen swinging the shovel, creating bovine panic. 

The splashing thud of hooves finding hard ground through the thick muck is almost hypnotic as the massive beasts swirl around me, heads ducking and diving as they avoid my swinging shovel.

Falling into a rhythm, the bullocks four-legged sprint in a small circle.

“GIT ‘EM INTEE THEE FOCKEN CRISH!” I hear the Jobber scream.

I lurch toward the circle of beef swirling around me, destroying their rhythm.  Cattle burst in all directions, thudding one into the other.

In the pandemonium, a big red one launches himself at the pipe-scaffolding fence and clears it, but just barely, his hind hooves clipping the top rail, making him stagger sideways, almost crashing to the ground.

“Jeezus focken Chri…isst, we ur in Taxas!” the Jobber snaps.

But in the shovel-generated confusion a cream-coloured monster ends up darting into the cattle-crush chute.  The Jobber moves with surprising speed for a man his age and slides the rail across to prevent the bullock from backing up.  From the crush, the beast lets out a frightened bellow.  The ones in the pen move even faster, thick-heavy hooves stabbing through the muck to hard soil.  

I javelin the shovel clear out of the pen, scattering the two lads like frightened sheep.  Then I’m up over the rails and out to safety.

The Jobber has the silver syringe stuck into a white plastic bottle jammed between his knees.

“Cum here tee fuck wan a ye’se,” he says to no one, not even looking up.

I’m ankle deep in muck, panting for breath, heart pounding, muddy water leaking into my FCA boots.

“Wats yeer name feller?” the cattle Jobber’s barks at me, his hand waving rapidly for help.

“Joe,” I answer.

“Joel?  That’s a focken new wan, when did the May-ho crowd stirt buyin’ ‘L’s’ for their Joez?”

“No, no, I said, Joe.  J…o…e,” I answer, summoning up fear-anger like the cattle.

“Well cum hur J…o…e,” he’s waving the hand again like mad.  “Grab a hoult a that cream fucker’s tail, an’ twist it gud an’ hard ‘til he’s head canny go nowheres but inta that wee gate.

I stare at the bellowing monster in the cattle-crush chute.

“Cum tee fock son, I have nay got all day, Cavan touwn I haveta ….”

Fear of being seen in fear propels me forward through the muck.  The FCA boot slips as it hits the lower pipe rail of the cattle-crush.  I grab the top rail with my left hand and somehow instinctively grab the bullock’s tail with my right hand.  But I grab the tail tool close to the bullock’s arsehole and get a handful of cow shite instead of tail.

“Och J…o…e, I did’nay ask ya take him oot on a date.  Grab his tail wud ya, not his focken arse-howel!”

Spit flies from the Jobber’s thin lips; his jowly face tightening in crankiness.

With my hand, still greasy-green with cow-shite, I grab the bullock’s tail proper and twist it hard.  The half-ton a beef magically lurches forward down the narrow chute of the cattle-crush, the bullock’s thick head lodging into the opening in the gate. 

The Jobber yanks the gate handle, trapping the huge bovine head inside. The pipe scaffolding shudders as the bullock lurches in panic.

“Keep yer hand on that tail or he’ll a pull his own focken head off!”

The bullock bellows a plaintive cry, hooves stomping violently.

“Now see this hur?” the Jobber approaches the crush holding up the silvery syringe, its menacing four-inch-long needle aimed at the sky.

“Now J…o…e, if an’ ye’se gat a shot a this, he’d be stannin’ for a week he wud,” he laughs a dirty ould man’s laugh. 

“Oh ay, meybe he’d stay up fer two, cuz an’ yer that yung.  Wat I wudney guve ta be yung agin.”

 His watery eyes gaze past the needle and up at the grey clouds piling in from the Atlantic.

“Oh ay, I tell ye wat, if an’ I got t’chance tee do it all agun, I’d jus’ double t’lot – that’s all.  Simple as that.  Every woman I rode, an’ there’s ben a plenty of ‘em let me tell ya that J…o…e,” the bags under his eyes tighten as he turns his eyes to stare hard at me, waving the sharp-pointed syringe slowly. 

“I’d ride her a second time.  But when she was young an’ firm, not now an’ ‘er all ould an’ saggy-baggy.” 

He squirts a small drop out the top of the syringe.

“That’s wat I’d do now tee git twice as much outta life.  But ye canny go back.  Remember that J…o…e, ye canny never go back!”

“Ah go away outta that,” the Gentleman Farmer clomps up through the muck to us, his eyes darting everywhere.  “Sure, you’d end up with callouses on your shank if ya did all that ridin’!”

“Cum hur now a let me teach ye howtee do this,” the Jobber waves the Gentleman Farmer in close. 

“I canny be cumin’ out here all times,” he stares hard at the Gentleman Farmer, who’s paying him no heed.  “I’n a busy mawn.”

The Gentleman Farmer stares at the bellowing bullock. 

The Jobber sighs and shakes his head.

“See yer a lookin’ for a haf dacent bitta beef fur tee stick the needle intee,” the Jobber says, grabbing the bullock at the haunch of its front leg.

“That’s nay bad, stick it in there hard … as she says,” he hands the huge syringe to the Gentleman Farmer and stands back.

“Me?” the Gentleman Farmer’s eyebrows shoot up, eyes fixed on the syringe.  “Ah Jaysys no, I on’y stick it in the missus.  I wudn’t be up for this kinda vet work.”

“Just focken stick it in, if ye call a vet fer this job, we’ll all end up within in the poh…lice barracks talkin’ fast.”

“Just jab it in, is that all?”

“Ay, but good an’ hard.  Then, push down t’wee plunger an’ give him all the gud stuff, unless ye want ta save some for yersell,” the Jobber laughs a dry laugh and steps even further back.

The Gentleman Farmer leans in toward the bullock, the syringe held like a dagger in his hand. 

His shoulders rising under a deep breath, he plunges the syringe into the cream, muck splattered leather.

The bullock lurches, shaking the pipe scaffolding. 

I twist the tail harder.

The beast bellows: Its hooves dancing rapidly in place.

One massive hoof plunges down onto the Gentleman Farmer’s green wellie.

“JAYSYS FUCKEN CHRIST!” he bellows, dropping the syringe, slurping his wellie out of the muck.

“The fucker crushed me toes!” his cheeks vibrate as he haltingly draws in a breath.

“Ach yee fool, why didn’t yee kaep yer focken feet back like I tol’ ye’se to.  Now, where’s me see…ringe?” the Jobber roots around in the muck with his wellington.  “That’s a fifty-pound item!”

The Gentleman Farmer scurry-limps over to where the muck ends and lays down on the grass, rolling in agony, his hands pressed to his face.

“Do I keep this fella stuck in here?” I roar, my arm tiring from twisting the tail.

“I’ll tell ye what J…o…e,” the Jobber glares at me.  “I couldny give a fock what youse do.  I have a teacher above in Cavan touwn tee ride afore her husband gets home.”

He stomps off toward the gate, his Barbour jacket stained with bullock-splattered muck.

“Tell that bollix he owes me foifty quid!” he yells back over his shoulder.

“AAAHH, ME FUCKEN FOOT!” the Gentleman Farmer groans, rolling on the grass.

With a puff of blue smoke, the Merc’s diesel engine rumbles to life.

I hold the twist in the bullock’s tail; brain frozen; muscles melting; time stopped.

Crushed - Part I

I’m dribbling the last of my rolling tobacco onto a Rizla paper that I’ve carefully located to avoid Guinness spills on the Humbert Inn’s bar.  It’s three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of our alleged-summer. 

Outside the skies are gainfully employed emptying the watery contents of the Atlantic Ocean on the West of Ireland.  Inside, amongst the students home from Uni and other associated wasters, there is neither hope nor consideration of gainful employment.

“Don’t ya see?” I posit, pursing my lips for full philoso-bullshitting effect.  “How the clouds do hide the blue sky from us, but the blue sky is only there to keep us from seeing the entire fucken universe!”

With the focus and intensity of a brain surgeon delving into someone’s sawdust, I pick up the Rizla with both hands and roll the world’s most perfect rollie-cigarette, sealing it with barely a touch of my tongue-tip.

“Sure, ‘tis no wonder fellas are in here pintin’ of a Wednesday afternoon, under the pressure of that sorta Catholic church, Irish guverment, CIA, KGB propaganda.  Ah, ‘tis terrible, really a lad has to somehow stay sober enough to know when they stop the clouds for one night, so he can see just how small a place we occupy in this universe.”

“Here Mick!” wan a the lads yells down to the barman.  “Grab that new cleaver ya got for cuttin’ lemons, we’ve another candidate here for your head transplant service.”

“No, no, I’m serious, I mean about quittin’ smokin’.  I’m serious about that,” I crack a match and light the rollie.

“Quittin’, quittin’!” Mick the barman scoffs, aiming his index finger at the yellow neon sign behind the bar that reads:

THE PUB IS A POOR MAN’S UNIVERSITY 

“I’ll tell ye what taday’s lecture is on: How ta fucken quit quittin!”

We were having a fairly typical Mayo summer: Nary a threat of work: A few heavy showers of rain breaking up the otherwise near-constant downpours: Gale force winds regularly tugging at roofs and hair follicles: The good citizenry of Mayo sitting in their kitchens, looking up from Wimbledon-golf-horseracing on the telly to glare out through the net curtains as the Atlantic kept up its deliveries of heaps upon heaps of wet-watery-grey clouds.

We stared at those same clouds out the oft-opening door of the Humbert Inn, philoso-bullshit-solving the problems of the world in increments of wan dirty-black pint at a time.

Then, much to our pintin’ chagrin the weather broke: Overnight, the sky went from an end-of-the-world-is-nigh, brooding-grey to a forget-what-I-said-yestarday, hopeful-blue.  We were not impressed with this sudden climatic, if not climactic, shift.  

But with youthful innovation, we retooled: First we discarded soupy-black Guinness in favour of Sally-O’Brien’s-crisp-yellow Harp: Then we shifted our philoso-bullshitting perches from stools at the bar to kegs in the Humbert-alley – thus availing of the good weather while avoiding heat stroke! 

One of those warm evenings, with the Humbert alley, as always, just a few pints shy of solving world hunger, we get approached by a fella in turned-down-green-wellies, crumpled white shirt, tweed vest with matching cap, cupping a glass of brandy in his left hand.  We’d seen this fella ‘round town in different pubs for a few weeks – doing a lot more drinking than your average gentleman farmer.  From somewhere up the country, now back from England with a heap a money, he’d bought a big farm out in Ballyheane.

“Howaye now lads, luvly-weather-luvly-weather,” he says too fast to be even half-genuine, looking up for the sky but all he sees is the stony top of the Humbert-alley.

“Ya-ya,” we all nod, not sure what to say.

“Usually, I on’y get weather like this at me place below in the south a France,” he says, eyes surveying to see if we’re impressed.

“Parlez vous Francais?” Pud, who speaks fluent French, asks.

“Je vous salue Marie …,” he starts too rapidly so when he stops everyone looks up.

“The Lord is with thee,” Pud laughs his deep laugh, rolls his eyes.

“Ahhh!” the Gentleman-Farmer forces out a dry laugh.  “Sure, I wuz on’y fucken with ye, I couldn’t speak two words of that shite.  I just yell at the bastards an’ wave me arms.  Sure, eventually even a Frog can be made to unnerstan’.”

We all half-laugh, but waiting to see what comes next, no one smiles.

“So, listen lads, let me tell ye,” he ploughs on, “I’m in the market for a bit a labour, help like, ya know, out at the farm.  I done a stoopid thing ta be honest.  I let meself get harangued inta buying a farm offa hersell’s uncle.  Ah he’s a nice enough ould divil, but sure he’s that ould he barely driv past them fields for years, let alone took care of nathin.  The place is in fierce fettle altagether.  But no better man ta fix it up, don’t ya know.  On’y see, I need someone else ta actually do the work!”

He laughs a bit too hard at his own joke.

“Course I’m payin’.  London wages too.  Well, ya know, normalized for local conditions,” he circles his hand, nods, purses his lips.  “Ya know, an’ whatnot.”

The next morning at nine, a damnably civilized starting time for lads with hangovers, three of us are standing at JB’s corner waiting for the Gentleman Farmer.  Around half an hour, and a lot of hangover-sigh-groans, later a battered, army-green Land Rover jams to a stop. 

Behind him, a cranky ould bollix in a purple Fiesta grimaces and shakes his fist.

“Get in there ta fuck lads wud ye,” he says, eyes all bloodshot.  “I nearly didn’t bother.  I rang the weather station in Claremorris.  Rain again taday, so they say.  But sure they say that every-fucken-day.  Cum-on-cum-on, we’ve a day’s work ta do.”

We pile in, all eyes on him as the words keep flowing.

“Where do we get a cup a tea in this town?  I’m as dry as a Hal Roache joke.”

He laughs way too loud at his own joke.

“In me kitchen,” one a the lads says, which was the onliest place we knew for tea.

“Is there no greasy spoon at-all-at-all-at-all in this town?”

We give him a what-the-fuck-is-that look, so he gives up on his greasy cup a tea.

He guns the Land Rover’s engine, but it just splutters and lurches forward.  Out the Ballyheane Road we head, then all of shot he takes a left up a sideroad, jostling us around in our seats.  A few twisty-turny miles up the narrow sideroad, he jams to a stop by a newish block wall.

“See, this bollix has a great cattle-crush altogether,” he slides the gearstick into neutral, nearly yanks the handbrake outta the floor and jumps out.

He walks over to the wall that’s up to the height of his eyes.

We all get out, presuming we’re at work.

“Ya can’t really see it from here,” he says, staring at the block wall.  “But if we went in over the gate down t’end, then ya’d see it.  It’s fierce perfessional altagether.  I don’t need nuthin’ like this, just something ta grab a hoult a them big fuckers a bullocks an’ get the gud stuff inta them.  Ya know, swell them up before ….”

He raises his eyebrows, runs the nail of his right index finger across his throat.

“It’s a cattle-crush.  Course townies like ye wudn’t know what that is.”

He was right.  I had seen these curious constructions in the corners of fields; a solidly fenced narrow little chute that ran off the side of a pen.  It was only with him that I eventually learned that farmers use the narrow chute to trap cattle, so they can hold them still enough to administer medicine or whatever.   

“But see this bollix won’t let me use his,” he rolls his eyes.  “I even offered to pay him.  See, that’d be what smart people do – right?”

He whacks the back of his hand lightly off my shoulder, inculcating me with the “smart people.”

“Share a resource for joint economic benefit, think like a businessman, right?” he shakes his head. 

“But this fucker’s only a farmer ‘cause his father wuz a farmer and his father’s father’s father wuz a farmer.  Right back ta t’ones that got down on their fucken knees an’ ate grass during the famine.  That’s the sort he is, don’ ya see.  He’s so blinded by all a them fucken sad stories that he doesn’t realize that a farmer is simply a businessman who, by manipulating crops and livestock, extracts value from the soil – huh?”

He gives me another back-of-hand whack.

“I mean that’s why God gave us the soil and brains.  Weren’t them two buckeens of Adam’s out extracting value from the soil when the wimpy wan got kilt – right?”

I look for the two lads, but they’re back at the Land Rover grabbing a smoke. 

I shoulda listened to Mick and never quit smoking!

We load back into the Land Rover and on we go to his farmyard which is for sure “in fierce fettle altogether.”  It musta been a nice place once upon a British-colonial time: Tidy cut-stone sheds with heavy wooden half-doors, a few areas of cobblestones left in the corners of the yard.  But now half the red-oxide shed roofs are collapsing in on themselves.  The yard is half flooded with an ankle-deep puddle: A big empty hay barn is home to a couple of ancient looking Zetor tractors, one with the engine next to it, both with tires so flat they looked like they’ve melted into the ground: The only sign of life is a massive, Alsatian lying sleepily outside one of the sheds, a blue nylon rope running, comfortingly, off his collar back in the shed’s open half-door.

“This is it lads!” the Gentleman Farmer waves his hand slowly around at the sheds.  “Hersell says I might find Heathcliff in wan a them sheds some day.  Who’s that bollix anyway?  Is that lazy cat in the stoopid cartoon in the Times - huh?”

He gives me another backhand whack.

“Sure, Tito there, … ya know he’s a purebred German Shepherd, right?” he whacks me again with the back of his hand. 

“But he’d ate a cat alive if an’ he came across wan.  When he’s off the sleepin’ tablets that is.  Hersell does pump him full a sleepin’ tablets she gets from a crazy ould aunt out in the States.  See, for ta keep him from barkin’ all day, he’s in the house day at night an’ he’s fine.  She wraps the sleepin’ tablets in yer world famous Barcastle rashers.”

We get to work. 

In the one of the sheds, thankfully nowhere near bleary-eyed Tito, there’s a few suspiciously clean shovels, picks, even a post hole digger.  In the flooded corner of the yard, sticking up like an island, is a pile of old pipe scaffolding and wood planks.

“I had to confis…cate this from that fucken thievin’ bollix of a contractor who did, or rather didn’t do the roof n’ windaws fer me,” the Gentleman Farmer shakes his head and sighs, his wellingtons sloshing around in the water.

We pluck thirty-foot lengths of rusty scaffolding pipes out of the puddle and slosh over to the Land Rover.  He’s left a red checkered blanket on the roof to protect it. 

“Here, here, we better move along, if hersell sees the granny’s Foxford rug on the roof a the car, she’ll go baa… fucken…listic on me altagether.”

He heads over to Tito, unties the rope, pulls the half-drugged, purebred guard dog into the shed and emerges with the blue nylon rope.

“I mhust have two fucken miles of rope within in wan a them sheds, but can I ever put me hand on it when I need it?  No fucken way!” he shakes his head violently, the tweed cap wagging.

From inside the shed, Tito barks, sounding pissed off, but muffled.

“See, that’s how life goes in Ireland, yer always a quarter-inch off success!”

We lash the rope around the scaffolding and through the open front doors of the Land Rover.  Leaning back, the blue-nylon burning my hands, I yank the rope as tight as possible, only to have it loosen when I go to tie the knot.  With everything either in or half-arsed tied to the Land Rover, we motor out of the yard.

“I’d say this was built be good, hard-arsed Protestant farmers,” he says, his wrists resting loosely on the steering wheel, his eyes, scarily, looking all around at the sheds.

“See, now in England, this’d be a kinda-sorta history or museumy place.  Ya know, ya’d have some ould fat red-faced bollix sellin’ oldee ale with fucken branches stickin’ outta it.  An’ some big-titted wench floggin’ plates a roast beef an’ Yorkshire puddin’ for a fiver.  See, that’s how ya make a country: By lettin’ people make money!”

He sighs loudly, and, thankfully, grabs the steering.

“But not in Mother Ireland.  Oh, no-no-no-no-no.  Here I have fucken Department a Agriculture gobshites in ancient tweed jackets with elbow patches, tellin’ me what I can an’ can’t plant, grow, kill, breed.  Oh, next they’ll be tellin’ when I can ride hersell! Chewsdays an T’ursdays for a fuck; blowjobs on the weekend, but only if you’re takin’ her to Reynards for the Sundah dinner.  Jaysys, what did I let meself in for?  What time is it at-all-at-all-at-all?  Would the Punchbowl ever be open yet?”

We inch slowly out of the yard, but even that’s too fast for the longest scaffolding pipes which slap off the Land Rover’s roof every bump we hit in his bumpy road.

A quarter mile down the road, as slow as we’re going, he manages to come to a sudden stop, shifting the long pipes just enough that they slide forward and whack the Land Rover’s bonnet and onto the ground. 

The red Foxford rug blankets the windshield.

“Awright lads,” he kills the engine, spits into the palm on his right hand and turns to me in the front seat.

“Here’s how this works,” he rubs both hands together.  “I’ll pay ye twelve pound a day.  Ye work hard an’ if we get if finished today, I’ll throw in a fiver bonus.  Deal?”

He offers his spitty hand.

I nod but decline the handshake.

No five-pound bonus gets earned.  Instead, it’s three days of hot-handed hacksawing; bitter complaints about the rurality of rural Ireland; pitched personal-battles against rocks that were placed in the soil thirty thousand years previously by guilefully anti-townie glaciers; all lubricated each late afternoon by pint bottles of warm Guinness.  By the end of the third day, despite our best efforts, we appear to have created something that the farming gods might, in a pinch, consider a cattle-crush.

Over the course of the three days, we get to understand the Gentleman Farmer:  Say nathin to him in the morning ‘cause he’s as cranky as fuck; just sit back and listen to him ranting about how “fucken fucked up this fucken country is.  Sure, ‘tisn’t a country at-all-at-all-at-all, there’s countries balow in darkest Africa run better than this gaff. Them shower a wasters above Dublin should be shot with balls of their own shite – I wouldn’t waste good bullets on them.  An’ then the whole gaff handed back to t’Queen, with a smallish apology for fuckin’ it up so bad.  Oh, that’s what Father Scully above in Clongowes useta say.  The oniest ting he didn’t think of is that them bastards in Westminster are even worser.  They’ll rob us blind for their own wallets.  What we need to figure out lads is how to become the ones whose wallets get stuffed no matter what!’”

By about noon, he’s calmed down enough that you could ask him a legit question.  By mid-afternoon, already planning his escape, he’s hand up to the head scratching, eyebrows knit together, trying to think up today’s excuse.

“Eh lads, I have ta run inta town ta get some more roof cement within in Chadwicks,” he starts all serious, but can’t keep it up.  “Hersell is furious, the leak is right over the bed now.  I wonder how that happened?

He grins a mischievous grin that takes years off his face.

“I have ta pretend I’m doin’ sumptin about it.  Don’t ya know.  The fucken mice keep dying with all the poison she’s put down.  Poor ould Tito ate a heap of it t’other day; pukin’ all night he was.  She didn’t like that either, so it’s all addin’ up, but slow, ya know.  She’s very slow ta move when she gets an idea inta that beautiful head a hers.”

He’s gone then for an hour or so and comes back with a new case of pint bottles and that grin that says now there’s a fifteen-year-old running the gaff.

With the sun starting to threaten to quit on the third day, we hang the gates, sort of, and stand back, blistered hands on hips, to survey our wondrous creation.

The Gentleman Farmer celebrates with a deep draught of his pint bottle of Guinness, creamy stout dribbling from the edges of his mouth.

“Let’s test drive this bitch,” he scrunches up his lips.

Turning to look up the field, he furrows a brow that despite all, we have not yet seen furrowed. 

“There’s a dozen buffalo-sized bullocks up the field, run up there an’ get them,” he waves his hand toward the field and starts walking back to the Land Rover.

I look at the lads nervously.

Cattle? 

We don’t know nathin about wrangling cattle.

“Fuck it, how hard can it be to move a few cattle?” I hear my voice say.  “Sure, they’re only like big dogs.”

Thinking of Tito, who since he lost his rope now spends his day snarling and scratching the shed door, I regret my three pint-bottles of Guinness fueled analogy.

Turns out it’s fairly hard to move cattle that don’t want to be moved.

Cattle, probly ‘cause we kill them, literally by the millions, are suspicious animals.  Plus, this bunch had not come into contact with humans for a while, so they’re extra-suspicious.  Come to find out afterwards in the Punchbowl that the Gentleman Farmer was afraid of animals – not a great thing for a prospective farmer.  A few brandies into the Cattle-Crush Ribbon Cutting Celebration, he divulged this fact, immediately negating it by adding; “sure I’ll be back in London in three months.  Just need ta wear hersell down a bit more with the mice, the roof leaks, fuses blowing day and night!”

It took quite a while, but we did get the cattle down to the cattle-crush, mostly by having them chase us.  Then with the aid of that most subtle of all farming implements, the shovel, we get them inside the newly created pen that opened onto the cattle-crush.

“There’s no chapter in the Department of Agriculture’s Manual of Modern European Farming on herding cattle with shovels!” the Gentleman Farmer yell-laughed at us, the stout sloshing around inside a newly opened brown bottle.

Finally, I shot the bolt on the pen’s gate.

“Howdaya get them into the crush part?” I asked, breathless, sweating, and displaying true townie-farming-cluelessness.  “They must fucken hate goin’ in a narraw passage like that altagether!”

“Well ya …,” the Gentleman Farmer scratches his scalp at the line of his tweed cap, reddening the pink skin. 

“Eh, ya just … ya know, they eh….”

He gives the pen a long stare, his eyes darting from the spindly pipe scaffolding to the massive bullocks. 

Issuing a determined sigh, he sticks his pint bottle in the muck.

“Give me wan a them fucken shovels!”

TLUG

I’m standing beneath a bare, relentlessly buzz-clicking fluorescent light in a cell phone repair shop waiting for one of the two clean-cut twenty-somethings behind wobbly, clear-plastic panels earnestly finger-picking at computer keyboards.  While just six miserable months ago this cramped storefront was home to a nail salon – the only nail salon in the history of North American cuticle care to fail – the plague has transformed its cracked-beige-floor-tiles and dusty-low-ceilinged decor into a latter day Hogwarths, housing me-llenial wizards in matching ER-red golf shirts, imbued with wisdom of all things “i or Sam” beyond my wildest nightmares.

With the plague forcing us to over employ our phones for everything from propping open the life-sustaining, yet somehow always broken windows to conducting on-the-hopper vaccine research, PhoneER is the hottest spot in town right.  The big thing in here is that people are forced to stop and talk to their “Customer Care Provider.”  It’s not like Starbucks, where you can use your as-yet-unbroken phone to order and pay for a half-caf-skinny-extra-turnip-flavoring-no-ice-iced-macchiato in a cup the size of something normally used for feeding calves – or maybe half-calves?  Then you swagger into the brownish-greenish-all-lit-the-same-space, full of self-important-plague-solemnity and grab your $15.67 drink not even making eye contact with the Bryn Mawr grad working down $200,000 in college loans one Starbucks tip jar at a time.

No, in PhoneER, you’re required, while making eye contact with a me-llenial, to publicly self-humiliate at the counter, spilling your luddite guts on your phone abuse: In my case, an extraordinarily large truck filled with thousands of pounds of soil drove over a poor case-less Samsung, transforming it into the phone Barney Rubble calls Fred Flintstone on to go bowling.

“I dropfed eet in toy…let,” a heavyset, seventy-something Russian woman confesses, casting a quick glance over her shoulder for the KGB.  

But there are no pale men in dark-baggy suits, glaring back at her with their dead eyes.  There’s just me, swaying from foot-to-foot, not even trying to disguise my undisguisable middleclass impatience with being made wait: A young, dark-sweat-suited Hispanic man sitting with his four-year-old daughter making adorably dramatic faces at the game she’s playing on her iPad: Sitting next to them, a muscle-bound gym-rat in a yellow Gold’s Gym wife-beater, with a gel soaked scalp beneath his thinning hair: At the other counter, a tall-fit-tanned-thirty-something woman in electric-pink yoga pants, a purple tee shirt and an extra-wide brimmed, floppy sunhat.

“Well mam, there is not a great deal,” the Russian’s Customer Care Provider – a skinny, twenty-something white guy, Bryn Mawr grad paying down his $200… you get it – says, enunciating his words with great care, “I will be able to achie ….”

“I putf in bag rice, my dotter say; Uncle Ben feexes phones,” the Russian woman interrupts, wildly waving in the aforementioned sometime occupant of her toilet bowl.

“No vork,” she shakes her head with a sad knowingness.

“Mam, there is probably nothin….”

“I cum, you feex,” she nods so much that you can tell the language barrier has been breached, but she can’t yet acknowledge the depth of her problem.  

Instead, with a loud sigh, she doubles her short body over and extracts, from one of her two bulging grocery bags, a long black-leather purse with a thick gold clasp.

“I pay, I pay, no vorry, no vorry.”

Surrendering all hope of a quick resolution there, I turn my attention to the other Customer Care Provider.

“No, no, you … don’t seem to under…stand!” the floppy hat jerks forward forcefully as its occupant makes her point on the phone-wizard’s lacking comprehension.

“Oh no mam, I get it,” says a clean-cut late-twenties African American man, a white plastic nametag “MANAGER” pinned to his red shirt, nodding his getting-it-ness.  

“It’s not me, it’s your en…surance company.  See they won’t pay for anything more than a broken screen, an’ now that we’ve started working on your phone, we discovered that there’s damage to the actual body of the phone.  The act…ual phone itself, an’ that’s a whole different deal, now they’re sayin’ you gotta FedEx it to th….”

“No, no, no,” she slaps her palm on the counter, getting a wobble from the plastic panel.  

“You, Zack the Manager are … not under…standin’ me, I came in here yesterday an’ showed you … your very person not the other guy,” with one hand she slips her mask off her nose, while she waves the other toward the Bryn Mawr guy, the floppy hat cranking backwards in what I have to imagine means eye rolling, “he’s worthle….”

“Eh mam, I’m sorry, but you can’t talk like that in my store, that ain’t cool.”

“Yeah-yeah-yeah sorry-sorry it’s just my disability don’t fuck with the disabled right? Just remember that!”  she forces out a fake laugh so dry and cold my stomach tenses.

“So, it’ll be $210 to do everything, that’s after the en…surance covers the cracked ….”

“NO!” she shrieks, whipping off the floppy hat revealing a head of bleached blond hair, the roots and stems a deep, earthy brown.

Russian, Hispanic, gym-rat, Bryn Mawr and impatient-Irish eyes all stare – at least one nervously.

“You made a promise to me yesterday that if I brought my phone in at noon today you’d have it ready for me by one thirty I gotta doctor’s appointment by zoom that creep don’t see me in his office no more too afraid of a few piddly little germs an’ I need this phone for it.”

“Yes mam, I understand,” he runs his finger along the top of his sky-blue mask, letting in and out more air, “an’ I can have yer phone ready for you at time.  We can do the repair.  It’s a matter of what your en…surance will an’ won’t pay for.  It aint PhoneER, it yours en…surance.”

“No no no you’re still not under…standin!” she yanks her mask off her mouth, waving it recklessly in my fearful-middleclass direction, tensing me up even more.  I increase my rate of foot-to-footing, actively considering giving up on my quixotic at a phone fix.

“YOU!  Your very person not someone else I remember YOU …,” she stabs the clear-plastic panel with her finger, “saying this is covered by insurance an’ then I went home an’ confirmed with the lady at the insurance company an’ everything is all set up for noon today an’ then I have my appointment with that condescendin’ prick of a doctor at one thirty this ….”

“Mam you cannot talk ….”

“… afternoon an’ now your trottin’ out a new lie looking for MY,” another finger stab, “money to pay for what the insurance lady said is covered an’ what you said was covered an’ I don’t have no two hundred dollars to pay for nuthin because I don’t have to pay for nuthin I know an awful lot about broken phones let me tell you an’ I aint payin’ for this because it’s covered by insurance Marybelle in India or China or wherever the hell she is told me so yesterday an’ don’t think I don’t know that her name aint Marybelle it’s … one of their names.”

“Let me check with my supervisor mam,” Zack says, his brow now sheened with sweat.

“NO!” she shrieks so loud this time the little girl reaches out for her father’s hand. 

“No-no-no you aint doin’ the disappearin’ act I’ve seen that play before I’ll be standin’ here for hours while you skedaddle out the back door, ye’re stayin’ right here an’ that crummy supervisor of yours is comin’ out so’s I can stop him from weaselin’ your company out of the promises that you, your … very … person made to me yesterday.”

“Mam, my supervisor is in Worcester, I need to talk to him over the phone.  It’ll only take a few minutes.  You can stand right here, Theo’ll …,” he starts to point to the other guy, then drops his arm.  

“I’ll be right out, I assure you mam, I’ll be right out.”

I check out Theo and he’s got the Russian lady dropping her phone into a clear-plastic food storage bag, which he then wraps around the phone twice and seals with packing tape.  His actions are careful and deliberate, exuding such a sense of ceremony that I’m expecting him to slide out from under the counter a magic phone-sanitizing-and-instant-repair machine – “the PSIR 2000, fixes your phone instantly, even after you’ve made an incred…dibly stupid mistake!”  

But no, instead he ceremonially hands the Russian lady her germ-secure-packaged phone, that now looks like something you’d buy in the gift shop at Chernobyl.

“Yes mam, you could try a different brand of rice,” Theo says perkily.  “Maybe try wild rice or black rice.  I do not know if they would work better than Uncle Ben’s, but there is absolutely nothing that we here at PhoneER can do at this point.”

“Zank you, zank you, I vill try udder rice, Marta on my floor, she have Spain…ish peoples rice, I try, I try. Zank you, zank you.”

As she turns to leave, the gym-rat, black cloth-mask just barely touching the tip of his nose, enormous biceps flexing, propels himself out his seat making her start with shock.

“Hey dude, I gotta problem with my phone,” he starts before he even approaches the counter.  “When I swipe a good lookin’ chick on Tinder, she always ends up ugly!”

He laughs too hard at his own, or stolen, joke.  

“Just kiddin’, just kiddin’, though that does happen.  Problem is my speaker don’t work, which is fine when my mom or sises call but ….”

As they delve into the phenomena of the wastefulness of family advice, the floppy hat, now back in place, twitches.  In the waiting area, so tiny and potentially virus rich that my stress-addled brain spontaneously invents an UBER-SCUBA-Gear-Rental App, the relentless beat of the soundtrack to the little girl’s iPad game competes credibly as the most annoying sound of the plague.  The music is low volume but high enough to be heard and has a sorta gasping nature to its beat; building in long-slow bars of random xylophone music to a much louder, short-sharp cymbal clash that then collapses to one second of silence.  Then it all starts all over again.  I start considering it for the soundtrack of the new musical I’m suddenly writing called “Cell Hell.”

The floppy hat twitches a few more times; the gym-rat is leaning his considerable bulk against the clear plastic screen, wowing it precariously towards Theo; the little girl’s dad stares at the twitching hat.

“Can you shut off that obnoxious noise,” she says with surprising calmness, turning to the little girl.  “It’s makin’ me a headache.”

She speaks so calmly and regularly, that the little girl doesn’t notice she’s being spoken to and continues tapping the screen.

“Hey KID!” she amps up rapidly.  “Turn it off!  It’s makin’ me a headache!”

The dad’s heretofore curious stare instantly hardens.

“Play on Letty,” he lays a hand on his daughter’s leg, “don’t pays her no heed.”

“PEOPLE!” the young woman snap-yells.  “I have a right not to listen to that shit, just turn it down!”

“Fuck you lady,” the dad shoots out of his seat, shoulders back, chin out.

“Don’t you dare talk to my daughter like that!”

I tighten tighter.

The gym-rat stands up from wowing the clear-plastic screen, his brow furrowing.

Theo starts out from behind the counter.

“Leaves my dotter alone, she didn’t do nuthin’ ta you,” the dad says, standing in front of the little girl, who stares up, open mouthed, her hand reaching out blindly to be held.

“Oh yeah I guess we … wuz raised different,” she turns full on towards the dad, yanking her mask off her face.

Theo appears between them, arms held up, pink palms aimed flatly at each of their faces.

“All right now everyone masks o…,” he starts.

“That’s racist. Yeah, you one a them,” the dad scoffs, his face relaxing, but his shoulders tightening up towards his ears. “Letty don’t ….”  

“Oh … pol…ease, I … am … not in the one-est little bit racist my dog walker Andrea’s a black guy an’ I’m always talking nice to the people of all the colors everywhere all the time.”

“…pay no heeda at-all ta this racist,” the dad sits back down, still glaring at her.

“It’s that you didn’t talk to women that way in my house, my fa….”
“PleASE, PLEASE!” Theo lurches his shoulders, and the soft pink palms attached

thereto, toward her first, then him.

            “Hey Theo man, whas goin’ on?” Zack stalks out of the back room, his cell phone held up near the side of his furrowed-brow face.  “I’m talkin’ ta Larry, see if I can help out this mam here an’ there’s all screamin’ an sh….”

“Let me talk ta Larry,” she spins around holding out both hands, fingers gesturing back toward her still unmasked face.  “I’ll fix Larry good we’ll be all set here in three seconds.”

Zack immediately backs up, turns on the fly and disappears into the back room.

Theo stands his ground, his head turning first one way, then the other.

The dad strokes his daughter’s hair.

The woman smushes the brim of the floppy hat against the clear-plastic panel until her deeply tanned forehead touches the screen.  She closes her eyes, her breath fogging the plastic.

“Ok. Ok.  We’re all good now,” Theo says to no one and everyone.  “I am going to go back … behind the counter and everyone will behave – right?”

In the silence the xylophone music creeps back to acoustic prominence.  In the illogical manner that human brains work, I wonder if I my bend my knees would they creak loud enough to drown out the xylophone and defer what seems like the inevitable clash of humans.

“Shut that fuckin’ thing off, it’s drivin’ me CRAZY!” she yells into the plastic screen, spit mingling in with her fog.

“You leaves my daughter alone, … BITCH!”

Theo almost trips over himself rushing back into the customer area just as the backroom door bursts open.  Larry, no longer needing convincing, is gone, Zack’s phone repocketed.

“Awright-awright-awright, I got this solved, … I think,” Zack raises his eyebrows, eyeballs darting from the smushed forehead on the plastic screen to Theo and to me.

I do my best to express middleclass-impatient-indignation with my eyes, but he moves onto the real problems.  As I concede defeat and start to turn for the door, I catch the gym-rat’s eye: All at once he raises his eyebrows, rolls his eyes, shakes his head: All done in microseconds.  

Involuntarily I look down at my boring-frumpy-khaki self to see if the gods of cell phone repair have made any substantive changes without notice – nothing!  I look back up, he’s still nodding at me, and executing motion-sickness-inducing, rapid quarter eyerolls.

“So, we can do this for you mam, La… my supervisor has authorized me to cut our fee in tw….”

“NO FUCKIN’ WAY!” she bolts upright off the plastic screen.

“To nuthin,” Zack continues calmly, if not convincingly.

“Fuck that,” the dad says, propelling himself from his seat.  “White lady can complain her way to a free fix while I’m slappin’ down hard cas….”

“Yours is free sir,” Theo raises his all-powerful pink palms again.  “It was a Samsung problem, an’ it’s almost ready, I’m just downloading the latest operating system, an’ you….”

“I have a disability,” the woman says calmly.  “I have a brain injury I can’t put up with this shit anymore that music is stressin’ my brain just fix my phone an’ I’ll be back at one twenty-five if it ain’t ready I’ll scream so loud that creep of a doctor’ll hear an’ cancel the appointment anyway that’s how you get by when the computer inside yer skull gets fucked up.”

She turns and without looking at them says: “Sorry little girl not sorry father.”

And she’s gone, the glass storefront door sweeping closed behind her.

I consider doing the same and fleeing this now incredibly tense environment, but my addiction to eavesdropping prevents me from moving.

The dad’s out of his chair again, kinda-sorta leaning forward like he may follow her.

“Don’t do it dad,” the gym-rat says, visibly shocking everyone.

The little girl turns carefully to look at his face.

“Hey man I learned this from a dude I worked with, a plumber,” he nods with a smile to anxious faced little girl.  Then he stares all serious faced at the dad.  

“If you can believe this, a plumber philosopher kinda dude, smoked weed all day long, read big, thick, red-hard covered books, listened to a shi… a ton a sixties music.  But he useta have this bumper sticker but stuck on the dash in his shit-box van, … sorry, sorry, little girl.”

He nods to her but keeps the serious face.

“But this sign said, The Love U Get Equals The Love U Give.  An’ that helped me a bunch with my crazy family, just sayin’.”

He looks a little bashful, half turns back toward the plastic screen.  

“That chick’s all busted up inside.  Good … lookin’,” he shakes his head.  “But broken, she probly can’t do love no more, but you can.  You got a nice family there, so just remember, the love you give.”

He nods deliberately like at some point he’s actually practiced advice-giving-nodding.

No one says anything, but the dad sits down again.

“The creep still fired me.”

“Who?  Wha’ happen?” the dad’s face scrunches up in confusion.

“The plumber, he fired my as…, sorry man, I aint ‘round kids much,” he bends his knees slightly, lurches his massive shoulders to the left in somatic apology. 

“The plumber.  He fired me, one Wednesday at lunch, both of us wasted.  He said, ‘this company can’t run with both of us bluntin’ all day, so you’re done.’  I hadda walk a mile ta Revere Beach T Station.  Later, I heard he hired some born-again dude who stole the company an’ renamed it Heavenly Plumbing.  I ain’t shi… foolin’ ya man.  The love you give!  But it worked, ‘cause I stopped smokin’ weed, got in shap….”

The gods of cell phone repair –now the brattiest gods on Mount Olympus – finally swoop to my rescue as Zack waves me over to his clear-plastic screen.  

As I step toward him, I slide the mangled Samsung from my pocket, clearly displaying this formidable new challenge to his wizardly powers.

 “Wu…heee, man!  You ain’t been givin’ this Sam no love!” 

The Fierce Darkness

 I’m pushed up again the wall in the Special Criminal Court’s public gallery, afraid a me shite that me an’ me brudder’ll be eyeballed be the judges.  Da says if they see us, then the cranky ould judge’ll kick us out, not wantin’ an eleven an’ a twelve year old ta hear all about how the ‘RA does be bombin’ an’ killin’.  

If we get kicked out for the day an’ Da’s stuck within evidencin’; us standin’ around on Green Street holdin’ our hurty-handle suitcases; Irish army soldiers scowlin’ out over heaps a sandbags at us; machinegun barrels aimed at our legs; then it’ll be Da doin’ the killin’! 

In front a me, below in the court there’s rows a shiny-backed wooden benches full a Gards in blue uniforms; navy ties pushin’ their sky-blue shirt collars up inta the pink-red a their necks; flat hats bobblin’ on knees; nervy eyes straight ahead starin’ at the barristers in filthy-white, wooly wigs an’ dusty, black robes.  The barristers sit-stand in an’ outta armchairs in front of an old wood table covered with papers, wooly-heads twistin’ ta glare at the Gards.

Da’s down there, standin’ behind the benches, head down, two-fingers on chin, in his funeral suit, white shirt collar flecked with blood from where he razored his face pink in the downstairs toilet at Uncle’s house out in Clontarf; hair Brylcreemed back sumptin savage – it’s almost as if a wee lad on a tiny surfboard could slide over that big wave in his hair.  He’s leanin’ forward talkin’ fierce serious to another detective, the fella as lost fingers abroad in Monasterevin durin’ the Herrema kidnappin’ siege: Sneakin’ up the stairs he was, when the ‘RA shot off a blast a bullets.

A door behind the stage where the judges do sit opens, an’ an important lookin’ little bald fella in suit way too big for him, steps out, hands clasped behind his back like he’s the boss-man for-sure-for-sure.

Davey pushes me even harder again the wall.

The door opens again an’ there’s that rustle a people standin’ that you hear at mass when t’altar boys’ black-n’-whites appear swishin’ like the barristers’ ahead a the priest in his colourful vestments. 

All the Gards stand up together like as if they’ve ben practicin’.  Da an’ the missin’-fingers detective stop their lean-in chattin’, backs straight, hands down by their sides as they stare up at the stage.

The first judge out the door is fierce bad altogether at the walkin’.  He shuffles along, slowin’ down the wans behind him, givin’ them more time to see us!

Needin’ a toilet fierce bad now, I flatten mesell again the wall.

The judges take their time sittin’, scrapin’ their big armchairs in an’ out, in an’ out. When their arses are gud n’ well settled inta the armchairs, then the middle one, who come in first an’ is shockin’ ould altogether, nods ta the important-lookin’ little fella, who then nods at the audience.  Everyone sits, but careful, not floppin’ down onta the seats like men do at mass.

Davey an’ me, way too a-scared ta move an’ come the judges notice, never stood.  We just crushed up against the plaster an’ stayed perfectly still.

Then sumptin’ odd starts happenin’; ya can tell cause no moves atall-atall.  It’s like the sorta end of a funeral, when yer waitin’ for t’altar-boys an’ the priest to come off the altar an’ finally start shiftin’ the coffin off ta the graveyard.

A door squeaks loud.

All the Gards’ heads turn right at the same time.

Inta the Prisoner’s Dock walks two bearded, shaggy-haired fellas in Wranglers an’ rumpled shirts; wan fierce tall, t’other re’glar size, both with eyes down ta the floor.  Behind them walks four big n’ strong sorta-Gards in all black uniforms, white shirts an’ ties; Da tells us later them are Prison Officers.  The hard faces on all six a them tell ya right away that don’t none them like jokes. 

Still an’ all the ‘RA-men are fierce normal lookin’ considerin’ they’re supposeda ben bringin’ a bomb ta blow up a border station in Fermanagh, on’y the Gards caught them drivin’ along one a them skinny-snaky roads above in the Cuilcagh Mountains.

The ‘RA-men don’t pay no heed to no one, just plonk themselves down, not even lookin’ at the judges on the stage.  The tall-skinny one stares at his left hand an’ starts pickin’ at the fingernails with his long-boney fingers.  T’other fella wipes the back a his hand across his mouth an’ opens a copybook. 

Yeah!

A ‘RA-man has a copy with a sky-blue cover, just like the wans I bought last year for 15p each from Brother Ailbe in the school shop that’s really just a narrow-dark storeroom.  As the ‘RA-man flicks the pages of his copy, inside I can make out a rake a blue-Biro writin’.

The ould judge whacks his hammer off the desk, makin’ a fierce crack in the silence.

The Gards, the barristers, Da, everyone goes straight backed, ‘cept for the ‘RA-men.

Nails is picked.

Copy pages is flicked.

Me an’ Davey is on’y here ‘cause wan a them three judges is from our town, an’ he’s doin’ Da a favour, givin’ us a lift home this evenin’.  See this is a strange court that has three judges but no jury.  Da says it’s cause the ‘RA’d shoot all the jurors if they convicted their fellas.  So instead, they have judges decide they’re guilty.  Then the Gards on’y have ta protect the judges from the ‘RA an’ not be protectin’ jurors all over the country.  Our judge has a Gard outside his house all the time in a little hut.  The hut looks sorta like the wan the grandfather from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang useta get inta.  The Gards must feel awful stupid in there, with no guns nor nuthin’, an the ‘RA drivin’ round with guns an’ bombs comin’ out their arses.

We need the favour, ‘cause we come up ta Dublin with Granny an’ Auntie earlier in the week to stay with Uncle for a few weeks.  Ya know, ta break the boredom down in Leitrim.  Our family keeps it nice an’ simple, we on’y have the one a each sorta relative: Granny-Auntie-Uncle.  ‘Cept there’s no Grandad, he doesn’t even come up in borin’ old stories.  There is Auntie Maura, but she’s Da’s sister an’ she has nathin’ ta do with the Granny-Auntie-Uncle gang.   

Since Ma died last year we’re bundled off up to Granny an’ Auntie in Leitrim at the blink of an eye.  Ya get a few days off school an’ suddenly Auntie’s brown FIAT 127 is outside the door, an’ you’re driven away.  ‘Cept now Auntie’s in hospital herself.  Here in Dublin, in wan a them big extra-confusin’ hospitals. 

Never would have thought that. 

Granny’s as ould as rocks, ya’d a thought she’d be next for a hospital bed or Uncle; sure he smokes like a chimney an’ the veins in his forehead do get blueish-thick when he’s mad, which is most of the time.  But with Aunty suddenly in hospital, Granny too ould an’ Uncle too busy priestin’ an’ smokin’, somehow we have ta get home fast. 

Lucky Da wasn’t evidencin’ above in the Special Criminal Court an’ the Castlebar judge said he’d give us a lift home.  See he’s a big blue shirt, the judge that is, or at least that’s what the lads say.  I don’t really understan’ what all the teams are in politics, but mostly it’s the Fine Gael blue shirts against the kinda-sorta green Fianna Fallers; not green like Greenpeace green, but green like “The Four Green Fields” I…R…A green.  ‘Cept the Fallers aren’t really that green, only some a them do send guns ta the ‘RA sometimes.  There’s other teams too: Labour, but they don’t have no colour, an’ Da says they don’t know whether to “piss or fart:” An’ there’s communists too, course they’re red like Chairman Mao abroad in China, but sure there’s only about three a them an’ Da says they’re “all cracked in the head.”  

It’s fierce confusin’, much better to follow Leeds United, even though all the lads support or either Liverpool or Arsenal.  But there’s no confusion with football team colours.

There’s not much confusion at the Special Criminal Court either, the judges, the Gards an’ the barristers are all again the ‘RA-men.  The ‘RA-men don’t even have no wooly-headed barristers.  Their big old wooden table is bare. 

Da’s not just against the ‘RA, he hates them altogether.

“Bloody thugs!” he calls them.  “Goin’ around with guns tellin’ people what to do.”

See that’s kinda-sorta he’s job: He has a gun, a pistol an’ sometimes an Uzi submachine gun – it’s fierce cool altogether.  He’s a detective, but that’s a Gard too, so he does tell people what they can an’ cannit do. 

Anyways, everythins fierce confusin’, but who cares, ‘cause Da said at the lunch break he’ll take us up ta Clerys toy shoppin’.  He never does that.   ‘Cept at Christmas he’d take ya for a look at the toys upstairs in Wynnes.  We march in past t’Irish Press with photographs of English pubs blown to smithereens, up the windy stairs we clop, lots a cheap ould toys hangin’ from wall.  Then after a few minutes, Da gets fake-cross an’ waves us out to wait for him on Main Street.  Wan a the toys ya liked that day ends up bein’ brung be Santa – yeah, right!

The two ‘RA-men don’t seem to care that everyone in the court’s again them.   The main judge, his voice all low an’ gravelly, gets fierce cranky soundin’:

“The accused are running a severe risk of receiving contempt of court charges ….”

He gravels on but the two ‘RA fellas don’t seem to care.  The wan a them is still goin’ hard at cleanin’ his nails; Jaysys, they must be spotless be now.  While the other buck stops his scribblin’ in the copy an’ looks up with a kinda-sorta smirk across his face.

“Cad é? (what’s that?)” the ‘RA-man asks.

“Oh yes, … rinne mé dearmaid (I forgot),” the judge’s cranky ould voice sounds tired.

The eyes near fall outta me head ta hear them talkin’ Irish.  Sure no one talks Irish on’y teachers when they pass Brother Ailbe standin’ inside the school door; then they start noddin’ “dia duits (hellos)” at one another like as if they talk that way all time.  

Walkin’ up ta Clerys at the lunch break, Da explains what was goin’ on:

“Well the wan bol… prisoner, he doesn’t recognize the court, says it’s a sham.  A ‘rulin’ junta’ he calls t’Irish government,” he twist-nods his head savage hard.  “Yeah, … can you believe that, like we’re some sort banana republic balow in Africa with t’army runnin’ the gaff.  As if Gay Byrne an’ the gobeshites like him on t’radio would let that happen!”

He was so mad he said a bad word in front us, so I didn’t dare ask him again about them all talkin’ Irish, but he got back ta it himself.

“An’ don’t ya see the other genius is defendin’ himself in Irish!  Says that’s his cons…titutional right.  Oh yeah?  What about the constitutional rights of all the people that was ta get blown up be the bomb them bucks had in the boot a their car?  Hah, … hah?”

A pudgy Traveller woman in a huge red checked skirt an’ a black bomber jacket approaches with her hand held out.

“A few coppers sur, for the babi….”

“Wud ya get the f…, I don’t have any money fer givin’ away,” he glares at her.  “Get away outta that!”

It isn’t until the toy section in Clerys that the frown comes off Da’s face, not that he likes toys, but he likes that we like them.  Toy shops are the best place in the world an’ the worst.  See, I want them all, even though I know they couldn’t all fit into our room without rakes a them gettin’ broken by me three brothers steppin’ on them.  But still, I want them all!

As always happens now that we’re not little no more, we come out with just the wan thing.

“Sumptin’ for the whole lot a them,” Da says, as he buys a Swingball.

Still, that’s a good toy.  None a the lads have wan.  An’ I can even wallop away at it on me own in the backyard when I’m mad with everyone. 

But now Davey an’ me have ta hide the Swingball in the public gallery.  Da’s all nods n’ winks ta the machinegunned soldiers at the sandbags outside the Court.

“Sumptin’ for the wee lads,” he twist-nods down at Davey an’ me.  “Nathin’ good like this down the country atall-atall-atall.”

The soldiers’ eyes move nervously in their faces, moustaches twitchin’ like they’re startin’ ta talk, but they never do.  They just settle back inta their worried stares.

The missin’-fingers detective has a big grin on his face when he sees Da push-shufflin’ us up the stairs ta the public gallery with the long Swingball box.

“Yer lucky ya got dat weapon past our crack sac…urity perimeter,” he raises his eyebrows an’ nods towards the soldiers an’ the sandbags.

 Upstairs in the gallery, Davey drops his end a the long box an’ sprints past me ta get the least-judge-seein’-seat.  When the important little fella comes in, an’ the whole room goes church-silent, now it’s me pushin’ Davey again the wall.  The judges traipse in half a minute later; everyone stands (‘cept not us, still too scared; now we’d have to mind the Swingball too!) an’ then sits: The ‘RA-men come in, led an’ followed be the four Prison Officers. 

Everyone’s back in position.

The game starts again.

On’y this time Da’s up in the stand.

Me stomach goes sick.

Da givin’ evidence against bombin’ an’ shootin’ ‘RA-men!

The important little fella holds open the wee gate ta the Witness Stand. Then he pints at a black book on the counter in front a Da – prolly the Gospel. 

Da puts his hand on the black book an’ starts inta the whole “I swear by almighty God …” – just like they do on the telly. 

The little fella stands in front a the Witness Box, his back as straight as a pin, face ferocious-serious-important lookin’ altogether, starin’ at Da.

A wooly-headed barrister pushes himself up out a his armchair, ya can nearly hear him sighin’ from the Public Gallery, grabs a piece a cardboard from the table an’ hands it to Da.

“Is that your signature detective,” he asks, his hand comin’ up to cover a yawn.

“Are we bor…ring you counselor?” the oul’ judge’s gravelly voice sounds.

“Oh no, no, no your honour, just a tad too much of the Wicklow lamb at lunch,” he kinda-sorta bows towards the judge.  “It’s very good right now, … trés succulent.”

“Pro…ceed,” the judge sounds all cranky again.

“So, detective Oh…Farrell, on June fourth, nineteen…seventy…five you took this set of fingerprints, correct?” he waves the cardboard at Da, who unless he’s got Superman’s eyes couldn’t see it at the speed the cardboard is wavin’.

“Yes,” Da says fierce fast, like as if he’s cranky.

“And can you affirm that this set of fingerprints, which are unsigned by the defendant are in fact those of the defendant.”

“Yes,” Da crankies again.

“Please identify whose prints these are.”

Da points at the two ‘RA-men.

“Be specific … please,” the wooly-head snaps crankily.

“The fel…, the man on the right.”

“Very good, very good, and why did the defendant not sign his own fingerprint card?”

“Well, … ‘tis very common for crim…, people not ta sign, they don’t want to make things azy for the law.”

“Yes, yes, we don’t need any editorializing Gard, simply the facts.”

“Counsellor, allow the members of the Gardaí Siochana to answer your questions!” the ould judge snaps.  “The court is indifferent to your ovine digestive quandaries but will not tolerate your taking them out on our hard-working Gardaí!”  

“Yes, yes, apologies your honor if I offended the court, simply trying to establish the Fingerprint Card as prima facie evidence … in the most efficient manner possible.”

In the Prisoner’s Dock, the ‘RA-man is fast-flickin’ through the pages a his sky-blue copybook.

Da wipes his hand across his mouth; his head not movin’, but his eyes dartin’ around.

The wooly-head flops down into his armchair, an’ there’s a sorta silence, except for the sound a copybook pages turnin’.

Suddenly the ‘RA-man rifles out a blast a Irish words.

The wooly-head eases back in the armchair, the face tryin’ ta not stretch into a smile.

The little fella clops outta nowhere, an’ stands halfway between Da and the dock.

“Arís (again)!” he barks.

The ‘RA-man releases another burst.  He’s got a northern accent that makes it even harder to understand his Irish.

“De question is,” the little fella moves his shoulders inside his too-big suit, “how de Gardaí can be sure dat dis un…sighened card is in fact de defendant’s finger…prints.”

“Sure, I took the prints,” Da’s forehead folds inta lines the way it does when he’s gettin’ mad with ya.  “An’ I had ta sign it mesell when that fella wouldn’t.”

Another burst a Irish from the ‘RA-man.

“And, eh, …,” the little fella’s neck squirms inside his too big suit.  “De question is, has the Gardaí ever made a miss…take in he’s life.”

“I did indeed,” Da twist-nods, “an’ sure isn’t it only God Almighty Himself that ….”

The ‘RA-man releases another burst a Irish.

The little fella cocks his ear toward the Dock

“Desist, desist!” the ould judge nearly yells, whackin’ his hammer off the counter.

It takes a few minutes an’ a drop a sweat runnin’ down the middle a me back, but everythin’ finally gets silent.

“Dat’s all de questions for dis Gardaí,” the little fella says softly, turnin’ ta the judges.

Da fumbles with the wee gates ta the Witness Box as he glares over at the Dock.

More Gards an’ detectives come up as witnesses, sayin’ this an’ that happened; how they seen the two ‘RA-men here an’ there, but there’s no mention yet a the bomb.  So it’s all fierce borin’, not like Rockford atall-atall-atall.

Finally around five o’clock we’re out on Green Street holdin’ our hurty-handle  suitcases in one hand and the slippery-smooth Swingball box in t’other, waitin’ for the judge’s luvly Granada to pick us up. 

I’m sure the ‘RA-men don’t think it, but the judge is fierce nice.  He asks us questions like an’ as if Davey an’ me is reg’lar people.  Course mostly it’s him an’ Da talkin’.  A lot a times they lead sideways towards one another talkin’ in whispers, fast-nods an’ winks.  

A Gard’s squad car follows us as we crawl along the Liffey quays through ferocious traffic.  It’s just car-bus-car-bus-car-bus-red-traffic-light, an’ then wan eejit on a bike in t’middle a it all.  Da says the bike fella’s “lookin’ ta get a wallop off a bus for a big payday!”

When we get out to Leixlip, there’s another Gard’s car waitin’ in front of a chipper.

“Anyone hungry?” the judge asks.

“Ah sure them two in the back’d ate the hind leg a the lamb a God no matter the time a day!” Da says.

I feel the heat a me face blushin’.

“I tell ya what, I could do with an ould bag a chips meself,” the judge sighs.  “All that rich food in them Dublin restaurants has me stomach actin’ up.”

“Oh yeah, sure there’s the best a food in chippers,” Da says all fake-cheery, though other than summer holidays in Kilkee, I never seen him in a chipper.

When the judge steps outta the Granada, the doors a both squad cars fly open.

He kinda-sorta salutes at them, like ould fellas do when they’re yellin’ “hallo” cross the street ta one another.  Then he points at the chipper, an’ all their faces relax.

Loaded up on an extra-greasy burger, fries an’ a bottle a Leed lemonade, we climb back inta the Granada.  There’s just the wan Gard’s car now, an’ off we go.

Me stomach full a greasy food, the heat, an’ t’engine thrummin’ all send me ta sleep.

I wake when we bump on the bridge over the Shannon in Lanesborough.  The darkness an’ the taste a burger in me mouth have me all confused.

Da an’ the judge are blabbin’ away in the front; Davey’s crumpled over asleep.

It’s dark outside now. 

The headlights make the bushes on the side a the road sorta reddish-grey alive, but out the side windas ever’thin’ looks pure-black dead.

After a while, we glide inta the yella lights a Roscommon town, an’ stop ta let the Gard’s cars swap.

The Roscommon squad car driver rolls down his winda an’ waves at Da, who rolls down his an’ waves back.

“Ora sorry, didn’t know ya were there,” the driver says, smilin’ with long teeth.

“Howaya now Tommy?” Da yells too loud for a town with sleepin’ children.

On we go.  In just a few minutes we’re snakin’ along between the tingly darkness a the bushes in the headlights an’ the fierce darkness out the side windas.

“Did the Roscommon squad stay behind?” the judge askes, his eyes suddenly in the rearview mirror.

“I dunno now, did they?” Da huff-grunts himself ‘round in the seat ta look back.  “I seen Tommeen Ryan within in the squad, haven’t seen him since t’Uzi trainin’ back in May.”

“I think they’re gone,” the judge says, a bit a worry in his voice.

“Ah, d’ya know what, Tommeen probly seen me an’ thought I was doin’ security, never thinkin’ I was comin’ back from court mesell.”

“Oh, Janey Mackers you’re right.  An’ sure you don’t have a gun with you, do you?”

“I … don’t … nooh,” Da twist-nods slowly.  “A course ya cannit brin’ wan inta court.”

“Oh, … ah,” the judge says, the whites a his eyeballs appearin’ in the mirror again.

“D’ya know what … ?” Da says in his fake no-worry, but act’ally wild-worried, voice. 

“I have a Swingball there within in the boot yer car, an’ it’d be as good as any ….”

The judge sudden-spins his face toward Da, forcin’ him ta stop him goin’ on.

Out the windshield, tingly bushes whip past.

Inside in me stomach the burger an’ chips turn ta mushy shite an’ I needa toilet bad.

Clampin’ the cheeks a me arse together hard, I turn away from the tingly bushes an’ force me eyes out the side winda inta the fierce darkness.

One Focal!

I’m lean-pushing my bicycle along a narrow road in Blacksod listening to the three Dublin lads complain in English about things I don’t even understand: The BBC vs ITV vs UTV, bus transfers, girlfriends, a chipper called Burger King.  To the right lies a watery field sweeping down to the Atlantic Ocean – three thousand liquid miles before there’s land again: To the left the furze bushes’ olive-green needles and brilliant yellow flowers toss about in the wind, their wild freedom taunting us in our imprisonment in the Irish language Gulag!

A shite-brown coloured Renault 4 rattles around the corner behind us and revs up loudly.  As it starts to pass, the driver’s face spins towards us and the car pulls to a sudden diagonal stop, blocking the road.  The fast stop lurches the boney-faced driver’s torso forward.  He has to hold his angry face back with arms locked on the steering wheel.  His passenger, a gaunt woman, with a cigarette in her mouth, slams forward, wide-eyed, a hand grabbing the dash, her mane of grey hair whipping past her face.

The Renault window rolls with fussy-anger-speed.

“Cen teanga a bhí a labhairt agat (What language were you speaking)?” the boney face barks, his steely blue eyes glaring into mine.

“Béarla (English),” I answer, shock preventing me from lying, but immediately I force out a bad-fake laugh and add, “Oh, tá brón orm, Gaeilge, Gaeilge (Oh, I’m sorry, Irish, Irish).”

With an angry sigh, the shite brown door flies open, hitting the front wheel of my bike.  A wad of the Vaseline smeared all over the Renault brushes from the car door onto my bike’s tire.          

“Béarla!  Béarla, an é (English, English, was it)?” he snaps, spit flying, eyes glaring, the skin stretched double-tight across his bony face.

The Dublin lads are all sniggering, but they do it in Irish so he can’t turn on them.

“Níl (No),” I hold my nerve, though my stomach is gone.  “Gaeilge (Irish).”

From inside the car, the woman sighs out a cloud of cigarette smoke and then fires a machinegun blast of Irish words.

He presses his thin lips press together, the skin on his brow about to snap.  He darts back into the Renault and immediately leans his torso halfway out the window giving me one last slow finger wag, the underarm of his shirt mopping Vaseline.

“Bí cúramach a mhac, bí cúramach (be careful son, be careful),” he casts a hateful glance at the three Dubs who leer back insolently, eyes begging to be sent home.

The Renault lurches away, speeding up, slowing down, brake-lights flashing red. 

“Fooken bollix,” FP says, arching his tall frame forward.  “Can ya ‘magine dem pair naked within in bed? Huh?  Sure, he’d be like a shaved Doberman, and she’d be like a Muppet someone set on fire.”

He throws back his head, like he’s an ould fella, who’s seen it all.  That’s just how he is.  He says FP stands for the “firing pin” from a gun.  His family are mad Provo.  The way he goes on cheering every time there’s an IRA attack in Belfast, ya’d think he was a trigger man for the IRA.  But it’s all bullshite, Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) has his name down as Francis Patrick.

“Jaysys,” Brenny jumps in, like all looking-to-fit-in fellas he’s never one to be left out.  “Sure, de sight a dem nakid’d put a fella off roidin’ so it twould.”

“Sure, dowen here all deys be roidin’ anyhows is sheeps,” FP nods knowingly, “I mean me uncle wuz below in Curry an’ he seen a farmer with de sheep’s back legs stuck inside he’s wellingtons, an’ de farmer goin’ like he wuz on top a Blondie.”

His eyes dart to mine.

“Don’t you’se?” he angles his head toward me. “I mean seer…iously.”

“I do…n’t … know,” I drag out the words trying to think of a comeback.  

The three of them stare at me like whatever I say next will become lore back in Dublin: “It’s for real, sure dis cultie balow in Mayo tol’ me.”

“Does that make us baahaaad?” the gods of bad jokes finally dispatch the words.

Smiles dissolve their curious-suspicious stares.

 “Get up de fucken yard!” FP laughs, swinging his fist toward me.

 “Cum on ‘til I get me dinner,” Sharkey snaps, he’s a cranky-old-soul, always-hungry, sorta fella. “Or de din…year as de Bean an Tí (landlady) calls it.  More fucken spuds an’ gravy dan anathin’, but at least an’ it fills ya up!”

We’ve all been imprisoned here by our parents having paid Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) a hundred and fifty pound to isolate us up in North Mayo’s wild beauty and flail the Irish language into our thick skulls for four weeks so we can pass the big exams next year, get into college or qualify for a half-ways decent job.  

The one rule we all must live by, though the Dubs seem to be constantly on the verge of dying by it, is to never get caught saying a complete sentence in English.  If you want to remain imprisoned here (as opposed to getting executed behind the garage at home for having squandered the hundred and fifty quid) then you have to drop in one Irish word to every sentence.  Or at least include one Irish-ish sounding word: These we make by adding “ail” or “adh” to the end of an English word; then bounce the pronunciation off the roof of your mouth and claim you were speaking Irish: 

“Pass-ail me the butter-adh, please-ail.”  

We’ve literally been sentenced to speak Irish-ish for four weeks!  

The couple who run the school are hardcore Gaeilgeoirs or Gaelgoers as we call them: That is people who love the Irish language so much they make everyone else hate it … and them!   They spin around in that shite-brown Renault – plastered with Vaseline so the salty Atlantic air doesn’t rust the French metal to pieces – giving shite to everyone for not speaking Irish.  

 We’re in classes every morning from nine to one, just like regular school, only worser cause it’s all in Irish and everyone else is at home working summer jobs with tall-tale hangovers.  Then in the afternoons there’s usually some activity, either sports or a bike ride to some place the Gaelgoers call “go hiontach ar fad (brilliant altogether)!” a holy well or a rock or something that looks fierce like a regular well or rock but apparently someone went there and got their hairy warts cured.  Then we cycle home grimacing through the rain.  Soaked through, we dry off in front of the turf fire, Wranglers steaming so hot your thighs get scorched.

A sports afternoon was better, but that meant lads who had never before bounced a ball in their lonely lives were harangued out onto a watery-windswept field and forced to play Gaelic football – a game somewhere on the sports continuum between soccer and a bar fight.  Any attempt to play the hated “cluiche Sasnach” (English game – soccer that is: I won’t dwell on the fact that we have two words for the often negatively-adjectived English) brought a swift, red-faced shrill of the whistle by the boney-faced Ardmháistir (headmaster).  He then deliberately picks up the ball, holds it up for everyone to see, and places it into the entirely uncoordinated hands of the nearest young fella.  Restarting play with an energetically hopeful whistle blast, his eyes instantly betray his hopefulness as they dart around angrily to make sure everyone’s hands are held up ready to receive, and most likely drop, the ball.

Na cailíní (the girls) are issued a burst tennis ball and the handle of the broom from the room behind the stage for them to play the sport of rounders: which in this context was essentially baseball without the gazillion dollar salaries, or a functioning ball, a bat, or a field.  But there were lots of rules, harshly enforced by the chain smoking, grey-mane tossing, Ardmháistreás (you guessed it; headmistress – though definitively not in the French sense of “mistress”.)  They used their jackets as the bases, which, with people standing at base on the watery field for the couple of hours long game, ensured at least three girls cycled home literally dripping wet.

The activity is also, of course, all in Irish and woe betide the student who gets so excited they forget to jam into their sentences that one Irish-ish sounding word!

That’s what happened poor ould, always-hungry Sharkey.

Sharkey, like myself and nearly everyone else there, hadn’t hardly a clue how to actually play Gaelic football, but Sharkey had the added disability that he didn’t like bar fights either.  Inevitably he got clobbered in a tackle by Brenny that looked suspiciously like a punch-kick.  Brenny, in line with his wish to conform, showed up every Saturday morning for years with hundreds of other young fellas at Na Fianna Football Club in Glasnevin, and therefore knew how to play, or at least how to tackle … kinda-sorta.

“Ya fooken tick Glasnevin bollix!” Sharkey cries out, crumpling into a puddle.

The whistle shrills!

“SHARKEY ANESO (HERE)!” the Ardmháistir screams, pointing angrily at the ground. 

Then he contradicts his screamed-order and stomps over, aiming his index finger down at Sharkey’s always-hungry and now in deep-shit face.

With an anger-tinged ceremonial turning over of the all-powerful whistle to FP, who in his second year at the Colaiste (College) had gained at least survivor status, Sharkey is hauled off to the shite-brown Renault, the Ardmháistir firmly gripping him by the arm … never to be seen again.

After an hour of not-exactly-benign neglect refereeing by FP – three chipped teeth, two dislocated shoulders and multiple kicked-black-and-blue fingers – we’re on our bikes headed back to the house for a meal of a little meat, a lot of potatoes and peas.   

“Jaysys, he wuz fairly hard on poor ould Sharkey! Huh?” FP says, his head turning all around, eyes scanning.  “He’s fooken done for now, prolly already on de redneck express back ta Dooblin.”

“Nah,” I say, my eyes now starting to scan all around.  “Sure, he couldn’t help himself, he got a whack an’ the words came out automatically.  It wasn’t deliberate.”

“Doesn’t fooken mat…her.  When dat bollix of an Ardmháistir makes up his moind, yer gone,” he shakes his freckly face slowly.  “Ya don’t have a fooken chance.”
Sure enough, when we get back to the house, all of Sharkey’s stuff is gone: His rucksack, his bike, his books.  

The landlady is all upset, her bulk slamming around in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes.  She liked Sharkey; he was friendlier than the rest of us and he walloped down everything on the plate she put in front of him.

I didn’t eat hardly any of the potatoes and peas at dinner.  I just chewed a lot on the pork chop that was as thin and hard as the sole of your shoe.

That evening before the “Céilí” (a session of music and singing from which the Gaelgoers had surgically extracted the joy) back at the school, the Ardmháistir stands with his fiddle and bow grasped white-knuckled in his left hand, while his right index finger stabs the air in front of all the older boys, warning us in spitting-angry Irish words that we too would be sent home if we spoke “as Bearla” (in English).  Jamming the fiddle and bow into his right armpit, so he could use both hands to emphasize his point, he was particularly careful in enunciating slowly in Irish and then translating it into the much-hated Bearla, that the courts had repeatedly proved the Colaistes (Colleges) correct in keeping all the fees when a student was kicked out for speaking in English, which was in fact “breaking the contract, signed by your parents when submitting your application.” 

“Agus anois, amhrán sona (and now for a happy song)!” he contorts his grimace into the fakest of fake smiles, whips the fiddle and bow from under his arm, and lifting and lowering his right leg, he tries to infuse levity into a being that can know no levity. 

That night back in the house, lying in the darkness on the top of one of the bunkbeds, I’m listening to FP and Brenny damn “to fooken cultie hell an’ beyond” the Ardmháistir, the Gaeltacht, the Irish language, the British Army, when suddenly FP goes:

“Éist (listen)!” 

They both fall silent.

We all listen.

The sound of gravel crunching underfoot comes in the open window.

“Oíche maith a fir uaisle (goodnight gentlemen),” FP enunciates the words slow, loud and clear.

I listen intently but it’s hard through the sound of my heart beating wildly.

A bunch of minutes later, FP slips off his lower bunk and pads to the window.

“Dat fooken bollix a bollixes was out dere, awright,” he says with a loud sigh.  “Jaysys, ya can still feel he’s weirdo-adhness!”

The next day it rains and winds so hard that we have classes inside the school for the afternoon.  During a break, FP, Brenny and I sprint through the wind-driven rain the fifty yards from the school door to the local shop-bar-restaurant (if a microwaved steak and kidney pie can be considered a meal).  In there they have a pool-table in the back.  Usually, we don’t go in, as the locals aren’t big fans of us strainséiri (blow-ins) taking over their spaces, but in the afternoon there’s only the usual two ould alkies sitting up at the bar glowering into their pints.

FP beats Brenny easily and I’m just putting my tenpenny pieces into the machine when in storms the Ardmháistir.

“Cén tseafóid atá ort anois (what sort of foolishness are you up to now)?” he says slowly, forcing a fake calm into his voice.

“Dhia duit a Paraiceen (how are you little Paraic),” he says, smiling his famously fake smile at the publican.  His eyes pass judgmentally over the alkies, who don’t even bother to look up from their yellowing pints of Guinness.  

His right-hand shoots out, index finger aimed at the door.

“Amach (out)!”

Outside, gripping his suit jacket with one hand, he run-walks to catch up to us.

“Nead Béarla an ait seo (that place is a nest of English)!” he sneers at us, giving FP a whack on the back of his head.

“Roinnt ceannaireachta a thaispeaint (show some leadership)!”

The windy-rainy days cycling all over the Mullet peninsula turn into rainy-windy weeks.  To spite the Gaelgoerswe actually attempt to communicate in Irish with the locals, but they’re so pissed off with them correcting their grammar that, out of spite, they only respond to us in English.  Still, we get friendly with some of the locals our age who can all speak Irish but won’t and only laugh at our pathetic attempts to pronounce the words correctly.  In any case, all they seem to want to talk about is what it’s like living in Dublin, which they then immediately compare to London and Birmingham to where all their brothers and sisters have emigrated.  

On Sundays we go to mass and listen to the priest rattle off words we all know so well and try to map them to their English meanings.  Everyone gets the “Our Father” down pat: We’ll all be fine so long as Saint Peter speaks Irish!  

The priest nearly always shows up fifteen minutes late, eyes bloodshot, a fierce scowl on his saggy, red face.  He rattles through the mass quickly, if he even includes a sermon, we’ll never know.

Then on the Sunday after Sharkey was “disappeared”, the priest never shows up at all.  Eventually, at the time we’d usually be leaving mass, we all end up crowding around outside the church, rain spitting on us.  It’s unsettling for everyone.  The teenagers are upset, not cause there’s no mass, but because we sat there as long as mass and now the Gaelgoers will probably pull a new priest out of their arse.

Either way, we were not getting out of this for free.

The locals are genuinely upset.

“He mhust be verah bad this morn,” an ould fella, with hardly any teeth, shakes his capped head slowly.  “I seen him drive off inta town yisterdah, ‘bout three-ish.  I suppose there’s nathin’ like startin’ on time.”

He nods a lot, his sunken face twitching between a mischievous smile and a religious frown.

“Thure was a H Blocks protest within in Ballina,” snaps a heavyset woman, 

bulging out a tan raincoat, the belt tied in a rough knot, a sky-blue scarf cinched tightly against her ample chin.  

“My Eamonn seen him within on the back owa lorry,” she continues.  “Givin’ a serm… speech he wuz, an’ two plainclothes polismen grabbed a hoult a him after.  They prolly have ‘im locked up within in the Ballina barrack.” 

As punishment for listening to full English sentences, we’re frog-marched down to the school where we spend an hour learning the hymn “Ag Críost an Síol” (I never did learn what that meant).

A couple of days later a letter arrives for FP from Sharkey.  The address was very deliberately written all in English: The College of Richard Barrett.  

In the letter he said the Ardmháistir was furious all the way to the train station in Ballina.  He just kept telling him how much he had “wasted his parents’ hard-earned wages,” how terrible it was that “modern Irish children were so spoilt” and how this “sort of reprobate behavior” would lead him to “a life of ruin”.  Of course, he said all this in Irish first, then when Sharkey didn’t have any reaction because he didn’t understand it, he’d do it all over again in English.  Poor ould Sharkey, always hungry and now headed for a life ruin!

As he was getting on the train, Sharkey said “Go raibh maith agat (thank you).”  

The Ardmháistir got a bit teary-eyed and said at least he showed “character in adversity” – he didn’t even attempt saying that in Irish.  But Sharkey said what really meant was “thanks for fucking releasing me from the Irish Gulag!”   

One evening after the tea, the Bean an Tí (landlady) drops an old, red wine coloured, hardbacked book on the table.

“Féach isteach (look inside)” is all she says – she’s well sick of talking to us in Irish, which she had to do per her “contract,” only to have us stare back blank-facedly.

The book was a history of North Mayo with a big KENNY’S BOOKSHOP stamp of extreme West of Ireland authenticity inside the front cover.  At a bookmark halfway through it was the story of Riocard Bairéad (Richard Barrett), the man after whom our Irish Gulag College was named.  Turns out Riocard was a fierce sound fella altogether, loved by one and all in this area of the world.  He was born around 1740, first he married a Protestant woman, which could have been a bit a challenge back then, after she died, he married again and settled into a life farming the wilds of North Mayo and writing ballads and witty poems in Irish and English.  He fought in the 1798 rebellion – just a few weeks ago really, in the memory of Mayo people – when the French landed over the road in Killala.  For his pains did a short stint in the old gaol in Castlebar.  

The terrible thing was that his second wife burned all his papers after he died. Maybe she had that disease that seems to singularly inflict humans: Spite!

 Luckily his work was so revered by the locals that they had learned his ballads and poems, passing them along orally.  This is how two hundred years later we still have Riocard Bairéad’s songs and poems.   

It’s the last few days and with the wild abandon of the about-to-be-paroled inmates, we’re all dropping the “adhs” and “ails” off the end of our English words.  Surprisingly, we haven’t really needed them for a week or so, because, despite our spiteful resistance to the Gaelgoers some of the Irish language has soaked into our thick skulls.  Now we can converse somewhat understandably between each other in this heretofore local-yet-somehow-foreign language.

The Ardmháistir and Ardmháistreás relax just a smidge, an occasional smile showing their pride at having successfully taught us a little of the language they’re smothering with their overbearing love.

On the Wednesday morning of the last week, everyone with banana sangwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a can of Lilt (on sale in the local shop) from the Bean an Tí (landlady), we all board two minibuses for the much ballyhooed end of session “turas” (outing) around North Mayo.  As we wait for the inevitably late student, the Ardmháistir runs language security on our bus, his pale-boney face suddenly appearing in murmured conversations.  Staring out the window, I see the Ardmhaistreas’ grey-haired mane tossing as she coldly scans her bus for illegal English.

As the bus pulls out of the deep-potholed lot in front of the school and turns onto the Belmullet Road, I realize that in a few days I’ll be making this same journey for the last time with Da – who doesn’t speak a word of Irish: Hardly no one’s parents do!  

Oddly, I feel a sense of loss for something I didn’t even know I had to lose, and for all I think about it, I can’t put a focal (word) on this feeling.

The minibus trundles on, the suspension squeaking in complaint at the load.  Outside the boggy-wet fields, framed by child-drowning-deep drains, run down to the open water of the Atlantic; bony cattle nose around searching for grass between yellow-brown tufts of reeds; low red-oxide roofed houses, dirty-white walls, two windows, one door, sparsely dot the fields.  The Atlantic is seemingly everywhere; steely-grey beneath low clouds that smother the distant mountains.  A cut-stone pier, topped with a few feet of rust-stained concrete, wraps around fishing boats, like an arm protecting them from the wrath of three thousand miles of easy-to-anger ocean.

“Is é sin monarcha olann Angora (this an Angora wool factory),” an hour later the Ardmháistir announces pompously, though barely audibly above the minibus’ squeak-screaming complaints, as we pull off the road through a line of thickly knit-together pine trees.  

In the raw clearing behind the wall of trees, there’s a tan coloured, rectangular metal building, no windows but a gaping opening where a van sized overhead door has been raised.  As we squeak into the car park, with just three other, rusty-worn cars in it, the Ardmháistir purses his lips, turns and aims his index finger at FP, Brenny and me:

“Na bach leis do amadántacht (don’t start your tomfoolery now)!” 

He stabs his finger towards us, as we beam with adolescent pride.
There’s a rush for bus door as the Ardmháistir say-yells that we’ll see “coiníní gruagach (hairy rabbits),” but won’t “i gcás ar bith (under any circumstances)!” another harsh finger stab in our direction, be allowed to touch said hairy rabbits.

As we teenage-slouch towards the factory, a man in stained blue overalls and green wellingtons stalks out, holding by the ears, clumps of hairy, white, dead rabbits.

“Whare in de fuck d’ya tink youse’re goin’?” he asks in a Dublin accent, stopping and staring first at us then over our shoulders at the oncoming droves.

“We were-ail ag teacht (we were coming) …,” I start to stay but stop as my eye catches the contrast of the dead rabbits’ glassy-red eyes against their brilliant white fur. 

“Rinneadh me glao teileafóin inné (I phoned yesterday) …,” the Ardmháistir starts with his fake good-cheer, but stops at the sight of the dead rabbits hanging by their ears.

“Wat in de fuck did ‘e say?” your man asks, staring at me.  

“Eh, he phone-ailed you yesterday, d’ya know, about us come-ailing,” I answer.  “For a look-ail like, at the rabbits.”

“Rabbits!  Youse wanna see rabbits!” he half-yells, glaring at me first, then the Ardmháistir.

“Dere’s a heap a dem insoide, … dead as doornails!  Poy…sonned dey were, when deir fur wasn’t worth nuthin’ no more causa de Chian…neeze an’ deir cheap fur.  An’ is de guvermant gonna pay me for ta get ridda all dem dead rabbits, is it? Huh?”

“Oh, go dona ar fad (very bad indeed)!” the Ardmháistir says loudly, spinning around and waving back all the other children.

“AR AIS AR NA MBUSANNA (BACK ON THE BUSES)!” he yells, waving his arms wildly, bursting into a sprint, suit jacket clasped in hand, to stop two inquisitive, Ceathrú Thaidhger girls who are in a Gaelgoer-circumventing jog toward the open door. 

“Whare are youse lot from? Gerr…many?”

“Oh níl (no), no, no, no,” I answer, with a sorta-laugh.  “We’re with the Irish College down the road outside a Belmullet, d’you know, ag learn-ailing Irish.”

“Oirish!  Gimme a fooken break would youse?  Sure, dat language is as dead as dem rabbits!”

Dad-cationing

I’m in a sleeping bag on hard ground, my body tensed, listening energetically for the sounds of easeful breathing that signals children finally, mercifully sleeping.  Next to me through the tent’s blue-dimness, powered by the streetlight directly above us, the kids, in their Ninja Turtle sleeping bags, are little bundles of exhausted joy, hair tussled, faces tanned, eyelids floated closed.  

After a few minutes the kids’ breathing settles into a deep-sleep rhythm.  Involuntarily, I release a self-congratulatory sigh at having my dad-cationing duties suspended due to the temporary incapacity of my charges.  I reach my hands behind my head and consider slipping out of the tent to the campfire for a phew-one-day-down celebratory polishing off of the sixpack. 

“STAYIN’ ALIVE! … STAYIN’ ALIVE!”

Out of nowhere blaring disco music rents the blue-dimness, vibrating the tent’s fabric, rattling its spindly poles.

“HA, … HA … HA … HA, STAYIN’….”

My hands snap from behind my head; body rigid in righteous-dad anger; eyes glaring at my sleeping kids; my self-congratulations a heap of smoking rubble.  

“AL…IVVVE, AHA, HA, HA ….”

From the “TEEN CL BHOUSE” – a graffiti scarred, bare blocked shed fifty feet away from our tent site – a whirling disco-ball slices fingers of light through the definitively not sound insulated, tent fabric. 

“LIFE GOIN’ NOWWHERE, SOMEBODY HELP ME!”

The disco-ball’s silvery light scans across the kids’ still peacefull faces with nary a flicker of an eyelid!

My self-image slightly repaired, I ease back on my troublesome pillow of damp, rolled up kids’ clothes.  My actual pillow is resting unburdened by a human head at home on the dining room table along with my backpack of clothes, a freezer bag full of everyone’s toothbrushes and toothpaste, sunblock, shampoo and soap, alongside of which is the bulging Stop & Shop bag of fruit I bought, promising myself I’d force-feed it to the kids before filling them with hotdogs, chips and ice-cream, and then, if they were still hungry, the perfectly balanced meal of chips mushed into ice-cream.

The Bee-Gees wallop out their paradoxical desire to stay alive even as I’m formulating homicidal thoughts against Manx musicians.  The disco ball curls its silvery fingers through the tent.  My perceived need to slake my dad-cationing anxiety with cold beer (I categorically did not forget a sixpack, and ice to keep it cold) wrestles epically with the actual need at all costs to get the kids back to sleep should they awake.

We arrived at SOJORN CAMPGRO ND a little after noon this blazing warm July Saturday, after four exhausting hours of playing “I spy” in a hundred-mile-long Saturday morning, Boston to Maine traffic jam.  

Check in was … interesting.  

Lem, the bushy eyebrowed, craggy faced octogenarian behind the counter in the campground store could hardly have been more welcoming, helpful, and rambling. 

“Berston, y’all driv up from.  Yeah, yeah, I ben a there,” he nods his once-upon-a-very-long-time-ago green and yellow but now greyish, John Deere cap a bunch of times as he scribbles our information into a speckled black and white covered copybook, the like of which the kids will be back-to-school-shopping for in a few weeks.  

“When I gor outta t’service, down Fort Benning.  They all put me on a train ta Berston,” he keeps scribbling and talking, never looking up.  “That son of a gun southern sergeant down there, from Mobeeel Alaa…bama he wuz, he said some God awful thins about Berston people.  But they wuz fine ta me, least ‘n all the ones in the train an’ bus stations. Mind ya, there weren’t no black fellers chasin’ me round like sarg sed they’d a be.  I on’y see’d t’one, an’ her cross the street.  She didn’t pay me no heed.  Then I gots a bus up ta Portland, n’ a second bus to Bridgton.  I had ta hitch a ride back to Denmark where mother wuz livin’ at the time with a fellar as wuz a sawyer in a mill.”

He finally looks up, stares me in the eye and tipples his hand toward his mouth in the universal symbol of anguish for those whose hands convey misery into their lives.

“Oh, that wuz nineteen sixty … one er two, I think.  I aint ben since.  How’s Berston lookin’ these days?” 

“Good, good,” I answer, nodding a lot, trying to reconcile the campground’s colorful website and flashy photos with the greyish John Deere hat, the scribbling in the copybook, the CASH ON Y sign behind the counter.

Two realizations dawn upon me, crushing my fragile dad-cationing mind.  The first is that I may have been going a smidge too fast when, around 11:45PM Thursday night I finally started looking for a campground for a mom relieving, dad’s weekend away with the kids.   

SOJORN CAMPGRO ND quite possibly meets the legal definition of a campground – it does have tent sites, two of them to be precise – but there is that quirky fact that all the other sites, designated on the website map as “Recreational Vehicle Sites,” were unmistakably filled with Vehicles which would in fact “vehicle” no more.  This is a trailer park on a lake in Maine with two tent sites smack in the middle, directly beneath the only streetlight for miles and we’re the sole tent campers inside the campground’s chain-link, barbwire topped fence.

This revelation would, of course, be dealt with in the normal manner – excessive sugar and fat for the children and beer for me, … lots of cold, dad-soothing beer.

The second realization came a little later, after Lem deftly emptied my wallet of cash renting the tent site, and then the ATM had collected a $5 usage fee for me to top up on cash to purchase the aforementioned sugar, fat and more beer. 

While unpacking the car, I realized we’d forgotten not only the contents of the dining room table but also such vital camping equipment as an enormous tarp to more than cover the tent for the inevitable downpour that follows our family whenever we stray outdoors, pegs to hold said tent down during the tornado that would surely touch down upon us, and a hammer to bash the tent pegs home in the rock-hard soil.

The explanation for this sort of cluelessness is that a father when placed in sole responsibility for his children has only two things on his mind: Convenience – that everything in this wondrous simulated-reality known as “Dad’s World” be easy, uncomplicated and without consequences, unlike, haha-hahem, how things usually go.  

Secondly, in Dad’s World it’s a hard a fast rule that there must be adequate time and resources for soothing when things are in fact not as easy, uncomplicated and lacking in consequences as dad-brain dictates they should be.  

Thus, the need for the, now doubly aforementioned, sugar, fat and beer.

Back in Lem’s general and camping haberdashery store for the missing supplies, my finely tuned dad-cationing radar picks up a signal, probably the nervous swaying and anxious desire for hand holding by the kids, that some serious soothing is in the offing.  

Lem favors the marketing of expensive items that could, in different life-threatening situations, actually be useful, ranging all the way from Wolf Urine (as it wasn’t Certified Organic I demurred on getting any to ward off deer eating our tent) to ivory handled buck knives (which were made of Certified Endangered Species Ivory) and a display case full of air rifles including the classic Red Ryder (eliciting the earworm: “No Ralphie, you’ll shoot your eye out!”) and the not so classic Fallen Patriot, a simulation street-sweeper type automatic rifle with a stars and stripes ammo cartridge.

I mean it’s all well and good flogging “true ‘Merican stuff” in your campground store, but where’s the patriotic food?  

Dragging the swaying, hand grasping kids down into the dark recess of the back of the store, I hit paydirt with a rack full of cleverly-not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand jun… convenient, kinda-sorta nourishing food of all varieties in packaging that will keep them fresh for decades!

We load up.

My Noah’s-Ark-anxiety does have me pick up a tarp, although two of the Kirkland Triple Saver chip bags, fully unfolded would probably have worked just as well – though we might not all have fit into the tent had we consumed that many carbs.  

When I ask about a hammer to drive home the pegs, Lem issues a chest-rattling sigh. 

“Usual folk jus’ give up n’ use a rock,” he mutter-mumbles.  “There’s a pile of ‘em behind the shithou…, sorry kids, latrine.  But true honest, I don’t think there’s ben a peg driv inta that soil since Paul Bunyan cum thru town.”

He laugh-nods definitively.

“Ok, I’ll take the tarp, these two bags a chips and a six pack of Bud.  Oh, and do you have any matches?”

“We got this,” with surprising alacrity, Lem slips a small flamethrower out from under the counter. “Twenty-four niney-nine.”

“I’ll take it,” I say, in my best pretend-serious-adult voice, even as my mouth waters at the thought of starting a campfire in mere seconds and not my usual fifteen-to-twenty minutes of caveman-self-esteem-destroying failed fire efforts.

I try to interest the kids in a hotdog for lunch from Lem’s hotdog machine.  They stare at the pink-edging-toward-brown, fleshy cylinders of mystery meat revolving on the rollers inside the oddly lit glass box.  

They both shake their heads definitively.

“I’ll have a hotdog without the hotdog,” my son says.

“You mean just the bun?”

“Yeah, that’s all I like.”

“Me too,” his sister jumps onto the carb bandwagon.

“No, no, no that would be too unheal…,” I’m silenced by the glint of salivated wetness on the hotdogs.

“Can I have three hotdog rolls please?” I ask, reaching again for my wallet.

By the time the tent is up, the dad-cationing formula is leaning solely on dad-soothing cold beer, with all thoughts of convenience long since dispelled. 

The newly purchased Sir Edmund Hillary tent (the lad who headed off up to the top of Mt Everest with Tenzing Norgay, a nice Nepalese fella who sells zero tents per year) gets extracted from its box with Herculean effort.  How could such a large object ever have been inserted into such a small box – are the Nepalese back at work again?

Getting the tent set up only generates two or three bitter fights, in each of which age, experience and maturity succumbs to youthful ability to follow Sir Edmund’s devilishly confusing instructions.  

In my defense, I take my timeouts with marginally less pouting than do the kids. 

Still, there’s the pond.  That’s good for an hour’s worth of I-hope-they-can’t-drown-in-there anxiety, and water makes the kids mellow and hungry even for Lem’s God-knows-when-these-were-made, marked up 500%, chips.

“Let’s go for a swim.”

“I forgot my bathing suit,” my son says.

“What the fuc…,” I kinda-sorta catch myself.  “Oh, my goodness that’s a hassle, you’ll just have to go in your underwear.”

“They don’t allow that,” he says, his eyes getting a worried look.

“Oh no that’s just the control-freak staff at the swimming pool.  In ponds you almost have to swim in your underwear.  It’s a rule … in Maine.  Only underwear allowed.  In New Hampshire you have to swim in your jeans … and lumberjack boots.”

“Really?”

“No, no, no, an’ don’t tell anyone I said that.  Ok?”

“Why?”

“Let’s go swimming!”

 The pond water is piss warm … I mean it’s literally as warm as recently passed urine. 

I suspiciously eye the handful of little kids but all of them seem old enough to bladder secure.  Then my judgmental eyes fall upon the cohort of lower-torso-bulging, blotchy-skinned, oldies standing groin deep in the water.  

I shake my head bitterly: One man’s convenience is another’s irrational anxiety.

“This is the best pond ever!” my daughter splashes me wildly with water.

“I’ll get some chips,” I say, hurriedly drying my face.  “Don’t drown while I’m away.”

“Does that mean we can drown when you come back?”

Buried deeply in the Americans with Disabilities Act, in print so small that it could appear to be some sort of oxymoronic joke and is in fact rumored to have been placed there as a Act of Contrition by Senator Ted Kennedy, is a clause which states: “In the interests of sustaining human civilization, males of Irish ancestry, including those who obtained said ancestry via excessive alcohol consumption on one or more Saint Patrick’s Day, are hereby prohibited from engaging in any and all activities associated with planning, booking, organizing, or in any way preparing for vacations, holidays, or weekends away of all types, sorts, sizes and occasions, other than those involving groups made up only of other human males or having anything to do with golf.”  

In another section he got us out of dancing – even at family weddings.  He did insert a “Michael Flatly syndrome” carveout for the Riverdance lads but lookit that’s a topic for another day.  The key point here is that I could be self-violating my rights and Federal Law by taking the kids on a weekend away.  

Let me tell ya, I’m not taking that lying down!

Ironically enough as this face-saving epiphany gets squeezed out between my two dad-brain cells, I am in fact lying down on rock-hard ground, in the tent’s streetlight powered blue-dimness, the pride of the Isle of Mann blasting us Noriega-style as the disco ball revolves with a depressing inevitability.  And yet Teddy K magically comes through, but in a different way this time, by keeping the kids sleeping.

Not sure how the big guy worked that magic, but by the time we – as in the eight surly teenagers groping one another fifty feet away in the CL BHOUSE and I – were In The Navy putting “OUR MINDS AT EASE” (not so much) as we “SAILED THE SEVEN SEAS,” I was, beer can in hand, staring ruefully into our fire’s red-gray ashes, in full dad-soothing mode. 

The next morning, it was actually still nighttime with the sky a gunmetal grey as the sun struggled to make up its mind whether Maine was going to hold another day or not – BTW, my vote was a solid “NO!” – I was awoken by least desirable words a dad-cationing dad wants to hear in a now somehow fully darkened tent:

“I have to pee – BAD!”

“Ok-ok-ok, let’s go,” the thought of transporting pee-soaked Ninja Turtle sleeping bags home propels me instantly vertically alert.

I don’t have time for shoes so I ouch-ouch-ouch it all the way to the public health disaster that is, per Lem, either a shithouse or a latrine – not sure which is worse.  While waiting for my son to pee, I stand barefooted on the cracked concrete floor, wet with a vile cocktail of human waste, dead insects and possibly Wolf Urine, staring up at the corpses of a few trillion mosquitoes caught in spiders’ webs, wondering can I get away with just cutting off the soles of my feet or does infection by this plague-ish liquid require that both feet be entirely amputated?

“I’m hungry,” he says as I’m ouch-ouch-ouching it back to the tent.

“Have some ch… fruit,” I catch myself.  “Daddy has every fruit known to mankind, and a few unknown ones, in the back of the car.” 

I’m lying outrageously but with the comfort that my lie has zero chance of getting called.

“No, I want pancakes!” his face hardens in the grey light.  “Pancakes is what you have when you’re camping, and a bear comes out of the woods and wants some of your syrup, so you give it to him, so he doesn’t kill ya!”

“Well, we’re not really cam…,” I simultaneously point at the streetlight and the ring of trailers surrounding our tent as his face melts into confusion. 

“Sure, sure we’ll have pancakes.  Pancakes it is, unless you’d like some of Lem’s breakfast hotdogs?  They’re very good and we have a…lot of chips left!”

“I want panc….”

Pancakes we had, in the cool grey of 5:30AM in the kinda-sorta, not even pretend woods.  The gas stove hissed and whistled insolently at me as the butter in the pan turned a comforting male-cooking-brown as I struggled to extract the pancake mix from the very bottom of our food box, sized for an Alaskan winter survival ordeal.

I think it’s safe to say that had there not been Eve or Wilma Flintstone or some human female shooing human males away from barbecuing the wooly mammoth, human evolution would have taken a severe turn left.  With all that burnt meat, we’d have thrown in the towel on civilization and instead evolved into two-legged, raw meat loving wolves.  Before you get too complacent about our heading down the civilization avenue, one does have to note that life as two-legged wolves would mean that we didn’t have had to endure Engelbert Humperdinck or Daniel O’Donnell!

The bigger philosophical point here is that men making pancakes is just another way of saying men making a mess.  Pancake mix was formulated by either men-hating women or a men-hating men, either way, they were geniuses, though of course the male geniuses made 40% more than the women geniuses.  

Anyway, as soon as water touches the magic powder that is pancake mix, the new not-quite-liquid-definitely-not-powder substance becomes possessed by evil spirits and finds its way into all sorts of places never designed to accept copious quantities of a gooey substance.  

Children’s hair is the most common place for this substance to be found, but there have been unconfirmed sightings in dad’s hair; it’s regularly found gluing together the middle pages of mom’s glossy magazines; and reportedly Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing craft into a pool of this substance.  With powers nothing short of divine, this eggishly-yellow goo can pass through the cutlery drawer and end up on every single one of the heretofore clean spoons.

Mixing approximately two gallons of pancake goo, I wonder aloud if Lem’s hotdog machine might, on a Sunday morning, get converted to a pancake machine.  Knowing Lem as I do, from two five minute, extremely expensive encounters, I’m assured he thinks of every possible way to help campers unburden their wallets of all that damp cash.  

With the butter now just the right sheen of black, I, per the directions on the box, drop a silver dollar sized clump of goo onto the pan.  As I’ve never actually seen a silver dollar, I end up dropping into the pan a lot, … a very lot of goo.  Twenty minutes later we have something akin to a pancake in shape and general consistency.  I have no answer for its oddish color somewhere between brown-black and Vantablack (look it up!) but technically this passes dad’s-specification as a pancake.  Anyway, we have a lot of chips and chocolate milk, which reportedly is packed with calcium!

We’re back in the piss-warm pond by 7:30AM.  As it’s still that warm even without the cohort of swollen oldies wallowing groin deep in the shallows, I feel a little better about staying in there.  Plus, with the kids likely to play in here for hours, now I don’t have to act my way through a fake showdown about them having showers in the public-health hazard bathrooms. 

Around 9:30AM humans start to emerge from trailers.  First its skinny-old-white-guys in jeans shorts and white undershirts leaning on trailer porch railings, inhaling so deeply on their cigarettes that I expect to see smoke leaking out of their knee-high, white tube socks.  

They nod to one another, but don’t talk.

Then two kids burst out of a newer trailer, the door left swinging, revealing the trailer’s dimness punctuated by the blue flickering of a television screen.  They race to the warm water and launch themselves off the dock.  In no time, all humans under the age of ten are having a squealing-shrieking good time.

“Don’t drown while I go get a newspaper,” I warn my kids who are having too good a time to pay any heed to my empty words.

Up in the campground store, Lem’s flogging coffee at Manhattan prices and blueberry muffins in plastic bags, appropriately at Space Station prices.  I quickly refinance the house on my phone and have enough for a second breakfast.

Back at the pond, I sit at a table savoring not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and per my DNA sequencing, perusing the death notices in the local paper.  When I see a best-by date on the muffin for three years out, I save it for the kids, figuring they’ll get more utility from its chemically propelled longevity.

Around 11:00AM a skinny-old-guy lurches out of his trailer with a Red Sox can-cooler in his hand.  The bony fingers of his hand press tight into the blue and red foam; in the other hand he’s got a cigarette jammed hard between his index and Boston-driver’s finger.  

On a mission, he moves fast for a seventy-something, his once-were-white sneakers and knee-high tube socks moving in a skipping gait.  Casting a shocked glance at our tent, he crosses the dirt road fast and skips in through the gate of a knee-high, plastic, white picket fence in front of a tidy-yarded trailer.  

He jams the cigarette into his mouth, raps his knuckles on the tinny door and steps back.

Nothing happens.

He draws hard on the cigarette, then snaps it away from his mouth.  

Smoke gushes off his face as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

He repeats the cigarette jam into the mouth, door rapping routine two more times, then turns and stalks away.  Just in front of our tent, he stops, stomps out the cigarette and takes an Adams-apple-bobbling, half-can swig of his beer.

By noon, it’s a full-on party.  

Everyone, but poor-old-has-to-drive-back-to-Boston me, has a can, or two, going.  

The kids are wearing out the pond.

The teenagers are skulking in the CL BHOUSE trying, not all that successfully, to keep their hands to their own bodies.

“Don’t drown!” I yell at the kids.  “I’m going take down the tent and pack up.

While I’m struggling with Sir Edmund’s nylon masterpiece, there’s a scene at the trailer that couldn’t be rapped awake a few hours earlier.  

Lem is there with a younger, but still old, female version of himself – his daughter?  They’re surrounded by a buzzing crew of four heavyset, middle-aged women in black tee shirts, jean shorts, once-were-white sneakers and white tube socks.  One of the women pushes between Lem and his daughter and raps her knuckles hard on the trailer door.

“Flonny! Flonny!” she yells, keeping up her rapping.

Another pushes through, presses against the trailer window, both hands cupped by her temples. 

Lem’s daughter limps off fast toward the store. 

Ten minutes later an ambulance drones into the campground.  

People stare from trailer porches.  

Cigarettes are lit.  

Cans of beer hoisted to lips.

I turn to the pond.  Every kid is out of the water, standing in dripping bathing suits, staring anxious-eyed, hands fidgeting at their mouths.

The EMTs, in navy-blue pants, white shirts and heavily laden equipment belts, stare expressionlessly at the trailer door.  Two old guys help Lem’s daughter pry the door open with a flat nail-bar.  The EMTs bustle in, the stretcher wheels thudding off the door step.  

Some of the kids tire of waiting for the EMT to emerge from the trailer.  They drift back to the pond but wade quietly into the water, frantically waving at friends to follow.

When the EMTs do emerge from the trailer’s darkness, they’re struggling with the stretcher, upon which lays a scarily still, obese woman with deep auburn hair in pink rollers.  The stretcher’s straps compress against her torso, cinching into her flabby arms.

Walking alongside the stretcher, the skinny-old guy who had tried the door earlier, tries to keep hold of the patient’s hand, a cigarette dangling from his lips, in the other hand his beer can. 

With the radio squawking out its open doors, the EMTs collapse the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.  They wait impatiently swaying for the skinny-old guy to stomp out his cigarette, hand his beer to a friend and climb into ambulance’s dimness.  

They slam the doors shut.

The ambulance drones out through a crowd of shaking heads.

A sweaty hour later, with several stalks back over to the pond to ensure my “don’t drown” words were in fact a warning and not a prophesy, Sir Edmund is down and deboned, but is now about eight times the volume he was coming out of the box.  I force everything back into the car, huffing-and-puffing the tailgate closed, imagining everything exploding out on the driveway at home.

“Come on, come on, we have to go, it’s a long drive back to Boston,” I try to round up the kids out the piss-warm water.

“No, no, no!” my daughter whines over-tired-tearfully.  “I’m staying forever with Brittany; she comes every weekend.  Can we come back?”

“Sure, sure, sure, but only if you tell your mother ten times how much you enjoyed the place that daddy booked … Thursday night at midnight!”

As we drive slowly out of SOJORN CAMPGRO ND it has settled back into the lethargy of hot summer Sunday afternoon.  

In the darkness behind the store’s screen door, Lem stands staring.  He waves faintly as we roll past. 

We bump along the dusty, dirt road.

Passing the pond, my daughter lets out a yelp:

“There’s Brittany, n’ Mary-Kate, n’ Kyle; Brittany says Kyle has AHHD, what’s that; he’s so funny; why do we always have leave everywheres good?” 

She reaches forward from her car seat, whacks the back of my seat, and promptly lurches into sleep.

In the mirror, through the dust rising off the road, I see people sitting on their porches, smoke rising from cigarettes, cans rising to their mouths as they yell-chat from trailer porch to trailer porch.

Dutch Auctioneers

I’m walking across the Market Square of a Saturday morning when I see the crowd herding up around the back of a blue Transit van.  I had ta go ta the bank ta get a canvas moneybag and a rake of plastic coin bags ta be ready for the Sunday church door collection. 

It’s kinda spitting rain, so some people have their hoods up, but no umbrellas yet.   I can recognize a lot of the crowd, mostly people from around town and few in from country shopping of a Saturday. 

I know I shouldn’t stop; Pat’ll be cranky if I don’t get back to the church fast.  He on’y sent me ta the bank at the last minute before it closed at noon to get the money bags so we could count everything up during the masses tomorrow.  And there’s a rake a cleaning ta be done back in the church: the sanctuary ta be mopped, the seats dusted, flowers ta be bought up in O’Donnell’s and put in them big brass vases that Pat says “t’Indians made for a coupley a pennies each.  Ya never hear no preachin’ about that, now do ya?”

Still a crowd is a thing ya don’t see much except maybe up if Celtic have a big match or Mayo are playing above in McHale Park.  There must be something good ‘cause people wouldn’t be crowdin’ tagether for no reason at-all-at-all.  So, it’s worth a bit a Pat’s crankiness ta see what’s goin’ on.

“Oh, we’re all gud now,” a little, ould fella, says real loud, but not shouting, with a sigh an’ a nod at me. 

He’s standing a few steps up a stepladder, just behind the open doors of the blue van.  In a baggy black cardigan with a kinda pinched face, a pointy nose, a rake of forehead and a wild, scraggly head of hair, he looks just like the Irish builder in Fawlty Towers.  

Just my luck, he keeps going an’ points his boney finger right at me, my face blushing red hot, as he says: “Money bags is here.  Cum here young fella, an’ we’ll take gud care a yer money.”

He has a Dublin accent, making me country-suspicious.

“Yaz needn’t worry about it … not much anyways!”

The crowd all starts laughin’ but it’s not like school where they all suddenly turn on ya – laughin’ an’ pointin’ fingers at ya.  Instead they keep staring at him, like he’s a magician.

“Cum in now, don’ be ah…faraid, Burnie hasn’t bitten no one latterly.  Stan’ in clow…ser, so’s I don’ loose me vice,” he says waving the crowd in.  “Here, … here, cum in, cum in.”

He reaches a hand back and Burnie, the helper, gives him a handful of them four-in-one pens!  They’re great; blue, black, red and green ink all in one pen!  Ya just push the button for whatever colour ya want, then it pushes its way down, pushing the other colour back up.  Fierce handy altogether in school.

“Here, here, a little gift from Burnie an’ me,” he starts throwing the pens into the crowd.

There’s all sorts a pushin’ n’ shovin’ by the crowd ta get them.  I see a young Traveler fella in fight ta the death with some ould farmer for one a them, and two ould wans, that’d be back in the church every evening at seven sayin’ the Rosary for peace in the North, clawin’ at one another over a pen.

“Relax foe…lks, relax, Burnie has rakes more a dem pens.  We’ll be thrungin’ dem out later, but first up I have an amm…aazing deal on a towester!”

Burnie, a small-bald-fat fella, jowly-pint-faced and piggy eyes, in a greasy looking blue anorak, hands him a box.

“Now Burnie, don’t be hidenin’ dis luvly towester from the good people a Gaul… May-oh.  Take it ourra de box, will ya, ya big leibide.”

From his perch on the stepladder, he nods at everyone, looking all serious.

“May…oh,” he forces out a sigh.  “May-oh God Help Us – roight!  Ga…reat countee, de best in Ire…land.  But dis fella, don’t ya see,” he slaps Burnie’s anorak hood with the back of his hand, “he doesn’t get let ourra Dublin hardly at-all-at-all.  He couldn’t sell water in de Burren so he couldn’t.”

He shakes his head fast, one hand grasping the top step of the ladder.

“Here I am with de finest towester ever made in Germany.  Didn’t dey make dem great Panzer tanks back in de day, an’ now they make great towesters.  It’d towest yer bread de finest, missus,” he nods a big nod down at Mrs Reilly, “ya know, for de hubby, an’ him headin’ off fer a day’s work in de bog.  It twould, now I’n tellin’ yaz de God’s honest truth dere.”

Ah, I’m thinking, I better get back ta the church, this fella is only a chancer, sure the Reillys don’t go ta the bog at-all-at-all-at-all.

“Now above in Arnotts a Henry Street, de manager’d charge ya de full arm an’ half a leg for dis towester, so he would.  I’m tellin’ ya de God’s honest true…it now.  He’d show no mercy on yaz country people at-all-at-all-at-all.  Here, here, cum closer, cum closer.”

He waves everyone in.

“Burnie, haf yaz any more a dem pens back dere, d’ya?” he waves his hands impatiently – one at the crowd, the other at Burnie. “Cum on, cum on.”

Suddenly a volley of royal blue and white pens gets shot out of Burnie’s hands almost straight up in the air.  The crowd lurches forward toward the stepladder, fingers grasping for the manna of four-ink pens.

“Now I’ll tell yaz what I’ll do is, for de first towester, I’ll sell yaz all a ticket for ten P.  But everyone has ta buy.  If yaz cannit afford ten P, then be’s off about yer beeswax, an’ don’t forget ta stop inta the priest’s gaff fer de free lunch.”

Out of the cardigan pocket he pulls a roll of pink tickets, unrolls a rake a them, tears them off and gives them to Burnie.

Burnie’s all business, he never stops moving, his piggy little eyes darting around the crowd, his face always in a cranky scowl.  Immediately, he tears the first ticket in two and grabs a tenpenny piece off Mulligan, the ould retired postman.

“Now, yer ten P please mam,” the little fella on the ladder leans forward with a ticket for a heavy farmer woman with a big head of frizzy hair, that you’d sometimes see flying down Gallows hill on a black bike.

She gives him a hard stare.

“Sure, ya haf as gud a chance as anyone mam.  Ten P an’ this ga…reat Krupp’s towester cud be towesting the sliced pan dis evenin’.”

She relents, produces a shiny black purse from nowhere, unclipping the brass mechanism, her chubby fingers fishing out a silver tenpenny piece.

The crowd hums as he reaches off the stepladder to them.  Burnie works the fringes.

“Fuck off ourra dat,” Burnie snaps at the little Traveller fella, the scowl not even increasing, his piggy not even looking at the young fella.  “Or I’ll break yer arse with a kick, so I will.”

The little fella steps back, staring sideways at him, but doesn’t leave.

Tenpenny bits switch hands for pink tickets torn in two – the number being printed twice on each ticket.

“Now, someone give me a hat, jus’ so yaz see it’s all fair n’ square like.  Here, here, mam!”

He aims his index finger at Mrs Cunningham, the doctor’s wife, with a big purple hat plopped on top of her head.  

I’m so surprised ta see her here, that I look away.

“Here, cum up here mam, an’ you’ll be de master, … er, I mean de mistress a ceremonies,” he waves his hands impatiently.  “It’ll be just like de Irish Sweepstakes, on’y you’ll be coverin’ for all dem nurses in dere lily-white dresses.”

I imagine Mrs Cunningham is blushing behind all her makeup, but surprisingly, she takes a step forward.

“Clear de way, clear de way for de lady with de purr…pell hat, she’s gonna draw a winner for us.  De Mayo Sweepstakes is on dis mornin’ here in Castlebar, with de grand prize of a Krupp’s towester.”

The crowd parts and Mrs Cunningham, barely suppressing an embarrassed smile and sliding these really long, sore looking, pins out of her hat and hair as she makes her way to the stepladder.

“Now, crowd back in everyone wid yer tickets.  Free towester here, just ten P a chance.”

He holds his hand out for the hat; people immediately start dropping their halves of the tickets into that purple hole.

Burnie, furiously tearing pink tickets in two, mops up any tenpenny pieces held up around the edges, and then pushes his way back to the stepladder.

I don’t buy a ticket, even though I have a sixty P in me pocket – sure we have a toaster at home.

“Here yaz are now,” he takes another step up the stepladder and reaches forward with the hat.

“All de tickets in, every ticket in May-ho into dat hat now.  A luvly towester ben given away here in Market Square Castlebar, sur ya couldn’t go wrong wid a deal like dis, could yaz?”

He puts his hand in the hand and mixes up the tickets.  A few fall out.

“Here, here,” he raises his voice.  “Get dem es…capees, dere’s no gettin’ away from dis Mount…joy, every ticket has ta stay inside.”

The crowd scramble for the tickets and drop them back in.

“Now, take wan out mam.  Cover yer eyes so dey don’t be saying ya seen yer own ticket in dere.”

Mrs Cunningham flashes a big toothy smile to the crowd, clenches her eyes deliberately shut, brings her left hand up to her eyes and starts fishing for the hat with her right.

“Here, here,” the little fella on the stepladder says, grabbing her hand.  “An’ I’ll take yer hand, not in marriage but in ticket-picken.”

He grabs a hold of her hand and guides it to the hat.

“Pick one now for the de luckiest purson in May-ho.”

Mrs Cunningham’s pale white hand reaches down into the purply-black hole in the hat and draws out a half ticket.  The little fella takes the piece of pink paper and slowly holds it up in front of his face.

“Awright, are yaz ready?”

He gazes out over the growing crowd, more people getting nosey as to what’s going on.

“Naught-naught-naught, tree …, seven …, nyon …, fohwer.”

He looks back across the crowd.

“Again, tree-seven-nyon-fohwer,” he stares around, his eyebrows suddenly rising.  “An’ it’s de gentleman wid de ears stickin’ ourra de side a his head.”

Who had won it but Big Ears!  A tall mental patient from above in Saint Mary’s with a thin plaster of white hair across his head and big frying-pan ears.

Big Ears stood holding up his ticket, his eyes darting around nervously.

“Wait now till Burnie checks yer ticket sur,” he nods slowly.  “An’ yaz’ll never be short a slice a towest again in yer life.  Not till dey send fer you from above.”

He points up at the sky.

Burnie reaches into the van, grabs a toaster-sized cardboard box and muscles into the crowd, the box held up over his head.

“Now, now, listen up, the gud news is Burnie has a rake a more towesters in de back a de van,” he stops for a breath, watching Burnie transact with Big Ears.

“So here’s what we’ll do.  I’m gonna offer yaz the towesters at a fair price an’ we’ll see if May-ho likes dat.  Awright?” he looks hard across the crowd.  “An’ if yaz doesn’t like that price, maybe Burnie here’ll let me help yaz out a bit more.  Awright dere now Burn, get yer arse back up here, we need more pens.”

The crowd around the stepladder has about doubled, but a lot are standing back staring, fingers on chins, foreheads furrowed.  The little Traveller is skirting the crowd, getting hands-jammed-in-pockets-hard-stares from everyone.

Burnie, head down, pushes back through the crowd, reaches into the box of pens and fires them up into the air over his shoulder.

Magically, the crowd pushes in, arms up, fingers tingling for four-ink pens.

“Now ya see, above in Arnotts a Krupp’s towester’d cost ya twenny five quid, an’ a rake a pence on top a dat, fer ta keep de stealin’ goin’ like.  Dat’s how mister Arnotts makes his money.  D’yaz tink mister Arnotts goes ta de bog?  Noooooo!”

He waves his hand around over the crowd, the words coming out like he’s an actor on the stage.

“Mister Arnotts is sittin’ above on de Hill a Howth smow…king cigars an’ drinkin’ brandy while we’re all out here workin’.  But ferget abour him.  Here’s what I’m … what Burnie is gonna let me do for yaz, de gud people a Castle…bar.  So dis Saturday morning, on’y cause yaz are up an’ at it gud n’ early.”

He stops for a breath, stares across the crowd, his hands waving everyone in closer.

“Now, whatayaz tink of a towester dat doesn’t cost twenny five nyontee nyon, but instead, be de magic a Burnie here, only costs yaz a tenner today.  Special offer of a towester fer a tenner.  How many a yaz will be takin’ one fer a tenner?”

His eyes dart across the crowd, a look of almost nervousness on his face.  I follow his eyes.  All eyes in the crowd are on him.

There’s an odd fella from St Gerald’s Secondary School standing up front in a green duffle coat, his hood up, his mouth hanging open.

“Jayzus, will yaz shut dat mouth will yaz.  I haven’t seen a mouth like dat since I was fishin’ on de Shannon.”

He doesn’t smile at his joke but keeps checking on peoples’ faces.

“A tenner now is all …,” he closes his lips tightly and stares around at the crowd, a few hands are up.

“But let me tell yaz what, Burnie here is feelin’ very generous, ‘cause see, he’s grandmudder is from May-ho, an’ he always lookin’ ta help de people a May-ho.  So fer today only, for dis auction only, we’re gonna ta give dem away for eight quid.”

He draws in a quick breath.

“Eight quid, now dats a bargain amongst bargains.  If Burnie wasn’t standin’ here next ta me, I’d say he’s goin’ soft in his ould age.  Eight quid for de finest a German towester enganeerin’, an’ dem tieves above in Arnotts lookin’ for more dan tree times as much.  Now how many a yaz’ll be taking one for eight quid?”

 A few hands shoot up and when I’m watching them, don’t I see Da standing over on the other edge of the crowd.  Immediately I want to leave, thinking Da’ll think I’m all wrong for even standing here listening ta these dodgy fellas.

But the crowd is heaving now, pushing up against the stepladder.

The little Traveller is talking to Big Ears, holding his two hands up to accept the toaster.

“Azy, azy now folks, we have enough towesters for everyone, but dere’s still a few yaz not seein’ de bargain here.  So how’s about, I just lose me mind altagether, an’ sure if Burnie bates de daylights ourra me for it, so what, it’ll keep yaz all happy.  So how about I say yaz can all have one for seven quid.  Now, dat’s de vury best I can possablee do taday.”

Arms reach up, fingers holding fivers and ones, the crowd surges forward.

“Awright, awright, cum on Burnie, get dem towesters ready!”

“What are you doing here?” I hear in my ear.

It’s Da.

“Oh, just comin’ back from the bank an’ I was wondering what this was all about.”

“An’ did ya buy ana’thing offa them chancers?”

“No-no-no.”

“Gud,” he sighs, nodding backwards.  “‘Tis all stolen stuff.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, a course, sure how else could they be sellin’ it for them prices.”

“An’ why don’t ya arrest them so?”

He purses his lips, jams his hands deeper into his anorak pockets and twist nods.

“Sure there’s no report of toasters stolen for me ta follow up on,” he pulls one hand out of an anorak pocket and wags his finger at me. 

“See, they were probly stolen above in t’North or abroad in England.  No record of the crime here, don’t ya see.  Nathin’ we can do.  They can sell away.”

“An’ are you gonna buy a new toaster?”

“Not at all, sure our toaster isn’t broken, is it?”

“No, but if we had a second one, in the morning it’d be faster.”

“Aragh, go away outta that.  Two toasters!” he twists his head hard.  “Sure people’d think we’re mad.  Now, get on about yer business.”

I turn to get back to the boredom of cleaning the church.

The little Traveller fella is still wrangling with Big Ears over the toaster.

“Now, yaz’ll all haf to come back dis afternoon, when we’re sellin’ de tellies.  Tell yer neighbours an’ aunts an’ uncles an’ everyone ta cum break open der piggy banks.  Big sale dis afternoon on Japaneeze telly…visions.  Yaz won’t believe de prices!”

Wrong Way

I’m in the front passenger seat of a black Jaguar barreling west on Interstate 20 East in Dallas. 

Next to me in the well between the cream pleather seats is an almost empty bag of weed, a bottle of Chivas Regal – half full or empty, depending on your outlook on what appears to be increasingly tentative life – and a sandwich baggy jammed with cubes of cheese. 

The driver’s stubby fingers fumbling for cheese every few minutes has smudged the sandwich bag’s clean, clear plastic.  The sound of that sandwich baggy rustling is worse than the relentlessness of lightning-bright headlights bearing down on us.

An eighteen-wheeler’s bank of headlights screams towards us, shifts suddenly, the cab shuddering, the headlights vibrating.  The truck changes lanes, horn blaring raucously, the windshield flashing past us in a second is full of the truck driver’s shaking fist, angry face.

“What’s he’s problem?  Aint he got no sense a humor?” snaps our driver, a sixty something-hard-years-old woman, as she slaps the steering wheel impatiently.  

“An’ don’t y’all Eye-Rish boys even think a takin’ none a ma cheese.  I o’ny eats it fer ma dia…beteez.  I could swoon like a damsel in dis…tress if an’ I didn’t have ma cheese.”

From the back seat, there’s the metallic clink of Jimmy Mc struggling to open a bottle of beer using the safety belt buckle.

“Fucking Brits!” he sighs.  “A Caddy’s safety belt opens a beer every time, like it’s a rule!  They probly got some fat fuck with a case of Schlitz in the Cadillac plant testin’ the belt buckles.  Imagine havin’ that job?”

“This is a high…class vehicle,” the driver says.  “Y’all kin on’y drink real liquor in here, none a that pisswater beer you Eurotrash lik… .”

“Hey, we gotta get offa this highway,” Jimmy Mc interrupts, his words coming fast.  “I’m getting’ a bad vibe.  A car just went past us the wrong way – fast!”

I turn my head slowly to see just how fucked up the back seat is: Jimmy Mc’s got a forced grin sprayed across his face; his eyes, dissolved into the grin-stretch, are suspended in drug and alcohol manufactured reality.

“We’ll be awright,” the driver sighs, I hear the baggy rustle again. 

“We’s on’y goin’ one exit.”

Next to Jimmy Mc, Cormac is seated Buddha; his face fully statued; nothing moves but his eyes; they dart around the inside of the car to the baggy full of cheese, the Jag’s cream pleather seats, the back of the driver’s head, my eyes: Anything to avoid looking at the terror that is the windshield.

“Y’all sure aint big on scotch.  I guess it’s t’Eye-Rish in y’all – drinkin’ gallons a that black shit all day.”

Hearing the bottle chaff out of the center console’s pleather, the scotch lapping around inside, I spin back to the oncoming headlights. 

“Down worry,” she snaps, like a child frustrated with their parent.  “I aint gonna drive n’ drink, that shit’s dange…rus.”

I turn my head to stare at her.  All evening this retired English Professor from some Dallas university has moved with an energy that belies her stiff-necked stoop, the lemon-with-legs physique, the heavy limp, the grey-blue bags billowing under her eyes.  Something inside this woman, forty plus years our senior, burns crazy hot to keep her locomoting.

“When y’all is driving, y’all drives; an’ when y’all is drinking, y’all drinks; don’t mix ‘em up.  Thems ma rules.  Martine Johnson, the stoopid bitch, kilt herself breakin’ ma rules.  Cum right outta the liquor store but could she wait?  No she could not!  Opened that vodka right the fuck up, takes a swig, an’ then driv straight through the liquor store winda.  She never could figure out her ‘R’s’ from her ‘D’s!’”

She cackles, her head bobbing.

“Damn near killed the poor Injun ahind the counter, who never shoulda sold a drunk lady a quart a vodka.  Anyhoo, now I aint got no one for Tuesdahs n’ Wednesdahs night.  Selfish bitch.”

She shakes her wrinkly chins and turns to stare back at me.

I shake my twenty-three-year-old head that’s thinking it’s never going to see twenty-four and point forcefully at the highway.

Her face turns back to the oncoming traffic.  

“What is it with people not drinkin’ hard liquor no more?” she asks, like she’s a teaching a class of fifty students and not doing fifty miles an hour in the wrong direction on an Interstate Highway. 

“A coupley a weeks back, I had this tiler dude cum over.  I had ta git the shower wall fixed where all I fell the night a Dolores’ husband’s memorial service. Now that was a night!”

She lifts her right hand off the steering wheel and magically waves the knowledge of Dolores, her dead husband and his sendoff party into our minds. 

“That dude, a little fat Armenian, he wuz kinda cute too, he didn’t want nuthin’ ta drink but C’rona!  No scotch, no bourbon, nuthin’ I had in ma Armageddon survival cab’net.  I had ta git m’ass on down ta Thrace in the liquor store ta git some C’rona. What’s the world a comin’ ta?  Armenians drinking Mexican beer, fixing Eye…talian tiles, n’ chargin’ like they’s Philadelphia lawyers.”

She cackles, her chins jiggling as she slows the Jag and effects a remarkably calm U turn.   

In our irrationally rational manner, we exit up the On Ramp.  Five minutes earlier, we had simply, if erroneously, drove from a city street onto the Off Ramp, the mind-altering substances altering our minds had discounted the multiple red signs screaming WRONG WAY. 

Now exiting off the On Ramp, a silver Toyota Camry rounding the jug handle, sees us coming but, likely caught up with processing the licentiousness of it all, only swerves onto the grass at the last moment to avoid a head on collision. 

Horn blaring, the terror in the driver’s face is fixating, almost thrilling.

“What in hell’s her problem?” our driver snaps.  “Aint she never seen no one git offa a highway the wrong way?”

 “Fucken weirdo,” Jimmy Mc sighs, ambiguously.

At the top of the ramp, our surprising entry onto the four-lane street elicits a symphony of car and truck horns.  Heads shake vigorously; faces sneer; fingers flip. 

Yet for all our Wrong Way navigation, there’s nary a sign of the famed Texas

Rangers, nor even a single obese, donut-stained Dallas cop.  They’re probly all still on that big case from thirty years back, in ‘63: The one where they let the President get shot, then let his supposed shooter get shot.  In fairness, they’re big on shooting in Texas.

Back in the boringly conventional regular flow of traffic, our driver finally succumbs to stress and hands me the bottle of Chivas Regal.

“I’m fine,” I say, deliberately stupidly.

“I don’t give a hot damn what you is,” spit flies from her mouth onto the windshield.  “I need y’all ta open that goddam bottle fer me.”

“Oohhhh,” I delay, my not yet entirely wired brain wondering what could go wrong?  I mean we just did a few miles wrong way on an Interstate Highway in a major urban area, how could a few swigs of scotch on a mere four lane city street make a difference?

“Cops,” I hear my voice lie.

“Where?” Jimmy Mc barks and I sense his head and shoulders spinning as he tenses up in the back seat.

That’s Jimmy Mc.  Still persecuted by a bad beating the cops gave him as a college kid.

“I don’t see no pigs nowhere,” our driver says, fumbling for the cheese bag.  “Anyhoo, we’re almost there.  Y’all are gonna love this ….”

“Youghal is in Cork,” Cormac says from the depths of his brain.

There’s a momentary confused if not embarrassed silence in the Jag. 

“What in the Sam Hill is he a blabbin’ about?” she says, eyeing the scotch still held in my hands.

“Youghal, it’s a little town below in Cork,” Cormac says, edifyingly.  “It’s the last place the Titanic crashed before stoppin’ inta the iceberg.”

I think I see three Irish flags whip past the corner of my eye, but distrusting my thinking and eye corners, instead, I let my mind jump to an imagined scene of the big Cathedral in Youghal and all the people from Lahardane kneeling at the altar, saying a prayer before they head off on the Titanic for a new life.

“Goddammit!” the driver snaps, spit flying onto the windshield.  “I missed the bar.  Y’all confused me, a talkin’ about sunken ships an’ us tin thousand miles from t’ocean.”

I brace myself, figuring that a missed turn for this lady is just a chance to show the world how she deals with turns that miss.

The Jag’s front wheels wallop into the curb! 

Up over the sidewalk we go, head, shoulders, teeth jostling.  The chrome Jaguar hood ornament looks like it is finally getting to launch itself onto some prey – which, perhaps disappointingly for a big-cat carnivore is the green, white, and red storefront of Ileana’s Taqueria.  

With the power of suggestion for a brain under the control of a stomach full of beer, I start to crave carbs.  But there’ll be no stopping for sustenance: Eatin’ is cheatin’ when you’re on an alcohol search and devour mission!

She screeches the Jag around in front of the Taqueria’s few parking spaces, barely missing a big old Caddy, and for consistency’s sake, slams back over the curb before we trundle along slowly a mere half block in the wrong direction before pulling into the lot in front of the TOOMEVARA INN Irish Bar and Restaurant.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  It’s jus’ like the old countree here,” she waves at the three Irish flags, the white sign with crossed hurling sticks at either end of the name. 

“Least n’ what I seen a t’old countree in a bar up in Boston.”

 The front tires thud off a concrete wheel stop, jolting everyone in the Jag forward, but the gods of cars-crashing-into-buildings, whom we know to disapprove of our current actions, are sleeping and the Jag comes to a stop.

“Onliest problem in here is that they mos’ly jus’ drink beer.  How cum everythin’ that’s hard in this world is a left up ta wymen, huh?  Child bearin’ n’ raisin’, cleanin’ up y’all’s mess when y’all spray the mall with machine gun fire, n’ doin’ the real drinkin’,” she cackles again, the bags around her eyes narrowing. 

“God mighta made the world awright, but he didn’t have no gud advice ‘til wymen cum along.  Y’all think that dope Adam n’ his murd’ring, kiss-ass sons woulda tol’ him hows ta git shit done?” she shakes her chins and reaches for the cheese bag.

“Nope, we’d still be ploddin’ round in animal skins if an’ it was up to them dopes. Cum on, I’m a gittin’ thirsty.”

She goes to push open the door, realizes the engine’s still running, turns the key, but leaves it in the ignition, and starts into the elaborate ceremony of extracting herself from the bucket seat.

Jimmy Mc, Cormac and I burst outta the car.  I resist the Popish move of kissing the asphalt paving of the TOOMEVARA INN parking lot. We stand shaken in the green neon halo of the bar’s sign, watching and listening as she lurches and grunts her way out of the car.

 “Shud we give her a hand?” I ask, naively.

 “Not unless y’all want ta wake up beside her tamorrow,” Jimmy Mc grins mischievously.  “Listen, when we git in here, I’m orderin’ a beer, a burger, an’ a cab in twenny minutes at the back door.  Don’t let that Texas grass totally screw yer brain.  Pay attention in here an’ follow me, or youuuuu … may regret it.”

  Still grinning, he raises his bushy eyebrows high, breaks from the huddle and stalks towards our driver.

  “You all right Prof?” he asks warmly.  “Here, here, let me give ya a hand, watch them stoopid concrete trip-over things.  I don’t why they bother with ‘em, it’s not like we think it’s a drive-in bar.  Now that’s a good ….”

Inside, the bar is too bright, forcing me to blink rapidly as I hold my right hand out in front like it’s a magical shield for my over-dilated eyes.  I force my eyes closed and stop moving, imagining myself going face first over a low table.

“… join ya for a bourbon, fer sure I will,” Jimmy Mc’s conspiratorial intonation weaves its way into my consciousness.

Now’d be a good time to slip away, I think.  Ah fuck it, I need a drink to calm me nerves.

“Bourbon, now that’s the honey-colored liquid they make up in Heaven – right?  I think I mighta had some a that before … like two million times!”

Behind Jimmy Mc’s hiss-spitting laugh, I hear the gimped scrape of the Prof’s shoe across the tiled floor.

Nothing stops people like the Prof and Jimmy Mc.  Every day they drink a river of booze and still walk away from the mangled metal that was the car they just launched into a wall.  They don’t fall down steps and break their neck, drown in their own vomit, or step out in front of the onrushing bus.  Somewhere, somehow along the way they’ve made a deal with the fates that trades the often shitty but always real effort of living for the oblivion of terminal soothing.

They shuffle past me to the bar as my vision portals finally resume regular, shitty but real duty.

I look up but don’t believe my eyes are in fact actually working.  After the umpteenth plus one hard rub of the knuckles against the eyeballs, I look up again and the sight is still there: Three big mustached, double-chinned barmen, hands on hips, their ample guts stretching blue and yellow Tipperary hurling jerseys.

Slowly a penny drops: Toomevara … Tipperary … hurling.

“See,” the Prof spins around fast, taunting gravity, her hands flapping at the walls covered with Tipperary jerseys in glass cases, crossed hurls, sliotars, photographs of Tipperary teams, on the myriad shelves is the contents of some Irish shop’s going-out-of-business sale.

“Seeeee, I tol’ y’all this is a real Eye…rish place,” she nods and approaches a bar stool in the manner a wrestler approaches an opponent.

“This fine young lady’ll have a Wild Turkey.  Sit yer tooshie down there princess,” Jimmy Mc taps a bar stool.  

“An’ I’ll have a very laaarge Old Forester.  I am one lucky man.  Lucky to be still a…live.”

He raises his eyebrows, forces his cheeks down, widening his eye sockets, as he nods towards the Prof attempting to wrestle her way into supremacy over the barstool.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask no one and everyone.

“The feller with y’alls?” the youngest barman asks but doesn’t wait for a reply.  “He walked straight through.  I hope he aint puking.  We gots a bathroom fer that.”

“Oooohhhhh,” I answer slowly, again I survey the bar.

My survey catches a dimly lit hallway.

I turn to the barman, who nods before I can ask.

Back at the bar a few minutes later, my biological needs met, my eyes roam over everything, but my tongue is uncharacteristically reluctant for work.

“Y’all is athletes?” the youngest of the three barmen asks Jimmy Mc, knitting his eyebrows together.  “Even the Rangers don’t drink like y’all do, an’ they’s just sittin’ on their fat asses all day watchin’ one millionaire after ‘nother swing a bat.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t be drinkin’ like this if we had a rugby game tomorrow,” Jimmy Mc says.  “No, no, no.  We’d be drinkin’ much harder!”

He throws his head and shoulders back to guffaw and slips off the stool, only to be saved once again by the fates as his left leg magically cuts through the stool and shoots out to stop his fall.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask again, a tug of team anxiety distracting my distraction.

“He aint out back, I mean, he wen’ out back, but he aint theres no more,” the barman says.  “He didn’t puke nor nuthin, I checked.  Pat don’t like it when people go out back ta puke.  Makes us look bad ta the Mexicalas.”

“Ooohhh,” is all I can muster.

“Here get this gud for nuthin a drink,” Jimmy Mc slaps my arm with the back of his hand.  “What’ll ya have?”

“Bud,” I manage to get out.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  He’s a drinkin’ cat’s piss, when they gots a fiiii…ne callection a whiskey here.  That Pat guy, he knows he’s whiskey, gotta hand that ta him.  How cum y’all got yerself a good bourbon but only got me a Turkey?”

She strikes Jimmy Mc on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

“I possess a delicate pallet madame,” Jimmy Mc flashes his mischievous grin.

The barman places a pint of Budweiser on the counter.

I watch the bubbles stream up from nowhere inside the glass.

“Sit down!” the Prof barks at me.  “Yer a makin’ me nervous.”

“How’d y’all know one another?” an older barman asks, almost suspiciously, pulling at the collar of his Tipperary shirt.

“I met ‘em all in a bar is how I know em, they was playin’ cricket or some faggy Euro sport like that,” the Prof grabs her shot glass.  “How in the hell else’s a soul a supposed to meet any one these days?  Aint like people down at church is gonna go fer a drink with y’all.”

I lean forward, finding it hard to get enough oxygen to think.

Through the golden yellow of the Budweiser, the red EXIT sign at the rear shimmers in the beer’s bubbles.

 “You got a burger back there,” Jimmy Mc asks, spinning his now half full glass of bourbon.

 “No sir, kitchen’s closed.  It closed at midnight, chef took off circa twelve oh one.”

 “Goddammit, give a bag a chips.”

 “You aint eatin’ no chips an’ gittin in ma Jag…war,” the Prof sneers.  “Chips smells like ass.  I don’t want no ass smell in ma car.  What if ma grandkids git in there tamorrow?”

 She kinda-sorta throws both hands up.

 This time the fates, no doubt exhausted, abandon her to gravity and backwards off the stool she starts to slide, her little, crazy head arcing towards the floor.  But Jimmy Mc, still loved by the fates, moves fast and his right arm shoots out and catches her torso.

 “We keep meeting like this princess,” his mischievousness is never more than a scratch away, “an’ we’re gonna have ta get a room.”

“Git yer fucken hands offa me,” she spit-snaps.

In the confusion of their confusion, I turn and walk out the front door.

In Ilheana’s Taqueria I load up on a little chicken wrapped in a lot of carbs.

The lady at the counter is friendly and chatty.  There’s no other customers but she stays open until 2:00AM and gets bored.  After a few minutes talking and waiting while a singing chef makes my meal, she says:

“So you notta like the crazy Eye-reesha guys cum in Sunday nights, one aholdin’ t’other.  Then a punchin’ start.”

She holds up both fists like a prizefighter.

“No, … no,” I say wondering how to react.

I take a deep breath.

“Can you get me a taxi?” I ask.  “‘Cause there is a couple a crazies next door who will prolly end up in here.”

At some point, post taco-devouring, a taxi pulls up out front. 

Two blocks away, I see Cormac lean-slipping against a light pole, his thumb wavering at the oncoming traffic.

“Here, here, stop for that fella.”

“You sure?  He aint gonna git sick all over my cab is he?” the black driver askes threateningly.  In the two blocks he’s already told me he just moved down from New York with his girlfriend, he hates it here cause the only work he can find is “driving this shitass taxi, shippin’ crackers round this shitass town.”

“No, no,” I try to sound convincing.  “He’s just tired is all.  It’s ben a busy day.”

He pulls over. 

“Here ya fucken moron,” I yell out the window. 

“Ye goin’ ta Youghal?” Cormac throws out, his head rising, making him stagger backwards into the light pole.  His shoulder blades grip the concrete pole to steady himself.  

“No it’s Cobh,” I yell back.

His eyes seem to register recognition.

The taxi driver’s head spins from Cormac to me; his face scrunching up anxiously.

Cormac’s head droops forward, his face limp, but his eyes are content.

“It’s Cobh anyways.  That was where the people from Lahardane were praying before getting’ on the Titanic, not Youghal.”

“What sort a shite are you talken?” Cormac manages, stumbling towards the taxi. 

“Ah, ya had me goin’ there for a bit is all.  I was going the wrong way.”

Give Unto Caesar

I’m leaning both elbows on the piles of paper on the tax preparer’s desk, craning my neck to see what’s on his computer screen.

“See, it’s the damn depreciation that’s killing ya,” he snaps, violently jerking the screen more toward me, his eyes, deep in his pink face, flaring with misdirected anger. 

“Nuthin’ I can do.  You were happy enough ta claim the depreciation all them years ya owned the property, now the rooster’s comin’ home to chic…, anyways.” 

He shakes his head, his chins quivering.

“Always remember the silver rule!”

He aims his fleshy forefinger at a sheet of white paper, taped at a slight angle to the wall, upon which are printed the words:

GIVE UNTO CEASAR THAT WHICH BELONGS TO CEASAR

“You know, from the bible, Roman’s Thirty-Three or sumptin.  God said it, right?” his thin, grey-white eyebrows shoot up in disbelief.  “Funny enough it wuz the Romans that wrote it down.  An’ now, with all these people havin’ ta give unto Caesar, I ben in this chair ten hours a day for the last three months, tappin’ this damn computer keyboard so’s our Caesar can get his slice of our pie – right?”

He breaths out heavily, his pink-red cheeks billowing and sneers up at a large, framed photograph of George W. Bush hung high on the wall gazing over the six desks in the open office area.

Two desks down the row from my depreciation problem, a couple ease into their seats, ushered there by the worn tan-tweed arm of a skinny, smug-faced, sixty-something tax preparer.  He fake-starts to get out of the chair, but never executes, instead his thick-dyed hair and bushy-eye-browed head swivel over and back in his chair as his customers settle.

“Let me see yer shirt,” he leans forward fast, waving his hand at the couple’s twelve-ish year-old boy in a bottle-green, Heineken tee shirt with a graphic of a string-bikini clad, pole-dancing young woman of the proportions leeringly enjoyed by us twelve-year-olds of all ages.

“Verrry … good, verrry art…istic,” he purses his smug lips, nodding his head repeatedly. 

“They have great stuff these days, don’t they?” he continues to stare at the puckered lips of the Heineken woman frozen into a cleavage revealing forward fold off her pole.  “When I was a kid, it was just all Playboy and Hustler.  Very harsh stuff, not classy like that.”

He shakes his head slowly a few times, then settles his eye on the actual, forty-something year-old woman still in a heavy winter jacket sitting across from him.

“Missus Dam…browski!” he makes as if he’s trying to stand, but instead just leans both his hands over the metal desk toward her.  “You are looking radiant today, just rad…iant.  You’re fooling mother nature somehow and getting younger every year.”

He holds her hand in both of his, flicking his eyes over and back from wife to husband.  The woman’s arm, torso and head stay rigid.  The boy’s eyes dart from his parents to the tax preparer. 

“Now, now, now.  Tell that husband of yours to keep his pistol holstered.  It’s actually a compliment to him that he has acquired and retained such a beauuut…tiful female.”

My own tax preparer puffs out his splotchy cheeks as he wrestles with his computer screen which obstinately resists getting evenly reset amidst the mountains of the paper on the desk.

“So, you see why ye’re paying this year, right?  I just wanted you to know it aint my fault, that’s all.  It’s give unto Caesar season, that’s alllll!” he yanks the base of his computer screen until it knocks a pile of manilla folders onto the floor.

My head involuntarily recoils at the clap of paper hitting the floor.

“Don’t worry,” he says on an exasperated outbreath, eyes staring at me from deep in the folds of puffy-red skin.  “It’s just on a floor excursion, get it?”

He smiles quickly, then reverts to his scowl.

“You know, like my desk is a cruise ship an’ all these files are the passengers, get it?” he stares at me, not getting it, but continues anyway.  “I guess May 15 can’t get here fast enough.  That’s the day I’ll be back on the Queen of the Mississippi, around sixish I’ll be in a lounger on deck, sipping a Manhattan, all a these damn files stuck back here in Boston.”

He swivels his chair, and angling his head sidewards, looks down at the “floor excursion” file.

“Ahhh, Mar...tin McGonigle’s … 2004 filing.  I wondered where that got to!”

He reaches his hand quixotically toward it, stops, shakes his head.

“At least now I know where to find it.  A refile, funny how that happens sometimes.  You know life can make people forgetful.  So, Mister McGonigle here, ‘forgot’,” he raises both pudgy forefingers, “to tell me the, not so inconsequential, fact that in May of 2004 … he got himself divorced!  An’ it weren’t pretty!”

He keeps up his stare, and I resolve not to forget any inconsequential facts.

A buzzing vibration on the desk finally makes him divert those truth-rendering eyes.  He sets both pink-splotchy-skinned hands on the piles of paper, a thick wedding ring strangling his ring finger, an enormous gold-and-black mound of a graduation ring wedged halfway down his right pinky finger.

“I’ll find it, don’t worry.  It can hide, but it can’t run,” he says to no one, his eyes roving over the piles of paper.

Then, with catlike speed and dexterity, his right-hand darts into a pile of paper and retrieves a purple flip-phone.

“My wife’s,” he says. 

He holds the phone up between his thumb and forefinger, twisting his head a little abashedly.  The purple phone continues to vibrate, shaking his fat fingers.

“I don’t own one.  Don’t believe in ‘em,” he keeps the phone dangling as he stares across the desk at me.  “She makes me take it now.  I say call the office if I’m at the office.  If I’m in Stop and Shop or Sears, then you’re S.O.L..  Just leave a message at the office or, … or, God forbid you could wait ‘til I got home – right?”

As he’s monologuing, the phone ceases its buzzing momentarily, then immediately starts up again.

“Now if I said I’m goin’ ta work, why not call the office?  It’s cheaper for one thing, every minute on this stoopid thing costs me a few cents.  Plus, it sounds weird.  Sounds like she’s ben kidnapped by Whitey, an’ she’s callin’ me from a warehouse in Chelsea to negotiate the ransom.”

He breaks his stare to look at the vibrating phone.

“I should be so lucky.  At least ta pick ‘er up, I could swing by Buzzy’s for a roast beef sub.”

He takes the phone in both hands, and yanks it open violently.

“Don’t you know I’m at work!” his words rattle off over the jabber emitting from the phone. 

He jams the purple telephonic device tight against the side of his face, creating a white shadowing imprint on his red cheek. 

“I’m with a very important client who has major depreciation issues, we’re halfways through his Schedule C, an’ now I have lose where I am ‘cause you’re callin’!  This better be worth the fifteen cents it’s gonna cost me!”

I sit back, averting my eyes up to the dust-stained white tiles of the drop ceiling, embarrassed to witness a phone-fight between this man and his no-longer-so-beloved spouse.

“That’s a beautiful weapon,” the tax preparer, two desks down, says so loudly it penetrates my newly-discovered-very-importance. 

He’s leaning over the desk again, both hands clasped around an imaginary pistol.

“It don’t hardly got no kick, requires very little cleaning – though I love cleaning my weapons.  It’s my favorite thing to do.  Fill up a big glass of a scotch, head down the basement an’ clean ma guns.  There’s nuthin’ better in this world.”

He moves his right hand to his lips, kisses the tips of this fingers and shoots the hand up in the air.

“What could possibly be better?  Right?” he beams at the husband.  “No one else’s allowed down there but me.  Can’t have untrained people around guns.  It’s just me, my weapons, … and my scotch.”

He shakes his head slowly.

The couple across the desk from him sit tight shouldered.  Their son, and the voluptuous pole-dancer wrapped around his torso, stand impatiently; the boy moves from one foot to the other; the woman pouts and flashes cleavage with each of his movements.  Unconcerned with his audience’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, the tax preparer continues:

  “Once upon a time, before the … you know,” he sits up erect in his chair and looks around, almost catching me paying too much attention. 

“The …,” he wipes the back of his fingers down his cheek, raises his eyebrows knowingly, “started gettin’ … you know access to weapons an’ shootin’ the sh… daylights outta one another.  Back before that I useta have a mini range down there.  I mean wasn’t nuthin’ like you’d go to ….”

He aims his forefinger at the husband.

“Nuthin’ perfessional like the Hyannis police department’d have.  Just …” he circles his hand rapidly, “you know some old carboard boxes from Purity Supreme ta help with the sound, an’ I’d shoot into a pile a sand my brother-in-law brought over from the public works yard on Hancock Street.  But it was ok.”

He nods sagaciously. 

“Course I was a younger man then, an’ I didn’t get too-too upset if some rookie cop come by with questions.  All the regular officers down Gibson Street knew when they got a ‘shots fired’ 911 from our street, that it was just me target practicin’.  They probly apperciated havin’ a sharpshooter in the neighborhood, in case … you know … things started up.”

He rubs the back of his fingers down his cheek again, raises both his bushy eyebrows and nods knowingly.

The husband’s right hand rises to his face.  He turns slightly sideways, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

I can’t see their faces to read what their eyes might be saying.

Their son props both his hands on the desk and leans forward staring too intensely at the tax preparer.

The purple flip-phone snaps closed in front of me, pulling me back to my new-found-importance.

“That was great, four dimes an’ a nickel to find out my sister-in-law’s blood pressure is up again, ‘cause her toenail fungus is back.”

He stops for a breath, staring so hard at me all time that I feel implicated in his sister-in-law’s toenail fungus outbreak.

“So now, after work I have to drive alllll … the way to Weymouth, pick up Anita an’ her toenail fungus, an’ that busted blood pressure measurin’ thing she bought mail order from Cala…forni…yah.”

He stops for a breath on the stately flourish, but his accusing eyes never leave my fast-diminishing-importance.

“That godda… piece a medical junk should be thrown in the trash … or the re…cy…cling bin.  Have ya seen the latest?  Now Tom Menino’s tellin’ us what to do with our trash.  Like that’s cons…tit…tutional!”

He tries to slap his hand off the desk, but just hits a tall pile of paper sending a few sheets skidding off.  As he’s deliberating whether he’ll retrieve the floor excursion sheets, the purple phone starts to buzz again.  He snaps it open and jams it up to his face, eyes blazing.

“WHAT IS IT NOW?”

Two tables down the wife starts to flick her head around for a second, then turns back.  Now feeling associative guilt, I let my eyes rove all over the stained ceiling, the calendars on the wall, furtively looking for a window to look, or jump, out.

Failing that, I resort to eyes-to-the-ceiling eavesdropping.

“Now for this young man, I’d suggest a Kel Tec 32.  A bee…uuu…tiful gun!”  

I can’t stop my eyes from darting down to see his face folding in on itself to reinforce his statement; bushy eyebrows crushing down to meet his smushed up lips.

“Now the Kel Tec’s gotta ah…luminum body, verrrr…ry light, even a young man, … a kid really, if you don’t mind my sayings so, can hold this gun.  Now it does have a kick,” he adds speaking fast, leaning forward toward the parents, his best serious-sales pitch visage in place. 

“Just like any pistol.  It’s gotta have a kick – right dad?  You’ve shot enough guns to know that the kick is the kick.  The bullet demands a kick, right, … right?”

He nods, purses his lips together.

“It’s natural law or chemistry or God’s law, whatever, … one a them put the kick in there and kick it does.  We’re not getting rid of the kick anytime soon.  Not even Teddy Kennedy an’ his liberal fiends down DC can get rid of the kick, right?  That’s what I call ‘em, ‘fiends;’ not friends but ‘fiends.’  They’re no friends a the ‘Merican people.”

He laughs a mirthless laugh and stares at his nonmoving clients.  His eyes flick to the boy who’s staring at a poster on the wall of a soldier lying prone on a lonely rock outcrop, shooting his rifle down at a blurry enemy.  Above the lithographic image, in black, bolded letters stands the name: WINCHESTER.

“But here’s the thing.  You can get the Kel Tec customized with a beautiful knurled ivory handle, see it’s actually ….”

He stops talking, his lips still formed around a seemingly unspeakable word; face set perfectly still; a slightly anxious look developing in his eyes as they dart from father to mother and back again.

“It’s really, or it … was, well it was designed for … ladies.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how crazy the world is now.  Mom needs a pistol in her pocketbook ta go down ta the market for a gallon a milk.  Ya see it was invented for a lady’s purse.  That’s why it’s nice an’ light, an’ why it’s pretty too.  Female ladies do love pretty stuff – don’t you sweeties!”

He fake reaches out with his left hand, as if it was long enough to pat the mother on the shoulder.

“But now we’ve retooled it so it’s good for teenagers too, for young men.  Ya know, ta get them inta the game early.  It’s like smoking, it’s something that ya start young an’ it stays with ya through life.  Like it should, like God wants it ta be.  Course, just like smokin’ it drives them liberals outta their minds.”

“Bartek aint gonna be smokin’ nuthin’,” the father speaks harshly, wagging his index finger towards his son. 

“I can tell ya that, not unless he wants ta go outta the woodshed fer a gud old-fashioned Pappa Dambrowski style hidin’!”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.  That’s what my father useta say … and do!” the tax preparer shakes his head, raising his thick eyebrows.  “Aint that the truth.  But now them whacko liberals’ll try to take him away from you if ya cuff him in public!”

“I don’t worry ‘bout that stuff,” the father says.  “Now, let’s get to ours taxes.”

“Sure, sure.  But, I’ll tell ya what.  With the refund I’m gonna find you, you really should think about getting a Kel Tec for the boy here.  They make them in black now.  I guess they found black ivory, maybe from an albino elephant ‘r sumptin, you know, the genes got everything backwards.  Or ya know I think it’s actually from a black rhino.  There’s a few a them left, I think.  But ya better go fast, we might have them almost extincted!”

The purple flip-phone snaps closed yanking me back to my reality of depreciation to be paid unto Caesar.

“Oh, it’s ok,” he puts on the fakest of fake smiles.  “Turns out I don’t need ta drive to Weymouth after all.  Anita’s stayin’ at a friend’s house in Rockland.”

He grits his teeth, eyes narrowing. 

“Even further away, more time for me in the car with her an’ her toenail fungus!”

He breaths out loudly and looks away down at the floor in the walk aisle.

“Are we good so?” I ask timorously looking to end my marital-strife and gun-madness agony.  “Or … not so good. I suppose like everything in life, depreciation catches up to you.”

“No, no, no, hang on one minute,” he says, opening a drawer in the desk and ceremoniously dropping the phone inside, slamming the drawer closed.

“I aint been dealin’ with Uncle Sam for thirty years ta give up that easy.  We might have ta give Caesar what’s his,” he flicks his eyes up at George W’s smarmy smile, again narrowing his eyes, gritting his teeth. 

“But I’ll be God…damned if I aint the one decidin’ what belongs to Caesar!”

Cutting Free

I’m sitting shirtless on a tall kitchen stool, a blue towel, fixed in place by a black and silver binder clip, draped across my shoulders, Maria’s fingers brushing gently through my hair.  Her soft fingertips glide across my scalp, dissolving the stress that somehow makes a home in the concealed confusion of skull, wiry muscle, skin and hair.  

My eyelids flicker under the pleasure of intimacy.

“Who knew,” my voice, that can’t tolerate silences of longer than ten seconds, says, “that it would take a plague for us to discover that haircuts can be the ultimate in relaxation?” 

“I don’t think women needed a pandemic to make that discovery,” Maria says with an assured chuckle.

“And by the way,” she continues, “why is one sideburn half an inch higher than the other.”

“Oh, that’s to ward off the devil, apparently he loves left sideburns, so says Saint Martin de Porres, Patron Saint of Barbers,” I lie outrageously.  

“Or maybe it’s actually because when I’m shaving my right-hand deals more severely with the left side of my face than its own side?” I experiment with the truth. 

“Aahhh,” Maria says, nodding.  “Some consciously unconscious bias?”

I reclose my eyes, force a silence on the interminable voice in my brain, and try to simply enjoy the feeling of my overgrown hair being gently ruffled, my scalp massaged.

“What number do you usually ask for with the shears?” Maria asks.

“I can never remember, but the one that takes off the least amount of hair.” 

My tortured philosophie-de-coiffure is based upon the, entirely fallacious, theory that a haircut should result with the absolute least amount of hair being removed.  Using this theory, I seek to move safely through life under the powerful cloak of the anonymity-of-sameness.   

It all started fifty gone-by-in-the-blink-of-an-eye years ago, with me as a “wee lad” sitting anxiously in a wooden children’s chair set on top of our kitchen table.  Ma drapes a raggedy blue towel over my shoulders, fixing it in place with a wooden, grayed by a million Mayo showers, clothes pin.  

Next to me, now at eye level, Ruairi, our budgerigar, flutters his yellow wings, the underside flashing sickly-white, his black eyes, flat in his head, staring at me anxiously: A five-year-old that near to his cage usually meant some sort of poking devilment.  

Da scrapes the chair, with me in it, across the gray-white Formica tabletop, dragging my overgrown head of hair closer to his right hand, in which he holds a terrifyingly sharp-pointy scissors.  He warms the scissors up, snip-snip-snipping the air.

“Now don’t be shifting yer head around,” he snaps, cranky with his monthly task of cutting a lot of little children’s hair.

He leans in; the sharp point of the scissors’ blade, seemingly, going directly for my left eyeball.

My five-year-old instincts kick in: Involuntarily my head recoils.

“STOP IT!” he yells, full on angry now.  “I told ya not ta move!”

Thereafter it was, seemingly, hours of ears reddened by painful scissors-nicks; clipped hair drifting easefully beneath the clothes-pinned-towel, to transform my nylon, collared shirt – there were no other kind of little boys’ shirts available in the west of Ireland, 1969 – into the most afflicting hairshirt available since the Spanish Inquisition.  

But the scariest of the scary tools in Da’s tortu…, I mean barbering kit was the hand operated shears.  

From our vantage point in 2021, a mere hundred years after the electric shears was first patented, we take it for granted that when hair needs to be effortlessly mown, an electric motor driven shears can be found buried at the back of a bathroom drawer.  But in 1969, as I was hoisted up into that chair on top of the kitchen table, such engineering advances had not yet made their way into Da’s red, black and yellow barber’s toolkit.  

These hand shears, operated by untrained digits that fatigued easily, quickly transformed themselves into torture devices.  A dilletante barber’s hand, failing to maintain the RPM required to sever individual hair filaments, would instead snag a hefty scraw of hair in the shears, jamming it from any possible further movement.  Thereafter, the disjunction of shears, hair and scalp resulted in such pain that even today, retelling this experience, I still sense the memory in my gut and cannot suppress the grimace.  

Yet somehow the pain and humiliation – every other child, seemingly, going to a barber shop like regular humans – of kitchen barbering all paled in comparison to the outcome of this homesteading endeavor: The actual haircut.

Da did three types of haircut: Fierce bad, ferocious, and worsest ever.

Humans have many delusions that distinguish them, unfavorably, from the other mammals that root around on this planet, but perhaps humanity’s obsession with self-image is the least favorable of these distinctions.  Thus, for my five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven-year-old self, dragging myself out of the kitchen barbering chair and walking out onto the mean streets Castlebar – which had, seemingly, been devoid of all sense of style right up until I reappeared after being yell-summoned in for a scalping –remains with me as a memory of both enormous courage and humiliation.

The courage came from the resigned acceptance that there was no other option but to present yourself to the judging world of human society as it played on those streets.  

The humiliation was entirely created by my mind, deluded by that same human society into thinking that self-image actually mattered.

It wasn’t until I was just barely twelve-years-old that I summoned up the real courage to break with the tyranny of Da’s monthly administered, embarrassingly bad, and always way-too-short haircut.  

One weekday, in the middle of a school shutdown caused by a six-inch fall of snow a few days previously, I sloshed through the now melting snow up toward barbers.  In my pocket were three pound notes liberated from Ma’s purse, still in the kitchen drawer where she had left it eleven months ago the day a stroke took her first to the kitchen floor, then the hospital, and finally to a grave, forty miles away, in Leitrim.  

Da used the purse as a piggybank where he deposited milk and bread money.  On this day, I made the unauthorized executive decision that the family could go low on carbohydrates, animal fats and protein so that I could get a haircut that was presentable in the major aspect that it left my hair long, … or at least longish.

As I sloshed along the entirely un-shoveled, un-plowed (the nearest snowplow was a thousand miles away in Germany) streets in my black Addidas sneakers – self-image trumping dry feet – I realized I had to make a decision: To which of the three barbers in town would I entrust the oxymoronic task of cutting my hair long?

            There was Kelly’s Barbershop, but he was old school and would surely cut my hair short, regardless of what I asked for.  Mick Quinn’s on Main Street was of the same ilk, and Da talked to him, probably went there himself.  It was only then that it occurred to me that this was an important fact I didn’t know: Where did Da go to get his hair cut torturously short?  Oddly enough I knew that Ma used to disappear every few months into what was, seemingly, really just Maureen Hernan’s living room, and come out a few hours later with her hair looking like brown papier-mâché: A look that remained in place for several weeks.  The danger in my choice of barber was that I might get caught telling the haircutter, who was being paid with our food money, that he was to cut my hair long – wastefulness on the scale of shoveling snow that would melt itself in a few days.

            Having ruled out two barbers, the only remaining option was the one nearest me at that very moment as I sloshed through Market Square. 

            I open the door of Gerard’s Barber Shop – it too was really just his living room converted into a hair cutting place – and stick in my wooly head of hair, peering around nervously.  Had Da, my heretofore barber, been somehow sitting inside, I would have stepped back out, and immediately shipped off to Van Diemen’s Land, never again to see my friends, family or favorite books.   But the gods of coiffure are smiling on me, and it’s all scowling, beer-jowled, shaggy-maned strangers sitting in the five waiting chairs.

            The barber waves me in from the cold-wet outdoors with a flick of his scissors.  

I squeeze in, standing awkwardly behind the closed door, immediately realizing that I am now preventing Mayo’s manhood from getting the hairy part of their self-image rehabilitated.  I try to move myself, but no such movement is possible.  I can’t move towards the waiting customers without looming over their staring eyes; a step in the other direction and I’d be too close for comfort to the barber’s always moving scissors.

For five snip-snip-snipping minutes I stand there, sweating in my hand-me-down anorak; my back pinned against the white door; feeling as if the entire population of the planet is judging me a complete and utter gobeshite; who goes places he shouldn’t; takes food from his family’s mouths for the sake of getting his hair cut long; and generally gets in the way, taking up space that other, more important, people actually need.

My panic is lessened only inasmuch as I get to observe a miraculous invention: An electric shears.  It glides effortlessly over the hair-cuttee’s head, hair disappearing beneath its teeth – which literally move faster than the human eye can behold.

The heat of my anorak is killing me, but I don’t want to draw more crushing attention to myself by taking it off.  Slowly, trying to avoid detection, I unzipper it, one stubborn pair of zip-teeth at a time.

“Gud man now, gud man yoursell,” the fella in the barber’s chair says too loudly, with all eyes flicking to him, enabling a flurry of secret anorak unzippering.

With a loud sigh, he pushes himself up out of the chair.  He’s an ould fella with a farmer’s weathered-red face, whiteish hair, and the slight stoop of a man well used to hard physical labor.  

Once standing, he turns and stares at himself in the large mirror that dominates the barber shop.  His right hand starts to rise to his hair, but he stops, his eyes flicking to the reflection in the mirror of ten staring eyes. 

To my, vastly untrained eye, the ould farmer’s crop of whiteish hair appears to have been very precisely moved a half an inch above his ears, revealing a border of fish-belly-white scalp against the weathered-red skin of his face.

I risk another inch of anorak unzippering.

“How much now?” the ould fella asks the barber, who murmurs a response.

“Ohhh, cheap at thrice a price, cheap at thrice the price,” he nod-nod-nods, fishing deeply into his trousers’ pocket for a well-worn, flat black leather wallet and, licking the tips of his fingers, he extracts from it two greenish-yellowish pound notes.

The barber turns, slides open a wooden drawer, and drops the notes in silently.

“Sure, the last time I came ta town for a haircut, two month ago,” the ould fella turns to face his audience in the waiting chairs.  “Didn’t I run inta Tomma McGinty below in Mick Quinn’s.”

He raises his hand at them, brings it down fast in a ya-wouldn’t-believe-this wave.

“Right over ta Padda Hoban’s he took me.  Just for a half-wan, … don’t ya see.”

He closes his eyes and nods slowly.  

“Sure, we ended up on the beer for three days.  Cost me a bleddy fortune, … a bleddy fortune.  On t’secunt day, I sold me bike to a barman for twenta quid.  An’ poor ould Mammy without at home, fadin’ an’ milkin’ t’cow.  Out in the dark her goin’, an’ her on a cane with an oil lamp hangin’ from t’other hand.  Good God above us, but drink is an awful curse. Me poor ould bike gone.  I’m on t’ould fella’s rattly ould wan since.”

He shakes his head slowly, his watery eyes turning down to the floor.  

“But the yellin’ Mammy done when I got home,” he kinda-sorta laughs, and looks up at his audience with a deviously unrepentant smile.  

“‘Twoulda woke the dead!”

To my twelve-year-old sweating panic, he turns to leave, and I’m faced with the choice of leaving the barbershop ahead of him and then returning – looking like an even bigger gobeshite – or shuffling up next to the barber’s platform in a way that might angrily confuse the other customers that I’m jumping the queue.

Once again, the gods of coiffure smile on me, as the next customer lurches out of his chair, shoulders back, up onto the barber’s platform.  Sighing, each in their turn, the other customers stand halfway up and with shoulders hunching, knees banging off the magazine piled coffee table, move one seat closer to their haircut. 

Initially relieved to get out of my the-very-opposite-of-anonymity stance by the door, I flop into the last seat in the queue, still warm from its previous occupant, but upon sitting, the heat of the chair, my anorak and this last bout of panic has me ready to puke.

I take a bunch of deep breaths, eyes darting around the barbershop, pull at the collar of my jumper to let some heat out and air in.  Eventually, I cool down enough, my mind stops racing enough, and my stomach settles enough, that I can watch and learn from every little thing that happens in a barbershop. 

The barber moves in a slow, easeful way – completely the opposite of Da’s anxious, sudden, ear-cutting lurches – with the scissors seemingly an extension of his hand.  He stands back a half step, crouches a little, angling his head to review his work. 

It’s as if he actually cares what the haircut looks like!

But as I relax into studying the workings of a barbershop, the interminable voice in my mind starts to intrude with new, previously unthought of, scary thoughts: 

How much does a haircut cost?  

Was two pound just the ould fella’s price, or is that the price for everyone? 

What if it’s really four pound or three pound fifty?  

I only have three – what happens then?  

Do I end up washing dishes in the barber’s kitchen?

Can you actually tell the barber how you want your hair cut?

What if he refuses to cut my hair long? 

With the worry-circuits in my brain glowing red hot, I force myself to resort to my worry reliever of first and last resort – escape through reading.  

I lean forward over the knee-banger-coffee table, scan the pile of magazines and grab a tattered copy of Shoot.  I flick through the pages quickly, not getting enough distracting stimulation from photos of Emilyn Hughes, Steve Heighway and Mick Mills kicking a ball, pointing a finger, all looking serious and anxious, like they’re at work.  

I lean forward again and carefully place the Shoot back on the pile.  Now I notice that no one else is reading, but their eyes are all staring at me.  

Does my impatience with Shoot look bad?  

Should I have liked it more?

I mean Steve Heighway is Irish, even though he’s called after an American road.  I probly shoulda looked at his picture for longer.

With the worry circuits glowing again, I impulsively grab a coverless glossy magazine with two-inch-tall, screaming headlines.   Inside those glossy pages, my mind sponges up useless facts to chase away the worry: The French claim this new European Economic Community thing will bring all the countries into a United States of Europe.  Fat chance!  Sure, half the time we can’t even understand what the hell the frogs are spouting off about.  And anyways, Da says we only want the German’s money to fix the roads and build factories, then the EEC can feck off.  Earth’s population to double to eight billion by 2020.  Sure, you couldn’t fit that many people on this planet, and anyway, that’s so far away, who gives a damn?  A new ice age is coming: American weathermen are predicting we’re headed for another ice age.  Their little weathermen brains’ idea to stop the ice age by covering over the north pole with black soot, so it’ll melt.  Sure, wouldn’t it be easier to drop a nuclear bomb on it instead?  

But I do get useful information too, like how eating too many onions can create a dangerous electrical charge in your body.  And there’s a story about the vicar from Chesterfield who ran away with his sixteen-year-old babysitter, and now they’re running a Bed and Breakfast in Blackpool.  She’s holding twins in the photograph, but the babies are black, and she and the vicar are white – as a matter of fact, they’re pasty white.  And I never knew that David Bowie has a brother who’s “troubled with mental health issues.”

My soaking up of the News of the World Magazine is interrupted every ten or fifteen minutes by having to move over to the next warm chair, as each victim’s shaggy mane of hair is summoned up to the barber’s platform to get slaughtered. 

Debilitated by my eternal cluelessness and stupidity, I’m forced to flip these liabilities into assets.  My plan, formulated in the sheen of those glossy pages, and employed surprisingly well from that day forward, forever and ever amen, is to happily embrace my thorough ignorance of everything even approaching cool-trendy-fashionable.

My relief at getting off the hook of having to be cool is physically palpable.  I breath out an extra loud sigh, turning four sets of hair-cuttee-waiting eyes.  But deviously I disguise my true intent by flapping my anorak and pulling at the collar of my jumper in fake, but actually real, attempts to lower my temperature … but not to be cool!    

This decision is borne from that nerdy confidence that comes from having such vital information as to monitor your onion intake to avoid spontaneous self-lightning; avoid Blackpool, vicars and twins at all costs; and to examine Bowie’s lyrics closely for family influences – to see if regular people could actually write something meaningful.

Eventually, as happens in life, whether you desire it or not, it’s my turn.

The barber, a gaunt-faced, bearded man, with penetrating eyes, waves me up onto the platform as he silently sweeps male-Mayo’s fallen hair into a dustpan.

New problem: I now need to remove my anorak.  After a minor kerfuffle, I successfully, if inelegantly, remove my outer layer without knocking out anyone’s eye.  

The barber nods silently towards the coat rack.

My anxiety projects impatience into his nod.  

I stare hard at the coat rack, assured that if I recklessly hang my anorak in such an unprotected fashion, then, with my eyes closed, to avoid the blindness caused by hair particle intake, the door to the barber’s shop will fly open and in will burst a gang of international anorak thieves to steal my hand-me-down anorak, with the not-so-smallish split-seam under the right arm.  Thus, will be confirmed the wrongness of my wantonly spending money at a barber shop and not letting Da cut my hair for free at home. 

Like a man approaching the gallows, I step over to the coat rack, hang my anorak, and barely breathing, sit anxiously into the barber’s chair, where I’m immediately enshrouded in a blue nylon cape that billows down over my arms.

The barber’s penetrating eyes look into the mirror at me, his hand resting on the back of the chair.

He raises his eyebrows as he nods slightly towards my reflection.

I squirm.

He stares.

Finally, eyes down on the mottled bottom of the mirror, I mumble:

“Not too shor….” 

I attempt to wave my hand toward my head, but instead catch it in the blue nylon cape, tugging it free from my neck.

With no reaction, the barber tucks the cape back into my shirt collar, and he’s off to work: Snip-snip-snipping.  

Fifteen minutes later, my anorak miraculously not stolen, I swagger out of the barber shop, and slosh home with one pound note left in the back pocket of my Wrangler’s, my shoes and socks soaking wet, but the first shoot of independence sprouting green from my mind’s rocky soil of endless worry, a self-esteem vacuum and the deeply confirmed conviction of my eternal stupidity.

To my horror, Da is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, shake-reading the Irish Press.

I make a big show of the returning the pound to Ma’s purse.

“Turns out, I didn’t need this,” I say, kinda-sorta brushing my hair with my hand.

“Did ya get a sliced pan?” he looks at me curiously, no carbohydrates visible on my person.

“No, er …. I gotta haircut.”

“A hair…cut,” he lowers the Press.  “Well, he didn’t take much off for two quid, I’d a done ….”

Sweat gushes from every pore in my body.

But he lets his trail-off trail off, and just stares me in the eye, gritting his teeth.

“Yeah, he was fierce busy,” I lie outrageously, looking away, panting for breath.

“Well, ‘tis better than nathin’,” he gives the Press a shake that’d rattle Dev within in his grave, and hiding behind the newsprint says:

“Anyways, I was afraid ya were goin’ ta ask me ta cut it.  Sure, there’s no need of me doin’ that sort of stuff anymore.  Run on an’ take care of yer own stuff.”

The green floods from my shoot of independence, … but it survives.

Many barbers have cut my hair since that day, all of them getting the direction:

“Just a trim, but don’t worry if you take too much, it’ll grow back in a week.”

Turns out my hair is like a weed, that quickly reverts to overgrowth.

Three thousand miles from the Market Square in Castlebar, the barbers are Boston are mostly immigrants:

A Greek who loves politics, watches all the US Presidential debates on Greek television, agreeing wholeheartedly with the oldest democracy’s assessment of the most curious democracy.

A Brazilian who couldn’t contain his laughter at my choice of hair style – fringe, sideburns and neck all squared off – summoning over his fellow barbers to laughingly display what the long departed, but not forgotten, wag Pat Shea had labelled as my “helmet head haircut.”

An Algerian who spittingly curses France for four hundred years of colonization and, when he hears my accent, loudly demands I do likewise of England’s eight hundred years in Ireland!

A Ukrainian with whom, on my September 11, 2001 lunchbreak, I watched the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing in on themselves amidst billowing black smoke.  Each time the unbelievable-to-our-eyes footage rewound, he would say: “I fukeen tol’ thees country, don’t fuck with the A…raabs.  Them’s crazy peuples.  I fukeen tol’ ….” 

A Russian who was forced to train as a hairdresser in the Soviet Union because when he showed up at the university, into which he had been accepted, the registrar told him “go away, we already have too many Jews here.”  Upon emigration to the US, knowing only one word of English – “No!” – he defaulted to cutting men’s hair. 

Right now, in Massachusetts, cutting someone’s hair in a barbershop is a crime, punishable by …, well it’s a crime; punishment TBD; enforcement zero percent.  Though the State Police are following anyone with too neat a trim as a potential QAnon suspect and a confirmed idiot.

As with many things, this last year has changed life’s most basic actions.  Now, getting my hair cut is not the hassle of constantly checking the time as I flick from my phone to GQ to Sports Illustrated, ready to jump in should the next customer in line indicate, by a shake of their shaggy head, that they don’t want the next available barber.  

Who knew you could choose your own barber?

The ultimate in curious democracy.

In times of plague, a kitchen haircut is an opportunity to relax into a surprisingly meaningful intimacy.  

It’s only taken four and a half decades, but my lack of respect for the aesthetics of coiffure and my constant refrain of “don’t worry, it’ll grow back in week” has finally aged into a comfortable truth. 

The Corandulla Blues

I’m sitting on the edge of Ma’s seat in the front of our car that Da’s driving awful slow toward our holiday’s in Kilkee.  This is where I sit when our car is packed full with children and towels and swimsuits and stuff for our holidays. 

With Mole, Ratty and Toad, the lads from The Wind In The Willows running round inside me brain and in the book on me lap, and two weeks ahead swimming in the Pollock Holes, climbing the rocks back at Burn’s Cove and playing on the beach, I was so happy I coulda farted!

“Somehow now, I seem to remember the orange light still on,” Da says, twist-nodding his head, squeezing his lips together. “I saw it when I reached in for me swimming trunks.  I haven’t taken them things out since this time last year.”

He’s been going on about how the Immersion Heater is probly left on since we left Ballinrobe.  Now we’re driving through Headford so slow that an ould fella, in a cap, a dark suit and turned-down wellingtons, pedals past us on a black-nellie bicycle.

“It’ll be fine, it’s off, I turned it off meself,” Ma snaps, a bit-cranky, but breathing in to get ready to distract him. 

“An’ sure, lookit all the terrible things goin’ on,” she starts.  “Sure 1975 is goin’ to be as bad as a year as any of them.  An’ that leibide Cooney, some minister for Justice he is.  He was the one said 1974 was to be the worst, an’ that he’d be making all better this year.  Sure ‘tis worse it’s improving.  Lookit them poor lads in the Miami Showband getting shot last weekend.  That Fran O’Toole had a lovely voice ….”

Ma shakes her head and blesses herself before she goes on: 

“I read in the Press that they found a piece of an arm in the field next to the explosion, with a tattoo on it that said: ‘UVF.’”

“What’s the U…V…F?” I ask.

“Be quiet,” Ma says. “Read yer book.”

“Ulster Volunteer Force,” comes out of the back.

“Be quiet!”

She does be saying things like this for to distract him from going on and on about “t’Immersion.”

Da has an awful fear of this electric thing that just heats the hot water tank so you can do the dishes or take a bath.  He thinks it’ll get so hot that it could blow up our house: Every time we’re heading off for a Sunday drive, just before we leave, all eleven of us packed into the Cortina estate, he gets out and half runs back inta the house, only his legs moving, his body, arms and head all still, the Yale key sticking out between the fingers of his closed fist. He’s back a few minutes later, nod-nod-nodding:

“Ah, it ’twas off awright.”

“Sure, I told you it ‘twas,” Ma says, squeezing her lips together.  “I turned it off meself.”

“Ah,” he twist-nods backwards.  “I thought wan a them mighta turned it on.”
Now the start of our holidays is getting attacked by Da’s Immersion-explosion fear.  Twice since Ballinrobe, when he thunk this idea, he’s pulled in on the side of the road and said we should go back and check.  Now, stuck behind a stupid tractor that’s letting bicycles pass us out, he’s at again.

“And what was that at-all-at-all-at-all about the jockey getting threatened with kneecapping over losing races?” Ma asks.

This a great question to ask, ‘cause Da knows a lot about horseracing and trouble.  Plus he mighta heard from other Gards in the barracks what really happened.

“Ah, it’s terrible really, he’s a good jockey too that Tommy Carmody,” he nods at the windshield.  “He musta ben riding horses that IRA fellas wanted to win, but didn’t, probly for other reasons.”

He raises his eyebrows like he knows something he can’t say.

“Ah, ‘tis like the joke about when the horse trainer is talking to his jockey who was riding a horse with clear instructions not to win, an’ the trainer asks the jockey if he coulda beaten the other horses in the race.  ‘Oro sure,’ the jockey says, ‘this horse coulda beat any of the four ahead of us, but I can’t vouch for the three behind us!  Oh, Irish horseracin’!”

He throws his head backwards hard.  

“Sure only mugs or crooks put money on an Irish horserace.”

The tractor turns into Joyce’s of Headford and we get going sorta good again.  I pick up me book and read about what Mole and Ratty and Toad are up to – Toad’s an awful gobeshite altogether.  He’s only interested in everything new; all new stuff is bad.  Sure that’s how the Trouble started in the North; people moved there who shouldn’t have.  I put the book down and daydream about running through knee deep water at Kilkee beach: Me pretending I’m an Indian on a brown horse, with a star on its forehead, no saddle, and I’m galloping in to kill the US Cavalry attacking my family. 

How come anyways the Cavalry are so mean to the Indians?

The way the car does kinda-sorta shake-jiggle as it drives along makes me sleepy.  Maybe I’ll nap and dream about being a real Indian warrior, whoop-whoop-whooping around on me horse.  We’re coming up the hill to that yellow school that we always pass when Galway is about twenty minutes away. 

Me eyes are getting droopy. 

How come anyways schools are always painted that yellow you never see anywhere else?  It’s not like the yellow in the Pope’s flag or the Roscommon jersey.

My eyes get droopier.

The sound of branches walloping the side of the car undroops me. 

The car is headed toward the ditch, the bushes racing towards us.

Ma’s arms raise up to protect her face.

She turns and stares wide-eyed into the back at her children.

“Fucking Headford!” Mick says from the drivers seat.  “I never drove through this shithole without getting stuck behind a tractor.  What are they saying about the Fijians in the paper?”

“Well this morning the radio was all talk about ‘Connacht’s cen…teen…ary year – 1985!” I say from the back seat, unfolding the Irish Times.  “Can you imagine the snobby-prods playing for Connacht way back in 1885?  Anyways, let’s see what ‘lies they’re vomitin’ out onto newsprint today!’ Who was it said that at-all-at-all-at-all?”

I shake the newspaper under control.

“Oho be-Jaysys: First flight outta Knock airport yesterday; Monsignor Horan is givin’ the big thumbs up.  An’ lookit, they’re saying them six fellas from the Birmingham bombing, way back in 1976, mighta been framed?  Sure, who’d be framing them?”

“The British police,” Basq scoffs.  “Who the fuck else?”

“No, no, you’re wrong,” I twist-nod my head.  “Police only want to stop crimes, they have no political age….”

“Ah, shut the fuck up an’ tell us about the match,” Mick snaps.

I turn the page:

“An RAF man killed in a helicopter crash in South Armagh, no fire from the Provos, just an accident, they got themselves this time: Blacks rioting in South Africa … again: Dalglish is going to pick himself today to play for Liverpool.”

“Come on ta fuck, what about the rugby match?”

“Awright, awright here we go, here’s the Connacht team: Henry O’Toole, ‘member he useta play for the Connemara All-Blacks, eh… a few we don’t know, … eh, and then Conor McCarthy from UCG, good man Conor, … and then a rake more, O’Driscoll and Fitzgerald from the Irish team, and lookit two Ballina lads, Deccie Greaney – sound fella – well he’s with Corinthians now, and Moylett.  And then Mick Tarpey – ‘member him from the Wegians’ under 20’s; a big fella – and then Fly Mannion from Ballinasloe.  Jaysys, we might beat the poor ould Fijians, the balls must be frozen off them in this weather.”

“Is that Fly fella the same fucker who destroyed us?” Basq asks from the seat next to me, “nearly all by himself, below in Ballinasloe a couple a year ago?”

Yeah-yeah-yeah everyone nods: We’re not big on reliving our destroyed-bys: We much prefer reliving the fights we won.

“Wasn’t that the day Pa walloped wan a the Ballinasloe tinkers?” Sid, the front passenger, asks; a cigarette shaking in his hands.  “An’ us hardly off the bus!”

We all laugh: The car shimmying.

The sky’s a weak October-blue, cold and crisp, a good day for rugby.  I just came home from college for the weekend last night, but the lads had a plan to go down to the Connacht vs. Fiji rugby game today.  A day on the piss with the lads in Galway was too good to turn down, so now I’m headed south again.

“Sure what do ye four latchikoes want to be headin’ off ta Galway for?” asked the barman in the Humbert last night.  “Cum in here an’ it’ll be on above on the telly.  No need for all that drivin’ an’ strange pubs an’ buyin’ food.  Have a bit a sense would ye!”

The tractor turns into Joyce’s of Headford, and the engine revs hard as Mick takes the open road.

We’re speeding up the hill toward the yellow school – about ten minutes to go for Galway. 

An old sheepdog, scraws of matted hair hanging from its coat, limps across the road towards the schoolyard.

Over the hill a red and white and blue, Denny’s Meats van appears – it’s flying.

 The old sheepdog is right in the van’s path 

 Sid jams the cigarette between his lips; his eyebrows rising high.

The van wallops the sheepdog, firing the poor ould fella, its legs still in a walking stance, into the briary ditch.

“GOOD JAYSYS!” Sid yells out, hands now up over his eyes.

We slow down, pull over, twist our necks to see what’s happening.

The Denny’s Hiace van is pulled over; the door open, the driver running back.

“The poor ould sheepdog,” Sid says, his voice brittle.  “Sure he was only goin’ over the road.  Can you imagine your dog just not comin’ home one day?  It must be awful.”

“Who the fuck are Denny’s anyways?” I ask for a distraction.

“Ah some shower a Northern bastards down here puttin’ Irish meat factories outta business,” comes the reply.

“And where the fuck are we anyways?” I ask, the car still stopped.

“Corandulla, I seen a sign back there said.”

“We got the Corandulla Blues,” I sing, badly, still looking to distract everyone.  “Onliest way ta beat them blues, … is with the booze!”

Twenty minutes later we swagger into Cullens Bar on Forster Street.  The match is about to start, we can see the teams warming up on the television, the pale skin and green jerseys of the Connacht team; the white jerseys and dark skin of the Fijians.

But pints must be imbibed before we journey up the road to the Sportsground.

Josie is behind the bar in Cullens: A man of considerable girth and even greater humor, he rolls his eyes slowly at the sight of us.  At one end of the bar, the Sean-nos singing, lorry driver has already settled in for the weekend: His pint of Guinness yellowing on the counter in front of him.  He sits upright on his barstool, arms folded, eyes peering through thick glasses at the telly.  There’s a spattering of weekend-alcos stuck to stools along the counter staring sullenly into their drinks. 

To our have-another-pint-surprise, at the other end of the bar, with one of his well-shined black dress-shoes up on a stool’s footrest, stands a bank porter from Castlebar.  A stubby man in his fifties or sixties, dressed in a well-pressed, grey suit, a white shirt and a red tie, he eyes us up and down suspiciously, runs his hand oh-so-carefully over the roof his tightly-trimmed-and-oiled hair, cinches his red jowls, and with a disdain-for-latchikoes sigh, grabs his glass of whiskey and turns, disowning us.  

“There’s Afree…cans in t’country today,” the lorry-driver says, unprovoked, his eyes on the Fijians getting into position for kick-off.

“They’s jus’ up t’road,” Josie lisps, nodding up the hill.  “Up with at the greyhound track.”

“Are ya serious?” his interlocuter fixes his thick glasses closer to his eyes.  “Afree…cans sleepin’ in Galway tanight.  Lock up yer daughters!”

He looks down the line of surly weekend-alcos, none of whom acknowledge the warning.

We start into our pints, loosely debating the merits of traipsing the extra quarter mile to see in actual fact what we can already see, via the magic of television, out over top of our pint glasses.

The bank porter abruptly departs with gait of a man imparted on serious business, but he’s accosted in the doorway by a homeless fella out of Eyre Square.  There’s a kerfuffle as the two men of similar age and build, and equal but opposite commission, try to navigate past one another in the doorway.  As the red jowls tighten, the homeless man concedes, but pushes in roughly past the porter as soon as the doorway is clear.

Josie immediately raises his arm and points his pudgy index finger back out to Forster Street, shaking his large face slowly.

“’Twas down by the sally garden, my luv an’ I did meet,” the homeless fella starts to sing-talk, his eyes forced up at Cullens’ smoke veneered ceiling, one hand stroking his chin, the other grabbing the lapel of his filthy blue suit-jacket.

“Ooouuuttt!” Josie raises his voice.

A few alcos’ heads turn in bitter pity at the unkempt, unshaven homeless fella.

“She passed the sally gardens with little shnow white feet.”

Josie starts to move his bulk along behind the bar.

“She bid me take luv azsy, as the leaves grow on a tree ….”

Josie moves with surprising speed for a big man.

“… but me bein’ young an’ foolish, with her I wouldn’t agree.”

He’s gone by the time Josie’s bulk fills the skinny archway leading to the back door and the open-air toilets.

Five rapid-pints in, I lose the debate – Connacht are doing well – and we depart for the Sportsground.

“Jaysys, I wonder what the Fijians were thinking when they saw all the greyhound shite on the edge of the pitch,” Basq asks.

We ponder that question as we bustle past the Magdalene Laundry and up the hill towards the Grammar School.

“Sure they wouldn’t be shiteing at all, they’re there to race,” Mick says.  “They give them medicine to shite everything out; like they give jockeys pissing tablets.”

“You know a human being carries around one pound of shite inside in them every day,” I offer from the depths of my twenty years of book-bought-wisdom.

“JAYSYS!” the lads all retort.

“There’s a lot a people I know have a couple a stone of shite inside in them.”

We push into the Sportsground; some gobeshite in a gabardine coat tries to collect a pound each off us, but we thick it out, and he gives in, sullenly. 

The one stand in the stadium is as full as the last bus to Salthill of a Thursday night, and the walls to keep the greyhounds from escaping are four-deep with spectators.

“I fucken told ye,” I complain, unable to see anything except the ball occasionally getting kicked high.  “At least below in Cullens, we coulda seen something, … and had a pint.”

Fiji win by a point.

Connacht lose by a point.

Same result – vastly different emotions.

We return to Cullens, then one pint in Rabbits, Foxes, the Skeff, and down to the Cellar to settle in for the evening.

A couple of hours later, full of porter and needing grease to anchor it in our bellies, we head outta the Cellar and up to Supermacs in Eyre Square.

Walking along the street, a man in his sixties, in a mustard trench-coat, tugs hard on his yappy little dog’s leash to get him out of the blindly-busy pedestrian traffic. 

The dog resists as it digs its nose into a discarded Chicken-Box.

The ould fella yanks the leash, pulling the dog off its feet and turning it all once.

“Hey you, ya fucken bastard,” Sid rushes in.  “Leave that dog alone.  We already seen a dog get kilt today.”

Sid grabs for the leash in the ould fella’s hand.

“Give me that dog, you’re not fit ta … .”

The ould fella moves so fast that the rest of us are still frozen in place when he pins Sid to Supermac’s wall; his gnarly fists pumping rapid left-right-left-rights into Sid’s face.

Drunken-stunned, Sid doesn’t even get to raise his hands.

“I didn’t do thirty years in the Army to take shite from hooligans like you!” the ould fella stands back; fists up, feet positioned like a boxer ready to attack.

The little dog’s eyes look up at the humans in confusion.

We clean up Sid’s face in the Supermac’s toilet; wolf down a pile of Chicken Boxes; and then stagger back to the Cellar, onto Garavan’s, the King’s Head, the Quays. 

Somewhere, somehow, whilst wobbling along Quay Street from its eponymous pub to Neachtains, in state of exuberant inebriation, I lost my three companions.

Lost, drunk, and lonely, the pubs all emptying out onto the street and still the lads nowhere to be found, my drunken brain makes a quick plan. 

With eyes down, watching the treacherous footpath for sudden changes in elevation, I tromp the two miles out to my college rental house in Cherry Park.  By the time I make it there, only falling twice, I realize that I don’t have the key with me.  I’ve sobered enough to climb in the upper window above the kitchen sink.  But I haven’t sobered enough to save the pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

I fall onto the bed, with a gash on my right ankle from a broken plate.

When I turn over, it’s already daylight, my unwound-for-days alarm clock lying to me that it’s a quarter past four.    

Forehead throbbing, stomach ready to heave, tongue stuck to the floor of me mouth, I close my eyes again, and lie there with irrational-hangover-self-pity.

The sight of the old sheepdog flying through the air, his life completed, plays and replays inside my mind: The old dog limps into the middle of the road; the red and white and blue Denny’s Hiace speeds down the road: In my head, I stare at the van’s tires eating up the road. 

On a badly needed-to-suppress-a-stomach-heave in-breath the tires age ten years, and it’s no longer a Denny’s Hiace, it’s a black and yellow Barcastle Meats VW van.  Inside my head, I’m not hungover, I’m ten years old again, and all of us are headed off on holidays to Kilkee; all jammed into the Cortina.

The Barcastle van trundles over the hill into Corandulla crossroads. 

It’s not going to hit an old sheepdog, ‘cause that dog is young and vigorous now, out herding sheep in the fields. 

No, instead the Barcastle van suddenly slows down, its engine complaining loudly. 

Da is already out of our car, that he nearly put into the ditch a few seconds earlier, the driver’s door still open.  He’s waving down the Barcastle van, like he’s running his own one-Garda checkpoint to catch the IRA … or maybe now the UVF?

The Barcastle van slows to a halt in front of the school’s low, egg-yolk-yellow wall, not at all like the pale Barcastle yellow.  The VW engine thrum-thrum-thrums, working all the time to keep the meat from the pigs, slaughtered squealingly in Castlebar a couple a days ago, nice and cold for people to fry up for their tea.

Da grabs the front of his sports coat and does his run-not-run across to the van, using only his legs, body-head-arms all frozen. 

The Barcastle van window rolls down in a fast-panic. 

Da leans his leather elbow patches on the van’s windowsill and talks to the driver, his head nodding all the time.

From the Cortina, we all stare silent-confused at Da leaning against the van windowsill, having a chat, in the middle of the Galway Road.

Then he turns, does his run-not-run, back to our car, half sits in and slides the keyring out of the ignition.

“Now, this fella’ll drop the key back to the Gard’s barrack in Castlebar,” he jams his thumbnail into the keyring, and starts pushing the Yale key around the ring. 

“Sure there’s a key hidden under the coal bucket that anyone could use.”

“No there isn’t,” he twist-nods in victory.  “I put that key in the drawer before we left.  I’ll phone the barrack from Kilkee an’ tell Tom Lee the key is at the desk, an’ would he go an’ check that bleddy Immersion’s off before it explodes.”

Lost in Space – Part II

Father Curran’s mother’s wake is in a funeral home in Headford.

I’ve never been to a funeral home, even though I hold a poor-man’s-Master’s Degree in funerals: Family – heaps of them in just a few years: Primary school – one friend and one classmate: Secondary school – one suicide: The Rugby club – a tragic drowning: Working in the church – about a million.

All funerals are sad, but the saddest of them all was one for a St Mary’s mental patient who didn't have another soul on this planet to mourn his passing from what had to been amongst the most barren of lives.  Rattled by the sight of a funeral mass without a single mourner in the seats, Pat and I route ourselves from the cold safety of the sacristy to sit in the front seat as stand-ins for the long absent family.  As a player in this poignant scene; one plain wooden coffin, one priest intoning into a cavernously empty church, two stand-in mourners; I respond to the priest’s invocations with loud-lung-issued prayer, that tries to keen away the naked loneliness. 

The Headford funeral home struck me as false, plastic, and coldly hygienic; but having a water jug and a toilet, it fit my hangover-driven physiological needs. 

It did not however fit Pat’s robust socializing style.  The mourners, all natives of a town thirty miles from Castlebar, may as well have been from another galaxy.  These aliens stood in tight circles, presenting solid walls of gabardine that Pat could not penetrate.

We find Father Curran, express our condolences; Pat enunciates a resounding “Our Father” over the corpse, and, with eyes raised to the tiled ceiling, loudly informs to Saint Peter to get ready for her soul’s very soon arrival.

Our business complete, or so I naively thought, the plum Fiesta screams out of Headford on the Shrule Road at twenty-five miles an hour … in second gear.

Having finally attained, and then, all too quickly, lost fourth gear just before the dangerous curves south of Shrule, we LeMons through that sleepy village in a manner that leaves my hangover-anxiety praying the Shruleans have that very evening all been struck deaf, dumb and blind.

We take Kilmaine in a blink … well, a longish, anxious closing of the eyes and holding of the breath, but we’re through without the sound of plum coloured sheet-metal striking a human form.  Après-Kilmaine, with the roads sufficiently twisty-dark-dangerous but empty, we speed along, anxiously.

The hangover, relentless in its Catholic punishing of yesterday’s dual Deadly sins of Wrath and Drunkenness, will not lift: Every few miles my saliva turns to water and my stomach retches up more bile.  It musta ben that pint yesterday below in Jim Pete’s in Glenamaddy.  It tasted a bit off all right, but my taste was off cause the inside of my lip had gotten torn up when, with a strong wind at our backs we kicked our third penalty and the Creggs ref blew up the first half ten minutes early, starting an all-in fight.

Rugby is, as I’ve determined, good for the soul but hard on the machinery.

Ballinrobe saps our progress.  We pick our way slowly through its medieval streets, stuck behind a shite-splattered, yellow Volkswagen pulling a trailer with three calves staring ominously back into our headlights through their wild-glassy eyes.

The farmer takes pity on us and pulls over enough that we can scream past him.  And scream on we do, until the Fiesta rolls to a halt with the sight of the big front window of Art O’Neil’s Pub filling our windshield. 

Hangover relieving sleep is just the one hard left from here onto the Castlebar Road.  Then the only places to get, prayerfully, navigated past would be Katie’s in Partry and maybe the Punchbowl in Ballyheane, before I could get home to my bed.

Pat indicates left.

I sigh with relief. 

But, selling the dummy, he doesn’t turn left. 

Instead he drives straight on, the blinker still clicking, as we head down a road I’ve never travelled in my twenty years of being driven down roads.

“We’ll go an’ say hallo, don’t ya see, ta Gerty,” he squints into the darkness of the road ahead.  “I haven’t had a word with her for this longest time.”

“Gerty?” I sit up in my seat.

Never heard of Gerty.

“Aahhh, Gerty’d be, I suppose she’d be near a fourth or fifth cousin a mine, something like that,” he nods, a lot, his glasses glinting the last of Ballinrobe’s streetlights.

The darkness down this road-less-traveled is thick, immense and of a quality that only a place sufficiently distrustful of morally dodgy modernization such as electricity will tolerate. 

I peer out the Fiesta window into the darkness, awed by its depth, its completeness.

They say writing a novel is like driving in the dark:  You don’t need to know where you’re going, just follow the headlights and they’ll take somewhere interesting.  We followed this novel-writing-trick for miles of darkness until we stop at a solitary black and white signpost sticking vertically out of our planet.

Pat reaches back behind my seat and produces an enormous flashlight.

“’Twas a Garda Superintendent above in Dublin, a neighbor of a cousin a mine, gave me this,” he says, clicking the switch, filling the Fiesta with light and crazy shadows.  “‘Pat,’ says he, ‘don’t be goin’ round the darkness a the countryside without a good torch.  ‘Tisn’t safe.’”

Huffing and puffing, he rolls down his window and points the searchlight up at the black and white sign.

“Bally…puckin’…glass!” he snorts, shaking his head.  “Sure Gerty on’y went to Ballyglass for small things.  ‘Twas Castlebar she done her shoppin’ in.  Maybe ‘tis close to here.”

He grinds the car back into gear, and we lurch back into darkness.  But not for long, a lone streetlight and a Smithwicks sign, a Guinness sign, and a Harp sign lure us over to the side of the road.

The Squealing Pig Pub.

“Sure, … we kennit pass here without goin’ in an’ saying hallo to Babs,” Pat says, killing the engine.  “If we kept goin’, they’d be talkin’ about us like we were gone odd.”

He turns the headlights off and on, off and on again, and finally off for good.

We stand out, and I follow as Pat’s thick silhouette in his greatcoat and porkpie hat ambles toward the Squealing Pig’s dim lighting, the loose chips of the road crunching under our shoes. 

Pat yanks the door open and leans half his torso in, the other half hanging on the doorframe.  I see the brim of the porkpie hat turn and look around the room.

“We’ll go in so,” he says to no one, or to me.

Inside the barroom is completely empty, not even a barman.  Noisily, we drag stools back from the counter lined with two each, Guinness, Smithwicks and Harp taps, and one Hoffmans tap. 

“Sit up there now,” Pat says, waving his hand at the stools.  “Is there anyone home at-all-at-all-at-all.  I suppose he’s havin’ he’s tea.”

I tap the bar with my hand.   

Pat coughs.

Somewhere a door opens. 

The sound of the News for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing floats out: “… the Minister for Just…tice reee…jects the pris…oner’s demaaands …:” the door closes again.

“Aragh howaye lads,” a jowly-beer-bellied barman appears.  He’s just a few years older than meself, in a bulging striped dress shirt open a few buttons down; a friendly grin on his face.

“What kin I get ye?” he asks, tapping his fingers off the blue and yellow Harp tap.

He grabs a damp cloth from somewhere and starts wiping the counter vigorously.

“I’ll have a Powers an’ whatever this fella wants,” Pat stares at the barman, waving his hand carelessly in my direction.

“I’ll have …,” me stomach is still that bad that a hair-a-the-dog isn’t even an option.  “A Lucozade.”

“Right so,” the barman makes a done-deal face, slides a glass off the shelf below the counter and turns to the whiskey optics.

“Good man,” Pat makes his own done-deal face.  “Ya done what I told ya, an’ stayed away from that bleddy stuff.”

He nods at the beer pumps.

I lie-nod back.

“There ye go now lads,” the barman slides Pat’s whiskey and my Lucozade across the counter to us.

“Will have you some ice in that?” he asks no one and everyone.

“I will not!” Pat retorts, grabbing his glass off the counter and curling it in toward his chest.  “Ice in whiskey?  Where do you think we are?  Below in the bleddy Canaries.”

The barman sighs silently and looks at me. 

I shake my head.

He starts to turn and go, but stops when Pat asks:

“Is Babs within?”

Pat looks down into his drink, avoiding the barman eyes.

“Eh, Babs, is it?” the barman asks; now looking at me for help.

Pat’s eyes stay down in his drink, but he continues:

“Tell her Pat’s here.  Pat Jer…dan.”

“Awright so,” the barman huffs off, flicking his big head backwards.

The door opens; Coronation Street’s theme music leaks out; the door closes again; silence.

Pat swirls his whiskey around in the glass.

“A biteen a water is what I need now.  Sure, that ladeen shoulda offered me water and never mind tryin’ ta sell me ice.”

I slide off my stool and grab the water jug from down the counter.   

“Sure, there’s no service left in this country at-all-at-all-at-all; not like what you’d get abroad in Leeds.  T’Englishman knows how to serve you – oh yeah, the best of everything is laid on for you over yonder.”

He takes the jug from me.

His shaking hand rattles the jug against his glass.

He waters his whiskey, takes a sip.

“Whooaaw!” he shakes his head, rolls his eyes.  “They’re still making poteen in this country.  I’ll tell you that, I’ll tell you that.”

“Will I get him, an’ tell him there’s something wrong it?” I slide of the stool again.

“No, no, no, ‘twon’t do a fella no harm.  A little of it twon’t.”

I scratch my head, wondering if I should dispute that.

He takes another a long sip.

“I’ll go an’ see if Babs is home.  That fella’s useless.  Babs’ll tell us how to get down to Gerty.”

He shuffles off, placing the porkpie hat delicately back on his bald head.

The door opens to the sound of Vera Duckworth giving Jack the business.

“Hallo, hallo,” Pat near-yells.

The door closes.

Silence.

I slide off the stool and pace with anxiety around the pub; stopping to examine the framed photos of Ballyglass FC’s 1982 and 1983 teams for familiar faces.  I recognize no one.

Times moves slowly as I pace.

Eventually a snippet of Stan Odgen whining signals Pat’s return.

“Ah, grand people, … grand people,” he says, shaking his head, stopping only to remove his hat, fire down the last of his drink, and replace the hat. 

“We’ll go now, Babs gave me t’directions ta Gerty.”

“Should we bring her something?” I ask, surprising myself.

“Ah no, no, no, we’ll only spend a minute.  I’ll bring her flowers the next time.  When it’s daylight.”

Back in the Fiesta, the engine bawls in agony as we lurch through a U-turn, gravel flying, our own exhaust fumes brushing up over the windshield.

“Now, ‘tis on’y down here a half a mile,” Pat says, surprising me as we head back down the same road we came in on. 

Within seconds we’re back in the complete darkness.

“‘Tis within on the right Babs said.  An’ a course the gate’ll be there,” his glasses rise up along his nose as he squints.  “I’ll put on the big lights, I shoulda done that on the way out, an’ we’d a seen the gate.”

He flips on the high-beams and the hedges on either side of the road light up like a brambly tunnel burrowing into the darkness.

I see the cut-stone wall first. 

As I open my mouth to speak, the Fiesta skids to a stop, gravel flying.

“Here she is, here she is,” Pat says with that broad smile of his that overrules all the desperate things he says about the world we inhabit. 

“Now, I’ll go within an’ say hello to Gerty.  Will you come in?”

He opens the driver’s door.  I stare out the windshield at the cemetery wall, the black wrought iron gate frozen in a half open position. 

As much as my innate curiosity wants to hear what a human being with a lot of life under his belt will say to a long-lost-loved one, my Da-installed decency forces me to say:

“No, no, you go on ahead.  I’ll stay put … an’ watch the car.”

Just who I’d be watching the car against in this dark-desolate spot at eight o’clock of a February Monday night goes uninterrogated.

“I won’t be long,” Pat heaves himself out of the driver’s seat.  “Where’s that bleddy torch of mine?”

He struggles to flip the driver’s seat forward, so I reach around behind my seat and grab his huge flashlight.

He clicks the switch, and a stout beam of light flashes across his face and glasses, creating ghoulish shadow-wells at his eye sockets.

“All right so.  I’ll go an’ say me hallos ta Gerty, the poor ould divil, sure the heart gave out her, an’ her on’y young, seventy-seven, a lot a livin’ left in her, … a lot a liv….”

He’s gone, limping over to the cemetery gate.

I open my door and stand out.

“Are ya comin’?” Pat stops, shining the thick beam of light back at me.

I shield my eyes with my right hand.

“No, no, just getting’ a bit a air.”

“Right so, I won’t be long, … a lot a livin’ left in her, a lot a ….”

I watch him work his heft through the half-closed gateway, the light-beam dancing wildly.

When he’s through, the beam settles like a search light scanning the gravestones.

Jaysys, my anxiety overwhelms me, if he trips in there, we’ll never get home!

I scurry over to the cut-stone wall.

“Are you awright there Pat, do ya know where you’re goin’?” I yell over the wall.

The beam of light doesn’t stop moving.

“Ora, I’m fine, fine, sure I do often come out ta Gerty, but I haven’t ben now for a while.  The strange road an’ t’darkness got me tonight.  She’s just down here on the left.”

I take a few steps back from the wall, allowing myself enough view to keep the beam of light visible.

Above me in the clear sky, a trillion stars sparkle in the pure blackness filling me with a hope that fights my body’s alcohol induced depression.

Here I am, a tiny being in an infinitely large universe, staring through the cold air at light from millions of miles away: What does all this mean?

“Aragh, how are now Gert…,” Pat’s words trail off as I crunch further away across the gravel to let he and Gerty have their privacy.

I lean back against the Fiesta, now blacker than tar in the complete darkness and stare up into space, my earth-shackled mind brawling with infinity.

Lost in Space - Part I

I’m in the passenger seat of Pat’s plum-purple Ford Fiesta watching him shine the beam of a huge flashlight out the driver’s window up at a tiny black and white signpost that will, if there’s a God above in the tar black sky, get us the fuck outta this tangle of bog roads.

Pat squints so hard, his glasses riding up his nose, that he starts to look like the fella in the Jade Dragon who sold me a container of pork-fried rice last night around 2:00AM; me ordering with me eyes ‘cause me mouth stopped working about a half hour after the fella in the Beaten Path sold us a Leed Lemonade bottle full of poteen. 

I draw in a deep breath and try to take a long-hard look at meself … inside. 

“Bally…puckin’…glass!” Pat snorts.  “Sure, Gerty on’y went to Ballyglass for small things, ‘twas Castlebar she done her shoppin’ in.  But, as the fella says, … we must be close.”

It probly around seven in the evening now, and all I want is to get home and sleep of the rest of this hangover.  Me stomach is in tatters; either it ‘twas a bad pint or the combined impact of the twelve pints and the poteen on the way home from yesterday’s rugby match below in Creggs.  It’s always a rough Sunday in Creggs – hard on the body, head and stomach.  Them Roscommon boys are solid and tough; they make you pay dear for your win.  

Then a course, the long-twisty road from Creggs to Castlebar is just knotted with, as our driver said, “the best a pubs, a lad kennit drive a past without stoppin’ in for wan … or two.”   

I woke this morning at twenty past ten; pork-fried rice stuck to me cheek; the bus back to Galway gone an hour and twenty minutes ago; and a cracker of a headache, with the stomach totally wiped out.  

I mope around house all morning, trying not to puke, and not thinking ahead enough to be gone when Da bursts in the door at lunch time.

“Good God man!” he blurts with the alarm in his voice that comes with any small upset. “What are you doin’ still here?”

“Sure, I have no lectures today,” I gave him a weak how-could-you-not-know-that look.  “There’s some sort of a teacher…lecturers meeting.”

His eyes harden enough that I figure when he gets back to the Gards barracks, he’ll call below to UCG to make sure I’m lying.

“I forgot to tell ya … Friday,” I slink off, mutter-mumbling about having to “give sumptin ta wan a the lads.”

My stupid lie was kinda-sorta true in one, unmentionable, way; I mean, I haven’t seen the inside of a lecture hall of a Monday morning since …, probly never: Sunday nights around Eyre Square are just too busy for a lad not go drinking.

My recovery plan was to be on the six o’clock Expressway back to Galway, and out from under Da’s prying suspicion; sleep all the way back and see what a Monday night in Eyre Square might have to offer.  

But then, slouching around town, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets, the stomach heaving little packets of bile up into me mouth, I stopped into the church to get distracted by Pat’s unique view of the human world.  

Pat’s nearly like a second father to me.  I mean, he’s everything that Da’s not, except the two of them would make laugh – but for much different reasons. 

With Da everything is caution and reserve: Run low to ground, always be ready to dart under a rock when the world tries to roll over and crush you.  And the world does that to us – all the time.

With Pat, it’s the opposite: The world seems to come to Pat, revolving around him in a flurry of high energy, chaos and confusion.  He misreads people, signs, omens, but by the force of his personality, he always seems to come out on top. 

I worked for Pat as second-junior-assistant-vice-sacristan all through secondary school: Every week flipping back the long-heavy-wooden seats in the church’s naves, to sweep and polish the parquet floor; prepare the cruets of water and wine, the chalice with the host for the altar boys bring out for mass; get the least-giddy-eejit of an altar boy to light the candles without burning the church down; check the Liturgical Calendar, pick out the right color vestments from the deep closet in the sacristy; then lay the gold-thread-embroidered vestments out in the stipulated manner for the priest’s ceremonial robing; Sunday mornings were spent sliding ten pence and five pence pieces across the front porch’s solid wood table, stacking them into pound high silver-columns, for bagging and banking.

Pat, as a man who stands between three worlds, see things differently than your average sinner. 

He’s heard mass often enough that he can say it himself, and betimes he does; providing backup vocals from his mass-time stand at the carved wooden bench in the sacristy; his deep-bass voice intoning so loudly it flows out into the front seats.

With his own priestly uniform of a black soutane and a white surplice on his Friar Tuckian body, he eases families through funerals with his knows-no-boundaries personal touch; he beams mutter-mumbled compliments to brides as he fixes their headband or cinches a dry-mouthed groom’s tie; he shushes oblivious weeks-old infants at Baptisms so that their adoringly-deaf parents can hear the words mouthed blandly by the priest.

Like the boatman on the River Styx, Pat is no longer fully a lay person, but definitely not a seminaried priest.  

Thus, his relationship with the clergy is … complicated.  

He’s their employee; occasional temporary-devotee to a clerical celebrity; the best judge in town of the veracity of priest’s sermonly anecdote; an erudite historian of diocesan appointments – how, when and, most importantly, why; and he holds an empirical professorship in the field of clerical human frailty.  

Daily, he gets buckets of data for his professorship.

Balancing all week on that precarious threshold that separates the only three worlds allowed to a Catholic – heavenly-heaven; cursed-is-the-ground earth; and hellishly-hell – tends make a fella thirsty.

“We’ll go now below, don’t ya see, ta Father Curran’s mother’s wake,” he says in a this-is-the-plan voice to my still-severely-hungover self around ha’past four.  “They have her laid out below in Headford.”

Needing a reason to avoid, at all costs, the sending-you-back-to-Galway-stuffed-full dinner that Da is likely deep-fat-frying back at the house, I do what I do best: I agree, silently.

“We better go so,” Pat shrugs his black wool greatcoat onto his girthy torso, grabs his porkpie hat, and, with hands that constantly tremor, places it gingerly onto his bald head.  “There could be a traffic jam below in Ballinrobe, don’t ya see, two cows, a few sheep and a donkey heading back to the stable, huh?  Just like Bethlehem, huh?  We might stop into Art O’Neil’s for wan on the way home.”

Sitting into the Fiesta, I take a regretful swallow, having somehow forgotten the impact on my nervous system of being Pat’s passenger.  

He revs Henry Ford’s littlest engine until it screams in agony.  

With an entirely unpredictable timing, we lurch into Chapel Street barely avoiding the front wheels of a huge Sandy Geraghty lorry.  

Leaning forward to look in the mirror, we both see Sandy’s driver shaking his head and fist at us.

“Good Jesus, where did that blaggard come from!” Pat shakes his own fist in the mirror at the truck driver.  

 We trundle down Chapel St, the Fiesta and the lorry both in second gear, to a symphony of combustion engine agony.

“Don’t ya see now, ‘tisn’t safe ta drive the roads a Mayo no more, not with them big lorries full a dirt comin’ around every corner.  I’ll be up to the Gard’s barrack about that blaggard tomorrow.  Get his number, what is it at-all-at-all-at-all; DIS 7 … what’s the rest of it.”

First, I feign shortsightedness, then I give in, kinda-sorta, and write the digits down in the wrong order on the back of an old ESB bill that Pat yanks from the pile of paper jammed between the front seats. 

With a running monologue on the generally inferior driving habits of Castlebar-barians, we alternately scream and jerk along Main Street, down Castle Street, swooping up to the chestnut tree lined Mall.  After a no-stop left onto Spenser Street, we hit Station Road with enough revs to make third, or thirtieth, gear.  Finally, as we summit the hump-backed railway bridge, the rev counter gets a breather, as Pat shifts up and we’re launched for Ballinrobe.

“Sure, this country ruined, don’t ya see, … ruined,” he shakes his head slowly as we pass the turn for the Rugby Club – at the memory of which my stomach issues another bilious delivery.  

“‘A great little island,’ they do say to me when I’m abroad in Leeds with Mick and his friends.   Don’t ya know, out for a meal, a nice bit of roast beef or lamb above in …, in…, in wan a them fancy places.  An’ t’Englishman, Cyril or Cecil was it, sipping a glass a sherry, like a woman would, God-forgive-me, but why wouldn’t he have a real bleddy drink?  An’ says he to me, says Cecil: ‘A great little island ya have over there Pat.’  Don’t ya see – oh, no, no, no, no.” 

To my hangover-anxiety’s extreme anguish, he turns to stare at me, lifts his left hand off the steering wheel and wags his thick-trembling forefinger over and back slowly

“This country is ruined, ruined.  Now they had a story in the Inda…pendent t’other day, some blaggard ray…, rape, … he raped a woman on the side of a city street.  In Dublin a course.  Yeah, some poor girleen going home late wan night from work, an’ this blaggard come runnin’ out of a dark alley, an’ he pulls the skirt and the knic…, t’underwear, don’t ya see, offa her.  An’ he rapes her right there in the street.”

He hits the steering wheel so hard my body tightens involuntarily.

“The baaastard should be bate within an inch of his life!” he car-yells.  “‘N then I’d bring him into court, I don’t care if he’s black n’ blue all over.  Within in the court, I’d sentence him to a flogging.  We should brin’ that back; oh, t’English weren’t wrong about that.  Nathin’ but a loincloth on, …. ‘n I’d baaate him to within an inch of his life for a second time.  Then he can go an’ rot within in Mountjoy for the rest of his miserable life.”

He wipes the back of his hand over the sheen of sweat built up on his forehead.   

“Sure, that poor girleen, she’ll never be the same.  Ah no, no, no, ‘tis terrible what this ‘great little island’ lets them away with.  The paper said they went an’ let the baaastard off with five years, because of ‘mitigating family circumstances;’ I’d show him mitigatin’!”

He lifts his right hand off the steering wheel and shakes his fist at the criminal element of Ireland lurking behind the stonewalls and hedgerows in the Mayo darkness.

“Oh, if I was the Minister for Injustices, I’d …, them bleddy baaastards,” he car-yells, opening his mouth wide, teeth showing, “I’d flay them to within an inch of their lives – the shaggin’ lot of them!

He shakes his head so vigorously the Fiesta starts to drift across where the white line would be on a bigger road.

“Then, let ‘the defendant’s counsel,’” he does a creditable imitation of a Dublin 4 shithead accent, “complain as much he likes.  Bleddy shaggers in sheep’s wigs, an’ them driving their Jags out to the Golf Club for lunch.  What about the poor girleen from Revenue?  That’s where she worked don’t ya see, the poor divileen.  I’m sure she’s a fine girl, but don’t ya see, in that bleddy Revenue office, an’ I’m speakin’ from personal experience now.  There’s some others in there are right … baaastards!”

Thus, we traverse thirty miles of the infinite universe, powered along the twisty, dark roads of Mayo and Galway by Pat’s steering-wheel-slapping, indignant anger at a republic slipping inexorably into moral declination.

From the passenger seat I barely hear Pat’s monologue, as the personal anguish of the mother-of-all-hangovers opens for me a glimpse of my infinitely small role in this universe. 

To be continued …

Provisional Wording

I’m standing watching my brother Davey line up the penalty shot to decide the match.  We’ve been up the Green playing soccer for the whole of a steamy August afternoon, stopping only to sprint home for big gulps of cold water outta the kitchen tap; splash your face and hair, get yelled at for wetting the tiled floor; maybe run upstairs for a quick feet wash; then right back to the Green for the next match. 

Now it’s all down to this one penalty.

If he scores the penalty, our team, Marian Row and Riverdale, will beat Saint Bridget’s Crescent to win the Green Cup. 

It’s just a thing we made ourselves to fill up the boring summer holidays weeks.  Some of the lads’ll be going to secondary school when the holiday’s end, but not me, I’m only going into sixth class.  Once the lads go to secondary school, they don’t want to be playing in the Green no more; they want to be up the town, standing at Parsons trying not to get caught staring at girls’ arses.

I didn’t understand why they’d be looking at them, but then last year two teenagers were making fun of us for not knowing what “the ride” was.  I said it ‘twas riding a horse or a donkey down at the beach: I know, ‘cause it costs 20P to go up and down the beach in Kilkee on the back of a brown-shiny mule, that with every step it walks makes a nice warm squish of its saddle against your bollocks.

When they told us what “the ride” was, I didn’t believe them. 

That’s disgusting – sticking your willy in there!

I couldn’t even think about something like that.

Davey does the Liam Brady, hands on hips, staring at the goalie, penalty taking move.  Then he looks down at the ball slowly, then back up at the goal – which is just a few of our jumpers piled as the posts. 

The final of the Green Cup, that came after every team played each other twice, ended in a 17-17 draw.  Now it’s down to penalties – just like the World Cup. 

When we knew it was going to penalties, all the lads were trying to sneak the jumpers in closer together to make it easier for the goalies.  I like that cause I’m a goalie; not cause I’m good at it, it’s just that I’m worser out the field.  Me feet don’t do what I tell them.  I can trip fellas pretty good.  Sometimes I get away with it, cause I do try get me foot on the ball real quick, as if it was a fair tackle. 

The lads say I’m no good at soccer, but that I’m too thick to let anyone get apast me.  They put me in goals, so the match isn’t stopped all the time for fights.  That’s fine with me; goalies can do anything they want once the ball comes into the box.

Davey, stalking around a lot the way the professional players on the Match of the Day do, raising up his shoulders to takes a deep-I’m-about-to-take-a-penalty breath.

I can’t watch.

My stomach starts to go, telling me I’m scared. 

Not scared that he’ll miss: I don’t actually care who wins.  It’s just a stupid game that went on for so long and had so much cheating that you couldn’t say who really won. 

But I’m scared that something terrible is going to happen next.

Me stomach is always going like that.

A knock on the door; too much silence in the house; the principal sticking his head into the classroom; Da’s face when he walks into the house from work – everything makes me stomach go.

I turn away and stare at the graffiti on the wall that holds Baynes’ Hill from falling out onto Pound Road.

“NO EXTRADITION” – it says, painted in white on the pebble-dashed wall, the paint kinda-sorta dripping off each letter from where the paintbrush was too wet.

Them words showed up on the wall one morning a few months ago, but it’s only now, trying to stop me stomach from going that I ever bothered wondering what EXTRADITION meant.

And who painted it?

And why?

I mean I knew it had to have something to do with the IRA, ‘cause everything that’s not regular has to do with them, except maybe the odd thing the Travellers do.  But the Travellers usually do funny things, kinda-sorta funny-smart things that make the Settled people – that’s what they call us that live in houses – all tut-tut and sigh loudly.  Like the time the council gave them a house, and they ripped out the doors, cabinets, windowsills and burned the lot in the fireplace.  Then they washed their feet in the toilet bowl and filled the bathtub full of shite.

The IRA aren’t funny at all.  Da says, they’d put a bullet in your head as soon as they’d look at ya.  That’s why the Gards got an Uzi submachine gun sent down from Dublin.  Da does bring it home sometimes.  It’s fierce cool in its little briefcase that everything fits into just perfect.  We even get to take it apart and clean it, but we’re never allowed to touch the bullets.  Da keeps the clip full of bullets in the inside pocket of his blazer, where he keeps important stuff, like his black leather wallet.

“Sure if you weren’t careful with that bleddy thing, you could riddle half a Marian Row,” he twist-nods his head fast – his hair, Brylcreemed back hard and black, seeming to slice through the kitchen air, as he stands over us, supervising us cleaning of the submachine.

I try to figure out what EXTRADITION means.  The ‘extra’ part is easy, it’s the ‘dition’ I can’t figure out at-all-at-all-at-all.

It’s something to with prisoners.  I know that ‘cause on the news they’ll say so-and-so “originally from the Falls Road, Belfast, is being held on suspicion of membership in the Provisional IRA and weapons offences, while the British Government is seeking to have the suspect EXTRADITED.”

Maybe that means they want to come down and beat the shite of him for a few hours like they do to Catholics up in the Castlereagh RUC station?

That would be a good thing to stop.

These Troubles are everywhere now.  It’s funny that they just call them “Troubles;” not like Travellers-funny, but stupid-grown-ups-funny.

I mean there’s so many people getting shot, bombs going off, riots everywhere, and when you go near the Border, there’s heaps of soldiers, their faces blackened, hiding behind sandbags, pointing rifles and machine guns at your head.  And there’s so many IRA prisoners that they put them all together in Portlaoise Prison.  That was a bad idea, ‘cause last year, the IRA kinda-sorta took over Portlaoise the night of Saint Patrick’s Day.  They made the lights go off in the whole town and set a few fires so the Gards and the Fire Brigade would be too busy.  Then they drove a big lorry in the door of the prison.  The prison guards and the regular Irish Army, not the Irish Republican Army – it does get awful confusing – stopped anyone from escaping.

Still, with all these armies and guns and everything, it’s more like the “Troubles” is a war, and the sort of things Travellers do is ‘trouble.’ Like the time a Traveller ran into Donegan’s food shop and yanked one of them lovely looking juicy-brown chickens outta the glass oven that cooks them in a circle.  When the caught a few minutes later him and took what was left of the chicken back from him, he said: “Ya’ll have to wait for t’other half ‘til I shite it out!”  

But the Dublin crowd don’t care about Travellers, maybe they don’t have none up there.  It’s only the IRA they’re always on about, or, as the fella on the News, with all the cotton wool in his mouth to stop him from talking normal, calls them: “The Pro…vision…al IRA.”

What does Provisional mean?

Are they in favor of seeing better?

Now no one calls the IRA the IRA anymore; they all call them the Provos – that’s the short of Provisional.

Why do they always be making words us little fellas can’t understand?

An even more stupid one that they do is when a lad starves himself to death, they call it a Hunger Strike?  The first time I heard of a Hunger Strike I thought it meant that people wouldn’t do any more work until they got some food.  I heard it when Michael Gaughan from below in Ballina died in a prison in England.  And even then, it was a bigger lie, ‘cause he didn’t die from starvation, he died when they stuck a feeding tube down his throat.  Ten prison guards held him down on the bed, stretching his neck back over the frame so they could get the tube down inside him.  But they were too rough, and somewhere on his inside they cut him wide open.

“Now them prison guards should be prosecuted, just like Gaughan was himself,” Da said, slapping his hand off the arm of his tubular armchair, and us all sitting watching on the Nine O’Olock News – me waiting for the riots to come on.  “There’s no way ten fellas holding wan fella, an’ doing him that much harm can be legal.  I don’t care how many English barristers they can stack up in a courtroom against one good man telling the truth.  It’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it!”

Da’s all about prosecuting people when they do something wrong.

I do get prosecuted mesell a lot, for pissing on the toilet seat; for when I find where the biscuits are hidden and eat too many of them; and for fighting up the Green – that’s a hanging offense.

But at least prosecuted is an easy word to understand: Do something wrong – get hurt.

The other crowd that love confusing words are the priests.  The old people say “ishn’t it great now that Mass isn’t in Latin no more,” but sure above in the church of a Sunday morning, you wouldn’t know the half of the words the priest does be saying.  Even regular prayers are confusing: “Forgive us oh Lord our trespasses, and those that trespass against us.” 

Why would them above in Heaven be worried about trespassing?  Sure, that’s only going somewhere you shouldn’t go, like into some farmer’s field that has a big “NO TRESPASSING” sign on the gate.

And what if you don’t have a field for people to trespass in?  People in town don’t fields, so how can anyone trespass against us?

Maybe trespassing against us is if there’s a bull in the “NO TRESPASSING” field, and he runs up and tramples you to death?  You know like, how his hooves’d be trespassing through your body.

I never say anything about how the mass and prayers are all stupid-confusing to Da or to the priests; it’s too dangerous. 

See, one day Da was complaining about how people up the North could be killing one another over religion.

“Sure lookit,” he says, waving his hand hard and slow in the way that he really means something.  “Even if there is isn’t any God, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just lived the way Jesus said we should!”

No God?

How could there be no God?  Sure, we’re only here to be doing what He says so He can open the gate and let all the Catholics trot into heaven.

Course when you start to think about that, it kinda-sorta doesn’t make sense.  It’d be like working so hard in school you get the best results of everyone, but then there’s just nothing to do with your great results. 

Anyways, you can’t say any no God stuff to Da or the priests, not even in confession; they’d kill you stone dead.

So now I say nothing, but me stomach does go all the time; I’m afraid I’ll be found out and they might burn me to death – like they did to that woman below in France once upon a time.

Davey turns suddenly from his walking around with his hands on his hips, and runs at the ball, hits it hard, flashing it toward the goal.

Immediately he falls to his knees, throws his arms in the air – we won!

“OVER THE POST!” the goalie yells.

“No fucking way!” we all crowd in, faces red, fists clenched.

There’s a push and shove; a fist whacks a face; blood splashes from a nose; everyone jumps in – fists and feet flying.

I charge into the fight from my spot on the side, yelling:

“I’ll fucken EXTRADITE ya!”

Seedtime and Harvest

            “Yeah, I ain’t joking Sarg.  The order’s from the POA’s own account, an’ it literally says: ‘Cut the treason-iss traitor in two,’” the EPA soldier pushes his thick glasses further up his nose, strokes his thin goatee.  

            “It’s got one of them spelling mistake as he always makes,” he nods, purses his lips in a practiced manner, looks up across the desks at the Sergeant. “Did you know that the first one, the orange-ish one, that they had to get rid of for …, well you know and all.  Anyways, he useta spell like that too.  Dad says that’s how President’s write to show they’re like real people, not liberals an’ perfessors.”

            “It’s God as does that,” the Sergeant shakes her head, her cheeks and chins quivering.  “Y’all oughta knows by now, that He don’t trust human words, don’t have no respec’ for ‘em.  Y’all builds yer house on rock by listenin’ to our Lord’s words.  It’s all in t’Bible, Private Belanger – if an’ ye’re a lookin’ fer salvation.”

            “Yeah, yeah,” Belanger says, leaning back to his computer, tapping the keys.  “He’s mad too, listen to this: ‘Videographic evidence to be provided to the office of the President of ‘Merica.’”

            “My, oh my,” she breaths out heavily, runs a pudgy hand through her regulation short, brown hair.  “Well, t’wages a sin is death, so’s I image this poor sinner’s a gonna git paid too-day.”

The Sergeant’s hands whiten as she strains to raise her bulk out of the chair.  Once standing, she uses the face-to-face metal desks to prop herself up, and scuffing her black, orthopedic shoes across the bare concrete floor of the loading dock, she starts to work her way around to look at her subordinate’s computer screen. 

“I never did hear no order like that afore, least n’ all not in my’s five years a here.” 

“I guess this Con G822 is an extremely treasonous traitor.  I mean this is from the Generalissimo’s official account … .”

“Don’t be a usin’ that word,” the Sergeant snaps. “It’s agin reg’lations!”

She speeds up her scuffing, rounds Belanger’s desk, her index finger pointing accusingly at his face.  

“On Wednesday, January 30, 2030, the Pres’dent writ a order forbiddin’ people as a callin’ him that word.  I ‘member that date too well, ‘cause an’ it was the day afore my little ‘un final …,” she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, “gave in ta the Crona-virus.”

She turns her gaze up into the iron structure of the loading dock ceiling. 

“An’ I hopes in Heaven they knows, if only he coulda stayed long enough ta talk, then he for sure woulda died in our Lord, like an’ all the Mashe family ben a doin’ since mamma’s mamma’s mamma foun’ Christ.”

She purses her lips, eyes unfocused, distant.  

“An’, … an’ Belanger,” she breaths in hard, her focus returning, arm raising, index finger re-aimed at her subordinate’s face.  “That’s the secondest time this week, I heard y’all a usin’ the ‘G’ word; once a more, an’ I’m a gonna have to write ya up – reg’lations.”

“Ok, ok, ok, Sarg,” Belanger tips his chair back on two legs, throws his gangling arms up behind his head, almost hitting the Sergeant’s red-shirted torso, as she shuffles into his space.  “Dad says, … well he used to say before it was illegal, that that name creates fear, and fear is what we need to root out the rest a them liberals.  Dad likes to say, ‘a little fear goes a long way in ‘Merica.’  He says that’s the Gen … President’s main philosophy.  And he ought to know – I mena he’s met the President, right?”

“I dunno,” the Sergeant answers, leaning on the desk, breathing in heavily.  “I don’t be a truckin’ with no phil …, phil…oss…sophie like an’ all as you Belangers be a wastin’ yer times on.  I lives by faith, not by sight, jus’ as the Bible a tells me ta do.  But let me tell y’all, the Safety Major in Palm Beach, who sees the Pres’dent alls the time, says the  Pres’dent thinks that word makes him sound like he’s a dick…tator, an’ not the God appointed leader of ours country.”

Belanger slams his chair back to the floor, pushes his palms down along the front of his shirt, lurches toward his computer screen.

“Wait’ll you see,” he breathes out, clenching and unclenching his teeth.  “This traitor’s probably a perfessor, or an abortionist, or a librarian – dad says they’re the worst, think they know so much more than regular ‘Mericans.  We all went to school too you know.  Heck, I went to Trinity School back in NYC, … when that was legal.”

“What…evers,” she leans heavily on his desk.  “This sinner’s gotta done sumpten real-real bad for the Pres’dent ta write a order like that.  Cuttin’ a corpse in two aint nuthin’ we wuz never ordered ta do afore.”

“Well, we had to shave that body one time, remember?” Belanger sits back again, arms easing up behind his head, eyes softening.  “And photograph it too.  It was some chic… woman that First Lady number four thought was having an affair with the President?  Dad says you shouldn’t get killed for someone just thinking you’re having an affair.  I mean, she had to be eliminated anyway, ‘cause it turned it out she was a lesbo-terrorist, but he says you should be tried and killed for the crime you committed, not the one … .”

“Belanger!” the Sergeant snaps, her nostrils flaring.  “Let’s a deal with t’problems we do gots, an’ not the ones y’all an’ yer pappy is burnin’ brain oil ‘magining.  Does we even have tools for cuttin’ a body in two?  Can’t believe I’m a askin’ such a question.”

“Sure, we still have the chainsaw I requisitioned for the time we had to cut that NFL’s player’s feet off to get him into the incinerator.”

“A chainsaw!  Well I’d a never thunk we’d come to cuttin’ up a Temple a the Holy Spirit with chainsaws – even an’ if the sinners aint a usin’ them Temples proper,” the Sergeant breathes out loud, shaking her head.  “But orders is orders.  I don’t remembers that guy, what’d y’all say he done?  N…F… what?”

She rubs her eye sockets with the balls of her hands.  

“It must have been back when you were quarantined.  See, this guy was with the South Florida Dolphins, the pro football team.”

The Sergeant looks blurry eyed blankly back at Belanger.

“You really should take a break from reading the Bible and watch a game some time:  They play twice a week, year-round, Wednesdays and Saturdays, taking Lord-day off.  It sure is violent, and them darkies is the most violent; course they don’t last long ‘cause of injuries and such.  But it’s a ton of fun to see them going after one another.”

“The Bible’s a ton of fun too Belanger; thinking ‘bout me ups in Heaven, with my little fellar, an’ maybe my ex too; y’all can get back together up thare you know.  The good book says ta ‘set yer mind on things above,” she casts her eyes up at the loading dock ceiling, “an’ not on earthly things.  Anyhows, all they is a doin’ on TV is givin’ ya bad news, an’ tryin’ ta sell ya stuff they thinks the bad news’ll scare ya inta buyin’.” 

She leans forward, her hands pushing flat against the desk, the skin whitening.  

“Make that screen big the ways y’all do for them photas a hop hippers.”

Belanger’s shoulders rock up and down, one hand holding his nose, the other reaching forward, his fingers splaying the screen wide.

“I done forgot my glasses – agin,” she leans in closer to his screen.  “I don’t know whats a goin’ on, but I can’t hardly see no more, nor remember nuthin’ neither.”

“You know,” Belanger leans his chair back again, arms rising behind his head.  “South Florida hasn’t hardly won a game, except for beating the Illinois Bears – three times in a row – since that idiot got himself eliminated for saying ‘Separate But Equal’ was wrong.  And him living in one of them special compounds the NFL’s got for darkies. ‘A return to a dark past,’ he says.  But he is a darkie, or at least he was before I burned his corpse down to ashes; so, wasn’t he just going back to his own past?”

Belanger laughs loudly, his whole body rocking.  

“Thing is, they do all look the same when I’m shoveling out the ashes, man, woman, darkie, white, lesbo, homo.  No matter: Ashes is ashes.”

The Sergeant leans further forward, her fingers bright-whitening as she peers closely at his computer screen.

“Dad says, that when we was finished with needing them darkies to build this country, they should of all have just gone back home,” Belanger rocks his chair back and forward on two legs.  “And now, with the President’s offer of free ships to Africa, there’s nothing stopping them, except those stoopid countries refusing to let them in.  Things aint good over there in the ‘dark continent,’” he unclasps his hands from behind his head, and makes a quotation mark sign, then re-clasps them.  “Dad saw on the See-cureWeb how they got some new virus over there that killed two million in a month.  I mean four weeks to kill two million – that’s ten times the number of rebels still holding out in the remains of New York City.  If only we could get that virus in there and eliminate all of them in just one month!” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the Sergeant shakes her cheeks and chins, and gives up trying to read the computer screen.  “A guy with a pappy as big an’ smart as your’n, should run for Florida District Council.  Ya all would git ya enough hits on MeTube as for the Party ta endorse ya.  Then y’all’d be livin’ high on the hog in one their pertected manshuns, not worryin’ ‘bout no poor old ‘nvironmental Pertection Agency soldiers down here in West PB; an’ us gittin’ orders now ta cut bodies in two.”

“No, the Party aint my thing.  I’m just a good ‘Merican, committed to my country.  Committed to rooting the last a them liberals out of here,” Belanger flaps his elbows behind his head, his eyes darting around the room.  “You know what’s weird, but I don’t even mind the blacks so much as the liberals.  I mean, the blacks we just want them gone – right?  But we’re stuck with them, living in those Separate But Equal towns, which, cause they don’t take care of them, are just piles of moldy old buildings with roofs caving in, no electricity, water, nothing.  You can kinda understand it with a young black guy.  If he doesn’t make it to the NFL, then he’s kinda got no choice but to end up bombing an’ killing.  But my question is: What is it that’s driving those white, liberal fucks for them to ….”

“That’s it Belanger, I’m a writin’ ye up!” 

She tries to lift her hand to slam it down on the desktop, but the weight of her torso prevents any sudden movements.  

“You know the Pres’dent is agin language like that bein’ used in a ‘Merican Facility.  An’ me, as a Christian mom, ‘r a widow-mom, … whatevers: It’s a sin for me ta hear them words.”

Now she’s erect enough to raise her hand and slap it down.

“Ok!”

“Yes’m,” Belanger whips his hands from behind his head, drags his chair back up to the desk, starts typing wildly on the keyboard, his eyes roving erratically all around the loading dock’s bare cinderblock walls.  “I’ll remember that.  For sure I will Sarg, I’m awful sorry, it’s just my … .”

He trails off into silence, disturbed only by his rapid tapping on the keyboard.

            “Oooo…kay,” the Sergeant breaths out loud.  “I don’t wanna hear no more of that now, y’all a hearing me?”

            “Yes mam,” Belanger clips, sitting erect in front of the computer, eyes still darting around the loading dock.

            “What time’s the corpse a coming down?”

            “Eh, eh,” his eyes return to the computer screen, he deletes the gibberish he’s typed into a cell in the Traitor Disposal Database.  “There is no time given, but he normally does the shootings just before lunch.  Dad says he heard someone at the bar in the Club say that the eliminations help the President’s digestion.  He’s down at WH Too, right?  I heard choppers flying over last night?  And there was gunfire this morning, probably him practicing.”

            “I couldn’t tell ya, even if an’ I knowed: Reg’lations,” she scuffs her way back to her desk, not turning to look at him. 

            “I guess you’re right … again … sarg,” Belanger purses his lips.  “Loose lips, sink ships, right?”

            He sucks in air fast and loud.

            “But I mean, I don’t even know why they keep White House One, heh?  That place aint hardly safe, what with so many darkies and all them liberals from the old commie dictatorship still up in the Mid Atlantic sector.  The other thing that I don’t understand is what do we need two Washingtons for?  You know there’s another one, or used to be anyway, I think it’s still there, somewhere out by where they nuked California, right at the beginning of the war.  Supposedly it was beautiful, the other Washington that is, not California: That was a scary place, all liberals and darkies, and mountain lions, and rattle snakes.  Can you believe they let things like that live with regular people?  But the other Washington was all mountains an’ rivers an’ fields, hardly no cities as needed shutting down.  I think we should get rid of the darkie-liberal Washington, just nuke it.  Dad said they were going to nuke Chicago, to eliminate all the rebels there, but they were afraid Lake ‘Merica would get too full of nukes, I guess they’re bad for you, even after the explosion, so they wouldn’t be able to use it for shipping.  And he says we need the shipping bad, what with the liberals blowing up all the railway tracks and hacking air traffic control all the time.”

            “Y’all an’ yer pappy be mighty busy reorg’nizin’ ‘Merica yet?” the Sergeant sighs, flopping into her chair.  “An’ silly me thought that all was t’President an’ t’Supreme Council’s job.” 

            “Just thinking Sarg, it aint a crime for a young man to think, is it?”

            “I honest dunno no more if a thinking’s good ‘r not.  But I do knows that Proverbs says; ‘the tongue has the power a life an’ death, an’ them as loves it, will fer sure reap its fruit.’”

            “Huh?” Belanger frowns so hard, his glasses move down his nose.

            She stares at him, breathes out, shakes her head, and pushes her face up close to the computer screen.

“Can’t see nuthin’ with n’ out my glasses,” she complains; slumps back in her chair; her torso ballooning her red shirt.  “So probly, it’ll be round’n bout one, by the time the corpse a gits here?  I’m still not a sure how we all git it a cut in two.  What else does it say thare.”

            “So here’s the whole order Sarg,” Belanger sits upright, draws in a deep breath.  “‘Con G822, to be eliminated, October 7, 2031, as a treason-iss traitor, pursuant to investigations of the Committee for ‘Merican Safety.  EPA to cut the body in two.  Videographic evidence to be provided to the Office of the President of ‘Merica, forthwith.’  That means, fast; like he aint messing round on this one.”

“Well, it’s strange fer sure.  I mean how’d we all a cut him in two?  An’ why take a vid-dao of it?” the Sergeant tries to fold her arms, but gives up and lays them on the desktop.  “We musta done a few hunderd, maybe a thousand traitors since the first Assumption to Power back in twen’y five.  I mean it was hard at first, but then when y’all heard how bad they wuz … the things Safety a said them people done!”

She shakes her head.

“An’ fer sure it was much slower under the one Without God, but maybe that wuz ‘cause the devil jus’ twisted he’s mind so bad, an’ he a ended up all lazy an’ greedy, an’ jealous, eatin’ all days ever’day, an’ them nakid women parties over in WH Too.  An’ … an’ then he’s mistresses gittin’ secret ‘bortions.  That was sinful, … so sinful.”

She shakes her head, breathing out heavily, runs the back of her hand over her forehead.  

“Did breakfast ever comes? My tummy’s a tellin’ me it’s gotta be at leas’ oh nine hunderd by now.”

            “I thought I just heard the Mississippi truck pull up out back.”

            He scrapes his chair back across the floor; walk-marches over to the loading dock door, executing sharp rights and lefts; pulls back the vision slot; peers out; then hits the red button to unlock the door.

Outside, the morning is hot, humid, the air thick with mosquitos.  

The Sergeant pushes her face up close to her computer screen, her eyebrows furrowed, forehead dampened with a sheen of sweat.  

Belanger grabs an aerosol can of Don’t Bug Me hung from a string screwed to the door frame, cracks the door open, and sprays the can out through the crack.

            “You dope!” the Sergeant shrieks, struggling to stand up, metal chair-legs dragging hard against the concrete floor.  “Y’all know them devil’s agents a comin’ in up top n’ down low, while yer a sprayin’ t’middle,” 

            Belanger doesn’t react, instead he steps into the haze of Don’t Bug Me, grabs the white paper bag, and ducks back inside, slamming the door closed, whacking the red button with palm of his hand.

            “There’s like tens a thousands of ‘em in here now,” she continues, panic in her voice.  

She stands by the desk; thrusting her bulk toward any sign of movement in the air; clapping her hands wildly.

            “I swear to the good Lord, if an’ I die from Nile virus, my moms a movin’ inta yer pappy’s ‘partment in PB.  Where else she’d a go?  We’d a lose the EPA ‘partment with me gones.”

            She yanks open a desk drawer, pulls out a pocket-book sized can of Don’t Bug Me, and starts spraying.

            “Hey, hey, hey!” Belanger almost yells.  “That’s poison, it’ll get on the food.”

            “The Pres’dent wouldn’t a be a sellin’ no bug spray, if an’ it done us no harm.  Anyhows, I don’t care, I’d a prefer ta die a poison than disease.  If Crona an’ West Niles didn’t happen to good folks, I’d a say they was new plagues, like outta t’Bible.”

She pouts, but stops spraying, her gaze drifting off into the loading dock’s high ceiling.

            “What’d you get?” Belanger says his face half in the bag of food.  “Bacon, egg and cheese?”

            “Yep, but two of ‘ems, on plain donuts, right?  An’ withs jelly?”

Belanger hands her the sandwiches and a tall, electric-purple drink.  For himself, he pulls out an iced coffee, condensation bubbling on the clear plastic.

“I ben a eatin’ this sandwich for thurty-three years, since I wuz like … three,” she peels back the paper.  “Truth is, I couldn’t a start my day, wouldn’t be able ta do my job right, if an’ I didn’t have a good breakfast like momma useta make.  Even when dad tooks off, an’ we was a livin’ in grandma’s leaky old doublewide, we’d all be a sittin’ thare at the little blue table, an’ the roof a droopin’ down on momma an’ grandma’s heads, I was too little for an’ it ta bother me, an’ us a eatin’ this vury same sandwich.”

The Sergeant sinks her teeth into the plain donuts. 

Belanger march-walks to his chair, stops, swivels, sits straight­-backed and takes a regulated first sip of his iced coffee.

            “Hey Sarg,” he says, the straw barely out of his mouth, “did you see on News ’Merica, how they caught some guy, like an old perfessor, I mean he wasn’t old, but he had been a perfessor when that was legal, before the Assumption,” Belanger leans towards his screen, taps the keyboard.  “Anyway, they caught him in a bombed-out apartment building with a bunch of books – old ones, even an illegal copy of the old, incorrect, Constitution.  It was somewhere real backwards, Boston or Baltimore or Buffalo, one a them stoopid places.  Anyways, he held off Safety for a few hours.  He had a gun – an old AR!  Could use it too.  I guess he was ex-military, he fought back in one of them liberals wars in Afghanaa… Afghanawhogivesashit, but Safety blas… .”

            “That’s it Belanger!” she slams her keyboard.  “I am filin’ a religion complaint, right now.  It’s a sin agin my Christian faith ta have ta work with someones as keeps swearin’ an’ cuss… .”

            “I’m so sorry Sarg,” he jumps to his feet, scraping his chair loudly.  “Look, I’m only twenty-two, dad says I just need to keep a clean sheet, and he’ll get me into Safety.  See, I didn’t hardly sleep a wink last night, my meds are all off, and now this cutting in two thing’s got me all stressed.  It’s just old habits from growing up in a city. I’m in a support group and everything.  I’m working the problem, believe me, dad’s got me on it.”

            She grabs her sandwich, chomps into it, her eyes blazing, mounds of jelly forming at either end of her lips, as she glares at him.  

            He tries to keep eye contact, but his eyes can’t stop roving.

            “Well, it aints mys fault, yer family was doofus enough,” she stops to inhale through her purple-food filled mouth, “as to live in a city. If an’ it wasn’t for the Pres’dent declarin’ them all liberal-traitor-swamps, then maybe t’Belangers’d still be livin’ thare.”

            She chews hard; a sheen of sweat rising on her face; takes a long, squelchy sip of her purple drink.

            Belanger stands still, his face pointed in her direction, but his eyes roving over the desks, the floor, the block walls.

            “Com’ on sarg, I prom…ise you, I’m on this,” he bows his head slightly, forces his eyes to settle on hers.  “We’ll get this traitor cut in two, and you won’t have to do nothing, only put your name on the form that says we completed yet another order for the President.”

            She chews and stares; her jaws moving in a slow circular motion; takes another long sip; but before she’s even removed the straw from her lips, her right index finger is aimed at Belanger’s face.

            “I’m a tellin’ ya kid, y’all aint Safety material,” she opens her mouth to breath, exposing a mash of purple stained bread, meat-product and jelly.  “My ex, he done like three months with ‘em.  Cuttin’ a stiff in two aint nuthin’ compared as to what theys gotta do.  There’s kids y’all gotta … you know … lot a times them liberals, specially perfessors an’ such, them have a lot a little ‘uns.”

            She stares at him, her jaws grinding the food.

“Well, they gotta goes too, don’t they?” she shakes her chins and cheeks.  “The Pres’dent a calls it ‘the rats nest phen…, phenom …’ thing, right?” 

Her eyes never leave his.  

“It aint that easy, is all I’m a sayin’.”

            “I’m ready,” Belanger swells his chest, shoulders back, arms tight by his side.  “Whatever it takes to keep ‘Merica safe.”

            “Hmmph,” she snorts and swallows noisily.  “Plus, I think they don’t take no ones from a city.  I mean, what with Safety’s air-oh-plane’s a pourin’ God’s sulfur an’ fire all over cities, peoples a comin’ outta thare gotta be pretty mess… .”

She moves to point her index finger at her head, then switches to lifting up her drink. 

“There might even be one a them secret reg’lations agin city folks a joinin’ Safety – jus’ sayin’.”

She stares out over the top of her cup at him; electric-purple liquid shooting up the plastic straw.  

Blindly, Belanger wraps a foot around a chair leg and drags it back toward him.  Sitting, he tucks himself into the desk, pushes his glasses up his nose, and peers at the computer screen.

The room is silent, other than the sound of the Sergeant eating, and the crinkle of paper as he opens his bag of food, then pushes it aside.

“Ok,” she drains her purple drink with a vacuuming sound.  “The Pres’dent’s order is for us ta cut this traitor in two – right?  So Private First Class Belanger, tell me how y’all plan on ‘chievin’ that?”

“Well,” he sits back in his chair, starts to lift his hands up behind his head, but stops when he sees the stern look on her face.

“One way would be to cut off the feet, just below the knees, the bone is thinner there.  Like I did for the NFL stiff,” he looks earnestly at her.  

She circulates her tongue between her gums and lips, bulging out the loose flesh, as she pursues fugitive food.

“I mean that would be strictly following the order.”

“Really?  Wouldn’t y’all be cuttin’ it in three?  I mean two legs, an’ the leftovers?”

“Strictly speaking, yes; but I can’t imagine the President would have a problem with more than two parts.  And it is a more efficient way to do the cutting.  I mean I had the NFL guy apart in, … like ten minutes, other than the hours of clean up.”

“I don’t a like it.  Pres’dent’s too smart for us to be a cuttin’ sumpten in three, when he said two, just ‘cause an’ it’s easier.  Y’all think ‘Merica’ got great by peoples doin’ thangs the easy way – heh?”

She shakes her cheeks and chins but stops to wipe the back of her hand across her mouth, catching the jelly smears.

“How abouts,” she starts, but stops to lick the back of her hand.  “We cut it right across the belly?  It’s only guts n’ stuff in there, be like cuttin’ melted cheese – wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, that could work,” Belanger takes a deep breath, raises his eyebrows.  “I mean, that could get messy, with the guts flowing everywhere, bits of them flying off the blade.  That chainsaw moves fast.  And the spine’s in there somewhere too.  I think that might be harder to cut than a leg bone.”

“Awright city genius; what’s yer big idea, ‘n it’s gotta add up ag…zactly ta two pieces?”

Belanger forces his chin down and out to the right, the skin on his face stretching so far, his glasses twitching on his nose.

“How … about we cut off the head, that adds up to … .”

“That’s decah … decap … decapitalization, aint it.  The Pres’dent’s order didn’t say nuthin’ ‘bout that, an’ he knows that ‘n all.  Back in the beginnin’, somebody done that ta one o’ them New York newspaper fellers; an’ the Pres’dent now, he was outta the army then I thinks, he wuz jus’ a wasting he’s time in that stoopid old Congress, but he didn’t like the cuttin’ heads off thing at … all.  Called it barbar-aric, like as them filthy Muslim terrorists a do.  No, we aint decapitalizing this guy, no way, no how.  That aint t’order.”

“For sure it’s not written in the order, but it does end up with two parts, and the chainsaw could do it, no problem.  I’d just come in from the bac … .

“Nah, they’re a looking for a vid-dao.  The Pres’dent could get mad, he’s got a temper y’all know, if an’ he sees a decap…, one of them head cuttin’ offs, an’ he’s  aspectin’ to see a vid-dao of a body in two big parts.  Now as I recall it, the Safety Major over in PB did tol’ me a story ‘bout one time that he had ta take a vid-dao of he’s guys draggin’ a traitor round the block a few times behinds a pickup.  It was some real bad spy, they’all a caught her a sendin’ army plans an’ photas ta Brazil, or China, or one of thems enemy countries.  Anyhows, t’Major submitted the vid-dao, per t’order; an’ he’s boss’s boss tol’ he’s boss, who tol’ him, that they’all showed that vid-dao one Saturday night when they had a bunch a Saudis over for one a them Unity Banquets.”

“Why does the President like the sand-rats so much - heh?  Dad says we should just invade and take all the oi … ,” he stops ‘cause the Sergeant’s face is twisted into snarl, as she tries to rise up out of her chair using one arm, the other arm aimed at him, index finger thrusting at his face.

“Ye’re all done Belanger, ya can forget ‘bout Safety.  I don’t care who yer pappy’s neighbors be.  Y’all aint a even goin’ to last with t’EPA.  The South Ah-rabs is our friends, maybe ours onliest real friends on this here planet, an’ them a taken such good care a the Holy Land for us n’ all.  An’ here y’all is, a EPA soldier, in a ‘Merican Facility, calling them names as only a city kid uses.”

She gives up attempting to stand, flops back into her chair, her torso flooding the space between the chair’s arms.

“I’m a gonna get Form one oh-oh seven a up here.  I’m a goin’ straight for firin’ this time, if an’ I can see anythin’ without ma gla… .”

A loud pounding on the door silences her.  

She flicks her eyes from the computer screen to the door, and back to Belanger.

The pounding continues like a regular drumbeat; the noise reverberating in the high volume of the loading dock.

Belanger jumps up; chair scraping back; hands closed into fists; eyes staring at the door.

“There are no other deliveries today, is there Sarg?” he turns to her, his forehead furrowed.

“Y’all wuz t’one on t’computer, only the cuttin’ in two a one, right?  Maybe they all had a party last night – made some more?”

“We need to get a camera for this door.  What if that’s some crazed librarian out there, looking to kill all of us working to keep ‘Merica safe?”

“Jus’ answer the door.  I ben here like five years an’ nuthin’ but stiffs come through that door, an’ one bomb, but that was a fake delivery.”

“See!” Belanger’s torso curves in on itself, his shoulders hunching forward.  “They’re out there, but Safety’s too soft on them.  I’d wipe out the goddam lot of them.”

“Belanger!”

The pounding on the doors gets louder, quicker.

“I’m a telling you for the final-final-est time, the Florida EPA General’s a reverend minister, an’ he don’t ‘preciate no one a takin’ Christ the Redeemer’s name in vain.”

“Go ahead an’ do what you got to do,” Belanger nods fiercely at her, his face taut.  “While I’m following your die-rect order to open the door and let terrorist abortioning perfessors overrun this ‘Merican Facility.”

He stomps over to the door; peers through the slot; whacks the red button; and whips the door open.

A human, in a bloodied jumpsuit, its face so wet-blooded the skin-tone can’t be made out, is push-stumbled into the room at rifle point.

Behind him swaggers a Kevlar suited and face-masked soldier.

“Here, … this traitor’s yours,” the soldier’s deep voice says, hooking his foot easefully around the jumpsuit leg, and pushing the prisoner forward so it falls face forward onto the floor.  

“AAAAHHH!” the prisoner screams, trying to writhe in pain, but the tight chain manacling it from feet to hands to neck, prevents any movement.  

The prisoner tries to turn its face to breath, daubing the floor with a bloody skid-mark.

“’An’ parently y’all gotta cut the dope two,” the soldier barks, waving a sheet of paper at Belanger’s face.  “An’ … they’all wants a vidao of the cuttin’ sent right aways ta the big house.  Needs it fer a berthday party as is happenin’ tonite up thare for Emp-poorer Poot’n.”

The Sergeant’s face blanches.  She clenches her teeth, and tries to spring from her chair, nudges forward, but gives up.

“Takes that pris’ner outta here with y’all,” she yells, aiming her pudgy index finger at the soldier’s Kevlar facemask.  “We’all don’t got nuthins’ ta do with living folks ‘ere; we on’y burns up dead bodies.”

The soldier’s shoulders and neck arch slightly as he turns his facemask towards the Sergeant.  

“Go on now,” she huffs up enough energy to stand.  “Git ‘im … it outta here.”

“Hah,” the soldier scoff-laughs, spittle flying out the mouth opening of his facemask.  “That’s yourn’s problem now.”

He turns and leaves, reaching his hand behind him to slam the door shut.

The Sergeant stares at the door, then flicks her eyes to Belanger, who’s staring down at the prisoner.  

She fast-scuffs out from behind her desk, leans over slightly to peer down at the prisoner, then back to Belanger.  He remains standing by the door, straight-backed, his eyes roving wildly from the prisoner’s blooded body, all over the room and back to the prisoner.

“Belanger!” she raises her voice sharply, glaring at her subordinate.

His eyes keep roving around the room and back to the prisoner. 

“What in the name of our Creator n’ Pertector we all gonna do now?”

Both sets of eyes settle on the prisoner trying to writhe.