Journeying Through the Heart Land

I’m standing at the side of the Milltown Road in Tuam, with my thumb dangling toward the oncoming traffic – stoned out of my brain.

Next to me, sitting on his duffel bag, is my friend, college roommate, and drinking partner – stoned out of his brain.

It’s a Friday winter’s evening; around six, could be seven too, or later; already dark for hours; and all sorts of foggy. Thick pea-soup fog, so thick the Ballygaddy Road roundabout, thirty yards away, is barely visible from our regular hitching stand outside the TV shop. Through the fog of the fog and the fog of the pot, the cones of light from car headlights dance and dissipate; then before you realize it, you’re blinded, and they’re gone!

Must remember to keep the thumb held out all time.

We’re hitching home from college in Galway to Castlebar for the weekend –a short fifty miles, generally hitched in a couple of hours; if you’ve got your head screwed down tight.

My plan, as with most of my college weekend plans, pivots around pints. Step one is to get good and drunk Friday night – I’ve made a solid down payment on this sub-paragraph of the plan, with a poorly rolled, too much hashish, joint: Then Saturday is tamer; work in a hotel bar until two-ish Sunday morning; stuffing a few pints down at the end of the shift: Wake late on Sunday, grumpily refuse a roast beef dinner, so that in the afternoon, I can participate in a kinda-sorta inter-town warfare, labelled as the Connacht Junior Rugby League. No one’s fooled by the labelling: This is full on war. Each match being a fight to the death, in which, as the old line goes, “you need to be prepared to die for your town, or get your opposite number to die for his town.” Then a few pints after the rugby batt… match; an agitated nap, bundled up against the window of the bus back to Galway; more pints in the Skeff, relaying heroic feats (getting more heroic with each pint) executed on the rugby battle-field. Then the busiest part of the week, the weekend, is all done: Back to college, doing hardly nothing at-all-at-all-at-all.

Our first lift coming outta Galway, from the Moneenageisha traffic light, all the way the Milltown Road, was a from a pharmaceutical salesman – an … interesting fella.

He was heading to Ballinrobe, but rather than going there by the direct route, he was taking an extremely roundabout way, basically taking two sides of a right-angled triangle, rather than drive along the hypotenuse – see, I did learn something during the week.

“It’s all about safety, safety, safety. Auto…moh…beel safety, as de Yank’d put it,” he says in his thick Dublin accent. “I wouldn’t go down dat Baa…linn…robe road outta Galway, if you paid me a t’ousand pound. Not for a grand, not for a G, I wouldn’t. Deadly!”

He hit the steering wheel with the small of his hand.

“It’s deadly, dange…err…us dat road is, a killer, a total killer. I tell, I’d rather drive tru de Bronx, I would. Dat’s de God’s honest truth. Fort Apache’d safer dan dat road.”

I’m in the back seat, still trying to click the seatbelt in place – to keep me from floating up and hitting my head off the roof of the car. In the passenger seat my drinking-travelling companion, his eyes glazed over, is staring hard at the driver, his face settling into a look of stoned-incredulity.

We barrel along the luxuriously wide, straight, and apparently safe, Galway-Tuam road at seventy miles an hour.

The driver Dub-drones on in a relentless monologue; distributing the news – as seen through the lens of a travelling salesman – of the world, or at least Ireland, sprinkled with curious references to America, as if that little piece of land had been incorporated as the thirty third county of Ireland.

“… and so ya see, I have a friend, now he done a few year in de College of Sturgeons, below in Stephen’s Green. A bit like Quincy M…D, do ye’s know dat fella off de telly? Wid de big nose?”

He doesn’t wait long enough for an answer.

“Yeah, dis frien’ of mine, he probly done a solid tree or four years in dere, with de cream of de country; rich an’ tick, an’ dem learning de doctoring loike. But, he never finished, no pint really! Ya do get a certain point, an’ ye’s knows everytin’ anyways – roight?” he spins all the way around, still doing seventy, to check that we both definitively agree that finishing your schooling to be a doctor is, in fact, an utter waste of time.

I nod, a bit too vigorously, and wonder if that nod has somehow made me a member of the cult of Any-Bullshit-That-Comes-Out-My-Mouth-Is-True. It’s a big cult, with, as time has taught us, world-wide membership.

“So, now, with all dat medicinal knowledge within in his head, dis lad, he’s got regular job now. He’s a security man at de Lilac Shopping Center, in town – he was bit fond of de gargle.”

He lifts his left hand off the steering wheel, and knocks back an invisible pint.

“Ya know how dat can derail de best laid plans. But, he kep’ de medicinal knowledge in de back of he’s head, an’ so now, on de weekends, he does do a bit a plastic surgery – on de side loike. Yeah, very afford…able too, he is. Me sister got a bit of a nip an’ tuck on de eye skin, ya knows de, … eh, … anyways, somewhere round de eyes. An’ I’m thinkin’ of sendin’ de missus down to him; see if he could get dat arse of hers back into a pair a Wranglers again – I useta like dat, I did.”

He finally stops for a breath, taps the steering wheel with his hand, shakes his head.

There’s an odd silence in what had been a voice-filled car.

We keep barreling along.

“See,” he revs up again. “’Tis like anyting in dis world, if ya sit down an’ study it, it comes easy enough. You know, all ye’s do is open up de skin, take out a little of de…, I suppose it’s flesh is it?”

He turns to see our reactions. I hold up my hands in complete innocence of any knowledge of what resides under human skin.

“And ‘tis actually stitching it back up where all de skill comes in. Sure, me ma could have done it, if on’y she knewed dere was a shilling in it. You have to be very patient, and slow, and careful with de stitching. He does it all dere in de back bedroom, above in he’s house in Blanchers’town. See, he’s so cheap, cuz you don’t need de half of de stuff dey have in dem hospitals. All dem beeping n’ blinking machines! Sure, dey’re only in de room so’s dey can drive up yer bill; ya don’t need de half of dem, he tol’ me. Sure, dey’d rob, dem ‘ospitals would, if you let ‘em, dat is. Sure, I’m tellin’ him; tis cancer, ya know, de cigarettes an’ de sunshine, dat’s what he should be getting into – dats where dere’s big dollars!”

He pulls to a sudden stop, fifty yards down the road from where we’re standing now.

“Here ya are now lads – Chew-em; de biggest little town in de west. Are ye’s sure ye’s don’t want to come on ta Baa…linn…robe?” he says, loathing the loss of an audience. “I just have de one stop dere, an’ den I’m heading back to Dublin, back to de big city. You’re welcome to go dere too, if an’ you’d like dat. ‘Tis a great city, sure ya couldn’t beat de pubs in Dublin!”

We get out.

“Jaysus, what a fucken freak?” I say, but I don’t retell all the lines he just said. That’s what I usually do to remember them, to store them up to be told another time, over pints somewhere, to get a few guffaws, a sign that I contributed, that I matter.

I don’t retell his lines, ‘cause with pot, talking, even inside my head, is the first thing for me to go.

It’s a new thing to us, pot that is. We, inevitably, discovered it in the ‘opium dens’ of Galway’s student underworld; though it turns out the ‘opium dens’ are just filthy kitchens, in moldy, rented flats. In fairness, in these ‘opium dens,’ you’re much more likely to come across a Fanta bottle full of poteen, nestled in amongst dishes not washed since 1921, or a crate of Harp liberated by a drunken shoulder charge to a pub’s backyard storage shed, or, once, a keg of cider, serendipitously liberated from a careless delivery to the College Bar.

But it’s the mid-1980s and the availability of pot has expanded from the, likely cleaner, kitchens of farmhouses restored by scruffy-smelly-back-to-zee-land, German hippies, and their, never-left-the-land-we-just-want-your-marijuana, Irish hangers-on, and into the towns filled with regular Irish wasters.

Initially, the economics of pot seemed to work out well: £10 for a little nut of hashish that produced enough silent glee for several evenings. But, to get the full benefit, you need to be out and about, gaining the observances that are real dividend of smoking pot. For us, out and about meant pinting in pubs, ending up in those filthy kitchens. Still, somehow you saw a lot more when you were high, everything slowed down to get observed, inspected, examined – but sadly, not usually stored in memory.

The fog, the real fog, that is, must’ve helped that evening, ‘cause the memories stayed in my brain, albeit in distributed fragments.

Through that real fog, a Jaguar emerges, picking up speed, coming out of the roundabout, clicking down a gear as it starts into the hill. It passes us fast-slow; a man and woman in the front seat: He’s in a tuxedo, thick-dark moustache, frowning; she’s in a fur coat, blond hair, smiling.

About thirty yards away, the Jag pulls to a fast-no-indicator-stop – almost lost in the fog again.

The passenger door opens. The woman stands out, with a foggy-evening-loud-click of a metal heel. As she stands fully upright, her black fur coat eases down over her tights. She takes a few steps to the back of the car – two clicks and a drag of a metal heel. One leg is stiff.

“Come on lads!” she waves us toward the car. “Sure, we were nearly past ye, before we knew it ‘twas ye.”

Then I recognize the voice, the gait – it’s a neighbor from Castlebar. A good person.

Safely ensconced in the back seat of the Jag, I’m having a hard time keeping up with the conversation. We speed along the winding road, swooping through foggy Milltown; edging along slowly behind a blue-shite-spattered Massey-Ferguson tractor, the brightly lit pubs of Ballindine glowing in the foggy darkness; then the tractor driver pulls in for a pint, and off we zoom.

I’m in and out of the conversation – mostly out.

Miles of blurry darkness. Then we’re nudging along in the traffic on James Street, Claremorris. A Gard, thumbs hooked on his uniformed chest, stalks along the footpath, eyeing us, from out under his peaked hat, with Gard-like suspicion.

There must give a class in that look up in Templemore: Garda staring 101.

Breaking free of the traffic, we lurch through the gears, and speed past the Sisters of No-Mercy Convent.

In the Jag, there’s talk of the burden of attending Rugby Club Dress Dances, and Mitchel’s GAA club do’s, and the Song Contest; all that dressing up, all that expensive drink; a bit of ould chicken hiding out under a mountain of mashed potatoe.

The townland of Brize appears and disappears with a flash of the Beaten Path’s neon sign.

Then, for reasons not registering with me, we pull up, with a gravel-spitting-stop, in front of a pub in Balla.

I look around a cue.

Everyone’s making for the doors, so I do too.

Inside, it’s a cozy pub; well lit; a fire in the corner; a couple of ‘the lads’ – men in their sixties and above; paunchy-jowly; blue veins snaking across red noses; balding, with wild-bushy, defiant hair growth on the sides of their head; caps magically resting on their barstool-bent knees.

The barman has that barman’s magic motion, where his legs never seem to move, as he rails along the bar, distributing pints.

We order.

Two pints, a brandy, a vodka and Coke.

The barman stares fixedly out over the taps at us as he pulls the Guinness.

Our driver asks about the pub owner. The barman points his thumb at the ceiling; his curiosity sated; he pays us no more heed.

I grab my pint, my first of the weekend, and take a deep draught.

My tongue is still locked by the pot; but my eyes and ears are accepting information.

“But do you know how much it costs ta built a car?” one of ‘the lads’ raises his voice with a sudden burst of energy, sitting up high on his stool. “Do you know that now? Do you know how much?”

He twists his head, almost threateningly at the other ‘lads.’

“Heh? Do you know? I do, ‘cause I read all about it in a maga…zeen the brether posted over from Luton. There was other phot-toe-graphs in there that Father Goalie wouldn’t have liked. You must come up some night, an’ I’ll show them to ye. But let me tell you first what it costs an Englishman, or … an Irishman living in England, to make a car.”

He stares at the ‘lads’ to ensure full listening compliance.

“It costs a bleddy fortune, that’s what it costs!”

He stabs the bar with his index finger.

“By the time you’ve paid the wages a lad would need to live in Luton, and have a few of them,” he lifts his pint of Guinness, “and put the childers below into a God-fearing school. And that doesn’t even take into figurin’ all the bleddy pieces an’ thingamabobs that does go into a car. Sure lookit, a car radio itself would cost ya what a fella’d get for a calf above in the Mart, … or so the brether says anyway. Oh, no, it can’t last.”

He raises his pint, and downs a good quarter of it.

The other ‘lads’ do likewise, watery eyes drifting over pint glasses to the telly, where Tom Selleck is busy stroking his Magnum moustache. He’s halfway into the red Ferrari, smirking as he pulls the piss out of the kinda-sorta Brit. The Brit, his legs sticking skinny outta Bermuda shorts, wanders off, moidered, into the lush Hawaiian estate, stroking his pencil mustache.

Turns out the telly is big on mustache stroking.

No one in the pub, other than our driver, has a mustache, and his hands are busy working a brandy and a cigarette.

“And, do you see then,” the alpha ‘lad’ starts up again, stopping as he raises his hand, wiping the glistening wetness off his lips. “The bleddy Ja…pan…eze, sure they don’t have no wages problem hardly at-all-at-all-at-all. A lad over there never goes out for a pint. Not at all. Sure, all they need to get paid is a bowleen of rice. That’s all.”

He twist-nods his head for emphasis.

Behind him Magnum is making great speed on the highway, his eyes dead ahead, palm trees zipping past the window, but his arm turning the steering wheel like he’s on Atlantic Drive, back in Achill.

“Like that now, give them a bowleen of rice,” he holds up both hands, cupped to signify the size of a small bowl, “and you’ll get a day’s werk out of them. A bowleen of rice. Sure you couldn’t compate with that, at-all-at-all-at-all.”

Behind him Magnum is now halfways out of the red Ferrari, smile-leering at a voluptuous young woman in a red bikini.

Turns out, the telly is big on red, and big breasts.

I take a deep draught of my pint, make glazed-eyed contact with my fellow traveler.

He smiles a stoned-knowing smile.

I wander over to the fire, and take a look out the window.

Balla’s Main Street, uncharacteristically wide for an Irish town, is sparsely lit by streetlights, and devoid of people. Most of the businesses closed and darkened for the evening. The fog is starting to lift, leaving the street drenched in glistening damp.

Reflected in the window, I see the alpha ‘lad’ twist-nod again.

“A bowleen of rice,” he repeats. “The brether says there’s no way you can compate with a bowleen of rice.”

Behind the alpha ‘lad,’ Magnum is reflected in the window: He stands up out of the Ferrari; strokes his mustache.

Behind Magnum’s leering smile, the shot takes in a sundrenched landscape, blue skies, palm trees curving upward, brilliant-white breakers crashing in on a sandy beach.

Behind the reflections on the glass, outside the window, the world is in cold, wet, darkness.