Banana Box Loyalties – Part II

I’m walking with Da and Davey, on our way ta the Connacht Final, past our huge-tall church. Everyone just calls it the Castlebar church, but its real name, that the Bishop gave it, is the Church a the Holy Rosary.  That’s a stoopid way ta name a church. There’s nuthin stoopid about the church itself; it’d be a Mortal Sin ta say anything bad about a church, it’s the way they have the church’s surname backwards. 

They shoulda called it The Holy Rosary Church.  Then everyone’d know for sure, it’s a Catholic church. See, protestants don’t say the rosary atallatall; that’s how they’d know not ta go in there. Sometimes I sorta wish we were protestants, cause they don’t do half the religious stuff we have ta. But, I don’t really want ta be a protestant, cause then I’d have ta kneel down and bow in front a Paisley who Ma says “will, if Wilson lets him, be our Hitler.”

I don’t know who Wilson is, but he must in charge of allowing people ta be fierce bad. 

Still, protestants, even if they are all going down ta hell like some lads say, are lucky cause don’t have ta say the rosary.

Every evening in our house, just when Rockford or McCloud comes on the telly – but not Hawaii Five O cause Da likes Steve McGarrett saying, “book him Danno!” – Da clicks off the circular switch on the telly, making the picture disappear inta a black hole in the middle a the screen, and says:

“Take out yer beads, we’re sayin’ the rosary.”

All a us children is too scared ta show how much we hate the rosary; even the big teenage wans, who are always getting inta trouble, say nothing. Any messing during the rosary means Da gives you a ferocious walloping altogether: “for in…sult…in’ God’s … mud…der!”

On the days after you get a long-slow-rosary walloping, Da does be watching everything you do fierce close, looking for other reasons ta show how evil you are, giving you more wallopings, but just regular wans. 

There isn’t any point in trying ta slow down the rosary – the thing we usually do ta show Ma and Da we’re not happy.  If you delay getting your beads or go slow kneeling down at your chair, it only drags the rosary out longer.  Going ta the toilet just means the rosary doesn’t start until everyone is kneeling, rosary beads ready between your fingers, ready ta start counting Hail Marys. All a these delays just means when Rockford finally comes back on the telly, you don’t understand why Jim is asking the questions he’s asking.

But today we don’t have ta worry about no rosary, nor no wallopings – I don’t think so anyway.

Me and Davey and Da is walking past the Holy Rosary Church ta get all the way ta McHale Park for the Connacht Final. Each a us has our very own bottle a Leed lemonade, bought for seven P each in Hoban’s shop: That’s how special is Connacht Final day. 

I take a huge slug from the Leed bottle. The luvly bubbly-sugary taste a lemonade is still in me mouth as Da gives me a wee-small slap on the back a me head, saying:  

“Would ya look at the let down on that fella … ‘tis lucky tisn’t a bottle a Guinness I got him!”

I’m pretty sure he’s not being cross. He’s just being a da, the way the lads’ das do say funny-confusing things ta us on rainy Saturdays when they find us on the stairs playing the ‘RA ambushing the Brits but we immediately switch ta pretend it’s world war two we’re playing – that the Brits are actually the good wans.

Still, Da can go fierce fast from messing ta getting so mad he’d give you a walloping.

Ta try ta show that I’m fierce I holy and not a messer atallatall, I go ta bless meself cause we’re right in front a the church’s marble holy water font. That’s another way protestants would know not to come inta this church: They don’t believe holy water does magic.

I have ta make sure ta bless meself proper with Da here.  Otherwise, he could start firing questions at me and find out that me and the lads don’t hardly never bless ourselves atallatall coming home from school.

At least not on normal days.

I don’t know if the lads have normal and not-normal days.

Not-normal days is when I wake so early Ma’s not even awake ta go ta eight o’clock mass.  Cause I not allowed ta get up until she does, I lie in bed getting fierce sad about all the sins I done; knowing how every day God is getting angrier and angrier with me for not stopping sinning. 

See, it’s just like how for a few days Da doesn’t get mad at me for saying or doing things in front of him that I kinda know I shouldn’t being doing. Then suddenly he’s walloping me ears so hard the pain won’t stop; his lips so pushed-together-white his words can barely get out ta ask himself out loud: “What sor…ta a brat am … I rear…in’?”

It’s going ta be the same with God. 

Someday, He’s going ta get so angry He’ll cripple me inta a wheelchair.

The lads’ll say they’ll push the wheelchair everywhere, but they won’t.

I’ll be left way behind everyone. 

On not-normal days, me and the lads do be walking home from school like regular, except I’m only pretending ta be sorta-happy. The lads is all cursing out a heap more sins.  I’m fierce tired from trying hard all day not ta sin without the lads noticing.  I don’t what I’d do if they caught me and started making a fun a me for acting all square.

When we get ta the front a the church, I’m full sure that God’s staring down at me, waiting for that wan last sin ta make Him angry enough ta finally cripple me.  Ta make sure the lads don’t know I’m gone all holy again, the way we all got in First Class just before First Confession, I pretend I have ta tie me laces and get down on wan knee ta do a fierce-fast sneaky blessing.

That seems ta be keep God happy enough that he only makes me be sad for a few days but doesn’t get Da-sudden-angry on me, jamming me inta a wheelchair.

After a couple of not-normal days, the heaviness a the God’s-mad-with-me-sadness slips away without me even noticing.  Then just like I can’t stop stealing sweets from Hoban’s shop, I forget about Him being mad with me; I’m even back ta not blessing meself and cursing with the lads as walk past the church. 

But now walking past the church with Da and Davey, I know I have ta do a full holy blessing exactly the way Mammy Handley taught us in Baby Room. Maybe Davey’ll forget ta, and he’ll be the one having ta answer all Da’s fierce fast and cross questions.

I squeeze the green Leed bottle between the skin a me knees, triangle me fingers up in front a me eyes, tips pushed together so hard they whiten. I try ta hold me fingertips together for a few seconds so Da and God can catch up, but doesn’t the glassiness a the bottle slip a bit on the warm-summer-Sunday sweatiness a me knees. 

Instead a slowly dotting me right aiming-finger ta my forehead … ta my chest, … left shoulder … right shoulder … fingertips back together; I have ta do a regular blessing; fierce fast dotting forehead, chest and shoulders.  That way I get ta grab the bottle before it falls and makes a huge sin that would mean a fierce walloping altogether: Breaking glass right in front a the holy water font.

Ta hide the fastness a the blessing, I take another big slug a Leed.

“Take it azy will ya fer God’s sake,” Da says a wee bit cross as he races through his own wan handed four-dots-blessing, “there’s on’y so much in them bottles an’ they hafta git ye all the way home without being thirsty an’ us barely a quarter the way ta McHale Park yet.”

Glad we’re getting past the church without any serious questioning; I run ahead again pretend-soloing a pretend-ball.  This time I only run back halfway ta Da and Davey, then turn and go on ahead again – that way only Davey has ta answer any questions.

I have ta stop at the end a Chapel Street and point me aiming-finger down Linenhall Street.

Da nods, so on I turn ta go down that street. Now that I have the hang a wan handed soloing with a pretend ball I can run a bit faster. I’m so busy wondering if this’ll help me learn how ta solo with both hands and an actual ball, that I nearly bump inta two mentallers. 

Mentallers is ould fellas from Saint Mary’s mental hospital who funny-walk around town all day in baggy, grey suits and too-big, wored out, black shoes. Wan a these two mentallers is a tall, pasty-faced, ould fella who can’t stop smiling; his hands pushed so deep inta his suit jacket pockets, his shoulders get jammed up beside his ears and the dirty, grey suit jacket stretches so tight it’s ready ta rip. The other mentaller is a real skinny fella, not as old as the first wan but with eyes that angrily dart around all the time, his head spinning left-right-left-right, as he fast-folds and unfolds his arms. 

Immediately, I run back, doing no pretend solos, ta walk alongside Da, tightening my grip on the Leed bottle. 

I kinda want ta hold Da’s hand.

But I can’t.

What if wan a the lads’ da drove them past on the way ta the Connacht Final and seen me so a-scared a these mentallers that I’m holding me own Da’s hand? 

They’d all be yelling and pointing at Play Time that I’m a scaredy-cat.

When me and the lads do see these two mentallers coming, we always run across the street. Then, when they’re far enough away that they couldn’t never possibly catch us, even if they could sprint in their too-big black shoes, we yell:

“Jay Da Kai, Jay Da Kai!”

See the skinny wan, with the crazy eyes, walks around saying “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ” – which is kinda a sin, but cause he’s a mentaller maybe it’s not.  The problem for him is that he pronounces it “Jay Da Kai,” so that’s how he got that nickname.

When we yell “Jay Da Kai, Jay Da Kai” from far across the street, the skinny crazy-eyed fella’ll kinda-sorta chase us.  He tries ta run in his too-big shoes, his arms still folded.  But after a few heavy steps, he stops, unfolds his arms, and shakes his bony white fist in the air.

Now us all walking in Da’s slow step…step…step down Linenhall Street, the two mentallers, shoulders bopping over-back-over-back causa their roly-poly way of walking, getting closer and closer, I keep me eyes looking down at the cracks in the footpath.  If the crazy-eyed mentaller recognizes me from the last time we yelled Ja Da Kii at him, he might try ta grab me, or give me a wallop across the head.

Da might get mad with the mentaller if he does something bad now. But later, Da’d start the questions and figure out how me and the lads do be mean ta the mentallers.  Then, all the madness would be aimed at me. It might even be worse than messing during the rosary.

See, teachers and das and mas, even though they wallop us for doing anything that they decide is bad, get fierce mad if we do even the littlest thing mean to wan another. They get even madder, giving ferocious wallopings, if we fight with wan another.

As I stare down at Ja Da Kii and the leany-over mentaller’s too-big shoes weird-walking towards us, I can’t hardly breath.

When they’re right in front a us, Da squeezes a grip onta me shoulder and push-pulls Davey and me inta the doorway a Lilly MacDonalds shop ta make room for the mentallers ta pass.

In the doorway, I grab a hold a Da’s hand and keep me eyes staring at the cement footpath. As their too-big shoes slap off the footpath, I squeeze Da’s hand tight.  Any a the lads’d do the same if they were so close ta two mentallers that they could smell their sweatiness and hear them mumbling out loud ta themselves as the shuffled past.

As soon as they pass, Da steps back inta the footpath like nothing happened.  Still a bit afraid the crazy-eyed fella might jump on me from behind, I start ta turn ta look.

“Leave them poor cratures alone,” Da says, yanking my hand forward so I have ta look where I’m going.

“They awready got a rough enough deal from life.”

Banana Box Loyalties

Me, Davey and Da is in a massive crowd that’s slow-shuffling up ta McHale Park’s pointy metal gates fer ta see Mayo beat Sligo in the Connacht Final. All around us there’s a crush a men in black shoes, dark-Sunday-going-ta-mass-suits, the sort Davey’ll hafta wear next May for his Confirmation, and thick-fingered, windy-red-faced farmers in brownish-greenish pants and sumptin-heavy-in-the-pockets tweed blazers.

Some young fellas, but not us, wave green and red Mayo flags or black and white Sligo flags.  Four Sligo teenagers, with white ribbons tied loosely around black-felt cowboy hats, with writing on the front that says “I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE BEER!” try ta push past us through the crowd.

            “Ye can hoult yer horses now!” a short-fat, Brylcreemed man snaps as he steps his bulging dark-blue-suit inta the gap the I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE BEER lads is trying ta make.

I see this man every Sunday at eleven o’clock Mass on the left side in the third seat back from the altar, kneeling and standing a few seconds later than everyone else.

“Ye’ll wait yer turn ye will, … our money is as bled… as good yours,” the fat-Brylcreemed man curls his lips up ta his nose and nods a rake a times, glancing around at Da and the other slow-shuffling men.

Da’s hand, sweaty from us walking all the way from home with the sun battering down, tightens hard around mine.

I imagine him gritting his teeth, getting angry at the Sligo teenagers. Maybe if they start fighting the fat-Brylcreemed man, he’ll arrest them.  But then we’d have ta go with him ta the Gard’s barracks and miss the Connacht Final.  That’d be terrible cause Mayo haven’t made it this far in a couple a years, not since 1973.

The Sligo teenagers is probly about the same age as me biggest sister Rita who’s just finished her first year in uni below in Limerick. She wouldn’t wear wan a them I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE BEER hats.  Our family don’t have nuthin ta do with beer or pubs; we’re all in the Pioneers Total Abstinence Association.

The Sligo teenagers make kinda-sorta sad-mad faces and stare down at their black slanty heeled shoes, the leather on the toes worn greyish-white from puddles and ball kicking. 

The massive crowd shuffles a few steps toward the gates.

Then wan a the Sligo teenagers dart-stumbles sideways through an opening in the shufflers; he races round the fat-Brylcreemed man’s bulging blue suite. The other two lower their heads and push their way through after him.  The last wan at them, without looking back, lifts up his arm giving everyone the two fingers.

Da snort-laughs.

“YE BLEDDY PUPS!” the fat-Brylcreemed man roars, shaking his pudgy fist at them, “AN’ THE STINK A PINTS OFF YE AT THIS HOUR OF A SUNDAH!”

He sorta reach-leans out trying ta catch a hoult a wan a the teenagers.

“BLEDDY BRATS!” he yells at top a his voice, pushing inta the people in front a him, two big, broad-shouldered farmers.

“YER MOTHERS SHOULD BE ASHAMED A RAISIN’ SCUM THE LIKE A YE!”

The pushed-inta-farmers spin around fast; their eyes all scared-mad like lads in the schoolyard getting ready ta fight.

The bigger a the two farmers raises a long blue-jumpered arm and pushes the fat-Brylcreemed man, making him stagger back.

Da’s hand tightens, not with anger, but ta let us know we’re ok even though a man from the front seats at mass is roaring in a big crowd and making farmers nearly want ta wallop him.

I tighten my other hand around a green bottle with sunny-yellow letters that says Leed Lemonade.

That’s how special Connacht Final Day is: We’re nearly seeing grownups in a fight: Da walked us all the way across Castlebar instead a driving like we always do: And, we got our very own bottles a Leed lemonade.

See, when we left the house after Ma’s Sunday dinner a roast chicken, mushy-watery peas (that I hate!), and mashed potatoes with gravy (that I love), me and Davey was running ahead and back, pertending we’re playing for Mayo.

“Take it azy there now,” Da says, his laugh getting stuck in his nose making his weird snort-laugh sound. “Ye might get brung on as subs.”

He’s only making fun a us.  You have ta be all growed-up and fierce famous at football ta play for Mayo. Even just ta get picked for Castlebar’s Under 12 team you have ta be able ta score a pint or a goal every time you get the ball on the school field at play time.

The onliest time we ever get ta play in the town league is when everyone else thinks the match is called off cause it’s raining so hard. But then, Dony Murphy, who lives at end a our street, Marian Row, knowing he’ll get two players there, pulls up in front a our house.  Dony is a nice da, always saying, “ah, we’ll make footballers a ye yet!”

He knows more about football than anyone else in Castlebar cause he won the Sam Maguire for Kerry, which is where they invented football. But no one can make a footballer outta me, not even someone like Dony’s who famous.

Davey plays soccer for Castlebar Celtic’s Under 12’s, but no one mentions ‘foreign games’ in Dony’s car, cause just a few years ago you usen’t be allowed ta even watch Celtic play if you wanted ta play in the town league.

Every morning me and Ma see Dony at eight o’clock mass. I’m awake so early that Ma makes me go in case I’d wake up me brothers be rooting around in the boy’s room for books or toys. One morning she came home from mass ta fierce fighting and crying. After that, and the walloping everyone got for waking Da, I have ta go with her every morning. Cause we see Dony at mass, when he knocks on our front door, she makes us go no matter how hard the rain is pelting.

But today’s is a luvy sunny Connacht Final Day. Me and Davey is all sweaty from scoring rakes a imaginary points over the Tech’s low creamy coloured walls, when Da stops and says:

“Good God almighty that’s a powerful day altagether,” he dabs his white hanky against his red forehead, careful not ta slather the hanky with Brylcreem, cause Ma’d be mad having ta wash it a rake a times trying ta get out the oily stain.

“Hould on now an’ we’ll cross over here,” he holds out the white hanky ta stop us from running across the road like we usually do ta beat the cars, “an’ we’ll get something ta drink.”

Da’s arms slant out for us ta grab a hoult a his hands.

We don’t want no hand holding.

I want ta say: “We’re not little fellas no more, we’re goin’ inta Fifth and Sixth class in September!”

But I can’t, Da’s the wan as decides when we’re growed up enough for doing stuff.

He sorta run-walks across the street, dragging us along.  He forgets ta let go a our hands when we’re back on the footpath. I want ta pull me hand away so no one see me holding me da’s hand, but I don’t even try cause I can tell Da’s thinking a heap, his forehead all crinkly.

I’m full sure he’s thinking about us getting a drink from the tap across the street from Molloy’s Hardware shop’s big-huge windaws. This tap has lots a water cause it’s right next ta the Town River which is filthy with Bests Stores plastic bags and a shopping cart, yellow and green labels peeling off brown cider bottles.  Still, the council men that make everything work in the town, who Da complains “wouldn’t work ta warm themselves,” somehow make the water in this tap cold and clean enough for drinking.

Walking past Hoban’s shop, Da still holding our hands, he blurts, “Come in here now, them pedlars above in McHale Park’ll rob us blind with their prices.”

We’re so sudden walking inta Hobans, Da holding me hand tight, that I nearly wee-wee me short pants.

See, even though Da always finds out everything we do wrong, no matter how much lies we bury the wrong under, he still doesn’t know this: When me and the lads was about halfway through Fourth Class, we started stealing from Hoban’s shop. 

On a Friday coming back ta school after dinner time, with the shop bursting full a lads spending their money, when wan at the two Brians – there’s old-Brian the father and he calls the son Breean, but Breean calls himself Brian – turns around ta get change from the till, you can grab a pack a Pay Day sweets and jam them down your pocket.  The shop is so packed you can turn around and leave, only taking the Pay Days out when you get on the street.

 Every Friday, after we’re finished our Friday dinner a fish and chips (that I love) or red-fish stew (that I hate), Ma pulls open the drawer under the telly and takes out her big black purse full a coins. She clicks open the purse’s two hugging pieces a silvery metal and hands me and Davey each a five pence with a harp on wan side, the other side is a bull getting ready ta charge.

Everywan in Fourth Class, except Marty the Traveller, gets pocket money on a Friday either after dinner, or when you get home from school, or after tea – that’s the rule.  Marty does get pocket money but at all different times every week; some weeks lots, some none atallatall. 

 Neither old-Brian, nor young-Breean never caught me stealing, but I’m scared that with the two them and Da all tagther now, they’ll start asking questions about why I’m in the shop every Friday dinnertime but never buy no sweets until Saturday morning.

When me and Da and Davey walk inta Hoban’s, Da huffing-and-puffing with the heat, me squeezing in me wee-wee, old-Brian’s boney-red face has that sorta-smile it always has until you start asking him how much different sweets cost. Then he pushes his narrow lips tagether inta a straight line and, shaking his head, snaps:

“Ask Breean about that, …NEXT!” 

Today, old-Brian’s sorta-smile slides off his face as we walk in; his eyes, behind his glasses, already getting NEXT!-cranky; arms folding; chin pointing up.

“Breean!” he says a bit loud and in his cranky voice, all the time staring at Da, “I’ll be in the back, … count…, doin’ that job I mentioned.”

Old-Brian turns, eyes now staring up at the ceiling, arms folded tight and walks all stiff, like how a puppet moves, inta the tiny back room a the shop where they do keep the ice cream in a huge freezer. 

On a Saturday, if there’s only the wan Brian in the shop and we have enough money, we ask for an ice cream sandwich.  Then, while the Brian is in the back using a big watery knife ta cut a slice a ice cream off the HB block for ta sandwich it between two skinny-crispy wafers, we steal a rake a sweets. 

That’s the why now, when me and the lads come in, if old-Brian is by himself, he always yells up the stairs for Breean ta come down and make it two Brians in the shop.  The mammy sometimes comes down, but she doesn’t know the price a any sweets and only watches us, not selling nuthin. 

See the Hoban’s house is built on top a their shop, which is kinda strange and means they don’t have no lawn in front a their house.  On Easter, when other houses stick a yellow and white Vatican flag in their lawn, so the pope knows they love God more than they love Ireland, the Hobans stick a pole out their second floor windaw with a green, white and orange Irish flag.

We don’t have any flags, just a painting in the kitchen above the sacred heart lamp a Jesus pulling his chest open ta show his blood red heart wrapped in fierce sharp black thorns.

With old-Brian puppet-walking off inta the back room, at least I don’t have ta worry about him asking Da why I’m crushing up ta the counter every Friday at dinnertime but never buying nuthin.

Young Breean is usually nice, he sometimes tries ta say jokey things, even if they are just grownups’ boring jokes. With his chin pointing slightly upwards, his mouth, that kinda slants down across his face, tries ta smile but his eyes dart all around: At me – making me even nervouser: At Davey: At the windaw: Out ta the street: Up at the ceiling. 

But he never looks right at Da, who’s all crinkly faced distracted, wan hand fishing down inta his huge pants pockets for his worn, black leather wallet.

“Give me three bottles a …, what sort a minerals d’ye like atallatall?” Da talks fast, like we’re in an awful hurry.

He doesn’t give us a chance ta answer his question, instead he says in his cross voice:

 “Give us three lemonades.”  

He’s not really cross but maybe Breean doesn’t know Da always starts off cross, just in case you done anything wrong.

“Well … mister Farrell, … we have a few sorts a lemonade,” Breean says, eyes still up on the ceiling; his boney-blue-jumpered shoulders rising under a big inhale.

“We have TK red, … TK arange, … an’ Leed lemonade,” Breean continues, still looking at none a us.

Cause the two grownups is kinda-sorta cross with wan another for some reason and so mightn’t find out I broke wan a God’s Commandments, I don’t feel no more that I’m going ta wee-wee me short-pants.

With stealing being such a massive sin, I hafta go ta a different priest every Saturday for confessions.  Each priest makes me promise I won’t steal no more.  When I make that promise, me soul gets all shiny clean, and I’m sure I’ll never do no more stealing.

 Still, when Friday comes and the Pay Day sweets is just there in front a me, with no Brian looking, I always steal.

Da, or even Ma, would give me a ferocious walloping and not let me out ta play for months and months if they found out I was stealing.

I keep waiting for a priest ta look at me like he’s fierce mad that I broke my promise, or for God ta make me sick or blind or a cripple for doing so many mortal sins. 

At school when I don’t do me homework, I get slapped; if I go fighting up the Green, Da’ll give me a walloping; if I talk back ta Ma, she gives a wooden spooning.

Even though God has ta know I’m stealing, nuthin terrible happens.

Stealing, and not getting caught like some eejits do, means that the lads know I’m wan a them, not a scaredy-cat afraid a everything like some fellas and all girls. 

Plus, stealing is a wee bit exciting; somehow it make me feel ticklish between my legs.

“I want Leed,” Davey says.

“Sssssh,” Da snaps, holding his hand out flat like his palm is trying ta cover Davey’s mouth.  

Then, not looking at Breean, Da asks:

“How much is three Leeds?”

“Well, seven P a bottle, … times tree … twenty wan P,” Breean says, nodding as he does the sums; his eyes fast-glancing at Da, Davey and me, before flicking back ta the ceiling.

From the back room I hear the freezer lid slamming closed.

Maybe old-Brian is making us ice creams ta be nice cause Mayo’s gonna ta finally win the Connacht Final, and, I realize, we never before been in Hoban’s shop with Da.

Ma always buys the Irish Press on the way home from mass.  On a Sunday, if she doesn’t want ta wait causa the crowds after half-nine mass, she’ll send me or Davey in ta crush with all the grownups.  Hoban’s is so full then, with all the grownups pushing up against the counter buying boring newspapers, though the papers do have good photographs a British soldiers in their armoured cars and IRA men in balaclavas aiming rifles.

Even though on a Sunday Hoban’s is all pushy-crushy like we make it on a Friday going back after dinner, you could never risk stealing a packet a Pay Day sweets.  The grownups’d somehow see and batter you around the ears; then Brian and Breean’d tell Da or Ma. It would all be so bad: Stealing on a Sunday and everyone knowing. Ma wouldn’t be able ta got inta Hoban’s for months.  The priests’d all know I’d lied ta them as well as committing a heap a mortal sins for breaking my promises by not stopping stealing.

“Give me three Leed lemonades so,” Da says, busying himself with his hand deep diving inta his huge pants pockets for coins. 

I can’t believe it!

Minerals!

We only usually get minerals at wan a the lad’s birthday party or at Christmas Tony McHugh drops off two cases a minerals. My favourite’s Coca Cola cause it’s black and fierce bubbly. 

But now, cause it’s Connacht Final Day, we’re getting our very own bottles a minerals!

“Awright so,” Breean nods, heading inta the back room with no fear a me stealing.

He’s back a few second later, three green Leed Lemonade bottles clinking in his hand. 

Then I hear that luvly sound a mineral bottles getting opened: Snap-hiss … Snap-hiss … Snap-hiss!

Ta be continued …

Saint Patio’s Day

“Yeah, I’m gonna buy an island in Ire…land,” she says, her hair, dyed-Munster-red and piled up high, wobbles as her head spins from me holding her humble dinner to the Cork man straining for whiskey, while from airplane floor wafts the stench of sweaty feet.

“Yeah, the Eye…rish guverment is sellin’ these islands out in the water over there fer like a hundred dollars …?” she holds out her pudgy palms in disbelief. “I guess they’re that cheap cause they’re all deserted off that rocky-cliffy coast, so I’d need a boat, probly a ladder too.”

“I bet they keep all them desserted islands below in Cork,” I say a bit too loudly, looking to drag the Cork man into the conversation.  “The Cork crowd do love their just desserts.”

It works. The Cork man’s long torso straightens up, momentarily forsaking his quest for nerve calming whiskey, as he simultaneously suppresses a smile and a grimace to say:

“Tis islands now that fucken shower is givin’ away, an’ fer a hunderd bucks, but the same bollixes turnt off t’water in me dead mudder’s house over a two hunderd Euro bill.”

 “Yeah, I guess yer guverment wants people like me ta move ta their islands,” she continues, obliviously re-piling her recalcitrant red hair into a heap atop her head as I proffer my computer hoping she’ll retrieve from it her homemade inflight dinner.

“It’s probly a thing ta get college educated people, like me, into yer country,” a frown flashes wrinkles her button nose, “I mean I as good as graduated, when you go to three different colleges, one of them a university, they should just print you off a degree, … right?”

Her frown deepens and it’s hard to fathom if the source of the frown is her unruly hair or the fact that finishing degrees requires that you … you know … finish them.

“An’ quite frankly, I’ve kinda had it with this country,” she plows on, “I been here like fifty years now, since I got born in Salem hospital on July fourth ninety sev… well, as mom says, that’s none of yer bee’s wax.  But I’m feelin’ like our witches, I’ve given this country everything, an’ what has it given me?”

She scrunches up her face, brow furrowing, nose wrinkling, lips pursing until she looks like a sad-angry five-year-old overwhelmed by a world too harsh for five-year-old emotions and now memory-frozen into a fifty-year-old human body.

“Nuthin, zilch, ZIPPO!” she snarls herself into a sad-angry fifty-something woman sitting next to two Irishmen haunted by their own internally frozen children as we all wait for the Friday evening Boston to Denver flight to takeoff.

This scarily-high-coincidence evening started with me in the airplane aisle seat confoundedly staring at the seat webbed pouch in front of me bulging with someone else’s iPad and water bottle.

Why would someone think this is their seat?

Readying myself for some work catchup on the five-hour flight, I slide my laptop from my backpack and glare down at the floor. What’s an Irish-boy-emotionally-frozen-at-eleven, now stuck in the body an Irishman-in-America-for-forty-years to do when there’s a backpack in the place where, paraphrasing the Seven Drunken Nights song, ‘my ould backpack should be?’

“Mine’s seat A, in by the window,” a clear-skinned, ruthlessly-pony-tailed, twenty-something woman’s words clip out of her red-lipsticked-mouth to her, unshaven, unkempt, I’m-a-ski-bum-deal-with-it twenty-something boyfriend.

“But I don’t really care,” she suddenly injects fake relaxation into her voice, “you take the window, I’ll take the middle.”

“Yeah sure, … whatevers,” he drawls, jamming his whole hand into the riot of hair sticking off his head, pursuing an itch to scratch.

Seat A … is next to the window: My narrowed-by-the-slightest stress mind turns over this aeronautical fact, duly creating turbulence. 

Oh bollix!

I immediately shuffle two seats over leaving the residue of my misplaced anger all over the aisle seat. 

At least now there’s an open place where ‘my ould backpack should be!’

I’ve barely taken control of the window seat, my security perimeter not fully established, when a pale, lanky forty-something man sits gingerly into the aisle seat.

“Apologies,” I say, employing the word I use most often. Indeed, I’m practicing for its prolific use should I one day appear in front of Saint Peter.

“I got mixed… my mind wuz,” I stumble over the actual apology.

“Ah no worries atallatall,” he answers in a suspiciously accepting tone.  “I wuz watchin’ ya when I cum outta the toilet, … amazed I wuz at yer confidence boy, it made me check me boardin’ pass twice.”

Oh Jaysys! I’ve been in a seat where this ould Irishman should be! 

“Yes, yes, false confidence,” I offer, “that’s my strong suit.”

His head and shoulders rock as he laughs.

Turns out he’s a Cork man who works in big pharma as a quality control engineer

“Pintin’ out ta people how wrong dey are,” he says with another head bopping laugh. “Natural enough work fer a Cork man!”

He came to the US on a soccer scholarship but realizing he couldn’t make a living on the playing field and after a season of drunken disappointment, switched colleges when he realized he was a better engineer than goalie.

“Aragh, ‘tis awright, a lot a travel, but sure it bates workin’ for a livin’!” he chuckles, his eyes searching the aisle. “Sometimes I can get an ould attendant ta brin’me  a wee nip a Jameson, I do tell ‘em I suffer from take…off anxiety.”

He coughs out a fake laugh.

“De t’erapist does say ‘tis failure ta launch as a pro soccer player, but sure dat’s ancient history now,” his eyes morph to those of a confused youth before he shakes them back to those of a wandering forty-something engineer. “‘Tis de feelin’ a sudden weightlessness dat gets me.”  

He leans back out into the aisle, his head bopping over and back as he tries and fails to make eye contact with the attendants too busy trying to get humans to shed their it’s-all-about-me for just two minutes so the plane can get boarded in an efficient manner.

The Cork man’s head-bopping whiskey quest is interrupted as a short, squat forty-plus-indeterminate-age woman in jeans, a bottle green, knockoff Celtics sweatshirt and a shock of red hair fills the airplane aisle.

She points at the middle seat.

“That’s me,” she laughs a dry non-laugh, “your bad luck!”

She struggles to sling her bulging carry-on bag into the overhead bin. The Cork man dutifully jumps up and helps as her second attempt stalls mid-hoist. Instantly she releases her grip on the bag and only the Cork man’s disdain for his shoulder sockets prevents damage to airplane floor.  She moves on to immediately stumble-lurching into the middle seat, her pink backpack held out in front like a battering ram.

“Phew,” she exhales flopping onto the seat. “I made it!”  

The Cork man looks at her, then at me.

“De Mayo colours,” he nods at the woman’s red hair and green sweatshirt. “I won’t git a word in edgeways now boy.”

“Ok, now I gotta organize myself,” she says to no one, then turns to me.

“Can you hold this?”

She dumps backpack on top of my computer before I get my chance to apologize for existing.

“The ladies ‘re goin’ to be bossin’ me soon to put my backpack away, but I need stuff in there,” she furrows her brow and reaches over to unzip her faded-soiled-pink JanSport backpack.

“Hold it lower,” she says tersely, “poh…lease, that is. Mom’ll find out if I don’t say my pleases an’ thank yous.”

Not without some effort, she unzippers the backpack, roots around inside and extracts a sandwich bag jammed with two crushed Wonder bread sandwiches, the clear plastic bag smeared with yellowish-brown peanut butter and rich-purple grape jelly.

“Haha, dinner!” she exclaims, “I aint payin’ fer their crappy food.”

Next, she extracts a mortally flattened bag of UTZ Sour Cream and Onion chips.

“Ok, food taken care of, I need a …,” she suddenly lurches over to the Cork man, “can you get one a the ladies, I need a Pepsi.  Sodas are free, right?”

“Jaysys I’m tryin’ ta git their attention meself, ‘tis more than a Pepsi I need, I do have awful takeoff anxiety.”

“Oh, I have pills for anxiety,” she says sitting upright, scrunching her face slightly. 

“But I can’t share them, mom says that’s not coo…,” she shakes her head a bunch.  “Bob junior, … he ruined all that, him an’ the Swampscott police, or was it the Saugus cops.  You can’t drink Scotch with Xanax, Bob junior knows that now, course I’m the one as got in trouble fer givin’ him the stoopid pill bottle.”

“All I’m lookin’ fer is wan wee green bottle, that’ll do me fine, I don’t need none a Pfizer’s magic pills, a dram a Irish whiskey does the magic fer me.”

“‘Re you Eye-rish?” she asks, but not waiting for an answer, gushes on: “I’m Eye-rish too, I’m goin’ to Denver fer the Saint Patty’s day parade, I’m marchin’ with the Patio Furniture Troop.” 

She holds out her palms and shakes here red head.

“Get it? Patty…oh, we play Eye-rish tunes usin’ deck chairs, it’s wicked fun, but I hafta practice or my uncle will be mad that I’m outta step,” again her brow furrows.

“I haven’t done it for a while, problem is mom doesn’t have a deck chair like the ones her brother has,” she shakes her head. “They’re really nice old aluminum ones that make a wicked nice sound when you tap them off the street, you don’t mind if I take my boots off, right, I’ll be marchin’ a ton on Sunday an’ I got wet waitin’ fer the Logan Express, an’ I didn’t polish my boots like mom tol’ me to, an’ now they’re wet an’ if get sore feet in the parade she’ll know I didn’t what she said again, an’ on an’ on ‘til she says now I owe her for the flight cause I’m not followin’ directions, so can I take off my boots, pleeeeaase?”

She spins her head over and back from the Cork man to me; red hair wobbling.

“Oh, sure, sure,” my I-don’t-matter-people-pleaser personality says.

“Play on tru, play on tru,” the Cork man says and returns to his pursuit of an attendant’s eye that he hopes will lead to a fluid ounce-and-a-half of hard alcohol.

“Here, gimme that, but hold these … please,” she says, taking the backpack from me, handing me the peanut butter and jelly smeared sandwich bag and chips, as she push-kicks the pink backpack in under the seat in front.

She sighs heavily, fake-fusses with her hair that won’t defy gravity and seemingly forgets about her boot removal plan and her food while I obsess about getting rid of the chips before I get proximity-high-blood-pressure from their 1000% daily sodium content.

“Have you got my Pepsi yet?” she turns to the Cork man still leaning out into the aisle on his quest for Jameson.

From his position angled into the aisle, he turns his Cork eyes to glare at her, but now she’s remembered the boot removal and is unlacing them with a series of sigh-grunts and sharp breaths.

“Workin’ on it,” the Cork man says, keeping up his glare at the side of her head.

“Thank you so much, that’s so nice of you,” she says distractedly tugging off a soggy-scuffed-black leather boot.

Immediately the stench of sweaty feet wafts up from the airplane floor.

My likely never to get fired up computer now acts as a tray for her smeared sandwich bag and chips.

“Ok, I’m ready for the ladies now…,” she exhales, unsheathes the second wet sock, releasing a fresh waft of sweaty feet smell.

Looking around, and apparently not liking the sound of airplane silence, she says:  

“Yeah, I’m gonna buy an island in Ire…land.”

Who Poisoned the Saxophone Section

I’m in full-on mind versus body combat: Legs, lungs, heart all begging for a break, as every pore of my sweat-suited body oozes the fluids I spent all morning sip-hydrating. Yet even this self-made pain is not enough to prevent my consciousness from straying into the full-length of the gym array of sixty-inch-flickering-flat-screen portals into human turmoil.

CNN hosts, with a-stick-up-their-arse anguished eyes, a year into their we-lost-but-I’m-still-paid-a-shitload cycle, dutifully frown as ICE shoot … and shoot … and shoot a prone Alexi Pretti; Fox hosts, with sex-toys-inserted twinkling eyes, a year into their we-won-and-so-I’m-paid-more cycle, flash their trademark no-critical-thinking-here smug smiles in front of a Charlie Kirk photo; On the Food Network a pair of saggy-white forearms spoon five thousand calories into a cake pan; Drake Maye throws touchdown…touchdown…touchdown, the brown ball spiraling oh-so comfortingly into Patriots’ baby-cradling arms; Out of nowhere Estêvão Willian Almeida de Oliveira Gonçalves, or simply Estêvão to soccer fans, Chelsea’s $60M Brazilian player, covers seventy-five yards in the time it takes Wolf Blitzer to form a smile, then blasts the ball past Crystal Palace’s €15M keeper from a seemingly impossible angle. As Estêvão’s teammates clamber upon his bony, eighteen-year-old shoulders, the five thousand calories have browned and risen to deliciousness; “AFFORDABILITY?” flashes in white letters on a royal-blue background; Alex Pretti gets killed… killed … killed.

Trying to avoid new-normal turmoil, I cast my glance beyond the flickering wall of human-insanity and see a small group of men in my own image: Sixtyish, fit but double-chinned, baggy sweatpants, faded tee shirts advertising old Boston teams’ “World Championships” and 10K’s they’ll never again run. They strut around between the black vinyl weight benches and racks of grey dumbbells, casting an occasional secret peek at their bulging-but-sagging biceps, frowning at the reality of turning old and irrelevant.

In the middle of this group moves an old-old guy, maybe as much as eighty-something, his craggy, greyish-white face framed between an arms-sawed-off, black sweatshirt and a raging-red MAGA hat. Though he limp-struts a little slower, frowns a little harder, the energy radiating from his eyes belies these slow-movements, as does the four-inch-wide black lifting belt handwritten across which, in shaky Whiteout is “INTENSITY”. 

Lugging a gallon water bottle filled with a cloudy liquid, he lurches his thick, muscular body over and back between a chest-and-arms-machine and a lifting bench straddled by two fifty-pound dumbbells.

Forcing my eyes down to the black rubber floor, I try to retreat from this instance of humanity; arms and legs push-pulling on the elliptical’s metal limbs, pores oozing sweat as I wrangle my consciousness down the skinny earphone wires into the podcast The Way Out Is In.

“Even Buddhist monks get overwhelmed,” Brother Phap Huu says in the polyglot accent of one who, aged three, moved Vietnam for Canada to join his refugee father, then as a thirteen-year-old moved to France to become a Buddhist monk.

“After all,” he laughs. “Buddhist monks are still human!”

Phap Huu is the Abbot of Plum Village in France, the Buddhist monastery and retreat center established by Thich Nhat Hanh, a monk and peace activist who left war torn Vietnam in 1966 to come to the US to protest the “American war” in his homeland. In the US he met anti-war leaders, including Martin Luther King, and then was denied re-entry to Vietnam for four decades; first by the US-puppet-regime and then by the communists.

Remember the communists?

They were big way-way back, before we had to climb on elliptical machines in sweatsuits “to de-stress,” and when most homes had a foot-and-a half-thick, cathode-ray tube TV, inside of which something hummed a little or a lot depending on the size of your father’s paycheck. 

Communists – whom we were taught to hate and thus labels as commies, reds, pinkos – were big when tube TVs showed News programs that were nonpartisan except when it came to communists. The News sneeringly showed up the “commies” laughable efforts at playing government with their military parades, ridiculous titles, not-so-secret-police kicking in doors, dragging off “counter revolutionaries” in handcuffs, many of whom never survived the detention camps long enough for their stage-managed trial. Yet somehow the communists had vastly superior spy networks. As it turns out beliefs, even perhaps unfounded beliefs, trump money.

Today Phap Huu’s banter with his smug-but-knows-it-and-fights-it, British cohost are having a tough time holding my wandering mind. My eyes glance out the gym’s tall windows to the opening act of a cross-country blizzard that’s forcing this gym to close at 11:00AM, thus compressing into a four-hour window, twelve hours’ worth of high-wear-and-tear de-stressing.

Outside on the busy street, the extremely low temperature makes the snow swirl in particles so tiny that it acts like a frozen fog, obscuring traffic, that nevertheless still whizzes past.

“You have to recognize where different energies come from,” Phap Huu says switching from his forty-something-yet-still-youthful voice to the earnestness of a teacher. “That’s very important, or else you could break!”

Puncturing my consciousness, a cortisol-summoning angry yell forces me to look up.

My eyes dance around and catch jagged human movements next to the chest-and-arms machine: The old-old guy in the INTENSITY belt tries to force his way past a sixtyish, goateed baldy who forms a muscular wall of more-in-control-of-emotions between this yelling octogenarian and a crew-cut, forty-something rippling-with-muscles guy in a black and yellow Bruins tee shirt.   

A few ellipticals over, a heavyset, light-skinned African American woman, slows her machine to a halt; pops out an earbud; furrows her brow; anxiously eyes the trouble.

Cortisol directs my sweaty index finger to tap Phap Huu silent; slide out an earphone; and ready myself for freeze, flight, or fight.

Big-sagging-bicepped sixty-plus-year-old men flood in around the chest-and-arms-machine. The goateed baldy, in a fading navy Patriot’s Super Bowl LIII tee shirt, stands with his right shoulder aimed into INTENSITY’s chest, his head spinning over-back as he holds out his left hand to keep back a forty-something bleached-blond, long haired woman who’s both hands push back on the chest of her husband’s Bruins tee shirt.  Over the wife’s shoulder, her husband’s muscular arm angrily stabs an index finger towards INTENSITY.

The octogenarian’s arm, sagging with fish-belly-grey-white muscles, shoots out his finger, counter-stabbing the air. The bleached blond woman stumbles a half step backward as her husband lunges to counter-counter-air-stab.

The African American woman a few machines away, her face contorting with fear-disgust, pops out the other earbud, and head shaking, stalks out of the gym.

Now the pudgy, don’t-get-high-on-your-own-supply, mid-twenties white guy who greeted me at reception swoops into the scene full of hand-waving nervous energy. Trying to insert himself into the thick-muscled group made up of his parents’ generation, he stalks around the closed circle of big-bicepped arms, his mouth opening and closing a lot, but clearly failing to be heard over the finger-stab-yelling.

All around the gym exercise machines slow to a halt.

The bleached blond woman grasps her husband’s shoulders, and coaxes him, still red-faced-yelling, around. Keeping her hands on his shoulders, she push-marches him off to the other end of the gym.

“Yeah go on, git outta here!” INTENSITY yells over baldy’s thick shoulder.

The gym front desk guy scowls hard, shakes his head rapidly and stalks away – arms swinging with determination.

Slowly, suppressing smiles and shaking heads, the big-bicepped guys drift back to their dumbbells. Baldy looks around anxiously for the Bruins tee shirt to stay gone: Then nodding, wagging his finger a bunch in INTENSITY’s face, he flexes his own considerable muscles before strutting back to his lifting bench, beside which sits a seventy-five-pound dumbbell.

Sliding the earphone back into my ear, I return to Phap Huu whose podcast was recorded in a simple cabin where his lifelong teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, lived in Plum Village near Bordeaux.

“Thigh, which is what we called our teacher, but it’s spelt T…h…a…y, Thay, when he wuz with us,” Phap Huu says with more than a hint of sadness in his tone. “He pointed out that no matter where we are, we have the refuge of deep breathing.”  

Now the gym manager, a mid-thirties, fit looking Hispanic woman arrives in front of INTENSITY preloaded with a hands-on-hips-what-the-fuck! glare.

 She stops the octogenarian mid-shuffle between the weight bench he’s occupying and the chest-and-arms machine he’s also occupying.

“Draw your breath down deep into your stomach,” Phap Huu intones, “hold it for just a few seconds, … then let it go, paying attention as the air exits your body.”

INTENSITY, eyes down to the floor, tries to shuffle around the gym manager who steps into his path, reaching both arms out to stop the older man’s movement.

They remain in this standoff; INTENSITY’s eyes down to the floor; the manager talk-nodding a bunch.

“That’s my refuge when things are going or I should say not going …,” Phap Huu gives a characteristic midsentence laugh, sounding like he’s the thirteen-year-old boy who thirty years ago departed our human world of wanting-lusting-fearing turmoil by entering a Buddhist monastery, “the way I want them to go!”

Back at the chest-and-arms machine, INTENSITY bends at the knees, picks up his gallon jug of cloudy water.

Nod-nod-nodding, the gym manager rests her hand lightly between INTENSITY’s shoulder blades as the old man’s thick torso subsides into a heavy lean onto his walker’s grey metal frame.

The gym manager takes a definitive step forward but immediately has to stop for INTENSITY to fire up his internal boilers. Together they ambulate; the gym manager step-stutter-stepping, while next to her INTENSITY takes half-steps, lifting and dropping his walker. Every few walker-drops, he halts to glare around for a pitying eye.

I turn my gaze back to the flickering screens: Side-by-side smiling photos of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti; a thirty something TV evangelist, in navy dress pants and an open at-the-collar white dress shirt, waves his arms manically, a black-leather-bound bible weighting down his right hand; a steak knife slices meat off the bones of mouth-wateringly barbecued ribs; colorful, sudden-movement ads for cheap processed foods that create systemic diseases compete with soothing, you’ll-get-back-the-life-you-never-had ads for Big Pharma’s expensive cures for those same diseases.

“One of the first things you learn in the monastery is to say the five remembrances lots of times every day, not that we as kids really wanted to hear them in our heads all the time!” Phap Huu’s boyish laugh arrives down the skinny earphone wires from three thousand miles and whole different world view away.

“Thay does this for a good reason,” Phap Huu’s tone slips into teaching mode, heightening my attention.

Outside gusts of wind furiously whirl snow, almost blanching out the traffic that has finally slowed.

INTENSITY halts.

His gallon-jug-filled-hand waves, face snarling as he argues with the manager.

In front of him stands the frame of his temporarily abandoned walker.

“Even as a young man, the remembrance I found hardest,” Phap Huu’s still in teaching mode, “is the one that says: I am of a nature to grow old, … I cannot avoid growing old.”

The manager’s expressionless face absorbs INTENSITY’s outburst until it flags; then she rolls her shoulders, grits her jaw, nods a bunch, and points a finger towards the door.

“Just think about that … I cannot avoid growing old.”

Makes a Body Feel Alone

The instant I screech the heavy black-iron bolt from its floor socket, the tall church door sweeps inward, forcing me to skirt outta the way too fast for my hangover. Tommy, the shopkeeper, Lawless’ shock of bristly white hair shuffles in past me sullen-silent, his red face scowling down at the front porch’s white mosaic tiled floor, in the bulging open the pocket of his saggy, brown-tweed sportscoat is an orange.

“What’s thee meaning of opening thee church tw… enty minutes late?” Michael Egan’s sneering, bulbous face is suddenly so close, I can see the dark-pink skin pores on his forehead, smell the Brylcreem smearing his barely-hair flat to his scalp. I involuntarily inhale, imagining my breath reeks of stale Smithwicks and puked-up-fish-n’chips. 

Egan’s stubby-round body bulges a pinstriped, navy three-piece-suit, an altar-wine-purple tie cinching his fat pink throat, as he huffs and puffs, waiting for an answer that’ll never be recovered from my hangover-addled-brain.  Sensing confused fear, his skin pores press closer-bigger; glasses jammed magnifying-hard against his face; eyes ablaze with the-world-must-do-what-I-demand-anger.

“Fath…her Blake will most cert…tainly hear … all about this!” he growls; intense anger in a voice well trained in intense anger by a lifetime of as an Irish bachelor in England, keeping British Rail trains running on time, before retiring to his birthplace in Castlebar.

My scrambled-by-the-fourth-pint brain – three pints a Smithwicks and I’m a smiley drunk, waking with a sour stomach; four and I’m a wobbly-eyed stumbler, waking with a crushing hungover – immediately jumps into excuse mode.  Not for Egan; no one pays him no heed; he complains about everything to everyone.  But opening the church twenty minutes late is real. Father Blake, the parish priest, could complain to my boss, Pat the sacristan, about people barely getting in for Saturday morning’s eight o’clock mass.

I don’t have time to think as Miss Flynn’s short-stooped frame is a half-step behind Egan; her trademark kind smile on her thin-pale-wrinkly face, that every week greets so many across the Dole Office counter.  Instinctively, I grab the inside porch door, swinging closed behind Egan’s waddle, to hold it open for Miss Flynn.  She unsheathes her rosary beads from a leather purse, and this genuinely holy woman heads for her usual seat just in front of the reddish-brownish-white marble pulpit in the middle of the church – from where every evening at half seven, except Sunday, she leads a group saying the Rosary for Peace up the North. 

The sudden movement of grabbing for the closing door is too much, retching scalding bile up my throat.  

Stomach knotting; hand cupped over mouth; I dart out the gaping church doorway to the relative puking-safety of Chapel Street. 

Stale fish n’ chips burp!

Mouth and nose tasting last night’s fish n’ chips with particular bitterness: One minute I’m swaying home across Market Square; suddenly I’m passing a pound in the chip van window to the sad-eyed, red-haired lady; minutes later a steaming luvly-smelling brown bag comes out the window.  Mouth-burningly I wolf the lot all down, dropping the greasy contents in on top a four pints a Smithwicks.  Ten wobbly minutes later, I volcanically deposit the pound’s worth of food onto long-gone Smiler Murphy’s front lawn.

Now, hand cupping my rebellious bile out, I’m on Chapel Street with the risk of my hangover creating suspicion of underage drinking shooting up as late arrivals fast-walk towards the church door: Lilly McDonald’s squat figure in a beige raincoat, jet black hair, short-rapid-steps up from her newsagents down Tucker Street where we used to buy single cigarettes for 2p; Dr. Caulfield, my dentist, leaning his bald-greying head forward, steps quickly across the street from his car; a black-bereted, hands in navy raincoat pockets, red-faced-straight-backed Brian Hoban, slow-stepping it from his Newtown newsagent, from where, in National School we stole sweets when he turned his back to put coins in the till, nods curtly suspicious as he passes; a skinny-gaunt De La Salle brother, new to the National School and whose name I’ve never heard, walks so fast his black soutane billows behind in his own wind.

Gulping burning-bile down, I scurry over to the side of the church where I can make it back to the sacristy from outside.  Sweat oozing from every pore, I stop for two seconds to sooth my throbbing forehead against the flat cold edge of the side entrance’s eight-foot tall, black wrought iron gate.

Scared whatever priest is saying mass will come across me and know what’s wrong, I jog-walk towards the sacristy.  As I pass Archdeacon Nohilly’s grave, I wonder at the power of this parish priest who made me so afraid as a five-year-old, that even eleven years later my stomach still tightens every time I pass his grave.

Inside the sacristy Father McCarthy is already arms-over-head pulling on the lily-white Alb, the first of the vestments for mass which thankfully, Pat had laid out yesterday after First Friday’s evening mass.  With my jaw moving as I rapidly make and swallow spit to force down the bile, I quickstep to the sacristy bench to get the wine and water cruets filled for the one altar boy who’s shown up.

“The … candles,” the slight altar boy whispers; standing on his tippy-toes, leaning forward; his serious eyes fighting to suppress his joy at getting to do all the altar boy jobs.

“I needa light the candles,” he whispers, nodding toward the altar.

“Yeah, yeah, here,” I grab a taper off the top a the drawers above the sacristy bench, yank open the matches drawer and hand him both.

His eyes widen in sheer delight.

“You light that, I’ll brin’ out t’water an’ wine,” I loud-whisper, distractedly creaking open the sacristy bench’s wooden cabinet door revealing the cruets, two bottles of altar wine and large cardboard box filled with thousands of communion wafers, which is just bread for now as they’ve not yet been transformed during mass into the body of Christ.

I stop for a half-second wondering if, with an empty sacristy during mass, a fistful of bread communion wafers would calm down my bile.

“Don’t forget me chalice,” Father McCarthy says in his singsong voice, “not much of a mass without a chalice!”

He laughs his good-natured laugh that always makes me want to help him as much as I can.

“Sure, sure,” I reassure, leaving the offerings-cabinet, skirting sideways to the middle of the sacristy bench. I unlock the sacristy kinda-sorta tabernacle, made of dark, intricately carved wood, where we keep the chalice. 

I place the chalice in the thin cork mat in front of this kinda-tabernacle; it’s covered already with its paten – a little golden disc for holding the host.  Then I start to gather all the chalice’s bits and pieces: Grabbing the clean white cloth Father McCarthy will use to purify the chalice, slipping it in under the paten. I reach into the back of the tabernacle-shaped cabinet to get the short, but heavy, silver jar filled with as yet un-transformed hosts.  I unscrew the silver lid, place a host on the paten, then cover the paten and host with a square of heavy-stiff cardboard enclosed in white fabric, in the centre of which is a blood-red double crucifix.  Checking what vestments Father McCarthy is pulling on, I finish with a chalice cover of the same colour.

“Come on, come on,” Father McCarthy says, “the wee lad can carry the cruets out with him.”

Father McCarthy is a fierce nice priest, and he always likes to get through things quickly: Mass, confessions, weddings, even funerals. 

“I do luv ta see him come out on t’altar,” Da says, “he’s the best wan below in that Castlebar presbytery for a good, quick mass.”

As I hurry to fill the cruets, the altar boy wanders back in from the altar starry-eyed staring at the flame tipped taper.  I yank the taper from his hand, pushing in its place the water cruet, wave-mumbling at him to fill the cruet from the sacristy sink.  A huffing breath blows out the taper with a smoky, blackening melted wax death.  Flinging the taper onto the bench, I start too fast filling the wine cruet and spill red altar wine all over the glass cruet tray. 

The sweet smell of wine fills the air and I’m not sure if I should try to dab it up from the glass cruet tray, but there’s no time. 

Father McCarthy shoos the altar boy into place, the fully loaded, and wine stained, cruet tray wobble-clinking in the boy’s hurried hands. 

Together they float out onto the altar: Feet unseen beneath their floor-draggingly-long vestments.

It’s only when Father McCarthy’s “Good more…ning,” crackles over the sacristy speaker that I realize I’m sweating hard; panting; ready to puke. 

I dart for the sacristy toilet; flip up its ancient wooden seat; knees collapsing to the tiled floor; head into the white toilet bowl.  

Panic! Is the toilet door locked?  My hangover puking will surely unmask underage drinking.

I force myself up off my knees; gulp down burning bile; fight the never-works-in-a-hurry door bolt.

Barely in time, my knees whack onto the tiles:

HHHUUUUAAAHHHHH!

Belly knots in white-blinding pain, bile scorches up along my throat.

Two sticky-drippy bile pukes: Spit-spit-spit into the shadowy-shimmering water.

HHHUUUUAAAHHHHH!

Doubled in pain, yet somehow forced to stand-stand-stand away the belly pain; hands grab the cold white toilet rim; legs try to straighten; a flash of white-blinding pain!

Knees whack the tiles; hands slip from the shiny white rim; head inside the bowl; immediately whipped back.

Prickly sweat oozing from every pore; heart thumping; head throbbing.

Breath … breath … breath.

Deep long breaths, relax belly muscles.

Finally standing.

Belly fake-knots into retch-retch-retching: Nothing left to empty but pain.

Jumper sleeve wipes standing sweat from brow.

Breath in … breath out … breath in … breath out.

Pull the toilet chain: The sound of water rushing away the evidence of my sin.

Fight the stubborn door bolt; heavy-the-bile-down breaths; back in the sacristy; walls shimmying; closer the altar door!

The door closer’s metallic click signals in a few seconds I’ll be safe from the altar.

“Blessed art Thou, … the Lord God of all creation,” Father McCarthy’s voice crackles out of the sacristy speaker.  “Thru your goodness … we have this wine ta offer, fruit a the vine, work a human hands, it will become our … spiritual drink.”

Head inta the sink; cold water splashing face; deep breaths; eternally-damp sacristy towel mopping forehead … cheeks … lips.

“Let your spirits come upon these gifts …,” Father McCarthy continues, “ta make them holy, so they become for us the body … an’ blood … of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Holy Disharmony - III

Scratchy must like summer holidays as much as we do, cause he never noticed his stick missing.  He was all happy-smiley-jokey at sports days, only getting mad wan time ta wallop-stop two lads from fourth class on the grass, hair-pulling-fighting over who would take the throw-in.  At half-three, our last day of fifth-class done, a big smile on his face, he grabbed his Silk Cuts, his empty of homework leather briefcase and walked out the door.

 A couple of weeks later, one drizzly evening during that grey-darkness right before the sun starts heading off ta shine on Australia, we got brave enough ta get down on our bellies and pull the stick out from under the prefab. The next day we tried to burn it but a damp stick by itself won’t be a fire, so we threw it inta the lake.  It floated but got stuck in amongst the bullrushes and you couldn’t hardly see it unless you knew it was a teacher’s slapping stick.

I worried all the summer holidays that we’d be found out somehow: Maybe some old lady walking her dog up the lake would knock on Scratchy’s door ta say she saw two lads from his class throwing a stick inta the lake.  That’s how mysteries do get solved; old wans walking around being nosey.

On the first day back in school, when we were writing our Summer Holidays essays first in English and then doing them again in Irish, except way less things happened in t’Irish wans, I could tell Scratchy was searching everywhere for his stick; pulling open drawers, lifting piles a paper. Then suddenly he look up fierce fast to see could catch a guilty lad staring. 

The next morning he strolls inta the classroom; sticking outta his leather homework briefcase is his new thick sally rod, with the wood on both ends still white from getting pared be a penknife.

After he gives us back our English and Irish essays, Scratchy chalks up on the blackboard a heap of hard multiplication sums with them decimal things stuck onta them for us ta solve.  While my stomach is getting sick trying to remember what you do with decimals, he sits with his brown slip-on shoes up on his desk, wrapping the ends of the stick in Sellotape. Probly he done that to make it hurt more.  It does hurt bad for slaps.  All sticks hurt for slapping.  Even when Ma’d get fierce mad and slap us with the wooden spoon it hurted.  But this thick sally rod hurts nearly as bad a leather.  A leather hurts the worst of all cause it has the bendiness of a sally rod and hardness of stick slapping down onta the soft palm of your hand. Ta stop lads messing, Ailbe only has ta reach fast inta his black dress like he’s going ta whip out the leather.

There’s just too many sticks in the world ta be stolen to stop all the slapping.

Fergie got failed too by Bart. 

Nearly everyone failed Bart’s audition thing.

Turns out the audition made no difference.

The day after the audtion thing, Ailbe came around taking daily attendance with the huge hardcovered book that has everyone’s name written inta it telling how many days of school you missed.  You have ta say “anseo” if you’re there; then Ailbe makes a correct mark in the book.  If someone is home sick, when Ailbe reads the sick lad’s name, a rake of us will say “as láthair.” If you miss a day you get an “X.”

This day, after he’s done reading names, Ailbe says, sorta like he near forgot, cause it wasn’t that important:

“Oh, an’ who here …,” his bottom teeth slide sideways over and back like he does when he’s about ta get fierce mad, “is joinin’ Fadder O’Malley’s new Choir. We need sixth classers in the choir. This is not the people did so poorly on yesterday, anyone can join this one.  Just give me some hands, I need sixth classers for the Fadder.”

He glares around the classroom, his chin dancing over and back threateningly.

I want ta look over and see if Fergie’s hand is up, but I can tell be Ailbe’s chin moving that he wants ta find a reason to give someone a walloping, so I just raise my hand, not smiling nor nothing but happy inside that we’ll have more choir messing.

Ailbe makes a bunch of extra ticks in his huge book.

Right when he finishes ticking, he says:

“Miss…ter Maughan,” he bends his pointy finger to call Marty out of his desk that’s way in front of everyone else’s so Scratchy can see him not doing his work.

“I didn’t do nathin,” Marty says, his eyes darting around the classroom, looking at Scratchy and any lad that’ll dare catch his eye.

“Maughan, that’s the surest sign of a guilty man,” Ailbe says with a little fake laugh, but his teeth grind together, and he angles his head forward, his piggy-eyes burning inta Marty’s face.

“Come with me, we need to … chat.”

“I didn’t do nathin Brether,” Marty says standing up, “I swear ta God, I didn’t done nath….”

Ailbe raises his hand, the Biro for marking who’s “anseo” or “as láthair” still between his fingers, up over his hair that’s Brylcreemed flat against his pink scalp.  He smashes hand and Biro down inta Marty’s face; hitting him so hard his knees go wobbly and his wallop-reddened cheek has a diagonal white line across it from the Biro.

Ailbe’s whole head, even up under his hair, is Gobstopper red, except for his creamy-white lips stretched tight across his teeth. The Biro’s on the floor, but he doesn’t seem to notice

“Don’t you daaaarrre … swear to our Lord as if you can use His name to cover up your lies,” he grabs Marty’s shirt collar and drags him towards the door.

He remembers his Biro and sorta flings Marty against the closed door, before stooping to pick up the pen, eyes glaring up at Marty all the time.

“Did this good fer nuthin do his homework,” Ailbe snaps at Scratchy, who’s standing behind desk, arms folded.

“He did … not,” Scratchy’s head moves suddenly, then folds and unfolds his arms fast, “but I awready ....”

The madness of Ailbe’s face stops him.

“What is the bleddy pint of allowin’ these …,” Ailbe pushes Marty hard inta the classroom door, then pulls him back, nodding at Scratchy ta open the door.

“These …,” Ailbe grits his teeth, shakes his head a rake a times, “they’re a curse upon the good Catholics of Ireland.”

Marty never came back from Ailbe’s that day: His nearly empty schoolbag that’s just a heavy plastic Dunnes Stores shopping bag like Ma useta use for shopping, stayed under his desk.  He missed a rake of days.  We never had to say “as láthair” when Ailbe came taking attendance cause he never read out Marty’s name.

When Marty finally came back, he’d tell anyone who’d listen that his father was going to “bate t’livin’ shite outta Ailbe.”

If Marty’s father did anything to Ailbe, we didn’t notice any change in how often Ailbe whipped the leather outta his black dress to give Marty a walloping.

Still the choir was back with more chances for messing instead of just being bored at mass. 

Bart made us practice, right after school on a Tuesday and Thursday until five o’clock.  We got to do the practices up in the old choir gallery, meaning even better messing cause of how Cecilia couldn’t hardly see us with her being too busy working the big windy-piped organ.  Bart only showed up for a few minutes at the beginning, singing with his great voice ta show us how we were supposed ta sing.  Then he’s spend a few minutes waving his arms like mad trying ta get us ta be as good as him. It never worked. 

Cecilia couldn’t control us atallatall up in the gallery.  Lads’d sneak out ta hang off the rope that rings the big old church bell that never gets rung no more.  Once we made it “DONG” and the next day when Ailbe came around with his big “as láthair” book, he made threats a fierce leatherings if that ever happened again.  Then a fifth-class lad chipped a tooth when he got pushed in a pretend-sword fight on the twisty-turny stone stairs, whacking his mouth against the sharp stone edge of a step.  Cause he had careful parents, that was the end of us getting up to the choir gallery and all that good messing. 

The practices moved back to the south transept where Cecilia could keep a better eye on anyone messing cause there’s nowhere to hide and the organ is really just a fat piano plugged inta the wall.

After a few weeks hardly no one was showing up for choir practice.

“You’re vurrrry good boys,” Cecilia said ta me and the few lads like me whose parents weren’t careful but woulda kilt us if they found out we missed anything ta do with the church.

Bart stopped coming waving his arms at us.  Even on Sundays, we didn’t see him hardly atallatall.  When it was his turn ta say half-nine mass, he’d come around twenty-five past nine and loud-whisper ta Cecilia. Then he’d rush inta the sacristy, pull on priest’s robes, swoosh out onta the altar; sing all the mass prayers that are hard enough ta keep up when the priest is just talking; and sing so loud and good through the microphone that we might as well not be singing; which I wasn’t anyway.

Most lads show up for the choir itself at half-nine mass, so there’s still great messing.  Cecilia does get awful cranky, fast-sliding down off her stool in front of the organ, her little black nun-shoes clop-clop-clopping round the side of the south transept, her finger wagging threateningly at us. She’ll threaten ta tell whatever priest is saying mass or Ailbe or our teachers, but cause she doesn’t know hardly any lads names, nuthin never happens. 

We’re not afraid of her; she never wallops no one; she’s harmless. 

Me and the lads came up with this idea ta unplug the organ right before Cecila was about to play a hymn.  The first week we done it too early. Cecila slid off her stool, clop-clop-clopped down ta the confession box and pushed the plug back into the socket. 

That was the first time I ever saw inside the priest’s part of a confession box; it was weird ta be able ta see the darkness where he does sit. Turns out, the priest has a nice comfy seat right in the middle, so he can just turn his head from one side ta the other after he gives a rake a penance ta one sinner and turns ta clean the next sinner’s soul. 

Confessions was hard in the beginning thinking about what sins I was supposed to confess.  If I got a walloping from Da or my teacher for doing something they said was bad, I’d be wondering if that was still a sin that God needed to know about.  I mean He must know, cause He knows everything, but still, I already done penance by that awful feeling you get after a walloping that everyone thinks you’re no good cause you couldn’t stop them hitting ya. Even though we know none of us can stop a walloping by a grownup, when we watch a teacher hit a lad a rake of times, we all pretend-think that if it was us, we’d fight back.  We blame the lad getting walloped for getting caught first of all, and then for us having to watch the grownup give him a walloping.

It’s crazy really, cause if we all jumped up from our desks when Ailbe is leathering Marty or wan a the lads who are always causing trouble, with the lad crying, begging Ailbe ta stop, wouldn’t he have ta stop? 

If we did that, probly one by one, we’d get sent to Ailbe’s office and with the door closed, get a ferocious leathering. 

Cause wan of God’s workers gives them, leatherings definitely count as penance.

There’s some sins that I only say inside my head in the confession box cause I’m afraid the priest’d get fierce mad if he heard me say the words.  He might tell Da or Ailbe.  What would a priest do if he knew I wanted ta beat up Ailbe and Scratchy so bad that they can never come back ta school?

The best thing for confession is to have the same few sins – lying, not finishing homework, staying up reading when you should be sleeping – that are safe enough for about wan decade of the rosary.  I make sure ta go ta different priests each week and keep my hands up in front of my face like I’m fierce holy and praying inta them, but it’s really so the priest can’t see me face.

Some day I’ll be fierce holy, tell all my sins in confession, do a huge heap a penance, then stop doing any sins atallatallatall.

But first of all I want ta get in plenty a messing, cause it’s so much fun ta see grownups getting mad but not knowing who ta blame.

After we made the mistake of unplugging the organ too early before mass started, giving Cecilia the chance to test it before everyone sat down, we waited a couple of weeks to try again.  This time we made sure we sat on the opposite side of the where the electric cord ran along the floor next to the south transept seats, knowing anyone sitting there would be the first blamed for yanking the cord and pulling out the plug. 

We sang the opening hymn, with Cecilia banging away on the organ, which makes a fierce amount of music for how small it is.  Then, when everyone stands for the what Jesus done next story, I sorta kneel walk around behind the south transept and pull the plug. I’m so careful about staying down behind the seat ta make sure Cecilia won’t see me, it takes me ages and I nearly get caught by rushing, half-standing, back ta me seat.

As I get back to my place, I can see Cecilia’s head turned to the altar, her hands up above the organ’s black and white keys.

Down come her little hands but no music starts.  She keeps moving her fingers for a bit, like she doesn’t know there’s no music coming out.  She stops, looks up, but no one’s laughing.  She starts flicking switches on the organ to see if she somehow turned  it off.

She turns her head ta the altar.  The priest in white robes is standing staring at the altar boys bringing him the water and wine.

When Cecilia’ head comes back around to us, she looks fierce cross.

She jumps off the stool, clop-clop-clops down the side of the south transept following the organ’s power cord.  I try not ta turn and watch her go inta the confession box, but I can’t stop meself.  She’s inside rooting around for a bit.  The plug is fierce low under the priest’s comfy seat and even with the little half confession box door open, it’s kinda dark in there.  Much easier for unplugging than plugging in.

Cecilia’s shoes clop loudly a few times inside in the confession box and the green curtain that hides the priest shakes a bunch. 

Her black nun’s head comes out from the behind the green curtain so fast, she catches me smiling.

My face can’t lie quickly enough to be serious.

Her eyes turn from mad to sad.

Another sin that I’ll have to wait until I’m a grownup to tell: Harming someone who’s harmless.

Holy Disharmony II

I’m slouching past the Principal’s Office trying not to cry but me eyes are boggy.  Ta stop the water flowing inside in me head I stare at Ailbe’s closed door and imagine him within interrogating Marty Maughan about the playtime fight between Bronx and the Travellers.  He goes for Marty cause Bronx can take a fierce amount a battering; it’ll make him cry awright, but he won’t tell anything.  Bronx knows that telling the truth after you lied makes them ta crazy so they give you a worser battering.

In me head I see a picture of Ailbe the way he does do interrogations: Sitting back in his armchair, shiney-black shoes, and black socks up on the desk; black dress sliding down his legs showing black priest pants underneath it. See his black dress is only for wearing in school to show he's a brother, cause they’re the boss a the school.  When he’s interrogating you, fast firing twisty questions that he can easily say you answered wrong, a wee bit of a fake smile does be on his face. With him hungry ta give a battering; tapping his own hand lightly the tip of his leather; his piggy eyes with hardly no eyelashes let you know what’s coming: Pain.

I’d take that now meself ta stop me from crying in front of all the lads for hardly no reason.

“No, no, no, no, NO, NO!” Bart had roared filling up the Assembly Hall on my third time singing fierce bad that stoopid hymn; “How Great Thou Art.”

With his face shiny pinkish-red, he sudden-sticks a finger inside his priest’s collar and tugs the whiteness making his flabby neck Gobstopper red.

A big drop of sweat runs down my back.

“Young man you’re singing with your throat, I’ve told you that twice already, that is simply not … how we sing to the Lord our God,” he glares out under his bushy ginger eyebrows. “We don’t sing that way because it’s not sustain…, you’ll tire an’ get hoarse an’ sound even wor… terr… very bad.  We’re pra…ying to our Lord through the hymns; you wouldn’t mutter an’ mumble your prayers, now would you?”

Having a priest, that we call by a nickname he doesn’t even know, firing questions at me is the worst part of this audition thing for a choir I’m already in. Questions is usually only for wan or two smart lads in class ta yell out the answer and get praised by the teacher so that everyone else can feel proper stoopid. When a grownup points a finger and asks fires a question at you, there’s trouble coming cause they always ask in a way that no answer is totally right. And in this audition thing, with only me ta answer questions, of course the answers is all wrong. I can’t hardly even think of answers cause, I’m more afraid I’ll say “yes Bart, no Bart” instead of “yes Father O’Malley, no Father O’Malley.”  I’d say using a nickname for a priest would end up with a fierce a battering and a sin that had ta be confessed to another priest for a big heap a penance.

“No … Father O’Malley,” I say, but too low, cause he puts his hand up behind his ear like he can’t hear.

“NO FATHER O’MALLEY,” I say much louder, near roaring myself now, but careful to make sure he knows I’m only answering his question and not getting angry. 

My face blushing so fast and hard it hurts a wee bit.

If you get angry with a teacher or with Da, for sure you’ll get an extra hard walloping with them stomping down your anger. But still, you getting angry must make them feel at least a wee bit afraid, cause after, when they’re not angry no more the way grownup can suddenly go back to regular, but your eyes still say you are, they give a heap of excuses for the walloping that lets you know they know now we’re sworn enemies.

You can’t have a priest as a sworn enemy; that’d be like going up against God and you could go blind or end up in a wheelchair, losing all your friends.

“Good, good,” Bart says, nodding slowly. “So you do have a voice … of sorts, but you’re singing voice is coming from your throat, … it’s not … that’s not singing, you’re forcin’ it out.”

“Ah, the poor crator is still nervous,” Cecilia says with a quick nun-smile from her perch on the piano stool.

Her nun-smile says them words is all she’s willing ta help.

“Ok, well, the world must keep turning, I have to get to the County Home for visiting hours if this inter…minable … if we can get through this, …,” Bart looks down at the important papers in his hand, “there’s still eight more of these … eight more to audition.”

He waves the important papers fast making a small wind that cools my face.

“Ok, ok … last attempt or I’ll have to fail you!”

Failed by Bart with a fast-angry wave of his important papers telling me ta get out of his sight, I’m walking back to Scratchy’s class, trying ta pretend it doesn’t matter.

But my boggy eyes say somewhere in my head thinks it does matter.

Maybe my soul is sad that I can’t sing for God?

But it can’t be that. Before, when everyone just joined the choir with none of these audition things, I was only pretending ta sing, just opening me mouth along with the hymn but letting everyone else do the singing. God had to know I was faking, He knows everything. But He mustn’t a been too mad, cause He never got me caught.

Sunday morning’s are going ta be fierce boring just going ta regular mass but worse cause the lads who didn’t fail and got into the choir will all be over messing in the south transept where they put the choir.  Now I’ll sitting be meself in the seat where Ma always had us sit, way up front on the right where you can clearly see the choir.  Ma did that cause she liked to watch the choir, so she’d know when to grab a hymn book ta sing along.  Plus, she’d always make a little holy head nod ta Sister Cecilia, who she sorta knows from Leitrim, when just before mass started Cecilia comes out of the sacristy, her little black nun-shoes clop-clop-clopping across the altar tiles and black marble steps.

What’ll I tell the lads?

Ta stop having me eyes still being boggy when I get back to Scratchy’s classroom I duck inta the Boys jax. The jax stinks of piss cause little lads do spill theirs onto the step in front of the yellowish-brownish-white drain.  I run a tap and splash cold water onta me face hoping that’ll disguise the eye-bogginess.

It has to be my soul that’s sad.  I don’t really care about singing, it’s not like football or sumptin that you wish you were better at. But my soul never done hardly nothing before.  Even at First Communion I was only excited for getting money and sweets off everyone. When Ma died I was sad and my soul musta been sad too; but mostly I was embarrassed that everyone was looking sad at us.  You could tell walking down the street. Someone’s ma would start ta smile-nod hello ta you; then they’d remember that your ma died.  Their eyes would turn like they were staring at the Traveller’s dog that got hit by a car up the Market Square; the dirty-white and brown little terrier howling, dragging its back legs along, scraping its way back in behind Dunnes Stores ta get ta the Maughan’s caravan.

 From the boy’s jax I hear the front door of the school rattling closed: Someone just came in or went out.

It’s probly some careful parent in paying for a school trip or a new book.  But it could Ailbe and maybe he’d start interrogating again, thinking he’d get me when I’m not ready.  And with me not far from crying, he’d think I done something wrong and he probly go even harder.  Grownups do always be thinking we feel bad when we done something wrong; like as if we want to let them know we done wrong. Most of the time they’re the ones saying what we done was wrong.  There’s nothing wrong clattering other lads when they do something mean to you or grabbing a roll of Toffos from Hoban’s when Breen and Brian has their backs turned and you don’t have no pocket money left.  Sure, the shop is nearly bursting with school lads crushing up ta the counter; and needing ta be back in your desk at exactly two o’clock, or you get a lateness slap, you’d hardly have time to pay.  I like Toffos cause they stick ta your teeth and you can still taste them even when you’re back in school.

I wait a long time ta let whoever came in or out be gone before I leave the jax. Listening to the silence is hard cause you want to hear sumptin but you don’t want to either – cause that’ll mean more waiting.

Scratchy’s pudginess is plumped down on the heater when I finally get back. I’m afraid he’ll say I took too long cause I stayed in the jax for what seemed like ages making sure I didn’t bump inta Ailbe, but instead all he says is:

“Awright, who’s the next Joe Dolan ta go over ta Father O’Malley?”

Fergie stands up. Cause of me, Fergie’ll have a fierce cranky Bart ta deal with.  With me failed, if he gets inta the choir, then we won’t be able ta have mass messing.

I slouch inta my desk and immediately spin around the little white ceramic inkwell in the top of my desk for good luck. I know it doesn’t work: All I ever get is bad luck. 

Still, the inkwell feels smooth on my fingertip. It’s kinda-sorta like how Ma’s arm useta feel when I’d run my fingertips gently along the underpart of her arm. Only her skin felt nicer than the inkwell, cause it was smooth, soft and warm.

“Now mister …,” Scratchy says, scrunching up his saggy face, staring around the class, “Garavan.”

He’s going asking questions that a few of the good lads can answer, allowing him to then ask the rest of us a bunch of just-how-stoopid-are-you questions.

“Not you, ya leibide!” he snaps when Sid makes a big deal of standing up, knowing full well it’s not him but his cousin that Scratchy asking. 

Scratchy shakes his head, his eyes narrowing into a don’t-waste-my-time-or-the-stick’ll-come-out glare. Sid’ll probly get asked some questions next that he won’t be able to answer, so then he’ll get extra homework on top of the homework he hardly never does anyway.

“SIT DOWN!” Scratchy roars when Sid isn’t sitting down fast enough.

Sid’s cousin stands up.

“Now,” Scratchy says, burying his fingers in his thick brown hair, scraping his nails along his scalp, “list for me … the class … the major cities in West Germany … an’ their main industries … an’ if they have a river.”

Scratchy sighs, stands up from his perch on the heater, walks over to his desk and picks up his stick. He’s not going walloping anyone over not knowing cities, factories and rivers.  When you don’t know teaching stuff, he just makes stoopid jokes that the class sorta laugh at. But if someone interrupts or starts doing anything that he says is wrong, like Bronx or Marty Maughan blurting out a funny-wrong answer or starting ta carve their name inta the desk with a penknife, they'll get a few wallops.  A course, not having your homework done is automatic five slaps on each hand. The lads who didn’t do homework get put in a line first thing in the morning and the slapping starts.

Slaps from Scratchy’s stick hurt. He uses a sally rod, but a thick one, not like the skinny-bendy sally rods Da cuts down the back of our yard when he’s really mad ta wallop us across the backs of our legs. Da’s slaps are fierce sore altogether causa how the bendy sally rod whips down onta your skin. As bad as that pain is, waiting for him ta come back from the end a the garden with a new slapping stick is nearly worse.

Da’ll be sitting in his armchair beside the fire reading the Irish Press, warning us ta stop messing or fighting by shake-crumpling the big sheets of newspaper and saying “stop, stop, stop” a rake of times.

Somehow, we can’t stop messing, even though we know how it ends. 

He’ll jump up scraping the armchair’s metal legs off the tiles and fold-slap the Irish Press onta the kitchen table.  If he’s not too mad, and he’s in his slippers, wan a them might get whipped off for a quick walloping with the rubbery sole. But if his eyes is blazing mad, then he’ll nearly take the back door off the hinges and run-walk down the backyard. It seems ta take forever for him to come back with a new sally rod snapped from the tree at the end of the garden. Them waiting minutes is bad; the laughy feeling of messing draining down inta jumpy legs; stomach turning sick; the clock ticking. You know the next thing you’re going ta feel across the backs of your legs is awful pain.

After he bursts out the back door, I always think ta run outta the house before he gets back with the sally rod. But running away would only make the terrible waiting go on longer. Like you don’t want a battering to happen, but when you know one is coming, you want it ta be over.

In the kitchen, there’s no place ta run, but still you try going under the table or jumping up on a chair.  But Da grab’ll a hold of your shirt or your arm: then we’re both spinning round in a kinda circle, bumping inta chairs and the table; him swinging the long sally rod; me trying to jump to have the rod hit a different place each time cause if you hits you twice in exactly the same place it kills for days. 

Then it’s over and Da put the sally rod outside next ta the back door and picks up the Irish Press.

“That’ll settle ye now,” he says shaking the paper loud, “an’ let me tell ya, the sally rod is right there if ye need another dose.”

Scratchy brought his thick sally rod in the second day after summer holidays. See, me and Fergie had stolen his old stick the last day of school in fifth class: That was the day Ailbe came in and said Scratchy would teach us again for sixth class. We were all so sad and mad.

Cause it was the last day of school, with no work ta be done, and the sun shining, the whole school had a sports day out in the field. Me and Fergie took an awful chance by pretending we were going to the jax, but instead running inta our classroom looking for Scratchy’s old stick. That stick was a bit of flat wood that he musta bought below in Molloy’s Hardware. We seen it on his desk beside his twenty Silk Cuts, grabbed it, ran outside, and tucked it in under the busted open bottom of our prefab classroom. 

We hid it by reaching in and pushing it up against a not-busted bit a the bottom of our prefab, carefully wiping off our fingerprints.  Cause my arms is longer, I pushed it in with my sleeve pulled down over my finger, getting it far enough behind not-busted-prefab that it couldn’t be seen, but not so far we couldn’t get it back out later on.  This way, if Scratchy realized his stick was gone and searched everyone’s schoolbag he wouldn’t find anything.  If the cleaner, who’s just a mental patient who sweeps and mops, smiling and smoking Woodbine cigarettes all the time, did find it by sticking his head inta the hole under the prefab, where rats do live, then there’d be no fingerprints on the stick.  No one could blame us. If Scratchy didn’t miss his stick, it being the last day and everything, and no one seen it under the prefab, then we could get it in a few days and bury it somewhere where it could never again give slaps.

To be continued…

Holy Disharmony

I’m run-walking towards t’Assembly Hall dead late for Father O’Malley’s choir audition cause Brother Ailbe interrogated me outside his office over the big fight at playtime between Johnny Bronx and the Travellers.  Father O’Malley – Bart me an’ the lads do call him; we’ll go ta hell for that – can be even crankier than Ailbe but at least he doesn’t have a leather for ta give you a walloping. 

The Assembly Hall’s door swings open with an irony rattle from them new metal bars they just put on so we can’t never all be locked inta this huge-tall room with windows too high up ta climb out.  The Assembly Hall fits everyone in the school but has a wooden stage with long-hangy-dusty purple curtains that could go up on fire and the lot of us’d be kilt.

At the piano, Sister Cecilia turns her red face to stare at me: Her chubby brown-stockinged legs and black nun-shoes dangle off the stool above the floor. She recognizes me and makes a nun’s-this-doesn’t-mean-I’m-happy-smile.  Somehow Cecilia knows our family; maybe she went ta school with Ma or maybe she’s just from Leitrim like Ma.  She does come down sitting in Ma’s armchair drinking mugs a tea, Da sitting in his armchair staring silently across the kitchen at her, the Irish Press he wants to read lying on his lap.  On and on she rattles about the strokes and cancer for people that no one in our house knows now cause Ma died.

Bart’s leaning heavy against the piano, a bunch of probly important papers in his hand.  He’s got a fierce cross look on his face.

I freeze in the door not sure if I’m still allowed in. At very least I’ll have ta keep saying I’m so sorry for being late.  I think about telling Bart that Ailbe made me late with all his twisty-turny questions trying to catch me out for saying I knew nuthin about the playtime fight.  See, Ailbe doesn’t know I’m a good lier cause Da is always interrogating for doing things I didn’t know were bad.  But if Ailbe ever found out from Bart that I blamed him to a priest, he’d find some different reason ta whip the leather outta his black dress and give me a ferocious walloping.

Bart’s reddish-orange hair is combed back kinda-sidewards in a big wave: His huge, white flabby throat – that flabbiness is what makes him the best singer in Castlebar – sags from his chin down to the bottom of his neck. When he’s saying mass, he sings nearly all of it except for the what-Jesus-done-next stories.  Bart’s singing mass is worse than trying to follow Father Ludden’s head-down-half-whispering mass; at least if you hear what Father Ludden’s says you can understand the words.  The only good thing about the singing mass is knowing that when the singing stops the Jesus stories start.  Then I stop daydreaming so I can listen and tell Da when he interrogates me about the Gospel making sure I did go ta mass.

“Sorry, I…eh,” I start and stop saying, hoping that me looking sad is enough ta make Bart still let me do this audition thing.

“Do you … think,” Bart says in a low voice, “that my time is less … precious?”

His pink lips seem to move a lot cause his big throat and face is so white. 

I never expected a question: Is hard questions a part of an audition?  I don’t even really understand what is an audition.

“THAN SOME SIXTH CLASS BRAT,” he suddenly half yells, “who takes longer to get here than it takes me to fail the two lads ahead of him?”

I’m don’t even understand the question, but I know that a priest’s loud voice means you say sorry a heap of times.

“Oh, sorry, I was … I got … sorry, see, I’m so sorry, sorry, so … so.”

Bart’s cross face is back – burning at me; Cecilia, her eyes down on the piano keys, doesn’t know me anymore.

I’m afraid to look the priest in the eye in case he thinks on the inside I’m angry at him –that’d for sure mean a battering. Instead I look down at the wooden floor we used to have so much fun sliding around on as Baby Roomers and High Infants when the rain was so bad playtime was in t’Assembly Hall.

After a bit, I hear Bart’s important papers waving

“Come-in-come-in,” he snaps impatiently, “you can’t sing standing in a doorway, this isn’t the West End, … more’s the pity.”

Now Cecilia, with her nun-smile and fast little come-in-come-in hand waves, knows me again.  I know them nun-smiles from when me and Ma are up the town shopping, and we’d meet two nuns, arms linked, walking slow as hedgehogs down Main Street. The nuns give Ma the nun-smile that kinda says; ‘poor you, busy shopping; we never have to do that.’  Ma does say, in the not-holy voice she uses when she complains about bossy priests, that “nuns don’t need any money, so they just shuffle around the town, staring in shop windows.”

Ta let Bart knows how sorry I am, I slow-walk inta the Assembly Hall, arms tight by my sides, like how t’IRA men on the telly do march behind the hearse in a funeral.  But Bart’s not even looking.  Instead, he’s staring at his important papers. He whips a biro from behind his ear and fast marks something on the paper.

“Now, young … Farrell, this should be …” he looks up, lines forming on his forehead, the reddish-orange hair wave kinda jumping forward.  “Well, your sister’s a fine singer, let’s see if you got, … in any case, come, come, come.”

His pink lips flap and points the papers a rake of times at a place in front of him on the floor.

In my head I get ready like I’m getting caught out in a lie by Da and I have to be fierce careful with every thought, checking it against everything I’ve said to him in the last few days, so my story stays exactly the same.  If one little thing changes, he’ll use that to keep up the interrogation which could easily, even if I do a good job keeping the lie, end up in a battering.  With cranky adults, mostly teachers, Brothers and Fathers, I use that same readiness, kind of pretending when I have talk to them is like a battle I have to fight, keeping myself ready to make sure I don’t say anything that might make it look like I don’t agree with them.  That’s how you can sometimes avoid getting a battering. 

As I stand facing the piano, the sides of Cecilia’s mouth drop down a bit; the white plastic-cardboardy edge of the black shawl kinda thing that covers her hair inches down her red forehead; she scrunches up her shoulders, hands hovering above the black and white piano keys.  

See, this is all kinda crazy, cause me and all the lads is already in the choir.  We go every Sunday ta half nine mass and sing. Cecilia plays an electric organ; that’s really just a piano that plugs in so it sounds like an organ.  Then on the Sundays in December, we get to up to the choir loft.  I love that, cause you have to climb up a twisty stone stair case with tiny windows, just like in a castle.  They have a real organ up there, like the one that makes music in the Dracula film: Big pipes as tall as a house within in a cabinet in the wall.  That’s how big a church is: You can fit a house into a church cabinet! We all sing like mad cause the Christmas hymns is fun to sing not like regular boring hymns.

We were having so much fun that Bart made a rule that everyone has to audition to be in his choir.  None of us even knew what “audition” meant until he kinda-sorta explained it.  But he used too many long words, talkin’ about goin’ ta Dublin or London and how we shouldn’t be afraid; which just made us afraid; cause before we didn’t even think “audition” was a hard thing.  Afterwards, thinking about what he said and making up meanings for some of the long words, auditions began to sound to me like not getting picked for any team. 

I hate team picking cause it’s just lads acting like they’re the boss.  At playtime the good soccer players do all the picking. I usually get picked last or not even picked atallatall cause the good soccer players just want to start showing how good they are and so they say; “Here we’ll take this half, you take that half of them.”

“Them” is lads like me whose feet don’t do what they’re told. 

Now, I don’t even go near team things.

“So, Jo…seph or is it Joe, your father’s Joe of course, in any case, you’ve been with us,” Bart waves the papers at Cecilia, “a while now, … why don’t you give me the first few stanzas of ‘How Great Thou Art.’”

Immediately my face burns red hot; over my whole body oozes a prickly sweat. 

See, I don’t know any hymns atallatall except the Christmas ones: I don’t sing hymns when I’m in the choir.  I’m only there for the messing with the lads.  When everyone’s mouth is open belting out a hymn, I just have to open mine too and no one can tell I’m not singing.

Feeling a big drop of sweat run down my back, I realize I have ta say something that somehow makes Bart not know that I don’t know the hymns I’ve supposedly been singing for two years. With Da or Scratchy, our teacher, when I have to lie, I don’t say much, but just enough that they can’t say I’m not answering. Then I stick with whatever I said, not changing it one little bit, even if they get mad and give me a walloping. Once you tell a lie, they’ll hurt you much-much more and for much longer if you admit it afterwards – I seen it happen with weak lads who give in.  If you don’t give in, then when they’re done walloping you, and you’re all red welts and crying and pulling away from them no matter how hard they hold; they have to feel at least a little bit sad that they might’ve battered you for no reason. 

But I can’t think of a lie to cover not knowing a hymn that a priest and a nun want me to start singing this very minute.  I’ve lied to priests before, but only small lies.  Tangling with a priest, a nun and a hymn might even get God involved; with Him making every day even harder.

“Eh, I don’…  I’m not su…,” I mutter-mumble, hoping they’ll get tired of me and somehow fix the problem.

“Ahhh!” Cecilia says, looking up, her shoulders unscrunching; her hands probly tired from being held over the piano keys. “He’s nervous, the poor little peteen. Sure we all know each other here, didn’t I see your sister Rita an’ a gang a them out at Father Michael’s a few weeks back.”

Father Michael is Bart’s brother and he’s a holy priest like Father Ludden. I’d say he does be talking to God a fierce amount cause he always says the right thing and makes you feel like you should do the right thing cause that’s what God wants.  He’s got white hair and a real soft voice, but he can’t sing like a lark the way Bart does.  My oldest sister, Rita, who’s goes to uni all the way down in Limerick, is a friend of Father Michael’s. They’re real friends, not just the way people have priests in for tea and then are happy when they get them out the door, so they don’t have to be pretending they’re holier than they really are.  Rita and a bunch of her friends do friend things with Father Michael, like going for walks out the country, even going ta the cinema.  

“Give him …,” Bart’s pink lips bunch up together into a sticky-out shape like a dead salmon’s mouth on the floor of Da’s boat.

He waves the papers a bunch: I don’t know what that means but I hear nun-shoe’s hard heels hitting the Assembly Hall’s wooden floor. Cecilia’s off the piano stool and rummaging around in the kinda bulging shopping bag a country woman does have hanging from her handlebars going home from town.  A few seconds later she doink-doink-doinks around the piano, waving a paper in her hand for me to walk to her.

“There ya are now,” she gives me a fierce busy sheet of paper with hymn words, a rake of straight parallel lines, and little black musical note symbols splattered all over the place. I can’t read the words properly cause they’re broken up into little bits, with a bunch of letters dangling at the end of the line like they might fall off.

By the time I look up from the sheet of paper, Cecilia’s back on her stool and Bart’s elbow is propping him up on the piano, eyes looking down on his paper again.  I’m wondering if I should just start singing.  I can kinda make out the first few words but I don’t know how the hymn goes. 

Cecilia hides my not-knowingness by starting up the piano.

As the music starts, Bart stands up straight; lips bunching up into dead-salmon-mouth; arms shooting up into the air; his papers turning into a conductor’s stick.

He flaps the papers furiously in front of my face for me ta start the words.

“OhLordmyGodwhenI,”,” I sing fast trying ta catch up ta the piano.

I slow down, breaking up the words the way they’re written on the paper:

“in awe…some wond…er … con…sid…her,” but now I’m falling behind so I speed up, “alltheworks.”

The piano stops.

Silence.

With so much air in the big Assembly Hall, the whizz of Bart’s paper flashing over and back through the air sounds really clear.

Flicking my eyes up from the hard-ta-follow-the-words hymn sheet, I see Bart’s puffy cheeks blown up like balloons:

“NO-NO-NO-NO, … NO!” his NO’s are big enough to fill the Assembly Hall. 

“Our Lord God is above in heaven weeping, … weeee…ping I tell you that we humans would offer him such dri…, such … can’t you see that a hymn is meant to add…ore God!”

He whizzes the papers in front of me making wind across my face.

“It’s not something to be, to be … be slogged through like you’re pouring calf nuts into buckets.”

He closes his eyes.

Silence fills the Assembly Hall.

My shoulders creep up and my neck scrunches down ta protect my ears as they get ready for a battering.

Maybe he’ll only hit me with his sheets of paper.

Nothing happens.

“Sorry, sor…,” I hear my voice mutter mumbling.

I know my voice is way too small for the Assembly Hall, but I don’t know what else ta do.  I’m sure it happens, but I never heard of a lad getting battered by a priest. Bart’d probably send for Ailbe who’d give me a ferocious leathering for being mean ta God.

“Listen … listen, it’s an, …,” Bart kinda bends his knees a wee bit, holds his hand up in front of his face; his eyes squint but look a bit sad, “an, ad…ore…ate…shun, by creating something beautiful, we’re trying to adore God who had his son to die on the cross for us.”

He unbends his knees, his arms shoot down and backwards like a bird’s wings just as its about to fly; his chest bulges out over his big tummy; his huge fish mouth fully open:

“OHHH … Lord my Goddddd!”

His flabby white throat shivers as he fills the whole Assembly Hall with the sound of good singing.

“When I … in awe…some wonnnn…der considdd…er all theworksThy hands have made.”

His throat stops shivering.

A sudden heavy silence in the big room makes me nervous. 

Immediately Bart’s back ta being a regular priest again; just a tired-looking man in a shiny black suit and bulging black shirt, his throat sagging down over his kinda-sorta white collar.

“Now, …,” he looks down at his sheet of paper, “Joe…seph ….”

His lips go dead-salmon-mouth but just for a second.

“Mister … Farrell, let’s here you adore God with your God given voice.”

A ball of spit jams in my throat.

I move my jaw a lot, trying ta swallow the spit.

This is worse than a battering.

An Orangeman In Milan

Outside on the street Milanese businessmen in their cobalt-blue-suit-crisp-white-shirt livery stride past the café’s open front, cigarette smoke gushing down their noses.  From the backroom of the café, to where I got hustled when it became clear I only wanted a cool drink, I crane my neck to gaze at the two semi-automatic-rifle-toting soldiers pacing inside a hip-high-red-and-white-plastic-fence enclosure at the edge of the grey-stone paved piazza.

The rush hour foot traffic of hurried professionals and construction workers cradling cloud-maker-vapes, keeps up along the café’s open front. A comfortably-plump-triple-chinned-seventy-something woman drags along an insatiably nosey black and tan Dachshund. But all the view of the four-hundred-year-old piazza, my smug Irish-thick-as-a-brick-ness draws my gaze back to the café’s two waiters as they unfurl a minor international incident.

This unfortunate incident is entirely my creation for ordering something so bizarre that the long-used-to-tourists-error-filled-orders wait staff conflab at the counter in an arms-flailing, stacatto-machinegun-bursts dispute amongst themselves as to whether or not it can be served.  

“Oh…ranageh juuuze?” my waiter had asked before I was even fully seated; taking me at my word that I all I wanted was a cold drink.

His long white apron, girded tightly around his barrel chest, whips his bushy-grey eyebrows up his forehead interrogatively: His pen rapid-scratches something on the tiny pad nestled in his palm: Perhaps he’s writing the response I did not yet know I would be giving.

“No,” I answer, my thick-as-brick-ness radar revolving ever faster, “a bottle of sparklin’ water … and an orange.” 

The waiter, a man of maybe only forty-five but with the mannerisms and brusqueness of a world-weary seventy-five-year-old, stares at me, his eyes tremoring minutely in their sockets.

“Oh…rangeh juuuze!” he gushes; nodding and flourishing his pen across the paper pad with dissimulating firmness. 

“No, … no,” I say softly: I’m now the dissimulator; employing fake timidity; an age old thick-man’s technique. 

I had figured this might not go well but dehydrated from a seven-hour flight and last night’s dinner, rendered delicious by a whole month’s worth of salt, I’m craving one of the juicy oranges on the counter I passed as the old-young waiter hustled me through to the back room.

Given the look now on his face, this cross-cultural interaction could escalate such that he summons the soldiers from their plastic paddock to rifle-muzzle-convince me of the error of my culinary ways.  The Italian government has deployed soldiers at every major point of pedestrian congregation to dissuade anarchist activity.  But, as I now note, at 9:00AM, with anarchists not known as early risers, the soldiers are excitedly chatting to two fit-looking twenty-something women in matching azure running gear.

“I would an or…ange,” I say as clearly as one can say to a person who may not speak the language you’re using. Seeing that the gun-toters are otherwise engaged, brings new energy to my citrus-quest and I cup my hands Jesus-like to emphasize both the wholeness of the fruit and, it would seem, of the confusion.

“Juuuze?” the old-young waiter persists, but into his voice enters a scratchy note of something’s-wrong-here-perturbation.

“Or…ange,” I resist the urge to speak-louder-as-translation and instead go Jesus-on-a-loop – cupping my hands several times.  “Just … one orange, pour favorah.”

Immediately I feel a phony at my fake negotiation concession, delivered in terrible Italian.

The waiter gives me a withering this-is-a-Milanese-café-not-a-supermarket look that lets me know the €1 in the supermarket oranges basketed on the counter are for patrons who want €5 eggcup sized servings of “oh…ranageh juuuze,” not for consumption in their fibrous whole by dehydrated, thick-headed Irishmen.

He purses his colorless lips; departs without a word; immediately rapid-hand-gesticulation summoning over the other waiter.  The other waiter is still-young-young, his body not yet prematurely aged by years on his feet satisfying petty human wants. Standing provocatively, I may add, over the veritable cornucopia of oranges in the basket on the counter, they conflab with arm waving, noisy bitterness, casting suspicious glances in my direction.

A tall, slim man in his sixties, or it could be his thirties given the Italian male diet of cigarette-espresso-cigarette, with a thick mane of grey-white hair combed back in rolling waves, regulation cobalt-blue-suit-white-shirt, an unlit cigarillo stuck in the side of mouth, passes the conflabbers saying something fast and important in Italian as he strides behind the counter with an alpha male’s bearing.

I watch from my limited-angle back-room seat as the young-young waiter tosses an orange anxiously into the air.  Both high-aproned men stand at the counter issuing ever escalating-competing staccato bursts of rapid-fire-Italian that eventually produce a cobalt-blue-jacketed arm with its tanned, gesticulating hand – an unlit cigarillo nestled between the fore and middle fingers.

The young-young waiter barely perceptibly nods in my direction.  The sixty-or-is-it-thirty-year-old’s tanned face appears next to the waiters.  Trying to look casually in my direction, he swipes his non-cigarillo’d hand through his grey-white mane, but as I’m the only customer sitting in the back room, this ruse fails.

Now his hands shoot toward the ceiling in the universal symbol of why-the-FUCK-do-I-have-to-solve-everything, following by a short-sharp-machine-burst-of-Italian.

Instantly a knife and fork clink derisorily onto a white plate; the orange gets mock ceremoniously placed between the cutlery and the disastrously un-Milanese-café meal is delivered to my table by the not-even-pretending-to-smile old-young waiter.

“Thank…grazie, grazie,” I feign humility, hurriedly grasping the orange like I was Adam grabbing the apple from Eve’s hand.

As an in-build-part of my personal version of Irish-thickness, my success produces an instant cocktail of dopamine competing with Catholic guilt for standing my ground.

I savor the orange, the juice cool against the parched roof of my mouth.

Outside, the street is quietening down, the two young women have jogged away leaving the soldiers to gaze around sullenly for early-riser anarchists; the old-young waiter stands in the café’s open front, left hand on hip as he exhales blue cigarette smoke out into Milan’s centuries old streets.

Encounters

Over the close to forty years I’ve lived in the Boston area, three times I’ve had these sorts of encounters:

1993

I’m heading west on the Mass Turnpike on a sunny weekday morning, my mind churning with the sort of shit that churns a young man’s mind.  Traffic zips along I90’s six-lanes compulsory-land-purchased-bulldozed-blasted into Massachusetts’ rolling green countryside. Despite my trusty-rusty Corolla, now firmly in its adult-diaper-fluids-dripping phase of life, groaning at the sight of yet another long hill, I glance in the mirror to pass an eighteen-wheeler. 

Immediately, my eyes lock onto two columns of motorcycles, twenty-two honking-big Harleys, flowing along I90’s fast lane with military precision. 

Curious now, I stay behind the eighteen-wheeler, eyes flicking from my rearview mirror to the truck’s bumper sticker: “IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT.”

One by one the silver BMWs, red Camaros, even a banged up navy-blue Cavalier with a tan door, drop out of the fast lane to get the column of motorcycles hot off their ass. 

We crest the long hill; I lose sight of the Harleys; minutes later their grumble rattles my rattley windows; the two lead bikes filling my side mirror with Black German army helmets, mirrored sunglasses, grizzly-grey-flowing beards, black-leather-jacketed arms stretching to handlebars.

As they growl past, my eyes lock onto the semicircular red-letters-on-white-fabric patches on their black leather jackets: “HELLS ANGELS  MASSACHUSETTS”.

Two-by-two the column passes: Large, scary humans on rumbling hogs filling my suddenly-even-more-tinny Corolla with an aura of raw power, danger, fear-excitement and a gnawing sense of life not lived. And yet, from some fucked-up place in my fucked-up head, I get an overwhelming urge to flag down these latter-day Vikings and lecture them that it should be the possessive: “HELL’S … ANGELS.”

I resist the urge for grammatical purity, instead choosing boring life: On the Harleys rumble: On my Toyota groan-rattles: On my mind churns.

As the last two Harleys pass, way-too-tight behind them speeds a black Dodge Intrepid filled with four burley, black-leather-jacketed Angels.  The front passenger has an indistinguishable-at-75mph oversized dark-ink-tattoo on his right cheek. From the back seat, a heavyset-bearded-baldy, twenty-something Angel, ADHD bounces in his seat as he glowers at me so hard that I flee back to my boring but safe life.

1998

I’m in the Middleton Baptist Church tent at the Topsfield Fair washing down a $3.50 turkey-gravy-mash-carrots-and-peas dinner with milk from a red plastic cup. The tent’s heavy white fabric, greying at the seams from years of long service, billows in the October wind, the canvas slapping against the sturdy metal poles.  Behind the hearty-dinner dispensing table, hovering over the shoebox in use as a till, stands a squat fifty-something, balding, jowly-faced church volunteer, in grey wool pants belted-and-suspendered hard up under his nipples, white shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, red-and-tan-plaid tie tucked between the buttons of his shirtfront.  With thumbs hitched inside his black suspenders, the church volunteer peers down into the Florsheim shoebox heaped with heaped $5’s and $1’s, his pudgy face grinning uncontrollably.

At our folding-table, my ten-year-old son, who’s big on rules, as in the breaking thereof by him but strict enforcement, also by him, for all others, is scraping a plastic fork along the shiny red-plastic plate to extract the last molecules of turkey gravy.

“Can I get dessert?” he asks excitedly, raising a gravy-moistened white-plastic fork to his mouth.

“I think Baptists are more into hell n’ damnation than desserts,” I parry with something I figure he won’t understand not wanting my ten-year-old, ninety-pound Rule-Enforcer to get up or look around and see that there’s two Hells Angels and their, interestingly clad for October, “old ladies” sitting on the opposite side of the tent enjoying aprés-dinner-Marlboros directly under a “NO SMOKING” sign.

My eyes flick to the church volunteer and his unstoppable grin: His eyes are now directed to the tent doorway which brings him more $3.50-a-mouth customers.

The Angels, tall, burly guys, the red-on-white HELLS ANGELS patches stretching across their weathered, black leather jackets, lounge back, almost toppling over the church-basement wooden folding chairs and billow blue-grey cigarette smoke.

“Come on!” my son tone sharpens.  “You said I couldn’t have a candy apple cuz I’d be gettin’ dessert. Now dinner’s done, so it’s dessert time.”

His increasingly insistent tone and darkening eyes foretell a mind mobilizing for an angry eruption in response to failure to follow through on a real, or perceived, promise.

My eyes flick to the symbol of order and civilization in this billowing church tent whose grin has deepened as he collects $14 off a plump, likely salivating, family of four.  Behind the church-volunteer’s ample torso I see a table littered with red plastic bowls heaped with orange Jello, mixed in with cans of spray cream, some standing, some lying over, their nozzles splattered with yellowing-cream. 

For a millisecond I fantasize that maybe, … just maybe, hidden behind the churchman’s grin-paunch-plaid-tie lurks a righteous Bruce Lee–Chuck Norris-whack-the-bad-guys persona or even better a Clint Eastwood type that’s packing a Howitzer, which he keeps stashed in the trunk of the purple Oldsmobile Cutlass parked directly behind the tent. 

There’s a distinct possibility of needing all of the above if a trip up to buy dessert from to this grinning churchman results with my son assuming responsibility to verbally correct the Angels and their lady friends on the No Smoking infraction employing a viciously cutting tone he has learned to mimic from his own multitude of infractions. 

I turn back to my son’s longing-trending-to-angry-explosion stare.

“You know what!” I try to sound like I’ve got a big idea, which I don’t and already I need to pivot as one of the Angels “old ladies” stands, shakes her over-flowing-over-tanned-crinkly-skinned cleavage, and stilettoes across the grassy-mucky tent floor to the counter. From her fingers dangles a Marlboro bleeding blue smoke.

“Gih me four Jellos an’ cream, with lots a cream,” she says to the church volunteer.  He glances at her cigarette and dispels my childish fantasy in favor of the wiser course that discretion is in fact the larger part of valor.

“Yeah what?” snaps my son – hidden from this whole scene, his normally so-smooth forehead contracts ominously into narrow furrows.

“What about the pig race?” I hear these words but didn’t now I had them – obviously they’ve been dropped into my frontal cortex by the gods of parenting. 

“How about we go to the pig race,” I repeat my newfound idea, now I’m all fake enthusiasm.  “They must be set up by now … an’ then we’ll go back to the carnie selling candy apples … or find some ice cream, Richardson’s has to be here somewhere.  Isn’t there a Massachusetts law that Richardson’s ice cream be available within fifty feet of every gathering.”

I beam an idiot-dad smile, begging a pre-teen insult.

“I really do wanna go ta do the pig race,” my son says slowly, eyes down, brow still furrowed.  “I just can’t decide between the candy apple an’ the ice cream, can I …,” he flicks up his beautiful brown eyes, “get bo….”

“We might need ta get some Oreos somewhere for the pigs,” I cut in to avoid letting him ask a question to which the answer can only lead to releasing pre-loaded disappointment-anger.  “Boy do pigs love their Oreos!”

A couple of hours earlier, walking into the Fairgrounds, the first thing we came across was the Pig Race.  They were still setting up: A gimpy, heaved-gutted, can’t-stop-smiling seventy something man and his same-aged, tall-boney wife, who walked like a marionette puppet, her shoulders and hips jerking up and collapsing down with each step.

“How d’ya get them ta race?” I asked.  As a dad accompanied by a younger child, I feel fully empowered to spontaneously ask anyone any question no matter how stupid or pointless.

“R…eos,” the old guy says with a heavy southern accent. With a smile, he slides an Oreo from the pocket of his stained and worn jeans.

“All critters luvs sugar.”

“But how do ya … ya know, how do they know there’s an Oreo to chase for?” I ask, as into my mind flashes a memory of the fake hare, basically a rabbit skin glued to a short iron rod, who got zipped around the Galway Sportsground on a tiny rail pursued by greyhounds seemingly in need of glasses.

“That’s where yer little fellar there comes in,” he hands my son the Oreo and then rubs his hand in a grandfatherly way across the top of his head. 

“See them little ‘uns encourages the pigs ta run an’ then the winnin’ pig’s motorvated by gittin’ a R…eo, cuz that’s what done happened t’last time he raced, an’ the time afore.”

He turns his head enough to unleash a stringy, brown tobacco-dip spit onto the grass. Breathing in a deep chest-rattley breath, he continues: 

“Then dad, you kin pay five dollars ta name a pig or pay a dollar ta have this little fellar be a en…courager.  An’ if this little fellar’s pig wins, he gits ta give the winnin’ piglet the Oreo in the ah…ward ceremony.  All that money goes on back ta t’Boys N’ Gurls club that done brung us up ‘ere.  Me an’ Millie, we don’t make a nickel in cash, but the Boys N Gurls paid every’thin fer us ta brung t’piglets an’ all this here gear all the ways up from Mar’land.”

Knowing the allure of animals for my son – just a few weeks back, he’d been so empathic separating cows from their weeks old calves on my brother-in-law’s dairy farm in Ireland that the cows didn’t freak out, as any mother would be wont to do in such a situation – I figured fun with pigs would get him out of this tent rapidly enough,h and in a good enough mood, to avoid his feeling the need to enforce rules on the Hells Angels.

“So where would we get Oreos in the Fairgrounds?” I ask in idiot-dad voice.

“The old guy who talks funny has them,” my son says, reflexively shaking his head at my deficiency in Pig Racing knowledge.

“Ok, well, we’ll go to the pig racin’,” I say jumpin’ up, “an’ if we see dessert along the way we can get some, if not we’ll go back to the Candy Apple carnie.”

I nod toward the smoking Angels and their “old ladies” to make sure the rest of our group table sees the need for the early departure while they’re still finishing up.

“We’ll meet everyone else at the Pig Derby, ok?”

My son and I walk hastily, pig-race-and-dessert-blinkered, towards the tent doorway.  As I attempt to further blinker my son’s vision by keeping directly apace with him, thus blocking his view of the smoking Angels side of the tent, we’re stopped in our tracks another an All American original: Red-plaid shirtsleeves rolled up all the better to display bulging-muscle-forearms, a massive fist gripping an axe so big it looks like it could decapitate the entire tent with one wild swing, the log-splitting-competition lumberjack fills the tent entry.

Grinning a grin of the comfortable extrovert, the lumberjack lumbers up to the Florsheim shoe box, drops in a $5 and two $1’s.

“Two turkey dinners, … if you would sir,” the lumberjack says.

“Heeheehee,” the church volunteer squeals a high-pitched laugh and says: “I hope our turkey’s better than your cutlery would seem to imply.”

The lumberjack’s eyebrows bunch together for a few seconds, then with his All-American-Hero smile he raises the axe, his enormous fist nestled under its huge, glistening head.

“Sorry sir, t’competition don’t start for ‘nother hour.  I didn’t wanta leave this a lyin’ round in case some stoopid dad hurt heself showin’ off.”

I swallow some saliva and consider my “stoopid dad” comeback options, but as I fit the fill, nothing comes.

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” the church volunteer pats his ample stomach and grins back with a church-man’s grin.  “Here at the Middleton Baptist Church, we accept everyone, even axe murders, heeheehee.” 

Pleased with his joke, his grin never leaves as he hands over two heaping dinner plates, adding:

“Just no axe murdering today, ok? Heeheehee.”

2014

I’m third in line waiting forced-patiently for a Santa-hatted Walmart cashier to check out the black-leather-jacketed biker who’s watching his wife slowly fish items from their cart and slam them on the conveyor belt.  Peering over the shoulder of the customer in front of me, I stare at the patch on the wrinkled black leather jacket where fading red-on-white letters spell out: HELLS ANGELS   MASSACHUSETTS CHAPTER. 

Next to me my twenty-six-year-old son ADHD fidgets with nothing; lurches towards the pastelly chewing gum display; then lurches back.

“I’m thinkin’ a quittin’ smokin’,” he says by way of lurching-explanation.

“Quit the booze first,” I respond impulsively and cruel-to-be-kindly. 

“No, I meant the pot, if I quit that, the booze is easy.”

“Quit everything,” I say, unhelpfully.

We’d seen this couple, the Angel walking gingerly, like every step hurt, Christmas shopping down various aisles.  My son and I were hunting a heavy, waterproof winter coat to protect him from the New England winter – that sort of protection being something I can provide.  Now they’ve beaten us to the register where the tall, stooped Angel leans in to help, two-handed unloading from their cart a heaped pile of Ramen Noodles, six cans of Starkist tuna, two loafs of whiter-than-snow Wonder Bread, four kids Christmas sweaters – two green, two pinkish-red – a Caterpillar-yellow toy bulldozer, a fire-engine-red toy fire engine whose lights flash when he picks it from the cart, a sixpack of Walmart Barbie knockoff dolls panic-faced-suffocating in plastic wrap and a royal blue, plastic snow shovel.

Embarrassed by my staring I turn to my son.

“So,” I say, forcing myself into conversation, “… you like this coat?”

“It’s warm,” he says reaching out and rubbing the greyish polyester faux fur draped over my arm. “It’ll be good for when I’m walking the three miles to start my Dunks shift at 5AM in a fucken snowstorm.”

The Angel pulls on the silver chain hanging from his jeans belt loop and fishes a fat, black-leather wallet from his jeans pocket.  Walmart’s extra-bright checkout lights glint off his thick silver wedding ring as he thumbs twenties and hands them to cashier.  His wife, scowling, brow furrowed, grabs one large, gray plastic bag stuffed with their purchases, turns and steps away, leaving the other two for the Angel.

“Murry Christmas,” he rumbles in a two-packs-a-day voice, his weatherbeaten, sixty-something-hard-years face cracking with a pleasant smile.

As he limp-lurches out, his wife a half-step behind, involuntarily I say:

“I never seen that before.”

“What?” my son comes right back at me, ready for an attack no matter how I respond.

The customer in front of me, a big-big-squat guy, fully filling a XXXL grey sweatsuit, reaches into his cart and with a sigh, places on the conveyor belt a tray of Stouffers frozen mac ‘n cheese the size of Rhode Island.

“Well, I just don’t bump into Hells Angels down the Trader’s Joe in Coolidge Corner, that’s all, at least not that often or actually in fact … never!”

“Yeah,” he responds calmly, but sullenly, “well they’re around here, I got a friend whose dad is one.”

“Oh, really, it never occurred me that … you know,” I say setting the winter coat up on the conveyor belt behind a mountain of Doritos Cool Ranch Party Size bags. “I don’t know, I never thought … think … it’s probably just my small brain.”

“Yeah, but you’re not gonna believe this,” my son’s face brightens but hardens all at once. “That kid whose father is in a bike gang, he wants ta be a chick, started wearin’ dresses, fuckin’ unbelievable, puttin’ pics up on Facebook, him with makeup on an’ shit.”

“Oh Jaysys, … now that for damn sure never occurred to me,” I shake my head, trying to not imagine how something like gender transition plays out in a viciously unforgiving world.

“It’s actually disgustin’, he has a beard an’ shit, so fucked up, lipstick, that blue shit they wipe on their eyelids, an’ then this scraggly-assed beard.”

“Oh, what the fuck, the poor guy, what’s goin’ through his mind?”

“What? Ya think kids aint all fucked up just like adults,” my son says, his shoulders tucking back defiantly as he defends the ground he’s won.  “That’s where all the fucked-up adults come ….”

“Evenin’ sir,” the Santa-hatted checkout lady says.  She’s a tall indeterminate maybe forties or fifties year-old, heavyset, fish-belly-white skin sagging from her prominent lower jawbones.

“… from fucked-up kids, where the hell else?” my son can’t stop winning his point.

I raise my hand paternalistically trying to silence him, but the checkout lady steps in:

“It happens, my all’s niece went down ta Salem State fer a year ‘n a halves, dropped out, took assistant manager job in a fancy sit-down restaurant up Portsmouth an’ now she’s mah nephew!  Wears a gorgeous blue, double-breasted suit ta work ever’day.”

She cackles out a laugh.

I watch as she searches for the price-tag on the bulky winter coat.

“Aint nuthin ya can do, d’ya all wants ta apply fer a Walmart credit card, git five percent off this pur…chase, that’s a nice coat, cozy, I might git one a these myself.”

“No on the credit card, an’ it is a warm coat,” I say, wondering if this older woman’s vote of confidence in the garment means this Christmas gift will in fact never get used by my image conscious and cold resistant son.

She rings it in, I swipe my card.  Handing me the receipt she says:

“Ye’re all gonna need that coat, t’Almanac says we’s in a fer a bad winter.”

“Thanks,” I say, meaning it for once.

Walking away from the checkout, the coat now draped over my son’s arm, he starts up again:

“Why’d ya stop me talkin’?” he says, with more than a tinge of resentment.

“Well, at that time I didn’t know the checkout lady was in on the cross-dressin’ story.”

“It aint cross dressin’’, this kid’s goin’ all the way, gettin’ his dick cut off, becomin’ a woman.”

We walk past a ten-foot tall, plastic Christmas tree with too many shiny-plastic-gold ornaments and white lights that blink too rapidly – like someone with dust in their eyes.

“An’ what does his father, … the Hells Angel think of this?”

“Fucked if I know, I bet he’s like lots a father’s, won’t never speak ta him again, probly kick the shit outta him … or her.”

“Jaysys, that guy … girl … woman is brave!”

Vignettes -2

We’re on the C train barreling through the maze of tunnels that every day facilitates the barreling of four million people around NYC. A hundred feet above us, on teeming thoroughfares, Manhattan huddles against wind-whipped-this-winter’s-never-goin’-to-end snow. We’ve just come from MOMA, that well-appointed art warehouse and symbol of American acquisitive capitalism, crammed with whatever it means when we say; ‘priceless art.’ There, not so much rubbing elbows with chin-tugging art connoisseurs, as elbowing our way through drifting legions of phone-clicking tourists, I witness a near-tears mother finger-waggingly threaten careless-middle-class death – “NO SCREENS for the rest of the day!” – on her five-year-old daughter for attempting to paw one of the many Picassos.

The subway, crammed with blemished humanity, is a more fertile place:

“I thunk y’all says it wuz two … for fih dollar?” a twenty-something African American woman with a fifty-something scowl, snaps at a skinny eight or nine-year-old Hispanic girl in a soiled, pink-fluffy-fleece jacket, a homemade cardboard box tray of eye-catchingly-bright candy hanging from around her neck.

Everyone lurches in unison with the train lurch: The skinny, hard-eyed little girl adjusts her footing, never losing eye contact with her prospective customer.

“Three … fifties,” the hard-eyed little girl says, one hand supporting the cardboard box, the other hovering protectively over her product.

“Three fifty … for one packs a gum?” the woman gasps, shoulders tugging in, torso curving.

The young girl nods.

Her brother, maybe four years old, a tiny-thin human in oversized clothes, darts precariously amidst the much larger, winter-booted, subway-lurching members of our species. He stands behind his sister carrying his own, much smaller, cardboard box tray of candy supported by a homemade plastic-bag rope running around his thin neck. Scowling, the diminutive sibling tugs on his sister’s jacket and looks around plaintively, grey-I-need-sleep bags bulging under his almond brown eyes.

Still mid-deal, his sister’s a-third-bigger-than-his torso twists rapidly, easily freeing his grip.

“Then, give me two,” the woman says, sighing loudly, peeling a $5 bill off her roll of notes.

The girl hands her a packet of spearmint gum.

“Which udder?” the little girl asks, wrestling free from a second, harder, brotherly grip.

“Classic … t’pink an’ red one,” the woman says, her face flipping from a fifty-something scowl to that of a smiling young girl. “I’n givin’ that one ta mah niece.”

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

The traffic light flips red against the darkness as we splash, wipers clapping fast-time, through puddles lugged fifteen hundred miles from the Caribbean by the storm lambasting Brooklyn.  Stopped on red, from the dim coziness of our car, Like a Rolling Stone bellowsing familiarly, white fingers of streetlight glinting off wet pavement, we see him: A man in his mid-thirties kneeling in the middle of the street; crushed Starbucks’ cup held out imploringly with both hands; homelessly unkempt, too thin, too pale; rain streaming down his gleaming face; lips muttering; tears trickling from beseeching eyes.

He stops time.

The windshield wipers clap over-back…over-back, maintaining this brutally clear scene of human suffering.

We can’t wait for the light to turn.

 ————————————————————————————————————

I’m leaning against a column in the NYC subway’s 42 Street station warily eyeing a clean-cut, young African American man fast-stepping around the crowded platform staccato-yelling: “RASTA, RASTA, RASTA!”

I try to get sciatica relief by jamming the sole of my winter boot hard against the fourth rivet up on the blue steel column.  The man breaks his fast-stepping to talk to a totally-ordinary-in-every-way-except-she’s-rolling-a-joint-on-a-subway-platform-bench, African American woman sitting one seat over from my wife.   The two speak rapid-familiarly in a hushed-vernacular that a country-mouse like me stands no chance of catching. 

The fast-stepping-man spins around, throws his shoulders back and fast steps away: The totally-ordinary-woman sighs audibly, and, returning to the Rizla paper flattened on the wood bench, spills a mound of marijuana from a slender orange and red packet, then spreads the washed-out-green herb along the paper with her purple, jewel encrusted fingernail.

“RASTA, RASTA!” the words cling to the air above the platform.

A stooped, balding African American man in a yellow high-viz vest emblazoned with “MTA COURTESY SERVICE,” leads a heavyset, older African American woman in a pink faux-fur coat, pulling behind her a full-size shiny pink suitcase, through the RASTA-RASTA-head-twitching platform crowd.

“This is yer alls train now, jes stand here, an’ it’ll be along in … oh …,” the Courtesy man says softly, stopping right in front of me.  Propping hands on hips, he leans back to look up at the digital noticeboard. “Jes three minutes now fer t’next downtown C.”

“Thank you, thank … you,” the woman says, lightly touching his arm, her fuzzy pink coated shoulders turning slowly, eyes narrowing as she surveys the platform.

“RASTA … RASTA!” the fast-stepping-man moves in a tightening figure-eight loop. 

My boot, not grippy enough for the smooth rivet head slips and slaps the platform.  The fast-stepping-man’s eyes dart to my boot, look up, catch my eye.  He rushes over holding out his fist to bump.

“King Selassie, … King Selassie,” he whispers, eyes blazing.

His eyes penetrate mine as I lightly bump fists and carefully calibrate our eye contact to keep it just long and short enough to immediately end this tenuous fellowship.

“KING SEL…ASSIE!” he’s off again, fast-stepping, “KING SELASSIE!”

A long, fat joint rolled, the totally-ordinary-woman stands up.

A flame peeks from a dying Bic.

The twisted end of the Rizla flares yellow-orange. 

“Y’all be fine here now,” the Courtesy man intones, “one stop’s all ya gotta go, one stop, Penn Station, the el’vator’s….”

“RASTA, RASTA, KING SELASSIE, KIN….”

The C train screams into the station.

Across the packed platform wafts the sweet smell of marijuana.

 ————————————————————————————————————

I’m walking into a too-brightly lit Cambodian restaurant at 11:00AM on Christmas Day accompanied by a friend with a crushing Naughty List.  A clean-cut, college aged Cambodian man, golf shirt tucked into pressed khakis, grabs tall-plastic menus and moves fast to close the distance between us, his face knotting in worry. 

In my crazy mind I project his logical mind racing to: “Here they come: Crazy-cussing white men, already drunk on Christmas morning!”

He’s accompanied shoulder-to-shoulder by a fifty-something Cambodian man, so similar looking it’s got to be his father.  The older man’s eyes look worried but determined.

“Merry Christmas!” I say as soberly as possible.  Then over-straining to not appear to be what I imagine he imagines we are; I add with near manic politeness, “Are you open?”

It’s a patently stupid question: There’s already two tables occupied by Asian families with little kids sloshing noodles out of their soup onto the red Formica topped tables.

“Sure, sure right this way,” the young man’s face barely relaxes as he directs us to a table. 

We drag back metal chairs, legs grating across the tiled floor.

“Would you li…, can I get you some water?” the young man says, his father still standing close behind him, as we settle into the table.

“Yes, … yes please!” I keep the forced-I’m-not-one-of-them smile on my face.

Breathing loudly, my friend peruses the drinks’ list on the tall plastic menu: As his eyes move up and down the five items on the list, I feel my breath quicken. 

I know he’s not not-drinking: I know he knows I know he’s not not-drinking: Christmas morning under the glaring fluorescent-lights of this Cambodian restaurant could easily veer sharp left.

“Ya know what?” my friend says, his irrepressible smile back on his face, “I’ll have me a good American drink …,” my lungs refuse to release the air they’ve trapped, “I’ll have a Coke!”

I breath out.

“We only do Pepsi sir, is that ok?” the young man says, turning his torso to leave.

“What the …!” my friend’s eyes already so darkened and hardened by life somehow find a way to turn darker and harder. “No Coke!”

“No, sorry sir,” the young man says flatly.  “The truck only delivers one or the other. We get Pepsi.”

His father peers in at us over his son’s shoulder.

“Well if that’s the way it goes,” my friend’s hand slaps the red Formica, “I’ll have a …,” my chest tightens, “Pepsi. Cause when life gives you Pepsi, that’s what ya drink!”

 ———————————————————————————————————-

I’m in the gym locker room untangling the cord of my centenarian-in-tech-years earphones, when from the next bay I hear:

“You still here?” It’s an old-guy’s gravelly voice.  “What?  Ya movin’ in?”

“Ahhh,” a new-old-guy’s voice responds, “that god…damn Murph kept me here talkin’ about pussy.  Is he still out there?”

“Murph, who’s he?  What’s he look like?”

“Ahhh, Italian blowback hair, honkin’ big nose on him?  He does the bike, sits out there pedalin’ an’ starin’ at all t’young ones walkin’ past.”

“I…taal..yan!  Thought ya said he was Murph?”

“He is, he’s both, one a them worst a both types, course he’d tell ya he’s t’best a both, just don’t ask none a his three ex-wives!”

Freeing up enough elderly earphone wire to not suffer an hour listening to my inner-critic, I start to walk out to the gym floor, glancing sideways at the talkers: One sits, a plump man in his late seventies, rumpled khakis, saggy sky-blue golf shirt, white-haired, red-faced, eyes and lips set in an I-seen-it-all grimace; the other old guy stands with liver-spotted hands on hips, wispy grey hair, ashen cheeks, thick glasses, his mouth agape, a cotton, navy-blue Red Sox tee shirt hanging off boney shoulders, black sweatpants with grey lint balls dotting the legs.

In short, two grandfathers.

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

I’m fast-walking down the too-brightly lit VITAMINS aisle towards the prescription counter at a local pharmacy when I see a skinny fifty-something-hard-years guy in a Carhartt jacket and soiled grey sweats, tippy-toe-leaning so far over the counter that his navy Red Sox wool-hat pushes the clear-plastic-Covid-screen way in over the counter.

“You’re t’one as tol’ me ta get t’FUCK OUTTA HERE,” he erupts, face reddening, breath fogging the plastic-screen, “an’ all I’n askin for … is ta get a simple script filled.”

He waves a small white sheet of paper in his right hand.

Smugly, I drop into this scene driven by a gnarly addiction to witnessing human strife and a self-righteous-who-are-you-to-stop-me need to pick up a white-crinkly paper bag containing big pharma’s finest chemicals. In an average year, a neighborhood pharmacy like this will sell 11,000 white-crinkly paper bags of chemicals to relieved, sad, why-me-angry, or addicted people to fuck with their biochemistry in a fashion kinda-sorta predetermined by big-pharma.

The Red-Sox-Carhartt guy slams the Covid-screen with the flat of his hand, his wedding band clacking off the plastic. The pudgy-faced, white-coated young Hispanic woman behind the counter backs up to the wall of white-crinkly paper bag stuffed bins. She’s not the direct target of the rage which is aimed at the white-coated, bearded, dark-skinned, forty-something man sitting on a lab stool staring at his wall-mounted flat-screen, lightly keystroking.

“YOU … were rude ta me … an’ so I’m GONNA …,” Red-Sox-Carhartt’s mouth opens so wide his stubble-covered cheeks and deep crow’s-feet stretch flat.

“Are you a wanting me to phone the poh…lease,” the white-coated man says, stopping his keystrokes, pursing his lips, but still not looking at his antagonist.

“Ya, call t’cops an’ tell ‘em how you tol’ me to get T’FUCK OUTTA HERE ….”

“I tolled you meester, the pharmacist is … not going ta fill that paper prescrip….”

“Who t’fuck are you people ta tell me what I can….”

“Ok, … I will phone the poh…lee….”

“Fuck you, ya fucken towel head terrorist!” Red-Sox-Carhartt wallops the clear-screen with both hands, then turns and jog-walks down the DIGESTION aisle.

“HEH! HEH! HEH!” a pasty, round-in-the-middle, sixty-something woman yells, as she propels herself out a pharmacy waiting chair. “You can take that talk outta here!”

She pads in her ortho-sneakers, washed-too-many-times pink sweats and matt-purple-puffy jacket down the DIGESTION aisle and stops in front of a floor-to-ceiling DEPENDS display; wagging her pudgy finger, triple-chins quivering, she yells down the empty aisle:

“WE’RE NOT HAVIN’ THIS IN MY TOWN!”

Pursing her lips, and shaking her head, she pads back to the counter.

“They can’t do this in my town, no way, no freakin’ way … my scripts ready luv?” she says to the Hispanic pharmacy tech who’s already back tapping her touch screen as the older woman grabs the Covid-screen with both hands to still its swinging.

“Ya know,” she says, not waiting for the tech to answer, instead turning to an obese, black-sweat-suited seventy-something woman wedged into a pharmacy waiting chair, “I have police in my family, we don’t put up with that sorta sh…tuff.”

“Yours is ready mam,” the tech says, raising her eyebrows interrogatively, “four … right?”

“Me too!” the obese woman says, attempting, and failing, to adjust her girth in the seat, “we gots police too, cousins an’ stuff, I wuz almost thinkin’ a callin’ them there for a few minutes.”

“Yep, four taday, I’ll come back tamorrow for t’others,” the round-in-the-middle woman sighs as she plucks a Visa card from her black leather and gold clasped purse. “How much?”

The pharmacy tech lays two teal fingernails on the black and grey pay-pad on the counter.

The white-coated man stares intently at his computer screen; fingers dancing on the keyboard.

The pay-pad chirps: Under the Covid-screen pass four white crinkly-paper bags.

 ————————————————————————————————————

I’m on the construction debris covered second-floor of a Boston firehouse fast-scribbling the captain’s complaints about our lower-than-a-snake’s-ankle renovation contractor, when through the August humidity rips a deafening siren.

“Goddamm!” the captain snarls, drops his clipboard and dashes towards the stairs. In on his day off, he brought along his two sons and now, it seems, a fireman, possibly to impress the 8- and 9-year-olds, has flipped on a siren inside the firehouse – a severely stupid thing to do as the siren is that deafening it permanently damages hearing.

The captain skids to a stop at the stair-landing; peers through the dust-caked screen of the open window; then bursts into a two-steps-at-a-time sprint down the stairs. With the siren still blaring and more sirens chorusing behind it, I hurry over to the window.

Below, standing spreadeagled in the middle of the narrow street, is a short-round, bearded thirty-something guy in a black Bruins hat, faded blue jeans and a once-upon-a-time-white Red Sox’s baseball shirt, his pudgy, hairless arms held aloft pointed directly at the windshield of a black Nissan Maxima jammed to a halt fifteen feet from the barrel of his snub-nosed revolver. 

Behind the Maxima, as far I can see down the street, police-car blues whirl. Uniformed cops snake-race along the red-bricked sides of the street, Glocks clasped in both hands. 

Stopping a few paces back from the driver’s side of the Maxima, a cop yells:
“HANDS, HANDS, I NEEDA SEE HANDS, SHOW ME YERE FUCKEN HANDS!”

The pudgy uncover cop resets his sneakered-stance; his snub-nosed revolver keeping its lethal aim at the Maxima’s driver; his salt ‘n pepper, tightly trimmed beard and shaved-raw-pink throat shudder under a suppressed gulp.

A motorcycle State Trooper – buzzcut blond hair, six feet plus tall, two hundred fifty pounds of muscle and bone in knee-high black boots, blue pants flaring over his thighs – lumbers down the passenger’s side of the car, sky-blue helmet swinging in his hand. He almost casually opens the passenger door.  His dropped helmet thuds off the barely paved cobblestones as he yanks a skinny, screaming African American teenager out of the car. The Statey swings the teenager from the car, pauses for a micro-second, then slams his skinny body down onto the ground.

The teenager, yowling in pain, squirms his arms and legs.

From the driver’s door emerges a stocky, thirtyish, corn-rowed, African American man. He shrugs his broad shoulders up and back, then immediately raises muscled arms up in the air.

“Fuck you, you mudderfucken mudder…fuckers,” he sneers at the gun barrels, “put down dem fucken guns an’ I show y’all howta fight!”

Two cops holster their guns and rush at the surrendering driver while the rest, their faces a study in concentration, keep Glocks trained on his chest.

With the driver still “mudderfucken” but now cuffed, lying face down on the street, the undercover cop, lowers his revolver.  He whips off his Bruins hat revealing a fish-belly-white scalp and wipes his brow with the back of his hand. Re-hatted, he hikes up his Red Sox shirt and slides the revolver into a black leather, small of the back holster.

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

I’m walking the dog down Gallivan Boulevard on a humid summer evening, the sky stretching blue-yellow-orange over Dorchester.  Absent four fear-biting convictions, the dog’s a good dog; long bodied, short-legged; completely black, yet named Ginger; hates cats, canines, squirrels; loves humans. 

Turning up Carruth Street, I see an older model silver-gray Corolla pulled to an angled stop well onto the sidewalk.  Behind the car, sitting handcuffed on the curb, is a pale, ribs showing, no-shirted teenager in black Celtic’s basketball shorts, crudely-whitened Nikes and a black Celtics baseball hat.  Standing behind the teenager, in skin-tight, bleached-front jeans, his pink dress shirt hoisted high enough to show a Boston Police badge and holstered pistol, stands a baldy, jowly-faced forty-something African American, the tips of his thick-fingers resting on top of the Celtic’s hat. 

Pushed up against the Corolla, hands cuffed behind his black tee shirt, an acned, older teen in once-upon-a-long-time-ago-white Celtics sweatpants sneers at the thirty-something, white soccer-mom in tan khakis and a faded yellow polo. With her hand flat between his shoulders, she whips off the teen’s Celtic’s hat, stares inside, then, her slight double chin shuddering, drops the hat on top of the car.

Presuming this would be a bad time for a biting incident, I cross the road, but keep my head turned so I miss nothing and end up catching the shirtless-handcuffed teen’s stoned eye.

“Nice dawg!” he calls out, “is he friendly?”

“Be quiet,” the cop growls, purses his lips and flattens his hand against the top of his charge’s hat.

 Ginger – a rescue from Tennessee, as opposed to me, a rescue from Mayo – reads the situation incorrectly, stops and wags her tail.

“Awwwwhh, he is friendly, what’s he’s name?” the teenager warms to the distraction.

“Please sir,” the cop waves his free hand for me to move along.

“Sorry-sorry,” I tug on Ginger’s leash, leaving behind us the city summer evening.

Nine-One-One Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His face shoots up fast, eyes burning with anger. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He doinks the fork and knife butts off the tabletop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An’ what happens with t’cup a piss?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Involuntarily my head turns away. 

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

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

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

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

He reaches for his glass of Coke.

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

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

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

“Eh, you can finish it.”

“Finish it!  Ya aint even touched it.”

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

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

He doesn’t finish so I rush in with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An’ he’s ok?”

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

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

Vignettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Whose did he beat?”

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

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

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

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

—————————————————————————————————————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shakes her head rapidly, finger swiping wildly.

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

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

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

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

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

 ————————————————————————————————————

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time freezes for the silence for his inbreath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please,” I smile back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mocsow Circus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wiping a bare forearm across her brow, she continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But real this is!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My shoulders twitch at the suddenness of his rage.

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

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

My whole torso tightens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short Trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With no else around, I yell:

“HELLO! … Eh, do you know wh….”

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

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

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

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

“Eh, the detox, I’m lookin’ for ….”

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

“This BUILDIN’S closed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He moves his arm to aim at the smoking shack.

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

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

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

Fuck this, my inner asshole takes over.

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

Nothing happens.

I grab the handle hard and yank the door open.

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

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

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

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

I wait ….

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

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

And wait ….

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

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

“EH, SORRY, is this the deto….”

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

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

And I wait ….

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

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

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

“Yeah, … what?”

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

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

Again, I wait ….

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

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

“Yeah, … I’ll take ‘em.”

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

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

“Cuz I’ll give ‘em to him.”

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

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

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

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

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

I stop.

Choices.

Is life the sum of our choices?

Post Colonial Driving Lesson

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

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

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

The car doors slam.

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

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

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

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

He forces out a dry false laugh.

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

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

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

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

“Now inda…caa….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The road is straight, no one in front. 

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

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

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

I drive on. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wha… who do ya mean?”

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

He slaps his hand off the dusty dashboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are ya doin’?” Da yelps.

“I’m … I’m or I wuz….”

I take my foot off the accelerator. 

The car shudders, lurches.

“Clutch!”

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

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

We crawl down Castlebar Road.

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

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

I take my foot off the accelerator.

The car shudders, lurches.

“CLUTCH!”

I sink the clutch.

Smoothness.

Jaysys, I might get good at this!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Them foreigners on the bikes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The car shudders and lurches heavily.

The vibrations coming through the sole of my foot stop. 

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

“BRAKE!” Da yells and handbrake croaks.

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

He slaps his hands together.

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

He wags a finger in my face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right hand just kinda-sorta moves without moving.

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

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

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

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

“Now let out the clutch sloo….oowly.”

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

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

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

I hear him pull the handbrake.

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

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

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

Dangerous Curves – Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That made Da fierce mad.

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

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

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

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

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

But he didn’t clear off.

He kept coming back. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hawk was winning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da aims the shotgun right at the hawk.

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

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

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

But Da never shoots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m never allowed to hold a real weapon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its wings whoop-whoop-whoop.

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

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

Immediately, the birds in the aviary calm down.

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

Dangerous Curves Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do things have to change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the problem.

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

Animals never pretend.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granny woulda ben furious!

To be continued …

Grass Grows on the Weirs – Part II

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

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

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

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

He gives the horn a loud blast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God bless all here!” I declaim loudly.

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

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

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

“Dat poor ould dog’ll be balds soon!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He slowly shakes his big head. 

“Vurry bad.”

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

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

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

No one enters. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josie stops in his tracks.

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

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

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

We drink on in silence.

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

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

Out the tan speaker Raidió Na Gaeltachta gurgles.

His lips purse; head shaking.

He snaps off the transistor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lubricated by pints, afternoon slips into early evening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He takes a deep breath, nodding a lot. 

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

He twists his head and sets his jaw.  

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

He furrows his brow, shakes his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pub-thrum dissipates.

Fiddle-guitar-bodhran notes drop from the air.

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

The crowd parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“GET OUT!”

Josie barrels through the crowd.

“LAVE ‘IM!” Mickey yells.

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

His girth brushes me aside.

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

Grass Grows on the Weirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shakes his head slowly. 

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

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

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

The fiddle bow stops mid-note.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hoult on!” 

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

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

“We fucken wish!” comes the chorus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His charges stomp out, their back and shoulders rigid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s dangerous stuff, you know.”

Involuntarily, I look up at the light grey sky.

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

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

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

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

I run out of words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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