Public Charges

I’m standing in the auditorium of a Catholic girls’ school in Southie, just a few doors down from Triple O’s Lounge– Whitey Bulger’s, vacated, headquarters.   

It’s around 9:00AM, on a bitterly cold, March morning, in 1999.  

Outside the auditorium, grey-brown snow piles, littered with frozen in place broken furniture, beach chairs, milk crates, are holding fast for now, but are doomed to a watery demise by the inevitable tilt of our planet just a few degrees closer to the nearest star.  In the broader world, beyond Triple O’sand the nasty snow piles: Bill I-didn’t-have-sex-with-that-woman Clinton is just over his impeachment; Timothy McVeigh has just had his death sentence for the Oklahoma bombing confirmed by the Supreme Court; gazillions of dollars and Euros (just a toddler currency then!) are being spent on averting something called “Y2K;” and, unbelievably, it’s already the tenth birthday of the Global Climate Coalition, a “nonprofit” formed and, handsomely, funded by fossil-fuel and industrial mega-corporations, to keep politicians primed that climate science “is too uncertain to justify any action.”

 Meanwhile, inside the girls’ school auditorium, all around me, sitting in wheelchairs, slouching forward onto walkers, leaning heavily onto canes are a few hundred elderly Eastern Europeans drawn out this freezing morning by the threat of losing their right to access Federal aid aimed, primarily, at the elderly and infirmed. 

The tension in the room is palpable.  

Like the good rule followers we are, we’ve been waiting for almost an hour, with no one seemingly in charge.

A few feet away from me, but up on the stage, an elderly, tall, stooped man, in a dark winter coat, black wool cap, waves his arms rapidly and issues a string of indecipherably fast words, to clear a similarly elderly woman off the piano stool.  

He sits down and opens the piano lid with a dull thud.  

He flexes his long, boney fingers – I imagine I hear the knuckles crack – and starts playing.  

His fingers flow mellifluously over the black and white keys.

The music, one of Bach’s Partitas – an almost three hundred year old piece of music, and something familiar enough that even a Neantherdal like me knows it – is eerily calming in the voluminous, tension fraught room

 A few minutes into his piece, a door opens at the other end of the hall.  A mob of people crush, in the sluggish manner an elderly, infirmed mob crushes, toward the door to see if there’s any news.  

He keeps playing the piano.

The door bangs closed, with that familiar school door metallic rattle.  

A hushed murmur shimmers across the crowd as it parts, in its distinctively sluggish manner.  

A nun, nunnishly-plump, fifty-ish, dressed undercover in a dark blue skirt, purple cardigan, except she is wearing the black and white head-thingie, stalks across the auditorium, her hard soled shoes resounding off the parquet floor. 

The piano keeps our end of the hall energized.

The nun makes her way up onto the stage, her heels competing with the piano.

She touches the piano player lightly on his shoulder.  

He stops playing.

“APOLOGIES,” she says loudly, and takes a practiced pause, waiting for the murmuring to stop.  

“Apologies, we are running a little behind.  Quite frankly we’re overwhelmed with the turnout, but …, BUT, I can guarantee you that everyone will get to take their Citizenship Test today, … every … single … person.”

She looks slowly around the room.

“So please, please be patient with the sisters.  You may now proceed to the classrooms through THAT door,” she points to where she had entered.

The door rattles opens again, and the mob surges, sluggishly, toward the opening.

The sluggish-crush through that doorway sums up how human systems work: Bill, I’ve-a-small-problem-with-the-truth Clinton just happens to have a rightward tilt, to save his presidency, and is playing junior-Republican, labeling non-citizens as Public Charges and thereby denying them access to federally funded end of life healthcare.  Clinton’s rightward tilt causes a rush on citizenship applications by these octogenarian Eastern European immigrants.  They had been brought here by far-to-the-right Presidents Reagan and Bush – after already living hard lives in Eastern European countries – to show up the failures and inequities of communism.  This rush on applications has required that the INS subcontract the Citizenship Test to third parties – among them the Southie nuns who happen to run a school, that just happens to be next to James, where-are-you-now-Whitey, Bulger’s old headquarters. 

I’m here ‘cause I can.  After five years with a Green Card, you can apply for Citizenship, and I did.  And thus, with my own, not even pretending to be under control, trauma and anxiety about being abandoned by the herd, I launch into the mob of the aged, the crippled, the infirmed crowding the doorway. Employing, questionably legal, skills honed on the rugby fields of the West of Ireland, I’m plowing my way through the mob, when a rare moment of clarity dawns on me.  

I pull up short, turn, and walk to the back of the line, offering, but getting refused, to help a woman so doubled over in her wheelchair that it’s hard to see how she can see where she’s going.

I can wait.  

I can take this test next year or the year after, or any year for the next thirty, before access to these federal programs may even be required.

Slowly the mob works its way down the school’s corridors, with nuns waving us into classrooms.  I’m waived into classroom 328, where I take a seat, and pull out the four HB pencils I had, per the carefully detailed instructions, brought along for the test. 

At the head of the class stands an elderly nun; possibly in her seventies; same undercover clothes, black and white head-thingie; arms tight folded; on her gaunt, bristly face, a seasoned scowl. 

Two white-haired, seventy-something, men enter the room talking, laughing and start to take seats next to each other.

“No!” the nun’s voice is loud, sharp.

The whole classroom sits up in their seats.

One of the old guys freezes, half-sitting, half-standing, a pleasant smile on his face.

“You two can’t sit together,” she stalks over to them.  “The rules prohibit fraternizing during the examination.”

She waves the half-stander to the other side of the room.

The smile slumps off his face, as he’s waved over to the far row.

“Sit down, sit down,” the nun says, turning, rapping a ruler off the teacher’s desk to get our attention.  “The examination will begin as soon as everyone’s seated … and behaving.”

The room settles. 

She walks over to the door, her eyes never leaving her class, and closes it gently.

We wait.  

She paces over and back in front of the teacher’s desk; the seasoned scowl never leaving her face; her eyes never leaving her class.

We wait.

In the front row, a plump man, his flat cap sitting on top of a head of wild-bushy grey hair, raises his hand.

The nun stops pacing, stares at him.

“P-lease mad…dam, thee papers, p-lease,” he smile-nods, holding up his right hand, a pencil gripped tight-white between his fingers.

“I’ll …, the examination booklets will be distributed when I’m released to do so … and … have them available.”

We wait.

Twenty, long, silent, scratchy, minutes later another undercover nun enters with a stack of booklets and drops them on the teacher’s desk, nods knowingly and departs.

“I am now going to distribute the examination booklets,” the nun stops her pacing, and stands behind the teacher’s desk.  “They will be distributed face down.”

She scowl-glares at her students.

“You may not, I repeat, NOT!  Turn them over, until I give the order.”

She paces one full loop of the teacher’s desk, her scowl-glare never diminishing, then picks up the stack of booklets and starts to distribute them.

The desk in front of me is vacant.  She lays a booklet on the desktop, then immediately picks it up again.

Back at the teacher’s desk, she stands staring around; her fingertips brushing lightly against the desktop.  Her mouth opens, she’s about to issue the definitive order that will release her class to start the process of accessing benefits that will prevent end of life penury, when the classroom door bursts open.  

In bumbles a burly man, red jowled, eyes deep in their sockets, a shock of white hair, a blue anorak, torn under the sleeve.  His eyes furtively scan the desks.  He sees the empty one in front of me, and rushes for it, knocking a booklet on his way.

“Excuse me?” the nun snaps.  “Where do …. YOU … think you’re going?”

“The peuples say,” his wild eyes focus on her, bewildered.  

“Ladee in door,” he waves his left hand back in the direction of the corridor. “Go rhoom free … two … eight.”

“Then sit down, you’re disturbing everyone else.  The examination has already begun.”

A few booklets get flipped over.

“Wait!” she yells, the strain showing in her eyes.  “I didn’t say to start the examination.”

Heads wag slowly.

“You are only permitted to work on Module One of the examination.  After twenty minutes I will …  stop turning the pages,” she rushes over to a petite, incredibly wrinkled-faced, blue haired, woman, and snatches the exam booklet from her hands.

“You may only work one module at a time,” she scowl-glares at the shocked old woman for a few seconds, then turns back to the rest of the class, her face resolving to its regular scowl.  

“I …,” she raises her voice and waits until enough eyes are looking at her, “will tell you when you can move from module to module.”

She starts pacing and fast-talking.  

“You must, I repeat MUST, write your name and applicant number CLEARLY on the booklet’s cover.  Once you have completed a module, you may not return to it. You may not leave the room and reenter.  You may not talk or communicate in any way during the examination. You may not ask me questions.  I will not answer.”

She stops pacing, looks around for emphasis.  

“If you leave the room before the examination is complete, your booklet will be submitted as is, even if it is incomplete.”

She glares around the room, the blue-haired woman’s booklet still clutched in her hand.

“Does everyone understand me?”

No one makes a move.

She walks slowly to the blue-haired woman’s desk, hands her the booklet. Then, without looking at him, she drops a booklet on the burly, late arriver’s desk.  

Back at the head of the class, she rises slightly onto her toes, holds her wristwatch up to her face and clicks a button on the watch.

“You may now begin the US Citizenship Examination – Module One.”

There’s a loud rustle of papers, the scrape of chairs dragging in tight to desks.

I flip open the booklet, and within a few seconds realize this is a test of basic English skills, something that is not in any way challenging to an English speaker.

The burly man in the desk in front of me has not opened his booklet, and is looking around the room.

The nun increases her scowl intensity as she approaches him, her arms folded.

She stops a few feet away.

 “What’s the problem here?” she asks in a loud, clipped, whisper.

He holds up his left hand, and makes the universal writing-in-the-air sign for needing a pen.

“You are required to bring four, Hard Black pencils with you to the examination,” she says, dispensing with the whisper; heads rise at the disruption. “That is your responsibility as the examinee.”

He keeps up his symbolling.

I can’t see his face, but can tell by her scowl relaxing, that he doesn’t understand her, and she knows it.

“I’ll phone down to the office to see what can be done.”

She turns and walks up to the desk, picks up the phone, and dials a few digits.

I finish Module One in about three minutes – wracked with Catholic guilt for how easy it was for me, compared to the clearly evident struggling of those around me.

In front of me, the burly man looks around the room, cranes his neck toward the desk.

I take one of my HB pencils, reach forward and poke him lightly on the shoulder.

He turns, and takes the pencil with a bushy-eyebrowed, thank you nod.

At the desk the nun rummages loudly in a drawer.

She pulls out a stubby pencil; jams it into a mechanical pencil sharpener, and whirls the sharpener loudly – the noise raising a few heads, her head-thingie shaking. After a few attempts at this, she has a three-inch long pencil, with a point that could harpoon a salmon. She starts down the aisle towards my burly neighbor.

A few feet away from him, she stops, her scowl intensity rising sharply.  

“Is that a Hard Blaa… ,” she starts to say, but stops when every head in the room shoots up.  “Continue, please continue.”

She turns and walks back to the teacher’s desk, shaking her head slightly.

Fifteen, boring if you’re an English speaker, minutes later, there’s a loud handclap that brings everyone to attention.

“Module One of the US Citizenship Examination is now completed.  Pencils down!”

We work through the, by now customary, punitive ceremony of finishing one module, and moving onto the next.

“Module Two: Government, will now begin,” the nun eventually gets to say. “On the fifteenth minute of Module Two, I will administer the … Spelling Test.”

Intrepidly, we launch into Module Two, which asks questions like:

Who is the highest leader in the government of a state?

Complete the following: “The Mayor is the leader of the _ _ _ _ .”

On the fifteenth minute, the nun again issues a startlingly loud handclap.

“Pencils down.  Pencils down, right way.  I will now administer the Spelling Test by saying the word three times.”

I dutifully place my pencil in the pen scoop on my desktop.

“The word you need to spell is … mayor.  Mayor.  Mayor. I will not repeat it again.” 

I slowly write the five block capital letters in the workbook, and return the pencil to the desk.

In front of me the burly guy is scratching his scalp, with what was once my, but is definitely now his pencil.

The nun paces slowly around; her lips pursed, determinedly not saying the word “mayor.” 

My burly neighbor’s shoulders suddenly tighten, he pulls the pencil out of his scalp and starts to rifle back through the booklet.

I smile, realizing he’s remembered the word “mayor” was used in a question on those pages.

He finds it, and is carefully transcribing it, flicking from one page to the other, when the nun’s hand comes down hard on his booklet, knocking the pencil from his hand.

“It is prohibited to look back on previous work!” she shrieks.

Every head in the room shoots up; shoulders tighten; the wrinkled-faced woman grabs hold of her cane.

Shaken, the burly guy sits back in his chair, and raises his arms in the universal sign of surrender.

The nun grabs his booklet off the desk, and forcefully creases it open to the Spelling Test page.  

I can see he has written: M A Y O.

She places the booklet on his desk, and steps back, her eyes never leaving him.

He leans over, picks up the pencil off the floor, keeping his head angled so he never stops facing the nun.

The pencil is broken.  

He holds it up in front of his eye, shoulders subsiding.  I take another pencil off my desk, and hold it up in the air. 

She swoops in, whisks the pencil from my hand, and leans over my neighbor’s workbook.

I can hear the scratch of graphite on paper.  

The pencil drops on his desktop.

The nun stalks back to the teacher’s desk, fixing her head-thingie.

Transported

I’m on the steaming hot tarmac at the Hyannis bus station, watching the Boston bus disgorge.

The driver, a stubby, bald man, in a tired-green uniform, is stooped over, slinging bags out of the baggage hold.  A man in his mid twenties, in boat shoes, khakis, pink dress shirt, grabs his wheelie suitcase, and breezes past the driver, out into the bus drive lanes.

“Hey!” the driver squalls, jerking upright, his face tight with anger.

He’s yelled so loud that everyone in earshot, but the young man, turns and stares.  

Wincing, the driver sways his torso forward, placing his hand on his lower back.

 “You can’t go that way,” he yells even louder, taking a half step toward the drive lanes.  “That’s not allowed!”

The young man finally looks around, slows down, slightly, but doesn’t stop.

“Hey,” the driver positively screams now; his face flushing beet red; his eyes wild with anger.  

“Stop!  I said stop!”

The young man, already halfway across the bus lanes to the guardrail separating the buses from customer parking, breaks into a jog. 

“You could be killed!” bellows the driver, taking a few defeated steps toward the runner, half-heartedly throwing his hands up in the air.

The young man stops at the guardrail, glances back nervously.  He flings his wheelie over, and lumbers over himself, taking extra caution not to stain his khakis.  

In the parking lot, the doors of a silver-grey Camry pop open, and out steps an older couple.  They walk toward the young man, smiles beaming, arms outstretched.

“That illegal idiot coulda ben kilt!” the driver turns, glaring, still wild-eyed. 

He points his index finger up at the sky, and glare-scans the line of passengers waiting for the, penitential, pleasure of having him convey us to Boston.

A half hour earlier, I had entered the, so-overly-air-conditioned-you-need-a-sweatshirt, Hyannis Transportation Center, with the usual cocktail of low grade, travel anxiety, and excitement at superior eavesdropping opportunities, racing around my mind.  The HTC, as the signs call it, is a newish building, where utilitarian, high ceilinged, clean bathroomed anonymity, has displaced the gritty, stinking-of-sweat-and-piss, distinctiveness of old bus stations.  

I leaned into the ticket window to pay my, shockingly affordable, $20 fare to Boston.  

Inside the window a slight-shouldered man, with aviator glasses, unevenly applied layers of makeup, and enormous, silver, hoop earrings, adjusts the clear plastic tiara propped on his thick mop of hair. 

“That’ll be twen’y bucks,” he says in a gravelly voice, his blue-bony fingers tapping rapidly on the keyboard.  “The bus’ll be at 6 – Gate 6.”

A printer’s tuck-tuck-tuck starts up somewhere inside the window.  

“Watch the silly-screen for changes,” he flicks his right-thumb toward the large, but already stuffed with travellers, waiting area.

Slowly he hands me the ticket.  

“The bus company don’t make no announcements,” he breathes in, raising his plucked eyebrows.

I take the only seat available, at the end of a long wooden bench.  On the floor at the other end of the bench, sit-lies a couple, probably late teens, early twenties; their bodies about as enmeshed as can allowed in a public place before someone needs to call the cops, … or the fire department.

“Hey babe,” the young man says, too loud, shifting himself suddenly.  “You’re crushing my nuts.”

A few heads turn.  

He raises his eyes to stare them down.

I force my eyes down to the tiled floor.

“I gotta pee anyway,” the young woman says, untangling herself, standing upright. “Having one-a them spritzers aint the best idea, when you gotta get on a bus.”

She’s pretty, younger than him, probably only seventeen, eighteen; dyed-black hair; remnants of acne dotting her forehead.  She slopes off in her baggy jeans, oversized, flannel shirt, with one button too many open; head and shoulders down; face obscured by hair.

The young man grunt-yawns, rises to standing, glaring victoriously at the social-jury on the benches.  

He’s got that square-jawed, blond look, coulda-shoulda-woulda been a surfer, but isn’t.  His eyes are old already, or stoned, … or old and stoned.

Satisfied that his dominance glare has worked, he looks down, taps the front and back pockets of his baggy jeans.

“What the fuck?  Did I leave my phone in the shitter?”

“No,” another guy, in black combat boots, camouflage-fatigues, black muscle shirt, sitting by himself at the far end of my bench, speaks up pointedly, soberly. “You gave it to the slut when the cops started hassling Josh.”

“Don’t call her that!” he snaps angrily, shaking his head.  “Did I do that?  Really?  Was I that fucked up?  And I gotta go ta Falmouth, get that bit… .”

He falls silent, his eyes darkening.

Along the benches eyes flicker toward his silence, and then away – fast.

“I’m goin’ ta Falmouth too,” a heavyset woman, late twenties, maybe thirty, says. She’s leaning up against the window wall; greasy hair, pudgy face; she fully fills out a pink and grey, sweat-suit.

Her eyes flicker up from her phone, to stare at the young man.

“Oh yeah?” the darkness lifts off the young man’s face.  “I got two baby-moms in Falmouth.  But fucking Brittany, she’s making me all kinds of shit.  She’s looking for cash; I don’t got none. But at least,” his eyes soften, like he’s practicing his lines, “if I tell how things are.  I aint worked in … fuck, three months.  I got issues. The, the … the thingam… you know that the judge makes you go see, … the social worker. She says I got issues. And she knows, she’s one a them … LI, … LI.  I forget what you call them.”

“A Long Island social worker?” the muscle shirt guy snaps, without looking up from his phone.

“Fuck you, it aint that.  It’s something else, more important.”

 “Oh yeah,” the young woman says.  “I got a little one too.  At home in Falmouth, my mom’s taking care of her, or my aunt is this morning, I think. I had-a come down here for a stoopid job interview, so social don’t shut me off.  Like I’m gonna work in Hyannis, and live in Falmouth.  Why don’t they move the job to Falmouth?  Heh?”

“Yeah, let me show you my kids,” the young man says, his eyes drifting off as he starts to pat his pockets again.

He spins around so suddenly that he stumbles toward the bench.  

The bodies on the bench tighten, with audible, fast in-breaths.  One older woman, with immaculately coiffed grey-blue hair, stands; grabs the handle of her maroon wheelie bag and clicks away to the other side of the crowded room.

“Hey, where the hell she’d go?” the young man asks, still turning around, but slowly now.

Fully drawn in, I lean forward, but the muscle shirt guy, at the other end of the bench, is intently playing a game on his phone.

The young man walks over to the door, sticks his head outside, warm air flooding in.

I catch a few other people on the benches staring.

The young man keeps his head hanging out in the heat for a few minutes, long enough for the overly cold waiting room to become almost bearable.

“Hey babe,” the girlfriend yells from across the waiting area.  “You ok?”

“Oh, there you are!” he answers, pulling his head in, beaming a smile.  “I thought you’d walked the fuck out on me – again.”

Twenty minutes later, out of the burning cold of the waiting room and into the burning heat of the tarmac, I’m inching slowly toward the still enraged bus driver. I await my turn at what starts to feel like a rite of passage to get on the bus: Especially creative insults from the driver.

“What the hell d’ya want me to do with this thing?  Strap it to the roof?” he snaps at the African American mother in front of me who pushes an oversized stroller toward him.  

“It’s bigger than the god-damned bus!”

“The lady-guy inside said it’s awright, when and she tooks my fawhty bucks,” she snaps, hitching her child higher up on her hip. 

Half the little girl’s hand stuck inside her mouth.

“Why I gotta pays for her?” she rapidly puckers and un-puckers her lips. “She aint taking no seat, she sitting on me, … de whole time.”

“Talk to the company mam, talk the company,” the driver shakes his head. “How we gonna get this thing on.” 

“Here,” I offer, my tendency for conflict avoidance joining forces with my travel anxiety.  “I think you just click that button with your fo … .”

“Don’t touch it,” the driver yells, interposing his stubby torso, with surprising agility, between me and the stroller.  “This baby … thing is now in the custody of the bus company.”

He glares at me with unregulated anger; a sheen of sweat on his balding forehead; a bluish vein straining through his tanned skin. 

“And only I, … as their employee, the driver of this bus,” he stabs the air with his index finger, “can touch it now.”

He continues to glare.

I step back beside my bag.

He huffs and he puffs, and eventually he collapses the stroller, and jams it into the hold.

“Well, the luggage hold’s full now,” he says loudly.  “Why don’t everyone just take their luggage on board with them.”

Dutifully, I turn to go to the door.

“Not you,” he yells, taking two fast steps and grabbing the handle of my bag. “Or you.”

He catches the eye of some other, terror stricken, passenger.

“Hang on, hang on, just hang on, would ya.  I can get some more on – may…be.  Stop, stop, everyone stop!”

He turns and glares at me.

“Don’t put nothing in that hold,” he wags his finger viciously in my face.

He stalks around to the bus door, and inserts himself into the line of passengers.

“No one boards the bus without getting their ticket checked!” he yells.

Several passengers’ shoulders tighten, their faces wincing.  

He steps onto the bus; the sound of his unintelligible yells spilling out onto the tarmac.  

Then he’s back on the tarmac, his face red and clouded, impatient-angrily waving everyone away from the bus’ door.  

Four passengers, stunned into angry sheepishness, emerge from the bus.  He closes the bus door with a loud pneumatic hiss. 

Then he walks slowly along the line of passengers to the luggage hold.

“Ok, sir,” he says, with mocking calmness.  “And just how may I help you?”

Tentatively, I hand him my bag.

He takes a half step away from the bus.

My chest tightens in confusion.

Then, resetting his feet, he swings back toward the bus, slinging my bag into the hold with a loud thud.

“Now, there you go, … sir.” 

Enough Killing Joe

I’m pretend relaxed, sitting on a filthy sofa in the LOW-LOW insuranceoffice at a strip mall on Route 1.  I lean back on the brown, dried out, pleather sofa, that’s been stained and deformed by hundreds, if not thousands, of customers ensnared by the same trap.  

I ventured in when, driving home from work, I saw the LOW-LOWbanner hanging across their storefront, and wondered if I could get a better car insurance rate.  Having just turned thirty, and recently signed a mortgage – the first intrusions of adulthood into my heretofore blissfully clueless life – managing costs had suddenly become important. 

The high-stacked-bleached-blond receptionist, stilettos in front me the thirty feet down the storefront into the dimly lit back office.  The salesman, a pudgy faced, thick-glassed man, of about my own age, eases back in his chair, and holds up his index finger as the universal signal of ‘wait, I’m much too busy for you.’  But, just as I’m turning to leave, he half stands out of his seat, and still jabbering on the phone, but now with a smarmy salesman smile, waves me onto the distressed sofa.

His office is too small for the sofa, but his closely studied Acme Strong Arm Life Insurance Sales Manualcalls for creating a faux-cozy environment to facilitate the tricky consideration of how many more years the mark … eh, I mean the customer is willing to bet they will live.

A few minutes of unavoidably eavesdropped mumbo-jumbo sounding business talk, ends with the surprisingly emotional admission: “So, a new cylinder head gasket is the only to get that piece of shit back on the road again, heh?  Ok, but then you’re covering the goddam oil change!”  

He slams down the phone, stands up, buttons his Caldor suit jacket over an ample, I-like-big-lunches paunch, and leans forward, holding out his hand, still sweaty from the phone.

“Hi, I’m Mike Nowell, CPI, AII – I only say them letters to let you know I’m not just some guy stuck at the back of an insurance office,” he says, completely devoid of irony. 

“Hello, yes, I’m Joe, Joe O’Fa… .”

He turns holds up the wait-index-finger, takes one big step and leans out the doorway.

“Phyllis, hold my calls,” he yells down the office, and pulls the tinny door closed behind him.

“Now,” he rubs his hands together. “Tell me about yourself Tom, or, Joe right, Joe.  Tell me about yourself,” again flashing the smarmy salesman smile.

“Well, eh, I live in…” I start, but again the wait-index-finger shoots up.

“It’s actually your parents I need to know about, how long they lived, what, if they are deceased, was the cause of death.  You know, that kind of insurance stuff.  Not that you’re not an interesting guy,” he sorta half grimaces, “but that’s the sort of info these big insurance companies need to know.”

Confused, but still with the hope of getting a better monthly car insurance rate, I’m muddling along when, he leaps right for the jugular.

“So …,” he holds up the wait-index-finger.  “Just what age did you say your father first had heart disease, … early forties?” he raises his eyebrows interrogatively, like we’ve just made a major discovery.  “That’s only around the corner, really.” 

He holds up the palms of both hands to keep me stopped.

“And your mother, that must have been so hard,” he shakes his head, “so young, so young.  I mean relatively speaking, not as young as you are now, but not a million years away neither.”

He stops, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, while he’s taking a breath.

“See an occurrence like that could leave the missus, and maybe by then you’d have a couple of little ones running around … .”  

His thick eyebrows shoot up, as he lets that hang in the air for a few seconds, before his face starts to deform into a frown that seems to ask: Could you possibly not be thinking about stuff like this?  Or, … or God forbid, you couldn’t actually … could you?  You could not be thinking at all, could you? Really?  With a wife, and now a mortgage – remember pal, the bank that owns your house – and maybe a few kids on the way, and you don’t even think about stuff like this?  

With me rattled into silence, he quickly moves into the business of just how many, or as he phrases it, “how limited a number of years there might be before there’s the possibility of big payout to your missus, … and the future little Joes.” 

By then, he has me numbed by repeatedly trawling through scenarios that inevitably end up with me abandoning my family, through the vehicle of death, in their time of greatest need.

“Let me tell you a story,” he sighs loudly; definitively tapping the stack of the papers I’ve just signed on the glass coffee table.  “Just two, … no three,” he holds up the index finger, “weeks ago, I had to go a good friend’s, well, a good friend of my parents’ wake. And I’m moving along the line, and the widow, … Mrs. … Jones, she was sitting, you know she’s quite elderly,” he cups both palms to somehow emphasize her elderliness, “so she’s sitting on the sofa in the funeral home.  And when it comes to my turn in the grieving line, she stands up and gave me a big hug, and says; ‘thank you Mike, thank you for protecting my family at this difficult time.’”  

He stares off into nowhere; his lips in a rueful half-smile; his eyes a little moist.

“You know, that’s kinda why I chose this business.”

He purses his lips, but quickly releases them.

“Anyway,” his eyes flash back to me. “We’ve killed Joe enough.  Onto the missus.” 

An hour later, shaken to the core of my soon-to-expire being, I leave with two stacks of carbon copy paperwork that predict the optimal time for economically beneficial deaths in my family.

“Remember to mail me those voided checks,” he yells across the parking lot at me, raising his arm high in a salute-wave.  “My boss is gonna be pissed at the low rate you got outta me.  But remember, that awesome protection for your family doesn’t kick in until the first payment.”

Three days, two bottles of wine, and a case of beer, later, I walk into the office of a regular insurance salesman, and walk out with sensible, affordable coverage and minor optimism around life expectancy.   

For twenty years I get by without ever forcefully thinking about my mortality. 

Then divorce.  

Suddenly, we’re sitting in the mediator’s office postulating upon my mortality.  

The mediator’s questions, raised in a far more reasonable manner than done by “Mike Nowell, CPI, AII, not just the guy at the back of an insurance office,” lead to a similar conclusion: A new life insurance policy is required.

“You fill,” Valentina, the life insurance company nurse, says in the punitively directive way that only a Russian can. 

She’s a short, squat woman, who must be at least seventy, makeup caked on her face, costume jewelry earrings, bracelets and necklaces, but no rings on her thickened arthritic fingers.

“No toy-let water,” she wags a thick index finger at me.  “Lab tell toy-let water.”

“I, … I never, … I wouldn’t …,” I meekly take the urine sample cup, still not attuned to her directness.

We’re standing the kitchen of my shitty little divorce apartment, where she’s already weighed, measured, blood pressured and temperatured me, with a record number of tsk-tsks and judgmental sighs. 

“You vash hands,” she sighs, and flops down onto a kitchen chair.  “I no vant sick too.”

I stare at her saggy-craggy face.  The ruby red lipstick strays well beyond her lips, and forms cracked heaps at the edges of her mouth.  Large, complicated earrings drag down her earlobes.

“Go,” she waves her arthritic hand impatiently toward the bathroom.  “I have old-old man to wisit in Bri-town.”

I comply, wondering whether the old-old man is buying insurance?  A relative?  A date?

When I return, anxious to get rid of the freakily warm urine sample cup, she’s leaning over a blue manila folder on the kitchen table, a stack of forms at the ready.

Without looking up, she points at the stovetop for me to leave the urine sample there.  I stall momentarily; considering the implications of that should I ever decide to cook.  

She waves her hand quickly.  

“Come, come: Old man vaiting.” 

I obediently sit.

“I ask,” she stares at me with her glassy eyes, holding a black Bic pen at the ready. “You tell.”

I nod as she stares hard at me

“You father; he live or he die?”

“Dead.”

“How old?”

“Eighty four.”

“How?”
            “Heart attack.”

She shakes her head, and looks up to consider me.

“You mother; she live or she die?”

“Dead.”

“How old?”

“Fifty one”

“Five … one,” she tsk-tsks, stops writing, looks up at me.

“How?”

“Brain hemorrhage, well ultimately it was a heart attack … .”

Her glassy eyes stare at me.  She turns the leaf of paper with my basic information.

“Is wery bad,” she shakes her head, tsk-tsking.  “You are sure?”

“Eh, … well, it’s eh, … I mean I’ve told other insurance companies this.”

“Wery good. Is so,” she gets back to writing, but sneaks a glance up at me under her penciled-on eyebrows.

We muddle on through the rest of the interrogation, my sense of wellbeing plummeting to historic lows.

Finally finished, and sliding the blue manila folder into the front pocket of her wheelie bag, she turns and stares at me.

“Vhy?”

“Why what?” 

“Now.  Life ensur-ance, vhy now?”

“Oh, it’s a divorce thing. I need to have it so that if I was to … know you, if … anyway, so the kids’ college costs are covered, and stuff.”

“Ahhh,” she nods knowingly, casting me a sympathetic look.

“But you don’t think the stuff with, you know … my parents, … my mother being just a couple years older …, you know, the insurance company, they won’t deny. Would they?”

She stops, sits down heavily again. Pulls the blue folder from the wheelie’s front pocket; carefully opens it.  

Slowly, her thick fingers turn each leaf.

I feel a drop of sweat run down my chest.

“No prob-lum,” she says, looking up, her face tightly distorting into what I assume is a smile.  

“Fifteen years poll-icee, come-pany no vorry.  Fall down stair, throw-pical dis-ease, accident – come-pany vorry alvays.  But fifteen years, no prob-lum.  After … .”

“Excellent!” the word gushes out of me, with a shoulder slumping sense of relief at one big divorce task completed.

“After,” she holds up a thick index finger.  

“After,” she repeats, but then turns her glassy eyes away. 

“Prob-lum.”

Who Rescued Who?

I’m plodding down Adams Street with Ginger, a short-legged, long-bodied dog, sauntering alongside.  Her neck strains for a hydrant, tautening the leash.  

I halt, let her sniff.  

Confused at being allowed to stop, her head turns and she peers up at me with those eyes that seem positively human – yet, today, show no comprehension of her fate. 

As it happens, I’m having a difficult time with my own, allegedly human, eyes: The inside of my sunglasses are drenched with tears.  

The day before, sometime around 6:00AM, our ten year old son, whom we had adopted a year previously, rolled over in his sleep, and laid his head on Ginger’s, only three years old, but already destroyed by arthritis, hip.  Reflexively, she launched at the object causing pain, and bit his face – half an inch under his right eye.  

Three hours later, with fourteen stitches, placed by an elderly plastic surgeon wearing jeweler’s glasses held together by masking tape, and he’s on his way home to recover, physically anyway.

“Can I not see Ginger,” he says tentatively, in the car.  “I mean, I’m not mad with her, I know she didn’t mean to do it, … but still, can I not see her?”

Ginger spends that day closed into our bedroom; that night also.  The next morning, when again, he’d “prefer not to see her,” it’s patently clear that this little boy, for whom we’d gotten this dog to help replace the soul-figures of dogs from his past life, could no longer deal with a best friend who relied on her teeth to solve problems.

“Probably two or, … three-ish, … maybe it’s the fourth time she’s bitten, a person that is,” I half-lie to the vet over the phone, glossing over the numerous slashing fights she’s gotten into with other dogs.  “Yeah, yeah, fourteen stitches, … under the eye.”

He haws and hems through a bunch of veterinary psycho-babble, finally breaking free to say: “A dog like that can’t be around humans, something worse might happen. It should be brought in, …, and eh, … put to sleep.”

As a pup, Ginger travelled fourteen hundred miles from Arkansas to Boston in the back of a ‘rescue animal transporter’ – an eighteen wheeler, with an air conditioned trailer jammed with dog crates, and reeking of dog urine. Expectantly waiting for her was a different, as in not us, family, who would keep her for a year or so; presumably until those teeth got to work.  

This small-ish industry of moving dogs from the laissez-faire southern states to the way-too-uptight northeastern US, is another instance of the clash between the two greatest forces in American life – guns and money.  The southern states still have a large number of humans who disappear into the woods with guns and dogs to slaughter whatever moves in the underbrush.  As a result of this, enshrined in the constitution, ‘recreational activity,’ southern hunters are vehemently, or at least manipulated into being vehemently, pro-gun and anti-spaying.  As a block, they have successfully stopped the passing of spaying laws.  

In the northeast, with our propensity to deliberately confuse, while looking down our noses at everyone else, spaying is referred to as “fixing.” As in, the vet saying, “for $600, without the hospital charges, I could fix that dog for you;” which translates to; it’ll cost $1,200 to completely break that dog’s only remaining purpose in life – to pass along its DNA.  Down south, it reportedly costs on average $300 to get a dog spayed – which, even with flights and a hotel, works out cheaper than getting your dog “fixed” in Boston – but for a litter of pups, that adds up to a lot of money.  All these “unplanned” pups, who can’t be fed and cared for, get turned loose.  Dog Rescue Leagues gather up these starving pups, spay them en masse, give them a full veterinary work over, and ship them up Interstate 95 to careless-middleclass, northeastern families; who then repay the rescue leagues for their costs, and spoil the dogs outrageously.   

Ginger’s paperwork, from the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission, indicated that she was a mix breed: Labrador Retriever and Corgi.  This odd mix prompted one wag, pun intended, to posit the following two possible scenarios:

“Did I ever tell you, pitiful excuses for royal canines, the story about …,” the alpha male Corgi speaks up, silencing the kennel, as he breaths out a deep, accomplished sigh, “about that time I fucked a Lab?”

He focuses his gaze to ensure everydog is paying attention.  

“Yeah, I know it’s hard to believe, but I did. ‘Cause of the height diff …, anyway, we had to do human-style: You know that disgusting way, where she lies on her back?”  

His lips flap, as he shakes his head rapidly from side to side.  

“It’s so demeaning, all those teeth, and that tongue flailing around!”

The alternate situation in the Labrador kennel would run something like:

“Hey, calm down, I was just experimenting, seriously guys,” the black Lab gushes, his wet-pink tongue dangling from the side of his mouth.  “I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m a weirdo.” 

He looks around at the blank faces, who just want to get back to rough-housing.

“I mean little dogs have a whole different outlook on the world; mostly they’re just looking up big dogs’ asses.  Anyway, to me it was something I felt I had to experience.”

He tries to look intellectual, but can’t, ‘cause he got that Lab goofy face. 

“But, I’ll be honest with you guys, it was pretty much the end of my hips.  After that, I never made it onto another human bed again.”

For sure Ginger had Lab genes in her, and maybe, just maybe, those frighteningly powerful jaws of hers could be tied back to the dogs Flemish weavers brought with them to western England in the 1100s.  Dogs that would later be selectively bred into canines fit for a queen. Or maybe, just maybe, those jaws could have come from a whole different breed, an American breed, whose powerful jaws, combined by predictable human mishandling, ended up making this dog the one we most fear.

“A Lab-Corgi mix,” again, I half-ish lie over the phone to vet.

“Yeah, I guess you can never tell,” he sighs heavily, genuinely exasperated that a dog has to go.  “Maybe she was abused as a pup, and eh, … got into the habit of biting?”

She for sure had “got in a habit of biting.”  After the first, unknown, family returned her to a shelter, we had her for less than a year, and in that time it could not be said her teeth were entirely restful. 

It started as a fact-finding trip to a dog shelter, but Ginger’s eyes, the way there appeared to be a human trapped in a dog’s head, irrevocably drew you in.  She was a deeply affectionate dog, loved to cuddle and got so attached to certain humans that she seemed to have affection-super-powers: When a car pulled up outside, she somehow knew if it was one of her humans, and would scratch at the door, yelping with joy.

Her first bite was a few months after she moved in: A young man is walking his dog past our house; our front door gets opened to retrieve the mail; out darts Ginger to protect our territory; when all the snarling, scratching and biting is done, the young man has a puncture wound on his thigh; wound cleaned, apologies accepted, a new front door policy put in place, and we think we’re good.

A few months later, at Castle Island, a popular seafront park from which colonial Americans summarily sank the ships of pirates and press-gangers, a roller-blader swishes past, just a smidge too close: Ginger gets his hand. The roller-blader, from Dublin as luck would have it, is fine, his wrist protector took the impact, but he does offer some ominous advice: “I’d watch that mutt, I would, she’s gotta mowth on hur, she does.”

To some humans Ginger couldn’t be a cuter dog.  Walking down the street one day, a woman in her twenties pulls her Jeep Wrangler over, a small bit erratically, and ignoring the Massholes stuck in traffic behind her, laying heavy on their horns, she quizzes me on Ginger’s breed, mix type, and the general availability of such “totally scrumptious dogs.”  

I start to bore her with the whole rebel dog transportation to the northeastern states phenomena, but she’s not listening.

“I’m getting one!” she belts out the Jeep window, screeching back into the even angrier, horn blowing traffic.  

Another time, while walking past a bus stop, the driver, a large, effusive African American woman, yells out the door:

“Hi doggy!  Ain’t you the cutest thing I ever did see on fouh legs.”

“Move the bus!” a barely-containing-his-anger, elderly white male voice yells from inside the bus.

“He is too cute.”

“She,” I reflexively – type A – correct her.

“Oh my Gawd, even better: A sistah!”

“Move the god…dam bus!” 

The Labrador genes twisted into the Corgi body was the root cause of the pain. She got a Lab’s torso and a Corgi’s legs.  Her hips and shoulders paid the price, with arthritis diagnosed when she was a little over two years old, only a few months after she moved in with us.  From thereon, I was slipping Tylenol into her food and giving her massages every day, trying to ease her pain, and trying harder to ignore the growls, … and occasional bites.

“Five is it?” the vet looks up at me from filling out his paperwork. “I mean one … or two is plenty, but if you want to list all five.”

“I just don’t want my son to think it’s his fault,” I hesitate, fumbling the question. “Why don’t we say, three, the two I just told you and me.” 

“So not your son at all?”

“Yes,” I answer, happy with my lies.

He finishes his paperwork, drops the clipboard on the stainless steel exam table.

“I’ll take her down the back room,” he says, taking the leash from my hand. “That’s where we’ll …, and eh, you better wait here.”

Ginger looks up at me with those human eyes.  The tears start again.  She walks, tail slow wagging, down the corridor with the vet.

I prop myself up against the stainless-steel table.  Garishly colored posters for medications that kill intestinal bugs, rendered at thousands of times their actual size, cover the wall; a devotedly filthy computer sits on a small stainless-steel shelf in the corner; next to it, a half empty container of dog treats.

I’m staring at the now never-needed-by-me jar of treats, when the door shoots open, startling me.  

 “And eh, I totally forgot this point, but … you see, ‘cause it was a bite, or three bites actually, as we, … well you established, then I, eh, … need to either hold the dog for three more days to see if she develops rabies, state regulations, and eh, or we could, … just do it today, right now, you know, put her out of her pain,” he holds up both hands, “and eh, not have her locked up for three days, with all the precautions, no human contact, and eh, ….”

He stops talking, out of breath.

I stare at him, waiting for the ‘but.’

“But, if we do it today, and eh, we’d …, you know, because of rabies, … we can’t do the exam for three more days, and eh, so, you know, we’d need to freeze it, you know.  Freeze it, so we can test it in three days.”

He stares at me, clearly distraught.

“Freeze it?” I ask, the room starting to move.

“Her head. Afterwards.  We’ll have to cut off her head.”  

Stupid Guy Thing

I’m standing in the home goods aisle of an Ace Hardware, my hands propped on my hips, as I consider this important purchase.  In a display of anxious-faux-maturity, I’ve gone so far as to get the ‘sales associate’ from the register to join the deliberations.  He’s a pudgy faced, scraggly-bearded man in his twenties, or thirties, … or maybe even early forties, in matching-ish, navy blue sweatpants and sweatshirt; the former forced down, and the latter forced up by his considerable girth, to expose the waistband of his Tommy Hilfiger underwear, and his fish-belly-white, hairy, bulging stomach. 

Amongst all the useful, or dangerous, or usefully-dangerous, objects available on the shelves of Ace Hardware, the ‘sales associate’ and I are spending a few moments, of debatably, quality time staring at irons: Not the sort of irons members of Trumpity’s inner circle now wear while commuting from their prison homes for further plea bargaining; nor the kind used while golfing, or scaring away Canadian geese; but clothes irons, the kind used for the occasional de-creasing of shirts, pants, or even a handkerchief, a seriously neglected, usefully-dangerous piece of drapery – but that’s a topic for another day. 

“Now, is this a good iron?” I hear own voice ask, as I point at a black and silver object sitting innocently on the shelf. 

My consciousness is acutely aware that, I am not only in the wrong place to purchase an iron, but this is the wrong human, in the wrong place, to seek advice from on the general topic of iron purchasing.

“Dunno.  Never ironed nuthin’,” the ‘sales associate’ throws out, with incautious honesty.

At this point in my life, I have enough faux-maturity to admit that I have a nasty hardware habit.  Mostly this plays out in Ace or TrueValue stores, smaller, local, preferably older businesses, where undiagnosed-depressives like myself can blend in with the undiagnosed-depressive ‘sales associates.’  I linger in the aisles for way too long, while innocent members of the general hardware-needing public dart in to get a key cut, pick up a tube of I’ll-probably-never-open-this-but-it’s-good-to-have-around caulk, or buy an odd-sized bolt to fix that unfixable kitchen cabinet door.  I also suffer from a minor related condition, which requires that I spend too much time in Home Depot’s power tool aisle, or can be seen contemplating their fleet of lawnmowers for a little longer than the average male-lawn-mower-contemplater. 

Thus I spend way too much of my, ever diminishing, time on this planet shuffling slowly along narrow, dusty hardware aisles; hand weighing tools (tool quality being directly proportional to tool weight) that I will never need; reading instructions for repair kits that I will never use; and wondering how household items like irons and kettles, and bathroom and kitchen cleaners, and, for mercy’s sake, sewing materials, ever got onto beloved shelves that once carried such true “hardware” as insanely flammable solvents, exploding wet batteries, and rat poison that paralyzed rodents at a whiff. 

As with most things in ones make up, this particular prob…., thing is a product of my childhood.

Almost fifty years ago, while holidaying at my grandmother’s house in a tiny village in Leitrim, my four-year-younger sister and I would get dispatched around eleven-ish in the morning, a fifty pence piece clutched in my responsible-older-brother, sweaty palm, to buy sliced ham for lunch.

“Don’t pay for fatty ham.  The ham they’re selling now, ‘tis a sin against God!” my grandmother would rail, uselessly; for we never got to see the purchased ham until she unpacked it on the kitchen counter under her discriminating eye. 

The reason for this obfuscated food purchase was that the ham was bought in the local hardware shop: From behind an enormous stack of red-oxide gates, glistening shovels, pickaxes, and sledgehammers, coils of barbed wire, and bales of raw-wood fence posts, we could hardly make out the slicer buried behind the counter, surrounded by boxes of skull-and-cross-boned emblazoned rat killer. 

Every pre-lunch time I stood there, the sweaty fifty pence piece in one hand, my five-year-old sister’s hand in the other, peering through true hardware at the rhythmical lean-in, lean-out, slicing of the shop owner, a man of few, but pleasant, words, who gained near-saintly status for donating a kidney to his brother, a priest, and thus from whom we regularly, and laconically, purchased rat poison, weed killer and ham.

Such retail transactions only grew more confusing to my nine-year-old mind when we went “shopping abroad in Drumshanbo” – the nearest town.  For these trips “abroad,” we scrubbed our faces, and dressed up in our Sunday best: Blue shirt, grey jumper, blue pants for me; flowery, pink dress and stockings for my sister; Granny in a long dark coat, with a feathery hat, staunchly fastened to her hair by several long pins, that, should the need arise, could also be employed as an assassin’s weapon.  There one particular Saturday afternoon, we journeyed first to the drycleaners to drop off a winter coat, that, with the benefit of faulty memory and a little knowledge, would seem to have been heavy and long enough for comfortable service in the Siege of Leningrad.  It’s worth noting that dry cleaning, in a climate where it seemingly rained three hundred and seventy days a year, was a process as inscrutably close to alchemy as we, in the West of Ireland, would ever come.  Thus, while, literally, dropping off the siege-worthy coat, the alchemist herself, taking a deep drag on her cigarette, leans over the counter, and through her mustached lip, whispers to granny a lead on to-die-for sponge cakes that were being sold out of … you guessed it, … the local hardware shop. 

Down Church Street we click-click-clacked to the sound of the stolid heels of granny’s shoes, on a fervent hunt for “the best kind of sponge cakes, light but heavy too, … if you know what I mean.”

We enter the hardware shop, to the sound of a doorbell tinkling.  It’s an old fashioned shop, filled glinting-dangerous farm tools, towering stacks of white plastic 10-10-20 fertilizer bags, the obligatory shelves of cross-boned weed and rat killer, all in behind a high counter, requiring retrieval by strong armed staff.   Leaning on her bare, muscled forearms, is what, in today’s anonymizing vernacular, I could refer to as the ‘sales associate,’ but back then in the West of Ireland was simply known as the ‘woman of the house: A stocky, short-grey-haired woman with deep set, slanted eyes, set in flat cheeks. 

The last tinkles of the bell fade.  Granny stands on one side of the shop, with the ‘woman of the house’ on the other.  They stare silently across the room at one another, barely containing their mutual distrust. 

We children, in our crinkly Sunday best, are clearly interlopers in her world of sharp tools, poison and flammables, and thus we try to occupy as few of the black and white tiles on the floor. 

But somehow over those few moments of staring, the Leitrim women silently commune; eyebrows rising and falling, slight, sideward head nods imparting even more knowledge.

“A … a sponge … is it, you’re looking for?” the ‘woman of the house’ finally breaks and engages in verbal communication; compensating for resorting to mere words by forcing her thick eyebrows to their crescendo.

“Yes,” Granny clips, “a large sponge, with strawberr … .”

“And cream?” ‘the woman of house’ cuts her off.  “She does a lovely fresh

whipped cream.”

“Yes, yes, of course, cream.”

“She whips it herself – pursonally!”

Granny nods in contented satisfaction, a thin smile forming on her lips.  For her,

consuming sponge cake without cream, freshly whipped to within an inch of its lactic-life, lay somewhere along the Catholic sin continuum of venial-trending-to-mortal.

            Granny’s name was scribbled, incautiously, on the side of a brown bag, a fifty percent deposit paid in coins snapped heavily onto the counter.  A week later, we returned to pick up a ten-inch sponge cake, with a filling of sugary smelling strawberries, and mercilessly whipped cream.

With Jeff Bezos single handedly turning retail on its head, the lines of just where you go to purchase the objects allegedly necessary for life are growing blurrier by the day.  Now a Neanderthal like myself can go accessory shopping at the pharmacy on the corner.  I actually buy all my belts in Walgreens: “3 for $10.”  High quality plastic belts, manufactured, just for me, in Vietnam.  They last about one month and then crack or delaminate so badly, that even I’m ashamed to be seen in them: Onto the next $3.33 belt!   In Home Depot, I buy eight pairs of gloves for $10, and over the course of a winter, lose them one-by-each, until in April, all I have is one mismatched pair.   I’ve gone into hardware stores for a can of paint, and come out the, proud-ish, owner of a new sweatshirt, a tee shirt, one time even a high-vis work jacket.

Once upon a simpler time – which was actually infinitely more punishing than today’s crazy world, but now, wrapped in the faulty memories and emotions of childhood, seems to have been a great time altogether – the hardware shop was a symbol of solidity and purpose in life.  Things broke at home, or on the farm, and men, or boys, were dispatched to cavernous hardware shops, which smelt faintly of saw dust, metal and carcinogenic chemicals.  In the mazelike aisles, undiagnosed-depressives – which BTW passed as “that just life” in the simpler time – but ultimately helpful, store men got you exactly-what-was-needed.  Their eyes lit up momentarily, when the exactly-what-was-needed is located.  What’s more is, when you got back with exactly exactly-what-was-needed, those there knew what to do with it, and fixed the problem.

Now we are permanently lost in hyper-space, with various Mr-Fix-It’s just an email-text-PM away, and thus humans have developed a confused relationship with the hardware shop.  Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon, was onto this twenty years ago.  In one of his cartoons, he has Dilbert explain how for enjoyment, he spends his time walking around hardware stores.

“Oh yeah,” the smart-bitter, high-stacked-hair, woman cartoon character responds.  “I am aware of this condition, it’s called the Stupid Guy Thing.”

A few years ago, hot out of a divorce, and rebuilding my home-life one barely-used appliance at a time, I visited the local TrueValue Hardware with my nine year-old daughter to purchase a hair dryer.

“Really?” she says on the drive over, trying, and failing, to get her mind around my retail strategy.  “That’s where you buy a hair dryer?  In a hardware store?  I would’ve thought you got them in … .”

She’s momentarily silenced by the realization that she’s never thought this thought before, and there may, in fact, not be a truly logical place to buy a hair dryer:  In which case, my advice is, as always, head to the hardware store.

“Hair dryers we have,” Skye, the permanently stoned, film school dropout, working the TrueValue register tells us. 

He nods way too fast, distorting his scraggly-goateed-face as he tries to remember where appliances are located.

“Yeeaahh, we gotta a couple of sweeeeet dryers in … aisle … four, …, no five,” his legs tightening, he rises off his stool, and claps his hands together with theatrical gusto. “Four it is, … or five.  You can’t miss ‘em.”

            In aisle seven, amongst the kettles, hand held food mixers, and coffee grinders we search, in vain, for a hair dryer.

            “See, I told you,” my daughter crows, folding her arms tight, setting her face into a pre-adolescent this-is-sooo-ridiculous look.

            “Well,” I sigh, my gaze already wandering around to more usefully-dangerous shelves. “Let’s get this food mixer thing, we don’t have one of those either

            “No,” she hisses in an urgent whisper. “The guy will think we’re weird.”

            “No, no, let’s just get it, what’ll Skye give a damn.”

            At the register, there is damn giving.

            “Heh man, you know that … eh,” Skye now appears even more stoned than when we entered. 

            His stool grates across the bare concrete floor as he stands up.  Holding the box carefully in both hands, he closely examines the food mixer images.

I feel nine-year old eyes burning into the side of my head.

            “No,” he says aloud, but to no one.

            He shakes his head a lot. 

“You know that, eh,” he’s still examining the box, “that this part…tic…ular home appliance can…not,” his stoner eyes look up from the box, stare at me, then briefly at my daughter, then right back to me.

“Or, at least, … should not …,” he angles his head imploringly at me, “be used as a hair dryer.”

The Oracle of Artane

I’m in a taxi heading to Dublin airport. We’re barely crawling along through Monday morning rush hour traffic: The problem exacerbated by the built-in-the-1700s-for-carriages-not-cars streets of Dublin’s Georgian quarter.  

The taxi driver, thickset, balding, tight-white-recent haircut, an Artane BeaumontFCpennant swing-dangling from the rearview mirror, raises his hand up to his mouth in a fake smoking gesture, and shifts forward to stretch his back. 

Our eyes meet in the rear mirror, as we’re both caught sizing each other up. 

“Mayo?  So, youse are from Mayo!” he arches his back further, baggy eyes tightening in a faux grimace.  “Jaysus, what’s a Mayo-man duin’ above in Dublin gowin’ to Boston?  Sure, you shud be balow in Shannon.”

He slaps his palm off the steering wheel; eyes finally back on the road.

“Dey need you down dere.  Let me tell you dat.  Dey need you mores den we do.”

He purses his lips, sighs audibly, and gives his head a why-can’t-mere-mortals-know-as-much-as-I-do, slow shake to the right, … and then to the left.

 “Dey haven’t a clue, God-forgave-me, not a clue.  But do ya see dem now,” he grabs his Costa coffee cup from the holder, and waves it at the beige-bricked, four storey, Georgian townhouses lining the street. 

“Dem Georg-ee-anne houses.  Sure dey’re all jealous of dem ohver in Londin.  Yeah, jealous as hell dey are. ‘Cause see, our Georg-ee-an houses do have all deir i-ronwork, but ohver beyond.” 

He nods his head expansively to the right, encompassing the entire island of Great Britain. 

“Dey don’t have nunna dat no more.  See, dey boiled dowen deirs for bullets to go fighting Hitlar.”

He nods slow-long for emphasis.

“Oh yeah, dey’re dead jealous awright of us here in Dublin.”

“It’s very nice,” I agree, gazing out at the gingerbread metalwork on the windows, and then without prior thought, I ask: “I wonder now if that would have been made here in Ireland, or did they bring in from England.”

“Oh, Jaaaysuusss no-no-no,” he reflexes, back arching, broad shoulders tightening up to his ears.  “Coarse it’d be made in Dublin.  Shure we had de finest of i-ronworks balow, … balow … in … .”

He falls silent, but disguises the lack of memorable Dublin “i-ronworks” by busying himself with light-finger-tip touches on the smartphone mounted on his dash. 

We nudge along, with air travel anxiety inducing lack of urgency, through the section of Dublin built during the era of the first three kings George. In the mid-1700s Dublin had its short-lived heyday as a colonial center of power and economic might, during which wealthy colonialists built cut-stone and brick, row-house-mansions, with large windows wrapped in distinctive wrought “i-ron.” A lot of history, economic and otherwise, got jammed in since George III pulled the economic plug on Dublin in 1801, but now, in the twenty-teens, Dublin is back as a fully paid-up member of the global economy. 

 “Well do you see dat now?” the taxi driver barks with startling energy.

“See dat van,” his finger stabs at the windscreen.  “Now he’s messin’ dis whole ting up.  See if he wasn’t so wide, we’d be able ta get aroun’ him.  But no, mister wide-van, probly a cultie – no offence loike, Mr. Mayo, but dey haven’t a clue how ta drive in Dublin, not a clue – has to take up two lanes.  And so here we is stuck behind ‘im, looking up his arse, an’ God-forgave-me, it’s not as if it ‘twas the Spice Girls bendin’ oveh in front of us, now is it?”

He falls silent, his head shaking barely perceptibly.

“Well I suppose it’d be hard to limit the width of a van, just for Dublin streets,” the gods of travel anxiety force the words out of my mouth, “I mean, the manufacturers wouldn’t mak …,” but I stymie them before a debate breaks out on the likelihood of taxi driver impatience forcing international van specification changes.

“Oh yeah, and sure what wud dey say if I was to go inta de Corpo, and tell dem to cut dowen dem trees dere,” he gestures with the Costa cup at three beautiful sycamore trees, wedged into the concrete footpath.  “Take away a bunch of dat footpath, sure no one walks anymore. An’ den let me drive in dere.  No bicycles allowed neither.”

He circles his head slowly a few times.  

“Ah, sure dey’d go crazy,” he sighs.  “Dey’d say twas jus’ de ramblins’ of a mad taxi-man.  But I’m telling ya, dat’s what ‘tis coming to, if an’ we don’t want no more traffic jams.  Because de truth dey don’t wanta hear is dat de traffic is all from dem guverment workers driving in to deir free parking spaces.  Yeah, up from the country, living out beyond,” he tosses his head wide to the far left, covering the entire western suburbs of Dublin, “and drivin’ in here to deir free parking.  With de lunch in de bag,” he sneers, “wouldn’t even buy a sangwich, miserable fu… .”

He shakes his head rapidly.

“Ah, it all starts at de top!” he almost yells.

I tighten at the gusto of his new onslaught.

“Sure look at Leinster House, where dat clueless guverment sits on deir big arses doin’ nuthin’.  Look at any time dey’re over dere with de telly-vision cameras, and de yard in front of it fulled up with cars.  Jammed-packed in dey is – like Jaffa cakes!  And dat’s de Tee-shuck’s job, to get dat cleared.  Sure even Trump wouldn’t let dem be parkin’ on de White House lawn.” 

“If he could figure out how to make money on it he would,” I reflexively throw out.

“I sup-pose.  But so long as he lets us keep our Gooo-gles an’ our Facebooks we won’t be saying nuthin’ abou’ him now.  Sure dey’re de lifeblood of de Irish economy.  Ya see, back in de day, in de 1970s loike, de government den was smart enough to see dat de manufactorying wasn’t on anymore.  I mean de pint was gone out of it.  Manufactor … making stuff was going to be only for d’Indians goin’ forwards.  So, smart enough, Charlie an’ de boys says, we need-a be gettin’ de young wans ready for de Facebooks of de future.  Loike, Irish Steel, dere you go, feck off, we can’t do dat no more.  No pint.  De Indians do sorta work now.”

He stops his onslaught to take a deep breath.  I consider, then decline, offering corrective input.

“But do ya see up de Nort den.  Well, first of all dey were all too busy killin’ wanother, but meanwhile dey stuck with de manufacturing: Harlan’ n Wolff, an’ tires, an’ all dat kinda stuff, ya know.  Sure, where are dey now?”

“Well,” unable to help myself, I counter with some facts.  “Didn’t Dublin get a bridge over the Liffey that was made by Harland and Wolff – a footbridge.”

“Don’t mind that load-a-bollix.  Sure, a lad could lay a bit a scaffoldin’ flat, an’ a few planks, an’ ya’d have a better bridge den wat dem Corpo dopes paid a few million for.  Dey haven’t got a clue.  Dat’s what a mate of mine said.  And he done buildings in London, down de docklands loike – reeaall big ones. Dat’s what he said: ‘An overly,’ or was it, ‘overtly, simplistic structure,’ he calls it.  But after a few jars, he’ll tell you how it’s really just a bit of scaffolding.  But the pint is that de manufactorying is all goin’ beyond to China an’ India an’ Viet-naaam. Sure dey’re trilled to have it, an’ we’re trilled to have all dem Gooo-gliebook jobs here.”

“And they pay well I’m sure,” I lay up a clear shot on goal for him.

 “Ohhh yeah. Dem ‘millennyuppies do get a nice brown envelop of a Friday, let me tell you dat.  And it’s not down de boozer dey go for a few jars.  Oh no.  It’s into a wh-ine bar, tippling dem shar-doh-nays or the cabra … cabra-yoursel-on, at a tenner a glass.  I don’t like giving Tommy down in Waxy’s €4.50 for a jar, but let me tell ya, de sister’s eldest wan, Aoife.  Now, she’s working within in Facebook, or for a company dat does all de actual work for Facebook – ya know loike dat sorta way, couldn’t survive without ‘em.”

He takes a sip of coffee.

“Anyways, of a Friday night, Aoife’d tink nothin’ of slapping down a tenner for a smallish pool of wh-ine in de bottom of a big glass dat …, dat, … God-forgave-me, looks like somethin’ Brown’s cows watered off.  Do you know what I mean loike.  It’s madness, madness, ever-tings different now.  I mean back in de day, de lads’d be comin’ into Waxy’s from Tayto, an’ dey’d be looing for pints, not shaggin’ wh-ine.  But ‘tis all changed times now.  All dem days is long gone.  Dey haven’t got a clue now.”

“Indeed it is,” I consider the truth of what he said, and the difficulty for us all to deal with the rapidity of change. 

We inch our way across a bridge.  

On the other, newer-wider streeted, side of the river, we break free for a moment until we’re halted again by a traffic light.

A silver street car trundles across the huge intersection in front of us.

“Does the train there, the Luas, does that help with traffic,” the gods of travel anxiety get the better of me.

“Oh yeah, dats a great job, but don’t ya see, ya need around a hund-erd thousan’ people getting’ on dem trams every day to make it pay for itself.  An’ de guverment now, anudder ting dat’s changed: Right, dey’re not smart ‘nough now ta be able ta rob de Euro-pee-ons de way Charlie an’ de boys used-ta. Ya, not a clue do dey have.  And sure anyways, ‘twas de farmers tore de arse outta dat stealin’.  So now dere’s no more robbin’, roight, an’ we have pay for stuff.”

He throws up both hands off the steering wheel in exasperation at this opportunity lost.  

“An’ to pay for a tram you need a solid hund-erd thousan’ steppin’ on and steppin’ off every day.”

“Makes sense,” I encourage.

“An’ do ya see now Cork and Limerick and Galway, dey’re all market towens, … well cities sort off.”

He purses his lips and shakes his head.  

“But dey don’t have no hund-erd thousan’ a day to keep de tram busy enough to pay for itself.  And sure in dem market towen… cities ya need yer car anyway.  I mean if some farmer comes in from Cahir-sigh-veen, or wan on dem weird name places, in to Cork to go to de … bank, let’s say, or de …”

He waves the coffee cup lightly to unlock inspiration.

“The doctor,” I offer.

“Exactly! De don’t have no ‘ospital on de farm, now do dey?” he raises the wax cup in triumph.  “So he’s headin’ into de ‘ospital ta get his spa-leen checked out.  De farmin’s very hard on de body, ya know: De have dis country broke with dem getting’ sick and dyin’, but dats for another day.  So de farmer’s coming in from Ballygobackwards, but he’s got to take de car.  I mean, dere’s no tray-ens to get ‘im in to Cork from Ballygo…,” he shakes his head in disgust, “an’ den no trams to get ‘im around inside-a Cork.”

He holds up both hands to make his point. 

“And what’s more without de hund-erd thousan’, dis lot of a guverment won’t be buildin’ none for ‘im neither.  Sure dey haven’t got a clue.”

He takes a long, triumphant drink of coffee.

The light changes. 

Reflexively, he accelerates, cup still at his lips.

He coughs violently as the coffee goes down the wrong pipe.

We travel in omniscient, traffic-lurching silence for a few minutes, broken only by his occasional splutter-coughs.

“But de big ting now is dem,” he storms back from the Costa-attempted-censorship, pointing his right elbow at a low slung factory building.  

“Da ya see dat buildin’ dere.” 

We’re further out of the city now, in an industrial area; silver metallic, windowless, one storey buildings abound.  

“Dats Gooo-gle for you now.  That’s where dey do all de cloud transactions.”

He nods a few times.

“See if some lad oveh America way commits a crime, on de computer loike.  Den de judge in Texas sends over an affy-david saying, you know, we need dis-and-dis-and-dis.  An’ de boys inside dere get it for ‘im.  An’ den off de online crook goes to de Riker’s Islan’.  ‘Tis dat simple, ‘cause dem lads do have a clue.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that complication,” I say, raising my eyebrows in genuine admiration at his knowledge.  “So, where the transaction is actually executed is where the crime is committed.  That would get tricky legally, wouldn’t it?  I suppose that’s why they like Ireland, we’re probably in all the treaties through the EU.”

“Kinda, dey might like dat part, but let me tell you wat dey luv. Wat dey totally luv is, our ten percent corporate taxes.  Oh yeah, it’s all about de money, oh ya,” he nods sagaciously.

We both stare at the metal building; travel anxiety making me will him to look forwards.  

“But wat dey do loike too, is dat we’re all a small bit sane here.  Loike in Ireland dere won’t be no one coming up wid a bazooka, to blow up de processing centers.  Ya know wat I mean loike, what dey’d be doing in Waco, or dem places. In America too dere could be an irt-quake, or wildfires, or mudslides.  Sure dere’s none of that carry on here.  De only mudslides we have would be at a wedding, when you can’t stomach no more Guinness, but de young wans wants ya to keep drinkin’.”

I lean forward, and search-stare around the taxi to determine if this whole journey is a candid camera episode.

“Yeah, and de do luv de weather here.  Not de rain, no on luvs rain.  But it’s not goin’ to be no forty degrees here, and you trying to keep dem com-pewters cue-ell.  No, we’re good at de old fourteen to sixteen degree weather, an so you see,” he goes with the elbow again at the factory buildings, “do you see dat?”

I look again, but see nothing more than the boxy industrial building, with shiny helical exhaust vent stacks running up the side.

“Dem tings is for taking de air in, nice cue-ell Irish air to keep the com-pewters happy, buyin’ and sellin’; sellin’ and buyin’.  And no sign of yer man wid de bazooka, or a machine gun.  Sure, as crazy as de Irish are, we won’t be selling guns at boot sales now will we, like dey do over yonder.”

He nods quickly, but deeply, left, rising out of his seat, in what I can only suppose is to encompass the lower forty-eight, or at least Texas.

We turn into the airport, and immediately traffic gets busier, crowding in around us.  A bulk cement tanker, starts to take a turn, changes its mind, and swerves back in front of us.

“Oho, watch out, we have a live one ‘ere.  Hasn’t got a clue, not a clue.  See he’s probly trying to get to where dey’re rebuilding de runway, way de other side of de hair-port.”

We drive slowly, a solid thirty yards behind the cement tanker.

“He’s roight banjaxed now, sure he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t hit de bridge.”

We stay back, but the tanker passes comfortably under the parking garage footbridge.

We make it to the Departures drop off.

“Dere you go now, let me get yer bags for youse,” he says, with newfound, lighthearted mirth, yanking the hand break.  

I get out on his side.  Just-unloaded-taxis whip past us racing to their next fare at Arrivals.

“Watch yourself dere now,” he guides me along his taxi to the rear. “A lot dem east Euro-pee-ons is drivin’ taxis dese days.  Dey’d drive roight true ya, haven’t got a clue, not a clue.”

We make it safely to the back of the taxi; I start to unload the bags.

“Do ya see dat now,” he points his index finger at a sky-blue Dublin-Belfast express bus.  “Do ya see dat; twenty … two-times-a-day. See it?”

Above the DUBLIN-BELFAST –italicized for speed – the writing on the side of the bus says “22 TIMES PER DAY.”

I nod.

 “See, dat’ll all be gone whit Brexit.”

 I nod again.

“Sure, I never even get to tell ya all about Brexit!”

“Next time,” I say, passing him the fare, which interests him not at all.

 I start to cross through the crazy traffic.

“Sure dat May wan,” I hear him yell above the traffic-buzz, “she couldn’t neg-osh-eeate her way outta de women’s jax in Waxy’s.  Hasn’t got a clue!” 

An Entirely Ridiculous Endeavor

I’m huddling with a squad of shoulda-retired rugby players under a sun canopy – rainwater sheeting wildly off its wavy overhang. 

A fork of lightning unzips the grey-black sky. 

We bunch, even more discomfortingly, closer together.

One … two …: A deafening peal of thunder.

Sitting on a Patriots canvas chair, in black rugby shorts, a black sleeveless shirt, the rain running over the brim of his black ten-gallon hat, a rain soaked cigar in one hand, a bottle of beer in the other, his rainwater-glistening arms, full-sleeve-tattooed battles, real, mythical, and some entirely self-imagined, sits the craziest bastard of us all, the self-nicknamed – Hazard.

It’s an Old Boy’s rugby tournament:  A cocktail of genuine fun; self-surprising accomplishment; over indulgence in alcohol – and ibuprofen; and never-shoulda-happened-in-that-way-at-this-time-of-life broken bones.

Under the rain besieged canopy a shoulda-retired player holds up his right hand: The pinky finger sticks out at a somewhat unnatural – one could even say unhealthy? – ninety degrees to its normal sticking out direction.

“Oh Jaysys, that doesn’t look right,” another shoulda-retired says, slow-shaking his head all-knowingly.  “You know how ya fix dat now do ya, ya just… .”

He grabs the miscreant digit in a tight grip, yanks hard on it. 

The miscreant digit’s owner’s knees buckle, face melting in pain, eyes welling up with tears.

“Ya know what,” the Unintentionally-Sadistic-Good-Samaritan says.  “I’m a carpenter, why don’t we ask my wife to help, she a receptionist at a doctor’s office.”

The teary eyes nod in intense please-stop-this-pain agreement.

The Sadistic-Samaritan reaches over the huddle, taps his wife on the shoulder.

The downpour of rain intensifies in a way that forces everyone to first look up, then out at the gushing waterfalls running over the edge of the canopy.

Hazard eases himself up out of his, now indigo-blue, Patriots chair, deliberately opens the cooler, rummaging around for another of his Anti-Hero IPAs, rainwater gushing off his hat into the ice.

“Come in outta that you psycho,” a woman voice calls out.

“Stop filling up the cooler with water,” a man yells, irritated.

Hazard stands upright.

The sky unzips.

The canopy-huddle contracts tighter.

He snaps the can open with a hissing beer spray.

The air cracks with thunder, but we can’t huddle any tighter.

“What?” the doctor’s receptionist snaps.

“Come ‘ere.  Can you fix dis fella’s finger?” the carpenter flips his thumb toward the teary-eyed visage.  “’Tis all wonky.”

“Sure isn’t there a doctor over there,” the receptionist demurs, tipping her beer towards the excruciatingly straight back of a man in deep-head-nodding conversation at the edge of canopy.

The Sadistic Samaritan leans over toward the upright doctor, taps him on the shoulder.

The man of medicine turns, his face obscured by a cloud of smoke from the huge cigar in his mouth.

“Here doc, can you help dis fella, his finger’s aboutta fall off.”

The doctor stoops over, picks up a you-can-definitely-trust-me-medically-because-I-have-such-expensive-leather-doctor’s-bag.  He hands his shot glass to the shoulda-retired next to him, opens the bag and holds it for the Sadistic Samaritan to see inside.

“Pick yer medicine, man,” he says, with a heavy Southern twang.

The expensive-leather-doctor’s-bag is wedged full of bottles of bourbon.

He pulls out a Wild Turkey.

“This one’s ben known to cure just about ev…very…thing,” he nods sagaciously at the Samaritan, “from adultery to testicular cancer.”

Old Boys Rugby: A psychological condition, whereby human males who have not sufficiently damaged their musculoskeletal system as teens and young men, are mind-controlled by midlife crisis to go deep into their garages, pull out their old gear-bag; brush the cobwebs off aged boots, try, but fail, to remove that intractable scum from the mouth-guard; heartrendingly pretend-in-private that the shorts and jersey fit after fifteen hard years of holidays-barbeques-golf-weekends; before putting everything back where it lived in blissful oblivion; only to, in a fit of focused-pique, Amazon a whole new – “never knew gear could cost so much, but still cheaper than a motorbike, and safer, right honey?” – kit for delivery in time for a threatened, but never executed upon, “run around,” at some Thursday night rugby practice.

I’m a part of this gathering of a few hundred shoulda-retired rugby players at the 2013 Old Man of the Mountain tournament in New Hampshire.  For a solid eight hours, with many, long breaks, we play on what passes for an airfield nestled amongst the beautiful White Mountains.  It’s probably six acres of a level-ish grassy field, down which, on a regular Saturday, single engine planes speed, towing gliders, piloted by even more heavily afflicted midlife-crisisers – Top Gun syndrome – sitting thumbs-up-grinning as they take off for a few death-defying minutes gliding on air shafts above Franconia Notch.  Once a year the Top Gun crowd, with wry, where-did-these-idiots-come-from smiles, turn it over to the Old Boy’s rugby tournament.  The six acres allow for multiple simultaneous games, a huge parking lot, and a veritable one day, middle-age, Mardi Gras in the mountains.

I arrive around ten, park, walk out to the playing fields, only to be almost knocked down, when a, normally-very-sensible, Volvo came up behind at a very insensible speed.  The car pulls to a sudden stop, out jumps a woman.

“Oh my God I’m so sorry,” she half yells in my direction.  “My husband just broke his leg, what-am-I-going-to-do, what-am-I-going-to-do.”

I look over to see six shoulda-retired rugby players cradling in their arms a man, whose blanched face and closed eyed alertness show his excruciating level of pain.

“Oh-my-God, oh-my-God,” his wife runs around the car, flinging open the rear passenger door.

The cradlers carry the injured player to the open door.  The woman runs around opens the other door.

They slide him in.

Back arching, he cries out in pain.

The woman settles his head and shoulders on a folded towel, gently closes the door.

One of the cradlers swings the other door shut.

The door bounces back.

The husband screams a pain-scream that no wife should ever have to hear.

“Oh-my-God, oh-my-God,” the woman runs around to the other side.

She tries to get the foot all the way inside the car.

The pain-screaming exhausts itself.

Eventually the door is gently closed.

“Oh-my-God, oh-my-God,” she runs to the driver’s door.  “Where’s the nearest hospital?”

It’s a solid forty-five minutes away, down I93.

She pulls out at high speed, shoulda-retireds scurrying out of the way.

With the sound of his screams still reverberating around my brain, we warm up for our first game.

It’s all supposed to be just fun.  Run around, get sweaty, drink too much on the sidelines with old friends, everyone misremembering how great a player they used to be.  The problem of course is that the ego doesn’t age out: It just gets more focused.

Thus some shoulda-retireds show up completely unfit, a high hazard to the deftly evolved hinge joints in their limbs, maybe even to the magic that is the blood pump itself; their internal clock set to when the first beer-shot-cigar can be consumed.  A minority … ok, a sizable minority … ok, ok, some days maybe even the majority, don’t set the clock at all and start guzzling cans-cupped-in-hands as soon they waddle over the sideline.

An entirely different set of shoulda-retireds tone down their triathlon training for a few hours, so they can dash around the rugby field, score a few tries, lecture everyone else what ligaments-tendons-fascia have been sprained-torn-shattered that day, and then, guzzling coconut water, climb back into their SUV, with the mountain bike on the roof – “for a twenty miler, that can’t be missed, on the way home.”

In between are some people who would like to feel, just for thirty seconds, that they were twenty-five again, and are willing to put in some, though not a lot, of effort to fake out that feeling.  I like to count myself in that set.

“Listen to me now, listen,” our self-appointed captain says, earnestly.  “We’re playing a team from Canada.  They’re serious, they’ve come this far.”

“I think Canada is actually closer to here than Boston is,” our tighthead prop says, his bushy eyebrows pinching his face into an ambiguously quizzical look.  “Maybe, th…ey, should be afraid of us.”

“Shut up,” the captain faux snaps.  “Now listen to me now, listen.  Do not tackle anyone in red shorts.  I see they have one of them old guys.  Red shorts mean they’re over sixty and can’t be fully tackled.  Just kinda wrap them up around the shoulders.”

“But that’s a high tackle,” the tighthead complains.

“Shut up!”

“Just saying.”

“Shut the fuck up saying!”

We get into position for the kickoff; thunder clouds crowding ominously into the valley.

“Sorry boys,” the referee, in a gut-bulging, fluorescent yellow jersey, yells to us.  “Tweaked my calf in the first game, won’t be able to keep up very well with play.  Just listen for my whistle.”

Our outhalf, veins bulging in his forehead, sneer-snorts at the limping referee, who is trying, and failing, to reset his stop watch. 

The ref eventually gets the watch set, and blows his whistle loudly. 

The outhalf kicks off, the ball floating in a high, slow arc, perfectly timed for our rag-taggle chase.

I see the red shorts standing behind the Canadian team’s forwards.

The ball hits the ground, and bounces right into the red-shorted arms.

He looks up at us bearing slowly down on him.  He’s bewildered to be so suddenly in possession.

I slow down, not sure exactly what to do.

Hazard crashes past me, spinning me as he clips my shoulder.

The sound of a pain grunt tells me what happened next.

The referee’s whistle shrills through the air in a continuous breath-in-breath-out issuance.

On the ground the red shorts writhes in pain; Hazard standing over him like a hunter standing over his kill.

“I fucking told you not to tackle the red shorts,” our self-appointed captain screams in Hazard’s face.

“What the fuck man!  I didn’t hear nothen’, I was in the woods smoking a bone during the warm up.”

The referee finally arrives, his whistle still breath-in-out blasting.

“Ok, what happened here?” he asks, pulling the whistle from his mouth: A spit rope dangling from the whistle.

“Eh, … they ran into each other,” our captain says, offering a hand to the red shorts.

“Really?” the referee snaps, suspiciously.

“Yes sir,” the red shorts says in a perky English accent, accepting the hand up.  “I tried ta get around ‘im, but me old legs just ain’t what they used to be.”

“Well it’s an automatic penalty for touching a red shorts,” the referee glares at our captain.  “And I strongly suspect that it’d be a red card, if only I didn’t have this tweaked calf.”

He furrows his brow for added disciplinary emphasis.

“Get back, get back,” he waves us off.  “Ten yards, ten yards at least.  Actually go back twenty.  I’m already sick of this game.”

We turn to walk back.

The red shorts streaks past me, ball in hand, moving at a shockingly fast pace.

He jinks and weaves through those few of our team actually paying attention. 

Our outhalf takes off after him, forehead veins bulging.  They arc in zigzags across the field, the red shorts with a devastating jink that forces the younger, heavier, man into lumbering changes of direction. 

Thirty seconds later the red shorts dots the ball down in the far corner, and falls to his knees, hands on hips.

The referee’s whistle shrills into my ear, blowing in-out continuously, his arm up in the air for a score, as he limp-run-walks from halfway towards the posts.

“He can move,” I say admiringly to one of the Canadians turning back to halfway.

“Yeah, he played at the Hong Kong Sevens, … in 1973!”

Sojourning in the Heart of Modern Cool

It’s a September-trying-to-be-August Friday evening in Boston-is-just-a-big-college-town, and the tattoo studio is saturated with frenetic energy.  Other than the undiagnosed-depression manager, I’m the only being over the age of thirty in this space – I can’t vouch for the grey-pillow-with-legs-and-a-pink-vest therapy Pug sitting anxiously by the front door.  None of the late teens, early twenties, gonna-get-tatted customers sit-flops on the communicable-disease-friendly sofas for more than ninety seconds, competing three-sentence-long-rapid-monologues pass off as conversation, and around the huge waiting room – enclosed by rambling, matt black, walls, dotted with purple-black-silver-sharp-angled tattoo designs– phone screens are forsaken only as waves of sudden-anxious-preening reverberate across this sea of scantily-black-clothed humanity.  

Faux lounging on the, public-lounging-requisite, brown-cracked-pleather sofa, my body as taut as a plank, I am peerless in this mercilessly hip space as the Great-Big-Wad-of-Boringness: My entirely conforming haircut, not even rising to the level of a hairstyle; my crows-footed-visage; my faded-earth-tones-who-cares-it’s-finally-Friday clothes; my middle-class-judgmental-near-sneer, all confirm my role as a forsaken soul, from the wilderness where consequences matter, wandered into the Heart of Modern Cool.

Only two justifications exist as to why a Great-Big-Wad-of-Boringness such as myself would sojourn to the Heart of Modern Cool.  I could be there as an undercover Health Inspector: This is Massachusetts after all, where tattooing is so heavily regulated that up until relatively recently, only a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Board Certified Physician was allowed to approach your epidermis with a tattoo gun; and where, loving our Blue Laws as we do, up until a few years ago, Sunday off license sales of alcohol were prohibited; and, and – BTW – where that self-same Commonwealth still considers it “an act unlawful for a mourner to eat more than three sandwiches at a wake!”  This last one was very clearly a misguided Yankee attempt to punish Irish immigrants, who did not, in fact, waste their time at wakes “ating sangwiches,” but were instead “ating bottles of beer, to drink that soul all the way into Heaven!”  

The more likely reason there’s a Great-Big-Wad-of-Boringness, stiff a plank, on the brown-cracked-pleather-sofa, is that I’m the parent to a minor who “needs” a body piercing. 

At the counter, the absolute dominion of the undiagnosed-depression manager, a nineteenish year old man, all in black, viper tattoo curling around his neck, eyebrows-nose-cheeks-ears bristling with piercings – I’ve already been filially stern-glaringly admonished, twice, for calling such objects earrings – and delicate chains, tries bargaining on price for a nipple piercing.  

Despite the punitive diligence paid to getting all of our information – my daughter’s passport and my driver’s license whisked out of my hand, and immediately photocopied; raising my cranky-middleclass-anti-identity-theft hackles – just to get in line to get pierced, prices are not visible anywhere.  Even the piercings case reveals only the cost of the most expensive items.  Indeed, it would appear that, as noted in small-small print on the menu at our local Chinese restaurant: “Prices are subject to change without notice.”

“All I got’s these two twen’ies, can’t that just cover it?” the heavily-alloyed, young man shrug-asks, his eyes decidedly disassociated from currently reality.  “I mean it was just like bada-boom-bada-bing, and the artist’s done?”  

“Sir, titanium straights run around fifty dollars, plus the nipple piercing runs …,” she yanks open a drawer beneath the counter, rummages roughly through a pile of papers, gives up too easily, and raises her stare back into the disassociated eyes.  “It’s … like seventy five, so all in you’re looking at one twenty five – plus sales tax, of course.”

She stares hard into the disassociated eyes.

“But all I got’s the two twenties, an’, … an’,” he holds out the twenties, but draws back his bony shoulders, “I needa getta train back to Waltham.”

“Sir, if you do not to pay for the goods and services rendered, then that is deem theft, and studio policy requires that I immediately contact the Boston Police,” she says, woodenly – clearly an oft used script. 

“I ain’t thieving nor nuthin’,” he shakes his head confusedly, looks around, touches his black-black tee shirt on the left nipple.  “An’, an’ I on’y got the one nipple done, so youse can have t’other straight back.  What’s it then?”

The manager angry-fast-sighs, shakes her head.

“You know … that’s not how it works, … sir.”

They stare at each other for a moment, his eyes un-fogging as hers harden.

“Hey, Hank, hey,” he turns, waves a little too energetically

A group of Goths flopped over a once-upon-a-very-long-time-ago white, sectional sofa, crane their necks to see what’s the excitement.  They all simultaneously get the urge to run four fingers through their thick, ruthlessly, black hair.  

Down by the earring … eh … piercings sales cases, a full-tattoo-sleeves, black-black-muscle-shirted young man turns around deliberately.

“Sup bro?” Hank words, barely audibly.

Hank’s eyes are so disassociated that even from thirty feet away, on the brown-cracked-pleather-sofa, I receive a barely-moved-elbow-nudge from my daughter.

This is only my second time ever in a “tattoo studio.”  More than twenty years ago, on a rugby tour to Texas, a few of us wandered out of the Alamo and into Singapore John’s Tattoo Arcade.  Behind the counter a yellowing cardboard sign, in black, twelve-inch high letters spelt: “NO CRYBABIES ALLOWED.” 

“What ken I do for you fellers too-day?” John asks, welcomingly.

He sits, a husky man, on a swivel stool, stopping his work on the final panel of non-inked skin on his customer’s right shoulder, to smile up at us.  

The customer, a portly, fifty-something man, full-tattooed-sleeves, and just the one non-tattooed patch of skin on his back, sits cowboy style on a metal chair, grinning out at his sudden-gawking-audience.

“Just lookin’,” we answer, sheepishly.

“That’s fine, that’s fine, lookin’s good, lookin’s good,” John says, holding his tattoo gun at the ready above the pinkish skin.  “Just stan’ back now, less and y’all wanna get heet by the blud.”

We all involuntarily retreat a few quick steps.

John and his customer guffaw loudly, throwing their heads back.  

The customer’s open mouth reveals two missing front teeth.

For most of its history in the western world, tattooing was the province of manly-men, who laid down hard cash to get anchors, hearts, or swirly “MOM” tattoos on their forearm; and then went on a three day bender, waking up, deathly hungover, in a cheap boarding house, wondering how their forearm got bandaged.  

Now tattooing is the province of the generation trying to come to terms with our fucked up world: Fully a third of them get “inked” sometime before the start of their third decade.  Great-Big-Wads-of-Boringness, like me, almost never swagger into a tattoo studio and say: “Ink me up in a way that says, I’m cool-unique-edgy and have this completely mystical view of the world.  Oh, and include a skull, a knife, a smoking Harley, and wrap it all in voluptuous curves.” 

At the register, heavily-tattooed-Hank, mutter-grumbling about his friend in need, produces some plastic.  

The manager’s face creases into her well-worn, victory smirk, as she repeated, harshly swipes the card through the reader.

“And would like to give the artist a tip?” she asks, barely containing her pre-knowing, faux-pissed-off response.

Hank turns away and looks at his newly-nipple-pierced friend, who’s back at the piercing cases.

A twenty-something woman – short, deathly thin, completely shaved head, even the eyebrows have been erased, but with a replacement too-black, hair tattoo, that crimps in the narrow skinfolds at the base of her skull – stands in the middle of the waiting space, and calls my daughter full legal name, backwards – reading precisely from the photocopied passport.

She leads us to the ear.. piercings cases, where titanium is the alloy of choice. Accepting 0.000% input from her so-uncool-you-should-be-in-a-history-book father, my daughter selects her piercings. The employee leaves “to get these babies sterilized,” and we browse the rest of the case.

For $150 – each – silver, inch and half long twisted bull horn nose-piercings can be obtained, thereby preventing close-talkers from hovering in tight proximity to your face – could be worth it.  There’s an actual earring – I receive permission to call it that – that helixes around the whole upper ear in individual threaded gold loops.  We look at tunnel sets: These start like small, thick earrings, but then grow, in sixteenth of an inch increments until the ear lobes are opened large enough to push an index finger through.  My alien-from-another-planet gawking is interrupted when we’re ushered into an exam room.

I kid you not: The piercing room is a fully functioning medical exam room, outfitted just like your doctor’s office – probably even better, ‘cause the piercing artist doesn’t have to fight the insurance companies.  Massachusetts regulations “require” that I be present with my minor daughter for the piercings; but, thankfully, they don’t “require” that I enjoy it – ‘cause I don’t.  

The piercing artist is a good guy, thirty something, full-tattoo-sleeves, multiple piercings, including stretched-triangular holes in his ear lobes the size of throat lozenges.  It would seem that, other than the manager, “studio policy” keeps everyone over age thirty in the background to avoid displaying too much of the burnt-out-cool look. Tattoos and piercings are like fruit and vegetables, they sell better when fresh, perky and firm: The thirty-somethings’ sagging piercings and just-slightly-out-of-focus tattoos do not inspire further sales. 

As the artist explains the procedure, he pulls on a pair of black disposable exam gloves, letting them slap loudly into place.  He smears various bacteria killing lotions onto my daughter’s ears, and dutifully lies that it “basically doesn’t really hurt, just like a long pinch.” 

We both gladly believe his sales-lie.

The earrings are there, on a small stainless steel tray, just out of the autoclave.  Surgically bagged piercing needles, swabs and daubs, sprays and squirt bottles, a surgically bagged set of forceps, are all lined up like a surgeon’s tools on a stainless steel instrument tray.  In the corner there’s a good sized machine on wheels, with dials and power cords, and what looks like an attachment for a tattoo gun.

“Don’t we need that?” I say, pointing at it, trying to employ stupid-dad-humor to sooth our combined familial anxiety.

“Nah, that’s the eraser,” the piercing artist responds flatly.  “When people want to get a tat covered over, we use that first, to clean off the site.”

“Oh, so that’s a tattoo removal machine?” I’m genuinely impressed with how much technology it takes to remove the ink from your layers of skin.

“That too,” he kinda-sorta nods at such a remote possibility.

“Dad, if you wanna hold your daughter’s hand,” he waves me over to the other side of the room, as he snap-changes his black gloves for the second time.

I’m just about getting about my hand crushed into early chronic-rheumatism, when he’s already reaching for an earring, the piercing made.

We repeat the dosage on the other ear – and hand.

And it’s all over.

An audible sigh can be heard from the Center for Disease Control, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Boston Health Commission offices at the successful completion of another medical procedure.

In line at the register, awaiting our verbal beating, we sense, all around us, the growing Friday night energy.  The Goth women on the sofa, rapid-communi-thumb with each other on their phones.  By the piercings cases, two stocky young women, buzz-cuts, bomber jackets, hold hands and point, careful – as the sign commands – that they DO NOT TOUCH THE GLASS.  On the brown pleather sofa, a couple enmesh their limbs, and like a four armed being scroll through iPad tattoo images.

“Well you’ll be lucky to get a piercing this evening,” the manager tell-scoffs at the two young Goths guys in front of us in line.  “I mean, take a look.”

She waves her hand around.

“We only got another hour, and the studio’s bustin’ full.”

One Goth says something, but too low for eavesdropping.

“Tomorrow?” the manager’s face twists interrogatively.

The Goth nods.

“Tomorrow we open at ten.”

Again a too quiet response.

“We don’t do appointments, just walk-ins for piercings.”

More mumbled questions.

“Well there wouldn’t be any point coming in right at ten, I mean, the piercing artist doesn’t start until twelve.”

The Goths leave, shaking their manes of black hair.

We muddle through our payment, making just a dozen or so unforgivably stupid mistakes, each of which are punishingly corrected.

“Can we get those copies of our passport and license back?” I ask – quixotically. 

“No way!” the manager retorts, her eyebrow piercings drawing close together in genuine shock.  “Those are now part of Massachusetts Department of Public Health records. They’re almost … almost more important than your payment.”

She flashes a wry, now-you-understand-why-I-have-to-be-so-difficult, smile at me.

As we pass the, even more anxious now, grey-pillow-on-legs by the front door, I stoop to pat him on the head. 

“DON’T!” the manager screeches.  

We depart.

The door to modern cool swings closed behind us; my daughter’s ears hurt-tingling; my never-all-that-well-formed-self-image in tatters.

Outside on the strip, Friday night is gearing up strong.  

We walk past open-doors-and-windows bars, music blaring; on a ginormous TV screen, a life-sized, white uniformed, Jackie Bradley Jr. stands in the green of Fenway, glove unstressed-ready for a fly-ball.  

In front of a rolled ice cream store, two, tattooed and pierced, young men stand vaping, mouthing, through huge clouds of smoke-vapor, in the window to two mini-skirted, tight-haircuts, full-tattoo-sleeved, laughing young women.  

A homeless man settles his cardboard bedding in the doorway of a packed windows, urban hardware shop.  

A cop, blues flashing, lumbers out of his cruiser, sighs heavily, adjusts his gun-belt under his gut, and starts toward a white, New York plated van – ruined with unintelligible graffiti.

With every step my daughter’s ear lobes hurt less.  She’s happy to have gotten this “need” out of the way before high school starts.

With every step my unique status as the Great-Big-Wad-of-Boringness in the Heart of Modern Cool, gets diluted by the all consuming tediousness of living a human life, so that by the time we approach my old, blue Volvo, I’m back to my plain, old fashioned boring self. 

Taunting Liameen

The ducks in Stephen’s Green, still bitter over their failure to get war reparations for the six members of their flock killed as innocent by-flappers in the 1916 Rising; and chafing under the fifty year old Park Bye-Laws that prohibit taking “part in any dancing, theatrical or musical performance or operating any radio, cinema, television or gramophone apparatus” in the Green; are now triply peeved that a heat wave has driven humans, with pasty pink thighs showing, and in full on it-seemed-cheap-online-deodorant-failure-mode, to invade their pond side. 

Ireland is cooking under the effects of is-it-real-or-fake-news Global Warming.  With air conditioning not yet a basic building system, cramped downtown with windows-nailed-close-to-keep-the-bleddy-cold-out offices heat up to unsafe temperatures: The city empties out into the outdoor cafés and bars.  Civil servants stand by the score on street corners, complaining about “de shockin’ hate altogether,” and crowd into parks, fighting for shade. 

“I’ll tell ya what,” the Stephen’s Green alpha drake mutter-grumbles, swimming in a tight, controlling, circle around his harem.  “It’s bad enough that de bleeding Corpo hasn’t cleaned this pond since, since, …,” he turns to a young duck next to him, “we don’t use days and weeks and dem tings like de humans do, do we?  How do we remember time?”

She duck blushes, feathers ruffling involuntarily and turns her beak away.

“How and ever, dem lazy bastards haven’t set a wellington in dis pond since I can remember, which in fairness is only since I last ate, or took a shite.  But, how and every, now our grassy pond bank – where it’s a Stephen’s Green duck’s constitutional roight to take a leisurely shite-waddle – is completely covered with pushy young wans up from de country.  I’ll tell you what; I’ll tell you what; tonight dere’ll be no standing at de fence spying on what junior Minister is adulterating wid what developer’s trophy wife in de Shelbourne.  No, I’ll tell you what; every duck’s arse off dis pond is goin’ to be spreading our green love all over de banks.  Heh-heh.  We’ll see how Mary-Jacinta from de Passport Office likes sitting on dat!”

We’re wandering around Dublin’s city center, our heads foggy with jet lag and the knock-on effects of decidedly non-traditionally hot Irish weather.  The Stephen’s Green Shopping Center, once the authentically cool Dandelion Market, where U2 got their start, now a refuge for shops that can’t afford Grafton Street rents, offers the joint mirages of Victorian aesthetics and air conditioning.  As it goes with mirages, neither prove true, and the young salesman in a tee shirt shop is at pains to tell us just how bad things have gotten.

“I mean dis hate is in-credible really, I mean Dublin on’y got one milli-meter of rain in the last week.  I mean, dat’s madness!”

His two arms shoot out for effect.

I nod repeatedly in fake agreement, walleting my credit card, and wondering just how big, or small, is a millimeter.

In Temple Bar, pub doors and windows propped open with kegs, chairs, that shocking-useless-bottle-boy, grant passers-by the dubious pleasure of maudlin Irish ballads, walloped out for pudgy, sweaty, I-never-knew-it-got-thiiis-hot-in-Ire-land, American tourists, wilting outside in the dust and cigarette butts, preferring that to indoor-heat-exhaustion, as they wolf down “funny tasting burgers, but the fries are good.”

The next morning, still time-zone-foggy, even after two cups of accidently double strength, how-does-this-fucking-machine-work, coffee, I peruse the newspaper, lingering over a story about how the heatwave is forcing farmers in Connemara to shear their sheep early.  In the photo, a traditional Irish farmer stands in turned-down-for-the-summer-wellingtons, the dress pants and once-was-white shirt he wore to his son’s christening (nineteen years ago,) staring at two rueful looking sheep, that just came out the wrong side of a skirmish with his shears; a farmer’s traditional worried, do-you-think-there’s-some-way-I-could-get-a-few-pound-out-of-this, look on his face.  But all is not lost, his neighbor, an enterprising young farmer, is considering “throwing in a few olive trees if hate like this is going to start coming regular.”

A prescient-climate-change Connemara farmer – or a chancer? 

In my all-too-easily-slipping-into-cynicism-imagination, there’s lads sitting on barstools up and down the Wild Atlantic Way, engrossed in nodding-conversations trying to figure how to go big on the first batch of EU grants for Irish olive tree farming – “til only last until de bleddy Germans find out!”

We tourist on from heat-island-effect-broiling Dublin to the cooler – in all ways –  Whest, passing fields full of cattle careful-bitterly planning a campaign of civil disobedience over the undue media attention being given to sheep. 

The cattle think they’re fooling us; gaping silent-blankly out over the NRA (not the dangerous one full of gun toting nuts, but the really dangerous one; the National Roads Authority) built fence, at cars zooming past at Autobahn speeds never available on the old twisty-turny roads. 

We pull over to examine this situation more clearly.

“Nathin’ to see here, would ye go away back out of dat,” a white faced bullock moos aggressively at us.  “Go on outta dat, have ye never seen a few Herefords, converting grass into protein dat’ll be mixed with all other kinds of cheap shite and sold to you as 100% ground beef?  Put away dat bleddy camera!  Ye have to pay for dem photo-graphs.  Fucking Yanks!” 

Back in the car, the radio blaring, I track the bovine-rebellion out of the corner of my eye, I listen as a male DJ – whom it would appear has spent approximately thirty something years on this planet, and yet has somehow only grown to a mental age of fourteen – says:

“I mean, if I was in de cave, like dem Thai buys are, I’d be on social media de whole time.  I mean, what else would dere be to do?  Me eyes’d be square when I came out!”

“And do you tink you’d get signal in dere?” his how-am-I-going-to-bail-the-gobeshite-out-of-this-one, co-DJ asks, sighing involuntarily.

“Oh jaysus, dey’d have to get signal in dere, I wouldn’t stay udder-wise.”

We get released from the idiocy of idiot-DJs, but only so that we can be subjected to a public service announcement in which we are sternly warned – by an individual who makes a handsome living doling out stern warnings to corrupt, eighteenth century Scottish nobility, Albanian sex traffickers, nineteenth century New York street gang members, and then back to the Albanians again - against the dangers of even contemplating a devil-may-care approach to swimming in Irish waters.  As Liam Neeson intones out of the car speakers, in a trying-to-get-deeper-than-Darth-Vader voice, spun through a Ballymena-Mid-Atlantic accent, he appears to be personally warning me – as someone whose teeth ache at the approach of a wax cup full of cooler water – against the extreme dangers of “COLD-WATER-SHOCK.”

In search of opportunities to drown or suffer a shock-induced heart attack, and in brattish defiance of Liam Neeson, we hit for the most dangerous body of water available: The Atlantic Ocean. 

This is a widely available source of danger – Ireland has a solid thirty-two hundred kilometers – which is … is … a lot of miles – of coastline.  Yet, in that special Irish way, it’s still hard to get at this ubiquitously dangerous amenity, as it is besieged by towns with traffic management plans designed to force tourists to stop in exasperation and buy a cup of coffee, a pint of Guinness, a seafood salad, or, for a steal, your own piece of the Olde Country in the form of a remote farmhouse with an unclear title and a collapsing roof. 

In the Coffee Shop Capital of Ireland – Westport – the we-wouldn’t-go-near-a-beach-crowd’s reaction to Global Warming is to sit outside drinking coffee, repeatedly daubing sunburnt foreheads with paper napkins, while tanned, scraggily bearded, French campervan-one-Euro-a-day-tourists stare in disbelief at the profligate waste of money, caffeine and paper napkins. 

“This is the worst driving ever,” my son, the recent recipient of the dubious title of being a fully licensed Masshole driver, says, sighing involuntarily.

“Look at that truck, he just stops dead in the middle of the street, and starts unloading!”

A jowly-beer-bellied delivery man, moving at an exasperatingly moderate pace, rolls open the coiling door on the back of his truck, and lumbers up inside; our place directly behind him in traffic-purgatory seemingly none of his concern.  He grumpily retrieves way too many cardboard boxes, bends himself backwards at a seemingly impossible angle, and blindly Charlie-Chaplin’s across the street into oncoming traffic.

“I need a cup of coff…,” I start.

“No!” my daughter cuts me off.  “It’s fricking roasting.  We’re going to the beach.  I don’t care what that weird guy on the radio says about how it being so ‘dange-her-us.’”

With the Westport-cuteness-and-traffic-snarl behind us, we tourist further west in search of the great life-threatening-ocean, only to have Global Warming throw up a new challenge.

The tar in the roads is melting, turning the good old fashioned twisty-turny roads into horizontal roller-coasters.  Tire tracks are clearly visible on the straight stretches, while tarry-skid-marks on the corners invoke a Liam-Neeson-death-is-imminent fear.  I crank the AC lower, white-knuckle the steering wheel and speed on – at 22 miles per hour.

“Do you know what we call dem?” the only fella who-can-be-let-out-of-the-office from the Irish Society Against Drowning – not to be confused with Irish Water Safety, this is a more “gen-you-ine anti-drowning group. Sure dey say, de only water de Director of Water Safety ever sees, is de small drop he does pour into he’s glass of Powers whiskey” – is on the radio.

“Lilos, dem blow up mattressy tings,” the idiot-DJ asks.

“Yes, de very art-icle.  We do call dem People-Killers.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am serious, deadly serious.  Because don’t you see what happens.  Mammy is sittin’ below on de beach, in de Aldi deck chair, engrossed in de Sunday World, lost in wan of dem stories about some farmer below in Tipperary, having con-juu-gal relations with his cattle, and Paddy and Mary are below in de water on de People-Killer, battering and scratching de shii… face off oneanother.

“Are you serious?”

“I am serious, deadly serious. Den doesn’t a wind blow up, and Jaysus, suddenly Paddy and Mary are bleddy halfway to New York.  Mammy drops de Sunday World, littering luvly photos all over de beach, and runs into de water after dem.   Of course now, Mammy isn’t de greatest swimmer in de world, is she? Ooohhhh, no.”

He releases an all-knowing, cruel laugh.

“And so we end up with tree coffins below in de church, instead of maybe just de wan!  Don’t you see?”

“Are you serious?”

“I am serious, deadly serious.  Now I’ll be putting fort a motion at de upcoming September ad hoc comm-it-eeee meeting to respond to all dis hate, dat we sell pin-knifes – with de ISAD logo of de young buy drownin’, and his arms wavin’ above in de air – for de sole and only purpose of puncturing lilos, and maybe, just maybe, if Father McQuaid’ll go along with it, dat we hold mammy swimming classes.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am serious, deadly serious.  I’d give a few dem lessons meself.  Heh, heh? A flock of mammies, in deir bikin-eees, below in de pool of a winters’ night – not bad, heh, heh?”

“And tell me, do you tink dem Liam Neeson adds de udder crowd are running are any good?  I mean, dere’s no voice like that man’s to put de fear-a-God into a fella.”

“Aragh now, what would that Liameen Collins know about drowning in Ireland, sure isn’t he abroad stuck on the side of some lux-ur-ious swimming pool in Los Hollywood, and him protected be ten Baywatch bab…, lifeguards.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am, deadl… .”

The heated air shimmers above Mayo County Council’s finest twisty-turny roads.  Prematurely sheared sheep, boney hipped, distended stomachs, flanked by mightily confused, how-the-fuck-did-I-end-up-coming-back-as-a-sheep-in-Mayo lambs, pick their way around bogs masquerading as fields. 

“Hey mammy,” a lamb asks his mother. “It’s scorching hot altogether, are you sure we’re really in Mayo?”

“Yes …, I tink so anyways …, I mane, dere’s green and red Mayo flags everywhere, so I suppose we must be,” she answers, her head turning around slowly with instinctual-bottom-of-the-food-chain-anxious-confusion.

“Well we could be in Portugal mammy, deir flags are green and red too.”

“Oh, listen to mister smarty-wool-pants, wan day below in de school, and now he knows all about Port-you-gal.  Do dere farmers have red arms and faces?”

“No, dey’re all kinda … kinda … latté colored.”

 “Latté!  I thought dere was something funny about dat last ram.”

“Well do you see mam, de climate down dere … .”

“Lookit!” the mother snaps.  “Do you see dat gobshite below in de tractor, and de arms and face on him as red as a beetroot’s arse – sure we have to still be in Ireland.”

We drive on.

“And tell everyone about de jellyfish, would ya?” the idiot-DJ can hardly get his question out with all his tittering.  “Dat was a good one you tol me juring de break about de nude swimmers.”

“Well now a man in my elevated position can’t be talking on de air about certain European people from France’s pro-cliv-ity for swimming with their gen-it-alia hanging below in de water for a jellyfish to sting dem.  A sting from wan of them boys below dere, … heh, heh?  After dat you’d nearly qualify for de Vienna Boys Choir – if you know what I mane.”

“But dey are dangerous right?”

“De genitals or de jellyfish?”

“De lat-her,” the DJ sighs involuntarily.

“Yes, dose brownish purplish ones are, not de little pink wans Paddy and Mary do massacre be de dozen with deir sand-shovels.  No, de dangerous wans are about a meter in dia-met-er, and deir stingers can extend a solid tree to tree-pint-five meters behind dem, dat’d be twelve or so feet – in de good old measurements, just so real Irish people know.  Do you remember dem at-all-at-all-at-all; feet and inches, pounds and stones, acres and furlongs.  Sure a fella knew what things meant back den, and dey were logical; don’t you know, twelve inches was a foot like, and sixteen ounces, or was it eighteen, was a pound.  I mean, it twas all logical, and I think dere was even a bit of a mention of dem in de bible.  And dat time too, we used to get all de Catholic holy days off.  Oh, sure twas magnificent altogether, every time you turned around dere was another day off.  I mane, you had to do a bit of crossing yourself and kneeling and standing, but den de rest of de day was yours.  And of course, den you could get de tree days off anytime you wanted, no questions asked or answered, to do Lough Derg.  Dere was no swimming at Lough Derg, but dat ould boat on way out was a certain deathtrap.”

“Awright, we’ll take a break on dat one and be back with de Love Island news.”

“If dey’re in bathing suits, I own ‘em … .”

We pull into Old Head beach: Our portal to a near certain watery death.  The kids, outrageously disregarding Neeson’s warnings, run from the car and jump from the old stone pier; shedding their hot-sweaty car journey selves in those few seconds suspended above the staggeringly clear water, and then plunging into the cool-refreshing Atlantic, they emerge with gasp-breathed-cries of delight.

A few middle-aged-minutes later, I stand on the heat of the pier’s huge cut limestone blocks in a rumpled boring-old-fart swimsuit. 

I stare at the unrestrained mirth taking place in the water; weighing a sudden “COLD-WATER-SHOCK” death against the slow certainty of skin cancer.

“Jaysus that’s shocking hate altogether, I never experienced nathing like this,” a traditional old fella, with a scraggy, sideways-looking-I-might-ate-you-or-wag-me-tail-at-you-not-sure-yet, black and white border collie circling around his turned-down-for-the-summer-wellingtons, says to no one and to everyone on the pier.

“Yes, very bad indeed,” I answer, turning to him, as I fall further back into role.  “Sure the roads on the way over were all melting.”

“Oh, surely, surely, surely.  I’d say there’s ferocious hate coming up off that tar be now; tid nearly burn-the-bollix-off-a-black-ant.”

Still staring at the whitened edges of the furrows on his weather beaten face, I involuntarily step off the pier, feel the coolness of the approaching water.

Across the bay, in stonewalled fields, sheep and cattle glare jealously.

Two children start for New York on a people-killer: A mother runs across the hot sand, tabloid newsprint strewing behind her.

Just beyond the limestone pier, brownish-purplish jellyfish circle in the water, selecting victims by European nationality.

Somewhere on a set in Hollywood, Liam Neeson, involuntarily, releases a stern-warning-defeated sigh.

Up on the Westport-Louisbourgh road, a crew of young black ants, their bags packed, ready themselves for the long trip to join the Vienna Boys Choir.

A Couple of Fires

I’m watching a short-muscular-incredibly-flexible African man gear up to limbo dance under a steel rod set at about eight inches and wrapped in a flame dripping rag.  The street performer, in his African-bona-fides-establishing leopard print, stretch hat, and an Oh-my-God-what-have-we-done-to-that-continent, purple Lion King jumpsuit, stalks around Dublin’s pedestrianized Grafton Street in tight figure eights, calling out in heavily accented English, clap-clap-clapping, as he tries to gin up the crowd of sweaty-faced tourists and a few youse-is-ony-pullin-me-leg-now Dubs.  As he rapidly figure-eight-clap-walks, behind him on the black and white checkered, plastic tablecloth, placed under the limbo bar to allow his sneakers glide along easily, a ball of flaming paraffin drips from the burning rag, and starts a, smallish, fire. 

In fairness now, it is only a smallish fire, albeit on an apparently, highly flammable tablecloth, recently procured from the €1 Shop.  But this is Ireland, so no one, including African immigrants, will getting excited nor nothing about, smallish, fires, on highly flammable materials, in thronged, pedestrianized, downtown retail districts, in the middle of an intense, is-this-climate-change-or-just-a-good-summer, heat-wave.  

A few of the youse-is-Dubs rethink interrupting their busy bargain hunting for a street act, purse their lips, grasp their oversized, plastic shopping bags, and drift off, heading for one of “dem latté tings, down Bewleys.”  The tourists, sticking with international tourist etiquette, stand stoic-silent, critically assessing the street performer for future comparison to acts in their own capital city.  A tall German woman, forehead anxiety furrowed, raises and lowers her arm repeatedly, pointing at the, smallish, fire. 

Finally, the leopard-print-hat turns just enough to notice the smoke emanating from his workplace.  Still clapping and calling out, he walks over, at the anxiety-inducing pace of a man who’s put out too many fires, to his duffle bag.  Maintaining pace, he rummages easefully around in the bag for a sweat rag, finds one, drops it on the burning tablecloth, and taps out the flames. 

A ball of fiery paraffin drips onto the sweat rag.  

The street performer calmly taps the second fire out with his shoe. 

Instantly happy that the, heretofore unperceived, threat of burning down one of Europe’s she-she retail districts has now been dispensed with, he releases a fresh burst of energy.  He calls out louder, more unintelligibly, and figure-eight-claps so vociferously that, before you realize that your self-image desperately needs “a latté from Bewleys,” the Africa fella is stuck halfway under the flame dripping, eight-inch high limbo rod.

There he hangs, totally pissing off gravity.

The insides of his feet and ankles – his only connection to our planet – entirely horizontal.

His shoulders sway-dance, over … back, as he shouts further, unintelligible, self-encouragement.  

His head never stops moving – shaking no; nodding yes – like it’s not even a part of the purple-Lion-King-suited body that is now this-is-what-it-takes-to-pry-a-few-Euros-from-you-miserable-bollixes, close to the flame dripping limbo rod. 

We, his, sufficiently walleted but beat challenged audience, all watch with gaping mouthed disbelief.  And for a few seconds we can suspend our middle-class-risk-adverse-boringness, and we all – the remaining youse-is-Dubs, the Euro and American tourists, even the anxiety-browed German woman – get onto his team.

He limbo dances his way under the flame-dripping, eight-inch high pole, the Lion-King jumpsuit getting scorched, but just a little-ish, on the chest. He whips his face, fractions of a fraction of an inch, under the dripping balls of flame.

He springs upright. 

Now, as the crowd starts breaking up without visiting their wallets, his, heretofore hidden, anxiety kicks in fast. 

“Pee-pulles, pee-pulles,” he calls out loudly, moving much faster than is required to put a, smallish, fire.

He grabs a purple, felt hat from his duffel bag. 

“Pleeaase doo nut fore-get,” he pauses, but for too long, the way someone communicating in their second language does. 

“That these ees my juub.”

He flashes a-too-quick-smile, that says he’s seen it all before.

“Pleeaase doo nut fore-get to pay fur dee show!”

Some pay – I send my son up with a, heavy-on-the-careless-middle-class-tourist-guilt, €10 note – but most turn quickly, and scurry away. 

Presumably the fleers are rationalizing that if the limbo bar had been set at four inches and laced with meth crazed scorpions, then, …well that would have been worth a €2 coin. 

Turns out July is a big month for fires, and not just smallish ones, in Ireland.  Well, at least in Northern Ireland, the six counties of which have remained under British rule, after, what is now the Republic of Ireland, gained its independence in 1921.

At this point, it’s important to dwell on the different methods of measuring time in Ireland.  First there’s regular Irish-time, as in for instance, the 5:05PM train to Westport, which leaves at 4:59PM or 6:34PM, depending on which will cause me the greatest heartache.  Then there’s Irish-sport time, as in the clock slowing to a near standstill when the Republic of Ireland’s soccer team takes a lead against any team better than the Faroe Islands, eh, …, make that Lichtenstein.

Then there’s Irish-history-time. 

This method of time measurement is no way tied to our planet’s three hundred and sixty five-ish day trip around the nearest star, but is instead inextricably linked to the emotions of your particular religious-cultural tradition.  Under Nationalist – as in supporting the Irish Nationalism; this term was coined long before the current type of “consumer nationalism” we see from those who believe that burning down refugee housing is a patriotic act – history-time, the War of Independence in 1921 was about fifteen minutes ago; just about when I ordered that latté, which I hope many other vain people are jealously observing in my hand.  Oddly enough, the Irish Civil War, which ran for about ten months between 1922 and 1923, gets no Irish-history-time at all; it would seem it took more or less as much time as it takes to re-swallow a bit of bile that might come up from your stomach.  Now in Northern Ireland, Loyalist – as in loyal to the British Crown – history-time holds that the Battle of the Boyne, 1690 was just about twenty minutes ago – pretty much just when I realized that it was way too long since anyone had seen me holding a latté.

To compress time like this – a feat which, even Einstein, for all his craziest-ever-hairstyle, couldn’t do – it is necessary to force-retain memories by faithfully commemorating every victory, loss and slight, no matter how small, against your particular religious-cultural community.  In fairness, every country attempts this.  The great state of Rhode Island – which is about the size of County Galway – celebrates VJ Day; Victory over Japan day: However it remains unclear if Japan knows that Rhode Island exists, and if so, that it’s not actually an island which can be retroactively, surprise bombed.  On our, sometimes unhappy, little island at the edge of Europe, we work hard at force-retaining memories.

Thus it is, not without some particularly convoluted Irish-Irony – a topic for another day – the battle of the Battle of the Boyne, actually won on July 1, 1690, is celebrated, with near religious fervor, every July 12.  The contestants in the battle were on one side, an army consisting of English, Scottish, Dutch, Danish, French Huguenots and colonial settlers in Ulster; all a part of the first ever alliance between Protestant European countries, and, none other than the, survival-first-religion-later, Vatican; fighting on behalf of a Dutchman – William of Orange.  On the other side was an army of French and Irish Catholics, fighting on behalf of James II, the recently dethroned Scottish, Catholic King of England.  There was that odd hilly-billy thing that James II was both William’s uncle and his father-in-law – one could have hoped they’d have solved their differences in a drunken brawl at the wedding?  They didn’t, and on the day, William of Orange’s forces won the battle decisively. If this is confusing, it is, seemingly, meant to be, and can only be kinda-sorta understood by studying it, under the tutelage of some bitter, old Irish man, while consuming massive quantities of alcohol.  But no worries, just hate on.  Now, through the mill of Irish-history-time, perennially re-ploughed confusion, and all too easily fueled sectarian hatred, the celebrations of that July 1, 1690 victory are now traditionally started at midnight on July 11th, by setting alight massive bonfires.

Once upon a time, these bonfires would have been modest heaps of various construction and household debris, maybe the odd bald tire, or a pallet, filched from the Harland and Wolff shipyard.  But with modern consumer nationalism taking over, now – not unlike the on-the-cheap-and-easy, KKK hatemongers marching with $3.50-on-Amazon tiki torches – pallets and tires are bulk purchased, or force-donated, such that communities compete as to who can have the tallest, most dangerous, highly combustible heap.  Once constructed, these, hundred foot plus infernos-in-waiting are then, traditionally, decorated with the Irish flag, effigies of the Pope, and any other remotely Catholic or Irish Nationalist symbols.  Since Brexit the EU flag now gets regularly burned, as, I imagine, does the odd stray poster of Father Ted.  While certain traditions, such as bonfire materiality or hand crafting a Papal effigy while consumed with hate, can be eschewed, others can definitively not be toyed with.  Thus, the requirement remains that these, smallish, towering infernos be placed in the middle of tight-streeted, redbrick, row-housed neighborhoods.  

On television, a news reporter harangues a stony faced man – whom the editors have elected to award the professional title of “Bonfire Builder” – about building these flimsy-infernos so close to people’s residences.  

“Ach, ‘e hav it all wrong agin, me sonny boy,” the “Bonfire Builder” retorts, with the acquired-wisdom of a man well used to hectoring the world into seeing itself from his point of view. 

“Them thare houses, they’s were built tii close ti my bon-fiire.”

The screen flicks to eerie-crackly footage of a few minutes before midnight on July 11.  It’s a scene that would send any self-respecting Health and Safety professional into an immediate, and deep, panic attack:  Climbing up the side of the hundred foot tall bonfire, is a twenty-something, jowly-beer-bellied man; whom, it would appear, has just spent several hours, traditionally, consuming alcohol.  Up he climbs, past the washed-out-by-the-darkness colors of the Irish and EU flags, one drunken arm being used to keep life and limb safe-ish, while the other drags an approved-by-no-one-ever, plastic five gallon container of whatever highly flammable liquid is, traditionally, sold to drunken young men on the afternoon of July 11.  

Then, swaying on a ledge, that would give Sir Edmond Hillary vertigo, the flammable liquid is roughly, and, of course, unevenly splashed around – the flags getting more than their fair share.  A couple of barely averted, you’d-be-lucky-to-just-end-up-a-quadriplegic, falls later, and out of nowhere a box of matches flames up. 

The flaming matchbox dominates the screen. 

The burning matches are thrown, wildly, as far away as possible.

Wooooosshhh, goes the bonfire, instantly a half an inferno.

Somehow I’ve gotten onto the team with this young man, who is seventy-ish foot up the side of the inferno, and clearly impaired.  But no worries, as the flames start to consume the pile, he retreats, with a previously unsuspected litheness and speed – fire, it would seem, induces this response in humans.

In a matter of seconds – so fast, that I’m expecting the next shot will be the beer-bellied-drunk man running, screaming, his back aflame, toward the camera – the pile of pallets and tires is a swirling, crackling inferno, making its own wind, as the flames devour the wood, the tires, the darkness. 

The crowd sings songs of hate and war, cans of beer and bottles of booze are raised in defiance at the television cameras, at the cops in their riot gear.  Off to the right, a fire truck busily hoses off houses downwind from the fire. 

The firemen hold their forearms up to the fire, shielding themselves from the heat and the hatred, waiting out the flames, hoping, no doubt, that on the way back to the fire station they can reward themselves with a latté. 

Full Frontal Posing

I’m sitting with my son on the patio of a way-too-cool bar on Dawson Street, Dublin.  Just off a plane from Boston this morning, we spent the afternoon touristing around the city center, until our resolve, and legs, packed it in – the cranky-time-zone-reboot-nap not really doing it.  Now, we’re content to retreat to this narrow bar-patio, people watch and imbibe refreshingly cold drinks, while around us Dublin buzzes.

Young professionals – grey-suited-white-shirted males; grey-suited-peach-shirted-or-summer-dressed females – unleashed from their desks, dart into bars and cafés for quick-hit-revitalization; libidos and credit cards, primed for summer evening action: They quick-step-off-on enormous, green-double-decker buses, barely letting these Dublin-originals lurch to a brake-screeching stop: Suit jackets and summer dresses fly backwards in youthful-self-made-wind, as they rush for the bus; to catch up to a friend: Rushing for the sake of youthful rushing, they duck-dodge between long groups of plodding-pointing-half-yelling Americans in tourist survival, backpack-water-bottle-hiking-cane gear: A homeless man picks his way along – sixty-hard-something-years old; greasy-blackened jeans, no shirt; fish-belly-grey-purple-splotched torso; beet-red-deep-wrinkled face; fogged-in-eyes – holding out an empty, battered coffee cup. 

By happenstance, and proximity to Hoggis and Figgis Bookshop, our touristing ended here at this Dawson Street bar.  The patio manager – a tall-bald-self-possessed African man, in a one size too large, black tuxedo and an unbuttoned white shirt – is bemused-indifferent at our politeness in asking if it’s ok to sit outside.

“Seet, seet,” he says kinda-smiling, waving one massive hand toward the patio, but carefully-indifferently, barely looking at us.  “Pick iny seet you liking – iny.”

We pick the only seats left, jammed between a large group of Irish millennials and two fortyish looking women.  The women turn out to be French speaking, and thus poor marks for eavesdropping, but the millennials, well, it turns out they’re Dublin Posers in full bloom: A particular Homo Sapiens’ social-subgenus – Hibernica Capitis Falsarium – that this Eavesdropologist has not studied for decades.

The young women, all fashionably dressed, to suit their fit builds, skillfully made up and coiffed to hide any overly prominent facial features, have very well defined roles for social occasions in this subgenus:  Most sit quiet-nervously-stiff, tittering when necessary, while the alpha-female, with faux-big-girl-gravitas, dispenses hackneyed advice about how to fool parents-girlfriends-bosses, or, most importantly, how to cure “killer hangovers.” 

The men are all skinny; no arses at all; their, appropriately, skinny jeans attached to their hip bones via thick brown belts; clean-trendy-haircuts; faked-tanned arms alighting from designer tee shirts.  They are, most importantly, voluble interrupters, cutting short each others stories of “a craaazy noight, madness, madnesss I’m telling you, and then she had the audacity to ask me to … .”

“Yer lucky she didn’t snap a pic of you, and put it for de whole worrild to see,” a thickset young Poser woman interrupts; her body language screaming boredom at one too many male-glory stories.  “You’d have ben in roight shite then, that little willy of yours skipping all over SnapChat.”

There’s a couple of titters, but an awkward stillness settles over the group.

“I don’t agree with dat sort of stuff,” the tale-teller says, setting his needs-the-double-chin-to-be-intimidating-jaw in a show of physical dominance.  “Dere’s plenty of women I coulda tooken pics of, … .”

He glares at his interrupter, his eyebrows raising just a smidge.

The waitress arrives, a slim, young Eastern European woman, with impeccable, but accented, Dublinish, and breaks the Poser-ice with a pleasant, eyebrows raised smile, as she leans toward them.

“Would any-one loike an-nod-er drink?”

My only previous experience with Dawson Street, confirming my unmitigated-redneckedness, was buying the street in the Dublin version of Monopoly – and it wasn’t even a particularly good earner, being one of the purple streets!

Thirty-two years ago, I left Ireland, or more correctly stated, left the ‘Whest’ of Ireland – from Shannon Airport, naturally – having been in Dublin so few times I might not even need to remove the second sock to count them all.  The only two Dublin locations that I knew well enough to say I could find them, were: Heuston Station, our point of excited arrival and anxious departure: And the Palace Bar, on Fleet Street, where beer-bellied-nicotine-stained-fingers Cavan barmen would, for 65p, serve a sixteen, and sometimes even a fifteen, year old a pint of Guinness the morning of a rugby international match.

For a solid sixteen years of two-week-three-weekend-trips to Ireland from Boston, I never got any further into Dublin than my brother’s house in Castleknock. This was not with any malice-a-forethought, but simply because we lived in a crowded city, and the joy of a trip to Ireland is to visit the vibrant countryside.  Then, the kids got old enough to savor the differences between American and European cities. 

Still, as an unmitigated-redneck, I remained unconvinced. 

Dublin was where your car got robbed, where “gougers” (not color coded – due to Ireland’s then all-whiteness – as are the disaffected youth in many other countries) hung out in gangs around gaudy shopping centers, waiting to unleash their crazed-at-the-world anger on whomever was stupid, or, as in our case, unknowing enough, to cross their paths. 

It wasn’t until six years ago, when I had to be picked up at the airport on a dark October morning, and driven across a large swath of the city, trying to get to a cancer hospital in time to say goodbye to my sister, that I ever even saw Dublin as a European city.

There we were in the almost-dawn, motoring down Georgian boulevards, blank two hundred year old windows gazing at us with unflinching indifference.  We rumbled down built-for-hand-carts-barely-wide-enough-for-a-car, cobbled alleys.  We zipped along once verdant suburban, but now tree-lined urban, streets; aging BMWs, Audis, Mercedes (legacies of the then anemic Celtic Tiger) parked carefully-haphazardly in front of what were once comfortably large country mansions, now extravagant city homes. 

That morning, in the grey dawn, the streets devoid of humans, travel exhaustion and the emotional stress of the race against time opened the shutters bolted closed by my redneckedness, allowing Dublin to declare itself a distinctive European capital.  

 Meanwhile, back on the now much better than Monopoly-purple-Dawson-Street, I get distracted by the table to my right – sorry, ‘roight’ – from which the French speaking women have departed, and is now occupied by four men in their early twenties, two sitting, two more standing, waiting for the carefully-indifferent-staring-at-his-phone patio-manager to not-bring them chairs.

The two sitters are working hard on Poser-cool-poses, but are not quite there yet – they’re probably third year apprentice-Posers.  Their faces are faux-taut with that pained visage that comes with being sooo-cool, but as they’re still apprentices, they need to busy themselves looking at stuff to avoid making eye contact with mere mortals.  One looks at the patio pavement, then at where their drink should be if only the waitress would acknowledge them:  The other one, for extra points, is busily involved in the complexities of rolling a cigarette; the paper, waiting for the loose tobacco, resting magically between his left thumb and forefinger. 

But never once – and thus I gain the secret art of posing in a Dublin pub – do the third year apprentice-Posers look at another human.  When you’re a card carrying Poser, you can’t get caught making eye contact with another person: They might pick up some frail concern for other humans, some potential weakness in the Poser armor, some mere mortal humanity! 

No, instead, all of a Poser’s energy must be devoted to – as one of the greatest poets, and a sort of Poser himself, said – “prepare a face, to meet the faces that we meet.”

As a secret coveter of the Poser’s suit of armor – I have long chaffed inside my unmitigated-redneck, Neanderthal suit of armor – I’m crushed to realize that my addiction to people-watch-eavesdropping has permanently ruled me out this subgenus.

Meanwhile, still standing, the first-year apprentice Posers, glance furtive-longingly toward the carefully-indifferent patio manager, who, as he dispenses a carefully-indifferent Poser lesson, disturbs not a single muscle to get them chairs.

One of the standing apprentice Posers – chubby, already balding, white-tee-shirt-belly-bulgingly-tucked-into-too-small-stonewashed-jean-shorts, early twenties, eyes that can’t stop roving – asks faux-nonchalantly: 

“Is dat Cuban or Dow-minican tobacca?”

His hands push too deep into the jean-shorts’ pockets, straining everything from his hunched shoulders to the mercilessly-stretched-denim. 

“I heared de Dow-minican stuff was really good,” he adds with an almost Poser-feminine titter.

“Nooh, nooh,” the cigarette roller says in a thick Cork accent – thus the need for extra points – carefully not looking up.  “I wouldn’t let a … a moleh-cule of Do-mini-can smoke into my luungs”

He stops to complete rolling a near-perfectly-cylindrical cigarette.

“Dis was grown, on an organic tow-bacca faram below en Wexford.  Wouldn’t be my ting to have ‘em burning fossil fuels trans-port-hing tow-bacca from da Colonies over here just for me to enjoy an ould smoke.  Oh nooh, not at all.  Johnny de bareman below in de Blind Pig hooked me up with dis Wexford crowd.  I haven’t smoked anudder ting since.”

As an unmitigated-redneck, who fled so far “Whest” that he ended up on the east coast of another continent, my last encounter with Dublin Posers was, rather improbably, forty years ago – in a chess tournament.

On that day, we were very much a social-subgenus all of our own: A successful chess team from the Whest, competing in an All-Ireland schools’ tournament.  These were the kind of tournaments that venerated private schools in the Dublin area mopped up with easeful regularity.   Our team, St. Gerald’s Castlebar, hot off the redneck-express train the night before, flustered-stressed-rushed out of Heuston to a billeting with relatives or hard-core-Irish-chess-enthusiasts, we somehow showed up the following morning ready to rumble. 

Initially, some of the Dublin players, teenagers who looked more like us – jeans-jumpers-sneakers-scruffy-hair – than the hardcore private schoolers – shirt-tie-pants-black-shoes-short-back-and-sides – were friendly.  But, as soon as we started beating them, they began to see us as a threat to their competitive-egos, and withdrew to the traditional tribalism of city versus country: Dub versus Cultie.

On the Sunday afternoon, as we milled around nervously before the final – we did everything nervously that weekend, until we stepped off the Heuston platform onto the train, clutching faux-gold medals – one of the apprentice-Posers, who had been friendly all through the Saturday, now back in the company of his wanna-be-Poser-peers, yells across the room towards me:

“Hey Paddy!”

I look back blankly, too confused and naïve to be insulted.

“Aren’t youse all named ‘Paddy’ down dere?” he scoffs, to a titter of nervous-maybe-the-Cultie’ll-start-swinging laughter.

“Come ‘ere,” the Dawson-Street-alpha-female says way too loudly:  She’s trying to salvage their summer evening from dissolving under the tale-tellers ongoing broodiness. 

“I hear de Aviva tickets are gowin’ on sale in a week or sow.”

“Jaysus,” a lanky male, full-blooded-Poser crows, his shoulders stretching back, both gangling arms rising up slowly.  “After what Jonny done to dem Austray-lians, de’ll be loike hens teet.  I’m glad I got me da’s for whenever I need ‘em.”

A few shoulders slump, some eyes avert; but he’s in full flight, hands closing in a loose, I-own-this-now, clasp behind his head.

“Sure, de ould fella’s ony interested in making a fewl of ‘imself in de befores and afters – wouldn’t know a rugby tackle if it, … if it, …, hit ‘im beh-tween de eyes.”

The waitress returns with a round bottle of clear spirits on a tray.

The Aviva-ticket-holder, breaks his passive-dominance stance, leans forward, grabs the bottle from the tray, peers closely at the label.

“Dats de one,” he nods, slowly, sagely.  “De best damn gin in Oire-land!”

I flick back to the apprentices, but they’ve disappeared, without leaving behind so much as a waft of Wexford-organic-tobacco-smoke.

The tale-teller’s-interrupter stands suddenly, flattening her short summer dress against her arse with both hands.

“Awhright, I’m off,” she says, with faux-cheerfulness.  “Rachel just Wha’sed-me, she’s oh-ver in Kehoes drinking durty pints of Guinness,” she forces out a titter, “wid her country-cousin from de tax office – she’s actually gas.”

She gives one final, extra-faux-cheerful smile, grabs her phone, unlocks it with one thumb, picks up her bag, clasps it deliberately, then starts to leave to a chorus of metal-chair-dragging-screeches, a smattering of barely-bothering-to-look-up “good-buy, good-buy, good-buys,” and an ostentatiously shoddy air hug from the alpha female.

She stalks out, heels stabbing the patio pavers, waving to the patio-manager, who, with the evening finally cooling and the nighttime crowds arriving, has been battlefield-demoted to doorman.  His shoulders squared, he holds the door open for an aging, Poser couple: The male in a so-dark-grey-it’s-actually-black suit, his mid-section amply filling the suspendered-pants and white shirt, his double chin quavering as he slowly steps along: The female has one of those, hard-earned-ugly-faces, gained by generations of rich-bitter living; she more than fully fills a fashionably-unfashionable cream colored, is-that-a-sail-or-a-dress; on her head an undersized pillbox hat, slightly askew, off which hangs some netting in an apparent attempt at a veil. 

The once-patio-manager-now-doorman bows, carefully-indifferent, as they pass.

I watch a double-decker swoop to a sudden-screech-stop at the curb, pedestrians stepping sideways with this-always-happens-but-I-never-get-used-to-it shock. 

The bus unloads fresh, young recruits for the assault on the Dublin summer evening.

A Euro-dad – fluorescent yellow flips, electric blue shorts, burnt-orange tee-shirt – strolls along, a lit cigarette in one hand, his toddler’s hand in the other.  The little girl tight-rope walks the curb line, oblivious to the now reloading bus.

Next to me the tale-teller rises fast-dramatic out of his seat.

“For reel!” he says, way too loudly, hands held up as he releases a nervous laugh.

Then he backs his no-arse arse into Aviva-man, holds his arms out, like he’s being crucified for a lack of coolness, his face contorting in mock-pain.

“And dis is me own mum, I mean I’m doing dis to me own mum!” he arches his back, for more effect, staggers, almost falls into Aviva-man’s lap.

The young women titter on command.

“You bet-her tell ‘er someone date-raped yer drink,” the alpha-female throws out, unleashing a chorus of loud-titters.

“Me owen mum!” he throws his hands up and snaps his head back, with the bacchanalian-wild-abandon of a Dublin Poser, full-frontal-posing on Dawson Street.

Throw On That Kettle

I’m walking home from school, my sixteen-year-old brain swirling with sixteen-year-old-swirling-bullshit. 

In front of our house there’s a badly parked, unmarked Garda car: Like all unmarked cop cars, it’s just a squad car without the Garda shields on the doors or the blue light stuck on the roof.  The regular Castlebar unmarked – a Garda-blue, Ford Cortina; recognizable by all, including the blind – is parked in front of it in our driveway.  

As I edge past the badly parked unmarked, I see the number “37” applied, in three foot tall, reflective, white numbers, on the roof – tall and reflective enough to be read from a helicopter!

My blood rushes.

Inside in the kitchen, there’s two detectives sitting either side of a smoking turf fire, slurping mugs of tea and puffing cigarettes: One is from town, Eamonn, I him know well; he’s a carbon copy of my father; hair greased back hard, blue trousers, a tweed-ish jacket, with plastic-leather elbow patches.

“Howaya now,” Eamonn says, nodding, lifting his mug of tea and cigarette toward me; his reddish face breaking into a thin-just-about-a-smile, smile. 

The other fella looks too young to be a detective: He’s all 1970s-Garda-cool; Wranglers, baggy red jumper, thick moustache, scruffy hair, with skinny sideburns; but he still has required Gard’s these’ll-give-you-a-good-kick-in-the-arse, black shoes; the ones that were way cool – back in the 1950s.

He stares at me with the sort of Gard’s suspicion I’m well used to, but for added big-city-cop-effect, he lets cigarette smoke slowly escape his nostrils.

“Did you get any slaps today?” Eamonn says, laughing, nodding to detective 37.  “Them De LaSalle brothers don’t be shy about letting young fellas have it, let me tell ya, and fair play to them.  We don’t want them growing up like bleddy eejits.”

Da is at the counter in the scullery making ham sandwiches, buttering up big slabs of Moran’s Bakery, sliced batch bread.

“Here, take this,” he says to me, passing me the plate that was meant for him.

“Nah, not hungry,” I grunt-lie, eyes ranging the shelves in the scullery for biscuits or something better than a ham sandwich.

He grabs the other two plates, and heads into the kitchen.

“Now we have residents’ lists from nearly every hotel and guest house in Mayo for the night of the fire,” Da says, handing over the sandwiches.  “Eamonn pulled them – fare dues, a lot of work.  Oh, ye’re nearly out of tea.”

“Ah well now,” Eamonn says, and from the scullery – where I’m still reconnoitering the shelves for sugary-food hiding locations – I can imagine him nodding his head a rake of times to show how just little trouble it really was, “some of them young lads above in the barrack do be very helpf … .” 

“Throw on the kettle in there,” Da blurts out, “there’s thirsty polis-men in here.”

I grab the kettle, and fill it up.  It’s a big old copper one, with a gun-metal-grey soldering scar where the leaky spout got rough-repaired. 

I know I shouldn’t, but I keeping turning around to see the action in the kitchen.

“Now the fire started around midnight on the Saturday,” Da says, sitting out on the edge of his chair, both hands held up and ready – like he was David Harvey waiting to get Leeds outta trouble with an easy Bremmer pass-back.

“Perfect timing,” he kinda harrumphs, throwing his head back, “at that time, half the Westport fire brigade’d be two sheets to the wind – and the other half dead drunk.”

I see him looking at 37 for a reaction; but 37 is busy pulling up the sleeves of his jumper – the tea, and the roaring fire, making him too hot.

Behind me in the scullery, the kettle starts to growl.

 “Anyway, the first one there,” Da starts up again, “was an arse-scratcher, just out of Templemore, out from Louisburg.  You see, Pat, the sergeant,” he touches 37 lightly on arm, “was within in town, ‘cause the second fire,” he stops-and-nods for emphasis, “had already been started in there, and he was trying to deal with that – along with whatever goes as a fire brigade in Louisburg.”

The hands go up again for another Bremmer pass-back, head back, eyes closed as he puts the night back together in his mind.

“And then the Westport squad – which of course beat the fire brigade” – he stops again, nods sideways, pursing his lips – “with another two youngish Gards, standing there, all scratching.  It twas an arse scratchers’ festival that night, because in fairness, there wasn’t much else could be done.  And sure by then the hotel was above in flames; it ‘twas a goner, or as much of a goner as whoever wanted it gone anyway,” he nods all-knowingly – head-shoulders-torso leaning forward from the chair.

“And I seen in … de arse-scratchers report,” 37 says, in a heavy Dublin accent, his eyes going over and back between the two of them, “dere was turf stacked up against de wall.”

“Yeah,” Eamonn says, lighting another cigarette.  “The hotels like the turf fires; I suppose for the Yanks; you know, the ould smell of turf smoke goes a long way with prying open a New Yorker’s wallet.  Do you remember the big round fella from Calee-forn-yah, above in the Cobweb, hogging the whole fire, and tears in his eyes, going on and on and on about ‘grand-maw and grand-paw’s thatched cottage’ – and all it twas some hackney driver took him to, was a bleddy cowshed, up the Windy Gap!”

He laughs a little laugh, throws his head back, and gazes into the fire.

“But stackin’ it up like dat, against de wall?” 37 says, his eyebrows raising, his head angling.  “I mean dey’re not … you know, farmers kinda ting.  From de photographs, dis was a nice premises – once and upon a time anyways.”

“Ah,” Da throws his head back, “I suppose the barman or the housekeeper did that, to make it easier it for himself … .”

“To burn de place down?” 37 says, getting excited.

“Not all at, to keep a bleddy fire going of a rainy night,” Da says taking fast gulp of tea. “Sure it only rains down here eight nights a week.”

“And ye’s are shore de Provies weren’t involved?” 37 says, giving Da and Eamonn the suspicious Gard’s stare.

“Oh yeah, no problem there,” Eamonn says, shaking his head, smoke gushing out his mouth and nose.

“Not at all,” Da cuts in, shaking his head.  “Sure we could tell you what every one of them ate for his dinner that day, and how many pints he had that night, and where.  ‘Twasn’t them – this time anyway.”

“And you see, we did get the wan curious name from the residents’ lists,” Eamonn says, slipping his notebook out of the inside jacket pocket. 

Da and 37 sit up even more.

“An Anthony … Bogs…worth,” Eamonn looks up the two of them.  “He only stayed two nights, within in Reek View Guest House in Westport – the Fridah and the Sat-ur-dah,” he looks back at the notebook, “and then he flew back to London from Shannon, on the Sunday evening flight.  The landlady said had a few pints somewhere down in the Octagon the Friday night, but wasn’t around until very late on the Sat-ur-dah night.”

“Dat’s our man,” 37 blurts, jumping up, lumps of Moran’s batch bread crumbs falling off his red jumper.  “We needa get ‘r hands on him – do you have a phone here.”

“No,” Da shakes his head, not moving another muscle.  “No phone in this house.  There’s a radio in the unmarked.”

“We needa contact de British authorities as soon as possible,” 37 says, still standing, looking like he needs to get somewhere fast.

I hear the kettle start to rumble.  Turning around, I see steam starting to billow out the spout.

“Ah now,” Da asks, lifting the mug up to his mouth again.

“What would that crowd be doing for us abroad in London?” he takes a big gulp of tea and shakes it down.

“Dey’re required, by deir own Backing a Warrants Act, to pursue a suspect for a crime committed in de Republic of Ireland with as much diligence as dey would for one committed in, … in, … in Liver-poool.  When I was a Garda in Crumlin, we sent manys de suspect over to dem – if de judge allowed it, of course.”

There’s silence, the turf fire shifts, settles a bit, sending a flock of sparks up the chimney.

“In fairness now,” Eamonn says, breaking the silence, his eyebrows rising up high, pointing the lit cigarette at 37.  “I’d say ye’d have had a fair pile of suspects above in Crumlin for sending over – heh?”

“Sure lookit, even if we were lucky enough that wan of them fuc…, fellas, knew yer man, then we’d be up again … let me tell you this one,” Da start-stops, takes a pre-story, big gulp of tea. 

“There wan day a couple of year ago, and more maybe, probly actually,” Da nods his head, doing that eyes-gazing-at-nothing-thing he does when starting a story. 

“I was within in the Claremorris barrack, making a photo-stat off some fingerprints I took in Dillon’s pharmacy.  Don’t you remember Eamonn, the tinkers pushed one of their wee lads – he was only eight I think; in the run up anyway he was too young for Saint Patrick’s – in Dillion’s back winda, and he took some of them ould Polaroid instant-taneous cameras, the whole lot worth fifty quid or something – and hundreds of pounds within in the till; he never even looked at it; the poor divileen.”

He takes another gulp of tea.

“And sure we knew well twas that crowd camped out the Knock road, back from England, ‘cause the wee lad they put in the winda, like many another first time burglar, didn’t he go and,” Da nods toward the scullery – I’m standing in the doorway now, and see everything – and mouths the word ‘shit’ to two detectives, “himself, and then toss it there on the floor.  Anyway, ould Dillion, God bless him, speak no ill of the dead and all the rest,” he raises his both eyes and hands toward the ceiling in fast-fake-prayer, “between the break-in and the …,” he raises his eyebrows, nods a couple of times, “well, you can imagine the same man, he was very proper – a Trinity man, I believe – arriving into that.  So McGinley, the inspector at the time, says to me, in the way the same man would; ‘shoot over there to Claremorris, and dust a few prints in the pharmacy, before Dillon lays wan himself on the carpet in front of the glasses rack!’”

They all guffaw hard, heads rollicking back, mouths opening wide, showing too much teeth-tongue-ribbed-roof – I turn away.

 “So I went over, took the prints, and when I was dropping them off, didn’t the barrack phone ring; some ‘constable bloke,’” I cringe as he does the worst ever imitation English accent, “on the line from, from, …, where do Arsenal play at-all-at-all?  Highport, High-something.”

“Highbury,” 37 cuts in, butt-end-lighting a new cigarette off the old one.

Behind me the kettle fumes scald-the-skin-off-your-fingers steam; boiling water spitting out the spout; I turn to get it.

“Good man, good man, you saved me there!  And wasn’t this ‘constable’ looking for the youngest of them Carney’s, there’s an awful clatter of them altogether, out Knocknashactha, by Lough Blenner.  The father has land right down on the shore of the lake; I fished it; once only; full of pike.”

He shakes his head rapidly, with angler’s impatience for bad water. 

“And fair dues to this ‘constable,’” I cringe again, unplug the kettle, “he had tracked young Carney all the way to the Claremorris barrack for a … a … stolen car, I believe.  Now that was some polis-work, let me tell you that.”

“Jaysus and it twas,” Eamonn says, head shaking, “’cause there’s an awful heap of Carneys out that way to be getting it down to wan of them.”

‘Twas definitely a stolen car,” Da says.

I’m back in the doorway and he’s wagging his index finger at Eamonn.

“I remember now, ‘cause, I happened to know this self same bucko.  He was a small bit fond of stealing cars outside dancehalls to get home, and then leaving them down the bog road behind his house.  I caught him in wan of them dead-drunk-asleep wan time. ‘Twas a young lassie from up the midlands, working within in the dole office; new; and she had her father’s mustard yellow, Hillman Hunter with her for the first few weeks, and didn’t the bucko steal it outside the TF of a Sunday night.  Oh, she was very upset.”

He stops for a breath, nodding-nodding-nodding. 

“She come right up to the barrack, crying about “daddy’ll say this, and daddy’ll do that.”  Sure we had the bucko below in the cell, and the mustard Hillman Hunter back in front of … of … I forget now what B & B she was staying in at the time, to her by three in the morning.  Ah, then the judge goes and gives him three months suspended, and pay for the damage to the car.”   

He shakes his head with resigned disgust.

“Anyway, I told the English polis-man I’d see what I could do for him.”

“So you see,” 37 says, sitting up his chair.  “We could get dat fella – wat was ‘is name again Eamonn?”  

“And I meant it at the time,” Da nods his head a few times, like he’s talking more to himself than to them.  “I did.”

He nods again, deep this time.

“I did.”

Eamonn flips open the notebook.

“Anthony … Bogsworth; he went be Tony or mister Bogsworth, the landlady said.”

“We’ll need her guest register information for his address, dey usually give de real one – in case tings go bad, and de old-lady has to track down de body.  De London gangsters is fierce souper-stitious altogeder – when it comes to a corpse.”

He looks from Eamonn to Da and back again. 

They both nod sideways – like they just might be impressed.  

“And sure den Joe,” he turns to back Da, “we’ll be as good a polis as yer ‘constable bloke,’” he does an even more cringe-worthy imitation.

 “Ah, let me finish, and you’ll see where all his good polis work ended up.  I get in the car, drive right out to Blenner, get a hold of young Carney, and I told him,” he wags the finger again for extra emphasis, “in no uncertain terms, that, in a matter of minutes – sure I was making it up as I went along,” he smiles, shaking his head, “that we’d have him on an air-o-plane, at his expense mind you, back to High…, London.  Oh, and I was rattling the cuffs, the lot.  Like I wasn’t fooling around as far as he was concerned.”

“They do get vury nervous at that pint,” Eamonn says, narrowing his eyebrows, pointing his index finger in the air, cigarette smoke trailing next to it.  “Vurrrryy nervous indeed.”

I take the chance to fill the teapot with boiling water, add another couple of teabags.

“Oh sure he was scared shi…,” I imagine Da turning to look at me back in the scullery doorway, “… very nervous.  Indeed he was Eamonn.  And then bucko starts telling me stuff he knew I’d want to know, and I’d say, in an hour or so, I got a solid two months worth of work done within in the unmarked out by that ould pike filled lake.  Oh, this fuc…, fella, knew every cattle-rustling-salmon-poaching-car-thieving-burglar from Blenner to … to … Belmullett.  Oh sure, the first thing he does is run into the house, and come back out with a yoke for swapping ear tags.”

He stops, stares at 37.

“Cattle ear tags – you know they do be swapping them around on stolen cattle.  And sure ‘twas a useless yoke, wouldn’t work at all, I could tell be looking at it, but he went and got it,” he nods and smiles, like as if a child did something funny, “to establish his bona-fides as a good crook.  Don’t you see, to get me to put away the cuffs and stop talking about the air-o-plane.  But when he starting talking, sure I had what I needed and let stay there in Blenner.”

“Still, dere’s de Warrants Act, and sure dey mightened play dat game over dere.”  

“Ah would you go away out that,” Da snaps, throwing his head back.  “Now, in my opinion, we've as much chance of them sending this … Bogglesworth, or whatever his name is, over to us, as, …, as, … as I have of marrying the Queen.”

“She’s not a bad looking woman – the Queen,” Eamonn says, shaking his head knowingly, holding out the cigarette hand.  “And she has a damn fair bit of property too, let me tell you that.”

37 sits down again, but on the edge of his chair.

“And a husband,” he says, taking a deep pull of his cigarette, and trying to pull the sleeves up a bit more.

Da makes eye contact with Eamonn, rolls his eyes, and then turning to the scullery, he says, way too loud, at me in the doorway:

“Is there any tea in that pot at-all-at-all-at-all?”

Seriously

I’m in the Picasso museum in Barcelona.  It’s beautiful, made up of five palaces – turns out a Spanish palace is just a big house, but these are impressive house-palaces; all cut stone walls, vaulted ceilings, naked baby reliefs holding up door lintels – and of course old, authentically old, European old, meaning it was actually built hundreds of years ago – way before any Ken Burns documentaries.  Barcelona’s “new” parts are our “old” parts.  

For a self-avowed Neanderthal, a Picasso museum is an odd place to end up, but it’s actually my second time in a museum dedicated to his work.  I made the same mistake in Paris a good many years, and a whole life, ago.  I say mistake only in that Picasso was most definitely not a starving artist; he sold his work for millions while he was still around to use his fortune, and fame, to live out a comfortably, dysfunctional life.  Thus his museums are left only with sketches, a few not-so-impressive-to-a-Neanderthal cubist pieces, and tons of early work, mostly in styles in which he would never have been more than yet another also-ran imitator of the masters.  To magnify, and complicate, my mistake, this time I dragged along my kids – son, fourteen; daughter, eleven: Well, they are in the five house-palace museum in body, if not in spirit. 

On a cool Barcelona summer morning, full of the hope good weather brings a city, we wait impatiently for forty-five minutes in a line snaking along the side of a narrow Catalan sorta-alley.  The kids whine that their boring-wages – remuneration for accompanying me on this “stuuuupid-we’re-not-going-to-learn-anything” part of the trip – had specifically excluded long lines with Moroccan van drivers lurch-brake-playing with us, as a cat plays with a mouse.  They did find it funny when a distinguished older lady – her boney-tall frame draped in a long black dress and topped with a wide-brimmed, cardinal-red hat – stood her ground, leaning heavily into her black wooden cane, glare-gazing at a mustachioed bakery van driver sweat through, what my son described as, “a million point turn.”

I zone out the whinegotiating, and instead eavesdrop on two older English couples in line behind us. 

“We could keep ‘ur place in the queue, if ye want to go far a pint,” one of the perfectly-coiffed-grey-haired wives says flatly, implicating the other woman – likely her sister – with a nudge of her shiny black handbag.

One of the husbands scrunches up his pink-wrinkly face.

“I’d sleep through this bloke if I hada bitter now – I would.  W’at’s he-all about anyway?”

“You know, he’s the famous one, had amaaazing girlfriends, and ‘e painted that picture of the bombing – with all the ‘orses ‘eads and stuff.”

“This is sooooo boring,” my daughter interrupts.  “You never said … .”

“Yeah,” my sons interrupts the interrupter. 

“we’d have to stand in line.”

“I didn’t know we’d have to.”

“Thought you knew everything?” she snaps, giving me her I’m-going-to-torture-you look.

The source of the waiting, whining, and consideration of pints of bitter at 11:00AM, was standard Catalan tourist management techniques – evolved in an environment where supply so incredibly outstrips demand.  Inside the museum there were four ticket desks, only one of which was staffed, and that by a never-smiling-Spanish-Catalan-only-speaking young woman, engaged in rancorous conflict with the credit card machine.  

The boring-wages, ten Euros per whining-child to be subjected to Picasso, were oddly enough, also the price of entry to the museum.  Once I had double paid – my kids live hard by Reagan’s “trust but verify” motto; verification in this case being crisp ten Euro notes rolling between their thumb and forefinger – my son settles into a chair outside the gift shop, his phone already out.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I ask, with the innocence of a Neanderthal who, twenty minutes earlier, was contemplating whether two older English perhaps-sisters, completely unknown to me, would babysit my kids in line while I went for a pint of bitter with their, completely unknown to me, husbands.

“No.  I hate museums,” he says, with that binary assuredness with which he approaches everything in life, and stares back at his phone.

Back in the first half of the 1900s, Picasso had taken a decent run at becoming European Philanderer of the Century.  His only problem was the steep competition from his peers: The average French male.  In between, during, and perhaps as a result of, his extra-marital exertions, he completed some of the most iconic, thought provoking art of the modern area.  Like all great artists, he tapped into humanity’s need to see itself represented in a manner that stretches human consciousness to capture a glimpse of our essence.

Unfortunately, there were very few glimpses available to me, or the kids – well, they weren’t really glimpsing anyway – that day.  Picasso’s best work is to be seen in the world’s best museums: Or not be seen at all, by your average Neanderthal, as it’s in private collections.  In any case, that day I’m in the wrong Spanish city to have my kids absorb through art something of the insanity of our world, as described in Picasso’s most famous piece: Guernica. 

He painted this scene “with the ‘orses ‘eads and stuff” in a visceral reaction to the ruthless bombing of the village of Guernica in the Basque country of northern Spain.  The bombing raid was executed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe in support of Franco’s fascist forces.  Most of Guernica’s able-bodied males were off fighting the fascists, and thus it was mostly women, children, the aged and infirm in Guernica that day.  It was a market day, in a market town, and the center teemed with people.  The Luftwaffe, experimenting with the power of air bombardment, for reasons the rest of sleeping Europe was about to discover, sent the first few waves of bombers in to flatten most of the buildings in the center of the town.  The collapsed buildings prevented the market goers from escaping.  Then they dropped three thousand incendiary devices onto the entrapment site, sending over a thousand women, children, the aged and infirm to a mercilessly hellish death. 

In Paris, busy philandering – and then painting during, after, and about it – word of this atrocity reached Picasso.  He was immediately driven to start into his enormous work which tries to capture, on a twelve foot by twenty-six foot canvas, the cruel insanity of mankind’s seeming inability to stop warring against ourselves.  It took him about six weeks to finish this monumental work of art. 

Reportedly, years later, in occupied Paris, a Nazi officer, while searching Picasso’s studio, pointed at Guernica and asked:

“Did you do that?”

“No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”

Back in Barcelona, things are going pretty much according to par.  My son downstairs lost inside his phone, I’m slow-walking around the museum, my disappointment curated by my eleven year old daughter, from whom streams a monologue on what an enormous waste of time it is walking around museums.

“I mean,” she says, in her imitation middle-aged-already-too-tired-cynical voice, “look at that.”

She points to a sketch that looks like a few crayon lines fell out of the sky onto a sheet of heavy paper.

“I mean, I could better than that – seriously!”

We battle on through the galleries; zero grams per cubic millimeter of art being absorbed.

“How did they do that?” she asks.

I turn hopefully.

She’s pointing at a cut stone wall.

“What?” I ask, walking over, trying to see what she means.

“That,” she says flatly, pointing at a stone in the wall.

“That particular stone?” I’m totally energized, but totally confused.

“All of them, how did get these big stones up this high?”

“Oh, I see,” I try to hide my confusion, “humans, human donkeys, the Catalans probably kidnapped some Irish to carry them up this high.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Downstairs, by the ticket desks – now fully manned by four smiling-chatting Catalan millennials; with no customers to serve – team O’Farrell rendezvous, assesses the situation.

My son has given up – hopefully – or was routed out of, his chair by the black-dress-red-hat lady, who is now in the middle of a deep nap: Her black cane resting precariously against her thigh.

“How was it?” my son asks, barely dissembling an interest in what we’ve wasted our time on, while he played productively on his phone.

“Really good,” I double-dissemble back.

“No, it was terrible,” my daughter cuts in.  “I could do better paintings – seriously!”

“Yeah, and the gift shop is full of crap” he piles on, nodding at me, “even you wouldn’t buy anything in there.”

“Seriously?” my daughter asks, her innate consumer urges excited.

“Seriously,” he answers.

“Seriously,” I nod in full defeat.  

Doing The Pigeon

 Doing the Pigeon

I’m standing behind an abandoned Catholic church in Boston’s Latin Quarter eave-spying on a pigeon four-baller.  The church – built back when the Catholic Church was the Catholic Church – is, or was, beautiful with its soaring, red bricked walls, slate roof, red-clay-tiled dome, creamy terracotta trim: Its overbearing immensity a testament to the power of human belief. 

But belief dropped off, the Catholics moved out, the pigeons moved in.  On this cold spring day, the grounds, where Irish, Italian, Polish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and El Salvadoran kids once played every Sunday morning, are dotted with pigeon couples freaky-eyeing each other up for an orgy of avian procreation.  

Pigeons, domesticated thousands of years ago, now sneered at as flying rats, had – back when colonialists were colonialists – an auspicious start in North America.  They were brought over by the French, who, being the French, took a few hours off from obliterating native populations and grabbing their land, to jumpstart snobbery in North America, by being the first to bring cool-shit over from Europe.  It worked: As soon as the wealthy in Quebec had pigeons, the wealthy in Boston wanted pigeons.  Before going feral and, getting back at us by, literally, shitting all over everything humans hold sacred, pigeon meat was considered a delicacy, and live pigeons were cool to observe because of their quasi-human characteristics, including monogamy. 

Despite the bitterly cold wind, the sun is high enough in the sky to let the two pigeon couples that I’m surveilling, in the courtyard created by the abandoned church and the repurposed Catholic school building behind it, know the time has come to get it on. 

The two pigeon couples adopt distinctly different approaches to their intent to procreate. 

One male, in a, fittingly, Latinesque take on Bert from Sesame Street’s classic “Doing The Pigeon” skit, is strutting his stuff – hard.  He swells his chest with air, his body extending an inch and a half taller, his luminous-green-running-to-purple feathers glistening in the weak spring sunlight, as he paces around the female with the self-importance of a bullfighter playing the crowd.  All the while, he coos with that broken-glass-in-the-lungs sound, as his grey head, with those freaky white-rimmed eyes – that seem to know so much more than one would expect from a being who survives on our thrown away junk food – nod-nod-nods like a windup toy.  He obsessively shadows the female, who with feminine guile continues to peck at what might be crumbs on the broken asphalt, but is more likely grains of left over winter salt.  All the while she appears not to notice that, right next to her is a twice-his-normal-size male member of her own species, apparently on the edge of a nervous breakdown, sweating bullets on a freezing April morning.

The other pigeon couple are Irish.

He’s wandering around like a lost dog, nary a puffing up of his feathers, nor nothing even close to it, fake-pecking every now and again, paying not a whit of attention to her, but staying kinda-sorta close, definitely never looking at her – no way, what would the point of that be, only encouraging her – no, mostly his freaky eyes look up at the sky, as he’s clearly considering, with great anticipation, the Man U – Man City clash on Saturday. 

The female ups the ante, obsessively rapid-pecking, her beak hitting the ground like a machine gun, nearly taking his pink-leathery-toes off, she sort of backs herself around the courtyard, her body language saying there’s not “wan other pigeon left on this planet, let alone that miserable gobshite standing next to me gazing up at the sky wasting his two brain cells wondering will that bollix Mourhino last!”

The wind cuts across the courtyard. 

I shiver, and wonder will someone come to let me into the old school building.  I’m way too early – a terminal disease for me – and well used to finding distractions.

The Latin male is fully swelled up now, looking like he’s about to burst with the innate urge to procreate.  The female, looking up for a second from her all-important pecking, casts him an avian “wouldn’t-you-love-to” sidelong look.  Driven by this modicum of female interest, the male somehow stuffs his lungs with a few more cubic millimeters of air, and I start to think I’m about to witness the first ever spontaneous-pigeon-explosion.

The Irish couple are in I’m-so-fucking-oblivious-to-you-that-I-keep-bumping-into-you bliss.  Himself with his head up in the clouds, from as every bit unlikely an elevation of twelve inches, as we humans frequently get to the same mythical place from an average height of five foot six inches.  Herself, with her feathered arse serving the same purpose, and intent, as a mobile police barricade, backing aggressively around the courtyard.  Thus they shuffle – the lost and the angry – pink-leathery feet lurching across the asphalt in a staccato-sudden-movement, bitter dance.

Another male pigeon drops in – an Aussie, on an I’m-fucking-my-way-around-the-planet-mate walkabout.  With an overly practiced, casual-wing-flutter, he settles himself in, surveys the scene, head turning as if on a swivel, freaky eyes capturing everything – including my staring-self.

The Latin male swells up like an indignantly-ready-to-pop-luminous-purple-green-balloon.  His movements are stiff, but definite, as he stalks – one pink-leathery foot after the other, head snapping back – between his soul mate and the Aussie interloper.

The Irish male makes a weak effort at the puffing up thing, but, honestly it’s been a while, he’s not exactly sure how it goes anymore.  Plus he’s thinking, ‘I don’t want that wan thinking I’d be getting all puffed up over her.  Heh, just because this tanned gobshite drops in looking to extend his line of DNA on the back of all the hard work I’ve done letting her know just how little interest I have in that sort of thing.  I mean, I’ll do it if she wants to do it, but otherwise, I’d be happy enough with a skin-full of Guinness and a couple ham sangwiches.’

He looks a small bit ridiculous as he throws a few shapes at the puffing up: A couple his feathers rise; turns out he has that same luminous-purple-green coloring, and with a big gulp of air can get a bit of height too.

The Irish female is thrilled. 

She looks up from her obsessive-rapid-pecking long enough to make freaky-eye contact with the Aussie male. 

This triggers deep-chip-on-the-shoulder instincts in the Irish male, and he swells up like his Latin neighbor, the broken-glass rattling – with an Irish accent – in his chest, his freaky-eyes glaring at the interloper.

Across the courtyard a dumpster lid slams closed.

Wings flap. 

All five disperse in different directions.

The courtyard returns to its windy loneliness. 

Just red bricks, broken asphalt, me.

Bike Safe Boston

Bike Safe Boston

I’m pacing up and down the 30-yard line on the second football field behind Madison Park High – the one that gets half-a-field-lengthwise stolen light from the streetlights. 

Pacing is what I do when I’m impatient: I pace a lot. 

Today my impatience is driven by too-warm-for-rugby-practice October weather, and the fact that in thirty minutes, the stolen-light half of the field will be all we have to practice on.  And what do the heat and dark matter anyway – when only ten players showed for practice?

Welcome to college rugby.

Still, the ten that showed are good kids, young men really: Most of them will be out of the crazed-college-world, and into the crazed-real-world, in a matter of months. 

They sit on the artificial turf, pulling on cleats, and bullshitting to one another with the sort of bullshit that drove me, one day, to inform them: “You know I’d run into a burning building to carry any one of you out.  But please, … please don’t ask me to drive in the same car to a game with you.”

I pace.

I check the time – it helps make me even more impatient – on the cheap watch I bought to ref games when the ref doesn’t show up – yet again.

Welcome to college rugby.

I’m looking up for more players to come straggling in, when the first pops – and that’s what they really sound like; “pop … pop-pop-pop” – make me turn my head.

A few of the less-involved-in-bullshitting rugby players look up too, and turn toward the sound.

Beyond the end zone, where everyone is black, contrasting to rugby practice, where everyone is white, on the street in front of the housing projects, there’s a few, same-ish age as the rugby players, men lounging on the battered furniture – a half burned sofa, lopsided beach chairs, two rusting no-longer-folding-chairs – that gets summer-strewn around projects.  One tall, young man, baggy, black sweats, white tee shirt, arms-outstretched-crucifixion-style across the hood of a red Jeep Cherokee, stares up at the dusky-orange sky.

 Across the street, an older man, dark pork-pie hat, scary-skinny arms and neck coming out of a short-sleeved, white dress shirt, leans up against a pickup truck bed, his slight torso propped up rigidly on his forearms.  He stares straight ahead into nothing. 

In the middle of the road, there’s a kid – maybe thirteen, fourteen, a thick-striped, navy-and-white tee shirt, baggy sweats, a shock of scraggly hair rising straight off the top of his head – stopped on a BMX bike. 

“POP-POP-POP.” 

It goes again – because I’m watching it happen, it processes clearer, louder in my mind.

I see smoke rise up in front of BMX-kid’s face. 

“Is that gunfire?” a rugby player asks.

“Nah!” another player scoffs back.  “That’s just … some fucking city-shit-noise …”

The BMX-kids eyes are clouded by gun smoke, but through the smoke, I can clearly make out his snarled-focus.

“POP-POP.”

“That was gunfire, I been deer hunting in Maine,” another rugby player says, standing up, staring down through the end zone, hands-on-hips-middle-class-ready-to-act.  “I know a gun when I hear it.”

I can barely make out what must be the pistol, held in both his thirteen-year-old-hands, shadowed by a thick navy blue stripe on his chest.

“That’s not a fucking gunshot, a gunshot hurts your fucking ears,” the scoffer rebounds.  “I went to the gun range one time with my cop uncl … .”

In my head, there’s one of those pauses, when everything seems to slow down and move so clearly that you get all the little details.

BMX-kid holsters his weapon in the right pocket on his baggy sweats; the black metal gun disappearing completely in there; he executes a BMX-180 – left sneaker on the ground, his tensed right quad showing through the grey sweats as he skid-rubber-grinding forces the bike around; then, standing on the pedals, torso tightening, shoulders hard to neck, he takes off, pedaling rapidly.

The street-furniture guys – frozen until now; like characters in a video game – come to life. 

One angry-bounces out of the sofa, sprints a few yards, realizes BMX-kid is already out of sprinting range – and has a gun – skids to a stop, arches his back, and unleashes an unheard scream-threat.

The crucified-guy on the Cherokee hood is off his cross, speeding around back of the vehicle; he yanks the hatch open and grabs a baseball bat.
            “Who does he think he is?” one of the younger rugby players genuine-asks. “Obi-Wan Konebi?”

He paces up the street in the direction BMX left in, slapping the baseball bat hard off his left hand.

“Yeeaaah,” the scoffer jeers, with 40-yards-plus-a-childhood-with-zero-shootings-complacency. “What’s he goin’ do, swat the bullets away?”

The just-shot-at young men huddle around the burnt-sofa.  The body language is all revenge-anger; heads turn repeatedly, shoulders-tighten-to-necks; a no-longer-folding-chair gets kicked hard into the middle of the street; the guy with the baseball bat can’t stop pacing and tapping.

“Are you guys just total fucking nerds or what?” a city kid, rugby player asks, gathering up his gear, like he’s leaving.  “Making jokes during a drive by?”

“Cycle by,” the scoffer corrects.

Beyond the end zone, a decision is made.  The young men pile into the Cherokee, baseball-bat-guy tap-tap-tapping the metal bat off the road, until he slings himself into the driver’s seat. 

They pull a fast-flee-U-turn.  Then drive off, at suburban-family-grocery-shopping-pace, in the opposite direction of BMX-kid.

The scary-skinny guy – the shots having forced him upright for a minute – leans forward again, resting his forearms on the pickup truck bed.

There’s an odd not-silent-silence about the scene.

Behind me, the rugby players start bullshitting again – with nervous half-laughs.

The city hums in the background.

Nothing moves on the street beyond the end zone.

The street furniture is knocked over and strewn further apart. 

There are bullets buried somewhere in the embankment at the edge of the turf field.

The scary-skinny guys stares into nothing.

Then, far off, but constant, and rising steadily enough to know they’re headed here, the sirens start.

The wail rises-rises-rises until it’s painfully close, then winds down to nothing, as two cruisers jam to a sudden-sideways-stop.  Police officers, guns drawn, emerge; crouch behind open doors; radios squawking.

Nothing happens for another weird minute.

But the not-silent-silence is broken.

Four more cruisers, two unmarked Crown Vics, and an unmarked van arrive.  Everyone, other than the van – who carefully parallel parks in an available street space – pulls up haphazardly, closing the surrounding streets to traffic. 

Blue-white light swirls off cruiser roofs; smaller blue lights whir in the front windows of the unmarkeds; all the vehicles’ regular lights fight the dusky-orange evening light, frantic-flashing red-white-red-white-red-white-red.

The cops slow-invade the area; hands clapped on holsters; moving forward hunch-crouched. 

The only black cop there, a uniformed officer, stays behind, sway-standing by his flashing-lights-cruiser at the top of the street, hands rising from his hips to whip his hat from his head, and wipe his sweaty-baldness with a red bandana. 

A tall-muscled-jeans-and-golf-shirted plainclothes officer swaggers fast into the middle of the street furniture, his arms shooting out as he points at the sofa, head nodding directions.

A heavyset, black woman, fortyish, bedraggled hair, loose fitting orange shorts and white tee shirt, lime green flips, with a small white-foo-foo dog on a leash, pads through the blue swarm.  She force-notices none of them, dragging the curious-friendly dog right through the flashing-lights-scene.

“Is she out of her fucking mind or just stupid?” the scoffer asks: Everyone laughs.

The tall-muscled plainclothes officer, black leather notebook flapped open, pen held ready, high-energy heads across from the street furniture to the scary-skinny guy.

He rests the notebook on the pickup, pen held ready.  The tall-muscled head and shoulders nod as he talks.

The scary-skinny guy stares ahead, shifting slightly on his forearms.

A minute later, maybe less, the notebook rises over the golf-shirted-muscled-shoulder, and is dramatically slapped closed. 

Head shaking, he stomps back to the sofa, anger-fumbling the notebook into his back pocket.

The swarming slows; hands off holsters, shoulders down; aimless walking, lightly kicking trash around.  Two groups of officers – uniformed and plainclothes – form in the middle of the street furniture.  A minute later, they merge into one big blue huddle.

Then, a decision made, they all head back to their vehicles, and depart, killing the lights as they pull away.

The non-silent-silence returns.

The city hums in the background.

The scary-skinny guy shifts on his forearms.

“All right, all right,” I yell, turning to the rugby players, who are still gawking-frozen at the now vacant scene.  “Everything’s ok – for us anyways.  Let’s get going; burn off some of this craziness.  Take a lap!  Take a lap!”

They form up, still bullshitting, still half-laughing nervously, and take off at a trot.

I fall in behind them, to burn of some craziness too.

But the craziness won’t burn: In my head, the snarling-focus of a thirteen-year-old’s face – clouded by blue-grey gun smoke – stamps hard onto my memory.

The dusky-orange evening light tinges to black. 

The streetlights snap on.

In the far distance, sirens wail. 

Made Pain

Made Pain

I’m lugging a black plastic bag, bulging with “fuck-head’s” suits and shoes, for the dumpster – huffing-and-puffing, but still all eyes for the dogs.  This is the sort of fast-fucked-up-confusion, where you barrel rapid out a doorway; frighten them; and they attack; lock-jaws and nail-sharp-teeth blazing.

“Hang on, hang on guy,” the boss stops me, a hand on the shoulder.  “You gotta think about this like it was your own money – right?”

He looks around, squares his shoulders with a deep breath, like he’s going to deliver a mini-lecture on how fucked up the world is, but the boys are all inside having great crack tearing furniture to pieces.  Giving up he pokes at the bag.

“Fuck-head wore expensive clothes, that was part of his con” he wags a finger at me.  “Maybe I could make a few bucks off these in of those goofy second-hand stores in Cambridge? ”

Eyes narrowing, lips tightening, he spits out: “Which would be more than I ever got in rent from the bastard. Throw ‘em in the truck.”

Arms aching, I turn, cut across the lawn. 

A dusting of snow attempts to cover the scars the boss carved into the lawn with the truck this morning.  Eyes full-on crazy, barely looking back, he gunned the V6, rear wheels spinning, rutting a road across his well manicured lawn.

“Fuck that fucking shithead housing court judge,” he yelled above the sound of the howling engine.  “Store freeloading fuck-head’s shit for six months – heh?  And then magically he’s going pay those costs! What about my fucking rent?”

He slammed his hand down on the steering wheel; the air behind us thick with diesel fumes, soil and winter-dead grass.  

“What kind of men wear black dresses, heh?” he continued, glaring out the windscreen while we fishtailed around the lawn.  “Heh?  I’ll tell you who: Fucking judges and Jesuits.  Jesuits and judges.” 

As I approach the truck, Diablo and Retard, downy snowflakes sticking to their muscled backs and shoulders, heads slightly angled, stare curiously at me bobbing through the ruts, the big bag nearly winning.  When they recognize me, their tails slow wag, drumming a relaxed beat on the truck bed. 

As I lean in to slide the bag up against the cab, Retard licks my cheek.

“Come here,” I call to them, backing up in front door of the house, slapping my thigh.  “Come in the house.  Come on – Diablo … Retard – come.”

Their ears shoot up, eyes electrifying, pink-edged-jaws growing bigger, stronger, more dangerous, tails flailing the walls of the truck bed.

“Come inside,”

They stare, taut-body-confused, but don’t move.

“Don’t be bothering any children walking down the street,” I wag a finger, uselessly, at them.

Back inside, hands on hips, I survey the house: Acres of honey-yellow-stained oak floors; Navajo-white walls; cathedral ceilings opened up by a series finger-skylights; two French doors in a window wall that overlooks a yard falling away down the side of a snowy “Who’s woods these are I think I know” hill; living room two steps below a dining area that runs into an open oak-cabinets-shiny-stainless-pink-granite kitchen; on the second floor a wraparound, wood-railed balcony, with five bedrooms – one with the door ripped off – tucked into the eaves.  And the whole place full of the tenants’ stuff, surprisingly, for a town as fancy as Hingham, ordinary stuff, except for the crucifixes and pictures of Jesus everywhere.  They must have been some sort of Born Again Christians – or as they say back in Mayo: Born Against Christians.

“Here,” the boss says, loudly – anger simmering just below the surface.  “Let’s see if we can’t burn some of fuck-head’s shit.”

He creaks open the door to a black, potbellied stove in the middle of the living room.  A six inch, exposed metal flue, painted streaky-black, staggers up through the roof, held in place by a couple of dodgy metal supports.

He shakes his head, eyes narrowing angrily.   

“Store fuck-head’s shit for six months?” he glares around at all his former non-paying-tenant’s stuff. 

“Sure – I’ll store it in here,” he stokes the cold stove with a too-smaller poker.

“Anyone got a cigarette lighter?” he asks, eyes softening.

All four of us reach for our pockets.

“What the fuck?  Do all Irish people smoke?  Don’t you know it’ll rot your lungs out?  What does the Pope think about all this smoking - heh?” 

He takes Shamy’s Bic, tries to light it, but his thumb keeps rolling off, a tiny stream of lighter fluid jetting out.

“Fuck it, these Jap lighters are made for women.  Doesn’t anyone have a Goddam good American Zippo?”

I hand him mine – a cheap knockoff Zippo.

“Thanks,” he flips it open; a blue flame popping to life.  “Now that’s one you could burn a village with.”

We stare, confused, at him. 

He grabs a People Magazine – with Bobby from Dallas on the cover, a dirty grin on his face, like Pam just gave him the nod – lights it up, and stuffs it, flaming, into the stove.

“Throw anything that’ll burn in here.  Fucking fuck-head, pays me three months rent up front.  Oh yeah, “I don’t want the hassle of paying every month – I’ll just send you a check after every deal” – sure … not so many fucking deals, heh? A year later and I ain’t seen another check.  And I’m supposed to store fuck-head’s stuff for six months – come on …” he holds his hands out … “are we still in America?”

He grabs a yellow fluffy pillow off the sofa, a few more magazines from the coffee table, and jams the lot into the stove with his boot. 

“Fucking asshole judge!”

Then he storms off with his usual sense of purpose, arms tight to his sides, face set in stone.

He’s an odd boss, what with the dogs – but sure you get used them; kinda-sorta – and the odd ould pinch of coke – every other coffee break there or thereabouts; and then the stream of shite talk brought on by such a wee bit of white powder.  But he pays fair-ish, has any amount of work, and there’s nearly always a good plot twist when you’re working with him.  He’s only about fifteen years older than us, but he dresses, talks and acts much older.  If it wasn’t for the coke, and the shite talk, and that we’re three thousand miles from Mayo, he could nearly be me father’s friend – not really, but you what I mean. 

His father, a thick Corkman – sure, aren’t they all – owned a pile of properties, but he keeled over before he got to enjoy all his scrabbling for money.  The boss and his ould-fella hadn’t gotten within an ass’ roar of each other for years before the keeling over; two right thick men, you can only imagine it.  But the mother, who the father told nothing – supposedly he said to Barney, down the Emerald; “as far as she knows, I’m a street sweeper, and so long as she gets enough to pay for the groceries, it’s equal a shite to her what I do!” – couldn’t manage the properties at all.  So the boss back-doored into a big inheritance.  As Barney, with his “forty-years-in-Boston” twang, said after he heard, “the old man must be boring a tunnel around Mount Hope cemetery!”  Now the boss is full against anything the father ever said, did, stood for, or might have had even a passing interest in – including being Irish.  

Normally we’d be building his gazillion-dollar condos in town, but the housing court judge just got done with him and the non-paying-tenants last week, and only yesterday, he finally routed the girlfriend and the little child out.  

This ‘fuck-head’ fella had gotten inside the boss’ head big time: He made out like they were the same kind of heroes; big risk takers, chasing big rewards.  He was “some sort a big time international deal maker.”  Whatever the fuck that meant, he still bought all his furniture below in Bradlees, like we do.  I seen the same TV stand in the living room that we got six months back for $29.99.  Anyways, he told the boss that he’d rent this house for a year.  The boss had this one up for sale – the old man liked it apparently, supposedly talked about moving in here – but he couldn’t get asking price.  Then, according to the boss anyway, fuck-head said that if his girlfriend, or maybe his wife, seemingly ‘twas never clear, and their kid, or just her kid, that was never clear neither, liked the neighborhood, he’d buy the house.

 “I’ll pay whatever you want, cash.  It’s an easy ride to the airport from here.  That’s all a guy in my line needs – a bed and a plane.”

Instead, of course, he fucked everyone.  He lost the head one day – according to the boss, if you can believe him and the coke; when fuck-head was away on his “international dealing,” she didn’t stay lonely – destroyed the place, well, the master bedroom anyway; scared the shite out of the girlfriend and kid; drove the BMW to the airport; got on a plane, and never came back.  She had no income, so of course no chance of rent; instead, just her showing up in housing court crying, and the utilities getting shut off one by each.  Then, one of them really cold nights a few weeks back, a pipe froze.  The boss probably should have been wrapped up in a straitjacket that day.  Oh, very bad altogether.  I’d say Retard pissed himself four or five times that day.  Finally, a few grand into a “good Jew attorney,” he made a judge say the woman and child had to get out of the house.  The two left with just their clothes.  Some bank owned the BMW – hadn’t seen a payment for months.  The straitjacket nearly had to be sent for a second time, when the judge told him to “store your former tenants’ personal property for six months, in a professional storage facility, and save all the receipts, so that reasonable reimbursement can be effected.”

We were waiting outside the house, getting ready for the dumpster-dope to drop a can on the driveway, and the boss is telling the courtroom story, spit flying, while we sneak in a last smoke before work.  He steals a long-hard drag of Shamy’s cigarette. 

“’Think I give a fuck what a guy in a black dress says?  Heh?” he waves impatiently at the dope beep-beep-beeping down the long driveway, smoke gushing out his mouth and nose.  “’Cause I know that asshole ain’t ever going to come back for his stuff.  And if he did, … , if I ever laid eyes on fuck-head again, I’d kill him with my bare hands. Wring his neck!” 

His eyes go pure wild, as he imaginary strangles.

A couple of hours later, his plan well underway to burn down the dumpster tonnage charge, the fire’s going good – so good I start to get overheated with all the winter layers.

“Come on, come on,” he snaps when I stop to peel off my sweatshirt.  “Where the fuck you think you are?  Wollaston beach?  Just get it done.  I don’t want to waste no more time on this asshole.”

He’s flying around grabbing anything that looks like it could burn, stockpiling it all on and around the couch by the stove.  Pretty quick, we have way too much fuel, and the pot belly is working so hard, it starts ticking.

“Leave the door open, more oxygen, makes a better fire.  Don’t you have fires in Ireland no more – what the fuck?” he snaps, shaking his head.

Meself and Shamy keep feeding the stove as fast as we think safe.

Conor and John are upstairs smashing before and behind them; Bradlees beds, chairs, dressers – a halfways decent wardrobe, that probably had been a candidate for a used furniture store, but not after Conor’s karate kick put the door out the back of it, mirror glass flying everywhere.  But there’s still more stuff: two closets full of her clothes, one full of his, and shoes-shoes-shoes for every possible occasion and season, the only thing more than shoes is broken toys, and they have enough of them to start a broken orphanage.  But it’s the piles of glossy magazines, everywhere, every room, even the floors of the bathrooms has stacks of People, Elle, US, Cosmopolitan, that got him thinking about burning.

“Here, look at this guys,” the boss says so loud he’s nearly yelling, interrupting the flow of burning and destructing.

He waves us over to him, holding up a framed photo. 

“Come here, come here, let me teach you something your Irish fathers never would.”

Conor and John lean over the balcony, faces red from work; eyes and heads rolling behind the boss’ back.  Then, smiling at the unexpected break, they mosey down the stairs.  Meself and Shamy drag our feet over from the potbelly’s heat halo.

“See guys,” the boss says, drawing in a deep breath, his shoulders rising, his face turning serious.  It’s not the face he gets when we have a real problem to solve – and he’s good at that; he’s a builder; lumber and steel and concrete he can work with, people, not so much – instead it’s that pretend-grown-up-serious look he puts on when he’s ready to deliver a just-how-fucked-up-the-world-is lecture.

“When you pick a woman to marry, live with, whatever,” he pauses, looks slowly around at each of us. 

“Remember that you’re going to be still fucking her in ten, twenty, thirty years – if you get the life sentence, right?  And naturally,” he raises his eyebrows, angles his head, like as if we think exactly the way he does, or, more likely, that we should be thinking the way he does, “you’re definitely going to wanna know what” he nods the point home hard, “you’ll be fucking in ten … thirty years – right? Come here, come here.”

Chisel and Marvel – the other two dogs; evil bastards if ever evil travelled on four legs – appear out of what was the TV room staring at him. 

Me and Shamy seen them in there earlier – up on a Bradlees’ “TV For Two” loveseat, like they were regular dogs, that wouldn’t ate the arse off you at the drop of a hat – and that’s why we stuck hard by the stove as hot it was.  Then Martha and Retard appear in the front door.  All the dogs jostle to push their muscley bodies up against the boss’ legs, tails slow-wagging.  He smiles down at them, holds up a framed photograph, and waves it around like he’s a Herald seller outside of South Station. 

“See, … ,” he draws in a deep breath. “This is evidence, forensic evidence of what happens with time to the human body – ‘humana corpus,’ as old Father Carney tried to beat into me a million years ago up in BC High.”

In the photograph there’s two women, their eyes covered by sunglasses, so the age is guesswork, but one looks around late twenties, early thirties, and the other could fifty-something hard years, or seventy – there’s no telling.  They’re standing on blinding-white sand, framed between blue skies and a bluer, white fringed, ocean; hair blown back, they look like age-enhanced versions of one another.  The younger one – presumably ‘fuck-head’s’ girlfriend – is tanned, bleached blond, fit looking in a bikini: The mother, in the same bikini, rail thin, dark brown alligator skin, burnt-out-bleached blond hair, every muscle – even the little ones in her forehead – sagging.

“See, remember this the next time you’re hanging one on down in Field’s Corner,” he says, shaking his head slowly – like he’s actually an old buck with some won-be-hard-times-wisdom to share.  “When you meet a colleen in the Emerald Isle – demand a current photo of her mother, or her grandmother, before you go and fall head over heels for her.”

There’s what regular people would call an awkward silence, with me and the boys all sort of moving around without moving; each of us laughing-scared to catch another lad’s eye, and for-real-scared to catch the boss’ crazy eyes.  And we’re all staying well back from the dogs, and eye-balling for something to grab, ‘cause, by how the tail wagging slowed to nothing, the backs tightened to straight, the ears up and down and up again, and the eyes on their master all the time, we could tell that they could tell he was about to blow.  The problem was, that when he did blow, we couldn’t tell what they’d do out of fear.

“All right, all right, nothing to see here ladies.  Lesson over Micks.  Let’s get this place cleared out, burn every-fucking-thing that belonged to fuck-head – I’m all done paying for his shit.”

He slings the frame inside the potbelly with a dull-glass-cracking-thud.

“And that fucking triple asshole of a housing judge,” he stops and points his finger at each of us, as if we’d be down the Emerald drinking in the corner with the judge that night. 

The dogs back way up.

“Who  … the … fuck … does he think he is?  No one!” spit flies out his lips. “I don’t give a fuck who they are, not even my mother, tells me what I can or can’t do with my own … this property!”

He draws back his leg, and unleashes a boot into a rickety Bradlees’ dining room chair, instantly transforming it into a pile of cheap wood and upholstery.  The dogs, bodies low, scurry up the two steps into the dining area, regrouping under the table around Marvel, eyes glued on the boss.

“Get to fucking work, what’s all this standing around for?” he storms up the steps.  The dogs cower under the table, but he blows right past them into the kitchen. 

I pick up the broken chair and start feeding it into the potbelly. 

In the kitchen there’s fierce banging and crashing with dishes and glasses hitting the floor – and, it must be noted, instantly losing their resale value. 

Then suddenly he’s back in front of me holding out a Sacred Heart painting.

“Burn this fucking thing,” he says, looking away from me. 

Now, this was not your grandmother’s Sacred Heart painting, like what you seen in every kitchen in Ireland, hanging on the wall above the little red bulb that barely shined, but that could never be shut off; didn’t even have a light switch to it; even when there was a power cut, you were supposed to light a candle under the Sacred Heart painting; unless, that is, you were up for a heap more time in purgatory.

In this Sacred Heart painting, Jesus stared out with oh-so-sad-brown-almond-shaped-eyes, holding open white vestments, that looked more like a toga than the Shroud of Turin, an aching, bloody red heart, wrapped a few times in double-ex-sharp thorns, dangling in the middle of His chest. 

“Burn it,” he snaps viciously, turning back to stare me in the eye.

His eyes are fully crazed now. 

“I suppose He’s on their side too,” he storms off, paralyzing another chair with a kick, “Him and the judge and the fucking Jesuits – fuck the whole fucking lot of them.” 

He storms out the front door, probably for a wee bit of coke. 

All four dogs scamper, haltingly, after him.

Holding the Sacred Heart painting in my hand, I stare at Shamy.  He stares me back in the eye, but for just a second, drops his eyes to Jesus’ almond eyes, then walks away toward the dining room.

Setting the picture down by the couch, I pick up two Boston Tall Ships 1976 placemats, the thick-heavy plastic punctured by a bunch of blue-ink stab marks.  Staring at the ships, in fake full sail, I force the plastic in two to make it fit in the stove door, and push the fleet into its final, hellish storm with my boot.  The potbelly gasps, then flares with electric-blue flames licking the doorway.  I stare, nervously, as the flames slowly subside back inside to a whitish-orangish glow.  Then I stuff in a stack of Cosmopolitan magazines and a yellowed-out Boston Globe with a big photo of the Space Shuttle flaming out. 

The fire, thirsty for oxygen, whistles.  

The potbelly ticks, ticks, ticks.

I stare sideways at the Sacred Heart painting.

Maybe I should be the only atheist in Boston with an – albeit anatomically dodgy – painting of Jesus in the corner of his room?

If I say I’m taking it, the boys will slag the shite out of me: But if I burn it the weight of family, culture, and abandoned religion will crush me.

Shamy has the dining the room table flipped over, and is amputating a leg – with his boot.

I find one more Tall Ships placemat, jam it into my personal inferno, and head into the kitchen for a drink of water.  I crunch over the broken glasses on the tiles, and stick my mouth under the tap.  The cold water, the tinge of chlorine, snap me back; I drink deeply, knowing I have to just not think so much and burn “the fucking thing,” like I was told to.  It’s only a cheap ould painting anyway.

As I walk back, wiping my mouth with back of my hand, I hear the potbelly tick-tick-ticking – loud, scary loud. 

The fire inside is a messy ball of plastic and paper burning white hot.  The first section of flue above the stove, what had been black metal, is starting to glow red hot: The redness visibly creeping up the black metal.

“Fuck!”  I yell out, and turn back to the kitchen for water.

“What?” Shamy looks up from another table leg amputation. “Oh Jaysus – double-fuck!”

When I arrive back with a saucepan full of water, the red-hotness is halfway up the second four foot section of black flue. 

The boss strolls in, eyes unfocused, shoulders relaxed, a newly lit cigarette dangling from his lips, all four dogs, go-halt-go, surrounding him.  He stands and stares.  

I throw the water in the door of the potbelly: Blinding smoke billows out. 

Shamy rushes in with a big vase full of water, and gives the disease a second dose of treatment. 

Steamy-thick smoke: Everyone splutter-coughing. 

The dogs growl, crouch; tails up; ears back; eyes wild with fear.

“Shut the fuck up,” the boss yells at them.  “We got a real human situation here.”

The whole house is a cloud of thick smoke.  All the metal is tick-tick-ticking.  Red coals struggle to stay alive inside the potbelly.   

A smoke alarm pierces through the fog of steam-smoke.

Tick …tick … tick goes the metal.

The smoke alarm shrieks.

The potbelly belches smoke.

Tick … tick … tick.

The boss, calmly puts his cigarette in his mouth, picks up a broom, walks over to the smoke alarm, and kills it with one whack.

“Hey, nice work guys,” his words fall strangely-soft into our newfound silence.  “American kids would’ve run like dickhe … .”

We all freeze as the flue, a black metal column, lurches out of the cloud of grey smoke. 

I leap over the couch toward the boss.

The metal hits the hardwood floor with a tinny bang.

Retard darts out, attacks the flue, his teeth flashing white through the smoke.  He cries out in pain as the metal scorches the sides of his mouth.

A weight suddenly impacts my lower leg; pain – sharp, intense, rising; like someone whacked my calf hard with a baseball bat.

I look down, tears welling in my eyes: It’s the top of Marvel’s head, his jaws wrapped around my calf. 

Shamy, shimmies for position, then drives a boot between Marvel’s back legs.  The weight comes off my leg, but the pain grows, radiating up into my thigh.

  Marvel bolts into the TV room, crying in his own pain.  The other three scurry after him, Retard still whimpering.

Shamy jumps over the fallen flue, grabs an amputated table leg, and stands ready for another canine assault.

The pain in my calf radiates up to my thigh.  I sit down on the living rooms steps and pull up the leg of my jeans.  There’s three deep puncture wounds in my calf, blood starting to ooze out.

 “Well,” the boss says, pausing for another drag of his cigarette, running his thumb and forefinger slowly down the bridge of his nose, “looks like the Big Guy didn’t like my idea of burning Him.”

He nods, smoke gushing out his nostrils, and touches his boot gently against the frame of the Sacred Heart painting.

 “Why don’t you put that in the truck,” he nods at me.  “Mom might like it.”

I look at Jesus’ sad eyes.

The pain brings me back to the punctures in my calf.

From the TV room Retard groans in pain.

Articles of Faith

Articles of Faith

Part 1

I’m in the living room, arms clench-folded, staring out the front window one last time.  It’s a beautiful old Brookline Victorian, built in 1882; tall, proud of itself; a balloon frame filled with southern pine and gumwood fastened in place by black rectangular nails; a swooshing main stair, a stern-narrow servants’ back stair; deep, dark-dusty walk-in closets; age-stained brass faucets on an oh-so-comfy-deep, lion’s claw bathtub.  Through the living room’s age-marred glass, Sunday morning sunlight fidgets with memories – good and bad. 

I’m waiting for Dominic from Leominister.  He’s already called me three times from the road, asking politely, but bluntly; “please Joe, please do not waste my gas money.” 

Outside on the sidewalk sits the saddest wheelchair in the Western Hemisphere: It couldn’t even make the cut – with one footrest missing – to get itself into a shipping container heading to earthquake stricken Haiti.  Instead, it provided hours of deliriously-near-dangerous fun, wearing out grey-wheel-rubber and parents’ nerves as it got kid-propelled at high speeds off the curb. 

Behind me, spread across the kitchen, living and dining rooms, are the articles of life too physically or emotionally cumbersome to be carted out of a divorce: The Art-Nouveau-maybe-antique dining room table – bought as a first anniversary wedding gift to ourselves; several bed frames and mattresses; a too-large-for-this-kitchen kitchen table that lived in the basement below me for seven years; three dressers – of KIDS-vs.-IKEA questionable life expectancy; a few where-the-fuck-did-these-come-from yard sale chairs; a ratty ottoman; and a sofa so big, I couldn’t get it in the door of my new apartment.  Sweaty-defeated, humping that sofa back to my soon-to-be-old-home was one of the more dispiriting moments in a time littered with dispiriting moments. 

But now Dominic is blazing in – at a speed of a phone call every fifteen minutes – from the so-far-out-can-you-call-them-burbs to get the oversized sofa for his cousin; “who’s been crashing in my living room, since he lost that job down Walmart – five years back.”

I hear a car pull up, and out the front window I see two men emerging from a battered, blue Ford Ranger.  The passenger, in life-faded jeans and a white undershirt with yellow-grey stains under the arms, immediately stuffs his hands into his pockets, and hunched-over stares at the wheelchair.  The driver, a short, slim man in jeans, black tee shirt and a black-and-yellow CAT trucker’s hat, rounds the back of the pickup in an arms-swinging-purposefully, fast walk.

 “Joe, is that my man Joe?” the short-purposeful man says in the window, smiling broadly as he bounds up the front steps.

The screen door slams, and then he’s in the front hall.

“Dominic,” he says, holding out a grease-stained hand.

“Oh!” I answer, feigning surprise.

“Tell me you still got it, tell me I didn’t drive no forty miles worth of gas money for nothing?”

I point to the oversized-sofa.

“A thing of beauty,” he paces, hands rubbing together, in front of the sofa like it’s a prize racehorse.

 “All right, how we going get this out?” Dominic asks.  “Now you said you could help, right Joe, ‘cause,” he stops, spins around, “where’d he go now?”

“He never came in,” I answer.

“Ok, ‘cause he aint gonna be able to help.  I mean he could, but he can’t neither,” he points a finger loosely toward his head.  “If you get where I’m coming from – and I don’t mean Leominster.  So I’ll need your help Joe.”

“Absolutely,” I nod, ruefully.  “I have some experience moving this particular article.” 

 “Ok.  Now let’s see.”

He rubs both hands together fast.

“Have you got,” he enunciates the words slowly, like I’ll have a hard time understanding them, “a measuring tape that I could borrow.”

I go get one.

 “Now Joe, let’s go measure the truck.”

Dutifully, I follow him out.

“Now, tell me the story of this wheelchair,” he says, shushing his cousin out of the way.  “An old relative’s?”

“No, I grabbed it from work for the kids to play with.  It was a donation for Haiti, but the people getting the stuff ready said it was in too bad a shape.”

“And is it?”

“I don’t know.  I went to Haiti once, and I imagine they could put it to use.  It’s hard times down there.”

“Hard times everywhere Joe – hard times everywhere.”

He flips down the tailgate.  There’s a greasy driveshaft laying in the back, and miscellaneous freshly-oiled engine parts, all looking like a car somewhere needs them – badly. 

He goes to work with the tape.

“Now Joe, we have a measurement problem.  The sofa and old Ranger here don’t fit together too good.  But don’t panic Joe,” he holds up his hands, “we’ll still take it.  It’s simply a matter of your having some rope.”

“Rope I have,” I answer, turning to look at the cousin, who, shoulders-tight-to-ears, hands-fisted-in-pockets, is slow-wandering around what will soon not-be my street.

He stops to stare down at a tuft of wilting daffodils.

I turn back to Dominic.

“Enough rope to hang a man,” the words come out of somewhere in my brain.

“Ok Joe,” Dominic says, eyebrows raising, lips turning down.  “Ok, ok. We got rope.  Let’s get at it.”

I follow him back inside my house.

In the living room, I’m bent-kneed-straight-backed-herniated-disc-anxious ready to lift the sofa, which, even stripped of the huge cushions, is a risk to my back.

“My cousin there, I mean he’s family, so I gotta take care of him, right?  Family is family Joe – you gotta do the right thing.  And so he’s been on my sofa for, for … it don’t matter, ‘cause he got nowhere else to go.”

We’re standing now, and with no pain shooting down my left leg, I breath out loud.

“You ok Joe, I mean, I could ask Arn… you know, it wouldn’t be worth it.  See we got a good sofa, a really nice one, honestly, nicer than this – not that is not good, this is perfect.”

He opens his mouth wide, raises his eyebrows in handless-expressions of gratitude. 

“See this guy in Weston is getting divorced, or splitting with her, whatever, and he wants to piss her off by giving away all the good stuff.  And they got more money than God, than God and the devil combined, you shoulda seen this place Joe, two swimming pools – indoor and outdoor.  So I get this a-m-azing sofa and a … a crocket set, you know that game the super rich play, standing around with these little things that look like wooden hammers, and they’re all in white pants, sipping from tall glasses, jabbering on the phones; buy-buy-buy-sell-sell-sell …  I don’t what they drinking Joe, I just know it ain’t Coors Light.  Anyways, that … game thing, was all I could fit in the Ranger, what will all the cushions this sofa had – so many cushions, unbelievable Joe.  I’d have gone back for more, but I was afraid to, in case she was there, and demanded the great sofa back.”

 “Croquet,” I say involuntarily.  “They call that game croquet.”

“Yeah, yeah, something like that.  I sold it for twelve bucks at a yard sale – easy money, easy money Joe.”

We’re negotiating our way out the porch, down the steps.  Dominic in front, his ropy arms all tensed, the veins in his neck blue-popping-visible.

I stoop into the stairs, regretting not taking the lead position.

“Here, here,” Dominic throws out, suddenly dropping the sofa on the stairs.  “Let’s take a break.  This thing is dead-ass weight.  What you got in there Joe?  The old-lady?”

I issue him a don’t-you-know-this-is-Brookline glare. 

But Dominic’s eyes aren’t there to receive my glare, they’re looking at the cousin, who’s down on the corner of the busier street, head turning on tensed shoulders as traffic passes by.

“He’s got bathroom problems,” he says, with a sigh.  “If you know where I’m coming from, and it ain’t Leom ….”

He lifts the CAT hat and wipes his brow.  He’s almost bald, the wide tract of scalp is yellowish-never-sees-the-sun-grey. 

“You know, he forgets, or he doesn’t know it’s gonna come out.  My old lady thinks he’s too lazy, or stupid …, but I don’t know.  He ain’t a bad guy, just don’t do too much thinking is all.  Me and him was close when we was kids.  And my mom,” he blesses himself rapidly, “she’d want me to keep her sister’s little boy safe.”

He stares at the cousin some more: I stare at him staring.

“I’m thinking of putting a tarp on top of this one,” he says, picking the sofa up again just as suddenly.  “You know, a blue tarp that’d catch the piss.  Maybe that way it’ll last longer.  I mean Joe, how many guys gotta get divorced so Arnie’s got a sofa to sleep on – think about it?”

We get it loaded.  It turns out Dominic has a frightening quantity of rope and bungees in behind the Ranger’s front seat – “forget the hell where I got all this.” 

The cushions end up grease-stained on top of the MIA car parts.  Some get stuffed in on top of the cousin, who gets bundled into the front seat, and told to hold as many as he can.

“The window, the window,” he whine-yells.  “Open a window so’s I can breath.”

“All right Joe, we took it off your hands.  Don’t worry about it no more,” Dominic says, giving me a reassuring handshake.  “Now I can drag that piss sponge outta my living room down the backyard.”

He strides purposefully around to the driver’s door, rubbing his hands together.

“You’re a good man Joe, he’s a good man Arnie,” he throws out, flashing a smile, resetting his hat, as he sits into the Ranger.

They start to pull off.  Dominic toots the horn two quick so-long-half-blasts. 

I push the wheelchair out into the open driveway behind my car, and walk up the driveway to house.

The screen door slams behind me.

I stand in the front hall looking at the remaining articles of my previous life.

The old Victorian is sunny, silent, solitary.

Even the Olives are Bleeding Expensive

Even The Olives Are Bleeding Expensive

I’m sitting on an uncomfortable metal chair in an outdoor café, on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, playing “Guess the Country” with my kids.  The early evening light has that you-can’t-but-relax-and-love-life Mediterranean orange-ish hue. The kids are licking ice creams the vivid colors of chemicals that – back when America was Great! – used to be disposed off a few miles offshore, under the cover of darkness, by no-necked-we-don’t-know-how-to-smile men.  I’m sipping a piss-water Spanish lager, mass-pro-brewed by disgruntled Spaniards who’d rather be making wine or playing professional soccer.  The basic premise of “Guess the Country”– a game that I made up as an outlet for my anxious-tourist-xenophobia – is that you have to guess the nationality of the various groups of tourists perambulating the pedestrianized plaza of Barcelona’s most popular – as in overrun by tourists – street.  This game is neither fair to my kids, who basically know three nationalities – American, Irish and everyone else – nor as easy to play as one would think.  Globalism, in the form of manufactured-by-cheap-Asian-labor-for-max-profit-sales-to-the-lucky-billion designer brand clothing, has reduced the world’s tourist classes to a nondescript herd of logoed-shirt-wearers.  But, as sometimes happens in Spain – kinda-sorta anyway – the Irish come to rescue.

An Irish family – all of considerable, perhaps even disconcerting, girth – Mammy, Daddy, Daughter and Son, tromp out of the masses of Brits and Euros filling my narrow horizon.  All four of them are outfitted in too-tight-fitting Meath GAA jerseys,  emblazoned with a Tayto Park logo, complete with a rotund, ever-smiling Mr. Tayto – the friendliest about-to-be-eaten-potato-chip in the world.  Son, despite being well past the age – he’s in his early twenties – when this might seem cool, has gone all out for the holiday in Spain, with his thighs thundering out of a pair of sprayed-on Meath shorts.  He concludes this distinctly Irish slap in the face of chic-Euro-design, with black socks arising scruffily from a pair of sandals that were considered cool back at the end of Franco’s reign.  Meanwhile, Mammy and Daughter settle for loose-fitting-black-hides-everything sweat pants, and new pink sneakers.  Daddy, a hard-boiled traditionalist, has Mr. Tayto’s smile crimped and half hidden inside a pair of well pressed, hooked-on-the-nipples, dark grey gabardine pants, and –inevitably – black socks and sandals.  He would have scored a full ten points as the Eternal-Good-Gael, if only he had a small transistor radio pressed up to his ear, crackling out GAA scores.  The whole family is red-faced-flustered in the still-too-bloody-warm-for-the-Irish, early evening, and – no more than myself, a few moments earlier – they have that unmistakable gait of the Irish-looing-for-beer.  They pass, like WWII freighters in front of a U-Boat, and I score a too-easy point.

A large group, all men in their thirties, four different races, converge on the officious black-suited-white-shirted Moroccan managing the tables of an outdoor restaurant.  They mill around, in tight fitting American designer jeans and loose primary color polo shirts, with elegant good manners. 

I’m stymied until a lanky, very dark skinned one of them speaks.

“So, I got seventeen ‘eads as’ll all looking for nosh,” he says to the Moroccan.  “Hows about you proffer a fifteen percent discount?”

“Fifteen? Seventeen?” the Moroccan says, waving his hand blindly behind his back at the busboy for more menus.

“No, no.  See understand: I got seventeen ‘eads,” the cockney says, volume increasing, the fingers on his right hand flashing full three times, then the left flashes the peace sign.  “And we’ll eat ‘ere, if you’ll give us a discount, let’s say fifteen percent.”

The Moroccan bows slightly, smiles, delicately scratches where a sideburn would be if he wasn’t so cleanly shaven.

“I speak on manager,” he replies without conviction, the same weak smile on his face.

“Twenty percent, tell ‘im twenty percent, and we’re ‘ungry, got a big night comin’ up,” the tall Briton says to the departing North African.  “No less than fif… seventeen percent.”

Suspiciously-electric-blue-and-red-colored ice cream melt is cleaned up efficiently, if somewhat face-messily, by young Bostonians.  Piss water Spanish lager is sipped by someone who’s not sure where-the-fuck he’s from anymore.

The mill of cockneys of African, Indian, Chinese and Celtic-Saxon-Viking-Norman descent continues; energy rising.  Then, on a secret signal they depart.  The lanky-dark-skinned Cockney looks around once for the Moroccan, and then he too departs.  A few sips and ice-cream licks later the Moroccan returns.  He resumes his stand, unperturbed, at the podium. 

Las Ramblas hums on.

We touched down in this historic city after eleven the night before, grabbed our bags, and rushed out of the airport to get ripped off by a Spanish cabbie.  Mission accomplished – wallet a few too many Euros lighter – and we’re in line in the small, crowded lobby of a veritable Spanish Fawlty Towers on Las Ramblas, being served by none other than Spanish-Basil himself; a frighteningly-energized-for-midnight, gaunt, Gaucho-mustachioed, ageless Catalan.  My ten year-old daughter clings tight, burying her face in my side.  There’s a mill of tourists in the lobby.  Some of them, unbelievably, look familiar.  Groups in tee shirts and shorts hover over their bags; all looking travel-weary; passports and paperwork clutched in their hands; waiting on the front desk.  As I fill out the hotel paperwork, my daughter emerges from under my arm.

“Hello,” she says quietly to Spanish-Basil.

“Good eeve-a-ning madam,” he beams a proud, tourist-industry practiced smile.

“Do you have a swimming pool?” she asks, looking around the cramped-downtown-feel hotel lobby.

“No madam, eh, no pool in thees ‘otel,” he quickly puts his right hand behind his back and performs a small bow, his mustache turning up into an even broader smile in compensation for having to deliver a negative answer.

“Oh,” she says, shooting me a we’ll-be-talking-about-this-later look.

Twenty minutes later we’re on Las Ramblas.  It’s about midnight but we’re all wide-awake-new-city-buzzed, and Las Ramblas is still busy.  The outdoor bars hum with tourists and young Catalans having a loud, good time.  We’re hungry, and while we could have eaten in any one of the major American junk-food chains, we settle on a Spanish restaurant, a clean, well lighted place, which takes mercy on non-Spanish-speaking tourists by using a menu that shows photos of the food.  My only Spanish word, which I learned as a reluctant co-watcher of Dora The Explorer, is azul – blue.   My thirteen year-old son exercises his budding Spanish by ordering a glass of milk and a plate of fries.  I take no chances and order a small, and – per the photograph – somewhat anemic pizza.  My daughter tries to go straight to dessert, and when repelled, settles on an empanada.  The glass of milk turns out to be heated milk, which has the consistency of warm dishwater, and is duly left to skin over and get on with its curdling process.  The empanada, whose photograph promised so much, disappoints on the first bite, and is then flayed for its pastry crust; the mystery-food contents left in a heap on the side of the plate.

After eating, we walk up Las Ramblas.  The crowds are thinning. At a large outdoor restaurant, the wait-staff in black-and-whites clump in a group around the waiters’ end of the bar. One whips a phone out of his pocket, the rest soon follow; faces lean into the silver-screen-glare, until the manager – a squat man, in a too-tight haircut and ill-fitting black suit – strides up to the bar.  The silver screens are rapidly slid back into hip pockets, where their glares are still visible through the black fabric.  We come across the toxic-chemicals-colored ice cream stand: I succumb to whining “for a once in a lifetime chance to eat Smurf colored ice cream.”  

I order, over-proudly employing my one Spanish word, plus a lot of finger stabbing on the glass.  The Spanish tourist industry etiquette is to take your order without the slightest acknowledgement; fines may be dispensed for as small an act as a slight nod or even a raised eyebrow; smiling is profoundly prohibited; pause for thirty seconds or so – to instill a further lack of confidence that your order has in fact been taken – then serve any old thing they like, and charge at will; a simple hand wave erasing any legitimacy of the posted prices.  As we work our way through this time-honored (since the 1970s anyway) ritual, a mid-fifties, beer-bellied tourist in new-for-the-holidays shorts, ratty sneakers, polo shirt, a shock of grey hair, wobbling under a load of cheap Spanish beer, cuts across Las Ramblas plaza.  Trailing a few feet behind him, an older teen – eighteen, nineteen? – short, heavyset African woman, in a too-tight mini-skirt and tang top, tries to keep pace.

“Ok, ok,” she says quickly, as she passes us.  “I go your hotel room.  All right.”

He stops. 

Turns to her. 

Runs his fingers through his hair.

“I don’t know luv,” he says, shaking his head, his beer belly shifting in opposite directions to his head.  “It’s a lot of fucken’ drama, ‘int it?”

“I do what told,” she says, looking back without staring.

Her eyes are a hundred years old.

“It’s just a business transaction luv,” he runs his hand back through his hair again.  “I don’t need no fucken’ drama – I can get that at ‘ome for free, can’t I?”

They leave.

Our chemicals arrive – and they’re even reasonably close to those we ordered.

“Why was the man swearing?” my daughter asks, her face disappearing behind the pile of electric-blue ice-cream.

“Oh,” I scramble for a lie.  “He was buying something off her and they disagreed about something.”

“What?”

“Finish up them ice creams, it’s time we went back to the hotel,” I say, gritting my teeth with stoic-paternal-finality.

Barcelona is one of the world’s great cities.  It’s been fought over by the Phoenicians (whoever the fuck they were), Romans, Visigoths (whoever th…), numerous Spanish crowns, 1930’s anarchists, and then overrun, first by vengeful Franco fascists, and now by the world’s tourist classes.  For me the charm of the city lies in its architecture, built and destroyed and built again by successive generations of Catalans, Spaniards, and temporary colonial invaders, it all seeps with distinctive bitterly-fought-for-character.  Like Ireland, Spain has deep roots of bitter internecine fighting.  So when Spain broke out into full civil war in the 1930s, the Irish – who were only then finally sitting down for a cup of tea after our own War of Independence, followed by the disastrous sequel, our almost-never-mentioned-Civil-War – joined in, fighting on both sides.  This was a trick we had learned well at home during eight hundred years under various British regimes, and then pulled off in a few other countries’ civil wars, most notably the American Civil War.   

The Spanish Civil War remains one of Europe’s saddest episodes: Atrocities abounding on all sides, infighting, leveraging of other country’s military resources (most famously, Hitler using it as a Blitzkrieg training ground), religion drawn explicitly into a modern conflict.  A few hundred Irish dropped themselves into this deadly chaotic scene.  Some were there to refight the Irish Civil War; some to support the Catholic church; some to start a whole New World Order.  Some of the New World crowd wouldn’t fight alongside British communists – apparently the New World would carry forward old world grudges – and so joined a US battalion.  Mostly the Irish fighters’ efforts in the Spanish Civil War were, not without some irony, quixotic. 

Barcelona, never fully at ease with its place under the Spanish crown, definitely did not want to be second sister to Franco’s Madrid.  The Generalissimo reciprocated the lack of love, and the people of Barcelona learned the harsh lesson of what it means to live in a repressive society.  One of the combined victims – loved and hated by both sides – was the famous architect Anton Gaudi.  Though Gaudi was over ten years dead when the Civil War started, the Republicans – who despised his fervent Catholicism – still destroyed his old studio, including all the precious files therein.  To the Fascists his sin was being a famous Catalan: All things Catalan were to be subverted.  Today Gaudi’s work is a huge part of Barcelona’s attraction: Seven of his projects there have been designated as World Heritage sites – monuments to humanity’s best of the best.  

We’re sitting at breakfast in the hotel’s skylight covered courtyard.  Sunlight streaks in through the glass, which along with the white plastered walls and marble floor all combine to create an whisper chamber in which every sound is amplified.  The wait staffs’ hard soled shoes clip against the marble as they deliver food, before they return to gossip at the bussing station.  All the guests’ table talk mushroom-clouds up into the room, bounces off the hard surfaces and falls onto the tables.

“I don’t know if we should eat their eggs,” an older American woman’s anxious voice drops in.  “Are they safe … you know?  How about the water then?  Maybe bottled only?  Is that safe?  God knows how they make it, or where – right?”

The coffee, black-rich-aromatic, rustles gently into my white porcelain cup.

The waiter sighs the muted sigh of a waiter already tired at breakfast.

“Tommy, sthop it,” an English father raises his voice, turning tourist heads.  “People are not sthupid because they don’t speak our language.  They could just as easily say we’re sthupid for not speaking Spanish.”

“I can’t believe Caleb is staying in the same hotel as me in Barcelona,” my daughter says, rolling her eyes, disrupting my eavesdropping binge.

“What?” I retort – too loud, turning heads.

“Yeah,” my son chimes in, grinning ear-to-ear behind a Spanish breakfast pastry.  “There’s a boy from her grade here, can you believe it?”

“Ooohhh,” I do the stupid-parent thing.  “So that’s who was in the lobby last night.  I thought I recognized them, and did you say hello?”

“Noooo!” she gives her eyes an Olympic medal winning roll.  “It’s embarrassing to meet people you know on vacation.”

Barcelona is a beautiful city, full of interesting places from the Gothic quarter to Barcelona FC’s Camp Nou – but the beach is not one of them.  A thriving port city for millennia, the hard working Barcelonians had not considered using the Mediterranean as a place to relax.  Plus there was that small problem that were no beaches on that section of coast: No beaches, that is, until they needed some for the 1992 Olympics.  So, playing the Urban Renewal card to wipe out a gritty old port neighborhood, they built beaches – eventually miles of them.  And they feel just like beaches brought in, with Olympic expediency, on the back of a truck.  The Mediterranean whisks them away when it can, knowing they’re not real, as does anyone who ever bought a cubic yard – or meter – of river run sand, and as do the bare feet any child who walks these beaches. 

Two trains, and a healthy-sweaty walk from the hotel, and we’re on the promenade scouting a beach location.  We came primarily so we could swim in the Mediterranean: Somehow, submersion in that salty water, so steeped in history – from the Athenians battling the Persians 2,500 years ago, to the cat-and-mouse naval warfare of two World Wars – feels like an important part of visiting Spain.  But as we wander out onto the beach, we’re hit hard by the powerful, and directly opposing, forces of pre-adolescent-prudishness and raging-teen-hormones: Turns out, it’s a topless beach. 

“Oh my God,” my daughter gasps, forgoing the usual “OMG” in her panic.

She throws up both hands as blinkers, shoots me an angry-stressed-look, and leads us on a quest to find a patch of river-run-sand peopled by clothed humans.  As the gods of good-old-fashioned-decency would have it, she pulls up next to a group of young Muslim girls; who are very definitively fully clothed. 

My thirteen year old son’s smile is so deep and so long, that I don’t remember when, or indeed if, it ended.

As with all things human, we get used to our new setting, and soon it’s a regular beach day.  The Mediterranean water is cool and refreshing, and, for me, as full of history as I ever remember it.  Like every beach day, we end up sitting on the promenade eating ice cream and complaining about the sun, sunblock, sand and the crowds.

“Why does everyone have to go to the beach the day we go?” my daughter asks.

“Because they’re weird,” I answer, resolutely.

“No, you’re weird – never take that book out in public with the Hitler-thingamajigy on it again.  So embarrassing.”

She takes a lick of ice cream.

“No, people are a pain,” she says, through a mouthful of ice cream.  “Why couldn’t they stay home and watch TV – just for today.”

It’s morning, early for a tourist town – 8ish – and I’m sitting on what might the smallest balcony in Spain.  More likely it’s the three square feet of outside space allotted to hotel residents, on which they are to huddle waiting for the Barcelona Fire Department – the other BFD! – to come rescue them when Spanish Fawlty Towers goes up in flames.   Inside the room, the kids are sleeping.  Outside, it’s the morning sounds of a city waking: The scraping-sweep of thick-bristled yard brushes, the beep-beep-beep of delivery trucks backing into position, slagging-yells across Las Ramblas, laughter, wheelie-bins slamming onto the ground, the sharp, unintelligible, but clearly discernable, rebuke of a stressed restaurant manager to the devil-may-care street cleaners.  I carefully fold over my book – a thousand page biography of Hitler – almost splitting the binding, so the Hitler-thingamajigy is not visible from the street.  A group of sixty-something American tourists straggles past; floppy hats, designer back packs, khaki shorts, tanned-blue-veined-legs; they all look a little why-can’t-anywhere-open-as-early-as-we-wake regretful.  I hear the rustle of blankets, a mattress compressing.

“What time is it?” my son asks, without opening his eyes.

“Gaudi time!” I answer.

Anton Gaudi was born in 1852 in a Catalan village, and grew up with an artist’s  appreciation for the natural world that would infuse his aesthetic throughout his life.  He was profoundly impacted by the religiosity of provincial Catalonia, and the living and built architecture which supported that religiosity.  Moreover, he had an overarching sense of the supremacy of the Mediterranean culture over other European cultures – one can only presume what he thought of American “salvatges.”  Gaudi succinctly summed up his notion of Mediterranean cultural supremacy in a single statement: “We own the image.  Fantasy is what people in the North own. We are concrete. The image comes from the Mediterranean.  Orestes knows his way, where Hamlet is torn apart by his doubts.”   For scorekeeping purposes, according Homer, Orestes killed his mother and her lover when he discovered that they had killed his father, who had just returned from the Trojan War – with a concubine in tow.  Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s interpretation of the Hamlet myth, shows that while dithering over whether he should kill his uncle – who had murdered Hamlet’s father to marry his mother, and gain the kingship of Denmark (so much for the happiest people in the world!) – intentionally, or often not, ends up being responsible for the death of almost everyone in the play.  Needless to say, everyone involved in both stories should have been in therapy or jail – or both.  How and ever, Gaudi’s natural world influenced, Orestian-concrete aesthetic led him to design some of the world’s most striking buildings, including the as yet unfinished, Sagrada Familia church.

The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, as it is formally known – expiation being the act of atoning; presumably in this case for budget increases and schedule delays that would warm the cockles of any slobberer-Irish-builder’s heart; they started this thing in 1886! – was a project that Gaudi actually took over from another architect who, after sixteen years working with the “church committeeeee,” could take it no more.  For Gaudi it quickly became the focus of his entire life’s work, indeed, perhaps even becoming the meaning of his life.  Eventually he withdrew from society – no more chardonnay tippling evenings on the terraces with Catalan’s shakers and movers – fell into a reclusive lifestyle, disheveled appearance, and devoted himself entirely to this life defining project.

The Sagrada Familia is a wonder for a great many reasons.  Construction, which has gone on more or less continuously for over a hundred and twenty years, is now slated to complete in 2026.  Back when Europe was Great!, medieval cathedrals were completed in this manner, some taking hundreds of years for the design and construction, thereby allowing for the influences of many generations on the both details of the design and the methodologies of the craftsmen, and now craftswomen.  For me – a devout atheist, with the aesthetic sensibilities of a concussed Neanderthal – its wonder comes from the sheer scale of everything.  The soaring granite columns, the intricacy of the structural engineering – sprawling, parabolic arches that seem goad gravity! – and, most importantly for an atheist in a house of worship, the scale of the irony of such devotion.  Nothing about this monument to humanity’s need to atone – for everything we’ve done to one another and the rest of our planet – suggests humility.  The whole edifice is a monument to what humans can do when they all point in the same direction and persevere for generations.  The attention to detail, the mix of materials, the audacity of the engineering, the devotion of it all, ironically yells out that humanity can be capable of great things.  Even though religious belief is not for me, seeing this manifestation of its power to inspire is itself awe-inspiring. 

We start to leave the Sagrada Familia.  We’re tired, thirsty and hungry, but first we must visit the gift shop, which stocks a collection of award winning photography books on the multiple generations of construction, and gaudy trinkets that could be used as props in a Father Ted Visits Barcelona episode.  With bottles of water procured at prices comparable to those found in the shop at a Saharan oasis, we wander out looking for food.  Legs tired from slow walking, we slide gratefully into a booth in a restaurant across the street from this monument to humanity’s focused ability.   We, the no-Spanish order food with some difficulty from a cranky, I-hate-tourists Catalan waiter.  We sit back, visibly affected by time in spent that piece of our planet so artfully enclosed by Gaudi’s design, and watch with a mixture of incredulity and chagrin as our lunches are cooked in the traditional Spanish way – at least tradition since the 1970s – in a fucking microwave.

It’s the last day in Barcelona, and the kids are happy to get back to visiting with their cousins in Ireland.  I’m happy to leave too, but I’m glad we visited this noble city.  I’ll miss the strikingly beautiful Gaudi, and Gaudi-imitator, buildings that flank its main thoroughfares; the Gothic Quarter with its winding alleys, courtyard wine bars, and five hundred year old churches stuffed with statues so realistic as to put the fear of the Inquisition into a Catholic-atheist; Camp Nou, with Messi’s size 7 – how does a lad with feet that small score so many goals? – European Golden Boot; and the omni-present ever-smiling-I’ll-give-what-I-have-not-what-you-want-shitty-Catalan service. 

Spanish-Basil – it seems he never sleeps – calls a cab for us, and, with gangling limbs and his disarming smile, makes a fun show of carrying the kids bags out.  He issues a dramatic parting bow, right hand diligently behind his back.

  In the tiny Fiat cab there’s a seemingly hopeless breakdown in inter-human communication.  The cabbie has no English whatsoever, not even one word, and my one word Spanish vocabulary does not seem appropriate in this situation.  It’s unclear just how many times, and at what ever-increasing-decibel level, it will be necessary for me to say “airport, airport, airport” before we can get the wheels of the Fiat rolling. 

But he’s a good person this cabbie, and he calmly let’s me fall silent, before making it clear that his hearing fine, but his English is non-existent.  He signifies receipt of the “airport” direction with his flat right hand rising slowly, in an airplane like trajectory, toward the windshield.  Then he angles his head back, runs his right forefinger and thumb down the glass Rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror, as he thinks deeply.

“Francés?” he asks, turning to me with a refreshingly optimistic smile.

I release an airplane-captain’s-sigh.

“Daddy,” my daughter reprimands me from the back seat.

Still I pause, wondering where in the crevices of what’s left of my brain I might find some French; a language I’ve had no truck with since, some thirty plus years previously, I ceremoniously burned my copy of Cent et Une Anecdotes Facile at the school gates.

“Oui,” I lie – and in Paris a crack develops in the Arc de Triomphe.

Still, we Fr-uddle through.  Somehow I impart to him what terminal we need to get to, and with Catalan how-could-anything-possibly-go-wrong assurance, he nods, and turns the key to start the Fiat’s engine. 

Of course, it doesn’t start: The travel gods are toying with us. 

But, no worries.  He turns, smiles an even more reassuring Catalan smile, pops the hood and jumps out.  Two minutes later, the hood still open, he’s back, and this time the engine turns over.

My Type-A2-travel-anxiety-stricken-self kicks in, and I offer, in mangled French and with excessive-hand-waving, to close the hood, but his warm smile assures me I’m entirely unqualified for such a complex technical task.

Silently, we reach our terminal in what seems like Olympic record time compared to the inbound trip.  He points at the meter, still with the reassuring smile.  It’s about half what the late-night-rip-off-artist-cabbie had run up winding us around the deserted streets of his sleeping city. 

In a confused gesture of spite at the rip-off-artist and appreciation for encountering a good person, I give him double fare. 

He’s genuinely confused.  Because he is so genuine, I assure him, in ever-increasingly-confused French, that he’s earned not just the big tip, but the “salvatges” respect for the Mediterranean culture.

My Camel Looks So Tired

My Camel Looks So Tired

The flight from Dublin to Barcelona is full – heavy on the Irish family with a couple of children under six.  Irish kids in that age group don’t whine and fuss for their parents the way American kids do, instead they move straight into breaking-stuff-mode.  Arms are a favorite; Airbus A320 seat arms; annoying little brothers’ arms.  Eyes are not entirely safe either, as knows anyone who has survived a just-before-Christmas-too-many-children-aboard Boston to Dublin flight – the aisles of which resemble Lord of the Flies meets the Exorcist.

The flight attendants – armed with the knowledge that the customer is not only always right, but also, ninety nine percent of the time, turns into a double-asshole when asked to do anything out of the ordinary – make fake smiling, yes-yes-yes-we-know-you-picked-this-seat-personally-online-but-now-you-have-to-move, seat reassignments to get everyone seated in a manner commensurate with their powers of self-preservation and projected apathy to small scale assaults in the next seat.  Several five and six year-olds, with their iPads or, for the nouveau-traditionalist-Irish-families (who, to keep current their more-Irish-than-thou bona fides, loudly direct their children “as Gaelige”*) Irish mythology coloring books and organic-fair-trade-dolphin-safe crayons, are gently relocated to aisle seats; from which the Airbus’ seats were reckoned the better to survive faulty signals from apprentice bladders.

With their passengers relocated to comparative safety, the attendants retreat to gossip loudly at the galley – an older attendant, tall, stringy, heavily made up, grey-blonde hair, repeatedly brings her right hand up to her face in an I-wish-I-was-smoking action.  I gaze around the cabin.  Next to me, my kids, excited at the vacation-inside-a-vacation – a few days in Barcelona while visit-ationing in Ireland – are temporarily intrigued by a clunky-graphics, iPad Camel Racing game; suggested by a much younger cousin in Ireland.  They share a set of earplugs, laugh too loud, my son elbowing me in the ribs to join in the ridiculous fun.  

On the opposite side of the aisle from me sits a hairy-eared, jowly man in his early sixties, tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, black gabardine pants, dark-socks-and-sandals.  He pages slowly through an Irish boating magazine plastered with glossy pictures of cabin cruisers lazing along the river Shannon, under suspiciously blue and cloudless skies, with white-bikini clad models, Catholicly-reclining on brilliant white decks. 

The Airbus starts down the runway, vibrating violently under the thrust of jet engines.  We swoop off planet earth, up into the sky.  As we achieve altitude, the captain crackles onto the speaker, giving a clipped, but managing-to-include-a-few-captainly-sighs, update on our two and a half hour flight, arrival time at 11pm, and, most uselessly, the Barcelona nighttime temperatures.  

I settle into my book: A massive biography of Hitler, with a correspondingly massive – and a small bit hard to explain given today’s rush-to-judgement-e-sensibilities – black swastika in a white circle, emblazoned on the Nazi-red cover.  I fold over the cover to avoid some five, or twenty-five, year-old’s indignant interrogation, and delve deep into the narrative of humanity’s greatest weakness: Our herding instinct.  This instinct, a vestige of a too rapid evolution, that in times of great change crave the sort of strong, absolute leadership – that comes packaged with fake-charismatic narcissism, and a deep vein of cruelty – behind which, too many humans are willing to forsake personal responsibility and slavishly follow the dictator’s edicts.  My mind burrows into the world of homelessness in 1910 Vienna; the ever-cold-and-hungry, broken men huddling around a table to listen to the budding, intoxicating terror of a young Adolf Hitler.  

About twenty minutes later – with camel hooves flashing relentlessly next to me, iPad movies flickering and crayons mushing paper along the aisle – the clinking of glass announces the start of cabin service.  Two pony-tailed, big-hipped, attendants start to lug a stainless steel cart full of over-priced junk food and booze down the aisle, forcing some quick-thinking-bathroom-access decisions on behalf of the four-year-old and fifty-plus crowds.  The cabin fills with the-Irish-are-on-holidays-again sounds; the pop-fizz of beer cans opening; the snap of single serve wine and liquor bottle seals breaking; guffaws of relief laughter.

The stainless cart works its way down the narrow aisle, attendants ad-libbing jokes with passengers, until it’s next to me.  By then, Hitler, his ambition to become an artist in tatters after a double rejection by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, is now eking out a pretend, I’m-actually-still-homeless, living by painting weak copies of Austrian postcards, which he sells for pennies to picture framing shops, who use them as throwaways to fill the frames advertised for sale in their windows. 

A screech from the opposite side of the plane yanks me from Vienna 1910 back to the plane.

I hold my thumb in position at the end of a paragraph.  

“I want him out of here,” a woman’s voice snaps, her tone rising to a shrill-almost-scream.

In the row on the other side of the aisle – two seats inside the jowly-boater; who doesn’t even look up from the models fake-sunbathing on the Shannon – a woman in her sixties, gaunt-faced, heavy make-up, hair too brown-too-be-true, her back pushed up hard against the window, is all at once spouting angrily at the attendant, while her eyes project a petrified fear. 

“He has to go,” she yells, spittle flying from her lips.  “This is intolerable!” 

Her hands involuntarily retreat up in front of her chest.

In the seat between this woman and the jowly-boater, sits one of the nouveau-traditionalist dad’s, his eyes burning two holes in the seatback in front of him.

“You need to stop that,” the big-boned flight attendant says forcefully, shaking her ponytail.  “You’re upsetting meself and the other girls.  Our job is to keep everyone safe, and that man is only there because your son gave up his seat so that he could watch his children.  Now calm down.”

“No!  He can’t stay,” her spine stiffens, pulling her head back, eyes moving off fear into unbridled anger.  “He has to go.  I’ll hurt him if he doesn’t.”

The dad’s head whips around to the attendant.

“You be quiet now or we’ll turn back and leave you off at home again,” the attendant snaps.  “It’s not fair to everyone else.  There’s children here. That man has children.”

The woman against the window swells taller as she gasps in a breath. 

I turn to my kids.  They’re both sitting forward, staring in fear-curiosity over at the woman. 

I point at a camel’s rump, in position to start a race. 

“Put a bet on that one for me,” I say.

“How?” they both ask.

“Figure it out: If I win, no dessert for you tomorrow, and if you win double dessert.”

They set to work.

When I look back, the woman against the window is still holding her breath.  The anger wavering in her eyes. 

Then her face collapses.   

Fear takes over her eyes.

“I want my son back,” she whimpers.

The floodgates let go. 

“I just want him back.  Please.  Please.”

She scrambles for a tissue. 

The attendant leans in with a clump of napkins.

“Sir, you’re going have to do something about this,” the attendant says, straightening up, and glaring down at the boater. 

“We went through this before, and you agreed you’d have to give her something before flying.”

The boater looks up from his bikini clad models.

“Eh, a Jameson please,” he says, countering the attendant’s glare with faux-pleasant-surprise. 

The dad stares up at the attendant, his hand up at his mouth, eyes full of panic.

“Sir!” the attendant says sternly.  “We can’t be going on like this forever.”

“Lookit now,” the boater says with a sigh.

He gives his models and cabin cruisers a little shake, forces a smile up at the attendant; nodding, nodding. 

“Between the jigs and the reels, sure it’ll all be grand in the upshot.”

The attendant pauses for a moment, then reaches into the cart for a Jameson, shoots the dad a not-much-I-can-do-for-you look, and cracks the seal on the green shot bottle.

“Eh!” the boater says, speaking louder, nodding his head sagaciously.  “You know what, you might as well make that two; two Jamesons.”

The crack of the second seal snapping fills the false silence.

“We won Daddy!” my son says too loud, elbowing me hard in the ribs, knocking my thumb out of the Viennese homeless shelter.

“Haha, double dessert for us – but my camel looks so tired.”

* as Gaelige – in the Irish language

All the Sheaves to Bind

All the Sheaves to Bind

I’m walking too-slow up the main aisle of the church; Granny – on her cane – setting the pace.  The open area before the seats start – where mass-dodgers like to stand of a Sunday – is full of cranky-serious men, in long-dark-wet-coats; men that I know from around town, but don’t know.  The back half of the seats, and maybe more, is as full as a sack of potatoes of elbowing schoolchildren from me and me brothers’ and sisters’ classes.  The rest of the church is filled with gazey-eyed-neighbor-mothers, in rain-stained-grey-brown coats, lips moving in breathy-prayers and whisper-gossip; and straight-backed-decent-praying men, white shirts cut in two be dark ties.  There’s seven-hundred of them – all jammed into the Church of the Holy Rosary.  I know that number, ‘cause Father Pat – he’s not really a Father, just a Pat; but he knows everything there is to know about the church – told us that’s how many you can jam into the church.  Seven hundred.  And every one of them seven hundred have a pair of staring, glad-it’s-you-not-me, eyes. 

Granny – with a halo of a frizzy-white-hair, blue-bony hand squeeze-leaning on the cane – is wrangling Aunty over who owns her left arm.  Granny’s been crying for days now. Aunty snapping at her to “stop, stop, stop, sure crying won’t bring her back;” then heading off into the kitchen to scald more tea, and cry herself.  Now they’re both crying, and wrangling, and walking too-slow; leaving me under the pitying stare of seven-hundred pair of eyes.  Even on a good day, Granny wouldn’t walk fast, not with the busted hip and them swollen-ninety-year-old-legs.  So she jabs her way up the main aisle on the yellow-brown-wooden cane that’s as stiff as the way she takes everyone.  I don’t know why she’s like that – it just is.  Granddad, he’s so long gone that he doesn’t even turn up in funny stories.  And so I’m stuck here, looking for a safe place to pass, but knowing I can’t pass; everyone has to stay behind Granny.

“Everyone” is us: Nine children – aged nineteen to seven, me little sister is the youngest, I’m next at eleven, then the rest are all sorts of different ages that change all the time:  Da – he’s forty nine, kinda tall, but not too tall, a slight lean-forward-hunch, hair Brylcreemed-back-so-hard-it-hurts, and sky-blue eyes – that I only seen actual tears in once.  Holding Granny be the arm – like one of them’ll drown is she lets go – is Aunty: A too-tight-hair-bunned-never-married-teacher, who can burn for hours with banging-around-the-kitchen-pot-slamming-anger, only to cure it all with a way-too-much-cake-and-ice-cream-lunch-dessert.  She and Granny are fighting a dirty-war – like as if it’s Northern Ireland – over Granny’s left arm: Silent, bitter, no one backing down.

The walls of the church – as big and tall and far away as they seem – all get closer, pushing the elbowing-children, the snarky-teachers, and the gazey-neighbor-mothers in on top of me.  I never look at them – but I can tell they’re all pity-staring at me – as I fake-dilly-dally, nearly bursting inside, toward the altar.  All my uncomfortable new funeral clothes – white shirt, navy blue pants, black shoes – pinch and scratch and grate even more than when I was forced into them.  A drop of sweat trickles down from beneath my left arm. 

Another half-step forward: When will we be there? 

Three months before this slow-painful march up the main aisle of the church, I came home from school at dinner time of a Wednesday – just like any other Wednesday.  Kinda-sorta raining, excited for the Wednesday afternoon football-beating match.  Me and the lads ran-walked-mock-fought-cursed-and-yelled – like the “pack of wild animals,” the neighbor-mothers called us – our way home from the six-slaps-on-each-hand-ear-wigging-world of fifth class.  I burst in our never-unlocked front door, took the front hall in three leaps, and I’m in the kitchen. 

But that Wednesday it’s not the regular kitchen; with the table set, and the smells of a dinner all cooked.

The white tiles of the kitchen floor is a lake of vomit. 

A pair of pink-gummed-white-teethed dentures is a disgusting-island in the middle of the lake. 

The smell! 

The dentures – without a mouth to hide them! 

I gag and freeze all at once.

“Ma!” I yell, my stomach coming up, fingers pinching hard on my nose. 

“Ma!”

I back up into the still okay space of the front hall.

“Ma!”

Silence.

I go back to the front door, and look out to see if anyone else is arriving home for dinner: No sign of anyone yet.

I start slowly up the stairs; one creaking-step at a time.

“Ma? … Ma?”

Then I see her: Lying on me little sister’s little bed, eyes staring at the ceiling – like that’s all they want to do.

“Ma,” the word gushes out my mouth with relief. 

Her eyes keep staring at the ceiling.

“Are you all right Ma?”

My breath comes fast. 

“Ma?”

A drop of sweat runs down under my arm.

I stare for a minute, take the stairs two and three at a time, and burst back out the front door. 

In spitting rain, I wait for the cavalry.         

For the next few days everything is wrong, and confused, so confused my stomach is always sick; I don’t eat much; I have a headache all the time.  My normally-always-home Ma is disappeared from the house. Neighbor-mother’s come and knock on the door, and Da grits his teeth and shakes his head; “don’t answer it.” 

They knock and knock and knock.

Then Granny and Aunty invade.  Aunty cooks and cleans like mad.  With each sweep-whack of the brush and pot clanged onto the cooker, she gets madder and madder.  Eventually she lets go in with a red-faced-long-roar at our “ungratefulness, and I’m only doing me best for ye.”  Then she disappears, crying, into the kitchen and bakes.  She bakes three different cakes – all delish! – and I’m sent for three blocks of ice cream; too much for our fridge – all has to eat!  In the corner of the living room, sitting in Ma’s chair, Granny nervous-knits a cardigan big enough, that – as Da says, shaking his head, gritting his teeth – “it could slung over a sick cow.”  They pretend-sleep on the sitting room couch – a contraption that magically folds from a sitting couch into a sleeping bed; something Ma forbids us to do!  They’re both cranky-sleepy drinking tea, in the kitchen whenever I get up; the first one up, and so the one gets the how-are-you-feeling-now interrogations.  I give away nothing; only name, rank and serial number. 

Whenever Da comes home, the three of them huddle in the front hall whisper-talking too loud.  With my ear pressed hard against the busted-hollow-door, I understand nothing; the words are all too big – hemorrhage, rupture, neuro-something-or-other.  The front hall goes quiet: I imagine Da glaring them into silence, and I back up double-quick from the door.  The three of them come in with fake half-smiles.  I read Granny’s wet eyes, Aunty’s topped-up-anger, and burrow down deeper into my confusion.  Da, who on a good day – and there hadn’t been one of them for a while – wouldn’t finish a full answer-sentence, trailing off with a don’t-ask-me-anymore-grit-teeth-sideward-head-nod, gives nothing away with his body; his blue eyes settle just above mine, on the forehead: We never meet.

For weeks I never see Ma.  Instead, I keep fresh in my head – by “rolling the tape Colette,” over and over again – that last sight of her staring at the ceiling, laying on my little sister’s little bed, her nostrils flaring with hard breathing.

One day – unannounced – Grannie and Auntie take off back to Leitrim; both of their teary-sadnesses crowding out the front seats of the chocolate brown Fiat 127 – with the new Leitrim reg: DIT 141.  

They threaten to be back any day – unannounced. 

The house gets so quiet, that I miss their snapping at each other.

The next day, a school day, at dinner time seven of us – aged seven to seventeen – arrive home hungry.  Da is in the kitchen kinda-cooking, looking weird in a sports coat and apron, the Brycleemed-hair perfectly in place. 

“Sit down there now,” he says, when I stand in the doorway staring at him.

A few minutes later, sitting on my hands at the table, everyone else there now, he serves up fish fingers and beans.  Starved, I stick a fork in a fish finger; it’s black-burnt on the outside.  The fork barely gets in.  Suspicious, I slowly put it in my mouth.  It’s still frozen in the middle.  I force back a fishy gag and spit it back onto the plate.  My eyes find everyone else’s one by one.  No one is willing to be first.  He sits down to eat with us.  Eight people eating in weird silence, seven of them chasing orangish-blackish things around their plates.

He takes a bite, looks around, eyes narrowing to slits.

“Give them back to me,” he snaps.  “Sure they’re not cooked at all.  Couldn’t ye say something – for God’s sake.”

I can hear everyone’s breathing, as we heap all the orangish-blackish things back on his plate for some more burning.

After a few weeks, I’m brought up to the hospital.  Older ones have gone, but when they come back, they don’t say anything useful.  Mostly they lie like Da does – “don’t be worrying, sure that doesn’t do any good …” trailing off with their own bad versions of his don’t-bother-me-grit-teeth-sideward-head-nod.  The hospital is in our town, which is good, and bad.  Good that it’s not a car-sickness journey to Galway, with Da checking the water in the radiator, double checking the petrol tank (“the gauge might be broken!”) and wondering again how long the brake pads have left in them – with me recording everything, studying hard how to over-worry.  And bad ‘cause sometimes I walk past the hospital – a building that seems to go on forever, with bits of it sticking out every time you turn a corner – on the way to the playing field behind it.  Inside the hospital, it turns out, all them bits add up to long-confusing-corridors. 

The only time I’d ever been in the hospital before was when I was nine, and the dentist sent me to get knocked out so he could pull ten of my rotten teeth all at once.  By then, he was well sick of a few attempts in his office fighting with my mouth, that wouldn’t stay still, even with his black-rubber-stopper jammed between the few good teeth left.  I’d be sitting, stiff as a terrified-plank, in his torture-chamber-chair, all sorts of pain-making-tools on shelves and hanging be chains on the cracked-white-tile wall.  My father, sitting cross-legged-bored somewhere behind me, chatting with the dentist.

“Any salmon this year Joe?” he’d ask my father, in his soft-smooth-this-might-hurt-a-lot-voice.

“Aragh, nary a one.  Them bloody Germans have it fished out.”

I squirm and moan under the pressure of the metal pliers on a crumbling tooth.

“Sit quiet there now,” says the soft-smooth-this-might-hurt-a-lot-voice.

“Aragh, do it fast, sure he’ll never notice.”

In my head I see him throwing a grit-teeth-sideward-head-nod to encourage the dentist.

“I would, I would, but honestly there’s really nothing left of the tooth to grab a hold of.  I wonder if these teeth ever met a toothbrush.”

A few weeks later, Ma takes me, early one morning, to a hospital ward with eleven hanging-grey-skinned old fellas staring cranky from their beds.  I’m given a sort of a big-baggy-pajama-shirt to change into, and pushed-walked toward the only empty bed.  A curtain swooshes around me.

“Hurry up now,” the nurse says.  I hear the lip-sucking-sound of her taking a quick pull of her cigarette.

I hurry, but when I come out from behind the curtain, Ma is gone.  I look around at the old fellas – ready to puke with fear.

“Now,” the nurse says, smoke gushing out her mouth and nose.  “Fill this for me.”

She hands me a shiny metal container that looks like a jug without a spout.

I take it from her, because she handed it to me, but I don’t what to do with it.

“Go on now, like a good lad, fill that for me.”

I look at the crazy-jug, then at the nurse – smoke curls up off the cigarette dangling from her too-lipsticky-mouth.

“Here, let me help,” an old fella with grey hair, and skin nearly the same color, slides off his sheets, and pads over in his bare feet, pajamas kinda-sorta hitched up on his hips.

“Put on a pair slippers would you,” the nurse snaps, her hand shooting for the cigarette.  “Jaysus, would you look at them bloody nails on you; I’ll have to send for a blacksmith to pare them.”

“Be quiet you, with your old talk – ‘tis an ancient Irish sign of good health, how thick a fella could grow a toenail.”

He takes the crazy-jug from my hand, and then immediately hands it back to me.  

“Lookit,” he says, breathing out heavy.

“She wants you to, you know …” he tosses his head back, “fill this thing.”

I look from his yellowy eyes down at the crazy-jug.

There’s no sound for a minute, just the rustle of red-ash eating the cigarette’s white paper.

“Ah, sure it’s not that hard, for God’s sake,” he says, starting to sound cranky.  “Will you just piss into the fucking thing!”

I go into the toilet and piss into the crazy-jug, and all over the toilet, and on the floor too, but I’m too scared to care.  Outside the nurse takes the crazy-jug away. 

Then I lay on the bed listening to old men complaining about anything there is as can be complained about.  Later, I’m wheeled into an operating room, feel a pinch on the back of my hand.  The next thing I know, I’m waking in a bed.  Everything is weird: My mouth is all different and raw, the ceiling above me too low; curtains too close; lights off.

But when I turn, I see Ma there, sitting turning the page on a Women’s Own.

“You’ll be all right now,” she says, standing up and squeezing my hand.

Now I’m back in the hospital for the second time ever, and nothing is all right – for either of us.

I walk down the long corridors behind Da – ready to puke again.  His face tells everyone not to stop and talk.  Doctors walk by fast, folders tight to their chests.  They give Da a quick nod of their this-is-actually-the-way-life-goes faces.  Nurses start toward us, hands held out as if they were going to give a hug, see Da’s face, and collapse into you-poor-ould-divils faces. 

A bead of sticky-sweat runs down under my arm. 

My mouth is dry. 

We turn another corner: The Children’s Ward – where children are sent to die! Their parents cry; their schoolmates cry; the neighbor-mothers cry; everyone says “it’s a terror indeed,” and asks “why would God do that?”  Then you never say their name again.  There’s big letters cut out of colored paper, and pasted sideways to the Children’s Ward windows; a poster of Mickey Mouse forever fake-smiles out the glass door; the colors in the corridor leading to Mickey brighten – a wee bit.    

Finally, sweat running under both arms, we stop outside a ward.

“Wait here,” Da says, and goes for the door.

“Don’t wander off,” he barks over his shoulder, as he disappears inside.

I look back down the corridor: cream painted walls, dark flooring, nurses in bright-white uniforms talk-walking fast, beds getting wheeled slowly along by dozy-looking fellas in stained-white coats.  If I took off running, I could never find my way out of this maze; no matter how many you-poor-ould-divil faces tried to help.    

Then Da’s back.

“All right, now listen to me, you’re going to be shocked, I’m telling you now, shocked,” he runs his hand down his face; thumb and forefinger squeezing the top of his nose.

“She had an operation, you know what that is?”

I nod – barely.

“A big operation.  A really big one.”

From under my eyebrows, I can sense him moving his right hand, flat and slow, down his face.

“And she might not recognize you.”

I can feel him staring on me.

“But listen, don’t let on anything if she doesn’t.”
 

I look up.  He has a tear gathering in that pink-triangle-space where your eye meets your nose. 

I look away.

Suddenly there’s a big white handkerchief there, and he wipes both eyes in one fast swish-swosh.

“Come on.”

We walk into the ward.  I’m full wet under my arms; a big drop runs slowly down my back. 

The ward is the same as the teeth-pulling-ward, except this time it’s eleven grey-hanging-skinned old women staring at me from the beds. 

Ma is in the far back corner, the green curtains pulled all the way around her bed.

We’re a few steps away from the curtain, when Da yanks me back behind him by the arm. 

I wobble under the force of his grip, but get steady again.

“Aragh, would you look at who’s here,” Da chirps in bad-fake-happiness, as we walk in the curtained opening.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to me or not, but I try to fake-smile just in case.

Ma is sit-lying on the bed, propped up by pillows along her right side.  The right side of her head is shaved all the way down to the grey-white-trout-belly skin that hides under our hair.  There’s a long scar – red raw and prickly with stitches – running down the side of her head. 

I can’t look at the red-prickly-scar, so I look up at the ceiling, then turn to her eyes.  It’s those same ceiling-staring-eyes, but now they straight-ahead-stare.  Then they flicker, first at Da, then me, but go right back to straight-ahead-staring.

Da stands there, all busy without moving.  His hands rise up and fall. Then they’re back up again.  His eyes dart around.  I’m watching him, ‘cause watching anything else inside that curtain will empty my stomach.

“Aragh, would you look at that, someone brought you the paper,” Da says, even worse bad-fake-happy, grabbing the Irish Press off the bedside table.

He waves his hand fast for me to push the wheelie-tray-thing in over the bed.  I do it, ‘cause I have to.  I try to keep my eyes only down, but the wheelie-thing sticks somehow, and when I look up to say ‘sorry,’ I see the trout-belly flesh, the red-rawness of the wound, the stitches, all in a kinda-sorta line, but sticking up like badly tied laces.  I pant, taste some here-comes-puke-water in my mouth, gulp in air and spin around to look out the window. 

Outside is grass, just grass, rich-green grass, looking like it hasn’t a care in the world, as it leads up to the high stone walls of the mental hospital next door.

“Look at who’s there now?” Da says – a bit too loud. 

I imagine eleven pairs of yellow-watery eyeballs turning toward the green curtain that hides us from the rest of the world.

“Do you recognize him?”

I half turn, eyes down. He’s pointing at the front page of the Irish Press.  There’s a photo of a bald-grumpy-fella looking up off the page.

“Isn’t that George Colley?” Da says, nodding his head, his finger tapping the bald head.

Ma’s left hand reaches across the paper, and takes the top corner of the front page.  She lifts it, but then folds it, flattening the front page with her arm into a triangle, showing some of the page behind it.

“Oh, that’s not how you … ,” Da starts, but stops, ‘cause she’s doing the same to the next page; folding it over, flattening the top half of the page into a triangle that folds back on itself.  She busies herself at this.  I watch her left hand work – her right hand always stays still; it never even twitches – folding, folding, folding until the whole paper is folded over the bald-grumpy-fella’s face.  Then I sneak, what I promise myself will be my last ever, look at the fish-belly-flesh, the red-raw scar.

Even Granny’s too-slowness, and the dirty war she and Auntie fight all the way over her left-arm, can’t keep us from finally getting to the front seat of the church: The one on the right side of the church that Father Pat sets aside for the family at funerals.

When me and the lads were learning to make our First Communion – and all full of holiness – we’d sit in that front seat at mass; there was no one between you and the priest; no chance to daydream at all.  In regular seats, with people to hide behind from the priest, the back of the seat in front of you had the kneeler and the slanty-hymn-book-holder for you to lean your face into your hands when the bell rang: ‘Twas said by the bigger lads that if you looked up too many times with the bell ringing, and the priest holding the stuff up, sing-songing “this is the body of …” – you could end up below in hell.  The front seat had no seat in front of it, so the kneeler and the slanty-save-yourself-from-hell-leaner were all attached to a thin-flat bit of wood that sounded like a drum if you dared bump your feet against it.  For the funeral – with Uncle, Ma’s brother saying the mass – I’d be jammed between that thin-flat bit of wood and the seven hundred pairs of pitying eyes. 

No hiding today.   

More people fill up the church behind me.  There’s that hushed-people-standing-sitting-slow-walking-whisper, until finally there’s silence – except for Granny sobbing.  Then the undertaker is there; grey-white-boney-faced, stringy-hair that even Brylcreem can’t keep across his fish-belly-baldness, hand-on-chin-worried-serious. Then his fat-bald-as-an-egg worker is standing next to him; black suit jacket bulging; squeezing and un-squeezing pudgy hands together, as he waits for orders.  They roll the coffin trolley across in front of our front seat until it’s in place, in the middle of the center aisle, directly in front of the altar.  The black metal over-and-back-X’s that hold the trolley together shake sideways under the weight of the shiny wood and brass and Ma.

Six altar boys, important-serious faces, hair-at-the-back-of-the-head watered flat, march out onto the altar.  Uncle flows out behind them in purple vestments, with a too-serious-don’t-talk-to-me face.  The sound of seven hundred humans standing up at once, necks and knees cracking open, clothes straightening out, standing-sighs, fills the huge space of the church: For just one second I feel like we’re all one. 

Mass is mass. 

Uncle sounds the same as he does when he’s telling funny stories, but he sounds just like any other priest saying mass too; trudging through the different pieces of it.

At least for as long as mass goes on, everyone’s behind me.  I can feel the seven hundred pairs of pitying eyes on the back of my head, but I don’t have any force field to put up to keep them away. And so, after the Gospel and after the prayers, after the sermon I never wanted to hear, after the consecration and after seven hundred communions are served to seven hundred sticking-out-tongues, I realize that even boring-terrible-things don’t last forever.

The altar boys swish off the altar suddenly.

There’s a weird silence while everyone waits.

Then they’re back, with all the funeral stuff.

The dusty-golden-brass altar gate creaks open, and Uncle is off the altar, mutter-murmuring-singsong prayers.  The six altar boys stream out after him, all with their best sad-serious faces.  One stands extra straight holding a tall pole with a crucifix on the top – Jesus looking very sorry he let them crucify him; another has the golden-brown-stained holy water pot; and another swings the smoky-thing, with smoke that smells of faraway-Three-Wise-Men-lands coming up out its twisty-curly openings.  The last three have sad-serious-we-got-nothing faces, hands held tight in prayer.   Suddenly the boss-man undertaker is back, wringing his bony-grey hands together, eyes on Uncle, who’s now reading-sing-song from a huge red-hard-covered priest’s prayer book.  The bony-grey hands pulls and pushes the trolley into the dead center of the middle aisle.  Uncle keeps up the sing-song praying.  Then the altar boy with the holy water pot is next to him.  He switches back to murmur-muttering prayers, and then he fires a few dollops of holy water on top of Ma’s coffin – the holy water shining silver in the light streaming in through the huge windows behind the altar.  More sing-song prayer, God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost have the red-of-their-arse-out doing stuff for Ma.  Then the smoky-thing altar boy is there.  Uncle hands the red-hard-covered priest’s prayer book to a got-nothing altar boy, who sudden-leans under its confusing weight.  Then Uncle, sad-angry faced, takes the smoky thing, smoke pushing-and-shoving out its curly-openings; he grabs it by the scruff of its neck, holding the other end way off up in the air, as if it’s a snake that could somehow come to life.   He swing-shakes it, surprisingly roughly, puffs of far-away-lands-smelling-smoke gather into clouds at the end of each swing-shake, all the while he’s mutter-murmuring prayers. 

Uncle stops praying.

The whole church is silence.

Seven hundred people not even making breathing sounds.

He backs up without looking.

The altar boys scramble out of his way; shuffle themselves into twos; there’s a bit of slobbering to the get the crucifix and smoky-thing up front.

Uncle never moves a muscle, just looks straight, sad-angry ahead. 

The boss-man undertaker starts the slow march down the middle aisle.

Then I have to leave the safety of the front seat. 

I feel one stiff-new-funeral-shoe touch the floor of the middle aisle, then the other. 

Then I have to turn. 

Immediately the seven hundred pitying eyes hit me hard. 

A big drop of sweat runs down my back.  I look down at the floor, then up at the back of Uncle’s purple vestments, Granny’s frizzy hair, then back to the floor.

I take a step, push forward through the crushing weight of seven hundred pitying eyes. 

Another step.

Exhausted, I try another step, searching the floor’s wood tiles – each one twisted at a right angle to the other – for a way out.

Another step.

Another drop of sweat runs down my back.

The weight of the seven hundred on my downturned eyes grows heavier with each step. 

I can’t look up; if I do, I’ll become a pillar of salt, explode like a car bomb, or cry. 

There’s no mutter-murmuring from Uncle, no holy water flying, just dribs of smoke coming off the smoky thing; sending up the smell of somewhere far-far-away.

One step at a time, one row of seats – full of pitying eyes – at a time, I sludge down the middle aisle.

Pushing in front of me the rest of my life.