The Fierce Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

Davey pushes me even harder again the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A door squeaks loud.

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

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

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

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

Yeah!

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

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

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

Nails is picked.

Copy pages is flicked.

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

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

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

Never would have thought that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A few coppers sur, for the babi….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone’s back in position.

The game starts again.

On’y this time Da’s up in the stand.

Me stomach goes sick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Da crankies again.

“Please identify whose prints these are.”

Da points at the two ‘RA-men.

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

“The fel…, the man on the right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Arís (again)!” he barks.

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

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

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

Another burst a Irish from the ‘RA-man.

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

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

The ‘RA-man releases another burst a Irish.

The little fella cocks his ear toward the Dock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anyone hungry?” the judge asks.

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

I feel the heat a me face blushin’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s dark outside now. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out the windshield, tingly bushes whip past.

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

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

One Focal!

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

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

The Renault window rolls with fussy-anger-speed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Renault lurches away, speeding up, slowing down, brake-lights flashing red. 

“Fooken bollix,” FP says, arching his tall frame forward.  “Can ya ‘magine dem pair naked within in bed? Huh?  Sure, he’d be like a shaved Doberman, and she’d be like a Muppet someone set on fire.”

He throws back his head, like he’s an ould fella, who’s seen it all.  That’s just how he is.  He says FP stands for the “firing pin” from a gun.  His family are mad Provo.  The way he goes on cheering every time there’s an IRA attack in Belfast, ya’d think he was a trigger man for the IRA.  But it’s all bullshite, Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) has his name down as Francis Patrick.

“Jaysys,” Brenny jumps in, like all looking-to-fit-in fellas he’s never one to be left out.  “Sure, de sight a dem nakid’d put a fella off roidin’ so it twould.”

“Sure, dowen here all deys be roidin’ anyhows is sheeps,” FP nods knowingly, “I mean me uncle wuz below in Curry an’ he seen a farmer with de sheep’s back legs stuck inside he’s wellingtons, an’ de farmer goin’ like he wuz on top a Blondie.”

His eyes dart to mine.

“Don’t you’se?” he angles his head toward me. “I mean seer…iously.”

“I do…n’t … know,” I drag out the words trying to think of a comeback.  

The three of them stare at me like whatever I say next will become lore back in Dublin: “It’s for real, sure dis cultie balow in Mayo tol’ me.”

“Does that make us baahaaad?” the gods of bad jokes finally dispatch the words.

Smiles dissolve their curious-suspicious stares.

 “Get up de fucken yard!” FP laughs, swinging his fist toward me.

 “Cum on ‘til I get me dinner,” Sharkey snaps, he’s a cranky-old-soul, always-hungry, sorta fella. “Or de din…year as de Bean an Tí (landlady) calls it.  More fucken spuds an’ gravy dan anathin’, but at least an’ it fills ya up!”

We’ve all been imprisoned here by our parents having paid Colaiste Riocard Bairéad (College of Richard Barrett) a hundred and fifty pound to isolate us up in North Mayo’s wild beauty and flail the Irish language into our thick skulls for four weeks so we can pass the big exams next year, get into college or qualify for a half-ways decent job.  

The one rule we all must live by, though the Dubs seem to be constantly on the verge of dying by it, is to never get caught saying a complete sentence in English.  If you want to remain imprisoned here (as opposed to getting executed behind the garage at home for having squandered the hundred and fifty quid) then you have to drop in one Irish word to every sentence.  Or at least include one Irish-ish sounding word: These we make by adding “ail” or “adh” to the end of an English word; then bounce the pronunciation off the roof of your mouth and claim you were speaking Irish: 

“Pass-ail me the butter-adh, please-ail.”  

We’ve literally been sentenced to speak Irish-ish for four weeks!  

The couple who run the school are hardcore Gaeilgeoirs or Gaelgoers as we call them: That is people who love the Irish language so much they make everyone else hate it … and them!   They spin around in that shite-brown Renault – plastered with Vaseline so the salty Atlantic air doesn’t rust the French metal to pieces – giving shite to everyone for not speaking Irish.  

 We’re in classes every morning from nine to one, just like regular school, only worser cause it’s all in Irish and everyone else is at home working summer jobs with tall-tale hangovers.  Then in the afternoons there’s usually some activity, either sports or a bike ride to some place the Gaelgoers call “go hiontach ar fad (brilliant altogether)!” a holy well or a rock or something that looks fierce like a regular well or rock but apparently someone went there and got their hairy warts cured.  Then we cycle home grimacing through the rain.  Soaked through, we dry off in front of the turf fire, Wranglers steaming so hot your thighs get scorched.

A sports afternoon was better, but that meant lads who had never before bounced a ball in their lonely lives were harangued out onto a watery-windswept field and forced to play Gaelic football – a game somewhere on the sports continuum between soccer and a bar fight.  Any attempt to play the hated “cluiche Sasnach” (English game – soccer that is: I won’t dwell on the fact that we have two words for the often negatively-adjectived English) brought a swift, red-faced shrill of the whistle by the boney-faced Ardmháistir (headmaster).  He then deliberately picks up the ball, holds it up for everyone to see, and places it into the entirely uncoordinated hands of the nearest young fella.  Restarting play with an energetically hopeful whistle blast, his eyes instantly betray his hopefulness as they dart around angrily to make sure everyone’s hands are held up ready to receive, and most likely drop, the ball.

Na cailíní (the girls) are issued a burst tennis ball and the handle of the broom from the room behind the stage for them to play the sport of rounders: which in this context was essentially baseball without the gazillion dollar salaries, or a functioning ball, a bat, or a field.  But there were lots of rules, harshly enforced by the chain smoking, grey-mane tossing, Ardmháistreás (you guessed it; headmistress – though definitively not in the French sense of “mistress”.)  They used their jackets as the bases, which, with people standing at base on the watery field for the couple of hours long game, ensured at least three girls cycled home literally dripping wet.

The activity is also, of course, all in Irish and woe betide the student who gets so excited they forget to jam into their sentences that one Irish-ish sounding word!

That’s what happened poor ould, always-hungry Sharkey.

Sharkey, like myself and nearly everyone else there, hadn’t hardly a clue how to actually play Gaelic football, but Sharkey had the added disability that he didn’t like bar fights either.  Inevitably he got clobbered in a tackle by Brenny that looked suspiciously like a punch-kick.  Brenny, in line with his wish to conform, showed up every Saturday morning for years with hundreds of other young fellas at Na Fianna Football Club in Glasnevin, and therefore knew how to play, or at least how to tackle … kinda-sorta.

“Ya fooken tick Glasnevin bollix!” Sharkey cries out, crumpling into a puddle.

The whistle shrills!

“SHARKEY ANESO (HERE)!” the Ardmháistir screams, pointing angrily at the ground. 

Then he contradicts his screamed-order and stomps over, aiming his index finger down at Sharkey’s always-hungry and now in deep-shit face.

With an anger-tinged ceremonial turning over of the all-powerful whistle to FP, who in his second year at the Colaiste (College) had gained at least survivor status, Sharkey is hauled off to the shite-brown Renault, the Ardmháistir firmly gripping him by the arm … never to be seen again.

After an hour of not-exactly-benign neglect refereeing by FP – three chipped teeth, two dislocated shoulders and multiple kicked-black-and-blue fingers – we’re on our bikes headed back to the house for a meal of a little meat, a lot of potatoes and peas.   

“Jaysys, he wuz fairly hard on poor ould Sharkey! Huh?” FP says, his head turning all around, eyes scanning.  “He’s fooken done for now, prolly already on de redneck express back ta Dooblin.”

“Nah,” I say, my eyes now starting to scan all around.  “Sure, he couldn’t help himself, he got a whack an’ the words came out automatically.  It wasn’t deliberate.”

“Doesn’t fooken mat…her.  When dat bollix of an Ardmháistir makes up his moind, yer gone,” he shakes his freckly face slowly.  “Ya don’t have a fooken chance.”
Sure enough, when we get back to the house, all of Sharkey’s stuff is gone: His rucksack, his bike, his books.  

The landlady is all upset, her bulk slamming around in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes.  She liked Sharkey; he was friendlier than the rest of us and he walloped down everything on the plate she put in front of him.

I didn’t eat hardly any of the potatoes and peas at dinner.  I just chewed a lot on the pork chop that was as thin and hard as the sole of your shoe.

That evening before the “Céilí” (a session of music and singing from which the Gaelgoers had surgically extracted the joy) back at the school, the Ardmháistir stands with his fiddle and bow grasped white-knuckled in his left hand, while his right index finger stabs the air in front of all the older boys, warning us in spitting-angry Irish words that we too would be sent home if we spoke “as Bearla” (in English).  Jamming the fiddle and bow into his right armpit, so he could use both hands to emphasize his point, he was particularly careful in enunciating slowly in Irish and then translating it into the much-hated Bearla, that the courts had repeatedly proved the Colaistes (Colleges) correct in keeping all the fees when a student was kicked out for speaking in English, which was in fact “breaking the contract, signed by your parents when submitting your application.” 

“Agus anois, amhrán sona (and now for a happy song)!” he contorts his grimace into the fakest of fake smiles, whips the fiddle and bow from under his arm, and lifting and lowering his right leg, he tries to infuse levity into a being that can know no levity. 

That night back in the house, lying in the darkness on the top of one of the bunkbeds, I’m listening to FP and Brenny damn “to fooken cultie hell an’ beyond” the Ardmháistir, the Gaeltacht, the Irish language, the British Army, when suddenly FP goes:

“Éist (listen)!” 

They both fall silent.

We all listen.

The sound of gravel crunching underfoot comes in the open window.

“Oíche maith a fir uaisle (goodnight gentlemen),” FP enunciates the words slow, loud and clear.

I listen intently but it’s hard through the sound of my heart beating wildly.

A bunch of minutes later, FP slips off his lower bunk and pads to the window.

“Dat fooken bollix a bollixes was out dere, awright,” he says with a loud sigh.  “Jaysys, ya can still feel he’s weirdo-adhness!”

The next day it rains and winds so hard that we have classes inside the school for the afternoon.  During a break, FP, Brenny and I sprint through the wind-driven rain the fifty yards from the school door to the local shop-bar-restaurant (if a microwaved steak and kidney pie can be considered a meal).  In there they have a pool-table in the back.  Usually, we don’t go in, as the locals aren’t big fans of us strainséiri (blow-ins) taking over their spaces, but in the afternoon there’s only the usual two ould alkies sitting up at the bar glowering into their pints.

FP beats Brenny easily and I’m just putting my tenpenny pieces into the machine when in storms the Ardmháistir.

“Cén tseafóid atá ort anois (what sort of foolishness are you up to now)?” he says slowly, forcing a fake calm into his voice.

“Dhia duit a Paraiceen (how are you little Paraic),” he says, smiling his famously fake smile at the publican.  His eyes pass judgmentally over the alkies, who don’t even bother to look up from their yellowing pints of Guinness.  

His right-hand shoots out, index finger aimed at the door.

“Amach (out)!”

Outside, gripping his suit jacket with one hand, he run-walks to catch up to us.

“Nead Béarla an ait seo (that place is a nest of English)!” he sneers at us, giving FP a whack on the back of his head.

“Roinnt ceannaireachta a thaispeaint (show some leadership)!”

The windy-rainy days cycling all over the Mullet peninsula turn into rainy-windy weeks.  To spite the Gaelgoerswe actually attempt to communicate in Irish with the locals, but they’re so pissed off with them correcting their grammar that, out of spite, they only respond to us in English.  Still, we get friendly with some of the locals our age who can all speak Irish but won’t and only laugh at our pathetic attempts to pronounce the words correctly.  In any case, all they seem to want to talk about is what it’s like living in Dublin, which they then immediately compare to London and Birmingham to where all their brothers and sisters have emigrated.  

On Sundays we go to mass and listen to the priest rattle off words we all know so well and try to map them to their English meanings.  Everyone gets the “Our Father” down pat: We’ll all be fine so long as Saint Peter speaks Irish!  

The priest nearly always shows up fifteen minutes late, eyes bloodshot, a fierce scowl on his saggy, red face.  He rattles through the mass quickly, if he even includes a sermon, we’ll never know.

Then on the Sunday after Sharkey was “disappeared”, the priest never shows up at all.  Eventually, at the time we’d usually be leaving mass, we all end up crowding around outside the church, rain spitting on us.  It’s unsettling for everyone.  The teenagers are upset, not cause there’s no mass, but because we sat there as long as mass and now the Gaelgoers will probably pull a new priest out of their arse.

Either way, we were not getting out of this for free.

The locals are genuinely upset.

“He mhust be verah bad this morn,” an ould fella, with hardly any teeth, shakes his capped head slowly.  “I seen him drive off inta town yisterdah, ‘bout three-ish.  I suppose there’s nathin’ like startin’ on time.”

He nods a lot, his sunken face twitching between a mischievous smile and a religious frown.

“Thure was a H Blocks protest within in Ballina,” snaps a heavyset woman, 

bulging out a tan raincoat, the belt tied in a rough knot, a sky-blue scarf cinched tightly against her ample chin.  

“My Eamonn seen him within on the back owa lorry,” she continues.  “Givin’ a serm… speech he wuz, an’ two plainclothes polismen grabbed a hoult a him after.  They prolly have ‘im locked up within in the Ballina barrack.” 

As punishment for listening to full English sentences, we’re frog-marched down to the school where we spend an hour learning the hymn “Ag Críost an Síol” (I never did learn what that meant).

A couple of days later a letter arrives for FP from Sharkey.  The address was very deliberately written all in English: The College of Richard Barrett.  

In the letter he said the Ardmháistir was furious all the way to the train station in Ballina.  He just kept telling him how much he had “wasted his parents’ hard-earned wages,” how terrible it was that “modern Irish children were so spoilt” and how this “sort of reprobate behavior” would lead him to “a life of ruin”.  Of course, he said all this in Irish first, then when Sharkey didn’t have any reaction because he didn’t understand it, he’d do it all over again in English.  Poor ould Sharkey, always hungry and now headed for a life ruin!

As he was getting on the train, Sharkey said “Go raibh maith agat (thank you).”  

The Ardmháistir got a bit teary-eyed and said at least he showed “character in adversity” – he didn’t even attempt saying that in Irish.  But Sharkey said what really meant was “thanks for fucking releasing me from the Irish Gulag!”   

One evening after the tea, the Bean an Tí (landlady) drops an old, red wine coloured, hardbacked book on the table.

“Féach isteach (look inside)” is all she says – she’s well sick of talking to us in Irish, which she had to do per her “contract,” only to have us stare back blank-facedly.

The book was a history of North Mayo with a big KENNY’S BOOKSHOP stamp of extreme West of Ireland authenticity inside the front cover.  At a bookmark halfway through it was the story of Riocard Bairéad (Richard Barrett), the man after whom our Irish Gulag College was named.  Turns out Riocard was a fierce sound fella altogether, loved by one and all in this area of the world.  He was born around 1740, first he married a Protestant woman, which could have been a bit a challenge back then, after she died, he married again and settled into a life farming the wilds of North Mayo and writing ballads and witty poems in Irish and English.  He fought in the 1798 rebellion – just a few weeks ago really, in the memory of Mayo people – when the French landed over the road in Killala.  For his pains did a short stint in the old gaol in Castlebar.  

The terrible thing was that his second wife burned all his papers after he died. Maybe she had that disease that seems to singularly inflict humans: Spite!

 Luckily his work was so revered by the locals that they had learned his ballads and poems, passing them along orally.  This is how two hundred years later we still have Riocard Bairéad’s songs and poems.   

It’s the last few days and with the wild abandon of the about-to-be-paroled inmates, we’re all dropping the “adhs” and “ails” off the end of our English words.  Surprisingly, we haven’t really needed them for a week or so, because, despite our spiteful resistance to the Gaelgoers some of the Irish language has soaked into our thick skulls.  Now we can converse somewhat understandably between each other in this heretofore local-yet-somehow-foreign language.

The Ardmháistir and Ardmháistreás relax just a smidge, an occasional smile showing their pride at having successfully taught us a little of the language they’re smothering with their overbearing love.

On the Wednesday morning of the last week, everyone with banana sangwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a can of Lilt (on sale in the local shop) from the Bean an Tí (landlady), we all board two minibuses for the much ballyhooed end of session “turas” (outing) around North Mayo.  As we wait for the inevitably late student, the Ardmháistir runs language security on our bus, his pale-boney face suddenly appearing in murmured conversations.  Staring out the window, I see the Ardmhaistreas’ grey-haired mane tossing as she coldly scans her bus for illegal English.

As the bus pulls out of the deep-potholed lot in front of the school and turns onto the Belmullet Road, I realize that in a few days I’ll be making this same journey for the last time with Da – who doesn’t speak a word of Irish: Hardly no one’s parents do!  

Oddly, I feel a sense of loss for something I didn’t even know I had to lose, and for all I think about it, I can’t put a focal (word) on this feeling.

The minibus trundles on, the suspension squeaking in complaint at the load.  Outside the boggy-wet fields, framed by child-drowning-deep drains, run down to the open water of the Atlantic; bony cattle nose around searching for grass between yellow-brown tufts of reeds; low red-oxide roofed houses, dirty-white walls, two windows, one door, sparsely dot the fields.  The Atlantic is seemingly everywhere; steely-grey beneath low clouds that smother the distant mountains.  A cut-stone pier, topped with a few feet of rust-stained concrete, wraps around fishing boats, like an arm protecting them from the wrath of three thousand miles of easy-to-anger ocean.

“Is é sin monarcha olann Angora (this an Angora wool factory),” an hour later the Ardmháistir announces pompously, though barely audibly above the minibus’ squeak-screaming complaints, as we pull off the road through a line of thickly knit-together pine trees.  

In the raw clearing behind the wall of trees, there’s a tan coloured, rectangular metal building, no windows but a gaping opening where a van sized overhead door has been raised.  As we squeak into the car park, with just three other, rusty-worn cars in it, the Ardmháistir purses his lips, turns and aims his index finger at FP, Brenny and me:

“Na bach leis do amadántacht (don’t start your tomfoolery now)!” 

He stabs his finger towards us, as we beam with adolescent pride.
There’s a rush for bus door as the Ardmháistir say-yells that we’ll see “coiníní gruagach (hairy rabbits),” but won’t “i gcás ar bith (under any circumstances)!” another harsh finger stab in our direction, be allowed to touch said hairy rabbits.

As we teenage-slouch towards the factory, a man in stained blue overalls and green wellingtons stalks out, holding by the ears, clumps of hairy, white, dead rabbits.

“Whare in de fuck d’ya tink youse’re goin’?” he asks in a Dublin accent, stopping and staring first at us then over our shoulders at the oncoming droves.

“We were-ail ag teacht (we were coming) …,” I start to stay but stop as my eye catches the contrast of the dead rabbits’ glassy-red eyes against their brilliant white fur. 

“Rinneadh me glao teileafóin inné (I phoned yesterday) …,” the Ardmháistir starts with his fake good-cheer, but stops at the sight of the dead rabbits hanging by their ears.

“Wat in de fuck did ‘e say?” your man asks, staring at me.  

“Eh, he phone-ailed you yesterday, d’ya know, about us come-ailing,” I answer.  “For a look-ail like, at the rabbits.”

“Rabbits!  Youse wanna see rabbits!” he half-yells, glaring at me first, then the Ardmháistir.

“Dere’s a heap a dem insoide, … dead as doornails!  Poy…sonned dey were, when deir fur wasn’t worth nuthin’ no more causa de Chian…neeze an’ deir cheap fur.  An’ is de guvermant gonna pay me for ta get ridda all dem dead rabbits, is it? Huh?”

“Oh, go dona ar fad (very bad indeed)!” the Ardmháistir says loudly, spinning around and waving back all the other children.

“AR AIS AR NA MBUSANNA (BACK ON THE BUSES)!” he yells, waving his arms wildly, bursting into a sprint, suit jacket clasped in hand, to stop two inquisitive, Ceathrú Thaidhger girls who are in a Gaelgoer-circumventing jog toward the open door. 

“Whare are youse lot from? Gerr…many?”

“Oh níl (no), no, no, no,” I answer, with a sorta-laugh.  “We’re with the Irish College down the road outside a Belmullet, d’you know, ag learn-ailing Irish.”

“Oirish!  Gimme a fooken break would youse?  Sure, dat language is as dead as dem rabbits!”

Dad-cationing

I’m in a sleeping bag on hard ground, my body tensed, listening energetically for the sounds of easeful breathing that signals children finally, mercifully sleeping.  Next to me through the tent’s blue-dimness, powered by the streetlight directly above us, the kids, in their Ninja Turtle sleeping bags, are little bundles of exhausted joy, hair tussled, faces tanned, eyelids floated closed.  

After a few minutes the kids’ breathing settles into a deep-sleep rhythm.  Involuntarily, I release a self-congratulatory sigh at having my dad-cationing duties suspended due to the temporary incapacity of my charges.  I reach my hands behind my head and consider slipping out of the tent to the campfire for a phew-one-day-down celebratory polishing off of the sixpack. 

“STAYIN’ ALIVE! … STAYIN’ ALIVE!”

Out of nowhere blaring disco music rents the blue-dimness, vibrating the tent’s fabric, rattling its spindly poles.

“HA, … HA … HA … HA, STAYIN’….”

My hands snap from behind my head; body rigid in righteous-dad anger; eyes glaring at my sleeping kids; my self-congratulations a heap of smoking rubble.  

“AL…IVVVE, AHA, HA, HA ….”

From the “TEEN CL BHOUSE” – a graffiti scarred, bare blocked shed fifty feet away from our tent site – a whirling disco-ball slices fingers of light through the definitively not sound insulated, tent fabric. 

“LIFE GOIN’ NOWWHERE, SOMEBODY HELP ME!”

The disco-ball’s silvery light scans across the kids’ still peacefull faces with nary a flicker of an eyelid!

My self-image slightly repaired, I ease back on my troublesome pillow of damp, rolled up kids’ clothes.  My actual pillow is resting unburdened by a human head at home on the dining room table along with my backpack of clothes, a freezer bag full of everyone’s toothbrushes and toothpaste, sunblock, shampoo and soap, alongside of which is the bulging Stop & Shop bag of fruit I bought, promising myself I’d force-feed it to the kids before filling them with hotdogs, chips and ice-cream, and then, if they were still hungry, the perfectly balanced meal of chips mushed into ice-cream.

The Bee-Gees wallop out their paradoxical desire to stay alive even as I’m formulating homicidal thoughts against Manx musicians.  The disco ball curls its silvery fingers through the tent.  My perceived need to slake my dad-cationing anxiety with cold beer (I categorically did not forget a sixpack, and ice to keep it cold) wrestles epically with the actual need at all costs to get the kids back to sleep should they awake.

We arrived at SOJORN CAMPGRO ND a little after noon this blazing warm July Saturday, after four exhausting hours of playing “I spy” in a hundred-mile-long Saturday morning, Boston to Maine traffic jam.  

Check in was … interesting.  

Lem, the bushy eyebrowed, craggy faced octogenarian behind the counter in the campground store could hardly have been more welcoming, helpful, and rambling. 

“Berston, y’all driv up from.  Yeah, yeah, I ben a there,” he nods his once-upon-a-very-long-time-ago green and yellow but now greyish, John Deere cap a bunch of times as he scribbles our information into a speckled black and white covered copybook, the like of which the kids will be back-to-school-shopping for in a few weeks.  

“When I gor outta t’service, down Fort Benning.  They all put me on a train ta Berston,” he keeps scribbling and talking, never looking up.  “That son of a gun southern sergeant down there, from Mobeeel Alaa…bama he wuz, he said some God awful thins about Berston people.  But they wuz fine ta me, least ‘n all the ones in the train an’ bus stations. Mind ya, there weren’t no black fellers chasin’ me round like sarg sed they’d a be.  I on’y see’d t’one, an’ her cross the street.  She didn’t pay me no heed.  Then I gots a bus up ta Portland, n’ a second bus to Bridgton.  I had ta hitch a ride back to Denmark where mother wuz livin’ at the time with a fellar as wuz a sawyer in a mill.”

He finally looks up, stares me in the eye and tipples his hand toward his mouth in the universal symbol of anguish for those whose hands convey misery into their lives.

“Oh, that wuz nineteen sixty … one er two, I think.  I aint ben since.  How’s Berston lookin’ these days?” 

“Good, good,” I answer, nodding a lot, trying to reconcile the campground’s colorful website and flashy photos with the greyish John Deere hat, the scribbling in the copybook, the CASH ON Y sign behind the counter.

Two realizations dawn upon me, crushing my fragile dad-cationing mind.  The first is that I may have been going a smidge too fast when, around 11:45PM Thursday night I finally started looking for a campground for a mom relieving, dad’s weekend away with the kids.   

SOJORN CAMPGRO ND quite possibly meets the legal definition of a campground – it does have tent sites, two of them to be precise – but there is that quirky fact that all the other sites, designated on the website map as “Recreational Vehicle Sites,” were unmistakably filled with Vehicles which would in fact “vehicle” no more.  This is a trailer park on a lake in Maine with two tent sites smack in the middle, directly beneath the only streetlight for miles and we’re the sole tent campers inside the campground’s chain-link, barbwire topped fence.

This revelation would, of course, be dealt with in the normal manner – excessive sugar and fat for the children and beer for me, … lots of cold, dad-soothing beer.

The second realization came a little later, after Lem deftly emptied my wallet of cash renting the tent site, and then the ATM had collected a $5 usage fee for me to top up on cash to purchase the aforementioned sugar, fat and more beer. 

While unpacking the car, I realized we’d forgotten not only the contents of the dining room table but also such vital camping equipment as an enormous tarp to more than cover the tent for the inevitable downpour that follows our family whenever we stray outdoors, pegs to hold said tent down during the tornado that would surely touch down upon us, and a hammer to bash the tent pegs home in the rock-hard soil.

The explanation for this sort of cluelessness is that a father when placed in sole responsibility for his children has only two things on his mind: Convenience – that everything in this wondrous simulated-reality known as “Dad’s World” be easy, uncomplicated and without consequences, unlike, haha-hahem, how things usually go.  

Secondly, in Dad’s World it’s a hard a fast rule that there must be adequate time and resources for soothing when things are in fact not as easy, uncomplicated and lacking in consequences as dad-brain dictates they should be.  

Thus, the need for the, now doubly aforementioned, sugar, fat and beer.

Back in Lem’s general and camping haberdashery store for the missing supplies, my finely tuned dad-cationing radar picks up a signal, probably the nervous swaying and anxious desire for hand holding by the kids, that some serious soothing is in the offing.  

Lem favors the marketing of expensive items that could, in different life-threatening situations, actually be useful, ranging all the way from Wolf Urine (as it wasn’t Certified Organic I demurred on getting any to ward off deer eating our tent) to ivory handled buck knives (which were made of Certified Endangered Species Ivory) and a display case full of air rifles including the classic Red Ryder (eliciting the earworm: “No Ralphie, you’ll shoot your eye out!”) and the not so classic Fallen Patriot, a simulation street-sweeper type automatic rifle with a stars and stripes ammo cartridge.

I mean it’s all well and good flogging “true ‘Merican stuff” in your campground store, but where’s the patriotic food?  

Dragging the swaying, hand grasping kids down into the dark recess of the back of the store, I hit paydirt with a rack full of cleverly-not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand jun… convenient, kinda-sorta nourishing food of all varieties in packaging that will keep them fresh for decades!

We load up.

My Noah’s-Ark-anxiety does have me pick up a tarp, although two of the Kirkland Triple Saver chip bags, fully unfolded would probably have worked just as well – though we might not all have fit into the tent had we consumed that many carbs.  

When I ask about a hammer to drive home the pegs, Lem issues a chest-rattling sigh. 

“Usual folk jus’ give up n’ use a rock,” he mutter-mumbles.  “There’s a pile of ‘em behind the shithou…, sorry kids, latrine.  But true honest, I don’t think there’s ben a peg driv inta that soil since Paul Bunyan cum thru town.”

He laugh-nods definitively.

“Ok, I’ll take the tarp, these two bags a chips and a six pack of Bud.  Oh, and do you have any matches?”

“We got this,” with surprising alacrity, Lem slips a small flamethrower out from under the counter. “Twenty-four niney-nine.”

“I’ll take it,” I say, in my best pretend-serious-adult voice, even as my mouth waters at the thought of starting a campfire in mere seconds and not my usual fifteen-to-twenty minutes of caveman-self-esteem-destroying failed fire efforts.

I try to interest the kids in a hotdog for lunch from Lem’s hotdog machine.  They stare at the pink-edging-toward-brown, fleshy cylinders of mystery meat revolving on the rollers inside the oddly lit glass box.  

They both shake their heads definitively.

“I’ll have a hotdog without the hotdog,” my son says.

“You mean just the bun?”

“Yeah, that’s all I like.”

“Me too,” his sister jumps onto the carb bandwagon.

“No, no, no that would be too unheal…,” I’m silenced by the glint of salivated wetness on the hotdogs.

“Can I have three hotdog rolls please?” I ask, reaching again for my wallet.

By the time the tent is up, the dad-cationing formula is leaning solely on dad-soothing cold beer, with all thoughts of convenience long since dispelled. 

The newly purchased Sir Edmund Hillary tent (the lad who headed off up to the top of Mt Everest with Tenzing Norgay, a nice Nepalese fella who sells zero tents per year) gets extracted from its box with Herculean effort.  How could such a large object ever have been inserted into such a small box – are the Nepalese back at work again?

Getting the tent set up only generates two or three bitter fights, in each of which age, experience and maturity succumbs to youthful ability to follow Sir Edmund’s devilishly confusing instructions.  

In my defense, I take my timeouts with marginally less pouting than do the kids. 

Still, there’s the pond.  That’s good for an hour’s worth of I-hope-they-can’t-drown-in-there anxiety, and water makes the kids mellow and hungry even for Lem’s God-knows-when-these-were-made, marked up 500%, chips.

“Let’s go for a swim.”

“I forgot my bathing suit,” my son says.

“What the fuc…,” I kinda-sorta catch myself.  “Oh, my goodness that’s a hassle, you’ll just have to go in your underwear.”

“They don’t allow that,” he says, his eyes getting a worried look.

“Oh no that’s just the control-freak staff at the swimming pool.  In ponds you almost have to swim in your underwear.  It’s a rule … in Maine.  Only underwear allowed.  In New Hampshire you have to swim in your jeans … and lumberjack boots.”

“Really?”

“No, no, no, an’ don’t tell anyone I said that.  Ok?”

“Why?”

“Let’s go swimming!”

 The pond water is piss warm … I mean it’s literally as warm as recently passed urine. 

I suspiciously eye the handful of little kids but all of them seem old enough to bladder secure.  Then my judgmental eyes fall upon the cohort of lower-torso-bulging, blotchy-skinned, oldies standing groin deep in the water.  

I shake my head bitterly: One man’s convenience is another’s irrational anxiety.

“This is the best pond ever!” my daughter splashes me wildly with water.

“I’ll get some chips,” I say, hurriedly drying my face.  “Don’t drown while I’m away.”

“Does that mean we can drown when you come back?”

Buried deeply in the Americans with Disabilities Act, in print so small that it could appear to be some sort of oxymoronic joke and is in fact rumored to have been placed there as a Act of Contrition by Senator Ted Kennedy, is a clause which states: “In the interests of sustaining human civilization, males of Irish ancestry, including those who obtained said ancestry via excessive alcohol consumption on one or more Saint Patrick’s Day, are hereby prohibited from engaging in any and all activities associated with planning, booking, organizing, or in any way preparing for vacations, holidays, or weekends away of all types, sorts, sizes and occasions, other than those involving groups made up only of other human males or having anything to do with golf.”  

In another section he got us out of dancing – even at family weddings.  He did insert a “Michael Flatly syndrome” carveout for the Riverdance lads but lookit that’s a topic for another day.  The key point here is that I could be self-violating my rights and Federal Law by taking the kids on a weekend away.  

Let me tell ya, I’m not taking that lying down!

Ironically enough as this face-saving epiphany gets squeezed out between my two dad-brain cells, I am in fact lying down on rock-hard ground, in the tent’s streetlight powered blue-dimness, the pride of the Isle of Mann blasting us Noriega-style as the disco ball revolves with a depressing inevitability.  And yet Teddy K magically comes through, but in a different way this time, by keeping the kids sleeping.

Not sure how the big guy worked that magic, but by the time we – as in the eight surly teenagers groping one another fifty feet away in the CL BHOUSE and I – were In The Navy putting “OUR MINDS AT EASE” (not so much) as we “SAILED THE SEVEN SEAS,” I was, beer can in hand, staring ruefully into our fire’s red-gray ashes, in full dad-soothing mode. 

The next morning, it was actually still nighttime with the sky a gunmetal grey as the sun struggled to make up its mind whether Maine was going to hold another day or not – BTW, my vote was a solid “NO!” – I was awoken by least desirable words a dad-cationing dad wants to hear in a now somehow fully darkened tent:

“I have to pee – BAD!”

“Ok-ok-ok, let’s go,” the thought of transporting pee-soaked Ninja Turtle sleeping bags home propels me instantly vertically alert.

I don’t have time for shoes so I ouch-ouch-ouch it all the way to the public health disaster that is, per Lem, either a shithouse or a latrine – not sure which is worse.  While waiting for my son to pee, I stand barefooted on the cracked concrete floor, wet with a vile cocktail of human waste, dead insects and possibly Wolf Urine, staring up at the corpses of a few trillion mosquitoes caught in spiders’ webs, wondering can I get away with just cutting off the soles of my feet or does infection by this plague-ish liquid require that both feet be entirely amputated?

“I’m hungry,” he says as I’m ouch-ouch-ouching it back to the tent.

“Have some ch… fruit,” I catch myself.  “Daddy has every fruit known to mankind, and a few unknown ones, in the back of the car.” 

I’m lying outrageously but with the comfort that my lie has zero chance of getting called.

“No, I want pancakes!” his face hardens in the grey light.  “Pancakes is what you have when you’re camping, and a bear comes out of the woods and wants some of your syrup, so you give it to him, so he doesn’t kill ya!”

“Well, we’re not really cam…,” I simultaneously point at the streetlight and the ring of trailers surrounding our tent as his face melts into confusion. 

“Sure, sure we’ll have pancakes.  Pancakes it is, unless you’d like some of Lem’s breakfast hotdogs?  They’re very good and we have a…lot of chips left!”

“I want panc….”

Pancakes we had, in the cool grey of 5:30AM in the kinda-sorta, not even pretend woods.  The gas stove hissed and whistled insolently at me as the butter in the pan turned a comforting male-cooking-brown as I struggled to extract the pancake mix from the very bottom of our food box, sized for an Alaskan winter survival ordeal.

I think it’s safe to say that had there not been Eve or Wilma Flintstone or some human female shooing human males away from barbecuing the wooly mammoth, human evolution would have taken a severe turn left.  With all that burnt meat, we’d have thrown in the towel on civilization and instead evolved into two-legged, raw meat loving wolves.  Before you get too complacent about our heading down the civilization avenue, one does have to note that life as two-legged wolves would mean that we didn’t have had to endure Engelbert Humperdinck or Daniel O’Donnell!

The bigger philosophical point here is that men making pancakes is just another way of saying men making a mess.  Pancake mix was formulated by either men-hating women or a men-hating men, either way, they were geniuses, though of course the male geniuses made 40% more than the women geniuses.  

Anyway, as soon as water touches the magic powder that is pancake mix, the new not-quite-liquid-definitely-not-powder substance becomes possessed by evil spirits and finds its way into all sorts of places never designed to accept copious quantities of a gooey substance.  

Children’s hair is the most common place for this substance to be found, but there have been unconfirmed sightings in dad’s hair; it’s regularly found gluing together the middle pages of mom’s glossy magazines; and reportedly Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing craft into a pool of this substance.  With powers nothing short of divine, this eggishly-yellow goo can pass through the cutlery drawer and end up on every single one of the heretofore clean spoons.

Mixing approximately two gallons of pancake goo, I wonder aloud if Lem’s hotdog machine might, on a Sunday morning, get converted to a pancake machine.  Knowing Lem as I do, from two five minute, extremely expensive encounters, I’m assured he thinks of every possible way to help campers unburden their wallets of all that damp cash.  

With the butter now just the right sheen of black, I, per the directions on the box, drop a silver dollar sized clump of goo onto the pan.  As I’ve never actually seen a silver dollar, I end up dropping into the pan a lot, … a very lot of goo.  Twenty minutes later we have something akin to a pancake in shape and general consistency.  I have no answer for its oddish color somewhere between brown-black and Vantablack (look it up!) but technically this passes dad’s-specification as a pancake.  Anyway, we have a lot of chips and chocolate milk, which reportedly is packed with calcium!

We’re back in the piss-warm pond by 7:30AM.  As it’s still that warm even without the cohort of swollen oldies wallowing groin deep in the shallows, I feel a little better about staying in there.  Plus, with the kids likely to play in here for hours, now I don’t have to act my way through a fake showdown about them having showers in the public-health hazard bathrooms. 

Around 9:30AM humans start to emerge from trailers.  First its skinny-old-white-guys in jeans shorts and white undershirts leaning on trailer porch railings, inhaling so deeply on their cigarettes that I expect to see smoke leaking out of their knee-high, white tube socks.  

They nod to one another, but don’t talk.

Then two kids burst out of a newer trailer, the door left swinging, revealing the trailer’s dimness punctuated by the blue flickering of a television screen.  They race to the warm water and launch themselves off the dock.  In no time, all humans under the age of ten are having a squealing-shrieking good time.

“Don’t drown while I go get a newspaper,” I warn my kids who are having too good a time to pay any heed to my empty words.

Up in the campground store, Lem’s flogging coffee at Manhattan prices and blueberry muffins in plastic bags, appropriately at Space Station prices.  I quickly refinance the house on my phone and have enough for a second breakfast.

Back at the pond, I sit at a table savoring not-Costco-but-Kirkland brand coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and per my DNA sequencing, perusing the death notices in the local paper.  When I see a best-by date on the muffin for three years out, I save it for the kids, figuring they’ll get more utility from its chemically propelled longevity.

Around 11:00AM a skinny-old-guy lurches out of his trailer with a Red Sox can-cooler in his hand.  The bony fingers of his hand press tight into the blue and red foam; in the other hand he’s got a cigarette jammed hard between his index and Boston-driver’s finger.  

On a mission, he moves fast for a seventy-something, his once-were-white sneakers and knee-high tube socks moving in a skipping gait.  Casting a shocked glance at our tent, he crosses the dirt road fast and skips in through the gate of a knee-high, plastic, white picket fence in front of a tidy-yarded trailer.  

He jams the cigarette into his mouth, raps his knuckles on the tinny door and steps back.

Nothing happens.

He draws hard on the cigarette, then snaps it away from his mouth.  

Smoke gushes off his face as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

He repeats the cigarette jam into the mouth, door rapping routine two more times, then turns and stalks away.  Just in front of our tent, he stops, stomps out the cigarette and takes an Adams-apple-bobbling, half-can swig of his beer.

By noon, it’s a full-on party.  

Everyone, but poor-old-has-to-drive-back-to-Boston me, has a can, or two, going.  

The kids are wearing out the pond.

The teenagers are skulking in the CL BHOUSE trying, not all that successfully, to keep their hands to their own bodies.

“Don’t drown!” I yell at the kids.  “I’m going take down the tent and pack up.

While I’m struggling with Sir Edmund’s nylon masterpiece, there’s a scene at the trailer that couldn’t be rapped awake a few hours earlier.  

Lem is there with a younger, but still old, female version of himself – his daughter?  They’re surrounded by a buzzing crew of four heavyset, middle-aged women in black tee shirts, jean shorts, once-were-white sneakers and white tube socks.  One of the women pushes between Lem and his daughter and raps her knuckles hard on the trailer door.

“Flonny! Flonny!” she yells, keeping up her rapping.

Another pushes through, presses against the trailer window, both hands cupped by her temples. 

Lem’s daughter limps off fast toward the store. 

Ten minutes later an ambulance drones into the campground.  

People stare from trailer porches.  

Cigarettes are lit.  

Cans of beer hoisted to lips.

I turn to the pond.  Every kid is out of the water, standing in dripping bathing suits, staring anxious-eyed, hands fidgeting at their mouths.

The EMTs, in navy-blue pants, white shirts and heavily laden equipment belts, stare expressionlessly at the trailer door.  Two old guys help Lem’s daughter pry the door open with a flat nail-bar.  The EMTs bustle in, the stretcher wheels thudding off the door step.  

Some of the kids tire of waiting for the EMT to emerge from the trailer.  They drift back to the pond but wade quietly into the water, frantically waving at friends to follow.

When the EMTs do emerge from the trailer’s darkness, they’re struggling with the stretcher, upon which lays a scarily still, obese woman with deep auburn hair in pink rollers.  The stretcher’s straps compress against her torso, cinching into her flabby arms.

Walking alongside the stretcher, the skinny-old guy who had tried the door earlier, tries to keep hold of the patient’s hand, a cigarette dangling from his lips, in the other hand his beer can. 

With the radio squawking out its open doors, the EMTs collapse the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.  They wait impatiently swaying for the skinny-old guy to stomp out his cigarette, hand his beer to a friend and climb into ambulance’s dimness.  

They slam the doors shut.

The ambulance drones out through a crowd of shaking heads.

A sweaty hour later, with several stalks back over to the pond to ensure my “don’t drown” words were in fact a warning and not a prophesy, Sir Edmund is down and deboned, but is now about eight times the volume he was coming out of the box.  I force everything back into the car, huffing-and-puffing the tailgate closed, imagining everything exploding out on the driveway at home.

“Come on, come on, we have to go, it’s a long drive back to Boston,” I try to round up the kids out the piss-warm water.

“No, no, no!” my daughter whines over-tired-tearfully.  “I’m staying forever with Brittany; she comes every weekend.  Can we come back?”

“Sure, sure, sure, but only if you tell your mother ten times how much you enjoyed the place that daddy booked … Thursday night at midnight!”

As we drive slowly out of SOJORN CAMPGRO ND it has settled back into the lethargy of hot summer Sunday afternoon.  

In the darkness behind the store’s screen door, Lem stands staring.  He waves faintly as we roll past. 

We bump along the dusty, dirt road.

Passing the pond, my daughter lets out a yelp:

“There’s Brittany, n’ Mary-Kate, n’ Kyle; Brittany says Kyle has AHHD, what’s that; he’s so funny; why do we always have leave everywheres good?” 

She reaches forward from her car seat, whacks the back of my seat, and promptly lurches into sleep.

In the mirror, through the dust rising off the road, I see people sitting on their porches, smoke rising from cigarettes, cans rising to their mouths as they yell-chat from trailer porch to trailer porch.

Dutch Auctioneers

I’m walking across the Market Square of a Saturday morning when I see the crowd herding up around the back of a blue Transit van.  I had ta go ta the bank ta get a canvas moneybag and a rake of plastic coin bags ta be ready for the Sunday church door collection. 

It’s kinda spitting rain, so some people have their hoods up, but no umbrellas yet.   I can recognize a lot of the crowd, mostly people from around town and few in from country shopping of a Saturday. 

I know I shouldn’t stop; Pat’ll be cranky if I don’t get back to the church fast.  He on’y sent me ta the bank at the last minute before it closed at noon to get the money bags so we could count everything up during the masses tomorrow.  And there’s a rake a cleaning ta be done back in the church: the sanctuary ta be mopped, the seats dusted, flowers ta be bought up in O’Donnell’s and put in them big brass vases that Pat says “t’Indians made for a coupley a pennies each.  Ya never hear no preachin’ about that, now do ya?”

Still a crowd is a thing ya don’t see much except maybe up if Celtic have a big match or Mayo are playing above in McHale Park.  There must be something good ‘cause people wouldn’t be crowdin’ tagether for no reason at-all-at-all.  So, it’s worth a bit a Pat’s crankiness ta see what’s goin’ on.

“Oh, we’re all gud now,” a little, ould fella, says real loud, but not shouting, with a sigh an’ a nod at me. 

He’s standing a few steps up a stepladder, just behind the open doors of the blue van.  In a baggy black cardigan with a kinda pinched face, a pointy nose, a rake of forehead and a wild, scraggly head of hair, he looks just like the Irish builder in Fawlty Towers.  

Just my luck, he keeps going an’ points his boney finger right at me, my face blushing red hot, as he says: “Money bags is here.  Cum here young fella, an’ we’ll take gud care a yer money.”

He has a Dublin accent, making me country-suspicious.

“Yaz needn’t worry about it … not much anyways!”

The crowd all starts laughin’ but it’s not like school where they all suddenly turn on ya – laughin’ an’ pointin’ fingers at ya.  Instead they keep staring at him, like he’s a magician.

“Cum in now, don’ be ah…faraid, Burnie hasn’t bitten no one latterly.  Stan’ in clow…ser, so’s I don’ loose me vice,” he says waving the crowd in.  “Here, … here, cum in, cum in.”

He reaches a hand back and Burnie, the helper, gives him a handful of them four-in-one pens!  They’re great; blue, black, red and green ink all in one pen!  Ya just push the button for whatever colour ya want, then it pushes its way down, pushing the other colour back up.  Fierce handy altogether in school.

“Here, here, a little gift from Burnie an’ me,” he starts throwing the pens into the crowd.

There’s all sorts a pushin’ n’ shovin’ by the crowd ta get them.  I see a young Traveler fella in fight ta the death with some ould farmer for one a them, and two ould wans, that’d be back in the church every evening at seven sayin’ the Rosary for peace in the North, clawin’ at one another over a pen.

“Relax foe…lks, relax, Burnie has rakes more a dem pens.  We’ll be thrungin’ dem out later, but first up I have an amm…aazing deal on a towester!”

Burnie, a small-bald-fat fella, jowly-pint-faced and piggy eyes, in a greasy looking blue anorak, hands him a box.

“Now Burnie, don’t be hidenin’ dis luvly towester from the good people a Gaul… May-oh.  Take it ourra de box, will ya, ya big leibide.”

From his perch on the stepladder, he nods at everyone, looking all serious.

“May…oh,” he forces out a sigh.  “May-oh God Help Us – roight!  Ga…reat countee, de best in Ire…land.  But dis fella, don’t ya see,” he slaps Burnie’s anorak hood with the back of his hand, “he doesn’t get let ourra Dublin hardly at-all-at-all.  He couldn’t sell water in de Burren so he couldn’t.”

He shakes his head fast, one hand grasping the top step of the ladder.

“Here I am with de finest towester ever made in Germany.  Didn’t dey make dem great Panzer tanks back in de day, an’ now they make great towesters.  It’d towest yer bread de finest, missus,” he nods a big nod down at Mrs Reilly, “ya know, for de hubby, an’ him headin’ off fer a day’s work in de bog.  It twould, now I’n tellin’ yaz de God’s honest truth dere.”

Ah, I’m thinking, I better get back ta the church, this fella is only a chancer, sure the Reillys don’t go ta the bog at-all-at-all-at-all.

“Now above in Arnotts a Henry Street, de manager’d charge ya de full arm an’ half a leg for dis towester, so he would.  I’m tellin’ ya de God’s honest true…it now.  He’d show no mercy on yaz country people at-all-at-all-at-all.  Here, here, cum closer, cum closer.”

He waves everyone in.

“Burnie, haf yaz any more a dem pens back dere, d’ya?” he waves his hands impatiently – one at the crowd, the other at Burnie. “Cum on, cum on.”

Suddenly a volley of royal blue and white pens gets shot out of Burnie’s hands almost straight up in the air.  The crowd lurches forward toward the stepladder, fingers grasping for the manna of four-ink pens.

“Now I’ll tell yaz what I’ll do is, for de first towester, I’ll sell yaz all a ticket for ten P.  But everyone has ta buy.  If yaz cannit afford ten P, then be’s off about yer beeswax, an’ don’t forget ta stop inta the priest’s gaff fer de free lunch.”

Out of the cardigan pocket he pulls a roll of pink tickets, unrolls a rake a them, tears them off and gives them to Burnie.

Burnie’s all business, he never stops moving, his piggy little eyes darting around the crowd, his face always in a cranky scowl.  Immediately, he tears the first ticket in two and grabs a tenpenny piece off Mulligan, the ould retired postman.

“Now, yer ten P please mam,” the little fella on the ladder leans forward with a ticket for a heavy farmer woman with a big head of frizzy hair, that you’d sometimes see flying down Gallows hill on a black bike.

She gives him a hard stare.

“Sure, ya haf as gud a chance as anyone mam.  Ten P an’ this ga…reat Krupp’s towester cud be towesting the sliced pan dis evenin’.”

She relents, produces a shiny black purse from nowhere, unclipping the brass mechanism, her chubby fingers fishing out a silver tenpenny piece.

The crowd hums as he reaches off the stepladder to them.  Burnie works the fringes.

“Fuck off ourra dat,” Burnie snaps at the little Traveller fella, the scowl not even increasing, his piggy not even looking at the young fella.  “Or I’ll break yer arse with a kick, so I will.”

The little fella steps back, staring sideways at him, but doesn’t leave.

Tenpenny bits switch hands for pink tickets torn in two – the number being printed twice on each ticket.

“Now, someone give me a hat, jus’ so yaz see it’s all fair n’ square like.  Here, here, mam!”

He aims his index finger at Mrs Cunningham, the doctor’s wife, with a big purple hat plopped on top of her head.  

I’m so surprised ta see her here, that I look away.

“Here, cum up here mam, an’ you’ll be de master, … er, I mean de mistress a ceremonies,” he waves his hands impatiently.  “It’ll be just like de Irish Sweepstakes, on’y you’ll be coverin’ for all dem nurses in dere lily-white dresses.”

I imagine Mrs Cunningham is blushing behind all her makeup, but surprisingly, she takes a step forward.

“Clear de way, clear de way for de lady with de purr…pell hat, she’s gonna draw a winner for us.  De Mayo Sweepstakes is on dis mornin’ here in Castlebar, with de grand prize of a Krupp’s towester.”

The crowd parts and Mrs Cunningham, barely suppressing an embarrassed smile and sliding these really long, sore looking, pins out of her hat and hair as she makes her way to the stepladder.

“Now, crowd back in everyone wid yer tickets.  Free towester here, just ten P a chance.”

He holds his hand out for the hat; people immediately start dropping their halves of the tickets into that purple hole.

Burnie, furiously tearing pink tickets in two, mops up any tenpenny pieces held up around the edges, and then pushes his way back to the stepladder.

I don’t buy a ticket, even though I have a sixty P in me pocket – sure we have a toaster at home.

“Here yaz are now,” he takes another step up the stepladder and reaches forward with the hat.

“All de tickets in, every ticket in May-ho into dat hat now.  A luvly towester ben given away here in Market Square Castlebar, sur ya couldn’t go wrong wid a deal like dis, could yaz?”

He puts his hand in the hand and mixes up the tickets.  A few fall out.

“Here, here,” he raises his voice.  “Get dem es…capees, dere’s no gettin’ away from dis Mount…joy, every ticket has ta stay inside.”

The crowd scramble for the tickets and drop them back in.

“Now, take wan out mam.  Cover yer eyes so dey don’t be saying ya seen yer own ticket in dere.”

Mrs Cunningham flashes a big toothy smile to the crowd, clenches her eyes deliberately shut, brings her left hand up to her eyes and starts fishing for the hat with her right.

“Here, here,” the little fella on the stepladder says, grabbing her hand.  “An’ I’ll take yer hand, not in marriage but in ticket-picken.”

He grabs a hold of her hand and guides it to the hat.

“Pick one now for the de luckiest purson in May-ho.”

Mrs Cunningham’s pale white hand reaches down into the purply-black hole in the hat and draws out a half ticket.  The little fella takes the piece of pink paper and slowly holds it up in front of his face.

“Awright, are yaz ready?”

He gazes out over the growing crowd, more people getting nosey as to what’s going on.

“Naught-naught-naught, tree …, seven …, nyon …, fohwer.”

He looks back across the crowd.

“Again, tree-seven-nyon-fohwer,” he stares around, his eyebrows suddenly rising.  “An’ it’s de gentleman wid de ears stickin’ ourra de side a his head.”

Who had won it but Big Ears!  A tall mental patient from above in Saint Mary’s with a thin plaster of white hair across his head and big frying-pan ears.

Big Ears stood holding up his ticket, his eyes darting around nervously.

“Wait now till Burnie checks yer ticket sur,” he nods slowly.  “An’ yaz’ll never be short a slice a towest again in yer life.  Not till dey send fer you from above.”

He points up at the sky.

Burnie reaches into the van, grabs a toaster-sized cardboard box and muscles into the crowd, the box held up over his head.

“Now, now, listen up, the gud news is Burnie has a rake a more towesters in de back a de van,” he stops for a breath, watching Burnie transact with Big Ears.

“So here’s what we’ll do.  I’m gonna offer yaz the towesters at a fair price an’ we’ll see if May-ho likes dat.  Awright?” he looks hard across the crowd.  “An’ if yaz doesn’t like that price, maybe Burnie here’ll let me help yaz out a bit more.  Awright dere now Burn, get yer arse back up here, we need more pens.”

The crowd around the stepladder has about doubled, but a lot are standing back staring, fingers on chins, foreheads furrowed.  The little Traveller is skirting the crowd, getting hands-jammed-in-pockets-hard-stares from everyone.

Burnie, head down, pushes back through the crowd, reaches into the box of pens and fires them up into the air over his shoulder.

Magically, the crowd pushes in, arms up, fingers tingling for four-ink pens.

“Now ya see, above in Arnotts a Krupp’s towester’d cost ya twenny five quid, an’ a rake a pence on top a dat, fer ta keep de stealin’ goin’ like.  Dat’s how mister Arnotts makes his money.  D’yaz tink mister Arnotts goes ta de bog?  Noooooo!”

He waves his hand around over the crowd, the words coming out like he’s an actor on the stage.

“Mister Arnotts is sittin’ above on de Hill a Howth smow…king cigars an’ drinkin’ brandy while we’re all out here workin’.  But ferget abour him.  Here’s what I’m … what Burnie is gonna let me do for yaz, de gud people a Castle…bar.  So dis Saturday morning, on’y cause yaz are up an’ at it gud n’ early.”

He stops for a breath, stares across the crowd, his hands waving everyone in closer.

“Now, whatayaz tink of a towester dat doesn’t cost twenny five nyontee nyon, but instead, be de magic a Burnie here, only costs yaz a tenner today.  Special offer of a towester fer a tenner.  How many a yaz will be takin’ one fer a tenner?”

His eyes dart across the crowd, a look of almost nervousness on his face.  I follow his eyes.  All eyes in the crowd are on him.

There’s an odd fella from St Gerald’s Secondary School standing up front in a green duffle coat, his hood up, his mouth hanging open.

“Jayzus, will yaz shut dat mouth will yaz.  I haven’t seen a mouth like dat since I was fishin’ on de Shannon.”

He doesn’t smile at his joke but keeps checking on peoples’ faces.

“A tenner now is all …,” he closes his lips tightly and stares around at the crowd, a few hands are up.

“But let me tell yaz what, Burnie here is feelin’ very generous, ‘cause see, he’s grandmudder is from May-ho, an’ he always lookin’ ta help de people a May-ho.  So fer today only, for dis auction only, we’re gonna ta give dem away for eight quid.”

He draws in a quick breath.

“Eight quid, now dats a bargain amongst bargains.  If Burnie wasn’t standin’ here next ta me, I’d say he’s goin’ soft in his ould age.  Eight quid for de finest a German towester enganeerin’, an’ dem tieves above in Arnotts lookin’ for more dan tree times as much.  Now how many a yaz’ll be taking one for eight quid?”

 A few hands shoot up and when I’m watching them, don’t I see Da standing over on the other edge of the crowd.  Immediately I want to leave, thinking Da’ll think I’m all wrong for even standing here listening ta these dodgy fellas.

But the crowd is heaving now, pushing up against the stepladder.

The little Traveller is talking to Big Ears, holding his two hands up to accept the toaster.

“Azy, azy now folks, we have enough towesters for everyone, but dere’s still a few yaz not seein’ de bargain here.  So how’s about, I just lose me mind altagether, an’ sure if Burnie bates de daylights ourra me for it, so what, it’ll keep yaz all happy.  So how about I say yaz can all have one for seven quid.  Now, dat’s de vury best I can possablee do taday.”

Arms reach up, fingers holding fivers and ones, the crowd surges forward.

“Awright, awright, cum on Burnie, get dem towesters ready!”

“What are you doing here?” I hear in my ear.

It’s Da.

“Oh, just comin’ back from the bank an’ I was wondering what this was all about.”

“An’ did ya buy ana’thing offa them chancers?”

“No-no-no.”

“Gud,” he sighs, nodding backwards.  “‘Tis all stolen stuff.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, a course, sure how else could they be sellin’ it for them prices.”

“An’ why don’t ya arrest them so?”

He purses his lips, jams his hands deeper into his anorak pockets and twist nods.

“Sure there’s no report of toasters stolen for me ta follow up on,” he pulls one hand out of an anorak pocket and wags his finger at me. 

“See, they were probly stolen above in t’North or abroad in England.  No record of the crime here, don’t ya see.  Nathin’ we can do.  They can sell away.”

“An’ are you gonna buy a new toaster?”

“Not at all, sure our toaster isn’t broken, is it?”

“No, but if we had a second one, in the morning it’d be faster.”

“Aragh, go away outta that.  Two toasters!” he twists his head hard.  “Sure people’d think we’re mad.  Now, get on about yer business.”

I turn to get back to the boredom of cleaning the church.

The little Traveller fella is still wrangling with Big Ears over the toaster.

“Now, yaz’ll all haf to come back dis afternoon, when we’re sellin’ de tellies.  Tell yer neighbours an’ aunts an’ uncles an’ everyone ta cum break open der piggy banks.  Big sale dis afternoon on Japaneeze telly…visions.  Yaz won’t believe de prices!”

Wrong Way

I’m in the front passenger seat of a black Jaguar barreling west on Interstate 20 East in Dallas. 

Next to me in the well between the cream pleather seats is an almost empty bag of weed, a bottle of Chivas Regal – half full or empty, depending on your outlook on what appears to be increasingly tentative life – and a sandwich baggy jammed with cubes of cheese. 

The driver’s stubby fingers fumbling for cheese every few minutes has smudged the sandwich bag’s clean, clear plastic.  The sound of that sandwich baggy rustling is worse than the relentlessness of lightning-bright headlights bearing down on us.

An eighteen-wheeler’s bank of headlights screams towards us, shifts suddenly, the cab shuddering, the headlights vibrating.  The truck changes lanes, horn blaring raucously, the windshield flashing past us in a second is full of the truck driver’s shaking fist, angry face.

“What’s he’s problem?  Aint he got no sense a humor?” snaps our driver, a sixty something-hard-years-old woman, as she slaps the steering wheel impatiently.  

“An’ don’t y’all Eye-Rish boys even think a takin’ none a ma cheese.  I o’ny eats it fer ma dia…beteez.  I could swoon like a damsel in dis…tress if an’ I didn’t have ma cheese.”

From the back seat, there’s the metallic clink of Jimmy Mc struggling to open a bottle of beer using the safety belt buckle.

“Fucking Brits!” he sighs.  “A Caddy’s safety belt opens a beer every time, like it’s a rule!  They probly got some fat fuck with a case of Schlitz in the Cadillac plant testin’ the belt buckles.  Imagine havin’ that job?”

“This is a high…class vehicle,” the driver says.  “Y’all kin on’y drink real liquor in here, none a that pisswater beer you Eurotrash lik… .”

“Hey, we gotta get offa this highway,” Jimmy Mc interrupts, his words coming fast.  “I’m getting’ a bad vibe.  A car just went past us the wrong way – fast!”

I turn my head slowly to see just how fucked up the back seat is: Jimmy Mc’s got a forced grin sprayed across his face; his eyes, dissolved into the grin-stretch, are suspended in drug and alcohol manufactured reality.

“We’ll be awright,” the driver sighs, I hear the baggy rustle again. 

“We’s on’y goin’ one exit.”

Next to Jimmy Mc, Cormac is seated Buddha; his face fully statued; nothing moves but his eyes; they dart around the inside of the car to the baggy full of cheese, the Jag’s cream pleather seats, the back of the driver’s head, my eyes: Anything to avoid looking at the terror that is the windshield.

“Y’all sure aint big on scotch.  I guess it’s t’Eye-Rish in y’all – drinkin’ gallons a that black shit all day.”

Hearing the bottle chaff out of the center console’s pleather, the scotch lapping around inside, I spin back to the oncoming headlights. 

“Down worry,” she snaps, like a child frustrated with their parent.  “I aint gonna drive n’ drink, that shit’s dange…rus.”

I turn my head to stare at her.  All evening this retired English Professor from some Dallas university has moved with an energy that belies her stiff-necked stoop, the lemon-with-legs physique, the heavy limp, the grey-blue bags billowing under her eyes.  Something inside this woman, forty plus years our senior, burns crazy hot to keep her locomoting.

“When y’all is driving, y’all drives; an’ when y’all is drinking, y’all drinks; don’t mix ‘em up.  Thems ma rules.  Martine Johnson, the stoopid bitch, kilt herself breakin’ ma rules.  Cum right outta the liquor store but could she wait?  No she could not!  Opened that vodka right the fuck up, takes a swig, an’ then driv straight through the liquor store winda.  She never could figure out her ‘R’s’ from her ‘D’s!’”

She cackles, her head bobbing.

“Damn near killed the poor Injun ahind the counter, who never shoulda sold a drunk lady a quart a vodka.  Anyhoo, now I aint got no one for Tuesdahs n’ Wednesdahs night.  Selfish bitch.”

She shakes her wrinkly chins and turns to stare back at me.

I shake my twenty-three-year-old head that’s thinking it’s never going to see twenty-four and point forcefully at the highway.

Her face turns back to the oncoming traffic.  

“What is it with people not drinkin’ hard liquor no more?” she asks, like she’s a teaching a class of fifty students and not doing fifty miles an hour in the wrong direction on an Interstate Highway. 

“A coupley a weeks back, I had this tiler dude cum over.  I had ta git the shower wall fixed where all I fell the night a Dolores’ husband’s memorial service. Now that was a night!”

She lifts her right hand off the steering wheel and magically waves the knowledge of Dolores, her dead husband and his sendoff party into our minds. 

“That dude, a little fat Armenian, he wuz kinda cute too, he didn’t want nuthin’ ta drink but C’rona!  No scotch, no bourbon, nuthin’ I had in ma Armageddon survival cab’net.  I had ta git m’ass on down ta Thrace in the liquor store ta git some C’rona. What’s the world a comin’ ta?  Armenians drinking Mexican beer, fixing Eye…talian tiles, n’ chargin’ like they’s Philadelphia lawyers.”

She cackles, her chins jiggling as she slows the Jag and effects a remarkably calm U turn.   

In our irrationally rational manner, we exit up the On Ramp.  Five minutes earlier, we had simply, if erroneously, drove from a city street onto the Off Ramp, the mind-altering substances altering our minds had discounted the multiple red signs screaming WRONG WAY. 

Now exiting off the On Ramp, a silver Toyota Camry rounding the jug handle, sees us coming but, likely caught up with processing the licentiousness of it all, only swerves onto the grass at the last moment to avoid a head on collision. 

Horn blaring, the terror in the driver’s face is fixating, almost thrilling.

“What in hell’s her problem?” our driver snaps.  “Aint she never seen no one git offa a highway the wrong way?”

 “Fucken weirdo,” Jimmy Mc sighs, ambiguously.

At the top of the ramp, our surprising entry onto the four-lane street elicits a symphony of car and truck horns.  Heads shake vigorously; faces sneer; fingers flip. 

Yet for all our Wrong Way navigation, there’s nary a sign of the famed Texas

Rangers, nor even a single obese, donut-stained Dallas cop.  They’re probly all still on that big case from thirty years back, in ‘63: The one where they let the President get shot, then let his supposed shooter get shot.  In fairness, they’re big on shooting in Texas.

Back in the boringly conventional regular flow of traffic, our driver finally succumbs to stress and hands me the bottle of Chivas Regal.

“I’m fine,” I say, deliberately stupidly.

“I don’t give a hot damn what you is,” spit flies from her mouth onto the windshield.  “I need y’all ta open that goddam bottle fer me.”

“Oohhhh,” I delay, my not yet entirely wired brain wondering what could go wrong?  I mean we just did a few miles wrong way on an Interstate Highway in a major urban area, how could a few swigs of scotch on a mere four lane city street make a difference?

“Cops,” I hear my voice lie.

“Where?” Jimmy Mc barks and I sense his head and shoulders spinning as he tenses up in the back seat.

That’s Jimmy Mc.  Still persecuted by a bad beating the cops gave him as a college kid.

“I don’t see no pigs nowhere,” our driver says, fumbling for the cheese bag.  “Anyhoo, we’re almost there.  Y’all are gonna love this ….”

“Youghal is in Cork,” Cormac says from the depths of his brain.

There’s a momentary confused if not embarrassed silence in the Jag. 

“What in the Sam Hill is he a blabbin’ about?” she says, eyeing the scotch still held in my hands.

“Youghal, it’s a little town below in Cork,” Cormac says, edifyingly.  “It’s the last place the Titanic crashed before stoppin’ inta the iceberg.”

I think I see three Irish flags whip past the corner of my eye, but distrusting my thinking and eye corners, instead, I let my mind jump to an imagined scene of the big Cathedral in Youghal and all the people from Lahardane kneeling at the altar, saying a prayer before they head off on the Titanic for a new life.

“Goddammit!” the driver snaps, spit flying onto the windshield.  “I missed the bar.  Y’all confused me, a talkin’ about sunken ships an’ us tin thousand miles from t’ocean.”

I brace myself, figuring that a missed turn for this lady is just a chance to show the world how she deals with turns that miss.

The Jag’s front wheels wallop into the curb! 

Up over the sidewalk we go, head, shoulders, teeth jostling.  The chrome Jaguar hood ornament looks like it is finally getting to launch itself onto some prey – which, perhaps disappointingly for a big-cat carnivore is the green, white, and red storefront of Ileana’s Taqueria.  

With the power of suggestion for a brain under the control of a stomach full of beer, I start to crave carbs.  But there’ll be no stopping for sustenance: Eatin’ is cheatin’ when you’re on an alcohol search and devour mission!

She screeches the Jag around in front of the Taqueria’s few parking spaces, barely missing a big old Caddy, and for consistency’s sake, slams back over the curb before we trundle along slowly a mere half block in the wrong direction before pulling into the lot in front of the TOOMEVARA INN Irish Bar and Restaurant.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  It’s jus’ like the old countree here,” she waves at the three Irish flags, the white sign with crossed hurling sticks at either end of the name. 

“Least n’ what I seen a t’old countree in a bar up in Boston.”

 The front tires thud off a concrete wheel stop, jolting everyone in the Jag forward, but the gods of cars-crashing-into-buildings, whom we know to disapprove of our current actions, are sleeping and the Jag comes to a stop.

“Onliest problem in here is that they mos’ly jus’ drink beer.  How cum everythin’ that’s hard in this world is a left up ta wymen, huh?  Child bearin’ n’ raisin’, cleanin’ up y’all’s mess when y’all spray the mall with machine gun fire, n’ doin’ the real drinkin’,” she cackles again, the bags around her eyes narrowing. 

“God mighta made the world awright, but he didn’t have no gud advice ‘til wymen cum along.  Y’all think that dope Adam n’ his murd’ring, kiss-ass sons woulda tol’ him hows ta git shit done?” she shakes her chins and reaches for the cheese bag.

“Nope, we’d still be ploddin’ round in animal skins if an’ it was up to them dopes. Cum on, I’m a gittin’ thirsty.”

She goes to push open the door, realizes the engine’s still running, turns the key, but leaves it in the ignition, and starts into the elaborate ceremony of extracting herself from the bucket seat.

Jimmy Mc, Cormac and I burst outta the car.  I resist the Popish move of kissing the asphalt paving of the TOOMEVARA INN parking lot. We stand shaken in the green neon halo of the bar’s sign, watching and listening as she lurches and grunts her way out of the car.

 “Shud we give her a hand?” I ask, naively.

 “Not unless y’all want ta wake up beside her tamorrow,” Jimmy Mc grins mischievously.  “Listen, when we git in here, I’m orderin’ a beer, a burger, an’ a cab in twenny minutes at the back door.  Don’t let that Texas grass totally screw yer brain.  Pay attention in here an’ follow me, or youuuuu … may regret it.”

  Still grinning, he raises his bushy eyebrows high, breaks from the huddle and stalks towards our driver.

  “You all right Prof?” he asks warmly.  “Here, here, let me give ya a hand, watch them stoopid concrete trip-over things.  I don’t why they bother with ‘em, it’s not like we think it’s a drive-in bar.  Now that’s a good ….”

Inside, the bar is too bright, forcing me to blink rapidly as I hold my right hand out in front like it’s a magical shield for my over-dilated eyes.  I force my eyes closed and stop moving, imagining myself going face first over a low table.

“… join ya for a bourbon, fer sure I will,” Jimmy Mc’s conspiratorial intonation weaves its way into my consciousness.

Now’d be a good time to slip away, I think.  Ah fuck it, I need a drink to calm me nerves.

“Bourbon, now that’s the honey-colored liquid they make up in Heaven – right?  I think I mighta had some a that before … like two million times!”

Behind Jimmy Mc’s hiss-spitting laugh, I hear the gimped scrape of the Prof’s shoe across the tiled floor.

Nothing stops people like the Prof and Jimmy Mc.  Every day they drink a river of booze and still walk away from the mangled metal that was the car they just launched into a wall.  They don’t fall down steps and break their neck, drown in their own vomit, or step out in front of the onrushing bus.  Somewhere, somehow along the way they’ve made a deal with the fates that trades the often shitty but always real effort of living for the oblivion of terminal soothing.

They shuffle past me to the bar as my vision portals finally resume regular, shitty but real duty.

I look up but don’t believe my eyes are in fact actually working.  After the umpteenth plus one hard rub of the knuckles against the eyeballs, I look up again and the sight is still there: Three big mustached, double-chinned barmen, hands on hips, their ample guts stretching blue and yellow Tipperary hurling jerseys.

Slowly a penny drops: Toomevara … Tipperary … hurling.

“See,” the Prof spins around fast, taunting gravity, her hands flapping at the walls covered with Tipperary jerseys in glass cases, crossed hurls, sliotars, photographs of Tipperary teams, on the myriad shelves is the contents of some Irish shop’s going-out-of-business sale.

“Seeeee, I tol’ y’all this is a real Eye…rish place,” she nods and approaches a bar stool in the manner a wrestler approaches an opponent.

“This fine young lady’ll have a Wild Turkey.  Sit yer tooshie down there princess,” Jimmy Mc taps a bar stool.  

“An’ I’ll have a very laaarge Old Forester.  I am one lucky man.  Lucky to be still a…live.”

He raises his eyebrows, forces his cheeks down, widening his eye sockets, as he nods towards the Prof attempting to wrestle her way into supremacy over the barstool.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask no one and everyone.

“The feller with y’alls?” the youngest barman asks but doesn’t wait for a reply.  “He walked straight through.  I hope he aint puking.  We gots a bathroom fer that.”

“Oooohhhhh,” I answer slowly, again I survey the bar.

My survey catches a dimly lit hallway.

I turn to the barman, who nods before I can ask.

Back at the bar a few minutes later, my biological needs met, my eyes roam over everything, but my tongue is uncharacteristically reluctant for work.

“Y’all is athletes?” the youngest of the three barmen asks Jimmy Mc, knitting his eyebrows together.  “Even the Rangers don’t drink like y’all do, an’ they’s just sittin’ on their fat asses all day watchin’ one millionaire after ‘nother swing a bat.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t be drinkin’ like this if we had a rugby game tomorrow,” Jimmy Mc says.  “No, no, no.  We’d be drinkin’ much harder!”

He throws his head and shoulders back to guffaw and slips off the stool, only to be saved once again by the fates as his left leg magically cuts through the stool and shoots out to stop his fall.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask again, a tug of team anxiety distracting my distraction.

“He aint out back, I mean, he wen’ out back, but he aint theres no more,” the barman says.  “He didn’t puke nor nuthin, I checked.  Pat don’t like it when people go out back ta puke.  Makes us look bad ta the Mexicalas.”

“Ooohhh,” is all I can muster.

“Here get this gud for nuthin a drink,” Jimmy Mc slaps my arm with the back of his hand.  “What’ll ya have?”

“Bud,” I manage to get out.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  He’s a drinkin’ cat’s piss, when they gots a fiiii…ne callection a whiskey here.  That Pat guy, he knows he’s whiskey, gotta hand that ta him.  How cum y’all got yerself a good bourbon but only got me a Turkey?”

She strikes Jimmy Mc on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

“I possess a delicate pallet madame,” Jimmy Mc flashes his mischievous grin.

The barman places a pint of Budweiser on the counter.

I watch the bubbles stream up from nowhere inside the glass.

“Sit down!” the Prof barks at me.  “Yer a makin’ me nervous.”

“How’d y’all know one another?” an older barman asks, almost suspiciously, pulling at the collar of his Tipperary shirt.

“I met ‘em all in a bar is how I know em, they was playin’ cricket or some faggy Euro sport like that,” the Prof grabs her shot glass.  “How in the hell else’s a soul a supposed to meet any one these days?  Aint like people down at church is gonna go fer a drink with y’all.”

I lean forward, finding it hard to get enough oxygen to think.

Through the golden yellow of the Budweiser, the red EXIT sign at the rear shimmers in the beer’s bubbles.

 “You got a burger back there,” Jimmy Mc asks, spinning his now half full glass of bourbon.

 “No sir, kitchen’s closed.  It closed at midnight, chef took off circa twelve oh one.”

 “Goddammit, give a bag a chips.”

 “You aint eatin’ no chips an’ gittin in ma Jag…war,” the Prof sneers.  “Chips smells like ass.  I don’t want no ass smell in ma car.  What if ma grandkids git in there tamorrow?”

 She kinda-sorta throws both hands up.

 This time the fates, no doubt exhausted, abandon her to gravity and backwards off the stool she starts to slide, her little, crazy head arcing towards the floor.  But Jimmy Mc, still loved by the fates, moves fast and his right arm shoots out and catches her torso.

 “We keep meeting like this princess,” his mischievousness is never more than a scratch away, “an’ we’re gonna have ta get a room.”

“Git yer fucken hands offa me,” she spit-snaps.

In the confusion of their confusion, I turn and walk out the front door.

In Ilheana’s Taqueria I load up on a little chicken wrapped in a lot of carbs.

The lady at the counter is friendly and chatty.  There’s no other customers but she stays open until 2:00AM and gets bored.  After a few minutes talking and waiting while a singing chef makes my meal, she says:

“So you notta like the crazy Eye-reesha guys cum in Sunday nights, one aholdin’ t’other.  Then a punchin’ start.”

She holds up both fists like a prizefighter.

“No, … no,” I say wondering how to react.

I take a deep breath.

“Can you get me a taxi?” I ask.  “‘Cause there is a couple a crazies next door who will prolly end up in here.”

At some point, post taco-devouring, a taxi pulls up out front. 

Two blocks away, I see Cormac lean-slipping against a light pole, his thumb wavering at the oncoming traffic.

“Here, here, stop for that fella.”

“You sure?  He aint gonna git sick all over my cab is he?” the black driver askes threateningly.  In the two blocks he’s already told me he just moved down from New York with his girlfriend, he hates it here cause the only work he can find is “driving this shitass taxi, shippin’ crackers round this shitass town.”

“No, no,” I try to sound convincing.  “He’s just tired is all.  It’s ben a busy day.”

He pulls over. 

“Here ya fucken moron,” I yell out the window. 

“Ye goin’ ta Youghal?” Cormac throws out, his head rising, making him stagger backwards into the light pole.  His shoulder blades grip the concrete pole to steady himself.  

“No it’s Cobh,” I yell back.

His eyes seem to register recognition.

The taxi driver’s head spins from Cormac to me; his face scrunching up anxiously.

Cormac’s head droops forward, his face limp, but his eyes are content.

“It’s Cobh anyways.  That was where the people from Lahardane were praying before getting’ on the Titanic, not Youghal.”

“What sort a shite are you talken?” Cormac manages, stumbling towards the taxi. 

“Ah, ya had me goin’ there for a bit is all.  I was going the wrong way.”

Give Unto Caesar

I’m leaning both elbows on the piles of paper on the tax preparer’s desk, craning my neck to see what’s on his computer screen.

“See, it’s the damn depreciation that’s killing ya,” he snaps, violently jerking the screen more toward me, his eyes, deep in his pink face, flaring with misdirected anger. 

“Nuthin’ I can do.  You were happy enough ta claim the depreciation all them years ya owned the property, now the rooster’s comin’ home to chic…, anyways.” 

He shakes his head, his chins quivering.

“Always remember the silver rule!”

He aims his fleshy forefinger at a sheet of white paper, taped at a slight angle to the wall, upon which are printed the words:

GIVE UNTO CEASAR THAT WHICH BELONGS TO CEASAR

“You know, from the bible, Roman’s Thirty-Three or sumptin.  God said it, right?” his thin, grey-white eyebrows shoot up in disbelief.  “Funny enough it wuz the Romans that wrote it down.  An’ now, with all these people havin’ ta give unto Caesar, I ben in this chair ten hours a day for the last three months, tappin’ this damn computer keyboard so’s our Caesar can get his slice of our pie – right?”

He breaths out heavily, his pink-red cheeks billowing and sneers up at a large, framed photograph of George W. Bush hung high on the wall gazing over the six desks in the open office area.

Two desks down the row from my depreciation problem, a couple ease into their seats, ushered there by the worn tan-tweed arm of a skinny, smug-faced, sixty-something tax preparer.  He fake-starts to get out of the chair, but never executes, instead his thick-dyed hair and bushy-eye-browed head swivel over and back in his chair as his customers settle.

“Let me see yer shirt,” he leans forward fast, waving his hand at the couple’s twelve-ish year-old boy in a bottle-green, Heineken tee shirt with a graphic of a string-bikini clad, pole-dancing young woman of the proportions leeringly enjoyed by us twelve-year-olds of all ages.

“Verrry … good, verrry art…istic,” he purses his smug lips, nodding his head repeatedly. 

“They have great stuff these days, don’t they?” he continues to stare at the puckered lips of the Heineken woman frozen into a cleavage revealing forward fold off her pole.  “When I was a kid, it was just all Playboy and Hustler.  Very harsh stuff, not classy like that.”

He shakes his head slowly a few times, then settles his eye on the actual, forty-something year-old woman still in a heavy winter jacket sitting across from him.

“Missus Dam…browski!” he makes as if he’s trying to stand, but instead just leans both his hands over the metal desk toward her.  “You are looking radiant today, just rad…iant.  You’re fooling mother nature somehow and getting younger every year.”

He holds her hand in both of his, flicking his eyes over and back from wife to husband.  The woman’s arm, torso and head stay rigid.  The boy’s eyes dart from his parents to the tax preparer. 

“Now, now, now.  Tell that husband of yours to keep his pistol holstered.  It’s actually a compliment to him that he has acquired and retained such a beauuut…tiful female.”

My own tax preparer puffs out his splotchy cheeks as he wrestles with his computer screen which obstinately resists getting evenly reset amidst the mountains of the paper on the desk.

“So, you see why ye’re paying this year, right?  I just wanted you to know it aint my fault, that’s all.  It’s give unto Caesar season, that’s alllll!” he yanks the base of his computer screen until it knocks a pile of manilla folders onto the floor.

My head involuntarily recoils at the clap of paper hitting the floor.

“Don’t worry,” he says on an exasperated outbreath, eyes staring at me from deep in the folds of puffy-red skin.  “It’s just on a floor excursion, get it?”

He smiles quickly, then reverts to his scowl.

“You know, like my desk is a cruise ship an’ all these files are the passengers, get it?” he stares at me, not getting it, but continues anyway.  “I guess May 15 can’t get here fast enough.  That’s the day I’ll be back on the Queen of the Mississippi, around sixish I’ll be in a lounger on deck, sipping a Manhattan, all a these damn files stuck back here in Boston.”

He swivels his chair, and angling his head sidewards, looks down at the “floor excursion” file.

“Ahhh, Mar...tin McGonigle’s … 2004 filing.  I wondered where that got to!”

He reaches his hand quixotically toward it, stops, shakes his head.

“At least now I know where to find it.  A refile, funny how that happens sometimes.  You know life can make people forgetful.  So, Mister McGonigle here, ‘forgot’,” he raises both pudgy forefingers, “to tell me the, not so inconsequential, fact that in May of 2004 … he got himself divorced!  An’ it weren’t pretty!”

He keeps up his stare, and I resolve not to forget any inconsequential facts.

A buzzing vibration on the desk finally makes him divert those truth-rendering eyes.  He sets both pink-splotchy-skinned hands on the piles of paper, a thick wedding ring strangling his ring finger, an enormous gold-and-black mound of a graduation ring wedged halfway down his right pinky finger.

“I’ll find it, don’t worry.  It can hide, but it can’t run,” he says to no one, his eyes roving over the piles of paper.

Then, with catlike speed and dexterity, his right-hand darts into a pile of paper and retrieves a purple flip-phone.

“My wife’s,” he says. 

He holds the phone up between his thumb and forefinger, twisting his head a little abashedly.  The purple phone continues to vibrate, shaking his fat fingers.

“I don’t own one.  Don’t believe in ‘em,” he keeps the phone dangling as he stares across the desk at me.  “She makes me take it now.  I say call the office if I’m at the office.  If I’m in Stop and Shop or Sears, then you’re S.O.L..  Just leave a message at the office or, … or, God forbid you could wait ‘til I got home – right?”

As he’s monologuing, the phone ceases its buzzing momentarily, then immediately starts up again.

“Now if I said I’m goin’ ta work, why not call the office?  It’s cheaper for one thing, every minute on this stoopid thing costs me a few cents.  Plus, it sounds weird.  Sounds like she’s ben kidnapped by Whitey, an’ she’s callin’ me from a warehouse in Chelsea to negotiate the ransom.”

He breaks his stare to look at the vibrating phone.

“I should be so lucky.  At least ta pick ‘er up, I could swing by Buzzy’s for a roast beef sub.”

He takes the phone in both hands, and yanks it open violently.

“Don’t you know I’m at work!” his words rattle off over the jabber emitting from the phone. 

He jams the purple telephonic device tight against the side of his face, creating a white shadowing imprint on his red cheek. 

“I’m with a very important client who has major depreciation issues, we’re halfways through his Schedule C, an’ now I have lose where I am ‘cause you’re callin’!  This better be worth the fifteen cents it’s gonna cost me!”

I sit back, averting my eyes up to the dust-stained white tiles of the drop ceiling, embarrassed to witness a phone-fight between this man and his no-longer-so-beloved spouse.

“That’s a beautiful weapon,” the tax preparer, two desks down, says so loudly it penetrates my newly-discovered-very-importance. 

He’s leaning over the desk again, both hands clasped around an imaginary pistol.

“It don’t hardly got no kick, requires very little cleaning – though I love cleaning my weapons.  It’s my favorite thing to do.  Fill up a big glass of a scotch, head down the basement an’ clean ma guns.  There’s nuthin’ better in this world.”

He moves his right hand to his lips, kisses the tips of this fingers and shoots the hand up in the air.

“What could possibly be better?  Right?” he beams at the husband.  “No one else’s allowed down there but me.  Can’t have untrained people around guns.  It’s just me, my weapons, … and my scotch.”

He shakes his head slowly.

The couple across the desk from him sit tight shouldered.  Their son, and the voluptuous pole-dancer wrapped around his torso, stand impatiently; the boy moves from one foot to the other; the woman pouts and flashes cleavage with each of his movements.  Unconcerned with his audience’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, the tax preparer continues:

  “Once upon a time, before the … you know,” he sits up erect in his chair and looks around, almost catching me paying too much attention. 

“The …,” he wipes the back of his fingers down his cheek, raises his eyebrows knowingly, “started gettin’ … you know access to weapons an’ shootin’ the sh… daylights outta one another.  Back before that I useta have a mini range down there.  I mean wasn’t nuthin’ like you’d go to ….”

He aims his forefinger at the husband.

“Nuthin’ perfessional like the Hyannis police department’d have.  Just …” he circles his hand rapidly, “you know some old carboard boxes from Purity Supreme ta help with the sound, an’ I’d shoot into a pile a sand my brother-in-law brought over from the public works yard on Hancock Street.  But it was ok.”

He nods sagaciously. 

“Course I was a younger man then, an’ I didn’t get too-too upset if some rookie cop come by with questions.  All the regular officers down Gibson Street knew when they got a ‘shots fired’ 911 from our street, that it was just me target practicin’.  They probly apperciated havin’ a sharpshooter in the neighborhood, in case … you know … things started up.”

He rubs the back of his fingers down his cheek again, raises both his bushy eyebrows and nods knowingly.

The husband’s right hand rises to his face.  He turns slightly sideways, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

I can’t see their faces to read what their eyes might be saying.

Their son props both his hands on the desk and leans forward staring too intensely at the tax preparer.

The purple flip-phone snaps closed in front of me, pulling me back to my new-found-importance.

“That was great, four dimes an’ a nickel to find out my sister-in-law’s blood pressure is up again, ‘cause her toenail fungus is back.”

He stops for a breath, staring so hard at me all time that I feel implicated in his sister-in-law’s toenail fungus outbreak.

“So now, after work I have to drive alllll … the way to Weymouth, pick up Anita an’ her toenail fungus, an’ that busted blood pressure measurin’ thing she bought mail order from Cala…forni…yah.”

He stops for a breath on the stately flourish, but his accusing eyes never leave my fast-diminishing-importance.

“That godda… piece a medical junk should be thrown in the trash … or the re…cy…cling bin.  Have ya seen the latest?  Now Tom Menino’s tellin’ us what to do with our trash.  Like that’s cons…tit…tutional!”

He tries to slap his hand off the desk, but just hits a tall pile of paper sending a few sheets skidding off.  As he’s deliberating whether he’ll retrieve the floor excursion sheets, the purple phone starts to buzz again.  He snaps it open and jams it up to his face, eyes blazing.

“WHAT IS IT NOW?”

Two tables down the wife starts to flick her head around for a second, then turns back.  Now feeling associative guilt, I let my eyes rove all over the stained ceiling, the calendars on the wall, furtively looking for a window to look, or jump, out.

Failing that, I resort to eyes-to-the-ceiling eavesdropping.

“Now for this young man, I’d suggest a Kel Tec 32.  A bee…uuu…tiful gun!”  

I can’t stop my eyes from darting down to see his face folding in on itself to reinforce his statement; bushy eyebrows crushing down to meet his smushed up lips.

“Now the Kel Tec’s gotta ah…luminum body, verrrr…ry light, even a young man, … a kid really, if you don’t mind my sayings so, can hold this gun.  Now it does have a kick,” he adds speaking fast, leaning forward toward the parents, his best serious-sales pitch visage in place. 

“Just like any pistol.  It’s gotta have a kick – right dad?  You’ve shot enough guns to know that the kick is the kick.  The bullet demands a kick, right, … right?”

He nods, purses his lips together.

“It’s natural law or chemistry or God’s law, whatever, … one a them put the kick in there and kick it does.  We’re not getting rid of the kick anytime soon.  Not even Teddy Kennedy an’ his liberal fiends down DC can get rid of the kick, right?  That’s what I call ‘em, ‘fiends;’ not friends but ‘fiends.’  They’re no friends a the ‘Merican people.”

He laughs a mirthless laugh and stares at his nonmoving clients.  His eyes flick to the boy who’s staring at a poster on the wall of a soldier lying prone on a lonely rock outcrop, shooting his rifle down at a blurry enemy.  Above the lithographic image, in black, bolded letters stands the name: WINCHESTER.

“But here’s the thing.  You can get the Kel Tec customized with a beautiful knurled ivory handle, see it’s actually ….”

He stops talking, his lips still formed around a seemingly unspeakable word; face set perfectly still; a slightly anxious look developing in his eyes as they dart from father to mother and back again.

“It’s really, or it … was, well it was designed for … ladies.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how crazy the world is now.  Mom needs a pistol in her pocketbook ta go down ta the market for a gallon a milk.  Ya see it was invented for a lady’s purse.  That’s why it’s nice an’ light, an’ why it’s pretty too.  Female ladies do love pretty stuff – don’t you sweeties!”

He fake reaches out with his left hand, as if it was long enough to pat the mother on the shoulder.

“But now we’ve retooled it so it’s good for teenagers too, for young men.  Ya know, ta get them inta the game early.  It’s like smoking, it’s something that ya start young an’ it stays with ya through life.  Like it should, like God wants it ta be.  Course, just like smokin’ it drives them liberals outta their minds.”

“Bartek aint gonna be smokin’ nuthin’,” the father speaks harshly, wagging his index finger towards his son. 

“I can tell ya that, not unless he wants ta go outta the woodshed fer a gud old-fashioned Pappa Dambrowski style hidin’!”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.  That’s what my father useta say … and do!” the tax preparer shakes his head, raising his thick eyebrows.  “Aint that the truth.  But now them whacko liberals’ll try to take him away from you if ya cuff him in public!”

“I don’t worry ‘bout that stuff,” the father says.  “Now, let’s get to ours taxes.”

“Sure, sure.  But, I’ll tell ya what.  With the refund I’m gonna find you, you really should think about getting a Kel Tec for the boy here.  They make them in black now.  I guess they found black ivory, maybe from an albino elephant ‘r sumptin, you know, the genes got everything backwards.  Or ya know I think it’s actually from a black rhino.  There’s a few a them left, I think.  But ya better go fast, we might have them almost extincted!”

The purple flip-phone snaps closed yanking me back to my reality of depreciation to be paid unto Caesar.

“Oh, it’s ok,” he puts on the fakest of fake smiles.  “Turns out I don’t need ta drive to Weymouth after all.  Anita’s stayin’ at a friend’s house in Rockland.”

He grits his teeth, eyes narrowing. 

“Even further away, more time for me in the car with her an’ her toenail fungus!”

He breaths out loudly and looks away down at the floor in the walk aisle.

“Are we good so?” I ask timorously looking to end my marital-strife and gun-madness agony.  “Or … not so good. I suppose like everything in life, depreciation catches up to you.”

“No, no, no, hang on one minute,” he says, opening a drawer in the desk and ceremoniously dropping the phone inside, slamming the drawer closed.

“I aint been dealin’ with Uncle Sam for thirty years ta give up that easy.  We might have ta give Caesar what’s his,” he flicks his eyes up at George W’s smarmy smile, again narrowing his eyes, gritting his teeth. 

“But I’ll be God…damned if I aint the one decidin’ what belongs to Caesar!”

Cutting Free

I’m sitting shirtless on a tall kitchen stool, a blue towel, fixed in place by a black and silver binder clip, draped across my shoulders, Maria’s fingers brushing gently through my hair.  Her soft fingertips glide across my scalp, dissolving the stress that somehow makes a home in the concealed confusion of skull, wiry muscle, skin and hair.  

My eyelids flicker under the pleasure of intimacy.

“Who knew,” my voice, that can’t tolerate silences of longer than ten seconds, says, “that it would take a plague for us to discover that haircuts can be the ultimate in relaxation?” 

“I don’t think women needed a pandemic to make that discovery,” Maria says with an assured chuckle.

“And by the way,” she continues, “why is one sideburn half an inch higher than the other.”

“Oh, that’s to ward off the devil, apparently he loves left sideburns, so says Saint Martin de Porres, Patron Saint of Barbers,” I lie outrageously.  

“Or maybe it’s actually because when I’m shaving my right-hand deals more severely with the left side of my face than its own side?” I experiment with the truth. 

“Aahhh,” Maria says, nodding.  “Some consciously unconscious bias?”

I reclose my eyes, force a silence on the interminable voice in my brain, and try to simply enjoy the feeling of my overgrown hair being gently ruffled, my scalp massaged.

“What number do you usually ask for with the shears?” Maria asks.

“I can never remember, but the one that takes off the least amount of hair.” 

My tortured philosophie-de-coiffure is based upon the, entirely fallacious, theory that a haircut should result with the absolute least amount of hair being removed.  Using this theory, I seek to move safely through life under the powerful cloak of the anonymity-of-sameness.   

It all started fifty gone-by-in-the-blink-of-an-eye years ago, with me as a “wee lad” sitting anxiously in a wooden children’s chair set on top of our kitchen table.  Ma drapes a raggedy blue towel over my shoulders, fixing it in place with a wooden, grayed by a million Mayo showers, clothes pin.  

Next to me, now at eye level, Ruairi, our budgerigar, flutters his yellow wings, the underside flashing sickly-white, his black eyes, flat in his head, staring at me anxiously: A five-year-old that near to his cage usually meant some sort of poking devilment.  

Da scrapes the chair, with me in it, across the gray-white Formica tabletop, dragging my overgrown head of hair closer to his right hand, in which he holds a terrifyingly sharp-pointy scissors.  He warms the scissors up, snip-snip-snipping the air.

“Now don’t be shifting yer head around,” he snaps, cranky with his monthly task of cutting a lot of little children’s hair.

He leans in; the sharp point of the scissors’ blade, seemingly, going directly for my left eyeball.

My five-year-old instincts kick in: Involuntarily my head recoils.

“STOP IT!” he yells, full on angry now.  “I told ya not ta move!”

Thereafter it was, seemingly, hours of ears reddened by painful scissors-nicks; clipped hair drifting easefully beneath the clothes-pinned-towel, to transform my nylon, collared shirt – there were no other kind of little boys’ shirts available in the west of Ireland, 1969 – into the most afflicting hairshirt available since the Spanish Inquisition.  

But the scariest of the scary tools in Da’s tortu…, I mean barbering kit was the hand operated shears.  

From our vantage point in 2021, a mere hundred years after the electric shears was first patented, we take it for granted that when hair needs to be effortlessly mown, an electric motor driven shears can be found buried at the back of a bathroom drawer.  But in 1969, as I was hoisted up into that chair on top of the kitchen table, such engineering advances had not yet made their way into Da’s red, black and yellow barber’s toolkit.  

These hand shears, operated by untrained digits that fatigued easily, quickly transformed themselves into torture devices.  A dilletante barber’s hand, failing to maintain the RPM required to sever individual hair filaments, would instead snag a hefty scraw of hair in the shears, jamming it from any possible further movement.  Thereafter, the disjunction of shears, hair and scalp resulted in such pain that even today, retelling this experience, I still sense the memory in my gut and cannot suppress the grimace.  

Yet somehow the pain and humiliation – every other child, seemingly, going to a barber shop like regular humans – of kitchen barbering all paled in comparison to the outcome of this homesteading endeavor: The actual haircut.

Da did three types of haircut: Fierce bad, ferocious, and worsest ever.

Humans have many delusions that distinguish them, unfavorably, from the other mammals that root around on this planet, but perhaps humanity’s obsession with self-image is the least favorable of these distinctions.  Thus, for my five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven-year-old self, dragging myself out of the kitchen barbering chair and walking out onto the mean streets Castlebar – which had, seemingly, been devoid of all sense of style right up until I reappeared after being yell-summoned in for a scalping –remains with me as a memory of both enormous courage and humiliation.

The courage came from the resigned acceptance that there was no other option but to present yourself to the judging world of human society as it played on those streets.  

The humiliation was entirely created by my mind, deluded by that same human society into thinking that self-image actually mattered.

It wasn’t until I was just barely twelve-years-old that I summoned up the real courage to break with the tyranny of Da’s monthly administered, embarrassingly bad, and always way-too-short haircut.  

One weekday, in the middle of a school shutdown caused by a six-inch fall of snow a few days previously, I sloshed through the now melting snow up toward barbers.  In my pocket were three pound notes liberated from Ma’s purse, still in the kitchen drawer where she had left it eleven months ago the day a stroke took her first to the kitchen floor, then the hospital, and finally to a grave, forty miles away, in Leitrim.  

Da used the purse as a piggybank where he deposited milk and bread money.  On this day, I made the unauthorized executive decision that the family could go low on carbohydrates, animal fats and protein so that I could get a haircut that was presentable in the major aspect that it left my hair long, … or at least longish.

As I sloshed along the entirely un-shoveled, un-plowed (the nearest snowplow was a thousand miles away in Germany) streets in my black Addidas sneakers – self-image trumping dry feet – I realized I had to make a decision: To which of the three barbers in town would I entrust the oxymoronic task of cutting my hair long?

            There was Kelly’s Barbershop, but he was old school and would surely cut my hair short, regardless of what I asked for.  Mick Quinn’s on Main Street was of the same ilk, and Da talked to him, probably went there himself.  It was only then that it occurred to me that this was an important fact I didn’t know: Where did Da go to get his hair cut torturously short?  Oddly enough I knew that Ma used to disappear every few months into what was, seemingly, really just Maureen Hernan’s living room, and come out a few hours later with her hair looking like brown papier-mâché: A look that remained in place for several weeks.  The danger in my choice of barber was that I might get caught telling the haircutter, who was being paid with our food money, that he was to cut my hair long – wastefulness on the scale of shoveling snow that would melt itself in a few days.

            Having ruled out two barbers, the only remaining option was the one nearest me at that very moment as I sloshed through Market Square. 

            I open the door of Gerard’s Barber Shop – it too was really just his living room converted into a hair cutting place – and stick in my wooly head of hair, peering around nervously.  Had Da, my heretofore barber, been somehow sitting inside, I would have stepped back out, and immediately shipped off to Van Diemen’s Land, never again to see my friends, family or favorite books.   But the gods of coiffure are smiling on me, and it’s all scowling, beer-jowled, shaggy-maned strangers sitting in the five waiting chairs.

            The barber waves me in from the cold-wet outdoors with a flick of his scissors.  

I squeeze in, standing awkwardly behind the closed door, immediately realizing that I am now preventing Mayo’s manhood from getting the hairy part of their self-image rehabilitated.  I try to move myself, but no such movement is possible.  I can’t move towards the waiting customers without looming over their staring eyes; a step in the other direction and I’d be too close for comfort to the barber’s always moving scissors.

For five snip-snip-snipping minutes I stand there, sweating in my hand-me-down anorak; my back pinned against the white door; feeling as if the entire population of the planet is judging me a complete and utter gobeshite; who goes places he shouldn’t; takes food from his family’s mouths for the sake of getting his hair cut long; and generally gets in the way, taking up space that other, more important, people actually need.

My panic is lessened only inasmuch as I get to observe a miraculous invention: An electric shears.  It glides effortlessly over the hair-cuttee’s head, hair disappearing beneath its teeth – which literally move faster than the human eye can behold.

The heat of my anorak is killing me, but I don’t want to draw more crushing attention to myself by taking it off.  Slowly, trying to avoid detection, I unzipper it, one stubborn pair of zip-teeth at a time.

“Gud man now, gud man yoursell,” the fella in the barber’s chair says too loudly, with all eyes flicking to him, enabling a flurry of secret anorak unzippering.

With a loud sigh, he pushes himself up out of the chair.  He’s an ould fella with a farmer’s weathered-red face, whiteish hair, and the slight stoop of a man well used to hard physical labor.  

Once standing, he turns and stares at himself in the large mirror that dominates the barber shop.  His right hand starts to rise to his hair, but he stops, his eyes flicking to the reflection in the mirror of ten staring eyes. 

To my, vastly untrained eye, the ould farmer’s crop of whiteish hair appears to have been very precisely moved a half an inch above his ears, revealing a border of fish-belly-white scalp against the weathered-red skin of his face.

I risk another inch of anorak unzippering.

“How much now?” the ould fella asks the barber, who murmurs a response.

“Ohhh, cheap at thrice a price, cheap at thrice the price,” he nod-nod-nods, fishing deeply into his trousers’ pocket for a well-worn, flat black leather wallet and, licking the tips of his fingers, he extracts from it two greenish-yellowish pound notes.

The barber turns, slides open a wooden drawer, and drops the notes in silently.

“Sure, the last time I came ta town for a haircut, two month ago,” the ould fella turns to face his audience in the waiting chairs.  “Didn’t I run inta Tomma McGinty below in Mick Quinn’s.”

He raises his hand at them, brings it down fast in a ya-wouldn’t-believe-this wave.

“Right over ta Padda Hoban’s he took me.  Just for a half-wan, … don’t ya see.”

He closes his eyes and nods slowly.  

“Sure, we ended up on the beer for three days.  Cost me a bleddy fortune, … a bleddy fortune.  On t’secunt day, I sold me bike to a barman for twenta quid.  An’ poor ould Mammy without at home, fadin’ an’ milkin’ t’cow.  Out in the dark her goin’, an’ her on a cane with an oil lamp hangin’ from t’other hand.  Good God above us, but drink is an awful curse. Me poor ould bike gone.  I’m on t’ould fella’s rattly ould wan since.”

He shakes his head slowly, his watery eyes turning down to the floor.  

“But the yellin’ Mammy done when I got home,” he kinda-sorta laughs, and looks up at his audience with a deviously unrepentant smile.  

“‘Twoulda woke the dead!”

To my twelve-year-old sweating panic, he turns to leave, and I’m faced with the choice of leaving the barbershop ahead of him and then returning – looking like an even bigger gobeshite – or shuffling up next to the barber’s platform in a way that might angrily confuse the other customers that I’m jumping the queue.

Once again, the gods of coiffure smile on me, as the next customer lurches out of his chair, shoulders back, up onto the barber’s platform.  Sighing, each in their turn, the other customers stand halfway up and with shoulders hunching, knees banging off the magazine piled coffee table, move one seat closer to their haircut. 

Initially relieved to get out of my the-very-opposite-of-anonymity stance by the door, I flop into the last seat in the queue, still warm from its previous occupant, but upon sitting, the heat of the chair, my anorak and this last bout of panic has me ready to puke.

I take a bunch of deep breaths, eyes darting around the barbershop, pull at the collar of my jumper to let some heat out and air in.  Eventually, I cool down enough, my mind stops racing enough, and my stomach settles enough, that I can watch and learn from every little thing that happens in a barbershop. 

The barber moves in a slow, easeful way – completely the opposite of Da’s anxious, sudden, ear-cutting lurches – with the scissors seemingly an extension of his hand.  He stands back a half step, crouches a little, angling his head to review his work. 

It’s as if he actually cares what the haircut looks like!

But as I relax into studying the workings of a barbershop, the interminable voice in my mind starts to intrude with new, previously unthought of, scary thoughts: 

How much does a haircut cost?  

Was two pound just the ould fella’s price, or is that the price for everyone? 

What if it’s really four pound or three pound fifty?  

I only have three – what happens then?  

Do I end up washing dishes in the barber’s kitchen?

Can you actually tell the barber how you want your hair cut?

What if he refuses to cut my hair long? 

With the worry-circuits in my brain glowing red hot, I force myself to resort to my worry reliever of first and last resort – escape through reading.  

I lean forward over the knee-banger-coffee table, scan the pile of magazines and grab a tattered copy of Shoot.  I flick through the pages quickly, not getting enough distracting stimulation from photos of Emilyn Hughes, Steve Heighway and Mick Mills kicking a ball, pointing a finger, all looking serious and anxious, like they’re at work.  

I lean forward again and carefully place the Shoot back on the pile.  Now I notice that no one else is reading, but their eyes are all staring at me.  

Does my impatience with Shoot look bad?  

Should I have liked it more?

I mean Steve Heighway is Irish, even though he’s called after an American road.  I probly shoulda looked at his picture for longer.

With the worry circuits glowing again, I impulsively grab a coverless glossy magazine with two-inch-tall, screaming headlines.   Inside those glossy pages, my mind sponges up useless facts to chase away the worry: The French claim this new European Economic Community thing will bring all the countries into a United States of Europe.  Fat chance!  Sure, half the time we can’t even understand what the hell the frogs are spouting off about.  And anyways, Da says we only want the German’s money to fix the roads and build factories, then the EEC can feck off.  Earth’s population to double to eight billion by 2020.  Sure, you couldn’t fit that many people on this planet, and anyway, that’s so far away, who gives a damn?  A new ice age is coming: American weathermen are predicting we’re headed for another ice age.  Their little weathermen brains’ idea to stop the ice age by covering over the north pole with black soot, so it’ll melt.  Sure, wouldn’t it be easier to drop a nuclear bomb on it instead?  

But I do get useful information too, like how eating too many onions can create a dangerous electrical charge in your body.  And there’s a story about the vicar from Chesterfield who ran away with his sixteen-year-old babysitter, and now they’re running a Bed and Breakfast in Blackpool.  She’s holding twins in the photograph, but the babies are black, and she and the vicar are white – as a matter of fact, they’re pasty white.  And I never knew that David Bowie has a brother who’s “troubled with mental health issues.”

My soaking up of the News of the World Magazine is interrupted every ten or fifteen minutes by having to move over to the next warm chair, as each victim’s shaggy mane of hair is summoned up to the barber’s platform to get slaughtered. 

Debilitated by my eternal cluelessness and stupidity, I’m forced to flip these liabilities into assets.  My plan, formulated in the sheen of those glossy pages, and employed surprisingly well from that day forward, forever and ever amen, is to happily embrace my thorough ignorance of everything even approaching cool-trendy-fashionable.

My relief at getting off the hook of having to be cool is physically palpable.  I breath out an extra loud sigh, turning four sets of hair-cuttee-waiting eyes.  But deviously I disguise my true intent by flapping my anorak and pulling at the collar of my jumper in fake, but actually real, attempts to lower my temperature … but not to be cool!    

This decision is borne from that nerdy confidence that comes from having such vital information as to monitor your onion intake to avoid spontaneous self-lightning; avoid Blackpool, vicars and twins at all costs; and to examine Bowie’s lyrics closely for family influences – to see if regular people could actually write something meaningful.

Eventually, as happens in life, whether you desire it or not, it’s my turn.

The barber, a gaunt-faced, bearded man, with penetrating eyes, waves me up onto the platform as he silently sweeps male-Mayo’s fallen hair into a dustpan.

New problem: I now need to remove my anorak.  After a minor kerfuffle, I successfully, if inelegantly, remove my outer layer without knocking out anyone’s eye.  

The barber nods silently towards the coat rack.

My anxiety projects impatience into his nod.  

I stare hard at the coat rack, assured that if I recklessly hang my anorak in such an unprotected fashion, then, with my eyes closed, to avoid the blindness caused by hair particle intake, the door to the barber’s shop will fly open and in will burst a gang of international anorak thieves to steal my hand-me-down anorak, with the not-so-smallish split-seam under the right arm.  Thus, will be confirmed the wrongness of my wantonly spending money at a barber shop and not letting Da cut my hair for free at home. 

Like a man approaching the gallows, I step over to the coat rack, hang my anorak, and barely breathing, sit anxiously into the barber’s chair, where I’m immediately enshrouded in a blue nylon cape that billows down over my arms.

The barber’s penetrating eyes look into the mirror at me, his hand resting on the back of the chair.

He raises his eyebrows as he nods slightly towards my reflection.

I squirm.

He stares.

Finally, eyes down on the mottled bottom of the mirror, I mumble:

“Not too shor….” 

I attempt to wave my hand toward my head, but instead catch it in the blue nylon cape, tugging it free from my neck.

With no reaction, the barber tucks the cape back into my shirt collar, and he’s off to work: Snip-snip-snipping.  

Fifteen minutes later, my anorak miraculously not stolen, I swagger out of the barber shop, and slosh home with one pound note left in the back pocket of my Wrangler’s, my shoes and socks soaking wet, but the first shoot of independence sprouting green from my mind’s rocky soil of endless worry, a self-esteem vacuum and the deeply confirmed conviction of my eternal stupidity.

To my horror, Da is sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, shake-reading the Irish Press.

I make a big show of the returning the pound to Ma’s purse.

“Turns out, I didn’t need this,” I say, kinda-sorta brushing my hair with my hand.

“Did ya get a sliced pan?” he looks at me curiously, no carbohydrates visible on my person.

“No, er …. I gotta haircut.”

“A hair…cut,” he lowers the Press.  “Well, he didn’t take much off for two quid, I’d a done ….”

Sweat gushes from every pore in my body.

But he lets his trail-off trail off, and just stares me in the eye, gritting his teeth.

“Yeah, he was fierce busy,” I lie outrageously, looking away, panting for breath.

“Well, ‘tis better than nathin’,” he gives the Press a shake that’d rattle Dev within in his grave, and hiding behind the newsprint says:

“Anyways, I was afraid ya were goin’ ta ask me ta cut it.  Sure, there’s no need of me doin’ that sort of stuff anymore.  Run on an’ take care of yer own stuff.”

The green floods from my shoot of independence, … but it survives.

Many barbers have cut my hair since that day, all of them getting the direction:

“Just a trim, but don’t worry if you take too much, it’ll grow back in a week.”

Turns out my hair is like a weed, that quickly reverts to overgrowth.

Three thousand miles from the Market Square in Castlebar, the barbers are Boston are mostly immigrants:

A Greek who loves politics, watches all the US Presidential debates on Greek television, agreeing wholeheartedly with the oldest democracy’s assessment of the most curious democracy.

A Brazilian who couldn’t contain his laughter at my choice of hair style – fringe, sideburns and neck all squared off – summoning over his fellow barbers to laughingly display what the long departed, but not forgotten, wag Pat Shea had labelled as my “helmet head haircut.”

An Algerian who spittingly curses France for four hundred years of colonization and, when he hears my accent, loudly demands I do likewise of England’s eight hundred years in Ireland!

A Ukrainian with whom, on my September 11, 2001 lunchbreak, I watched the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing in on themselves amidst billowing black smoke.  Each time the unbelievable-to-our-eyes footage rewound, he would say: “I fukeen tol’ thees country, don’t fuck with the A…raabs.  Them’s crazy peuples.  I fukeen tol’ ….” 

A Russian who was forced to train as a hairdresser in the Soviet Union because when he showed up at the university, into which he had been accepted, the registrar told him “go away, we already have too many Jews here.”  Upon emigration to the US, knowing only one word of English – “No!” – he defaulted to cutting men’s hair. 

Right now, in Massachusetts, cutting someone’s hair in a barbershop is a crime, punishable by …, well it’s a crime; punishment TBD; enforcement zero percent.  Though the State Police are following anyone with too neat a trim as a potential QAnon suspect and a confirmed idiot.

As with many things, this last year has changed life’s most basic actions.  Now, getting my hair cut is not the hassle of constantly checking the time as I flick from my phone to GQ to Sports Illustrated, ready to jump in should the next customer in line indicate, by a shake of their shaggy head, that they don’t want the next available barber.  

Who knew you could choose your own barber?

The ultimate in curious democracy.

In times of plague, a kitchen haircut is an opportunity to relax into a surprisingly meaningful intimacy.  

It’s only taken four and a half decades, but my lack of respect for the aesthetics of coiffure and my constant refrain of “don’t worry, it’ll grow back in week” has finally aged into a comfortable truth. 

The Corandulla Blues

I’m sitting on the edge of Ma’s seat in the front of our car that Da’s driving awful slow toward our holiday’s in Kilkee.  This is where I sit when our car is packed full with children and towels and swimsuits and stuff for our holidays. 

With Mole, Ratty and Toad, the lads from The Wind In The Willows running round inside me brain and in the book on me lap, and two weeks ahead swimming in the Pollock Holes, climbing the rocks back at Burn’s Cove and playing on the beach, I was so happy I coulda farted!

“Somehow now, I seem to remember the orange light still on,” Da says, twist-nodding his head, squeezing his lips together. “I saw it when I reached in for me swimming trunks.  I haven’t taken them things out since this time last year.”

He’s been going on about how the Immersion Heater is probly left on since we left Ballinrobe.  Now we’re driving through Headford so slow that an ould fella, in a cap, a dark suit and turned-down wellingtons, pedals past us on a black-nellie bicycle.

“It’ll be fine, it’s off, I turned it off meself,” Ma snaps, a bit-cranky, but breathing in to get ready to distract him. 

“An’ sure, lookit all the terrible things goin’ on,” she starts.  “Sure 1975 is goin’ to be as bad as a year as any of them.  An’ that leibide Cooney, some minister for Justice he is.  He was the one said 1974 was to be the worst, an’ that he’d be making all better this year.  Sure ‘tis worse it’s improving.  Lookit them poor lads in the Miami Showband getting shot last weekend.  That Fran O’Toole had a lovely voice ….”

Ma shakes her head and blesses herself before she goes on: 

“I read in the Press that they found a piece of an arm in the field next to the explosion, with a tattoo on it that said: ‘UVF.’”

“What’s the U…V…F?” I ask.

“Be quiet,” Ma says. “Read yer book.”

“Ulster Volunteer Force,” comes out of the back.

“Be quiet!”

She does be saying things like this for to distract him from going on and on about “t’Immersion.”

Da has an awful fear of this electric thing that just heats the hot water tank so you can do the dishes or take a bath.  He thinks it’ll get so hot that it could blow up our house: Every time we’re heading off for a Sunday drive, just before we leave, all eleven of us packed into the Cortina estate, he gets out and half runs back inta the house, only his legs moving, his body, arms and head all still, the Yale key sticking out between the fingers of his closed fist. He’s back a few minutes later, nod-nod-nodding:

“Ah, it ’twas off awright.”

“Sure, I told you it ‘twas,” Ma says, squeezing her lips together.  “I turned it off meself.”

“Ah,” he twist-nods backwards.  “I thought wan a them mighta turned it on.”
Now the start of our holidays is getting attacked by Da’s Immersion-explosion fear.  Twice since Ballinrobe, when he thunk this idea, he’s pulled in on the side of the road and said we should go back and check.  Now, stuck behind a stupid tractor that’s letting bicycles pass us out, he’s at again.

“And what was that at-all-at-all-at-all about the jockey getting threatened with kneecapping over losing races?” Ma asks.

This a great question to ask, ‘cause Da knows a lot about horseracing and trouble.  Plus he mighta heard from other Gards in the barracks what really happened.

“Ah, it’s terrible really, he’s a good jockey too that Tommy Carmody,” he nods at the windshield.  “He musta ben riding horses that IRA fellas wanted to win, but didn’t, probly for other reasons.”

He raises his eyebrows like he knows something he can’t say.

“Ah, ‘tis like the joke about when the horse trainer is talking to his jockey who was riding a horse with clear instructions not to win, an’ the trainer asks the jockey if he coulda beaten the other horses in the race.  ‘Oro sure,’ the jockey says, ‘this horse coulda beat any of the four ahead of us, but I can’t vouch for the three behind us!  Oh, Irish horseracin’!”

He throws his head backwards hard.  

“Sure only mugs or crooks put money on an Irish horserace.”

The tractor turns into Joyce’s of Headford and we get going sorta good again.  I pick up me book and read about what Mole and Ratty and Toad are up to – Toad’s an awful gobeshite altogether.  He’s only interested in everything new; all new stuff is bad.  Sure that’s how the Trouble started in the North; people moved there who shouldn’t have.  I put the book down and daydream about running through knee deep water at Kilkee beach: Me pretending I’m an Indian on a brown horse, with a star on its forehead, no saddle, and I’m galloping in to kill the US Cavalry attacking my family. 

How come anyways the Cavalry are so mean to the Indians?

The way the car does kinda-sorta shake-jiggle as it drives along makes me sleepy.  Maybe I’ll nap and dream about being a real Indian warrior, whoop-whoop-whooping around on me horse.  We’re coming up the hill to that yellow school that we always pass when Galway is about twenty minutes away. 

Me eyes are getting droopy. 

How come anyways schools are always painted that yellow you never see anywhere else?  It’s not like the yellow in the Pope’s flag or the Roscommon jersey.

My eyes get droopier.

The sound of branches walloping the side of the car undroops me. 

The car is headed toward the ditch, the bushes racing towards us.

Ma’s arms raise up to protect her face.

She turns and stares wide-eyed into the back at her children.

“Fucking Headford!” Mick says from the drivers seat.  “I never drove through this shithole without getting stuck behind a tractor.  What are they saying about the Fijians in the paper?”

“Well this morning the radio was all talk about ‘Connacht’s cen…teen…ary year – 1985!” I say from the back seat, unfolding the Irish Times.  “Can you imagine the snobby-prods playing for Connacht way back in 1885?  Anyways, let’s see what ‘lies they’re vomitin’ out onto newsprint today!’ Who was it said that at-all-at-all-at-all?”

I shake the newspaper under control.

“Oho be-Jaysys: First flight outta Knock airport yesterday; Monsignor Horan is givin’ the big thumbs up.  An’ lookit, they’re saying them six fellas from the Birmingham bombing, way back in 1976, mighta been framed?  Sure, who’d be framing them?”

“The British police,” Basq scoffs.  “Who the fuck else?”

“No, no, you’re wrong,” I twist-nod my head.  “Police only want to stop crimes, they have no political age….”

“Ah, shut the fuck up an’ tell us about the match,” Mick snaps.

I turn the page:

“An RAF man killed in a helicopter crash in South Armagh, no fire from the Provos, just an accident, they got themselves this time: Blacks rioting in South Africa … again: Dalglish is going to pick himself today to play for Liverpool.”

“Come on ta fuck, what about the rugby match?”

“Awright, awright here we go, here’s the Connacht team: Henry O’Toole, ‘member he useta play for the Connemara All-Blacks, eh… a few we don’t know, … eh, and then Conor McCarthy from UCG, good man Conor, … and then a rake more, O’Driscoll and Fitzgerald from the Irish team, and lookit two Ballina lads, Deccie Greaney – sound fella – well he’s with Corinthians now, and Moylett.  And then Mick Tarpey – ‘member him from the Wegians’ under 20’s; a big fella – and then Fly Mannion from Ballinasloe.  Jaysys, we might beat the poor ould Fijians, the balls must be frozen off them in this weather.”

“Is that Fly fella the same fucker who destroyed us?” Basq asks from the seat next to me, “nearly all by himself, below in Ballinasloe a couple a year ago?”

Yeah-yeah-yeah everyone nods: We’re not big on reliving our destroyed-bys: We much prefer reliving the fights we won.

“Wasn’t that the day Pa walloped wan a the Ballinasloe tinkers?” Sid, the front passenger, asks; a cigarette shaking in his hands.  “An’ us hardly off the bus!”

We all laugh: The car shimmying.

The sky’s a weak October-blue, cold and crisp, a good day for rugby.  I just came home from college for the weekend last night, but the lads had a plan to go down to the Connacht vs. Fiji rugby game today.  A day on the piss with the lads in Galway was too good to turn down, so now I’m headed south again.

“Sure what do ye four latchikoes want to be headin’ off ta Galway for?” asked the barman in the Humbert last night.  “Cum in here an’ it’ll be on above on the telly.  No need for all that drivin’ an’ strange pubs an’ buyin’ food.  Have a bit a sense would ye!”

The tractor turns into Joyce’s of Headford, and the engine revs hard as Mick takes the open road.

We’re speeding up the hill toward the yellow school – about ten minutes to go for Galway. 

An old sheepdog, scraws of matted hair hanging from its coat, limps across the road towards the schoolyard.

Over the hill a red and white and blue, Denny’s Meats van appears – it’s flying.

 The old sheepdog is right in the van’s path 

 Sid jams the cigarette between his lips; his eyebrows rising high.

The van wallops the sheepdog, firing the poor ould fella, its legs still in a walking stance, into the briary ditch.

“GOOD JAYSYS!” Sid yells out, hands now up over his eyes.

We slow down, pull over, twist our necks to see what’s happening.

The Denny’s Hiace van is pulled over; the door open, the driver running back.

“The poor ould sheepdog,” Sid says, his voice brittle.  “Sure he was only goin’ over the road.  Can you imagine your dog just not comin’ home one day?  It must be awful.”

“Who the fuck are Denny’s anyways?” I ask for a distraction.

“Ah some shower a Northern bastards down here puttin’ Irish meat factories outta business,” comes the reply.

“And where the fuck are we anyways?” I ask, the car still stopped.

“Corandulla, I seen a sign back there said.”

“We got the Corandulla Blues,” I sing, badly, still looking to distract everyone.  “Onliest way ta beat them blues, … is with the booze!”

Twenty minutes later we swagger into Cullens Bar on Forster Street.  The match is about to start, we can see the teams warming up on the television, the pale skin and green jerseys of the Connacht team; the white jerseys and dark skin of the Fijians.

But pints must be imbibed before we journey up the road to the Sportsground.

Josie is behind the bar in Cullens: A man of considerable girth and even greater humor, he rolls his eyes slowly at the sight of us.  At one end of the bar, the Sean-nos singing, lorry driver has already settled in for the weekend: His pint of Guinness yellowing on the counter in front of him.  He sits upright on his barstool, arms folded, eyes peering through thick glasses at the telly.  There’s a spattering of weekend-alcos stuck to stools along the counter staring sullenly into their drinks. 

To our have-another-pint-surprise, at the other end of the bar, with one of his well-shined black dress-shoes up on a stool’s footrest, stands a bank porter from Castlebar.  A stubby man in his fifties or sixties, dressed in a well-pressed, grey suit, a white shirt and a red tie, he eyes us up and down suspiciously, runs his hand oh-so-carefully over the roof his tightly-trimmed-and-oiled hair, cinches his red jowls, and with a disdain-for-latchikoes sigh, grabs his glass of whiskey and turns, disowning us.  

“There’s Afree…cans in t’country today,” the lorry-driver says, unprovoked, his eyes on the Fijians getting into position for kick-off.

“They’s jus’ up t’road,” Josie lisps, nodding up the hill.  “Up with at the greyhound track.”

“Are ya serious?” his interlocuter fixes his thick glasses closer to his eyes.  “Afree…cans sleepin’ in Galway tanight.  Lock up yer daughters!”

He looks down the line of surly weekend-alcos, none of whom acknowledge the warning.

We start into our pints, loosely debating the merits of traipsing the extra quarter mile to see in actual fact what we can already see, via the magic of television, out over top of our pint glasses.

The bank porter abruptly departs with gait of a man imparted on serious business, but he’s accosted in the doorway by a homeless fella out of Eyre Square.  There’s a kerfuffle as the two men of similar age and build, and equal but opposite commission, try to navigate past one another in the doorway.  As the red jowls tighten, the homeless man concedes, but pushes in roughly past the porter as soon as the doorway is clear.

Josie immediately raises his arm and points his pudgy index finger back out to Forster Street, shaking his large face slowly.

“’Twas down by the sally garden, my luv an’ I did meet,” the homeless fella starts to sing-talk, his eyes forced up at Cullens’ smoke veneered ceiling, one hand stroking his chin, the other grabbing the lapel of his filthy blue suit-jacket.

“Ooouuuttt!” Josie raises his voice.

A few alcos’ heads turn in bitter pity at the unkempt, unshaven homeless fella.

“She passed the sally gardens with little shnow white feet.”

Josie starts to move his bulk along behind the bar.

“She bid me take luv azsy, as the leaves grow on a tree ….”

Josie moves with surprising speed for a big man.

“… but me bein’ young an’ foolish, with her I wouldn’t agree.”

He’s gone by the time Josie’s bulk fills the skinny archway leading to the back door and the open-air toilets.

Five rapid-pints in, I lose the debate – Connacht are doing well – and we depart for the Sportsground.

“Jaysys, I wonder what the Fijians were thinking when they saw all the greyhound shite on the edge of the pitch,” Basq asks.

We ponder that question as we bustle past the Magdalene Laundry and up the hill towards the Grammar School.

“Sure they wouldn’t be shiteing at all, they’re there to race,” Mick says.  “They give them medicine to shite everything out; like they give jockeys pissing tablets.”

“You know a human being carries around one pound of shite inside in them every day,” I offer from the depths of my twenty years of book-bought-wisdom.

“JAYSYS!” the lads all retort.

“There’s a lot a people I know have a couple a stone of shite inside in them.”

We push into the Sportsground; some gobeshite in a gabardine coat tries to collect a pound each off us, but we thick it out, and he gives in, sullenly. 

The one stand in the stadium is as full as the last bus to Salthill of a Thursday night, and the walls to keep the greyhounds from escaping are four-deep with spectators.

“I fucken told ye,” I complain, unable to see anything except the ball occasionally getting kicked high.  “At least below in Cullens, we coulda seen something, … and had a pint.”

Fiji win by a point.

Connacht lose by a point.

Same result – vastly different emotions.

We return to Cullens, then one pint in Rabbits, Foxes, the Skeff, and down to the Cellar to settle in for the evening.

A couple of hours later, full of porter and needing grease to anchor it in our bellies, we head outta the Cellar and up to Supermacs in Eyre Square.

Walking along the street, a man in his sixties, in a mustard trench-coat, tugs hard on his yappy little dog’s leash to get him out of the blindly-busy pedestrian traffic. 

The dog resists as it digs its nose into a discarded Chicken-Box.

The ould fella yanks the leash, pulling the dog off its feet and turning it all once.

“Hey you, ya fucken bastard,” Sid rushes in.  “Leave that dog alone.  We already seen a dog get kilt today.”

Sid grabs for the leash in the ould fella’s hand.

“Give me that dog, you’re not fit ta … .”

The ould fella moves so fast that the rest of us are still frozen in place when he pins Sid to Supermac’s wall; his gnarly fists pumping rapid left-right-left-rights into Sid’s face.

Drunken-stunned, Sid doesn’t even get to raise his hands.

“I didn’t do thirty years in the Army to take shite from hooligans like you!” the ould fella stands back; fists up, feet positioned like a boxer ready to attack.

The little dog’s eyes look up at the humans in confusion.

We clean up Sid’s face in the Supermac’s toilet; wolf down a pile of Chicken Boxes; and then stagger back to the Cellar, onto Garavan’s, the King’s Head, the Quays. 

Somewhere, somehow, whilst wobbling along Quay Street from its eponymous pub to Neachtains, in state of exuberant inebriation, I lost my three companions.

Lost, drunk, and lonely, the pubs all emptying out onto the street and still the lads nowhere to be found, my drunken brain makes a quick plan. 

With eyes down, watching the treacherous footpath for sudden changes in elevation, I tromp the two miles out to my college rental house in Cherry Park.  By the time I make it there, only falling twice, I realize that I don’t have the key with me.  I’ve sobered enough to climb in the upper window above the kitchen sink.  But I haven’t sobered enough to save the pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

I fall onto the bed, with a gash on my right ankle from a broken plate.

When I turn over, it’s already daylight, my unwound-for-days alarm clock lying to me that it’s a quarter past four.    

Forehead throbbing, stomach ready to heave, tongue stuck to the floor of me mouth, I close my eyes again, and lie there with irrational-hangover-self-pity.

The sight of the old sheepdog flying through the air, his life completed, plays and replays inside my mind: The old dog limps into the middle of the road; the red and white and blue Denny’s Hiace speeds down the road: In my head, I stare at the van’s tires eating up the road. 

On a badly needed-to-suppress-a-stomach-heave in-breath the tires age ten years, and it’s no longer a Denny’s Hiace, it’s a black and yellow Barcastle Meats VW van.  Inside my head, I’m not hungover, I’m ten years old again, and all of us are headed off on holidays to Kilkee; all jammed into the Cortina.

The Barcastle van trundles over the hill into Corandulla crossroads. 

It’s not going to hit an old sheepdog, ‘cause that dog is young and vigorous now, out herding sheep in the fields. 

No, instead the Barcastle van suddenly slows down, its engine complaining loudly. 

Da is already out of our car, that he nearly put into the ditch a few seconds earlier, the driver’s door still open.  He’s waving down the Barcastle van, like he’s running his own one-Garda checkpoint to catch the IRA … or maybe now the UVF?

The Barcastle van slows to a halt in front of the school’s low, egg-yolk-yellow wall, not at all like the pale Barcastle yellow.  The VW engine thrum-thrum-thrums, working all the time to keep the meat from the pigs, slaughtered squealingly in Castlebar a couple a days ago, nice and cold for people to fry up for their tea.

Da grabs the front of his sports coat and does his run-not-run across to the van, using only his legs, body-head-arms all frozen. 

The Barcastle van window rolls down in a fast-panic. 

Da leans his leather elbow patches on the van’s windowsill and talks to the driver, his head nodding all the time.

From the Cortina, we all stare silent-confused at Da leaning against the van windowsill, having a chat, in the middle of the Galway Road.

Then he turns, does his run-not-run, back to our car, half sits in and slides the keyring out of the ignition.

“Now, this fella’ll drop the key back to the Gard’s barrack in Castlebar,” he jams his thumbnail into the keyring, and starts pushing the Yale key around the ring. 

“Sure there’s a key hidden under the coal bucket that anyone could use.”

“No there isn’t,” he twist-nods in victory.  “I put that key in the drawer before we left.  I’ll phone the barrack from Kilkee an’ tell Tom Lee the key is at the desk, an’ would he go an’ check that bleddy Immersion’s off before it explodes.”

Lost in Space – Part II

Father Curran’s mother’s wake is in a funeral home in Headford.

I’ve never been to a funeral home, even though I hold a poor-man’s-Master’s Degree in funerals: Family – heaps of them in just a few years: Primary school – one friend and one classmate: Secondary school – one suicide: The Rugby club – a tragic drowning: Working in the church – about a million.

All funerals are sad, but the saddest of them all was one for a St Mary’s mental patient who didn't have another soul on this planet to mourn his passing from what had to been amongst the most barren of lives.  Rattled by the sight of a funeral mass without a single mourner in the seats, Pat and I route ourselves from the cold safety of the sacristy to sit in the front seat as stand-ins for the long absent family.  As a player in this poignant scene; one plain wooden coffin, one priest intoning into a cavernously empty church, two stand-in mourners; I respond to the priest’s invocations with loud-lung-issued prayer, that tries to keen away the naked loneliness. 

The Headford funeral home struck me as false, plastic, and coldly hygienic; but having a water jug and a toilet, it fit my hangover-driven physiological needs. 

It did not however fit Pat’s robust socializing style.  The mourners, all natives of a town thirty miles from Castlebar, may as well have been from another galaxy.  These aliens stood in tight circles, presenting solid walls of gabardine that Pat could not penetrate.

We find Father Curran, express our condolences; Pat enunciates a resounding “Our Father” over the corpse, and, with eyes raised to the tiled ceiling, loudly informs to Saint Peter to get ready for her soul’s very soon arrival.

Our business complete, or so I naively thought, the plum Fiesta screams out of Headford on the Shrule Road at twenty-five miles an hour … in second gear.

Having finally attained, and then, all too quickly, lost fourth gear just before the dangerous curves south of Shrule, we LeMons through that sleepy village in a manner that leaves my hangover-anxiety praying the Shruleans have that very evening all been struck deaf, dumb and blind.

We take Kilmaine in a blink … well, a longish, anxious closing of the eyes and holding of the breath, but we’re through without the sound of plum coloured sheet-metal striking a human form.  Après-Kilmaine, with the roads sufficiently twisty-dark-dangerous but empty, we speed along, anxiously.

The hangover, relentless in its Catholic punishing of yesterday’s dual Deadly sins of Wrath and Drunkenness, will not lift: Every few miles my saliva turns to water and my stomach retches up more bile.  It musta ben that pint yesterday below in Jim Pete’s in Glenamaddy.  It tasted a bit off all right, but my taste was off cause the inside of my lip had gotten torn up when, with a strong wind at our backs we kicked our third penalty and the Creggs ref blew up the first half ten minutes early, starting an all-in fight.

Rugby is, as I’ve determined, good for the soul but hard on the machinery.

Ballinrobe saps our progress.  We pick our way slowly through its medieval streets, stuck behind a shite-splattered, yellow Volkswagen pulling a trailer with three calves staring ominously back into our headlights through their wild-glassy eyes.

The farmer takes pity on us and pulls over enough that we can scream past him.  And scream on we do, until the Fiesta rolls to a halt with the sight of the big front window of Art O’Neil’s Pub filling our windshield. 

Hangover relieving sleep is just the one hard left from here onto the Castlebar Road.  Then the only places to get, prayerfully, navigated past would be Katie’s in Partry and maybe the Punchbowl in Ballyheane, before I could get home to my bed.

Pat indicates left.

I sigh with relief. 

But, selling the dummy, he doesn’t turn left. 

Instead he drives straight on, the blinker still clicking, as we head down a road I’ve never travelled in my twenty years of being driven down roads.

“We’ll go an’ say hallo, don’t ya see, ta Gerty,” he squints into the darkness of the road ahead.  “I haven’t had a word with her for this longest time.”

“Gerty?” I sit up in my seat.

Never heard of Gerty.

“Aahhh, Gerty’d be, I suppose she’d be near a fourth or fifth cousin a mine, something like that,” he nods, a lot, his glasses glinting the last of Ballinrobe’s streetlights.

The darkness down this road-less-traveled is thick, immense and of a quality that only a place sufficiently distrustful of morally dodgy modernization such as electricity will tolerate. 

I peer out the Fiesta window into the darkness, awed by its depth, its completeness.

They say writing a novel is like driving in the dark:  You don’t need to know where you’re going, just follow the headlights and they’ll take somewhere interesting.  We followed this novel-writing-trick for miles of darkness until we stop at a solitary black and white signpost sticking vertically out of our planet.

Pat reaches back behind my seat and produces an enormous flashlight.

“’Twas a Garda Superintendent above in Dublin, a neighbor of a cousin a mine, gave me this,” he says, clicking the switch, filling the Fiesta with light and crazy shadows.  “‘Pat,’ says he, ‘don’t be goin’ round the darkness a the countryside without a good torch.  ‘Tisn’t safe.’”

Huffing and puffing, he rolls down his window and points the searchlight up at the black and white sign.

“Bally…puckin’…glass!” he snorts, shaking his head.  “Sure Gerty on’y went to Ballyglass for small things.  ‘Twas Castlebar she done her shoppin’ in.  Maybe ‘tis close to here.”

He grinds the car back into gear, and we lurch back into darkness.  But not for long, a lone streetlight and a Smithwicks sign, a Guinness sign, and a Harp sign lure us over to the side of the road.

The Squealing Pig Pub.

“Sure, … we kennit pass here without goin’ in an’ saying hallo to Babs,” Pat says, killing the engine.  “If we kept goin’, they’d be talkin’ about us like we were gone odd.”

He turns the headlights off and on, off and on again, and finally off for good.

We stand out, and I follow as Pat’s thick silhouette in his greatcoat and porkpie hat ambles toward the Squealing Pig’s dim lighting, the loose chips of the road crunching under our shoes. 

Pat yanks the door open and leans half his torso in, the other half hanging on the doorframe.  I see the brim of the porkpie hat turn and look around the room.

“We’ll go in so,” he says to no one, or to me.

Inside the barroom is completely empty, not even a barman.  Noisily, we drag stools back from the counter lined with two each, Guinness, Smithwicks and Harp taps, and one Hoffmans tap. 

“Sit up there now,” Pat says, waving his hand at the stools.  “Is there anyone home at-all-at-all-at-all.  I suppose he’s havin’ he’s tea.”

I tap the bar with my hand.   

Pat coughs.

Somewhere a door opens. 

The sound of the News for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing floats out: “… the Minister for Just…tice reee…jects the pris…oner’s demaaands …:” the door closes again.

“Aragh howaye lads,” a jowly-beer-bellied barman appears.  He’s just a few years older than meself, in a bulging striped dress shirt open a few buttons down; a friendly grin on his face.

“What kin I get ye?” he asks, tapping his fingers off the blue and yellow Harp tap.

He grabs a damp cloth from somewhere and starts wiping the counter vigorously.

“I’ll have a Powers an’ whatever this fella wants,” Pat stares at the barman, waving his hand carelessly in my direction.

“I’ll have …,” me stomach is still that bad that a hair-a-the-dog isn’t even an option.  “A Lucozade.”

“Right so,” the barman makes a done-deal face, slides a glass off the shelf below the counter and turns to the whiskey optics.

“Good man,” Pat makes his own done-deal face.  “Ya done what I told ya, an’ stayed away from that bleddy stuff.”

He nods at the beer pumps.

I lie-nod back.

“There ye go now lads,” the barman slides Pat’s whiskey and my Lucozade across the counter to us.

“Will have you some ice in that?” he asks no one and everyone.

“I will not!” Pat retorts, grabbing his glass off the counter and curling it in toward his chest.  “Ice in whiskey?  Where do you think we are?  Below in the bleddy Canaries.”

The barman sighs silently and looks at me. 

I shake my head.

He starts to turn and go, but stops when Pat asks:

“Is Babs within?”

Pat looks down into his drink, avoiding the barman eyes.

“Eh, Babs, is it?” the barman asks; now looking at me for help.

Pat’s eyes stay down in his drink, but he continues:

“Tell her Pat’s here.  Pat Jer…dan.”

“Awright so,” the barman huffs off, flicking his big head backwards.

The door opens; Coronation Street’s theme music leaks out; the door closes again; silence.

Pat swirls his whiskey around in the glass.

“A biteen a water is what I need now.  Sure, that ladeen shoulda offered me water and never mind tryin’ ta sell me ice.”

I slide off my stool and grab the water jug from down the counter.   

“Sure, there’s no service left in this country at-all-at-all-at-all; not like what you’d get abroad in Leeds.  T’Englishman knows how to serve you – oh yeah, the best of everything is laid on for you over yonder.”

He takes the jug from me.

His shaking hand rattles the jug against his glass.

He waters his whiskey, takes a sip.

“Whooaaw!” he shakes his head, rolls his eyes.  “They’re still making poteen in this country.  I’ll tell you that, I’ll tell you that.”

“Will I get him, an’ tell him there’s something wrong it?” I slide of the stool again.

“No, no, no, ‘twon’t do a fella no harm.  A little of it twon’t.”

I scratch my head, wondering if I should dispute that.

He takes another a long sip.

“I’ll go an’ see if Babs is home.  That fella’s useless.  Babs’ll tell us how to get down to Gerty.”

He shuffles off, placing the porkpie hat delicately back on his bald head.

The door opens to the sound of Vera Duckworth giving Jack the business.

“Hallo, hallo,” Pat near-yells.

The door closes.

Silence.

I slide off the stool and pace with anxiety around the pub; stopping to examine the framed photos of Ballyglass FC’s 1982 and 1983 teams for familiar faces.  I recognize no one.

Times moves slowly as I pace.

Eventually a snippet of Stan Odgen whining signals Pat’s return.

“Ah, grand people, … grand people,” he says, shaking his head, stopping only to remove his hat, fire down the last of his drink, and replace the hat. 

“We’ll go now, Babs gave me t’directions ta Gerty.”

“Should we bring her something?” I ask, surprising myself.

“Ah no, no, no, we’ll only spend a minute.  I’ll bring her flowers the next time.  When it’s daylight.”

Back in the Fiesta, the engine bawls in agony as we lurch through a U-turn, gravel flying, our own exhaust fumes brushing up over the windshield.

“Now, ‘tis on’y down here a half a mile,” Pat says, surprising me as we head back down the same road we came in on. 

Within seconds we’re back in the complete darkness.

“‘Tis within on the right Babs said.  An’ a course the gate’ll be there,” his glasses rise up along his nose as he squints.  “I’ll put on the big lights, I shoulda done that on the way out, an’ we’d a seen the gate.”

He flips on the high-beams and the hedges on either side of the road light up like a brambly tunnel burrowing into the darkness.

I see the cut-stone wall first. 

As I open my mouth to speak, the Fiesta skids to a stop, gravel flying.

“Here she is, here she is,” Pat says with that broad smile of his that overrules all the desperate things he says about the world we inhabit. 

“Now, I’ll go within an’ say hello to Gerty.  Will you come in?”

He opens the driver’s door.  I stare out the windshield at the cemetery wall, the black wrought iron gate frozen in a half open position. 

As much as my innate curiosity wants to hear what a human being with a lot of life under his belt will say to a long-lost-loved one, my Da-installed decency forces me to say:

“No, no, you go on ahead.  I’ll stay put … an’ watch the car.”

Just who I’d be watching the car against in this dark-desolate spot at eight o’clock of a February Monday night goes uninterrogated.

“I won’t be long,” Pat heaves himself out of the driver’s seat.  “Where’s that bleddy torch of mine?”

He struggles to flip the driver’s seat forward, so I reach around behind my seat and grab his huge flashlight.

He clicks the switch, and a stout beam of light flashes across his face and glasses, creating ghoulish shadow-wells at his eye sockets.

“All right so.  I’ll go an’ say me hallos ta Gerty, the poor ould divil, sure the heart gave out her, an’ her on’y young, seventy-seven, a lot a livin’ left in her, … a lot a liv….”

He’s gone, limping over to the cemetery gate.

I open my door and stand out.

“Are ya comin’?” Pat stops, shining the thick beam of light back at me.

I shield my eyes with my right hand.

“No, no, just getting’ a bit a air.”

“Right so, I won’t be long, … a lot a livin’ left in her, a lot a ….”

I watch him work his heft through the half-closed gateway, the light-beam dancing wildly.

When he’s through, the beam settles like a search light scanning the gravestones.

Jaysys, my anxiety overwhelms me, if he trips in there, we’ll never get home!

I scurry over to the cut-stone wall.

“Are you awright there Pat, do ya know where you’re goin’?” I yell over the wall.

The beam of light doesn’t stop moving.

“Ora, I’m fine, fine, sure I do often come out ta Gerty, but I haven’t ben now for a while.  The strange road an’ t’darkness got me tonight.  She’s just down here on the left.”

I take a few steps back from the wall, allowing myself enough view to keep the beam of light visible.

Above me in the clear sky, a trillion stars sparkle in the pure blackness filling me with a hope that fights my body’s alcohol induced depression.

Here I am, a tiny being in an infinitely large universe, staring through the cold air at light from millions of miles away: What does all this mean?

“Aragh, how are now Gert…,” Pat’s words trail off as I crunch further away across the gravel to let he and Gerty have their privacy.

I lean back against the Fiesta, now blacker than tar in the complete darkness and stare up into space, my earth-shackled mind brawling with infinity.

Lost in Space - Part I

I’m in the passenger seat of Pat’s plum-purple Ford Fiesta watching him shine the beam of a huge flashlight out the driver’s window up at a tiny black and white signpost that will, if there’s a God above in the tar black sky, get us the fuck outta this tangle of bog roads.

Pat squints so hard, his glasses riding up his nose, that he starts to look like the fella in the Jade Dragon who sold me a container of pork-fried rice last night around 2:00AM; me ordering with me eyes ‘cause me mouth stopped working about a half hour after the fella in the Beaten Path sold us a Leed Lemonade bottle full of poteen. 

I draw in a deep breath and try to take a long-hard look at meself … inside. 

“Bally…puckin’…glass!” Pat snorts.  “Sure, Gerty on’y went to Ballyglass for small things, ‘twas Castlebar she done her shoppin’ in.  But, as the fella says, … we must be close.”

It probly around seven in the evening now, and all I want is to get home and sleep of the rest of this hangover.  Me stomach is in tatters; either it ‘twas a bad pint or the combined impact of the twelve pints and the poteen on the way home from yesterday’s rugby match below in Creggs.  It’s always a rough Sunday in Creggs – hard on the body, head and stomach.  Them Roscommon boys are solid and tough; they make you pay dear for your win.  

Then a course, the long-twisty road from Creggs to Castlebar is just knotted with, as our driver said, “the best a pubs, a lad kennit drive a past without stoppin’ in for wan … or two.”   

I woke this morning at twenty past ten; pork-fried rice stuck to me cheek; the bus back to Galway gone an hour and twenty minutes ago; and a cracker of a headache, with the stomach totally wiped out.  

I mope around house all morning, trying not to puke, and not thinking ahead enough to be gone when Da bursts in the door at lunch time.

“Good God man!” he blurts with the alarm in his voice that comes with any small upset. “What are you doin’ still here?”

“Sure, I have no lectures today,” I gave him a weak how-could-you-not-know-that look.  “There’s some sort of a teacher…lecturers meeting.”

His eyes harden enough that I figure when he gets back to the Gards barracks, he’ll call below to UCG to make sure I’m lying.

“I forgot to tell ya … Friday,” I slink off, mutter-mumbling about having to “give sumptin ta wan a the lads.”

My stupid lie was kinda-sorta true in one, unmentionable, way; I mean, I haven’t seen the inside of a lecture hall of a Monday morning since …, probly never: Sunday nights around Eyre Square are just too busy for a lad not go drinking.

My recovery plan was to be on the six o’clock Expressway back to Galway, and out from under Da’s prying suspicion; sleep all the way back and see what a Monday night in Eyre Square might have to offer.  

But then, slouching around town, shoulders slumped, hands in pockets, the stomach heaving little packets of bile up into me mouth, I stopped into the church to get distracted by Pat’s unique view of the human world.  

Pat’s nearly like a second father to me.  I mean, he’s everything that Da’s not, except the two of them would make laugh – but for much different reasons. 

With Da everything is caution and reserve: Run low to ground, always be ready to dart under a rock when the world tries to roll over and crush you.  And the world does that to us – all the time.

With Pat, it’s the opposite: The world seems to come to Pat, revolving around him in a flurry of high energy, chaos and confusion.  He misreads people, signs, omens, but by the force of his personality, he always seems to come out on top. 

I worked for Pat as second-junior-assistant-vice-sacristan all through secondary school: Every week flipping back the long-heavy-wooden seats in the church’s naves, to sweep and polish the parquet floor; prepare the cruets of water and wine, the chalice with the host for the altar boys bring out for mass; get the least-giddy-eejit of an altar boy to light the candles without burning the church down; check the Liturgical Calendar, pick out the right color vestments from the deep closet in the sacristy; then lay the gold-thread-embroidered vestments out in the stipulated manner for the priest’s ceremonial robing; Sunday mornings were spent sliding ten pence and five pence pieces across the front porch’s solid wood table, stacking them into pound high silver-columns, for bagging and banking.

Pat, as a man who stands between three worlds, see things differently than your average sinner. 

He’s heard mass often enough that he can say it himself, and betimes he does; providing backup vocals from his mass-time stand at the carved wooden bench in the sacristy; his deep-bass voice intoning so loudly it flows out into the front seats.

With his own priestly uniform of a black soutane and a white surplice on his Friar Tuckian body, he eases families through funerals with his knows-no-boundaries personal touch; he beams mutter-mumbled compliments to brides as he fixes their headband or cinches a dry-mouthed groom’s tie; he shushes oblivious weeks-old infants at Baptisms so that their adoringly-deaf parents can hear the words mouthed blandly by the priest.

Like the boatman on the River Styx, Pat is no longer fully a lay person, but definitely not a seminaried priest.  

Thus, his relationship with the clergy is … complicated.  

He’s their employee; occasional temporary-devotee to a clerical celebrity; the best judge in town of the veracity of priest’s sermonly anecdote; an erudite historian of diocesan appointments – how, when and, most importantly, why; and he holds an empirical professorship in the field of clerical human frailty.  

Daily, he gets buckets of data for his professorship.

Balancing all week on that precarious threshold that separates the only three worlds allowed to a Catholic – heavenly-heaven; cursed-is-the-ground earth; and hellishly-hell – tends make a fella thirsty.

“We’ll go now below, don’t ya see, ta Father Curran’s mother’s wake,” he says in a this-is-the-plan voice to my still-severely-hungover self around ha’past four.  “They have her laid out below in Headford.”

Needing a reason to avoid, at all costs, the sending-you-back-to-Galway-stuffed-full dinner that Da is likely deep-fat-frying back at the house, I do what I do best: I agree, silently.

“We better go so,” Pat shrugs his black wool greatcoat onto his girthy torso, grabs his porkpie hat, and, with hands that constantly tremor, places it gingerly onto his bald head.  “There could be a traffic jam below in Ballinrobe, don’t ya see, two cows, a few sheep and a donkey heading back to the stable, huh?  Just like Bethlehem, huh?  We might stop into Art O’Neil’s for wan on the way home.”

Sitting into the Fiesta, I take a regretful swallow, having somehow forgotten the impact on my nervous system of being Pat’s passenger.  

He revs Henry Ford’s littlest engine until it screams in agony.  

With an entirely unpredictable timing, we lurch into Chapel Street barely avoiding the front wheels of a huge Sandy Geraghty lorry.  

Leaning forward to look in the mirror, we both see Sandy’s driver shaking his head and fist at us.

“Good Jesus, where did that blaggard come from!” Pat shakes his own fist in the mirror at the truck driver.  

 We trundle down Chapel St, the Fiesta and the lorry both in second gear, to a symphony of combustion engine agony.

“Don’t ya see now, ‘tisn’t safe ta drive the roads a Mayo no more, not with them big lorries full a dirt comin’ around every corner.  I’ll be up to the Gard’s barrack about that blaggard tomorrow.  Get his number, what is it at-all-at-all-at-all; DIS 7 … what’s the rest of it.”

First, I feign shortsightedness, then I give in, kinda-sorta, and write the digits down in the wrong order on the back of an old ESB bill that Pat yanks from the pile of paper jammed between the front seats. 

With a running monologue on the generally inferior driving habits of Castlebar-barians, we alternately scream and jerk along Main Street, down Castle Street, swooping up to the chestnut tree lined Mall.  After a no-stop left onto Spenser Street, we hit Station Road with enough revs to make third, or thirtieth, gear.  Finally, as we summit the hump-backed railway bridge, the rev counter gets a breather, as Pat shifts up and we’re launched for Ballinrobe.

“Sure, this country ruined, don’t ya see, … ruined,” he shakes his head slowly as we pass the turn for the Rugby Club – at the memory of which my stomach issues another bilious delivery.  

“‘A great little island,’ they do say to me when I’m abroad in Leeds with Mick and his friends.   Don’t ya know, out for a meal, a nice bit of roast beef or lamb above in …, in…, in wan a them fancy places.  An’ t’Englishman, Cyril or Cecil was it, sipping a glass a sherry, like a woman would, God-forgive-me, but why wouldn’t he have a real bleddy drink?  An’ says he to me, says Cecil: ‘A great little island ya have over there Pat.’  Don’t ya see – oh, no, no, no, no.” 

To my hangover-anxiety’s extreme anguish, he turns to stare at me, lifts his left hand off the steering wheel and wags his thick-trembling forefinger over and back slowly

“This country is ruined, ruined.  Now they had a story in the Inda…pendent t’other day, some blaggard ray…, rape, … he raped a woman on the side of a city street.  In Dublin a course.  Yeah, some poor girleen going home late wan night from work, an’ this blaggard come runnin’ out of a dark alley, an’ he pulls the skirt and the knic…, t’underwear, don’t ya see, offa her.  An’ he rapes her right there in the street.”

He hits the steering wheel so hard my body tightens involuntarily.

“The baaastard should be bate within an inch of his life!” he car-yells.  “‘N then I’d bring him into court, I don’t care if he’s black n’ blue all over.  Within in the court, I’d sentence him to a flogging.  We should brin’ that back; oh, t’English weren’t wrong about that.  Nathin’ but a loincloth on, …. ‘n I’d baaate him to within an inch of his life for a second time.  Then he can go an’ rot within in Mountjoy for the rest of his miserable life.”

He wipes the back of his hand over the sheen of sweat built up on his forehead.   

“Sure, that poor girleen, she’ll never be the same.  Ah no, no, no, ‘tis terrible what this ‘great little island’ lets them away with.  The paper said they went an’ let the baaastard off with five years, because of ‘mitigating family circumstances;’ I’d show him mitigatin’!”

He lifts his right hand off the steering wheel and shakes his fist at the criminal element of Ireland lurking behind the stonewalls and hedgerows in the Mayo darkness.

“Oh, if I was the Minister for Injustices, I’d …, them bleddy baaastards,” he car-yells, opening his mouth wide, teeth showing, “I’d flay them to within an inch of their lives – the shaggin’ lot of them!

He shakes his head so vigorously the Fiesta starts to drift across where the white line would be on a bigger road.

“Then, let ‘the defendant’s counsel,’” he does a creditable imitation of a Dublin 4 shithead accent, “complain as much he likes.  Bleddy shaggers in sheep’s wigs, an’ them driving their Jags out to the Golf Club for lunch.  What about the poor girleen from Revenue?  That’s where she worked don’t ya see, the poor divileen.  I’m sure she’s a fine girl, but don’t ya see, in that bleddy Revenue office, an’ I’m speakin’ from personal experience now.  There’s some others in there are right … baaastards!”

Thus, we traverse thirty miles of the infinite universe, powered along the twisty, dark roads of Mayo and Galway by Pat’s steering-wheel-slapping, indignant anger at a republic slipping inexorably into moral declination.

From the passenger seat I barely hear Pat’s monologue, as the personal anguish of the mother-of-all-hangovers opens for me a glimpse of my infinitely small role in this universe. 

To be continued …

Provisional Wording

I’m standing watching my brother Davey line up the penalty shot to decide the match.  We’ve been up the Green playing soccer for the whole of a steamy August afternoon, stopping only to sprint home for big gulps of cold water outta the kitchen tap; splash your face and hair, get yelled at for wetting the tiled floor; maybe run upstairs for a quick feet wash; then right back to the Green for the next match. 

Now it’s all down to this one penalty.

If he scores the penalty, our team, Marian Row and Riverdale, will beat Saint Bridget’s Crescent to win the Green Cup. 

It’s just a thing we made ourselves to fill up the boring summer holidays weeks.  Some of the lads’ll be going to secondary school when the holiday’s end, but not me, I’m only going into sixth class.  Once the lads go to secondary school, they don’t want to be playing in the Green no more; they want to be up the town, standing at Parsons trying not to get caught staring at girls’ arses.

I didn’t understand why they’d be looking at them, but then last year two teenagers were making fun of us for not knowing what “the ride” was.  I said it ‘twas riding a horse or a donkey down at the beach: I know, ‘cause it costs 20P to go up and down the beach in Kilkee on the back of a brown-shiny mule, that with every step it walks makes a nice warm squish of its saddle against your bollocks.

When they told us what “the ride” was, I didn’t believe them. 

That’s disgusting – sticking your willy in there!

I couldn’t even think about something like that.

Davey does the Liam Brady, hands on hips, staring at the goalie, penalty taking move.  Then he looks down at the ball slowly, then back up at the goal – which is just a few of our jumpers piled as the posts. 

The final of the Green Cup, that came after every team played each other twice, ended in a 17-17 draw.  Now it’s down to penalties – just like the World Cup. 

When we knew it was going to penalties, all the lads were trying to sneak the jumpers in closer together to make it easier for the goalies.  I like that cause I’m a goalie; not cause I’m good at it, it’s just that I’m worser out the field.  Me feet don’t do what I tell them.  I can trip fellas pretty good.  Sometimes I get away with it, cause I do try get me foot on the ball real quick, as if it was a fair tackle. 

The lads say I’m no good at soccer, but that I’m too thick to let anyone get apast me.  They put me in goals, so the match isn’t stopped all the time for fights.  That’s fine with me; goalies can do anything they want once the ball comes into the box.

Davey, stalking around a lot the way the professional players on the Match of the Day do, raising up his shoulders to takes a deep-I’m-about-to-take-a-penalty breath.

I can’t watch.

My stomach starts to go, telling me I’m scared. 

Not scared that he’ll miss: I don’t actually care who wins.  It’s just a stupid game that went on for so long and had so much cheating that you couldn’t say who really won. 

But I’m scared that something terrible is going to happen next.

Me stomach is always going like that.

A knock on the door; too much silence in the house; the principal sticking his head into the classroom; Da’s face when he walks into the house from work – everything makes me stomach go.

I turn away and stare at the graffiti on the wall that holds Baynes’ Hill from falling out onto Pound Road.

“NO EXTRADITION” – it says, painted in white on the pebble-dashed wall, the paint kinda-sorta dripping off each letter from where the paintbrush was too wet.

Them words showed up on the wall one morning a few months ago, but it’s only now, trying to stop me stomach from going that I ever bothered wondering what EXTRADITION meant.

And who painted it?

And why?

I mean I knew it had to have something to do with the IRA, ‘cause everything that’s not regular has to do with them, except maybe the odd thing the Travellers do.  But the Travellers usually do funny things, kinda-sorta funny-smart things that make the Settled people – that’s what they call us that live in houses – all tut-tut and sigh loudly.  Like the time the council gave them a house, and they ripped out the doors, cabinets, windowsills and burned the lot in the fireplace.  Then they washed their feet in the toilet bowl and filled the bathtub full of shite.

The IRA aren’t funny at all.  Da says, they’d put a bullet in your head as soon as they’d look at ya.  That’s why the Gards got an Uzi submachine gun sent down from Dublin.  Da does bring it home sometimes.  It’s fierce cool in its little briefcase that everything fits into just perfect.  We even get to take it apart and clean it, but we’re never allowed to touch the bullets.  Da keeps the clip full of bullets in the inside pocket of his blazer, where he keeps important stuff, like his black leather wallet.

“Sure if you weren’t careful with that bleddy thing, you could riddle half a Marian Row,” he twist-nods his head fast – his hair, Brylcreemed back hard and black, seeming to slice through the kitchen air, as he stands over us, supervising us cleaning of the submachine.

I try to figure out what EXTRADITION means.  The ‘extra’ part is easy, it’s the ‘dition’ I can’t figure out at-all-at-all-at-all.

It’s something to with prisoners.  I know that ‘cause on the news they’ll say so-and-so “originally from the Falls Road, Belfast, is being held on suspicion of membership in the Provisional IRA and weapons offences, while the British Government is seeking to have the suspect EXTRADITED.”

Maybe that means they want to come down and beat the shite of him for a few hours like they do to Catholics up in the Castlereagh RUC station?

That would be a good thing to stop.

These Troubles are everywhere now.  It’s funny that they just call them “Troubles;” not like Travellers-funny, but stupid-grown-ups-funny.

I mean there’s so many people getting shot, bombs going off, riots everywhere, and when you go near the Border, there’s heaps of soldiers, their faces blackened, hiding behind sandbags, pointing rifles and machine guns at your head.  And there’s so many IRA prisoners that they put them all together in Portlaoise Prison.  That was a bad idea, ‘cause last year, the IRA kinda-sorta took over Portlaoise the night of Saint Patrick’s Day.  They made the lights go off in the whole town and set a few fires so the Gards and the Fire Brigade would be too busy.  Then they drove a big lorry in the door of the prison.  The prison guards and the regular Irish Army, not the Irish Republican Army – it does get awful confusing – stopped anyone from escaping.

Still, with all these armies and guns and everything, it’s more like the “Troubles” is a war, and the sort of things Travellers do is ‘trouble.’ Like the time a Traveller ran into Donegan’s food shop and yanked one of them lovely looking juicy-brown chickens outta the glass oven that cooks them in a circle.  When the caught a few minutes later him and took what was left of the chicken back from him, he said: “Ya’ll have to wait for t’other half ‘til I shite it out!”  

But the Dublin crowd don’t care about Travellers, maybe they don’t have none up there.  It’s only the IRA they’re always on about, or, as the fella on the News, with all the cotton wool in his mouth to stop him from talking normal, calls them: “The Pro…vision…al IRA.”

What does Provisional mean?

Are they in favor of seeing better?

Now no one calls the IRA the IRA anymore; they all call them the Provos – that’s the short of Provisional.

Why do they always be making words us little fellas can’t understand?

An even more stupid one that they do is when a lad starves himself to death, they call it a Hunger Strike?  The first time I heard of a Hunger Strike I thought it meant that people wouldn’t do any more work until they got some food.  I heard it when Michael Gaughan from below in Ballina died in a prison in England.  And even then, it was a bigger lie, ‘cause he didn’t die from starvation, he died when they stuck a feeding tube down his throat.  Ten prison guards held him down on the bed, stretching his neck back over the frame so they could get the tube down inside him.  But they were too rough, and somewhere on his inside they cut him wide open.

“Now them prison guards should be prosecuted, just like Gaughan was himself,” Da said, slapping his hand off the arm of his tubular armchair, and us all sitting watching on the Nine O’Olock News – me waiting for the riots to come on.  “There’s no way ten fellas holding wan fella, an’ doing him that much harm can be legal.  I don’t care how many English barristers they can stack up in a courtroom against one good man telling the truth.  It’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it!”

Da’s all about prosecuting people when they do something wrong.

I do get prosecuted mesell a lot, for pissing on the toilet seat; for when I find where the biscuits are hidden and eat too many of them; and for fighting up the Green – that’s a hanging offense.

But at least prosecuted is an easy word to understand: Do something wrong – get hurt.

The other crowd that love confusing words are the priests.  The old people say “ishn’t it great now that Mass isn’t in Latin no more,” but sure above in the church of a Sunday morning, you wouldn’t know the half of the words the priest does be saying.  Even regular prayers are confusing: “Forgive us oh Lord our trespasses, and those that trespass against us.” 

Why would them above in Heaven be worried about trespassing?  Sure, that’s only going somewhere you shouldn’t go, like into some farmer’s field that has a big “NO TRESPASSING” sign on the gate.

And what if you don’t have a field for people to trespass in?  People in town don’t fields, so how can anyone trespass against us?

Maybe trespassing against us is if there’s a bull in the “NO TRESPASSING” field, and he runs up and tramples you to death?  You know like, how his hooves’d be trespassing through your body.

I never say anything about how the mass and prayers are all stupid-confusing to Da or to the priests; it’s too dangerous. 

See, one day Da was complaining about how people up the North could be killing one another over religion.

“Sure lookit,” he says, waving his hand hard and slow in the way that he really means something.  “Even if there is isn’t any God, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just lived the way Jesus said we should!”

No God?

How could there be no God?  Sure, we’re only here to be doing what He says so He can open the gate and let all the Catholics trot into heaven.

Course when you start to think about that, it kinda-sorta doesn’t make sense.  It’d be like working so hard in school you get the best results of everyone, but then there’s just nothing to do with your great results. 

Anyways, you can’t say any no God stuff to Da or the priests, not even in confession; they’d kill you stone dead.

So now I say nothing, but me stomach does go all the time; I’m afraid I’ll be found out and they might burn me to death – like they did to that woman below in France once upon a time.

Davey turns suddenly from his walking around with his hands on his hips, and runs at the ball, hits it hard, flashing it toward the goal.

Immediately he falls to his knees, throws his arms in the air – we won!

“OVER THE POST!” the goalie yells.

“No fucking way!” we all crowd in, faces red, fists clenched.

There’s a push and shove; a fist whacks a face; blood splashes from a nose; everyone jumps in – fists and feet flying.

I charge into the fight from my spot on the side, yelling:

“I’ll fucken EXTRADITE ya!”

Seedtime and Harvest

            “Yeah, I ain’t joking Sarg.  The order’s from the POA’s own account, an’ it literally says: ‘Cut the treason-iss traitor in two,’” the EPA soldier pushes his thick glasses further up his nose, strokes his thin goatee.  

            “It’s got one of them spelling mistake as he always makes,” he nods, purses his lips in a practiced manner, looks up across the desks at the Sergeant. “Did you know that the first one, the orange-ish one, that they had to get rid of for …, well you know and all.  Anyways, he useta spell like that too.  Dad says that’s how President’s write to show they’re like real people, not liberals an’ perfessors.”

            “It’s God as does that,” the Sergeant shakes her head, her cheeks and chins quivering.  “Y’all oughta knows by now, that He don’t trust human words, don’t have no respec’ for ‘em.  Y’all builds yer house on rock by listenin’ to our Lord’s words.  It’s all in t’Bible, Private Belanger – if an’ ye’re a lookin’ fer salvation.”

            “Yeah, yeah,” Belanger says, leaning back to his computer, tapping the keys.  “He’s mad too, listen to this: ‘Videographic evidence to be provided to the office of the President of ‘Merica.’”

            “My, oh my,” she breaths out heavily, runs a pudgy hand through her regulation short, brown hair.  “Well, t’wages a sin is death, so’s I image this poor sinner’s a gonna git paid too-day.”

The Sergeant’s hands whiten as she strains to raise her bulk out of the chair.  Once standing, she uses the face-to-face metal desks to prop herself up, and scuffing her black, orthopedic shoes across the bare concrete floor of the loading dock, she starts to work her way around to look at her subordinate’s computer screen. 

“I never did hear no order like that afore, least n’ all not in my’s five years a here.” 

“I guess this Con G822 is an extremely treasonous traitor.  I mean this is from the Generalissimo’s official account … .”

“Don’t be a usin’ that word,” the Sergeant snaps. “It’s agin reg’lations!”

She speeds up her scuffing, rounds Belanger’s desk, her index finger pointing accusingly at his face.  

“On Wednesday, January 30, 2030, the Pres’dent writ a order forbiddin’ people as a callin’ him that word.  I ‘member that date too well, ‘cause an’ it was the day afore my little ‘un final …,” she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, “gave in ta the Crona-virus.”

She turns her gaze up into the iron structure of the loading dock ceiling. 

“An’ I hopes in Heaven they knows, if only he coulda stayed long enough ta talk, then he for sure woulda died in our Lord, like an’ all the Mashe family ben a doin’ since mamma’s mamma’s mamma foun’ Christ.”

She purses her lips, eyes unfocused, distant.  

“An’, … an’ Belanger,” she breaths in hard, her focus returning, arm raising, index finger re-aimed at her subordinate’s face.  “That’s the secondest time this week, I heard y’all a usin’ the ‘G’ word; once a more, an’ I’m a gonna have to write ya up – reg’lations.”

“Ok, ok, ok, Sarg,” Belanger tips his chair back on two legs, throws his gangling arms up behind his head, almost hitting the Sergeant’s red-shirted torso, as she shuffles into his space.  “Dad says, … well he used to say before it was illegal, that that name creates fear, and fear is what we need to root out the rest a them liberals.  Dad likes to say, ‘a little fear goes a long way in ‘Merica.’  He says that’s the Gen … President’s main philosophy.  And he ought to know – I mena he’s met the President, right?”

“I dunno,” the Sergeant answers, leaning on the desk, breathing in heavily.  “I don’t be a truckin’ with no phil …, phil…oss…sophie like an’ all as you Belangers be a wastin’ yer times on.  I lives by faith, not by sight, jus’ as the Bible a tells me ta do.  But let me tell y’all, the Safety Major in Palm Beach, who sees the Pres’dent alls the time, says the  Pres’dent thinks that word makes him sound like he’s a dick…tator, an’ not the God appointed leader of ours country.”

Belanger slams his chair back to the floor, pushes his palms down along the front of his shirt, lurches toward his computer screen.

“Wait’ll you see,” he breathes out, clenching and unclenching his teeth.  “This traitor’s probably a perfessor, or an abortionist, or a librarian – dad says they’re the worst, think they know so much more than regular ‘Mericans.  We all went to school too you know.  Heck, I went to Trinity School back in NYC, … when that was legal.”

“What…evers,” she leans heavily on his desk.  “This sinner’s gotta done sumpten real-real bad for the Pres’dent ta write a order like that.  Cuttin’ a corpse in two aint nuthin’ we wuz never ordered ta do afore.”

“Well, we had to shave that body one time, remember?” Belanger sits back again, arms easing up behind his head, eyes softening.  “And photograph it too.  It was some chic… woman that First Lady number four thought was having an affair with the President?  Dad says you shouldn’t get killed for someone just thinking you’re having an affair.  I mean, she had to be eliminated anyway, ‘cause it turned it out she was a lesbo-terrorist, but he says you should be tried and killed for the crime you committed, not the one … .”

“Belanger!” the Sergeant snaps, her nostrils flaring.  “Let’s a deal with t’problems we do gots, an’ not the ones y’all an’ yer pappy is burnin’ brain oil ‘magining.  Does we even have tools for cuttin’ a body in two?  Can’t believe I’m a askin’ such a question.”

“Sure, we still have the chainsaw I requisitioned for the time we had to cut that NFL’s player’s feet off to get him into the incinerator.”

“A chainsaw!  Well I’d a never thunk we’d come to cuttin’ up a Temple a the Holy Spirit with chainsaws – even an’ if the sinners aint a usin’ them Temples proper,” the Sergeant breathes out loud, shaking her head.  “But orders is orders.  I don’t remembers that guy, what’d y’all say he done?  N…F… what?”

She rubs her eye sockets with the balls of her hands.  

“It must have been back when you were quarantined.  See, this guy was with the South Florida Dolphins, the pro football team.”

The Sergeant looks blurry eyed blankly back at Belanger.

“You really should take a break from reading the Bible and watch a game some time:  They play twice a week, year-round, Wednesdays and Saturdays, taking Lord-day off.  It sure is violent, and them darkies is the most violent; course they don’t last long ‘cause of injuries and such.  But it’s a ton of fun to see them going after one another.”

“The Bible’s a ton of fun too Belanger; thinking ‘bout me ups in Heaven, with my little fellar, an’ maybe my ex too; y’all can get back together up thare you know.  The good book says ta ‘set yer mind on things above,” she casts her eyes up at the loading dock ceiling, “an’ not on earthly things.  Anyhows, all they is a doin’ on TV is givin’ ya bad news, an’ tryin’ ta sell ya stuff they thinks the bad news’ll scare ya inta buyin’.” 

She leans forward, her hands pushing flat against the desk, the skin whitening.  

“Make that screen big the ways y’all do for them photas a hop hippers.”

Belanger’s shoulders rock up and down, one hand holding his nose, the other reaching forward, his fingers splaying the screen wide.

“I done forgot my glasses – agin,” she leans in closer to his screen.  “I don’t know whats a goin’ on, but I can’t hardly see no more, nor remember nuthin’ neither.”

“You know,” Belanger leans his chair back again, arms rising behind his head.  “South Florida hasn’t hardly won a game, except for beating the Illinois Bears – three times in a row – since that idiot got himself eliminated for saying ‘Separate But Equal’ was wrong.  And him living in one of them special compounds the NFL’s got for darkies. ‘A return to a dark past,’ he says.  But he is a darkie, or at least he was before I burned his corpse down to ashes; so, wasn’t he just going back to his own past?”

Belanger laughs loudly, his whole body rocking.  

“Thing is, they do all look the same when I’m shoveling out the ashes, man, woman, darkie, white, lesbo, homo.  No matter: Ashes is ashes.”

The Sergeant leans further forward, her fingers bright-whitening as she peers closely at his computer screen.

“Dad says, that when we was finished with needing them darkies to build this country, they should of all have just gone back home,” Belanger rocks his chair back and forward on two legs.  “And now, with the President’s offer of free ships to Africa, there’s nothing stopping them, except those stoopid countries refusing to let them in.  Things aint good over there in the ‘dark continent,’” he unclasps his hands from behind his head, and makes a quotation mark sign, then re-clasps them.  “Dad saw on the See-cureWeb how they got some new virus over there that killed two million in a month.  I mean four weeks to kill two million – that’s ten times the number of rebels still holding out in the remains of New York City.  If only we could get that virus in there and eliminate all of them in just one month!” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the Sergeant shakes her cheeks and chins, and gives up trying to read the computer screen.  “A guy with a pappy as big an’ smart as your’n, should run for Florida District Council.  Ya all would git ya enough hits on MeTube as for the Party ta endorse ya.  Then y’all’d be livin’ high on the hog in one their pertected manshuns, not worryin’ ‘bout no poor old ‘nvironmental Pertection Agency soldiers down here in West PB; an’ us gittin’ orders now ta cut bodies in two.”

“No, the Party aint my thing.  I’m just a good ‘Merican, committed to my country.  Committed to rooting the last a them liberals out of here,” Belanger flaps his elbows behind his head, his eyes darting around the room.  “You know what’s weird, but I don’t even mind the blacks so much as the liberals.  I mean, the blacks we just want them gone – right?  But we’re stuck with them, living in those Separate But Equal towns, which, cause they don’t take care of them, are just piles of moldy old buildings with roofs caving in, no electricity, water, nothing.  You can kinda understand it with a young black guy.  If he doesn’t make it to the NFL, then he’s kinda got no choice but to end up bombing an’ killing.  But my question is: What is it that’s driving those white, liberal fucks for them to ….”

“That’s it Belanger, I’m a writin’ ye up!” 

She tries to lift her hand to slam it down on the desktop, but the weight of her torso prevents any sudden movements.  

“You know the Pres’dent is agin language like that bein’ used in a ‘Merican Facility.  An’ me, as a Christian mom, ‘r a widow-mom, … whatevers: It’s a sin for me ta hear them words.”

Now she’s erect enough to raise her hand and slap it down.

“Ok!”

“Yes’m,” Belanger whips his hands from behind his head, drags his chair back up to the desk, starts typing wildly on the keyboard, his eyes roving erratically all around the loading dock’s bare cinderblock walls.  “I’ll remember that.  For sure I will Sarg, I’m awful sorry, it’s just my … .”

He trails off into silence, disturbed only by his rapid tapping on the keyboard.

            “Oooo…kay,” the Sergeant breaths out loud.  “I don’t wanna hear no more of that now, y’all a hearing me?”

            “Yes mam,” Belanger clips, sitting erect in front of the computer, eyes still darting around the loading dock.

            “What time’s the corpse a coming down?”

            “Eh, eh,” his eyes return to the computer screen, he deletes the gibberish he’s typed into a cell in the Traitor Disposal Database.  “There is no time given, but he normally does the shootings just before lunch.  Dad says he heard someone at the bar in the Club say that the eliminations help the President’s digestion.  He’s down at WH Too, right?  I heard choppers flying over last night?  And there was gunfire this morning, probably him practicing.”

            “I couldn’t tell ya, even if an’ I knowed: Reg’lations,” she scuffs her way back to her desk, not turning to look at him. 

            “I guess you’re right … again … sarg,” Belanger purses his lips.  “Loose lips, sink ships, right?”

            He sucks in air fast and loud.

            “But I mean, I don’t even know why they keep White House One, heh?  That place aint hardly safe, what with so many darkies and all them liberals from the old commie dictatorship still up in the Mid Atlantic sector.  The other thing that I don’t understand is what do we need two Washingtons for?  You know there’s another one, or used to be anyway, I think it’s still there, somewhere out by where they nuked California, right at the beginning of the war.  Supposedly it was beautiful, the other Washington that is, not California: That was a scary place, all liberals and darkies, and mountain lions, and rattle snakes.  Can you believe they let things like that live with regular people?  But the other Washington was all mountains an’ rivers an’ fields, hardly no cities as needed shutting down.  I think we should get rid of the darkie-liberal Washington, just nuke it.  Dad said they were going to nuke Chicago, to eliminate all the rebels there, but they were afraid Lake ‘Merica would get too full of nukes, I guess they’re bad for you, even after the explosion, so they wouldn’t be able to use it for shipping.  And he says we need the shipping bad, what with the liberals blowing up all the railway tracks and hacking air traffic control all the time.”

            “Y’all an’ yer pappy be mighty busy reorg’nizin’ ‘Merica yet?” the Sergeant sighs, flopping into her chair.  “An’ silly me thought that all was t’President an’ t’Supreme Council’s job.” 

            “Just thinking Sarg, it aint a crime for a young man to think, is it?”

            “I honest dunno no more if a thinking’s good ‘r not.  But I do knows that Proverbs says; ‘the tongue has the power a life an’ death, an’ them as loves it, will fer sure reap its fruit.’”

            “Huh?” Belanger frowns so hard, his glasses move down his nose.

            She stares at him, breathes out, shakes her head, and pushes her face up close to the computer screen.

“Can’t see nuthin’ with n’ out my glasses,” she complains; slumps back in her chair; her torso ballooning her red shirt.  “So probly, it’ll be round’n bout one, by the time the corpse a gits here?  I’m still not a sure how we all git it a cut in two.  What else does it say thare.”

            “So here’s the whole order Sarg,” Belanger sits upright, draws in a deep breath.  “‘Con G822, to be eliminated, October 7, 2031, as a treason-iss traitor, pursuant to investigations of the Committee for ‘Merican Safety.  EPA to cut the body in two.  Videographic evidence to be provided to the Office of the President of ‘Merica, forthwith.’  That means, fast; like he aint messing round on this one.”

“Well, it’s strange fer sure.  I mean how’d we all a cut him in two?  An’ why take a vid-dao of it?” the Sergeant tries to fold her arms, but gives up and lays them on the desktop.  “We musta done a few hunderd, maybe a thousand traitors since the first Assumption to Power back in twen’y five.  I mean it was hard at first, but then when y’all heard how bad they wuz … the things Safety a said them people done!”

She shakes her head.

“An’ fer sure it was much slower under the one Without God, but maybe that wuz ‘cause the devil jus’ twisted he’s mind so bad, an’ he a ended up all lazy an’ greedy, an’ jealous, eatin’ all days ever’day, an’ them nakid women parties over in WH Too.  An’ … an’ then he’s mistresses gittin’ secret ‘bortions.  That was sinful, … so sinful.”

She shakes her head, breathing out heavily, runs the back of her hand over her forehead.  

“Did breakfast ever comes? My tummy’s a tellin’ me it’s gotta be at leas’ oh nine hunderd by now.”

            “I thought I just heard the Mississippi truck pull up out back.”

            He scrapes his chair back across the floor; walk-marches over to the loading dock door, executing sharp rights and lefts; pulls back the vision slot; peers out; then hits the red button to unlock the door.

Outside, the morning is hot, humid, the air thick with mosquitos.  

The Sergeant pushes her face up close to her computer screen, her eyebrows furrowed, forehead dampened with a sheen of sweat.  

Belanger grabs an aerosol can of Don’t Bug Me hung from a string screwed to the door frame, cracks the door open, and sprays the can out through the crack.

            “You dope!” the Sergeant shrieks, struggling to stand up, metal chair-legs dragging hard against the concrete floor.  “Y’all know them devil’s agents a comin’ in up top n’ down low, while yer a sprayin’ t’middle,” 

            Belanger doesn’t react, instead he steps into the haze of Don’t Bug Me, grabs the white paper bag, and ducks back inside, slamming the door closed, whacking the red button with palm of his hand.

            “There’s like tens a thousands of ‘em in here now,” she continues, panic in her voice.  

She stands by the desk; thrusting her bulk toward any sign of movement in the air; clapping her hands wildly.

            “I swear to the good Lord, if an’ I die from Nile virus, my moms a movin’ inta yer pappy’s ‘partment in PB.  Where else she’d a go?  We’d a lose the EPA ‘partment with me gones.”

            She yanks open a desk drawer, pulls out a pocket-book sized can of Don’t Bug Me, and starts spraying.

            “Hey, hey, hey!” Belanger almost yells.  “That’s poison, it’ll get on the food.”

            “The Pres’dent wouldn’t a be a sellin’ no bug spray, if an’ it done us no harm.  Anyhows, I don’t care, I’d a prefer ta die a poison than disease.  If Crona an’ West Niles didn’t happen to good folks, I’d a say they was new plagues, like outta t’Bible.”

She pouts, but stops spraying, her gaze drifting off into the loading dock’s high ceiling.

            “What’d you get?” Belanger says his face half in the bag of food.  “Bacon, egg and cheese?”

            “Yep, but two of ‘ems, on plain donuts, right?  An’ withs jelly?”

Belanger hands her the sandwiches and a tall, electric-purple drink.  For himself, he pulls out an iced coffee, condensation bubbling on the clear plastic.

“I ben a eatin’ this sandwich for thurty-three years, since I wuz like … three,” she peels back the paper.  “Truth is, I couldn’t a start my day, wouldn’t be able ta do my job right, if an’ I didn’t have a good breakfast like momma useta make.  Even when dad tooks off, an’ we was a livin’ in grandma’s leaky old doublewide, we’d all be a sittin’ thare at the little blue table, an’ the roof a droopin’ down on momma an’ grandma’s heads, I was too little for an’ it ta bother me, an’ us a eatin’ this vury same sandwich.”

The Sergeant sinks her teeth into the plain donuts. 

Belanger march-walks to his chair, stops, swivels, sits straight­-backed and takes a regulated first sip of his iced coffee.

            “Hey Sarg,” he says, the straw barely out of his mouth, “did you see on News ’Merica, how they caught some guy, like an old perfessor, I mean he wasn’t old, but he had been a perfessor when that was legal, before the Assumption,” Belanger leans towards his screen, taps the keyboard.  “Anyway, they caught him in a bombed-out apartment building with a bunch of books – old ones, even an illegal copy of the old, incorrect, Constitution.  It was somewhere real backwards, Boston or Baltimore or Buffalo, one a them stoopid places.  Anyways, he held off Safety for a few hours.  He had a gun – an old AR!  Could use it too.  I guess he was ex-military, he fought back in one of them liberals wars in Afghanaa… Afghanawhogivesashit, but Safety blas… .”

            “That’s it Belanger!” she slams her keyboard.  “I am filin’ a religion complaint, right now.  It’s a sin agin my Christian faith ta have ta work with someones as keeps swearin’ an’ cuss… .”

            “I’m so sorry Sarg,” he jumps to his feet, scraping his chair loudly.  “Look, I’m only twenty-two, dad says I just need to keep a clean sheet, and he’ll get me into Safety.  See, I didn’t hardly sleep a wink last night, my meds are all off, and now this cutting in two thing’s got me all stressed.  It’s just old habits from growing up in a city. I’m in a support group and everything.  I’m working the problem, believe me, dad’s got me on it.”

            She grabs her sandwich, chomps into it, her eyes blazing, mounds of jelly forming at either end of her lips, as she glares at him.  

            He tries to keep eye contact, but his eyes can’t stop roving.

            “Well, it aints mys fault, yer family was doofus enough,” she stops to inhale through her purple-food filled mouth, “as to live in a city. If an’ it wasn’t for the Pres’dent declarin’ them all liberal-traitor-swamps, then maybe t’Belangers’d still be livin’ thare.”

            She chews hard; a sheen of sweat rising on her face; takes a long, squelchy sip of her purple drink.

            Belanger stands still, his face pointed in her direction, but his eyes roving over the desks, the floor, the block walls.

            “Com’ on sarg, I prom…ise you, I’m on this,” he bows his head slightly, forces his eyes to settle on hers.  “We’ll get this traitor cut in two, and you won’t have to do nothing, only put your name on the form that says we completed yet another order for the President.”

            She chews and stares; her jaws moving in a slow circular motion; takes another long sip; but before she’s even removed the straw from her lips, her right index finger is aimed at Belanger’s face.

            “I’m a tellin’ ya kid, y’all aint Safety material,” she opens her mouth to breath, exposing a mash of purple stained bread, meat-product and jelly.  “My ex, he done like three months with ‘em.  Cuttin’ a stiff in two aint nuthin’ compared as to what theys gotta do.  There’s kids y’all gotta … you know … lot a times them liberals, specially perfessors an’ such, them have a lot a little ‘uns.”

            She stares at him, her jaws grinding the food.

“Well, they gotta goes too, don’t they?” she shakes her chins and cheeks.  “The Pres’dent a calls it ‘the rats nest phen…, phenom …’ thing, right?” 

Her eyes never leave his.  

“It aint that easy, is all I’m a sayin’.”

            “I’m ready,” Belanger swells his chest, shoulders back, arms tight by his side.  “Whatever it takes to keep ‘Merica safe.”

            “Hmmph,” she snorts and swallows noisily.  “Plus, I think they don’t take no ones from a city.  I mean, what with Safety’s air-oh-plane’s a pourin’ God’s sulfur an’ fire all over cities, peoples a comin’ outta thare gotta be pretty mess… .”

She moves to point her index finger at her head, then switches to lifting up her drink. 

“There might even be one a them secret reg’lations agin city folks a joinin’ Safety – jus’ sayin’.”

She stares out over the top of her cup at him; electric-purple liquid shooting up the plastic straw.  

Blindly, Belanger wraps a foot around a chair leg and drags it back toward him.  Sitting, he tucks himself into the desk, pushes his glasses up his nose, and peers at the computer screen.

The room is silent, other than the sound of the Sergeant eating, and the crinkle of paper as he opens his bag of food, then pushes it aside.

“Ok,” she drains her purple drink with a vacuuming sound.  “The Pres’dent’s order is for us ta cut this traitor in two – right?  So Private First Class Belanger, tell me how y’all plan on ‘chievin’ that?”

“Well,” he sits back in his chair, starts to lift his hands up behind his head, but stops when he sees the stern look on her face.

“One way would be to cut off the feet, just below the knees, the bone is thinner there.  Like I did for the NFL stiff,” he looks earnestly at her.  

She circulates her tongue between her gums and lips, bulging out the loose flesh, as she pursues fugitive food.

“I mean that would be strictly following the order.”

“Really?  Wouldn’t y’all be cuttin’ it in three?  I mean two legs, an’ the leftovers?”

“Strictly speaking, yes; but I can’t imagine the President would have a problem with more than two parts.  And it is a more efficient way to do the cutting.  I mean I had the NFL guy apart in, … like ten minutes, other than the hours of clean up.”

“I don’t a like it.  Pres’dent’s too smart for us to be a cuttin’ sumpten in three, when he said two, just ‘cause an’ it’s easier.  Y’all think ‘Merica’ got great by peoples doin’ thangs the easy way – heh?”

She shakes her cheeks and chins but stops to wipe the back of her hand across her mouth, catching the jelly smears.

“How abouts,” she starts, but stops to lick the back of her hand.  “We cut it right across the belly?  It’s only guts n’ stuff in there, be like cuttin’ melted cheese – wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, that could work,” Belanger takes a deep breath, raises his eyebrows.  “I mean, that could get messy, with the guts flowing everywhere, bits of them flying off the blade.  That chainsaw moves fast.  And the spine’s in there somewhere too.  I think that might be harder to cut than a leg bone.”

“Awright city genius; what’s yer big idea, ‘n it’s gotta add up ag…zactly ta two pieces?”

Belanger forces his chin down and out to the right, the skin on his face stretching so far, his glasses twitching on his nose.

“How … about we cut off the head, that adds up to … .”

“That’s decah … decap … decapitalization, aint it.  The Pres’dent’s order didn’t say nuthin’ ‘bout that, an’ he knows that ‘n all.  Back in the beginnin’, somebody done that ta one o’ them New York newspaper fellers; an’ the Pres’dent now, he was outta the army then I thinks, he wuz jus’ a wasting he’s time in that stoopid old Congress, but he didn’t like the cuttin’ heads off thing at … all.  Called it barbar-aric, like as them filthy Muslim terrorists a do.  No, we aint decapitalizing this guy, no way, no how.  That aint t’order.”

“For sure it’s not written in the order, but it does end up with two parts, and the chainsaw could do it, no problem.  I’d just come in from the bac … .

“Nah, they’re a looking for a vid-dao.  The Pres’dent could get mad, he’s got a temper y’all know, if an’ he sees a decap…, one of them head cuttin’ offs, an’ he’s  aspectin’ to see a vid-dao of a body in two big parts.  Now as I recall it, the Safety Major over in PB did tol’ me a story ‘bout one time that he had ta take a vid-dao of he’s guys draggin’ a traitor round the block a few times behinds a pickup.  It was some real bad spy, they’all a caught her a sendin’ army plans an’ photas ta Brazil, or China, or one of thems enemy countries.  Anyhows, t’Major submitted the vid-dao, per t’order; an’ he’s boss’s boss tol’ he’s boss, who tol’ him, that they’all showed that vid-dao one Saturday night when they had a bunch a Saudis over for one a them Unity Banquets.”

“Why does the President like the sand-rats so much - heh?  Dad says we should just invade and take all the oi … ,” he stops ‘cause the Sergeant’s face is twisted into snarl, as she tries to rise up out of her chair using one arm, the other arm aimed at him, index finger thrusting at his face.

“Ye’re all done Belanger, ya can forget ‘bout Safety.  I don’t care who yer pappy’s neighbors be.  Y’all aint a even goin’ to last with t’EPA.  The South Ah-rabs is our friends, maybe ours onliest real friends on this here planet, an’ them a taken such good care a the Holy Land for us n’ all.  An’ here y’all is, a EPA soldier, in a ‘Merican Facility, calling them names as only a city kid uses.”

She gives up attempting to stand, flops back into her chair, her torso flooding the space between the chair’s arms.

“I’m a gonna get Form one oh-oh seven a up here.  I’m a goin’ straight for firin’ this time, if an’ I can see anythin’ without ma gla… .”

A loud pounding on the door silences her.  

She flicks her eyes from the computer screen to the door, and back to Belanger.

The pounding continues like a regular drumbeat; the noise reverberating in the high volume of the loading dock.

Belanger jumps up; chair scraping back; hands closed into fists; eyes staring at the door.

“There are no other deliveries today, is there Sarg?” he turns to her, his forehead furrowed.

“Y’all wuz t’one on t’computer, only the cuttin’ in two a one, right?  Maybe they all had a party last night – made some more?”

“We need to get a camera for this door.  What if that’s some crazed librarian out there, looking to kill all of us working to keep ‘Merica safe?”

“Jus’ answer the door.  I ben here like five years an’ nuthin’ but stiffs come through that door, an’ one bomb, but that was a fake delivery.”

“See!” Belanger’s torso curves in on itself, his shoulders hunching forward.  “They’re out there, but Safety’s too soft on them.  I’d wipe out the goddam lot of them.”

“Belanger!”

The pounding on the doors gets louder, quicker.

“I’m a telling you for the final-final-est time, the Florida EPA General’s a reverend minister, an’ he don’t ‘preciate no one a takin’ Christ the Redeemer’s name in vain.”

“Go ahead an’ do what you got to do,” Belanger nods fiercely at her, his face taut.  “While I’m following your die-rect order to open the door and let terrorist abortioning perfessors overrun this ‘Merican Facility.”

He stomps over to the door; peers through the slot; whacks the red button; and whips the door open.

A human, in a bloodied jumpsuit, its face so wet-blooded the skin-tone can’t be made out, is push-stumbled into the room at rifle point.

Behind him swaggers a Kevlar suited and face-masked soldier.

“Here, … this traitor’s yours,” the soldier’s deep voice says, hooking his foot easefully around the jumpsuit leg, and pushing the prisoner forward so it falls face forward onto the floor.  

“AAAAHHH!” the prisoner screams, trying to writhe in pain, but the tight chain manacling it from feet to hands to neck, prevents any movement.  

The prisoner tries to turn its face to breath, daubing the floor with a bloody skid-mark.

“’An’ parently y’all gotta cut the dope two,” the soldier barks, waving a sheet of paper at Belanger’s face.  “An’ … they’all wants a vidao of the cuttin’ sent right aways ta the big house.  Needs it fer a berthday party as is happenin’ tonite up thare for Emp-poorer Poot’n.”

The Sergeant’s face blanches.  She clenches her teeth, and tries to spring from her chair, nudges forward, but gives up.

“Takes that pris’ner outta here with y’all,” she yells, aiming her pudgy index finger at the soldier’s Kevlar facemask.  “We’all don’t got nuthins’ ta do with living folks ‘ere; we on’y burns up dead bodies.”

The soldier’s shoulders and neck arch slightly as he turns his facemask towards the Sergeant.  

“Go on now,” she huffs up enough energy to stand.  “Git ‘im … it outta here.”

“Hah,” the soldier scoff-laughs, spittle flying out the mouth opening of his facemask.  “That’s yourn’s problem now.”

He turns and leaves, reaching his hand behind him to slam the door shut.

The Sergeant stares at the door, then flicks her eyes to Belanger, who’s staring down at the prisoner.  

She fast-scuffs out from behind her desk, leans over slightly to peer down at the prisoner, then back to Belanger.  He remains standing by the door, straight-backed, his eyes roving wildly from the prisoner’s blooded body, all over the room and back to the prisoner.

“Belanger!” she raises her voice sharply, glaring at her subordinate.

His eyes keep roving around the room and back to the prisoner. 

“What in the name of our Creator n’ Pertector we all gonna do now?”

Both sets of eyes settle on the prisoner trying to writhe.

Early Warning Signs

I’m lounging in Ma’s tubular armchair in the kitchen, my socks, still wet from playing over in the Green, steaming against the fire’s red-hot coals.  It’s a Tuesday night, eight o’clock.  All the sixth-class homework is done, checked, and back in the schoolbag, leaving Scratchy no reason to send me to Brother Ailbe’s office for six slaps of his leather across the hand.  

Now I get to relax for an hour, leave Castlebar behind, and head off through the black and white tunnel to the rest of the world: The telly!

Rockford’s buzzing around LA – “LA” … just saying them letters together makes you sound cool – in his golden-brown sports car.  He spin-twists-turns the car, barely touching the steering wheel.  That’s not how Da drives, white knuckles grabbing the steering wheel as if we’re sinking with the car and us after skidding over a cliff, and really we’re only going up Bests for groceries.  No, Rockford shakes off the bad guys, with just the tips of his fingers on the steering wheel, a little kinda-sorta smile on his face, as he leaves them in his dust.  It’s weird how the roads are so dusty in LA. 

Then, Jim – that’s what I call Rockford – heads back to his caravan parked on the side of a “highway.”  He calls his caravan a “trailer;” in Mayo only Travellers live in “trailers.”  So you do be scratching your dandruff about Jim.  I mean he is a great PI, better than that ould fat Frank Cannon or that eejit above on a horse McCloud, but he is different how he makes a gobeshite outta everyone, even himself sometimes, the way he does win, but still kinda-sorta loses.

Problem is tonight, the black line is back on the telly. 

It comes every few months, across the bottom of the screen.  It’s thin first, like you’d only notice it ‘cause you knew it meant trouble was coming.  It goes away if you turn off the telly and let it cool down.  But back it comes, and thicker every day.

Da’ll pretend it’s not there until it’s about a quarter the way up the screen.  By then you miss bits of what’s happening in the story, especially if someone’s reaching for their gun or sneaking something under a table.  All them weird Russian subtitled films, that Da says RTE musta got for free, sure you can’t watch them at-all-at-all-at-all ‘cause you can’t read any of the words. 

Finally, when it gets fierce bad, Da’ll send for the telly repair man.  The telly repair man’s a bit like a telly himself, ‘cause he comes from another world.  I mean he only comes over from Claremorris, sixteen miles away, but he seems to live in a different world. 

First of all, he looks like Lou Grant from the Mary Tyler Moore Show; for real, he does.  I suppose he’s lucky he ended up looking like Lou and not like Ted Baxter – who’s a ferocious gobeshite altogether.  No, he’s just like Lou; short-stubby-bald, bulge-filling his yellowish shirt and grey pants, with a rake of creases in the pants where his short, thick legs meet his short thick body, and then more lines, but in his skin this time, where his thick neck meets his shoulders.  And he always has a cigarette in his hand, a Major; just like himself; short, thick and strong. 

He points at Da with the cigarette:

“So this beaut that’s threatening to drag me into court, he’s a small bit of a nuisance during the day, but he’s a creel full of trouble with drink on him,” he says, sitting at the edge of Ma’s tubular armchair. 

The Major moves like it’s a part of his talking, blue smoke rising off the grey-red ash. 

“He’s claimin’ the toilet floor washn’t cleaned.  Sure, a toilet floor’s made for to be wet an’ slippy, ishn’t it.  Sure that’s why they put down tiles in there.”

He waves the Major wildly.

“Where was he expectin’ ta end up an’ him goin’ for a piss?  The lobby of the Gresham Hotel!”

“Ooohhh, ye’re in choppy waters now my man,” Da twist-turns his head in warning-disgust.  “Fet’ then if that blackguard gets the right solicitor, he’ll be livin’ above in the Gresham, an’ you footin’ the bill!”

See the telly repair man owns a night club.

Yeah, imagine that. 

A nightclub. 

In Mayo. 

Sure, nightclubs should only be in Dublin, like the add in the cinema, with all flashing disco lights, that says: “ZHIVAGOS …, where looovvve stories begin!”

Da somehow gets word to nightclub owning, telly repair man that our telly is sick again, and over he comes to pick it up.  Then he stays talking and smoking for hours, usually trying to figure out how to make the nightclub work better.  I don’t know how he thinks Da could help him.  Da doesn’t drink, he always wears a Pioneer Total Abstinence Association pin on his jacket, he for-sure-for-sure doesn’t dance, he doesn’t ever go out at night, and the only things he even watches on telly is boring stuff like the news and maybe Outlook, or Mart and Market. 

Outlook is religion, and it’s so borin’ I’d prefer to watch the RTE Test Card – that stupid circle full of black and white and grey squares that’s on before the programs start at four o’clock.  That’d be better than watching that priest, and him with a face on him the length of a fishing line, listing off all the things we can’t do, unless and we want to end up burning below in hell.

Mart and Market’s nearly worse.  It’s just farmers selling cattle. This ould bald fella sits at a desk, reading so fast you can’t hardly hear him, telling us how much “dry heifers an’ bullocks sold for a hundredweight” – whatever a hundredweight is.  Then the farmers come on the screen, their hands buried in anorak pockets, all stand-staring down at the cattle getting driven around the mart ring by this gobeshite in shite-splattered-wellingtons.  The cattle kinda-sorta jolt around in a nervous circle until they’re finally sold to some meat factory to get slaughtered. 

Every now and again one of them tries to turn on the gobeshite.  Then, just like Brother Ailbe does to us with his leather when we’re bad and sometimes even for no reason, the shite-splattered-gobeshite raises his arm high up over his shoulder and brings the stick down that hard it bounces back up off the cattle’s turning head.  Ailbe’s leather leaves a fair track of long-burning across the palm of your hand.  But God help you if he makes himself all red-faced mad and delivers a few lashes of it to your head. 

I’d say Jim Rockford wouldn’t put up with any of this at-all-at-all-at-all.

“Ya see, the punters pay their two pound fifty ta get inta the nightclub,” the stubby-fingers with the Major are going again, stabbing the air in Da’s direction.  “An’ for dat dey get a bowel of soup an’ a roll, … an’ a course the dancin’, with the late bar.  The problem is them two hours off a Sunday night that ya can’t open the bar.  For me that’s one hunderd an’ twenty long minutes of not makin’ a bleddy penny, and that gobe…,” he flicks his eyes toward my staring eyes, “fella above there in the discah booth barkin’ inta the microphone, ‘playin’ he’s toons.’  Ah, good Lord, deliver me!”

He sits back in Ma’s armchair, shakes his head, jams the Major between his lips, the red ash quiet-crackling its way down the cigarette’s white paper.

“Sure the licensing laws in dis country is pure cracked,” he’s off again, behind  clouds of smoke gushing outta his nostrils.  “Waitin’ until wan minute after midnight on t’Monday morning ta open the bar.  ‘Tis pure madness.  Lads an’ lassies lamping down my soup, with their tongues hanging out a them for a pint or a vodka an’ whatever.  The bleddy cash registers dead silent, with me payin’ the barmen, the doormen, yer wan in the coat check, an’ that ould fool above in de discah booth.  The lot a dem on damn good money!”

He tears into the Major again, reaches for the pack to light the next one off the one already in his mouth.

Hours later, he and Da, huff-huff-huffing with the importance of being careful, carry the telly out to the boot of his car, and off it goes to Claremorris: Not to be seen again for months.

That’s how things get fixed.

One time we had a clock that Da and Ma got for their wedding all them years ago, a fancy, shiny-wooden thing, and one day it just stopped ticking.  It took the clock-fixer fella above in Ballaghaderreen, thirty-three miles away, two years to get it to tick again.  After one year, we drove up for the Sunday spin to ask if it was ready: Only he was above at a Sligo Rovers match that day – the neighbour woman tol’ us.  A year later, we got a letter to come and pick it up; ‘twas finally fixed.

When the washing machine breaks, Da writes a letter to the repair man who lives in Tobercurry, thirty miles away.  The repairman writes back, says a day a few weeks out that he’ll come and fix it.  All the washing gets done by hand for them weeks, or not done at all.  The repair man shows up in a white Hi-Ace van, with “BENDIX” in blue letters on the side.  The key to the house is left hidden under one of the empty milk bottles outside the front door – the letter lets him know which bottle.  In he comes, fixes the washing machine.  A bunch more letters go over and back to get the bill paid by Postal Order.   

But that’s not how a telly gets fixed. 

Getting a telly fixed is a bit like one them subtitled Russian films, full of confusion, strange places, and disappointment.

The telly’s gone for so long we have ta find something to fill the evenings.  Da digs out a chess set from way in the back a the press under the stairs.  We don’t have a chessboard, so he makes one outta a few pieces of letter-writing paper Sellotaped together.  We don’t need letter writing paper anymore.  Only Ma used that to write to Granny and Auntie, and sometimes Uncle.  Da uses my ruler and black pen to draw the chessboard squares.  There’s hardly any ink left when I’m finished colouring all the squares black.  That’s all right, ‘cause Scratchy doesn’t hardly let me write in pen anyways; “‘cause ye’re always makin’ stoopid mistakes!”

Chess is a bit like the news, except it all happens in a quarter of an hour and not over weeks.  You use your pieces to attack the other player’s king, who’s just like a real king; lazy, good for nuthin’, an’ can’t even defend himself.  The other player tries to defend their king and attack yours.  But it’s hard goin’ to be defending and attacking.  So, I just defend, and wait for the other player to make a mistake. 

I use the French Defence. 

It’s very good. 

The French must be fierce scaredy-cats; probly ‘cause Hitler lived next door.

The other players – mostly my brothers or friends; girls don’t play chess – usually get impatient and make bad moves while I’m setting up my French Defence.  Then it’s easier for me to attack.

Maybe the French are scared-smart.

If we had a telly, we’d a been watching people scared-smart up in Belfast and Derry.  Every evening there’s news at six and again at nine.  If there’s good rioting on the six o’clock news – you know, fellas in balaclavas throwing petrol bombs exploding in a burst of flames at the British Army, and the soldiers standing behind Saracen armored cars, all ready for battle, helmets, gas masks, rifles aiming at the lads with the petrol bombs – then I’ll watch it all again at nine.  They always show it again, and maybe even show more, ‘cause nine o’clock is the main news.    

The only thing I like on the telly more than Rockford is rioting.

The weird thing is that the RTE reporters use the same voice when they’re talking about rioting or the body of some fella shot be the IRA or UVF, lying booby-trapped on the side of the road, as when they’re talking about a strike at some factory or a disease killing cattle abroad in Cork.  They don’t talk regular on the news.  It’s like every word is heavy and means more than if I was just talking with the lads or even Rockford talking to Angel, his awful gobeshite friend.  I suppose to get a job with RTE, you have to be fierce important and that’s the how your words do get so heavy.

With no telly, the house is just children moving around all evening; in and out of rooms searching for anything not boring to do that you mighta missed the last time you were in there – four minutes ago. 

Sauntering into the girls’ room and saying something stupid is a great way to start a fight.  Fighting makes the evenings go quicker, but in a small house with eight other children to fight, it can get bad fast.  The fights carry on for days, and you’d be worn out remembering which brothers and sisters need how much, and what kind, of meanness.

There’s always books.  Reading is better than the telly for getting out of Castlebar, ‘cause in a book you’re with them for so long that you really get to know the people: It’s like you’re living with them.  With the telly gone, I move in with the Jordache family from Rich Man, Poor Man first, and then I devour the second one, Beggarman, Thief. 

After a few games of chess, and maybe a small fight in the girls’ room, I race into bed, the soles of me feet still cold from the lino floor in our bedroom, pull the blankets up tight and read a rake more chapters about the Jordaches: They’re fierce crack altogether!

The fighting they do with one another makes our evening fights look like two hens wing-shoving one another over who can scratch what bit a dirt.  I mean, the Jordaches are not actually fighting like they do up the North; no one’s getting shot dead or burned outta their houses, but they fairly make things bad for one another.  It’s all great stuff, and they do be having sex!

  In and outta bed with one another.  There’s none of that sex carry on in Ireland.  Father Blake and the other priests make sure that only happens in America and England.  But maybe Irish people that emigrated to them places do get to be doing sex?

One rainy Saturday afternoon, with the boredom meter ticking up towards a Jordache-sized fight, Da announces we’ll go for a swim in Claremorris.  As well as having a nightclub, that’s the other weird thing about Claremorris: They have an indoor, heated swimming pool. 

We have a swimming in Castlebar, over in the Green, but it’s outdoor, not heated, and it’s only open in the summer.  The “duck pond” everyone calls it.  Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are for boys swimming; Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays are for girls; and everyone can swim of a Sunday.  It’s only open from two to five on Sundays, so everyone can get mass and have their Sunday dinner.  It’s great crack in the pool, swimming under water, fighting with the lads, but when you get out your eyes are all red from chlorine and you’re blue-purple with the cold.

In Claremorris, you have to pay 10p to go in, but everyone gets to go, and it’s hot.  Not as hot as a bath, but close.  When you walk into the kinda-sorta warehouse where the Claremorris people keep their pool – a big blue tub sitting on the floor, with wooden ladders you climb up to get into it – the smell of chlorine hits you, along a watery-hotness that immediately makes you start sweating all over your body.  You don’t get to stop sweating until you splash inta the made-blue-by-the-blue-tub, lukewarm water.

We have a great time, and come out after an hour, exhausted and with our skin cleaner than our souls would be coming outta Father Blake’s confession box.  ‘Cause you know how you might on accident not tell him about the Jordaches doing all that sex, so the next time you see him on the street, he doesn’t be lookin’ at ya like you’re on the divil’s team.

“We’ll run down an’ see if the telly is fixed,” Da says.

I’m for sure happy about the telly, but I was hoping instead, we’d go to the chipper in Claremorris for our tea.  

Da opens the door beneath a small sign that says: “EXPE T TELEVISION REPAIR.” 

The bell tinkles as we walk into the repair shop’s dim darkness. 

“Hello Tom, HELLO!” Da says too loud.

‘Cause of the dimness and the chlorine it takes a minute for my eyes to be able to see.

“The next time we come we’ll have to bring our own lightbulb,” Da says, sighing, shaking his head.  “Hello, … HELLO!”

By now I realize the reason for the dimness is shelves full of broken televisions towering all around me.  There’s ones with their screens gone, and only the wiry guts dangling inside the plastic-wooden box.  Other ones with dead screens stare blankly at me.  Some of the shelves are just the screens pulled outta the box.  Them ones are weird looking, with this kinda-sorta triangular shape ballooning out behind them – I suppose, if I was still little, I’d a thunk that was where the small-people lived inside the telly and acted out all the parts.

“HELLO, HELLO!” Da says, fierce loud this time. 

He waits and then says softly:

“Are ya there at-all Tom?”

Tom wasn’t there. 

Neither was our telly. 

Or at least we couldn’t see it amongst what seemed like hundreds of other sick and dying televisions. 

We’re walking back to the car when the tinkle of the bell makes us stop and turn around.

“Aragh Joe, I didn’t know ya were in town,” the telly repairman, looking like Lou Grant coming out his office to yell at Mary Tyler Moore, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, a pair of glasses wedged up against the top of his bald-round skull.

“Ah, sure this crowd needed baths, an’ I said I’ll throw them in the car an’ take them over for a swim …,” Da tosses his head back, rolls his eyes.  “You know, an’ I thought while we’re in Claremorris, sure why don’t we grab the telly.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no.  ‘Tis not ready at-all-at-all-at-all yet.  There’s a few ahead a ye, an’ I have parts ordered from above in Dublin.  Sure, the Dublin crowd do on’y be laughin’ at us down the country looking for parts. ‘Buy a new one,’ they’ll say.  An’ sure that bleddy nightclub has me heart broken.  Now the priest is after me.”
            His stubby hand comes up fast, and he rubs it down slow-hard over his face – just like Lou does!

“‘Are they sellin’ French Letters within in the toilets?’ says Father Quigley to me.  Sure, how would I know?  Amn’t I beyond at the door taking in me few measly quid?  French Letters, good Lord deliver me.”

“Run on over there to the car,” Da flashes us a don’t-you-dare-bother-me-now look.

Half an hour later he’s back.

“Good God,” he sighs loudly, dropping into his seat behind the wheel.  “Ye’ll be fit to bate Bobby Fischer by the time our telly gets fixed!”

“What’s a French Letter?” I ask.  “Is it anything to do with the French Defence.”

“Never mind you an’ your bleddy questions.  We’ll go an’ get the tea below in the chipper.”

I smile. 

Another French Defence win.

The television did get fixed, … eventually.

By the time the telly made it back, RTE had sold some cattle or inherited money, ‘cause now they had money to get better programs, including a miniseries from America of Rich Man, Poor Man.

Excitedly, I raced through my homework and plonked myself into Ma’s tubular armchair before anyone else could get there ahead of me.  The fire’s burning in the hearth, the telly working with no sign of a growing-black-line across the bottom.  I couldn’t believe I’d be seeing the Jordaches for real, not just imagining them in my head.  Maybe they’d even be doing sex. 

The boring old here-comes-the-program music starts, with these stupid pencil drawings of all the characters.  Everyone in the house arrives to watch.  There’s just enough chairs, plus one, and a fight breaks out over me, the nearly littlest, hogging Ma’s armchair.  By time that’s over, I’m on a reg’lar hard chair and the Jordaches are for real on the telly.

But wait a minute! 

Lou Grant is there pretending he’s the Jordache’s father. 

Sure, this is total rubbish.  No one could believe Lou’s a vicious ould baker, when he’s really a cranky-kind television station manager. 

I’m furious, it’s all rubbish.  Plus they don’t do sex, not really anyway, just stupid ould kissin’. 

At the end, pretending I’m still mad over losing my place in Ma’s armchair, I burst outta the kitchen and up the stairs.  Lying on my bed, I thumb through the pages of the big thick books of Rich Man, Poor Man and Beggarman, Thief, remembering how all the Jordaches and Falconetti came to real pretend-life behind my eyes.    

I suppose everything on the telly is made up.  

Rockford’s not really Rockford.  When he drives his own car, he probably drives like Da, hands stuck to the steering wheel.

They’re all just actors. 

Probly the shite-splattered-gobeshite is paid to act the fool, walking round in a circle, with his head nearly boppin’ the cattle’s arses. 

Maybe the cattle are stunt cattle like they do have in John Wayne films, and that one that tries to run away is taught when to turn, so the gobeshite knows exactly when to do Brother Ailbe with his stick.   

I drop the books off the side of the bed and turn over sleepy-tired.  The heavy blankets, warmness and sleepiness are like the French Defence, keeping me safe.

The British soldiers and the rioters, do they know they’re on the telly and so they act it up a bit more?  Maybe the RTE reporter tells the rioting lads when to throw the petrol bomb.  The soldiers never shoot anyone when the camera is goin’, but they do often shoot people. 

It’s all just acting. 

Everything is acting.

I suppose the only real people on television not acting are the dead bodies lying at the side of the road, booby-trapped!

Interring Youth

I’m fifteen years old, standing at the bar in a Castlebar pub, white knuckled hands gripping the edge of the counter, praying I’ll be served a pint of Smithwicks. 

It’s September 12, 1980, and the Inter Cert exam results came out this afternoon.  I rushed home after school to tell Da I got all A’s and B’s.

“Sure, the Inter is on’y a joke,” he says, throwing his head back. 

“'Tis the Leaving Cert every job wants now.  You’d be lucky to get a job as street sweeper today with an Inter Cert, no matter how good it ‘twas,” he gives his head a quick-shake, and goes back to reading the paper.

Freezing my disappointment at barely qualifying as a streetsweeper, I take the stairs in twos and threes, burst into the bedroom, fling the Manilla results envelope on the desk I’d studied so hard at all spring, and head for town.

Some of the lads are standing in front of Parsons Shoes window, pooling money and planning how to get a few six packs.  A few more got brave and are already below in the pub drinking. 

I’d drank plenty before, but I never drank in a pub.  

A pub is where men drink.

Young fellas like us go up the lake in the dark, hiding in the thick pine trees from the Gards with their big flashlights dancing around in the darkness.  Us in the darkness, slugging down bottles of beer that some older fella bought for us for a pound extra.  Sometimes one of the lads’d whip a bottle of vodka or whiskey from home.  We’d lace it Coke or Fanta, and in about a half hour flat we’d be as drunk as forty cats.

I look down the Main Street. 

Rubbish flits about in the gutter.  

I qualify now to sweep that, … maybe. 

Without saying anything to the lads that were too scared to try the pub, I drift off from in front of Parsons.

Me stomach is sick walking up to the pub door.  But sure me stomach’s always sick.  The slightest change from the world of yesterday and the day before, and the first thing to pack it in is me stomach.

I push in the pub door.

Inside the low-ceilinged room is dark, the bar barely lit with strips of creamy-white light, and only a steely-blue, neon Harp sign on the wall lighting the seats. 

First up on the right is a table full of Travellers; then the two lads huddling around a small, low table; then a group of fellas in after work playing cards under the Harp sign, and lorrying pints.

The jukebox blares “The Coward of the County.”

Me brain is going so fast I don’t notice if the lads had pints in front of them.  They might have already been refused and are just sitting there being thick.  I don’t go near them, ‘cause if they have been refused, then me going over to them would have been an automatic refusal. 

The ways to get served underage had gotten more studying amongst us than the Inter Cert exam itself.  Every Friday night up the lake, we’d be discussing it for hours.  All the lads that had been served said that it’s one of them things you have to do by yourself, and that there’s rules to follow:

Two underage lads standing at the counter have triple the chance of getting refused. 

If you act like your supposed to get served, then you will get served.

With this advice racing around in me brain, I swagger up to the counter, where the barmaid, a plump, dark-haired woman, probably around twenty five, is washing glasses in this thingamajig that looks like a small bucket with a black toilet brush upside-down inside in it; water and suds flying everywhere. 

She finally stops sloshing the glasses into this thingamajig for long enough that I say, all casual-confident:

“Eh, give me a pint of Smithwicks there.”

She pays no heed of me, just grabs another dirty pint glass and sticks it down over the toilet brush, more suds flying.

Not sure what to do, I freeze with desperation. 

If I get served, I’ll be a hero: If I get turfed out, I’ll be a right gobeshite.

I want to turn around and see if the lads have pints.  But if they do, then I’ll be so desperate, that I might make a mistake, and if they don’t, then I might give up too easy. 

As I watch her jamming the pint glasses into the toilet-brush-thingamajig and paying no heed to me, I start to get thick.  That’s always my way through this sort of situation.  I’ve seen Da do it a thousand times.

Fuck her anyway, I start to say to meself.  She should serve me or tell me to get the fuck out of here.  But this not paying attention to me, that’s not on! 

She puts a cleaned glass upside down on the shelf behind the counter; a once-upon-a-time white dishcloth spread out across the shelf starts to stain wet under the glass.  Without so much as a turn of her head, she reaches for another glass, splashes the dregs into the sink, and then plunges it into the glasswasher thingamajig.

That’s me breaking point.

“Hey!” I say, a bit louder than I expected it to come out.  “I’m waiting here for me pint.”

She stops, the cuff of her white cheesecloth blouse stuck to her arm with suds, and stares at me.

“Aragh, would you fuck off outta that,” she scoff-laughes.  “You’re probably on’y after gettin’ yer Inter results.”

I make my best angry-impatient face, and it’s well I know angry-impatient faces:  I’ve spent fifteen long years watching Da, and teachers, and every other grown up in my life.

“Would you give me me fucken’ pint,” I snap, forcing a fake weariness into my voice.  “I’m after a hard day’s work.”

I hear the words, and I know I’m saying them, but still I don’t recognize them as coming out of my mouth.

For effect, I let out a big sigh, and give an angry quick-shake of the head, me shoulders drawing up like I’m getting madder.

She pulls the glass, suds and all, out of the washer thingamajig.

Still looking at me through the corner of her eye, she dries off her wet arm with a dishcloth.

I feel the thrill of victory rush over me.  But like Da would do, I keep me angry-impatient-face until I have in me hand that which I wanted.

The pint glass clinks against the black plastic of the Smithwicks tap, and the beer flows with a quiet hiss, brown-yellow swirling bubbles flowing into the glass.

As I watch, a little fog of coolness settles on the glass while the beer fills up.

“Sixty p,” she says, setting the pint down on the counter in front of me, but looking away.

I hand her a pound note, and grab hold of the pint glass.

When she turns to the till, I take my first sip.

I drank plenty of warm and sudsy beer from bottles, but this pint of Smithwicks is cool and bitter, almost sharp.

She slaps four ten penny pieces on the counter, three salmons and one harp stare up at me. 

Immediately, she turns back to her glass washing.

I drop the coins into me Wranglers’ pocket, grab the pint and head for the lads. 

We’re giddy-grinning at one another, big pints on the little-low-table in front of us.  Still, we try to act like we’re just in for a regular Friday evening, after work pint.

“No problems,” I mumble to the lads.

“The boyos here,” one of the lads whispers, nodding toward the Travellers, “were hassling her.  She thought wan a them was barred, so she served us first and then dealt with them.”

I raise my eyebrows and glanced over at the Travellers.  There was a fair clatter of them, four or five, all leaning in over the table staring at their pints.

“You shoulda heard wan of them goin’ on about how it ‘‘twasn’t him, ‘twas he’s brether as smushed the telly’ in here last Easter.  Supposedly that brother’s up in the Joy now, and he broke the telly up there too.  He must fucken’ hate televisions.”

We all snigger.

“Is that them?” I nod at the jukebox.

The lads nod back.

“Jaysys, what’s next? ‘Who Shot J.R. Ewing?’  If I hear that fucken song played wan more time on the radio, me head’ll explode.”

I reach for a tenpenny piece in me Wrangler’s pocket.  

“Should we put on U2?  Even here must have ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ by now, hey?  You know they played below in Ballina back in May!”

“No, no, no better to stay low key, not come to anyone’s attention.”

“I suppose,” I shake me head, and from behind a swig of me pint, glance over to the other side, towards the fellas playing cards. 

More fellas have come in, people who had actually done “a hard day’s work,” and were thirsty from it.  Well, some of them probably had worked hard, but they were all thirsty.

I keep an eye on me pint, trying not to drink too fast or too slow.

The game of poker next to us gets bigger; the stacks of ten pences and five pences on the table grow taller. 

One fella heads up to the bar to break a pound into five pences.

“Shag off outta that!” the barmaid snaps at him.  “Where d’ya think y’are, above in the bleddy Bank of Ireland?”

“Ah go on now, ya will, ya will.  An’ sure ye’re looking smashing yerself today,” he plawmasses her.  “Here, just give me fifty and ten fives.  That’ll do me fine.”

She gives in, turning to the till with his pound note.

We’re mad keen to play cards.  When no one has money for drink we play a lot of poker and blackjack ourselves, and fancy ourselves as card sharks.  But this is not the game to join.  If we won, they’d be pissed off at getting beaten by underages, and maybe tell the barmaid, or, more likely, bate the livin’ shite out of us. 

Still, in between big slugs of our pints, we watch them like hawks.  After a few minutes it’s clear that one of them is cheating, badly.  He kinda actually doesn’t even make a big-bones about it, which none of us can understand.  If he gets a hand that’s no good, he slips a few colored cards into the folds of a Wrangler jacket sitting on his knees. Then he throws the rest of his hand in on the table, being half-arsed careful to mix his cards in with all the other cards.  The other fellas had to know, but still they played on. 

It gets so bad that at one point, the cheater gets up to take a piss, and he very carefully picks up his jacket, keeping it in its folded position, looks the other players in the eyes and says: “Shake well before use, huh, huh?”

He gives the tightly folded jacket a little shake, laughs a cruel laugh, and heads for the jax.

Before I know it, me pint is finished, and I’m feeling extra good.  Me stomach is fine now.  It’ll only play up again when I need to go back out and deal with the regular world.

In fast whispers the lads argue that we should start a round.  But I wasn’t so sure about that.  What if someone went up to the bar and didn’t get served?  Then we’d all be fucked.  The lads say that’s how it’s done in pubs, and if we don’t do it, then we’ll stand out like underages. 

Still, I’ve been watching everyone, and only some people came back from the bar with rounds, more just go up and get their own pint.  We end up agreeing to be like Solomon, except we’re more extreme and we do cut the baby in two: We start a half round.  The oldest looking fella will go up and get two pints. Then a little bit later, one of us will mosey up and get another pint.  That way all of us would become familiar to the bar staff.

The poker players are back at it, everyone with their cards held up tight to their chests, peering over the top at the other players.  The cheater doesn’t seem to be the smartest card player, ‘cause for all his saving colored cards, he either can’t get them out of the jacket when he needs them, or he just fucks it up.  For one hand he backs himself on two pair of queens and jacks, only to lose to three fours. 

He gets fierce mad at that, glaring at the three fours winner, like he’s the one cheating.

Meanwhile, the Travellers are lashing into pints, still mostly leaning heavy on their table, but a couple of them now sprawling back across the taped-up, maroon pleather couches.

“Awright, I’ll drive out t’Breaffy Road tanight an’ tell de Cock ye’re on ta fight ‘im,” an older Traveller, with huge porkchop sideburns, says from his sprawl on the couch, staring hard at a pudgy-faced, nervous looking fella of about twentyish.

“Cock’s a big man,” another one of them says, nodding wiseman-like, before he takes a long slug of his pint. 

“An’ a strong man, an’ ….”

Another big gulp of beer, dampness all across his upper lip and moustache.

“An’ he ken fight like de divil, bu’, ….”

More beer, little rivers of it now running off the sides of his mouth.

“But ‘e’s too fond a dis stuff.”

He holds up his empty glass.

“I’ll drive out dere tanight, if an’ ya’ll fight,” the older one on the couch nods at the younger man.  “But if an’ I say fight ta de Cock, den it’s fight.  Dere’s no backin’ out.”

He turns to the fight advisor, but he’s gone for more pints.

I look over the shoulder of the card player next to me.  He has three sevens and two tens; and he’s having a hard time keeping it in.  It’s not even his turn to bet, and he keeps reaching for the stacks of coins in front of him, and then drawing back his hand. 

The cheater pushes a pound fifty in fives and tens into the pot; a bullying smile on his face; his cards held close to his chin. 

My fella’s hand stop moving, he peers over the top of his cards at the cheater, and then back to his three sevens and two tens. 

He folds, slowly placing his cards face down on the table.

The fight advisor is back with new pints.

“I’m telling ya, ya bitter git dis fight done afore de Cock starts ataken’ it serious.  I mane, he could astart trainin’.  He’s a trained man ya know, done a year’s boxin’ in a club over Kilburn.”

“’E could,” another older Traveller slurs damply, his head weaving from side to side.  “But what ya shud do, is ta challenge ‘im ta fight off a Chews-day night, after de dole.  He’ll have cash den, an’ as sure as brown shite comes outta my arsehole, he’ll drink de lot.   Dat’s de best time ta fight de Cock!”

He tries to nod, but mostly his head just weaves from side to side. 

The pudgy-faced young fella that’s going fighting, takes a deep breath, lifts up his pint and drinks heavy.

At the next table, the cheater lays down three kings; hearts, diamonds and spades.  He leans over the table to collect his heap of coins. 

My fella shakes his head, gathers up his money, slugs down his pint and leaves.

Our Solomon’s half-round arrives from the bar.

“That was great,” the round buyer says.  “She was nice and friendly to me this time.”

“We’re in now,” I answer, grabbing a hold of my pint, putting on the serious face of a fifteen-year-old man.

The Famous Five On Crack

I’m standing, hands on hips, with the kids and their cousins staring at twenty or thirty geranium pots outside the front door of our castle. 

“Jesus, when they said the key would be under the flowerpot, they could have been a bit more specific,” I whine, like a castle renter locked out of his castle.

“We’ll just have ti look under them all is all,” a niece throws out with youthful good humor, and pragmatism. 

The kids launch into the search with kids’ boundless energy and enthusiasm for the adventure of staying a week in real castle.

“Shouldn’t a place like this have a hunchback-butler who just appears out of a crack in the wall, and glares through his one good eye at us to let us know that we don’t belong here?” I posit to my brother-in-law.

“Awh, would ye’s quit ben borin’ ould adults, an’ help us with the scavenger hunt,” the pragmatic child snaps.

After a lot of toppling over of geranium pots, we crack the code.  The key was not under a flowerpot, but was under a small piece of concrete that, along with quite a few companions, had separated themselves from the façade of our rented castle.

Of course, we should have known there’d have been trickery involved – the castle crowd couldn’t have ruled Ireland for eight hundred years without the use of trickery!

The castle’s setting could hardly be more idyllic.  An imposing promontory, overlooking the grassy, dotted with sheep, islands of Clew Bay.  At the mouth of the Bay lies Clare Island, half mountain, half lowland, it’s rocky coastline sculpted by countless Atlantic storms.  Across the Bay, a conical mountain dominates the skyline, and psyche, of west Mayo: Croagh Patrick.

On that mountain, a devoted Christian, from France, or maybe it ‘twas Wales, or maybe he was son of a Roman fish and chip shop owner in Glasgow  … well, he had to come from somewhere foreign anyways, cause the Irish were too busy killing one another over who owned what piece of bog to be thinking of anything spiritual.  Anyways, up that mountain this fella, fasted for forty days and forty nights before coming down, stopping in for a pint in Campbells in Murrisk, copyrighting the name Saint Patrick (he probably had to do it by fax, it ‘twas long ago,) and then going on to drive all the non-human snakes out of Ireland.  Good man yourself Paddy!

Creaking open the appropriately heavy castle door, we launch into our adventure:

Once inside, we’re greeted by the obligatory grand stair sweeping into the Front Hall.  It’s important to note, I know this as the(one week) kinda-sorta owner of a castle, that castle room names are always capitalized to distinguish them from the rooms in peasant homes – and by peasant homes, I simply mean all non-castle dwellings. 

With an American twist, that we narcissistically imagine is for us, there’s moose head mounted above the front door.  Just for record, as moose were last recorded as living in Ireland around about the year never, it can be safely assumed this stuffed moose was just more of the castle dwellers’ trickery.

On we go, into the Living Room, a large, high ceilinged, used furniture warehouse, with a fireplace the size of a Galway flat.  The Dining Room sits twenty at the table, has its own large fireplace, and a two-person breakfast table by bay windows that perfectly frame Clew Bay.  Off the Dining Room, runs a Servants Corridor to the kitchen, which is a full production affair; an eight-burner stove, with an oven the size of a Galway …, you get the gist: Everything is castle sized! 

Out the kitchen door is the sort of high-walled yard in which once upon a happy-for-a-few-miserable-for-most time was likely a kitchen garden, but now it’s just an overgrown mess, and a series of rambling sheds for the storage of ‘castle stuff:’ Vats for boiling oil, spare parts for the portcullis, wooden stocks for punishing miscreant servants, cans of anti-sapper spray.

We stomp up the sweeping staircase, to find there’s enough bedrooms to sleep a small village, and a series of dodgy bathrooms with early 1900’s plumbing fixtures by “Maguire & Gatchell, Ltd., Sanitary Engineers” – an old firm from Dawson St, Dublin.  The kids chose the servants quarters, which have a plethora of beds to choose from, all at odd angles, perfect for pulling all-night-movie-watching-tall-telling sessions.

As one does, we occupy the castle – also known as bringing in our luggage.

That evening, decidedly non-period, disposable grilles flare up under copious amounts of starter fluid.  Soon the smell of meat – beef from the Centra in Newport, not moose valiantly hunted in a mythical time – fills the castle grounds, which happen to mainly used for parking cars now.  After a veritable feast, washed down with a rich sampling of the best-of-the-West’s craft brews, we retire to our enormous bedrooms like feudal lords and ladies: fat, happy and drunk!

The next morning, with my internal clock unable to reset itself to holiday mode, I’m up at six rambling, Quasimodo style, around the castle.  I stare out the Living Room window, the sun is well up over Clew Bay.

Inside our castle, my senses sharpened by a mild-trending-to-severe hangover, I start to “notice” things:  Like the door of the fridge needs a broom jammed against the opposite wall to keep it closed.  Last night, retrieving yet another brown bottle, this was hilarious; this morning, it’s a pain in the arse.  The Dining Room floor creaks, a lot – so much that, to avoid an unscheduled visit to the basement, I unconsciously start to use a circuitous route to get from the Servants Corridor to the breakfast table.

The Servants Corridor is quite simply a crime against humanity: Part symbol of the dark life of the downtrodden Irish, forced, by the threat of starvation, to smilingly serve their colonial masters; part public health hazard, arising from years of food pounded under servants’ feet into the blackened carpet; part architectural insult, an unlit, dangerously uneven floored passageway, that separated the “have-nots” from those who “have” by virtue of forceable taking.

Two cups of strong coffee and a walk on our beach later, I’m feeling a little more positive.  The listing agent indicated that we could “tell anyone we wanted to leave the beach, after all, it is private!” 

I’m imagining that I’m a few reincarnations away from having the stupidity or arrogance (if there is in fact a difference) to tell an Irish person that they have leave a beach because, “after all, it is private!”

Kids, with their magical sense of wonder and fluid imaginations make the most of their castle.  With them, we explore further, finding a staircase leading to a tower roof – sadly, and badly, shut off from access; “DANGER” a handwritten sign taped to the piece of wood, not-blocking our access, warns.  In the Games Room we uncover a trove of old games, play darts and billiards, check out an aged tourist map of Ireland. 

Behind an odd sized door, the kids find the motherlode – kayaks, a standup paddle board (of sorts), an inflatable canoe.  With the sun, now high in the sky, transforming Clew Bay into a tray of glistening diamonds, the kids don bathing suits and head for the water, which is a little colder than advertised by the glistening; actually, a lot colder!

Undaunted, the kids wear out Clew Bay, living the “The Wind in the Willows” maxim that “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” 

The adults spend the day engaged in the uniquely human activity of finding fault with that which previously impressed them.  We discover ourselves to be smarter than we thought, perhaps even “raaather smart!”

As the sun sets slowly on our castle; the not-yet-disposed-off disposable grills get pressed into savory service once again; the broom-handle-jammed-close fridge stocked with the finest west of the Shannon ales, ciders and lagers; we tipsily damn our enemies; marvel at the size of the moon; scream at a World Cup Soccer game being played thousands of miles away in Russia; eventually stumbling off for our feudal bedrest.

The castle, it turns out, is not really a castle.  It’s more a manor built in the castle style of architecture.  About one quarter of the footprint was a real castle, as evidenced by the narrow-slit windows, and the tower with its winding stair badly blocked off.  The rest of the building is a landlord’s house, built to mimic a castle. 

The kids, keen on the killing parts of history, had wondered how you’d keep Vikings out of this castle.  Turns out our castle was temporally saved from such a fate: The Vikings had stopped their trademark raping and pillaging a solid thousand years before our castle was even built.  And lucky we were too, as even the most obese Viking, Sigurd the Stout, would have easily clamored in the Dining Room windows, his great sword held aloft to slay all before him, until he tripped in the dark of the Servant’s Corridor, and impaled himself on the sword blade.   

Trickery, I tell you.  They held this country by trickery!

We get used to castle living. You get to burn off half your breakfast calories repeatedly toing and froing along the Servants’ Corridor for forgotten items.  Dining formally turns out to facilitate wine consumption.  We learn to tell visitors to go around to servants’ entry. 

When out and about in the local area, and getting ready to go home, the kids revel in loudly proclaiming, “Awright now, time to go back to our castle.”

And then of course, seven sunsets over Clew Bay are worth everything.

Friends and family visit, sitting in deck chairs, imbibing, marveling at the beauty of the island dotted Bay, Croagh Patrick, Clare Island. 

Some want to know the history of the castle – we don’t know it, and don’t have good enough WiFi to discover it just then, but we suspect it won’t be favorable to the Irish. 

Some want to poke around and get a feel for the castle.

“Ya know,” one of the poker’s says.  “This is sorta like one of dem Famous Five books.  Do ya remember Enid Blyton’s books.  Where the five young ones, they must have ben only twelve or so.  Somehow, they’d end up at Auntie Gertrude’s manor for the summer, an’ they’d find some stupid mystery to solve, a stolen chalice or a missin’ cat.  You know completely pointless, but fun.”

“Yeah, maybe they could solve how to keep the fridge closed without the broom,” I brattily suggest.

“No, no, no you’re just being your cynical self.  This is just like a Famous Five book.  You should write a new one.”

“I will: The Famous Five On Crack!”

Human Dealings

I’m walking to work on a July morning, about 7:30AM, the sun beating relentlessly out of a hazy sky.
It’s already a humid 80°degrees, Fahrenheit that is; God’s difficult to understand measurements, used in the US, Belize, Liberia …, oh and I almost forgot to include the mighty Cayman Islands: This temperature would be 28° degrees in that atheistic, Celsius measurement, which the US sniffed at and rejected, but which is used by all scientists, school kids (even in the US, and probably in the mighty Cayman Islands), and every other country in the world.
In a quixotic effort to cool myself from the effort of being a human office worker cruelly exposed to heat and humidity, I tug at the neck of my shirt, and am rewarded with an unrecordably small amount of perceived cooling. Woe to the office worker not safely ensconced their air-conditioned office, which can be sometimes so cold you have to put on a goofy sweatshirt, but that’s better than being coated all over with a sheen of sweat.
Rounding a corner, there’s a homeless woman, standing by her wheelchair. She’s a regular on this street corner, probably sixty, maybe seventy, hard-hard years. She uses the wheelchair as a carriage to carry her life’s possessions, and occasionally to rest the body within which lives her tumultuous, life.
She never asks for money.
Rarely makes eye contact.
On extreme weather days, she’ll park the wheelchair next to a Starbucks air-vent, and sit there with a grey, homeless-shelter blanket tented against the vent: Hot air in the winter; cool in the summer. On the rare occasion when her eyes are visible, they rove and snap away from any contact in a manner that signals; behind these eyes lies wracking turmoil.
Today she’s got both hands leaning against the Starbucks wall, no blanket, and she’s screaming into the air-vent.
“She’s trying to kill me. I tell you; I’m going to be murdered!”
As I walk past, holding my breath – because that’s how a modern human gets safely through tough situations – she spins around, but doesn’t register my presence: her brown irises frantic against the white of her eyeballs.
“She’s a fucking murderer!”
Spittle flies from her weather-raggedy lips, eyes blazing.
I keep walking, finally breathing again; tugging at my shirt collar, squinting rancorously at the sun.
From behind me she yells: “A murderess!”
Two blocks on, breathing again, but now sweating profusely, the Dept of Public Works is engaged in a street sweeping operation, that let’s say, has gotten a tad over-muscular:
There’s an orange DPW truck, in the bed of which is strapped an enormous loudspeaker, that looks like they bought it used from the makers of the 1953 War of the Worlds movie.
“ALL VEHICLES MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS STREET IMMEDIATELY,” a recording blares out of the speaker in back of the truck.
“ALL VEHICLES PARKED ON THIS STREET WILL BE TOWED TO ALLOW FOR THE COMPLETION OF ESSENTIAL CITY SERVICES.”
Behind the DPW truck, in a cruiser, with blue lights flashing, a cop taps plate numbers into the cruiser’s built in computer; while another cop, leans his considerable weight on his thumb, as he presses impatiently on the doorbell of an apartment building – offering the car owner their final chance.
Behind the cruiser, three tow trucks hover, like hawks waiting to swoop.
Well behind the tow trucks two street-sweepers whine along the curb, their bristle-brushes spinning wildly. One of the street-sweepers suddenly wheels across the street to clean the other side; the bulky vehicles glides on its tiny wheels with the secretive urgency of a post-apocalyptic cockroach
The tow truck drivers’ elbows and faces hang out their windows. Smoke snakes up from the cigarette jammed between the first driver’s fingers, an anxious scowl on his twenty-something face, as he watches a fourth third tow truck hurriedly hook a green-grey Prius.
The tow truck’s hydraulic pump squeals as the three thousand pounds of metal fashioned into a car, of sorts, in Japan, and shipped to the US gets hoisted for a trip to tow-yard.
The big cop backs up from the apartment building doorbell, shakes his red, jowly face.
“HOOK ‘IM,” he yells at the first tow truck driver, pointing at a silver-grey Honda Civic.
“ALL VEHICLES MUST BE … ,” the refrain continues.
I keep walking, quixotically flapping my arms, tugging my shirt, wiping my brow.
Three blocks on I see yellow police tape.
There’s an unmarked police car parked at an odd angle, closing a whole street. One end of the yellow tape is jammed into the unmarked’s closed door, the other end cinched around a streetlight.
Now my eyes rove, searching for something sensational to break the heated lethargy of this morning.
In the doorway of a she-she coffee shop lies a perfectly laundered, white sheet, barely a crease in the fabric.
Sticking out under one end of the white sheet, is a pair of red New Balance sneakers, the heel worn through, the side of the sneaker so greasy it’s almost black.
The shoes of a homeless man.
They’re not moving.
They won’t move again.
Standing in front of the white-sheet-covered body of a dead human being is the driver of the unmarked police car: Tall, muscular, hair buzz-cut, tree trunk legs in tan khakis, folded arms bulging out of a white golf shirt, police badge clipped to his belt. The thirty-something detective, nod-chats down to a short-paunchy uniformed cop.
The dead man – I’m presuming a man based on the size of the shoes; probably a poor presumption given that homelessness doesn’t typically allow for fussy footwear choices – is presumably, here I go presuming again, a homeless victim of the opioid epidemic. Even if I do presume too much, this is likely not a bad presumption, because every single day in Massachusetts, abuse of prescription opioids such OxyContin, Codeine, Fentanyl, takes the lives of four mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters.
Across the whole US that death count runs up to one hundred and twenty-eight humans dying every day from misuse of “legal” prescription drugs.
No problem there.
If the much Trumped up MS13 gang killed four people every day in Massachusetts, we’d have an FBI-ATF-State Police task force kicking in doors and arresting half the Hispanic population of Massachusetts: If the MS13 gang killed a hundred and twenty people nationally every day, the Trumped-Up-Feds, in the name of National Security, would napalm Chelsea and East Boston, and clamp the burning neighborhoods under siege.
But this particular human dealing, that costs so dearly in lives, is the perfect confluence of Big Pharma and the illicit drug trade; two powerful, fifty plus year old industries, enabled by a small number of money grubbing doctors and pharmacists, who shredded their Hippocratic oaths in pursuit of that house in the Caribbean, … oh and a plane to get there. So, instead of actually doing anything, we just talk about it, … a lot.
My feet keep me moving, even as my body sweats and my mind swirls.
“He can’t hit, it’s that simple-stoopid,” the paunchy uniformed cop complains to the detective, his chubby, red-brown forearm rising to shade him from the sticky sunshine.
“I mean if I’m the Red Sox, how can I afford to pay a guy thirteen million a year, … thirteen, to sit on a bench in Fenway Park. I heard he don’t even like ta fly, so he begs outta a lotta the road trips?”
“And you gotta sell a hell of a lotta shirts to make thirteen large,” the detective smiles wryly, shakes his head, but cold-eyes my rubbernecking the white sheet as I glide past with office-worker anonymity.
Just around the corner from the white sheet, a uniformed sergeant jawbones into an iPhone held a few inches from the side of his head.
“He’s gotta pick one or t’other,” he half-yells at the phone. “It’s gotta be U Lowell or Salem State. I tol’ ‘im I can’t do no outta state schools, not this year, but he’s gotta pick. You gotta taulk to ‘im.”
He stops to take a breath.
I stop and stoop down, with considerable cost in sweaty discomfort, to fake tie my shoelace.
The sergeant interrupts the machine-gun burst of angry words emitting from his iPhone speaker:
“I’n tellin’ ya, I just ain’t got the detail hours. I jus’ can’t do ‘em, not with the ankle like this.”
His free hand stabs the air; the reddened flesh around his eyes narrowing.
“I can’t stand on the goddam thing for more than four hours. An’ them scumbags lawyers from the cruise company is fightin’ me toot’ n’ nail. It aint my fault they didn’t
clean up the water on the basketball court; I don’t give a hot shit if I spilled it or not. It’s still their responsibility!”
The verbal machine-gun out of his speaker starts up again. He pulls a white facecloth from his pocket, wipes his entire face.
I can’t hold out fake tying my shoelaces any longer without looking suspicious.
I stand up; stretch; feel a large drop of sweat run down my back.
“Next yeah, next yeah, if I get the cruise ship money, an’ construction holds, then UConn might be an option. But he’s gotta pick one! I aint picking, you gotta … .”
The machine-gun burst starts up again.
He flashes a this-is-the-shit-I-gotta-deal-with look, holds the phone out toward me, still squawking in machine-gun bursts.
I nod back with fake empathy, walk on, tugging my shirt neck, uselessly.
A tow truck, yanking a silver-grey Civic whines past, cigarette smoke rising from the arm leaning out the window.

Tight Quarters

I’m lying in a hospital johnny, on a white plastic bed, earplugs stuffed deep into my ears, breathing hard through the surgical mask.
The MRI tech’s lips are moving but I don’t hear what she’s says, because my, already construction-deaf, ears are plugged; plus, I’m checking out a room I actually know pretty well but haven’t seen for twelve years.
She smiles a taut, I’m-supposed-to-smile-at-this-point smile, leans forward, and installs hulking, white headphones over my ears.
I stare up at the ceiling of backlit, photographic ceiling panels trying to pretend they’re a fake deep-blue sky, with a smattering of brilliant white clouds; providing a sort of canned hope, in a room where hope of any sort is often in short supply.
I know this, because I managed the construction of this room, and the whole building it’s located in. Back then, I, mean-spiritedly, argued against spending the extra $15,000 for this little parcel of manufactured hope to help the oftentimes deathly ill patients, who spend time in this room getting their failing hearts imaged.
“Now,” the MRI tech’s voice crackles over the headphones. “We’re going to start. If you need me, just squeeze the little ball in your left hand.”
Then the top of the plastic bed starts to magically slide into the magnet – way too fast!
Suddenly I’m in a two-foot diameter tunnel, the top of which is just above my face. My surgical mask billows, then rapidly tightens across dry lips and into my mouth, as I pant for air!
I have to get the mask off!
But the tunnel’s so tight, it’s hard to get a hand up to my face.
It’s too much.
I can’t stand it for much longer.
My fingers start to tighten around the little soft ball in my left hand.
I repeat a Zen mantra: The three false pillars upon which we lean: Wanting, Lusting, Fearing.
Right now, I’m all over Fearing!
But then, in a blinking instant, the karma of Irish claustrophobia-trauma transports me thirty years and three-thousand miles away from the two-foot tunnel of an MRI in Boston to the boot of a Ford Escort parked on the gravel outside the Castlebar Rugby Club.
It’s after midnight on the Sunday night of some summer bank holiday weekend. We’ve been near-continuous lorrying pints of Guinness into our ourselves since the lads all arrived back in town Friday night; breaking only for a few hours of no-rest-drunk-sleep, and two penitential hours of hangover sufferance, before we’re back leaning on the counter in Hoban’s Bar, sipping a hair a the dog.
The Rugby Clubhouse closed a while ago; the disco crowd already drunk-driving all over the barony of Castlebar. We didn’t leave right away, ‘cause we were goofing
around on the field; playing rough-touch rugby in black darkness, using a tied into a bad-knot jacket as the ball.
Then it’s time to go.
There’s nine of us. Way too many to squeeze into the only car left: One of the lad’s old Ford Escort.
Walking the few miles into town gets nary a second of consideration.
Instead, with the bleeding-edge insight one gets after fifteen pints of Guinness, we Clown Car it: Jamming two into the front passenger seat and five into the back seat. With two in the driver’s seat a bridge-too-far, even for fifteen-pints-us, there’s only one alternative left.
I climb into the boot.
The lid is slammed closed.
Immediately, I regret it.
But the muffled sound of the Escort’s door closing and the rattle of the engine trying to start let me know that now, there’s no way out.
With panicked-regretful-me in a crumpled fetal position, the Escort weaves chaotically through the townlands of Horsepark and Mount Gordon, my head taking the odd ding as the driver warms up the tires – racing driver style.
Then we hit the Westport Road.
I know, because even in my tight quarters, with my mouth as dry as a gravel pit, every drop of liquid in corporeal-me now standing on my skin as sweat, I still get the rush that comes to a nineteen year-old brain from a car rapidly accelerating.
But as that rush wears off, I freeze with panic at the thought of the car hitting something, flipping over, and my being stuck in there, upside down, the smell of petrol permeating my tight quarters, as I wait to get barbequed alive.
Propped up, drunken-badly on one elbow, I strain against the boot lid, delusionally.
Panic compounds; hyperventilation; heart thumping the chest.
We skid to a stop the at the traffic light, the only one in town. I can hear muffled laughter, the engine revving for a green-light-launch.
I try slapping the inside of the boot to get their attention, but the space is too tight for my hand to get any momentum.
More head dings, my ear drums palpitating with wild heartbeats, as we hard-left at Heatons, swoop down through Market Square into Newtown; tire screeching hard-rights onto Chapel and Linenhall Streets; then outta nowhere, a sudden, crunching jam to a stop.
My good-for-nuthin-no-more body bundles forward.
Car doors slam.
There’s laughing outside the boot. I hear someone yell; “Is Chipadora open? Get me a steak n’ kidney pie!”
A hand slaps down hard on the metal.
But now, I’m not worried.
My brother is in the group; he’ll get me out of here; and he does.
The sound of the key grating into the lock is the sound of the rest of my life outside of these tight quarters.
“Are you awright there boss?” the driver asks.
“No worries,” I lie Guinn-rageously, my shirt clinging to me with sweat. “Sure, doing the Circuit of Ireland Rally in the boot of your car is all in a day’s work for a fella like me.”
Back in the two-foot MRI tunnel, it’s all worries.
I’ve been in there for what feels like three days now. If the thing didn’t keep shaking and making a series of rhythmic thuds, I’d a thought it was broken, or that they’d forgotten about me and gone home.
Coming to the hospital, even in the middle of a pandemic, I was beyond happy: Being driven there by my soulmate, taking care of myself in a way that I normally never do: It all felt good and right.
As might be imagined, with the self-esteem of someone who elects to climb into the boot of a car, I don’t do a great job at the taking-care-of-myself stuff. And is it any wonder?
As kids we were taught not to take up too much space in the world: That space was made for other, more important people. Doctors, doctor’s offices, and hospitals were most definitely only there for those important others.
One of my sisters walked around for four days protecting a broken arm from the ever increasing, swarm-of-bees-attacking pain that comes with a broken bone.
“Don’t be going up there to that hospital, bothering them doctors!” Da snapped, shaking his head with that resolute belief of his that we were to run low to the ground, and never stray far from cover.
Finally, sanity reigned and a “bothered” doctor got the broken arm into a cast.
A friend’s father was asked by an officious ICU doctor if his dying mother should be revived:
“Ah, give it the wan try anyway,” was the father’s humble answer.
The ailment, that has me bothering doctors today, is a careless-middle-classes “new normal” condition: A disc herniated, as my world, like that of a great many of the luckier people, got a pandemic-shrink to the tight quarters of our dining room tables.
All my bothering the not-to-be-bothered-doctors got me sent into an MRI; a staggeringly complicated piece of technology that can see inside our bodies by using a pulsing magnetic field to send the protons in our atomic structure off on the booze for a few milliseconds, and then, like a judgmental parent or spouse, record how the protons behave getting back home as a measure of our health.
It’s amazing, and terrifying!
But now inside my two-foot home, back from my trauma-holiday, the tightness of the tunnel doesn’t feel quite so bad, compared to the Escort’s boot; the MRI’s clicking and clacking seems tame enough compared to the Escort’s engine revving and tire screeching; and the little soft ball in my left hand replaces that yearning to hear the key grating into boot’s lock.
Who needs Zen, when you’ve got a warehouse in your brain full of fucked-up memories?
“Ok, we’re finished now,” the tech’s voice crackles in my ears.
Magically, the plastic bed slides out of the tunnel, as I quickly replace the surgical mask.
I lie there staring up, somehow begrudgingly proud of the $15,000 fake sky; my surgical mask now back to normal levels of billowing.
“Now that wasn’t too bad, was it?” the MRI tech says, faux-pleasantly as she removes the hulking headphones.
“No worries,” I lie traum-rageously, my johnny clinging to me with sweat. “Hanging out in a two-foot tunnel? All in a day’s work for a fella like me.”

Boomer Zoomers

“Eh, eh, ok folks, is everyone on my … Zoom meeting?  This is Brad …, your intrepid leader, ha-ha-ha, firmly at the helm, during the defining crisis of our time.  Meghan, start recording this for future generations.”

“Sure, … em, hang on, I mean I hit the button but it’s not saying anything.  This is my first time using Zoom.  I mean, as I say to my girlfriends, ‘I’m in tech, but I’m not tech.’ Right?”

“Eh, eh, everyone turn on your cameras, as your boss I need to see you looking at me, eh, eh, …, who’s NMG301?”

“Brad, this is Nance, and they’ll have to pay me a heck of a lot more than they do, for me to turn on that camera and stare at my chicken skin throat for the next sixty minutes.”

“Is that you Nancy Goldberg?”

 “Please, please, call me Nance.  This stoopid virus got my appointment at Gotham Plastic Surgery resched… .”
“Why is your name showing as NMG301?  Didn’t you take the online tutorial on how to personalize your account Nancy?”

“Nance is my name Brad, and as HR rep to the company’s smallest, and still not profitable unit, I do need to note that you shouldn’t cut people off.  That’s rule one of video conferencing … .”

“But you’re not video conferencing Nance…eee.  Please switch on your camera, just click the little TV camera icon.  I’m trying create community here.  If I can stand to look at your … .”

“Hello, hello, this is Tom, Tom Morgan.  Can you hear me Brad?  I couldn’t get all those letters and numbers and periods in my calendar to work – why do they do that?  So I just phoned in.  It’s my home phone, if this is a toll call, is it reimbursable, or do I just write it off with my taxes?  I only keep a home phone because it’s essentially free with my cabl … .”

“Tom, Godammit!  I personally spent five minutes setting up your laptop.  I don’t expect a sixty something accountant to understand how tech works, but, I’m happy to say, as a fellow sexagenarian, that I made the decision to make tech one of my areas of experti… .”

“And Zach’s!  I mean Zach’s the real tech here.  By the way we’re almost definitely recording, … maybe.  Zach messaged me how to do it.  Eloise can you type up the transcript of this call for Brad’s Defining Crisis of Our Time Log.  He’s creating a company archive, so future generations can understand how, even as thousands were being hospitalized, our App got New Yorkers handmade chocolates delivered within one hour, guaranteed!”

“No.  I don’t type.  I wuz hired to answer the phones – occasionally; book the cheapest travel known to man; set up yer never ending meetings; an’ keep Brad caffeinated.  I ain’t typing nuthin.”

“Eloise this is Nance, if it wasn’t in your job description when hired, and you have not received a promotion with new dut… .”

“That’s fine Nance, I don’t actually give a shit.  Plus, I ain’t herd a you since that whole camera in the bathroom thing – I never did get no money from that.  You know the Zoom guys gots a box ya can click that makes you look better. Between that an’ a low light, I’m savin’ a frickin’ fortune in makeup.”

“Eh, eh, let’s get going with this, as your leader, I have urgent matters to deal with.  Some customers are unwilling to pay the extra $4.99 for end-of-delivery CO…VID…19 sterilization of their packages. It’s just a Clorox wipe, but I did ensure a You…Tube video of correct wiping techniques got sent to the Ubers.  Eh, … Zach, Zach, would you mind leaning back a little from the camera, your face is filling my entire screen, and quite frankly it’s a little disconcerting.  You look like you’re in a rage.”

“Brad, that’s Zach HR head shot.  I mean, isn’t it Nancy?”

“Please, please everyone, call me Nance.  Nancy was my aunt, from Brooklyn, who made challah that tasted like Sty…ro…foam, and divorced three cantors, before she ran off with a jazz saxophonist from Jersey City.  Broke grandpa Irv’s despotic heart.”

“Eh, eh, Zach, Zach, are you there?”

“Brad, Zach doesn’t like talking … I mean, not much anyway, he messages me when you ask a question.”  

“Brad, it’s Tom again, I’m so sorry, I have to deal with Zsa-Zsa, our cat.  She’s scratching for food.  If I don’t feed her, she’ll destroy the leg of the dining room table.  I think Peggy’s soul somehow journaled into the cat when she passed.  I mean, it’s even more exhausting taking care of Zsa-Zsa than Peggy.  Thankfully Zsa-Zsa hasn’t discovered martinis at three – yet!” 

“Zach’s not talking to me?  He’s on my Crisis-of-Our-Time videoconference, and he’s not talking to me!”

“I mean Brad lots of the younger generation, like me, we don’t like to talk. I do, a lot, but they ‘thumb’ instead.”

“I taulk, an’ I’m young.  Thurty’s still young on Staten Island.”

“You’re the receptionist Eloise, I mean it’s a job requirement that you talk.”

“Well Meg-man, maybe if you unstuck yer head from Zach’s as… .”

“Brad, this is Nance.  Per HR, employees are allowed not to talk, so long as they use other effective … communication … methodologies, includ… .”

“Oh for God’s sake Nancy, what sort of HR drivel is that?  How can I possibly stay the most successful unit head in … for your sakes, I … don’t get anything extra for being the greatest you know.  It’s all for my employees.”

“Youse did go on the ‘Top Ten to Hawaii’ last year – that wuz nice, heh? ‘Member, I booked you through Vegas, cuz youse wanted to triple your bonus on the way.”
            “Eloise, that’s private …, all employees must remember they need to maintain standard business decorum throughout this trying time… .”

“Brad I’m back, Peg…, Zsa-Zsa just wanted to pee.  Her litter box is in the downstairs bathroom, well it’s really just an old orange crate with shredded Wall Street Journals.  I don’t find it fiscally responsible to recycle until everything is fully utilize… .”

“Tom, don’t tell me you recycle newsprint after the cat …, I mean, hang on, Zach is typing …, he says, … .”

“Eh, eh, please Meghan, I need to get back to my Zooming.  Now the Upper East Side is holding, but everywhere else my chocolatiers ar … .” 

“He says: That’s not just disgusting Tom, but it’s also a violation of Board of Health regs in sixty one of the sixty two counties in New York.  Zach says you should move to Sullivan County if you want to … .”

“MEGHAN! I said I need to get back to my business.”

“Brad, this is Nance.  You can’t yell at people.  You, as the supervisor, are totally within your rights to suggest reasonable … communication … methodology … improvements, but raising your voice above … eighty decibels … is not acceptable per Corporate’s ‘It Takes a Village’ policy.”

“Well every village has an id…, I need to get back to … .”
            “Does that include regular meetings?”

“Sorry?  This is Nance.  Who’s talking?”

“Zach.”

“Oh Zach, nice to meet you, this is Brad, the guy who hired you when Google found you ‘too quirky’ to work with.  So glad you summoned up the decency to use my unit’s preferred communication … methodology.”

“Zach, this is Nance, and to answer your question.  From a HR perspective, of course Brad has his rights as a supervisor, and you have your ri… .”

“It’s ok Nancy, Zach just messaged ‘HR sucks.’”

“Oh well, of course as an employee, Zach is entitle… .”

“With this sort of behavior, how can I … possibly generate the esprit de corps necessary to ensure New Yorkers can get gourmet chocolates delivered to them during the defining crisis of our time – within one hour, guaranteed!”

“What the hell’s spree-de-core?  One of ours new choc-lates?”

Intro to Anthratpology

 I’m glued to the chair, mesmerized by how he talks. 

It’s started as a regular old west of Ireland day, wind rattling the windows, rain belting in sideways.  We were sitting in our regular old kitchen; black and white tiled floor, mint-green walls; the Sacred Heart lamp, with a bit of dried up palm tucked into it, glowing red below a picture of Jesus with a red heart, wrapped in thorns, suspended inside his wide open chest; Da, ankles crossed, lounging back in his tubular armchair, next to a glowing fire, drowsy from the heat and his just finished ham sandwich lunch.  

Everything in my world as suffocatingly boring as ever, except that today who showed up, but the rat-man. 

 “Throw on the kettle there,” Da tosses his head back, acknowledging it’s worth spending a mug of tea’s length of time with this fella.

I pretend to make for the scullery, but stop and turn my head to keep fully plugged in.

“Don’t ya see I had a brether a-below in Australia.  Ah, he went off on a boat outta, I believe it ‘twas South…hampton, back in t’fifties.  Sure, there was nawthin’ in Mayo in them days.  Not a bleddy thing.  I’ll tell ya now, cows considered themselves lucky if an’ they had thistles to ate.”

He kinda-sorta twists and nods his head all at once. 

“Neighbours of ours, t’father driv a lorry for t’Mayo County Council, an’ I belief he could manhandle a bulldozer too, if an’ he was asked.  Sure, we used to call them ‘t’emperor’s family.’  They had that much in the kitchen dresser, which wasn’t much, but ‘twas more than ever got into our dresser.”

 Da waves his hand impatiently at me to get into the scullery and boil the kettle.  From within I can still hear.

“An’ after about ten year a-below in Australia, t’brether come home for a visit, an’ don’t ya see, he stopped within in London for a few nights craic.  There’s a lot of Balla people in London, always was.  Sure they built t’bleddy place.  The Queen wouldn’t be able to go down t’road, if an’ that road hadn’t been built be Balla lads.  Any an’ ways, t’brether knew I liked animals, an’ t’farm was long gone be then.  Ah yeah.”

He stops for more than a breath, and I’m sad I can’t see what his sad-thoughtful face looks like.

“I was above portering in t’hospital, part time, an’ doin’ a bit a milkin’ for this fella, an’ fixin’ fences for that fella.  Don’t ya know that sort of a way. Any an’ ways, didn’t t’brether brung me, from England, yeah, a cage filled with four rats.”

 Scalding the tea, I keep my ears sharp, afraid I’ll miss something important.  

We often had odd fellas in the kitchen: It’s not our fault, I mean we’re a small bit odd, but these fellas were odder.  

See the problem was the birds.

My father bred canaries and budgies; or budgerigars, as the slow-talking fella in the pet shop on Capel Street in Dublin called them.   One day an ould retired Yank came to buy one, and he and his wife called them parakeets.  

It started kinda-sorta as a hobby for my brother and Da.  But now Da has them  breeding like rabbits out in the garage.  I mean you can hardly fit the car in the garage, but there’s cages full of these wing-flappers up on the walls; shite and feathers flying out through the bars of the cages.  

And out the back of the house, Da built an aviary.  It’s like a little room, except the walls are made of chicken wire, only better, small wire squares that a budgie could never get out of – no way.  Or no wild bird could ever get in through that wire.  The wild birds come over and hang on the wire, having a bird natter with the canaries and budgies, but they don’t stay long.  It’s probably like visiting someone in prison; you don’t want to stay too long, in case you get kept.

Inside the aviary, the canaries and budgies flutter around all day, landing on perches or bits of branches, put in there to make it feel like they’re in the wild.  Sure, even a budgie’s bird-brain would have to know that they’re not at home below in dry-hot Australia – they’re stuck in wet-n’-windy Mayo.  

I don’t know where the canaries come from, maybe Spain, ‘cause they have that island down there named after them.   But the canaries are for sure more like the birds in Ireland.  

I mean one time Da and this ould fella – and he was ould, probably seventy anyway – went off and found a goldfinch’s nest, and they kidnapped one the chicks out of it.  They brought it back to the ould fella’s house, and he put it in a cage outside, so that the mother would come and feed it through the bars.  

And she did!

Or some mother goldfinch did anyway, ‘cause it grew up to be a goldfinch in a cage.  

Then they bred it with a canary, to get what they called a “mule.”  Yeah, just like Francis The Talking Mule; except this was just a small bird that wasn’t one nor the other: Neither canary nor goldfinch.  But they got what they were after, ‘cause it for sure did “sing beautifully.” 

But when the regular canary and budgie chicks grow up enough to have feathers and can fly – if you can call flutter-hopping from one perch to the other flying – Da sells them.

That’s when the odd fellas show up.

Lots of regular families, who want a pet bird to drop feathers and shite all over their kitchen floor, come too.  But they’re regular; so they just pick out a bird in a colour the children like, pay for it, and leave.  

The odd fellas have to come in, have tea, haggle a bit over the price or try to get a second bag of birdseed thrown in for free – “to close the deal.” 

It’s as if they think they’re buying cattle, out of cages in our garage! 

But most times the odd fellas really just want to sit in our kitchen and tell stories about animals.  Stories that other people, regular people, would think odd.

I’m back with the teapot and mugs for everyone.  

The rat-man takes his mug, and nods as I pour.

“An’ if you had a dropeen a milk,” he says, nodding.  “An’ a few grains a sugar, that’d be the finast.”

I pour for Da and then turn to go for the milk and sugar.

“So any an’ ways, I kep’ the rats, two whites, a black, an’ a brownish wan.  They were great fellas altogether.”

I stop, and look back to see if he’s spoofing.

He’s not.

“The onliest problem was they were divils for the … you know ….” 

He holds the mug in three fingers, makes a circle with his left index finger and thumb, and then pushes his right index finger repeatedly in and out of the circle. 

“Divils, … divils they were,” he shakes his head slowly, a bit of a guilty grin on his face.  “‘Twas worse now than the bleddy car park behind the Royal Ballroom of a Sunday night!”

I rush into the scullery for the milk and the sugar.

“Ah, sure before you knew it, I had nearly a hunderd a them, … an’ then again a coupley a month later, nearly four hunderd.”

I’m back with a pint a milk and the bag of sugar.

“Jest a dropeen now, to scare away t’darkness,” he says, holding up the same index finger and thumb, millimeters apart.

“Good God,” Da says, shaking his head slowly.  “Four hunderd rats!”   

He has that look on his face like when I break a thing he thought couldn’t be broke.  

“Ye’re neighbours must have loved you.”

“Ah, sure no one knew.  I kep’ them within in daddy’s cowshed.  Unless I brung ya in there, ya’d think I was on’y keepin’ a coupley a pigs.”

“And tell me what happened them all?” Da’s eyebrows knot together as he stares at the rat-man, and I’m imagining him having some choice words when he’s gone.  “You couldn’t sell a pet rat in this country now, could ya?”

“Oh, no, no, no.  Don’t ya see, as t’good Lord,” he kinda-sorta blesses himself using the mug, “would have it, the work ran out … everywhere.  ‘Twas wan a them sort a winters, nothing goin’ on.  T’ospital let me go, an’ t’farmers got their lazy arses outta the bed in the mornin’.  So, I had to go over to Celia in Birmingham to make a few quid.”

He shakes his head slowly, and looks down at the tiled kitchen floor, his hand rising to hide his eyes.

“I couldn’t get no one to take care of me rats.  So, I went out wan morning, … an’ I poisoned t’lot of them.”

The head shaking speeds up.

Da’s eyes flick to mine.

Because we often had odd bird people in the kitchen, we didn’t pay so much attention to oddness after a while.  

There was one fella, he was on the dole, that came and bought a budgie one time.  But then he kept coming back and coming back, talking about getting another one to keep it company. Finally Da gave him one for free – one that was no good for breeding anymore.  

But that didn’t stop him coming.  He’d show up at the door, maybe two or three of his little children skirting around his legs.  He always came at dinner time, thinking Da’d be home for sure, to answer his questions.

“Now, if they’re talkin’ to wan another, an’ the bakes is wide open,” he mimics a budgie’s parrot-beak by reaching his arm out in front of his face.  “Are they roaring at one another?  I’d be afraid they’d start fighting an’ get hurt.  How would you fix a budgie, if it got broken?”

Da, chewing hard on a pork chop, would glare at him, trying to finish the meat before he blurted out some harsh answer.

“Go on there now, ate your dinner, don’t be mindin’ me” yer man’d say, slapping at one of the children for some wrong thing they hadn’t done at all.  “I’m afraid havin’ the two within in the wan cage.  Maybe, I should see if can get another cage?”

When he was finally gone, Da’d blow a gasket:

“And that fella, living below in a houseen the size of, … of, … of a shoebox, and he has them birds in on top of that poor missus of his.  And sure she’s grand, not a thing in the world wrong with her.  She stopped me up the Main Street the other day, and begged me, I mean the woman was nearly in tears, not to give him any more birds.  Do you know where he keeps them?  In the bathroom!”

Gards that work with Da come and fill the kitchen chairs on their tea breaks: Big, thick shouldered men, with serious faces, that split into smiles for three seconds at a joke, and then freeze again.  They sit there, walloping down mugs of tea, and talk in a code of trailing off, half sentences, nods and winks.   Then suddenly, with the sort grating of chairs across the tiled floor that Da’d kill us for, they’re gone, just a pile of still-warm mugs left on the kitchen table.

An ould fella from back the road comes in and sits next to the fire drinking mug after mug of tea.  He goes on and on and on about the “fas…cinating hiss…tory of Castlebar,” and then he starts lecturing us on what we should and shouldn’t do for this thing and that thing.  Da sits there, holding up the Irish Press in front of his face, sighing and rolling his eyes.

“That fella,” Da says through gritted teeth, when he’s gone.  “He’d bleddy well tell ya how to build a watch.”

But the rat-man could keep all our attention, all the time.

“Wan time, don’t ya see,” the rat-man says, slapping his hand off his knee, stopping for a big breath.  

“Wan a them do-gooder groups within in town, the Lions or the Tigers or wan a them things.  Any an’ ways, they were having a funds raiser for handicapped childer, or some cause like that.  An’ they must’ve heard I was a rat-man.”

He raises his little finger and nod-winks knowingly.  

“‘Cause, don’t ya see, how they were raisin’ t’money was a rat race.”

He holds up his mug – ready for more tea.

I glance at Da.  

Not a muscle moves in his face; both eyes bearing into yer man’s. 

I bounce my eyes between the two of them.

“Any an’ ways, they axed me if an’ I’d take care of the rats fer them.  Don’t ya see, git them in an’ out of the cages like.  ‘Tis not every man can manhandle rats.”

He twist-nods his head slightly, but strongly.

“An’ tell me now,” Da says, setting his mug up on the mantle-piece, and leaning forward, tenting his fingers under his chin; like he does when he’s gonna catch me out in a lie.

“Where did they get these rats?”

“Oh, from some place below in Ballin…nah.  Some gang down there had a tin building full a them.  The finest of rats.  But all white wans, no colours at-all-at-all-at-all.”

He shook his head, a kinda-sorta sad look coming into his face.

“A building full a rats below in Ballin…ah,” Da says slowly, knitting his two eyebrows together, reaching for his mug.  

“I remember now,” he nods, and sits back in his armchair.  “There was some sort of an ould lab-roar-itory down there.  It ‘twas Germans or Japs or wan a them crowds had it, doing research.  Maybe now that I think of it, … ‘twas probly something to do with Asahi?”

“Any an’ ways, t’do-gooders brung me in to town that night.  Some lady an’ her daughter, sure she was all growed up too, t’daughter that is.  They come out for me in a blue Renault, an’ the two of them stinking of per…fume.  Course I had t’wedding suit on.  Don’t ya see, I had on’y just got it for Celia’s eldest’s weddin’ abroad in Birmingham.” 

He shook his face fast twice. 

“Oh, … ‘twas a big night. Bright lights an’ the knobs a the town in black suits, with big tumblers full a porter, an’ women in fur scarves, sippin’ glasseens a wine.”

“An’ tell me how do rats race?” Da asks, and adds with a snort.  “Other than the bleddy rats we see racin’ each ‘round town in Rovers an’ Merks.”

“Well now don’t ya see, they had these glass, or maybe they were plaa…stick, tubes.  An’ they put sand within on t’floor a the tube.  Rats don’t like sand; it hurts their feet; so they’ll keep moving.  An’ which ever wan of them moved the fastest down the tube, they called that winning t’race.  The tube washn’t too long, an’ they left food at t’end for them. An’ don’t ya see then t’people of Cashel-bar would bet on them.  That was only wan way they made money.  T’other was a bizhness in town might buy a rat.   Like, not really, they didn’t really own it, ‘cause them rats had to be back to work t’next morning.”

Now Da holds up his mug for more tea, his eyes drifting off.

“An’ so, my job was to get them out of the cage an’ into t’tube.”

“Good God man, a rat’d ate the hand off ya!” Da says, looking all interested again.  “Wouldn’t he?”

I pretend I don’t see Da’s mug; this is getting too good.

“Not if you know rats, he won’t” the rat-man says, his head twist-nodding, slowly, proudly.  “Don’t ya see, the ways ya do it is, you grab t’rat be his tail, ‘tis sticking outta the cage, that’s how they’re built.  An’ then, … then.”

He sets his mug down on the floor, and stands up.

“Then you pull them out of the cage, an’ you whirl them, …,” he starts swinging his right arm around in a circle up over his head and down by the pocket of his baggy black pants.  “Round an’ round a few times.”

He sorta staggers a bit; stops swinging; and sits back down.

“Don’t ya see it makes them dizzhy, so they don’t know what’s goin’ on when you stuff them into the tube.”

“Good man, I wouldn’t have thought of that one now,” Da says, nodding slowly in admiration.  “And did any get away on ya?”

He smiles at the thought of a rat running through a half-drunk crowd, all dressed up to the nines.

“Oh no, no, no.  Don’t ya see, there’d a been hell to pay if a wan a them rats got away.”

He slaps his hand on his knee.

“Oh yeah, hell ... to … pay.”

He twist nods his head slow-strongly.

“I was tol’ in no uncertain terms on t’night, be a Chinese doctor, that them there rats was highly educated!”

“Come on so,” Da says, standing up suddenly, setting his mug down on the kitchen table.  “And we’ll get you a bird.”

“Great, great, sure I don’t have no animals ‘round about at-all-at-all-at-all these days, an’ ‘tis just mesell out at the home place now.  We planted Daddy … twelve month ago.”

He nods, and looks sad again, but doesn’t move to get out of the chair.

“Ah yeah, ‘tis nice to have an ould pet around,” Da says; hands on hips, staring hard, waiting impatiently for the rat-man to get out of his seat.

“I’ll tell you now the God’s honest truth,” Da squint-winks and kinda-sorta nods at him.  “But I’d take animal any day, sooner than some ould pain in the arse human.”

He spins immediately and glares at me; I’m guilty of overhearing him curse out a truth.

“Don’t ya see now,” the rat-man says as he pushes himself out of the armchair, eyes glued on Da.  “I’ll for sure be ‘specting ya to throw in a second bag a seed – to close the deal.”

Viral Walking

I’m plodding along the Riverway in Jamaica Plain with two of my kids: Me with a fake smile tiring the muscles in my face: The kids, as teenagers, who don’t truck for free with human fakery, project the standard adolescent why-the-fuck-do-I-have-to-go-for-a-walk scowl.  

All three of us are sick of the lockdown order, sick of having the walls of our apartment exist as our horizon when we peer up from binging Netflix, and sick to our screaming-eyeballs of one another’s quirks.  

Barely fifteen minutes ago, we concluded a series of three-party, inter-familial negotiations that made the Iran Nuclear Deal negotiations look like the calming walk in the park I had been, quixotically, hoping for.  The impetus to cease hostilities, and move into negotiations, was a few small, but shatter-able, ornaments getting propelled across the apartment, at a high rate of speed, and stopping with an oddly satisfying “CRASH!” against one of the aforementioned horizon defining walls.

An abstract of the deal we reached, had it been officially recorded, would read something along the lines of: 

Whereas the father, who never liked that stupid plate from Barcelona anyway, is, albeit under extreme duress, hereby acknowledging himself to be a complete anus in stressful situations; will use commercially reasonable efforts to procure two servings of dairy fat, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and colorings, summing to no less than two hundred calories in the form of medium sized, JP Lick’s ice creams; one each, of their desired flavors, for his incredibly cool, completely unappreciative, extremely-annoying-in-close-quarters-for-long-periods-of-time offspring; in consideration of which access to the JP Lick’s retail outlet, Center Street, Jamaica Plain, will be gained by expending no less than one hundred calories.  

See, that’s the key phrase: “expending no less than one hundred calories.”  That’s how I won my, albeit pyrrhic, victory! 

Because to burn those hundred calories, we have to walk there.  And I imagine we’ll easily burn off the other hundred calories plus in the wash-your-hands-for-twenty-seconds fight and ornament tossing contest after the walk.

But now, outside in the heavily wooded park – although even the trees can’t get my blood pressure down from its 370/360 range – it’s one of those hopeful spring evenings that completely belies the hopelessness being purveyed by the no-we’re-the-real-news-they’re-the-fake-news media.  

The towering, barrel-trunked oak trees are starting to bud for their hundredth plus time; a cherry blossom, in early bloom, radiates pink-whiteness; crocuses peak out of the frozen-three-weeks-ago ground; grass arises, Lazarus-like, from the winter with a refreshing yellowish-green hue.  

In the most reliable sign of the approach of spring, the we’ve-never-actually-been-to-Canada Canadian geese are starting to get crazy again: Heads down, open bills exposing tiny white, hurtful teeth, they hissingly charge at inquisitive dogs and naively staring humans.

On the tableau of yellow-green grass, two robins engage in their unique mating ritual.  Well, … unique that is other than the traditional Irish-human mating ritual: The male and female, in rapid fire stutter-steps, cross the expansive lawns; heads occasionally cocked to listen for a worm (in the Irish ritual, this translates as; “I’m payin’ heed to every feckin’ thing in this world but you”); then, with a sudden explosion of wing power, the male, barely rising six inches above the grass, flits over to the female (this translates as; ten pints into the evening, a wink and a nod in her general direction); the female with her own show of explosive wing power, and disdain, takes off and lands a few feet away (this is her way of saying; “feck off outta that, you wouldn’t come near me if you weren’t bulging with ten pints of Guinness inside in ya”); but the female, perhaps a little too quickly, regrets her disdain, and starts stutter-stepping back into the male’s general area (“but sure come here, stop with them dirty ould looks of yours, and tell me, how your mother/sister/aunt/dog is doing, I heard they were sick/had a baby/won the lotto/got hit by a car); the male’s chest swells up, his wings cocking slightly, as he tries to make himself look as large as … well … as large as the biggest-badass robin in North America (“darlin’, ya don’t know what ya’re missin’, did ya ever see me lift a keg of Guinness with me teeth? And then drink it afterwards!”); the female stutter-steps closer to the male, who launches again, this time landing on her back.  There’s a ferocious clatter of bills squawking, wings flailing, feathers flying: It’s basically a full Irish.  The female’s bill never stops squawking, while with great focus and intensity the male settles on her back.  The whole thing takes about eight seconds, so only about half the length of an Irish-human copulation; but of course they are a bit smaller than Irish-humans.  Then he’s off, with another flutter of wings, back to listening for worms, which is really just his, let’s face it, pathetic version of flicking to SkySports. 

Because we’re still in the post-negotiation-you-suck, silence phase, I do not attempt to point this out little microcosm of Irish life taking place next to us on the grass.  

Instead we walk on through seemingly hundreds of joggers.  There’s ould-fellas out jogging in sweat-shorts so old and disheveled looking, that they were last in fashion … never; there was never a time when these simultaneously baggy and over revealing, sweat shorts were ever cool.  But now, in the teeth of pandemic, they’ve been retrieved from the back of the, until last week never opened, workout drawer, as men in their sixties jog along the pathways at walking pace, a sheen of sweat on their pallid faces, dark socks peeking out of faded Vans that look like they were bought in the 1970s, because, they were bought in the 1970s.  Whatever about the predicted baby boom coming nine months after the lockdown, the expectant mothers will be lucky if they can even get hospital beds, ‘cause they’ll already be full with these ould fellas in for knee replacements.

We walk on, passing twenty seven different young medical professionals, all in blue scrubs, facemasks – which we’ve been, ambiguously, warned need to be left for just such medical professionals to wear at work – and baggy fleeces – which I’ve been, unambiguously, warned to stop wearing in public on threat of patricide! 

Then there’s the family out walking the dog that really wasn’t made for walking:  He was made for killing other dogs, and the odd human. One mom leans back at a thirty -degree angle, as Tyson, a hundred and fifty pound cross between a pit-bull and Chewbacca, lunges at Louie, an obese Pug with a sagging belly and Sinead O’Connor’s eyes.  Louie stares back with a we’re-from-Brookline-and-you’ll-be-hearing-from-my-attorney look of fearful disdain.  Meanwhile, the little kids from both families practice reverse-social-distancing; hugging, kissing, and purposefully pushing their digits into each other mouths.

Louie’s mom kibitzes loudly, over Tyson’s mom’s screechy “be a good dawg now” recriminations, on how tough life is without toilet paper.  

“Can’t help ya,” Tyson’s mom yells over a guttural snap of fangs.  “We barely gots enough for ourselves. An’ Tyson here enjoys chewing on a roll sometimes too.  Gotta keep the pooch happy!”

We walk on, the all-too-familiar horizon of our apartment walls somehow now seeming less boring.  

There’s a mild thaw in familial relations, and I’m allowed to point out the sign that requires we walk clockwise around Jamaica Pond, except that I actually do point – a crime in teenager-world that lies somewhere between misdemeanor and a felony.

“Stop pointing, you’re embarrassing me,” my daughter snaps breathily.  “Do those fingers have to be aimed at everything.  Don’t you think I could make out what you’re talking about?”  

“Yeah. Use your words,” her brother chimes in.  “You’re always telling us to use our words instead of hitting each other.”

“Well it’s just …,” I start to say, and then realize my finger is still pointing at the sign.

“Stop pointing, or I will murder you!”

We walk on.

There’s a bunch of people fishing – hopefully COVID-19 can’t swim.  

Three twenty-something, hippy-dippy types are set up on the embankment with a mandolin, a banjo and an acoustic guitar.  They’re still warming up, or maybe that is the act?  Either way, there’s more musical talent evaporating from their open instrument cases than I’ll muster in my entire life.  

A fit looking couple rollerblade past, weaving easefully between groups of people on the incredibly crowded pathway.

We pass more sexagenarians (don’t worry, we’re not back to the robin-Irish thing; it just means sixty-somethings) plod-jogging along, feet flaring out wildly as they work on burning out those knee-joints with maximal efficiency.

We pass an Arabic family; the women dressed head-to-toe in black fabric, a tiny slit for their eyes; the men in bright designer casuals; the kids are kids – fun to watch as they exude puppy energy and innocence, getting their version of designer casuals filthy in New England spring mud. 

At JP Licks, I wait outside with our dog, Buddy.  He’s so sick of extra-long lockdown walks that lately I’ve been getting mysterious middle-of-the-night-emails warning me of the “dengars of walking two much,” and “the benyfits of driven your dog round, nocking down kats.”  

Originally, I thought these were coded messages from one of the many Nigerian Princesses-with-access-to-billions-in-stolen-money that I’ve been sharing my bank account information with.  But then in the middle of one night, cursing middle age as I rush-stumbled to the bathroom, I heard the click of the computer mouse, and the swoosh of an email departing.  

I fumbled for the light switch, splashing an ornament to the floor, thereby removing it from the list of ammunition for the next “family discussion,” finally found the switch, flooding my confusion with light.  By the time my eyes had adjusted, Buddy was lying on the sofa blinking his eyes open – though I could have sworn that, in the midst of all the fumbling and ornament breaking, I heard the jangle of his tags.  

I returned to sleep, promising myself that tomorrow, I will go ahead open all those credit cards for the Nigerian Princesses to spend down their billions. 

Now outside JP Licks, Buddy stares up at me in disdainful boredom, and I wonder will I get an overnight email on the benefits of “bying iceream for dogs.”

We walk on.

The kids enjoy their ice cream.

Buddy enjoys turning his head and staring over his shoulder at me disdainfully.

Back at the pond, we walk counterclockwise, and everyone, even Tyson, stares at me, the nominal adult in the group, disdainfully.

Up ahead we see a group violation of social distancing, as people huddle at the side of the path staring up the embankment.  When we reach them, the excitement in the air is palpable.

Halfway up the slope stands a red-tailed hawk; feathers puffed up, head whipping rapidly from side to side; his right claw sunk deep into the back of a squirrel’s neck.  The squirrel’s body lies limply, as the hawk keeps moving up the slope to get away from the social-distance-violating, gawking humans.  It’s a heavy load for the hawk.  He struggles to move, but his anxiety that some skiving human will take away his hard-won prey keeps him moving.  As is required for social-distance-violating-gawking humans, we take a video.

“How did the hawk catch a squirrel?” I’m asked.

“Coronavirus,” I answer, glibly.

“Really?  How?”

“Well, the squirrel was standing there, hands on hips, saying to himself, where did that gobeshite in the crazy shorts and ancient runners come from, and BANG!  Out of nowhere, a hawk grabs him.”

“Really?”

“Really!”

“How many ornaments are left?”

We walk on.