I’m fourteen pints, three pubs and a failed-hotel-turned-nightclub into a Thursday night’s studying in the library … I mean, kinda-sorta.  Ya know how it goes: If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to failing exams is a canal flooded with Guinness.

I try to keep myself vertical by leaning against the bar as I’m being unsubtly encouraged to leave by a couple of hard-eyed, beer-bellied bouncers with outsized porkchop-sideburns.

“We’re closed, get out t’fuck!” they keep up their refrain, voices growing more impatient with every yell.

I’m in the once-upon-a-more-innocent-time Lenaboy Hotel that’s been metamorphosed by a coat of flat black paint into The Oasis Nightclub.  Tonight, it’s brim full of drunk students, for surely no “worker” would patronize such a shithole.

The bar, that once tranquilly served Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry to nuns down from the North seeking safety for the Twelfth, is tonight occupied by exhausted legions of pint glasses, browning with Guinness foam.  The dining room, that an eon ago served newly-weds from Mayo their first ever restaurant meal, is now the dancefloor; gone are the white tablecloths and glistening silverware, replaced by a dance floor greasy with beer and puke.  The entire ground floor of this sometime-hotel is fitted with black-vinyl booths now littered with unconscious young men and women.  They’ll be the last to get manhandled onto the street, the bouncers careful to ensure they don’t get befouled by their patrons’ vomit.

Everywhere drunks stumble and lurch beneath the glaring fluorescent house lights; the air filled with stale smoke and bouncers’ menace.

“Cum on ta fuck!  I don’t care if ye’se have homes ta go ta but I fucken do.”

“Cum here, cum here?” I wave over the portly, least-hard-eyed bouncer.

“Cum on ta fuck son, don’t you start or I’ll finis….”

“No, no, no,” I try to sound serious.  “I have a real question fer ya.”

“Lookit, there’s no more drin….”

“No, no, I was juz wondrin’ if ya were aware that nowadays … wan plus wan equals zero?”

Thirty seconds later I find myself standing in the drizzle, my jacket still bouncerly-bunched up under my arms. I rub my temple where it glanced off the door jam and stare down Salthill at the Inferno-esque scene of other nightclubs emptying, forcefully, onto the street.  The bustling clamber for taxis; drunks banging car roofs to get the driver’s attention; shrieks and yells of “FUCK YOU” in disgust at lifts stolen; the last bus, bulging with alcohol bulging drunks, long since dieseled off into the night.

My bitterness and drunken ego contemplate a return to the Oasis to hurl a fist or an insult at the bouncer.  I’m thusly philosophizing when from a crinkle in the Inferno-esque landscape emerge a few of my flatmates.

“Where in the fuck were you?” Paul asks too quickly.

“Stud…rinkin’, see I started studyin’ but that wan plus wan ….”

“Ya near burnt t’fucken flat down ya bollox!”

“Ah go ‘way ta fuck outta that, that sounds dangerously like work, I wouldn’t be gettin’ mixed up with no fucken wor….”

“Ya left t’fucken pot a oil on t’cooker on, an’ when I ran back fer a few more quid I put a 50p in t’meter,” he stops, breathless.

In an attempt to concentrate I purse my lips, but my drunkenness doesn’t want reality.  Instead, I observe the crowds thronging onto the road stopping traffic.

“An’ t’fucken oil is everywhere now, all over t’walls, t’ceiling is as black as a badger’s arse,” he throws his arms up, blocking my view of the crowds, “we’re lucky t’whole place didn’t fucken burn ta t’ground.”

“Ah Jaysys, that’s fucken awful awright,” my fourteen pints say, but what’s left of my mind focuses on the mayhem.

But the pints were right. 

It is fucken awful. 

When we get home, still drunk, and now exhausted after haranguing the last-last taxi to take six of us, our boring old, always-dirty kitchen is such black, greasy and smokey disaster that it’s so far beyond worry, I release a little chuckle.

“‘Tis a bit like t’Oasis, on’y shinier, an’ without t’fuckhead bouncers!”

The next morning the kitchen for sure looked like it had been in a fire. That’s the problem isn’t it, there’s always a next morning, and the grinding reality of reality is that things are never quite the same next morning as they were when you toppled into bed the night before.

It takes two cranky pots of tea for us to complete the forensic examination – which ruefully reminds me that my books are sitting lonesome back in the library.  Eventually the forged-by-hangover-and-tea forensic scientists concur on the following sequence of events:  Party A (allegedly, and actually, me) had the pot of oil boiling when the electric pay-as-you-go meter ran out; thusly the electric ring beneath the pot was set on full heat; when Party B (that is Paul) fed the meter about a half hour later, to facilitate retrieving more cash to continue the traditional Thursday night clean-the-brain-of-all-facts-learned-this-week session.  Thanks to the vindictive reliability of the ESB, the pot of oil reheated – a lot – thus boiling for as long as 50p’s worth of electricity can boil a pot oil: Which, it turns out, is a disquietingly long time. 

Close forensic examinations, using fingernails to measure the depth of blackness remaining caked in the pot, reveal there is approximately a half gallon of cooking oil, formerly residing in the pot, now residing, in an uneven but consistently black manner, on the ceilings and walls of our heretofore merely filthy, but now a public health hazard, kitchen.

The solution was, like cruel Boolean algebra, both simple and incredibly complex: We’d repaint the kitchen.  It was such a small room that a gallon of paint would cover it.  That and a couple of the cheapest brushes in the hardware shop would allow two shifts of two flat mates at a time to sprint through a full remodel of the kitchen.  Two of the lads head off to buy the paint and brushes, while another moves furniture out of the way and I start washing dishes. 

The sink, unused to human contact, puts up some resistance but eventually lets me half fill it with surprisingly hot water; a squirt of Three Hands Washing Up Liquid and we’re off to the races.  The dishes, shocked at being cleaned, take quite a bit of hot water, detergent and scrubbing to move the aged food caked onto the ceramic glaze.

Being so engaged in valiantly fighting dirt, it’s only after a few minutes that I look up and see streaks of grease melting on the wall above the sink and running down in dense black globs.  Now here’s a problem: To get paint onto the walls and ceiling, and thusly fool the landlord into thinking that his kitchen did not nearly burn down, we’ll have to remove all that grease: A task dangerously close to work!

I wipe the wall with a wetted corner of the dishcloth, and it streaks enough that you can kinda-sorta see the paint, but the grease is mostly just moving around.

The lads return with the paint.  With the chairs and table now out of the kitchen we hold a terse standing meeting on my perceived problem of the grease on the walls.

A few theories are promulgated:

“Don’t worry about that shite, just get them fucken dishes outta t’way!”

“T’grease is on’y a problem when it’s warm, open t’windaw an’ paint away!”

“Cum on, lets jus’ fucken paint!”

Taking fragments of all theories, we open the tiny kitchen window, complain about the cold, and start painting.  It’s quickly apparent that our theories are … wrong.  The paint goes on and immediately turns into a soupy-greasy mix that swirls and curls most majestically, but never actually changes the wall colour.  Grease-tinged paint accumulates on the edges of the cheap paintbrushes.  

We retool.

The dishcloth, our only general-purpose cleaning device, is sacrificed in the face of this unholy crisis.  It’s wiped along the ceiling directly over the cooker, removing a small Texas oil well’s worth of grease before the irredeemably blackened fabric is cast into the bin.  It’s clear that at least one bedsheet will need to be similarly sacrificed.

We battle on, recklessly offending the gods of grease, home improvement and common sense. 

Lunch presents us with our first artistic-differences-schism: Some, mere “artisan painters,” prefer solid food; while deathly-hungover-others, more in the line of “Bukowski-esque artistes,” pursue a liquid lunch. 

Thus, splattered with beige paint, we stomp across Foster Street into Cullens Bar.  As we scrape our stools up to the counter, Josie, the corpulent bar manager, is already starting pints of Guinness.

“Wot is youse up ta now?” he lisps in his English-as-a-second language Connemara accent, his head boggling in disbelief.

“Nathin, … nathin atallatallatall,” I lie, badly, trying to somehow hide the … ahem … significant quantities of beige paint on my hands, arms and hair.

“Well,” he smiles his trademark broad smile, stretching his thin moustache across his pudgy face, “den, ‘tis a vury messy nathin.”

We negotiate ourselves into two pints each, so after our third – wan for the road being the governing rule – we return to our own, humble, version of the Sistine Chapel.

Painting with pints is more interesting, if not more productive.  The walls are barely passable, still looking suspiciously like they may have experienced a small fire, but the ceiling, with its nagging addiction to grease, despite two bedsheets worth of scrubbing, looks a newly discovered Van Gogh: “Storm in the Septic Tank!”

Swirls of grey-black grease mix with beige paint imbuing the kitchen ceiling with an energy, excitement, and interest well beyond its lowly origins.  The more we paint and swap out “paint brush operators,” the more flamboyant become the swirls until such time that we fear “‘tis t’divil himself runnin’ dem paintbrushes.”

By now it’s late afternoon, the sun already starting it wistful goodbyes; the gallon of paint as empty as our stomachs; artistic differences starting to get physical.  Thus, we agree to divide and conquer: Two will go for burgers and chips, while two get more paint, and see if the hardware shop has any magic solution for our swirling problem. 

Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the bottle of poteen sitting in the back of the cabinet beneath the sink.  This brown-glass flagon bottle, that once upon-a-more-innocent time housed Cidona, is now filled with fine Glenisland poteen.  It lives its, surprisingly, long life silently in the darkness beneath the sink, bothering no one, never throwing any shapes as to its actual potence, simply there as a seatbelt to prevent us from ever getting fully catapulted into the reality of life.

But reality has a persistence similar to the ceiling’s grease addiction.

As we rip into the, ironically, greasy burgers and chips, the hardware shop team report the grim advice from the paint counter’s toothless oracle:

“Ta paint a kitchen now lads, ya do need to clane it dat good, dat ya cud haf yer appendix out on de kitchen table.  Don’t ya know what I mane … dat fucken clane!”

I eye the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, noticing that it’s missing one hinge: We’ll have to complain about that to the landlord.

“I think we should let t’paint we awready put up dry over the grease an’ then we’ll have a fightin’ chance with t’next coat,” I hear my voice say, but don’t relate to the content of the words.  

“Ok so Michaelangelo!  An’ I suppose we’ll do t’waitin’ in Cullens for it ta ….”

Before that suggestion is finished, we’re up and out, crossing Foster Street to our beloved local pub, as we stuff the last few greasy chips into our mouths. 

Cullens is filling up with both the after-work and the I-wouldn’t-work-for-luv-nor-money crowd.   We sidle up to the bar looking more like human-paintbrushes than customers. 

“Derz a shower out de back,” Josie lisps, rolling his eyes slowly toward the backyard.

“A shower!” Paul retorts, “why don’t ya start be puttin’ a fucken roof on t’jax.”

He isn’t lying: the men’s toilet is an open air drain in behind a white-washed stone wall.

An hour, three pints and a few ballads by the truck driving, Sean Nos singer, later we resolve to finish our Sistine Chapel and get on with the work of enjoying the weekend.  The paint is tacky but at least it doesn’t dance around under the brush. 

Buoyed by the pints, the sight of the grey-black stains finally succumbing to thick gobs of beige paint and the coming-too-soon optimism of youth, we break out the poteen.  We don’t know it then, but three more hours will elapse before the last dollop of paint gets daubed over a particularly recalcitrant stain.

By then we’re drunk again, exhausted, filthy, but triumphant…ish.  The ceiling no longer looks like a lost Van Gogh and instead resembles … a particularly poorly painted ceiling in the kitchen of a nasty Galway flat.  Or as Rory full ta the top of his throat with pints and poteen captures it so well:

“Lookit, ya cannit make a sow’s arse outta some ould fucken pink handbag.  Isn’t that right?”

He hits me hard on the shoulder.  I absorb the shock to avoid spilling any poteen from my now sterilely clean mug.

“I tink t’poteen is finally cleanin’ these fucken mugs,” I hold up the mug so they can see the brownish-grey stains gone from anywhere blessed by the touch of poteen.

“See, see, sure I tol’ ye,” Rory says authoritatively “Every ear has a silver linin’!”

The only the task not yet complete was finishing off the flagon of poteen which we did with toasts to our great work and ingenuity.  By the grace of the gods of excessive alcohol consumption we finished the flagon of poteen in just enough time to send a raiding party out to purchase more alcohol. 

For many weeks I’d seen a sign outside an Off License at the end of Shop Street that read: JOHN BEGG £9.99. 

We didn’t know who or what John Begg was, but we were pretty sure that a tenner’s worth of his whiskey would work for a few more hours to keep reality at bay.

And the John Begg, mixed with tea to prolong its effects, worked so well that the endorphins released by our various successes – not actually burning down our flat, painting over our mistake and getting drunk at the same time – all went to our poor, forsaken brains.  Sometime between four and five in the morning we dispatched another party for more booze.  At that time of the day the only option was to be liberate a keg over the tall, sharp pronged gate of some pub’s alleyway; a task that required more commando skills and sobriety than we would possess for at least several lifetimes.

In our drunken exhaustion, we’d over-reached and failed.

Our failure was not, unfortunately, a complete failure as we did scavenge a stack of Saturday’s Irish Times from the doorway of a newsagent and a five-gallon bag of milk in a carboard box left outside a restaurant.  The Times were immediately savaged, shredded to pieces as West Brit propaganda, other than the rugby news, which was equally shredded, just not considered propaganda.  

The milk sat in its brown cardboard box in its clear plastic bag on the kitchen floor amidst a knee-high pile of badly shredded newsprint as slowly the pints, poteen, John Begg all wear off and exhaustion slowly takes control of what’s left of my brain. 

Then my oldest friend of all, worry, comes for a visit, making me obsess about the possibility of that most fabled spill of all – MILK!   

The five gallons of this particular white liquid now sitting on the kitchen floor, in a mere plastic bag, is a quantity whose spill would definitely be worth shedding tears over.  The chance that someone go after the box-bag of milk as we had done the stack of Irish Times takes over the remnant of my mind.  The smell of five gallons of sour milk soaked into the walls and floor of the kitchen might outdo even the careless almost-fire.

My eyes dart around the room; the lads are starting to nod off but every now and then they’ll bolt upright on their hard kitchen chairs, eyes flashing open as they glare at nothing.  The sun is returning, its ashen winter rays probing the tiny kitchen window until it catches a piece of the newly painted wall and radiates.

Without a thought, I’m up out of my chair, ripping open the cardboard box, pulling out the five-gallon bag of milk, dropping it with an ominous thud into the sink.

“Whatindefuck …,” I hear from behind me.

But I can’t be stopped.

I grab our only sharpish knife, the breadknife, and plunge it into the plastic bag.  The breadknife’s serrated age slips off the side of the bag’s plasticky whiteness, as it bulges against the sink’s browned stainless-steel walls.

Again and again, I plunge the tauntingly blunt breadknife into the bag.

“What t’fuck are you doin’ up there?” Paul asks.  “Butcherin’ a pig?”

“He’s goin’ for Halloween as the Yorkshire Ripper!” Rory squeal-laughs.

I raise the breadknife, grasp a hold of the bag, squeeze the liquid and plastic tight, before I stab the knife down into the tightened plastic.  The rounded tip of the breadknife pokes a small hole in the plastic before the serrated blade slices across the back of my hand ripping open my skin.

I lean forward to purge the milk from the plastic bag.  The white liquid swirls across the plastic with a thin tread of crimson oozing from my hand.

“I fucken got it Boole!” I yell with excitement, staring up at the beige ceiling.

“Shutuptafuckwouldya, I’m tryin’ ta sleep.”

“Wan gobeshite an’ wan breadknife equals zero milk!”