Call Me the Breeze (17 page)

(A lot of the later entries are undated — a sign of growing contentment, I think, and a preoccupation with Mervin’s schemes. There is definitely a lighter touch to the prose, as in this little pen picture of our custodian.)

Mervin (and ‘The Poetry Association’)

Mervin, Mervin, Mr Governor Mervin, where the fuck did he come out of? Don’t ask me — but what a guy! What a motherfucking cool fucking guy …!

What I mean by that is, he’s so full of ideas and enthusiasm. And really good at imparting them. ‘I think it would be a real good idea,’ he says to me the other day in his study. ‘Might get rid of the stink of piss!’

I couldn’t believe it when I heard him swearing like that. But then, Mountjoy can get to him too, with its fucking grey walls and its fucking grey skies, with its endless fucking rules and interminable head-counts. At first I didn’t believe his idea would work and nearly laughed straight out in his face. ‘What would the dumb fuckers in here know about poetry?’ I said. And was pretty damned cocky about it too, the way it came out. But not quite so much so after Mervin had done with me. ‘What gives you the right to say that?’ he asked me. ‘Where’s your evidence for such an assertion?’ By the time he was finished with me I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with Rocky. I won’t say that when I left the office I was a completely changed Joey Tallon, but one thing for sure — he had made me see how arrogant I could be.

‘That’s exactly the attitude that prevented you from writing!’ he told me. ‘That prevented you from bothering to articulate how you felt. Don’t give me that shit, Joey! Get out there and form that Poetry Association!’

At first I thought I had fucked it in one! For the minute I mentioned it to Bonehead he started getting all fired up, suggesting all these ridiculous projects, such as inviting T. S. Eliot in to speak to the prisoners! (He saw I had been reading him and picked it up in the cell one night.)

‘The fucker is dead!’ I told him. ‘Bonehead, T. S. Eliot is dead!’, making no more impression on him than the man in the moon, before eventually having to grab him by the bollocks and rasp into his face: ‘Will you fucking listen to me, will you? You can’t invite in dead people!’

‘Jasus, Joesup, will you take it aisy!’ he says. ‘Sure there’s bound to be people that’s alive can write pomes as good as him!’

In the end, anyway, we got it up and running, although it wasn’t called the ‘Poetry Association’ and wasn’t confined to verse. The name we decided on was the ‘Mountjoy Literary Society’, and after the first three or four meetings — which consisted just of me, Eddie ‘Mouse’ Gallagher, or perhaps what was a close relative of his who popped by the recreation room for a snoop — things began to pick up and, before you knew it, you were beating the fucking bastards off with a stick. Mervin managed to wangle us a grant and, after a while, we did start bringing in writers, although not well-known ones like T. S. and not because they weren’t alive, either, but on account of our budget not stretching that far.

It was the making of Bonehead too, for that was where the ‘secretarial’ aspirations began, culminating in, of course, his compilation of the definitive ‘Joey Tallon Archibe’.

He had even started to wear his glasses on a cord — or in his case, a shoelace — and I couldn’t go anywhere now without him coming up to me with questions. I nearly pissed myself the day I came upon him in a corner of the exercise yard, leafing his way through Joseph Conrad. ‘How are you getting on with that?’ I asked him, and what does he do? Puts the hand up, as much as to say: ‘Do you mind, Joesup? I’m reading!’

There were some fabulous nights you couldn’t forget at our ‘soirées’, as I’d taken to calling them.

‘
You fucking bastards you put me in the Joy/Me just a decent young boy! You put me in here where there is no joy
!’ this fellow delivered one night — and that wasn’t the worst of them either! Not by a long shot! Another time a junkie got up and started punching the air, all these rat-a-tat-tat smacks as he went blue in the face going on about ‘
smack
!’ and how it ‘
fucks your bleedin’ head!’ ‘But they don’t care
!’ he says, ‘
’cos all they bleedin’ care about is their share — of
cash!’

It was after that we got put in charge of the library, and I suppose it was there Bonehead learnt his other skills — became ‘The Catalogue Meister’, I suppose you could say — which has resulted, happily, as I say, in this quite extensive chronology.

He has even included on bits of wrapping paper little quotes — just random thoughts, I suppose you could call them — that he’s found. One, believe it or not, in pencil on the back of a Rizla!

The worst thing about it was that it turned him into Hitler. ‘What the fuck do you mean you don’t know where you left it? That’s library property! What are you, a traveller? You needn’t think you’ll lift all about here, you thieving cunt!’ I heard him saying to this fellow one day. ‘So you’d better go and find it! And if I catch you taking ency-clomapaedias out of here again, it’ll not be good for you! Them’s reference books!’

Another great thing about it was I could get extra privileges for myself. Mervin saw that I had special entitlements, which he could justify to his board on account of membership of the library being up fivefold since me and the Bone took over. Although, to tell you the truth, I think it had more to do with Bone’s eccentric style of management than any dramatic refinement of literary tastes. On the other hand, maybe that isn’t quite fair, for the literary society was definitely turning a lot of people on. I used to love reading
The Poetry of T. S. Eliot
aloud, even though I have to admit there was a lot of it I still didn’t understand, and
St John of the Cross
, which, despite the fact that it still reminded me of The Seeker and the old days, I was beginning to warm to again.

‘I didn’t know you were holy, Joesup,’ said the Bone to me one night in the recreation room. ‘You never said anything to me about being holy.’

Another time he caught a fellow by the shirt and fired him out the door. At that point I had to take action. ‘You can’t be at this, Bone!’ I said to him, quite forcibly. ‘You’ll lose the pair of us our jobs!’

‘I know,’ he says and starts going all shaky, ‘but he was cutting pictures out them special books to take back to the cell to wank with. It’s not good enough, Joey!’

Then he shows me this book of Rembrandt plates and shakes his head, disgusted. ‘Even an itinerant wouldn’t do it,’ he says, ruefully.

Diary of a Kip: 24 June 1985

We have had the best of crack all morning talking about these moving statues. This smack dealer called Crowe, who has just been locked up, was telling us about going down to Ballinspittle, where
the whole thing’s been happening. ‘You wouldn’t believe it!’ he says. ‘Half the country is down there and swear they seen her talking. She came down off the plinth and walked over to a fellow. Apparently the auld bollocks couldn’t walk and now he’s kicking football!’

‘Maybe we could get him on the team,’ says Bone-head.

‘They’re coming from all over,’ the dealer replies. ‘Only the cops fucking caught me I could be down there making a fortune selling burgers.’

‘Shut up, you fucker you! We don’t want pushers in here!’ snarls Bonehead the other day when an argument started. ‘You’re giving us a bad name!’ Your man, of course, goes for him then! Bonehead never knows when to shut up.

There is great excitement too about the boxing.

Barry McGuigan looks set to win the world title. He’s from near Scotsfield, so I can imagine what the crack must be like in Austie’s right now. I wish I was there. But I don’t suppose they’ll ever want to see me after what I went and done, stupid bollocks that I am. I have only myself to blame, no matter what the governor says. He’s a great man to talk to is Mervin, he’ll just sit there and yap for hours. ‘What about your friend St John of the Cross — what has he to say about forgiveness?’ he asked me. I could have given him a couple of quotes right there off the top of my head. But I knew there’d be no point. It isn’t St John I want forgiveness from.

He says he’s delighted with the way things have gone, both in the library and the literary society generally. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘I have a proposition to put to you.’

Then he says — I nearly shit myself! — ‘Did you ever think of putting on a play?’

That was the first time it had ever entered my head. At first I completely rejected the idea, but when Mervin said he would help — he had directed a lot of plays himself, he said, he was a member of an amateur company — I decided I would give it a go.

When Bonehead heard about it first, he said: ‘What? You? Sure you couldn’t do plays! We’re in charge of libraries and pomes, Joesup, that’s enough!’

But, of course, as soon as things got started, there was the fucker in the thick of it, running around with a clipboard, flapping his arms with the glasses swinging. It didn’t take him long to learn the jargon. ‘Take five!’ he says to this crackhead who was playing the lead.

‘What?’ says your man and looks at me with his mouth open, as Bonehead gives me this painful look as though saying: ‘Do you see what I have to put up with?’

Diary of a Kip: 3 July 1985

Have been in the library all day, studying and getting ready to begin the play. Came across a great book called
The First-Time Director: A Guide
and it really is excellent. I can’t wait to get started. It says in the book that it’s like a general getting ready to go into battle, and that’s exactly what it feels like now. You read and you read and you read and then you find yourself standing in front of the mirror going: ‘This has to be a production that will set this prison alight! It has got to be something really special! Something that they’ll be talking about for years. For years to come, you got that, Joey?’ Then, adjusting this imaginary dicky bow as off you go, thinking to yourself:
This is gonna be a piece o’ cake, pal! Dig
?

27 November 1985

All the way through Merv has been around, just in case anything might go wrong. He’s like an anchor. A rock. He has made it all so very easy. It has
been plain sailing, a really terrific experience. Although of course I’m nervous, obviously.

24 December 1985: A History of Mountjoy Prison!

There was a huge crowd in tonight. The papers have picked up on the good work Merv’s doing and they sent some reporters in. The crowd was mostly social workers, relatives and people from the department. But it was fantastic! I was shitting myself all the way through. Some junkie your man turned out to be! His performance as the narrator was terrific. He also played one or two other parts. There wasn’t a sound as he delivered the speech: ‘
your Petitioner thereby humbly prays Your Excellency will be graciously pleased to extend your clemency to Petitioner by remitting him to his family thereby enabling your Petitioner to spend his future life in loyalty to his queen.’

It just shows you what can be done. It was basically the history of Mountjoy Prison from 1850 to the present day, with your man the junkie doing all the links. We took in the troubles of 1920 and the political stuff and then ended with the smackheads and all the rest of it. It was fantastic, even if I say so myself.
Mountjoy — A History
we’ve called it on the posters, all of which we printed ourselves in the workshop. There is even talk now of us starting a magazine. There is talk of all sorts of things.

I don’t know where it came out of but when our ‘Narrator’, i.e. the junkie, came up to me one day out of the blue and told me that he’d had a poem accepted for publication in the
Irish Press
— they run a page that prints short stories and poems — I am ashamed to say that instead of being proud — I mean, we in the literary association had been the first to encourage him — what I experienced was an undeniable
twinge of jealousy. I couldn’t believe it as I felt it begin to assert itself and had to turn away from him, knowing I was on the verge of saying: ‘So, what do you expect me to do about it?’

It was a dreadful thing to think for you could see he was over the moon.

That was the first night in ages that the depression came back. It enveloped me from head to toe, becoming so bad that at times I literally couldn’t breathe. It was awful and I was mortified because I’d caused it myself with my attitude to the junkie earlier. I read his poem and it was really, really good.

But that only made me worse.

Diary of a Kip: 17 February 1986

The young junkie is really coming into his own right now. He showed me some more stuff today and I really have to admit that he’s excellent. I have to laugh at the way Bonehead keeps going on about him. All you can hear now is: ‘He’s powerful, isn’t he, Joey? He can do some writin’, oh yes!’, which is fine for a while but after a bit begins to fucking wear, you know? In the end I had to tell him to shut up. Just to give it a rest for the love of fuck. Of course, he gives me his baleful look, but I’m sick of that too.

Anyway, I have my own work to think of.

28 February 1986

I can’t stand it in here sometimes, it’s …

Barry McGuigan did the business the other night, beating Cabrera really fucking well. And I bet you’ll never guess what? The junkie has another poem written! Bonehead is going around quoting it! ‘He’d bate T. S. Eliot any day, Joesup!’ he says.

My, my, it’s hard not to think what a literary society we’ve created in here! One minute they can’t write their name and the next they’re going around quoting
Four Quartets
!

I can’t get over the thought of Boyle Henry being
at the McGuigan fight. I saw it in the paper. Beaming from ear to ear. Like he’s his fucking manager or something. He won in the election. He’s a senator now. My stomach turns —

11 March 1986

I can’t stand this fucking place! And I wish Bone-head would fucking shut up! He wants to start a film society now! ‘What the fuck would you know about films?’ I said to him. ‘There’s more to the cinema than fucking John Wayne!’ Another fucker he never shuts up about! ‘Did you ever see it, Joesup, did you?
True Grit
! Your man has the eyepatch the very same as you! Man but that’s some fillum!’