Call Me the Breeze (6 page)

I went out to The Ritzy myself for a laugh the next weekend. We all got a lift with Hoss and, despite what had happened with the cops, he seemed to be in great old form. There was nothing he loved more than telling yarns about Brendan Behan — the ‘Laughing Boy’ — writer and big-time IRA man of the fifties. A lot of the lads said it was because he looked the spit of him, with his wee short legs and greasy curls. ‘So anyway,’ he was saying, ‘the Laughing Boy’s in France without a tosser and he says, he says, how will I earn me a crust? So he goes over to Froggy: “C’mere, Henri,” he says. “How about I paint a welcome sign over your bar to get the tourists in? Let me paint you a sign and your
pub’ll be fucking hopping!” “Right,” says your man, “then away you go,” and off goes Brendan, off he goes with his bucket and brush, and by Christ if next day the fucking bar’s not stuffed — stuffed with English fucking tourists and Behan there half-twisted like the cat who got the cream. “By Jasus, how did he do it,” says the owner. “How did he fucking do it?” Then he looks outside and what does he see in big bright painted letters —
en Anglaise
, as they say! — “
This Is The Best Fucking Bar In Paris
!’”

We were all in stitches after that, and then the blues came on. Mostly all you heard were grunts and groans. Some of the time it was OK but after a while you’d’ve had so much bad sound and out-of-focus scenes — as well as being tired from working hard all day — that you’d find yourself just drifting off to sleep. It was at times like that you’d see her, more clearly and far sharper than any dumb, stupid movie, blue or otherwise.

Waiting, maybe, in this little place in Mexico, with the dust all blowing around her and me just coming out of the haze to take her hand. ‘I knew you’d come,’ I could hear her saying. ‘I knew if I waited long enough that sooner or later you’d appear.’

It was when I was emerging out of a half sleep just like that that I looked over and saw Boyle Henry sitting there, I suppose no more than ten feet away from me. I glanced a second time to make sure it was him for I was surprised, to say the least. For someone like him, the local bigwig councillor, was just about the last person you expected to see. No matter how much he might be involved. But there he was, his gaze fixed intensely on the screen as a masked woman, in close-up, parted her lips and mock-lisped: ‘
What is the secret of
The Blue Sextet?’

There was some kind of a party going on in a country house now and all you could hear was the vibrato organ music reaching a crescendo as the woman in the mask began to strip. During that scene — she was covering herself with a fan — I got to wondering had they ever gotten around to making a movie out of
Steppenwolf
.

When I looked again Boyle Henry was gone and there was a rolled-up tissue on the ground. I wondered what Mrs Henry — his wife in her younger days had been a local beauty — would say if you posted her that as a present. Not that anyone would be stupid enough to go and do the like of that. The way I was thinking, I found myself having a certain kind of pity for him. I could see myself saying: ‘Boyle, can I tell
you something?’ and explaining as best I could what it’s like to be in love. To experience the mystery. How crystal clear it makes everything seem and how it can change your life.
Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion
was coming on as I left, the Provo nodding as he opened the door.

Well, were Boo Boo and the boys over the moon or what? I mean, invited to perform was one thing but to go and win it outright was far more than any of them had dared to dream, no matter what they might have said. And the standard was fucking high, there’s no point in saying it wasn’t, with a heavy metal band from Dublin looking like they were going to walk it and then this other crowd from Cork who did all their own amazing stuff. Turning in a scorching set and no fucking question about it. But when Boo Boo hit that stage like a man possessed you knew something really special had happened. The audience went apeshit and it really didn’t surprise you. Scaling the amplifiers in his swallowtail coat and black pipestem trousers, he was like a miniature juju man, kung-fu chopping the air and sweeping his stovepipe hat, out of his mind on something. Except he was out of his mind on nothing, apart from the desire for fame, which he’d always been honest and upfront about. How many nights in the back of the van had I heard him at it: ‘We’re gonna do it, Joey, you wait and see! We’re going right to the top, you mark my words! Right through the fucking stratosphere in our psycho mothership!’

The judge said he hadn’t seen a band that could come close to them in years. ‘Fucking right,’ said Boo Boo, ‘and we’re going to see that’s the way it stays!’, as he hit me a karate chop right between the ribs. They won five hundred quid, a series of gigs in McGonagles, which was the ‘in’ place, and a bunch of hours studio time. All the way back you didn’t hear a word. It was like they were all in shock. But you knew they were happy. It was all over the papers after that, ‘
Scotsfield’s finest
!’, like they were a fucking football team, when a few weeks before they’d have lynched the band. But no one was complaining, it was all part of the bigger game. There was even talk of a record deal now, at the very least a single. Around that time there was a call from
Scene
, a new music mag starting up in Dublin, requesting an
interview. ‘I’ll melt their fucking jackeen brains,’ vowed Boo. ‘I’ll take their heads apart.’

The heading — on the very front page of
Scene
— was:
Scotsfield Psychopunk Speaks Out
!, with a photo of Boo sticking up his middle finger. It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t do. Songs were literally pouring out of him. He even wrote one about The Ritzy — ‘Hardcore’. He nearly wrecked the whole fucking place performing it for me in the caravan!

Between the success of the band and the peace rally coming up, there was a great stir now in the town and everyone was glad of the opportunity to show the place in a better light. Especially Fr Connolly, droning on in the pulpit about Ireland having had enough of ‘many young men of twenty’ going out to die and why a decent, law-abiding town like Scotsfield would never collude with a minute crackpot element whose only achievement was to besmirch this country’s name in the eyes of all good, right-thinking people. That was why he had invited the ‘Peace People’ from Belfast who, he said, had informed him that they would be more than delighted to come to Scotsfield. It was going to be the most wonderful night that the town had ever seen, he said, and that as a result of it we were destined to become a ‘beacon on the hill’. But what was necessary was that everyone be seen to muck in and put their shoulder to the wheel for the press would be watching us like hawks. In the churchyard afterwards there was great excitement. It was like the sun had come out especially for Scotsfield.

Everyone went home in great humour that day.

I used always to leave my copy of
Steppenwolf
lying on the counter — you could tell now that it had been read a dozen times, if not more — in case she might come in and ask me about it, just catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye. But it didn’t happen. She always tended to concentrate on whatever it was she was doing at any one particular time. Whoever it was she might be meeting, or what she wanted to
drink. But it didn’t matter that much, not at all in fact, for it was just nice having the book there, thinking of how she’d read it too and how when the time was right we’d be discussing it together. Properly and intelligently. Taking our time. Not the way some of them would approach it, Hoss for example, or Austie himself, flicking through the pages growling: ‘What the fuck is this? Me bollocks! Books is a load of bollocks, Tallon!’

I had known the band Steppenwolf, of course — lead singer John Kay — who’d done the music for
Easy Rider
. After work one day me and Boo Boo drove out to the reservoir and the two of us started singing it — ‘Born to Be Wild’, one of their greatest hits. ‘Did you know they were named after the Hermann Hesse book?’ I asked Boo. ‘Fucking hippy cancer!’ he snorted and flicked the jay out the window. Then, half stoned, he said: ‘I’ve done a good song about Connolly, Joey.’ ‘What’s that?’ I said as I took a drag. “‘Peacenik Fuckbrain Padre”,’ he says, and the two of us doubled up with the laughing. When the mirth had subsided, I got to wondering could Bennett hear us? We were parked in the exact spot where they’d found him. His voice coming drifting on the wind, stirring the leaves as though he’d never been gone at all.

The night of the gig, McGonagles was heaving. I couldn’t believe it myself, except that when we got talking to the punters it didn’t take long to figure out that it was for the band from Manchester, Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, not us. But they were damn good and no question about it. Which they had to be, I guess, for Boo Boo took the place asunder again. Doc Holliday on amphetamines, hurling himself across the stage rasping ‘
Psycho
!’ and ‘
Hardcore
!’ at the audience, who couldn’t believe their ears. I’m not saying we blew Dublin’s mind but we were asked back for three encores. We had a few jars with the Albertos in the dressing room after. I guess you could say they were a sort of satirical band, taking the piss out of everyone but most especially the punks. ‘Fuck them middle-class weekend punks,’ said Boo Boo, and they laughed. ‘Scummy Dublin ponces living off Daddy’s wallet!’

It was fucking great to be alive that night, that’s all I know. ‘Pity there aren’t more places like McGonagles,’ said Boo on the way home
one night, ‘Then we wouldn’t have to do these country dumps, supporting every redneck prick from here to Ballyfuckways!’

The idea behind
Steppenwolf
was that you had so many different personalities inside the one person — any one person. It suggested that you or whoever you were, your soul — however you might like to describe it — was split into several selves and that you were like an onion, the more layers you shed the more emerged underneath. ‘Fascinating’ is not a word you would have heard me using much. Usually I’d have been embarrassed, to tell you the God’s honest truth. I mean, you could imagine them if I had — you could hear them, couldn’t you: ‘Do you hear the fucker — “
fascinating
”!’

The truth, of course, is that I’d always wanted to write. I didn’t know why. To discover things, or maybe to explain them. I thought it might help me find out who I was — and my father and mother. What all of it meant and who we
were
. It might, I reckoned, give me the answer to why I used to spend all day longing for Mona, staring out the window waiting for school to end so I could collect my primroses for her and then go around to her house for some bread and jam.

And sit there listening to her voice for hours.

It was in her kitchen that I first felt the urge. To write, I mean. To put it all down and examine it in some way.

Whether I’d have done any of it in the end — if indeed I’d be writing this — if a man called Johnston Farrell hadn’t decided one day on coming to Scotsfield is literally impossible to say. All I know is — regardless of whatever difficulties we might have had later on — I definitely do owe him a major debt as far as kick-starting my ‘creativity’ goes. His writing classes opened up a whole new world. It’s just unfortunate it worked out the way it did.

Of course, we couldn’t have known that. Indeed, I think if you’d even suggested that we would one day become warring parties in a bitter feud, I think I’d probably have laughed in your face and I dare say so would he. But that’s the way it ended up, I’m afraid.

It was hard to handle it when you saw her at Mass, kinda difficult at first to believe she’d be bothered. Going along to hear the likes of Connolly, I mean. He was hardly John Kay or Charlie the Gardener.

But when you thought about it, it was obvious she wasn’t going to come to a little town in Ireland, then turn around and start making herself out to be something special. Going around thinking:
Why the fuck should I do the things you do? I’m from California
! Which only made her even more special, possessing that kind of insight. I did the best I could so she wouldn’t see me looking, displaying what they called in the books ‘an unmistakable yearning’ (I think it was Hesse who said that — don’t ask me where I saw it) so bad at times it was like it was physically trying to take shape so it could get out of me and touch her hair, lay its head upon her breast.

Connolly lowered his white head and asked the congregation
why
. Why was it we seemed to be turning our backs on the faith of our long dead fathers, to be selling our souls to television sets and paying nothing more than lip service to the laws of Christ. ‘What would St Patrick think if he were alive today? He’d be horrified, that’s what he’d be,’ he continued. ‘It seems to me we are producing the most unloved generation of children Ireland has ever seen. Oh, our children are well fed, well treated when they are ill. But they are growing up in a foreverness of infancy spiritually. Mothers are too busy and house-proud to talk or listen to the little confidences of small children. Pleasure-seeking and money-making are the top priorities. Easy to rush off to Mass and pile off out at the end as if there has been a bomb scare. “Pull a quick one” on a neighbour, cod the taxman, lie to teachers, read filth.’

He listed a whole load of other things that were wrong with the country, then sighed and placed his palms over his eyes and added: ‘I could go on. But I won’t. For what I want to concentrate on is the possibility of a new beginning for us in Scotsfield — no, not alone in Scotsfield but the entire island of Ireland.’ His speech was so impressive that you could see some people were quite eager to clap. I was so dizzy from trying to get a look at her — there was a fat woman blocking my view — that all I could think of, daft as it seems, was Connolly on the stage in Monterey or somewhere, stripped to the waist going: ‘
This one’s for all the people over there in Ireland! It’s called “Peace Frog
”.’