One of the squaddies, guy named Sheils, from up North, had been on my case from day one. Always with the Irish jokes, the stealing of my gear, screwing with my head. He hated the Irish, liked to say,
“I’m of Scots Protestant descent and we colonised your godforsaken country, what we’d get? Fucking bombs in our public toilets, shot in the back...”
He had the truly dangerous blend of arrogance and stupidity, he’d have been seriously threatening if he’d one ounce of intelligence. I’d learned a vital lesson from the Brits, take your time. So I bit down, and with every successive humiliation, like urine in my bed, glass in my porridge, I acted like it was no biggie.
Sitting in the pub in Salisbury with Tommy, my first Saturday off in weeks, I told him about Sheils. Tommy was flush, he was making money hand over fist and spending at an equal rate. He was drinking gin, said,
“You ask the fuck for Jameson, he says, they don’t stock Mick piss.”
That kind of place.
Tommy could care less, the insults of the world he didn’t take personally anymore, he’d been so severely hurt for so long, he just assimilated it into the whole bleak view he maintained. I was drinking pints of bitter and well-named it was. I daren’t lose control, my life literally depended on it.
Tommy asked,
“You have rifles, yeah?”
“Course.”
“With live ammunition?”
“Sure.”
“Shoot the bollix.”
He reached in his jacket, took out a packet, said,
“Got you something.”
This was a first, we didn’t do gifts, wasn’t sure what to say so I said nothing, unwrapped it. A black leather wallet, with a crest on the front. A shield with a diamond in the centre, crisscrossed with two heavy lines and on the top, a cat... a fiery looking animal but a cat nevertheless. A logo beneath in Latin, roughly translated as virtue and nobility.
It was the Blake coat of arms, my family name. I said,
“Jesus, I didn’t even know we had a crest, let alone a motto, how’d you find that?”
He was smiling, a real smile, not his usual cynical one, said,
“The Internet.”
I said,
“I’m delighted, thanks.”
He waved it off, said,
“You Prods, you like yer coat of arms.”
I kept it light, said,
“We haven’t been Protestant for donkey’s years.”
He was looking for the barman, said,
“Ah, once a Prod, always a Prod, you check in there, there’s a secret compartment.”
But we got distracted and I never did get to find the secret pocket.
The other lesson I’d learned in Salisbury was to fight dirty. None of that gentleman crap. You fought by the rules and they handed you your arse. Eventually, Sheils got tired ragging me, he’d still make the odd gesture, spit in my coffee, but he’d lost the momentum. Early morning, in the washroom, he was shaving, whistling the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai. I locked the door, picked up the metal waste bucket and blindsided him. The force of the blow actually dented the metal. I caught him before he fell, asked,
“You hear about the Paddy who goes into a bathroom...”
Then gave him the kidney punches we’d been taught... continuing
“Says to an English guy...”
I got him into the stall, put his head in the bowl.
“What’s the difference between a horse and an Englishman?”
Pulled his head up, butted him between the eyes, then broke his nose.
“You can bet on a horse.”
I don’t think he found it very funny, but then, Irish jokes are a lot of things, funny is rarely one of them.
“The first thing you learn in life is that you’re a fool.
The last thing you learn is you’re the same fool.
Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I
regain consciousness.”
A long time after the principal players in this story were buried, I was sitting one cold February evening in New York, in a studio apartment in the West Village, watching the snow fall, a full-on melancholy building. The windchill factor was ferocious, a neighbour, the only one who spoke to me, said,
“I’m not venturing out till late May.”
Got my vote.
I had a glass of Jameson in my right hand, The Waterboys on the speakers. A group founded by a guy from Edinburgh, Mike Scott, they ended up in Galway, laid down a couple of classic tracks and made little impact outside of Ireland. At the time when U2 was about to conquer America, the boys were playing small venues in Ireland. Their following may have been small in rock terms but it was fierce in its enduring loyalty. “The Whole of the Moon” was spinning and if I had to describe my love for Siobhan, the difference between us; their lyrics may best capture it, saying:
“I saw the crescent, you she saw the whole of the moon.”
Did she ever.
A time when she had a semi-nervous breakdown, I think she was seventeen or so and she saw a head doctor, as they call them in Ireland. She told me that he said,
“You are quite unique in that you have no illusions and that is a hard way to live.”
Jesus, to see to the granite core of the world, I couldn’t hack it like that. I have to believe in... shit, I dunno, some kind of hope. Siobhan believed you made your own luck, and thanks to me, she ran out of all the hard-earned luck she’d strived so long to achieve and that is my burden. It’s not so much that I led her astray but that I had her think a new life was not only possible but within reach. She’d done all the work, and me, I let it unravel. They say no sin is unforgivable, well, they’re wrong. I believe there is one sin without redemption and that is to hold out the prospect of a better life and through sheer fecklessness, to let it slip away. If the Jesuits are correct and the fires of hell are being stoked for me, I’m going to ask,
“Put on a few more coals.”
“But to be American is to be Nietzschean in half of
yourself. You move beyond sin even if part of you
still believes in it.”
Steve-O.
Tommy’s term of affection for me.
An old joke, combining Hawaii Five — O and care. After the army, we moved back to Galway, I tried teaching but couldn’t hack the normality. It was to Tommy, on one of those endless winter evenings, when it’s raining, cold, dark, fucking primeval, I proposed,
“Let’s go to America.”
In jig time, we were in New York. I got on the building site straightaway but Tommy joined Kinney’s, the cleaning contractors, and ended up scraping chewing gum from the floor of Radio City, — he couldn’t believe such a job existed and it nearly killed him, he said,
“You cannot imagine how difficult it is to get that shit off a carpet, and man, the places they stick it.”
So I put in the word and he got to join me at the site. We’d a year of wild and wildest abandon.
The cab stopped and the driver intoned,
“Dino’s, that like new?”
“You’re asking me?”
He was already on a different track, fiddling with the radio, heard the sports, hit the dash, shouted,
“Goddamn Jets choked.”
I paid the freight and laid a five on top, then on impulse, added the nun’s Padre Pio, he said,
“Caramba, He is the man.”
Then, as he placed the relic beside yhe Virgin, added,
“Watch your ass.”
He was already firing up another menthol as he burned rubber outta there. The Madonna had her work cut out, is how I figured it. I took a moment on the sidewalk, what we call footpaths. Get my face in gear. Truth was, Juan was an arsehole but Tommy rated him, so, so I’d gone along. They had dope in common. I never quite figured if Juan was Mexican, Puerto Rican but he affected characteristics of each and was big on the macho bullshit.