Boy, it looked a sorry sight. After it cooled, I tried a bite. Hey, not bad. Between tentative sips of water, I got it down.
Then sat back, see where it went.
Orbit.
Hash cookies are renowned for space travel. I can confirm it.
A deep mellowness enfolded me. My mind was tiptoeing through tulips. I said aloud... or did I?... “I love my life.”
That’s the best indicator of my condition. Time later, I got the munchies and began to eye the green chicken. Luckily, a frozen pizza had somehow survived my recent campaigns, and I got stuck into that. Halfway through, I fell asleep. Out for six hours. If I dreamt, it was of “Hotel California”.
When I came to, my hangover had abated. Not gone but definitely not howling. After a shower and oh so careful shave, I headed for my video shelf. It’s sparse but has my very essentials:
Paris, Texas
Once Upon a Time in the West
Sunset Boulevard
Double Indemnity
Cutter’s Way
Dog Soldiers
In 1976, Newton Thornberg wrote Cutter and Bone. Three ruined survivors of the sixties share a house. Cutter, a crazed crippled Vietnam vet. Bone, a draft dodging dropout. Mo, a mother and agoraphobic alcoholic. They investigate the murder of a young prostitute. They piss off the wrong people, and Mo and her baby are killed.
Cutter and Bone track a capitalist they hold responsible. Cutter, according to Bone,
has a savagery of despair. It precluded his responding to any idea or situation with anything except laughter. His mind was a house of mirrors, distortion reflecting distortion.
Cutter operates on two things:
Despair
Cynicism
Robert Stone wrote Dog Soldiers in 1973. Karl Reisz adapted it for the screen in 1978.
Again, it’s three fucked people.
Marge, hooked on pharmaceuticals. Her husband, John Converse, a war correspondent, and Hicks, who brings drugs into the States. John Converse sells out his friend to the DA and realises fear was extremely important to him. Morally speaking, it was the basis of his life. I am afraid, therefore I am.
Hicks, pursued by villains and agents, dies in an old hippie cave. Written on the wall is
I watched these movies back to back and felt, as I had felt all my life... fuckit.
“One door I passed revealed a man
fully dressed in an antique zoot suit
and a white ten gallon hat.
As I passed by we regarded each other
as two wary lizards might stare as
they slithered across some barren stone.”
Eleven in the morning, I’m sitting on a bench at Eyre Square. The debris of Sunday night is mildly stirring. Four o’clock, in the hours before dawn, that’s when it’s the war zone. The clubs and fast food joints disgorge the hordes.
The fights and yahoo-ism begin.
Top of the square is a statue of Pádraig Ó Conaire. They beheaded him. Christmas two years ago, a yob torched the crib.
Down near the public toilet, a young lad was murdered.
A city on the predatory move.
Progress my arse!
I’d a battered copy of Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me in my jacket. It’s the green faded one. Pockets to burn, like Robert Ginty in The Exterminator. Richard Farina was Joan Baez’s brother-in-law. Would probably have written fine books but the dope took him out. I’m running a list in my head:
Jarrell
Pavaese
Plath
Jarrell, from a Caribbean cruiser threw himself
and
Gustav Flaubert (1849)
As my body continues on its
journey
my thoughts keep turning back
and bury themselves in days past.
Out loud, I mutter, in Irish, “Och, ochon.”
A new age traveller approaches, sits on the end of my bench. I’m drinking a cappuccino from a styrofoam.
No chocolate sprinkle. I hate that shit.
The traveller is mid-twenties, bangled in every conceivable area. She says,
“Caffeine will kill you, man.”
I don’t figure this requires a reply. She says,
“Did you hear me, man?”
“Yeah, so what?”
She scoots a little closer, asks,
“What’s with the negative waves?”
A cloud of patchouli envelopes me. I decide to cut through the hippy pose, say,
“Fuck off.”
“Oh man, you’re transmitting some serious hostility.”
My coffee’s gone cold and I put it down. She asks,
“Did you have red carpets in your home as a child?”
“What?”
“Feng Shui says it makes a child aggressive.”
“We had lino. Brown, puke-tinged shade. It came with the house.”
“Oh.”
I stand up and she cries,
“Where were you when John died?”
“In bed.”
“The Walrus will never die.”
“Perish the thought.”
And I’m outa there. I look back and she’s got the cappuccino on her head, sucking it down.
I’m bursting for a pee and risk the public convenience. A minor drinking school has temporary possession. The place is infamous since a paedophile ring preyed there. The lead wino shouts,
“Want a drink?”
Do I ever, but answer,
“No, but thanks a lot.”
My interview with Green Guard is at 12.30 so I still have some time to kill. Catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my hair is wild. As I exit, I say,
“Take care.”
The school chorus,
“God bless yah, sur.”
Off Quay Street, I notice one of the old barber shops. Check my watch, reckon... go for it.
There’s no customers. A man in his late twenties puts The Sun aside, says,
“How you doing?”
“Pretty good, thanks.”
I clocked the English accent straight off, asked,
“Didn’t this used to be Healy’s?”
“You wot?”
He didn’t call me “guv” but it hung there, available at a comb’s notice. I said,
“I forget the numbers, but I think I want a No. 3.”
“You sure?”
“Well, Beckham was a No. 1, so I definitely want up from that.”
He motioned to the chair and I sat down. Avoided, to the best of my ability, my own reflection. I asked,
“London?”
“Highbury.”
I longed to say, “Highbury and shite talk“, opted for
“Grand bit of weather.”
The music was loud and the guy said,
“Joy Division... 1979’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’.”
I kind of liked it. The twisted mix of grace and savagery spoke to my withered sensibility. I said,
“All right.”
“Oh yeah, mate, they’re the biz. You know, it’s twenty years since Ian Curtis drank a bottle of Scotch, watched a Werner Herzog film on TV, turned on a Stooges’ album...”
He stopped. The punchline was coming and it wasn’t going to be good. I could do my role, asked,
“What happened then?”
“He went into the kitchen and hung himself from the clothes rack.”