Call Me the Breeze (2 page)

But you never get to hear what it is the Big Fellow’s going to do. All you can feel is his presence right there. As an icy wind blows by. And the next thing you know The Seeker is there — but with flattening beads of brackish blood pushing out of his mouth. I shudder when I think of it and I don’t want to see it again. There was a needle too. A hypodermic syringe, just lying on the bare floorboards. I get headaches when I think of that and it makes me just want to stay in. Not to go out at all, or go back into work or
-

But then I think of Jacy and it’s like the sun is rising in your head. Just that way she smiles when she turns around, like she knows instinctively you’re there. Blue eyes. Blue eyes and blonde hair. It’s fantastic. I have taken up the guitar and am learning a couple of Joni Mitchell songs. I think she’ll really like them. One is actually called ‘California Sunshine’ — isn’t that amazing? The other is … I forget
…

(Some of the scrappier bits of foolscap have no dates at all. This one I’m not sure of, but it looks like it comes from early June 1976.)

The worst thing about Mona is her moods. One minute she’ll be perfectly OK — smiling away there, grand and happy, with not a bother on her. Then the next thing you know she’ll be glaring at you, making demands or cutting you dead. Looking at you like you’re the worst piece of filth she’s ever had the misfortune to lay her eyes upon
.

Then other times she’ll be taking you in her arms and covering you
all over in kisses, saying: ‘So, how are you today then? How is my best little boy? How is Joseph today
?’

It’s not a nice feeling, not knowing which it’s going to be. It’s the worst feeling in the world, to tell you the truth, and I’ve had it all my life — right from the earliest days when my father would come in, all smiles one night and full of simmering violence the next — and only for Jacy would probably have never known anything else. I often ask myself: ‘Just what does Jacy mean?’ She makes me feel secure and believe in love, that’s what my Jacy means. She helps me and makes me want to — like The Seeker said — believe. Because that, more than anything, is so much of the essence, so important, more than all other things
…

When she came to the town first, she was so beautiful that some of them couldn’t wait to get started. Calling her this and calling her that. They called her a stuck-up bitch, but all I did was smile. And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t so long after that that any time they spoke her name, a part of me would just shut down, and it was like they weren’t in the bar at all
.

All you’d see were these lips moving and over in the corner, the prettiest woman you’d ever laid eyes on, really. The kind of chick you never thought would stop for a second in your town. But she had, and they were so unprepared for it, it was all they could think of doing. Like the worst kind of backward hillbillies. Pathetic fucking bullshit, nothing more or less
.

I knew what was going through their minds, of course, things such as: ‘Why the fuck should we look at her? She wouldn’t pass us the time of day!’ and ‘Flicking her hair like she’s in the movies, fucking Californian whore
!’

Maybe the reason I knew was that, before The Seeker, before I got reading, I might have thought along those lines myself. But not now
.

Not now
.

Not since that first time
.

I don’t need any diaries to help me remember that. She was standing at the far end of the counter, and when she turned my heart skipped a beat. It was like a camera had caught the floating wisps of her hair in
slo-mo. She was wearing a zippered blue denim jacket. There was a cluster of flowers on the scalloped collar. She was the spit of Joni.

Sinking her hands into the pocket of her Levis and fingering that lovely bead necklace, one exactly like you’d expect Joni to wear. You could tell straight away that she played the guitar. I could just imagine her, in a log cabin somewhere with the firelight flickering on her face as she looked into my eyes and strummed. I just stood there watching as she talked to her friend about Iowa, which is a state in America, of course, but apart from that I knew nothing about it. Maybe they were going on holiday there or something because you could see a travel guide with this coloured cover sticking out of her bag with a great big blue sky and waving golden corn and just that one word —
Iowa
. I even loved the way it formed on her lips. I would call her ‘
My Lady
’.

‘A pint of Guinness,’ she said, and it was like I was kind of swaying in space.

Afterwards, when I went home, I thought of her all night.
The One
, was all I could think, for that was how she seemed:
The One who is The Only One
.

In Dublin today to score some acid but Boo Boo didn’t have any. Said he’d be getting some at the weekend, that one of the guys he busks with is definitely scoring — windowpane, I think. So we just had a spliff and rapped about her and things in general. ‘She sounds like a cool fucking chick,’ he said and started what was probably the only argument I ever had with Boo
.

‘
I don’t like you saying “fucking”, Boo Boo,’ I said. ‘Not when you’re talking about her
.’

There was a bomb scare in the Film Centre during
Taxi Driver
but it turned out to be a hoax, not that it would have made any difference for we were too out of it to know what was going on. After that we went to Zhivago’s to get more wine. Boo Boo met some doll he knew and she asked us back to her place for more booze and who knew what else. What else, as it turned out, being mostly Boo Boo blathering on about his band and what they were going to do, world domination starts fucking here. ‘You’ve heard The Sonics,’ he says
.

‘You’ve heard The Voidoids, The Mojos.’ He cupped his hands and blew the jay: ‘But, baby, you’ve heard nothing.’ The last thing I heard was him saying: ‘And that man there — Big Joey — he’s gonna be our roadie!’

I remember getting back early the next morning with a fucking ripper of a hangover. It was around eleven when I hopped off the bus and made straight for the pub. Austie gave me an unmerciful slap on the back as I sat at the bar digging into a steak and kidney pie — I always seemed to want to eat whenever I got nervous or excited. He said: ‘Jasus but you’re the happy-looking boy! Did you have a good time in Dublin?’

‘Sure,’ I said. All I kept thinking of while he was talking was the album — the one I got ‘her’. Wondering would she like it. It was called
The Only One
by a band I’d never heard of — Spontaneous Apple Conclusion. I had come upon it completely by accident.
Which is a load of nonsense
, I thought,
for nothing ever happens entirely by accident
.

‘Will you like it, Jacy?’ I asked myself.

I didn’t even even have to ask. I knew she would. Of course she would. The Only One. She who is …

I wasn’t listening very carefully to what Austie was saying now. But you could see that it was serious. He was telling me about the British Ambassador and his secretary. They had both been killed in Sandyford — blown up by a landmine.

‘A crater twenty-feet wide,’ he said. ‘Now we’ll be fucking for it. After the salesman, we’ll be fucking tormented, we will. They’re convinced they’re all hiding out here! Fucking Provos — they’re going to ruin my business! Why don’t they all get around a table and settle it all, pack of fucking —!’

Some of the things I’m asked to do I don’t like them any more, even though I used to look forward to them. I don’t have a problem admitting that. But it’s different now. Ever since Jacy all of that has changed. Now all I want to do is say: ‘Go away, Mona, don’t come near me tonight, don’t ask me to
-’

But she always gets around me, standing there with that crooked smile she has whenever she’s been drinking. Running her fingers through my hair and
-

She lifts her own skirt up. Ever so slowly, till it billows around your head like a parachute. And then it comes — that blissful feeling. When you put your thumb in your mouth and you see the glittering stretch of water with her just standing beside it, staring off out to the horizon. She doesn’t speak but you know what she’s thinking. ‘Out there is the precious harbour. That wondrous place where we’ll all feel safe. One day we’ll get there, Joseph.’ ‘Yes, Mona. I know we will’ you are about to say, but when you look again she’s gone and all you can hear are groans
.

(There is a little notebook here marked
BAND NOTES
. With some fantastic little doodles in it by Boo Boo. Kind of like Marvel comics, or Robert Crumb. I remember him laughing whenever he’d do them, to keep himself awake on the way home from gigs. Odd bits of lyrics, too, some of them really good. I don’t think they were ever used, though.)

Looking over the cuttings brings that time back, those first few weeks of the band getting together and Boo Boo setting his plans for world domination in motion. ‘Make no mistake, this thing is going to happen. I know you don’t believe it, Joey, but we’re gonna prove you wrong. We’re gonna take the place apart and you’re in it, my friend, whether you like it or not.’ He was right — I didn’t believe him but he sure put the smirk on the other side of my face when I went down to hear them in Jackson’s Garage. Some of the songs were fucking great,
no doubt about it, especially ‘My Daddy Was a Vampire’. The yowls out of Boo Boo during it were unbelievable, so much so that Jackson came round in his overalls with a face like thunder. ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said, but Boo Boo told him to lighten up. ‘Easy, baby,’ he said as he wound the microphone cable. Jackson knew his father, otherwise I think he’d have knocked the bollocks out of him right there on the spot. In the end, though, he just fucked off, wiping his hands with an oily rag and warning us all to ‘
Watch it
!’

I agreed to be the roadie all right — I didn’t see why not if I could work it OK with my shifts in Austie’s.

When there weren’t many in, I’d maybe leaf through a novel or just stand there staring way out across the town. I could see it all plainly, me arriving in this deadbeat hole where she lived with her husband, some old motherfucker of a bank clerk who’d bored her half to death since the day they got married. I’d be standing at the edge of town in my long leather duster coat, the sun lancing off my eyes as I gazed first into the sky then up and down the drab, unpainted buildings that seemed to hold each other up all along the winding street. ‘So!’ I’d say. ‘Old timer!’ Bout a room for the night, maybe, huh?’ and he’d show me to the motel where I’d wait till dark, just oiling up my Winchester pump action. Then it’d be time to go. Soon as she saw me coming she wouldn’t be able to speak. The pump I’d keep well hidden right in there beneath the duster, not thinking about producing it at all unless there was some kind of trouble. Which there wouldn’t be for the jerk bankman or doctor or whoever she’d somehow managed to get holed up with wasn’t going to be that foolish. For if he was —

‘How you been then, Jacy?’ I’d say, not taking her hand just yet.

‘I … I …’ was all she’d say. She wouldn’t be able to speak.

It would be beautiful making love that night, running your fingers through her hair, her jeans cast away there on the floor beside the bed. ‘I love you!’ I’d say. ‘I’ve waited all this time.’

‘Joey,’ she’d say. ‘Joe Boy, my lovely darling,’ just the simple sound of her voice making everything you’d lived till now nowhere close to living at all.

Nights I’d drift towards sleep with a single word on my lips. ‘Iowa,’ I’d hear myself whisper, and with its swell and ebb it would remind me of the sea, even though I knew there was no water there. I’d borrowed a book from the library, just an ordinary guide to the Midwest. Of course there was no sea there. There was in California, though, the Pacific Ocean crashing just beyond the Big Sur sands. I’d read about it in
The Family
by Ed Sanders, which Eamon had sent to me. ‘Check this out,’ he’d written. ‘He used to play with The Fugs.’ I thought he meant Charlie Manson but it was the author he was talking about.

The more I went through it the more sympathy I had for Manson. In the beginning his ideas were kind of OK. Called himself The Gardener and collected all the flower people. Maybe if the karma hadn’t gone wrong, things might have worked out different. Who knows how it would have ended up? It was just that old karma going wrong, that’s all. It was a pity but that’s the way things are sometimes. They just go kind of astray. The karma gets … I don’t know, turned inside out, I guess. According to Ed Sanders, he was a really good player. Guitarist, I mean. Maybe if the recording contract had come through, that might have turned things around. But it didn’t. A shame. Yeah. ‘I’m The Gardener. I collect flowers. I see they get light and then I watch them grow’ he used to say to people as he drifted along the road. In the days when the karma was good. I wrote a short little lyric in the pub, just scribbled it there on a beer mat to pass the time when there was no one around. It’s just called ‘The Gardener’ or ‘Song for Charlie’.

When I told Boo Boo I’d been thinking of easing up on things he said that it was a good idea, especially the acid, he reckoned. Then he said he was going down to Glenamaddy at the weekend. ‘I have to pick up
an echo box,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to check out some support gigs with the showbands.’

‘Good thinking, Boo!’ I said, but I wasn’t really thinking about that. In fact, all I could think about was how great it was that we were all getting ourselves together. Not that we’d been doing all that bad, but you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a bar sweeping floors and scouring glasses. I went down to another practice and the boys were coming on great. They’d managed to get an interview with Dave G on community radio. Also Boo Boo and Chico came back from Glenamaddy at the weekend and said they reckoned there’d be no problem — as regards the showband gigs, that is.