Call Me the Breeze (22 page)

He said she was like someone from a favourite book you can almost feel walking beside you. What he called: ‘
An exceptionally well-drawn character, fleshed out with convincing detail
.’

He had just happened to say it one night in Austie’s and I took it down. Another thing he said was that maybe I should consider calling it
Siege
!, but I didn’t agree because I didn’t think the story was really about that. It was more, I felt, about
feeling
, and what people are like deep down inside. What their dreams are. How they might journey towards peace. Find a peaceful place they could call their home. At first he didn’t quite understand, he said, but when I gave him my diary from around that time (the ‘Total Organization’ ledger, in fact), he said things were becoming much clearer. He said that he found a lot of it funny — things like the idea of Fr Connolly singing ‘Peace Frog’, say, which had completely slipped my mind. It was that night, just as we were leaving, that he happened to mention that Bono and him had gone to the same school. Not making a big deal about it the way I might have done! Telling everybody you met, like an eejit!

No, just saying it matter-of-fact. Like it didn’t cost him a thought. Which was the way things should be and the way Bono would have liked it himself. He had said it in the papers. ‘
I’m just a regular guy
.’ The same as Johnston, the same as myself. Just regular guys in search of the truth. Fighting the good fight, as Johnston would say. His favourite writers were Gogol and Eliot. I couldn’t believe it when he said that. ‘Mine too, Johnston!’ I said. ‘Even though I don’t understand it all!’ Meaning Eliot. I knew about Gogol after reading him in the library. What a headcase! Noses in bread rolls!

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he told me, ‘as long as you hear the beat of its heart.’

He really could catch it in one, Johnston. I used to sit for hours by the window of the caravan wondering how he did that. Then I’d take down Gogol or Eliot and write like a maniac in the same way they did. I used to take
Dead Souls
out to the reservoir and read it there for hours listening to the wind bringing voices from the clouds. At the end of the book the character wanted to build a Temple of Colossal Dreams. I thought that was a fantastic phrase — and a fantastic thing to want to do. I couldn’t stop thinking of it rising up there out of the trees, with these great big marble pillars with vines and greenery all around. I wasn’t sure what the temple meant, to Gogol at least, but to me it meant
a new beginning
. A new
spring
was what it meant. That the past was over and all the old winters were dead, with the freshest of warm breezes blowing in a world no longer knowing deceit or duplicity or guile.
Now that anything is possible
, I’d think as I closed
that book,
what you once dreamed, now you can do! Because you know it can happen
!

‘It can!’ I said to the utterly silent water. ‘It
can
!’

Which was why when I got home I dashed off a few words to Bono, telling him about Johnston and how we’d happened to meet up and shit and how much his music had meant to me at a particular time in my life. I didn’t want to use the word ‘prison’. I couldn’t believe it when I received a reply hardly three fucking days later! All I could think of was how the world had changed. It was almost like the temple had been built already and there was no need to go to the bother of doing it. On top of that, Johnston Farrell kept phoning — to invite me out to dinner, no less!

He was fascinated by my story, he told me, especially what with its being set in the early seventies. Which he’d read about but didn’t
know
. Well, of course he didn’t — I mean, back then Johnston Farrell would have been but a child!

This is fantastic
! I thought as I rabbited on like a youngster myself. I couldn’t believe that it sounded so interesting to him. But it did, you could tell just by his expression. Not to mention his notes! Jesus! He had even more than me! The big difference, of course, that his weren’t written by a semi-literate gobshite! No, I don’t mean that. That’s just me being stupid. Once upon a time I would have meant it. But not now. Not since he’d educated me. And Mervin. And, through his music, the man who had written
The Joshua Tree
, along with his mates Larry, Adam and a fabulous virtuoso called ‘The Edge’.

I really treasured the letter from Bono but I didn’t want to show it to Johnston in case he thought it a bit kind of … I don’t know — silly. ‘You don’t carry it
everywhere
with you, do you?’ I could hear him saying. Which out of embarrassment — the new spring hadn’t entirely arrived — I knew I would deny. But I did. I did carry it everywhere, all creased up in the back pocket of my jeans. It was covered in Guinness rings and cigarette burns and had lots of little notes in the margins. There were even a few little astrological doodles on it. I read it again:

Dear Mr Tallon

Thank you for your letter which we have noted and kept on file. Unfortunately Bono and the boys are in Miami recording at the moment and won’t be back until late June. I will pass on your ideas to them and will be in touch.

The thing I was really looking forward to talking to Bono about was how you — anyone — can do anything if they truly believe in it. It is, in a way, the happy marriage of
considering
and
doing
. You
think
and you
act
. You
think
and you
do
. You …
go for it
! That was what the journey was. That was what it was all about. I believed that now. What I couldn’t believe more than anything was that I was just going to stroll in and meet Bono, one of the most famous rock singers in the world, and it wasn’t going to cost either of us a thought. Which was why I sat down with the guitar and strummed a few simple chords. Simple because that was how the new spring seemed. That it all had happened so effortlessly, and without any mystical old bullshit. As soon as I had the song finished I was on the verge of going up to the library and taking out
Siddhartha
with the sole intention of putting a macth to it. Or tearing all the pages out of
Steppenwolf
. But then I thought,
No, that would be stupid. For the past is the past and the present is the present. The new spring is the old winter’s son
. When I thought that, I reckoned it wasn’t bad. Not as good as Johnston, maybe, but not exactly a pile of horse cack either.

Then I took the guitar and went out to the reservoir. It was particularly beautiful there in the dawn. After I’d played my song, I recited a few words from Gogol. The dew was on the grass and the leaves were beginning to whisper. I declaimed it the way Johnston did, like you weren’t ashamed of what you were saying or, more accurately, afraid that someone was going to pop out from behind a rock, shouting: ‘Shut up with all that shouting, Tallon! You and your fucking poetry, you great big one-eyed fuck!’

There were wisps of cloud floating out across the blue as I swept my hand and boomed: ‘
The spring, which had for a long time been held back by frosts, suddenly arrived in all its beauty and everything came to life everywhere. Patches of blue could already be seen in the forest glades, and on the fresh emerald of the young grass dandelions showed yellow and the lilac-pink anemones bowed their tender little heads. Swarms of midges and clouds of insects appeared over swamps; water spiders were already engaged in chasing them; and all kinds of birds were gathering in the dry bullrushes. And they were all assembling to have a closer look at each other. All of a sudden the earth was full of creatures, and the woods and meadows awakened. In the village the peasants had already started their round dances. There was plenty of room for festivities. What brilliance in the foliage! What freshness in the air! What excited twittering of birds in the orchards! Paradise, joy and exaltation in everything! The countryside resounding with song as though at a wedding feast
!’

I was exhausted, spent — but delirious when I’d finished.

We had been discussing Samuel Beckett at the writing group so I went off up to Dublin to get a few of his books — there were none in Scots-field Library — and just by chance where did I pass? Only Windmill Lane Studios. At first I wasn’t going to bother going in but then I thought of Johnston’s confidence: ‘Of course he’d have come out to say hello to you, Joey!’

So in I went, but as it happened he wasn’t there. But June Enright, the girl who’d written to me, was sitting behind the desk and when I asked to see Bono she couldn’t have been more helpful. Turned out they were still in Miami recording and that things were going real well. ‘All things being equal, their new album should be out around this time next year,’ June told me. Then we got chatting about this and that. Knew quite a lot about literature, did June. Wasn’t that fond of Beckett, though. ‘Doesn’t quite do it for me, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d be more into the beats.’ I wasn’t all that well up on them, either, but they sure did sound interesting. ‘
On the Road
— now there’s a book,’ she said. ‘By Jack Kerouac!’ ‘Sure!’ I said. ‘I’ve heard of that,’ and told
her about my own plans for going on the road ‘when I get a few bucks together’. ‘Whereabouts are you headed?’ she asked me. It transpired she knew the States inside out and had been there with ‘the boys’, as she called them, over half a dozen times. ‘Oh, here and there,’ I told her. ‘Midwest, the West Coast! All around!’

‘Well, you get reading those beats now!’ she said. ‘Believe me, they’ll blow your mind!’

And was she right! Straight away I went out and bought them. That Allen Ginsberg. ‘Howl’! ‘
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness — starving, hysterical, naked
!’ and all that shit. What good was Beckett after that? Three arseholes sitting in dustbins arguing about sweet fuck all and, just when you think it’s all over —
thank fuck
! — they start it all over again? I had a good mind to do exactly the same with him — fire his books into a bin that I happened to be passing right there and then. But I had to study him for the group so I thought it’d be best to hold on to them. Instead I bought myself a baseball cap and sat there smoking. ‘Dodgers’ was written across the front and it felt real good just sitting there in the Clarence Hotel (which U2 own, of course), reading. I couldn’t wait to get home to discuss all this new stuff with Johnston, who would know it inside out, of course.

It was hard not to think of yourself sitting there, maybe going through William Burroughs — another right fucking headcase, went and shot his wife with a crossbow, for Chrissakes! — when, whaddya know, next thing would walk in Bono. ‘Hey, how you doin’, Joey?’ he’d say as I tugged the baseball bill down and answered: ‘Hey, OK, Bono!’ As I pulled some poems, or a film script, maybe, out of my inside pocket. Then after a rap — who knew, even discussing with him the possibility of him writing some songs for the movie, or the entire band doing the soundtrack — heading off to a drinking den, say Lillies Bordello.

If he felt like it, of course. Maybe meet up with The Edge and some of the other ‘musos’.

The more I got talking to Johnston the more I started to feel, once and for all, the way you reckoned a real writer should. You nearly couldn’t move in the caravan now I’d filled it with so many books. But not with mystics and ‘the ancients’ and all those fuckers — all they did was tie
you in knots — but fiction from all over the world. ‘That’s it, Joey!’ Johnston told me. ‘Read voraciously! All the fiction that you can find! But I still think, deep down, that your story is a movie!’

Now that I knew how to do a treatment — up until now ‘I’d only pretended, I hadn’t a clue what he was on about, treatment this, treatment that, treatment the other — I’d just nodded and pretended I knew. I had a pretty good idea now, though, I reckoned, what with his advice and all the manuals I’d been reading. So a screenplay on the story was definitely beginning to look like it could happen.
The Life and Times of Joey Tallon
up there on the silver screen. With particular reference to a certain thing that had gone wrong once upon a time in his long-ago life.

I’d wake up in the night and see it all before me, the water lapping as we approached the shore where the lights of the harbour were twinkling. ‘Soon we’ll be there,’ you could hear Jacy saying, ‘over there in the land of Paradise. That is what your writing means, Joey. It can make it happen! Out of something bad something really beautiful can come.’

I’d wake and realize that I had never felt so empowered, not even since the very first reading years before of
Siddhartha
or the chats I used to have with The Seeker. It being so strong, in fact, that those memories seemed as nothing if not adolescent.
That’s baby stuff
! I found myself thinking.
This is it, man, and you’d better believe it! This is home! This is the real deal. The real fucking deal and make no mistake
!

I let my beard grow good and long until it looked like Ginsberg’s. Which meant, of course, you couldn’t go up the town without someone shouting abuse. Such as ‘Beardy’ or ‘Fucking ZZ Top!’

I’d go out to the reservoir to do some declaiming. ‘You’re like a prophet,’ says this old fellow to me one day out there. ‘Like John the Baptist or someone.’

I smiled when he said that and closed the book as we had a smoke together. ‘We all are, my friend,’ I remember saying, ‘each one in his or her own way. In his or her own special way.’

Unfortunately that would appear to be all that remains of a systematic chronicling of my earliest years of freedom. But even the most cursory sifting through the various papers makes it pretty much clear what transpired. If the ‘Writing Class Notes’ are anything to go by — and
there are literally thousands of them — there couldn’t have been a minute of the day or night during those creatively fecund times when the scribe was not busy blocking out some script scenes or just shoving down the barest bones of random ideas. There are even story-boards which I’d completely forgotten about, to be honest, and a weatherbeaten jotter called
The Movie Book
, containing the names of my favourite films — 1,357 to be precise. So I suppose it was no wonder that my skills began to be honed quite precisely and a new confidence was soon on display. Not that it was to make a whole lot of difference, for as this letter shows, the response from Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios to the first draft of my masterpiece — at that time entitled
Psychobilly
— was destined, sadly, to be somewhat less than ecstatic.