Call Me the Breeze (4 page)

‘A pity you didn’t meet The Seeker,’ I told him. ‘He knew, man! He
knew
— you know what I’m saying?’

‘Right,’ said Charlie as he popped the rollie between his lips. ‘Friend o’ yours then, Joey?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘he sure was, Charlie. He sure was. He’s dead now. Overdosed in London.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said as he exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘He’s not dead. He’s sitting right there beside you.’

I was so stoned I could hardly think straight!

‘There’s always a frog beside the pond, Joey,’ Charlie said then, and I thought about that for a good long time as the desert sun burnt on, trying to figure out what Charlie had meant, for you always knew he meant something.

Sometimes after work I’d go into Barbarella’s and have myself a few beers and, if she wasn’t there, just sit there and think about stuff she might say — in a downtown club maybe, looking into my eyes with the smoke curling from the cigarette as one of our favourite songs was played. They were always playing our favourite numbers in Barbarella’s. Sitting there with the table lamps glowing and a couple of dancers moving in the shadows we’d look at one another and smile, especially if the song — which a lot of the time it seemed to be — was ‘I’m Not in Love’ by 10cc. I liked that one and I knew so did
she, the way it was about someone who was so deeply in love that not only could they not admit it but had to keep on denying it, it was so strong. Knowing that sooner or later they’d be forced to give in.

When I went home, I read some more of
Don Juan
and then opened up
Siddhartha
, the other Hermann Hesse book I’d just started reading. I sat up until dawn, really getting into it. I happened just by accident to notice in the paper that Martin Scorsese’s film
Taxi Driver
was tipped for movie of the year.

Any time you rang Boo now, or called to his house, he was below in the garage practising with the band. One night when I was working behind the bar he called by for a beer. ‘Say, Joey, can you do Mount-mellick this Friday?’ he says.

I nodded and slapped up the pint. ‘Sure thing!’ I says.

So that was my first gig with The Mohawks, lugging hired amplifiers from a weatherbeaten bandwagon into a draughty old country parish hall. The band that night was Magic and the Swallows, their lead singer a rotund headcase in a suit made of lightbulbs. ‘Don’t care for your kind of music much,’ he said, ‘but I’ll say you’ve got some guts.’

We hung out for a while there after the gig, drank in the hall for a couple of hours, then headed home. ‘Did you see the faces of the hoors when I was singing “Schizoid”?’ Boo Boo said. Sure, we said, how could we not, it’d have been pretty fucking hard to miss them! But it was great gas and you could see Boo Boo was right pleased even if he didn’t say it. As I drove, I kept myself amused with thoughts and dreams about me and The Jace (dune buggies scorch the roads of Ireland!), and when I came back to earth, we were coming into Navan. It was a fantastic fresh morning, the windscreen splattered with flies. All I can say is that it was just wonderful to be heading home, knowing she was there asleep, soon to rise and head for work in the shirt-factory office. I couldn’t stop thinking of Magic and the Swallows playing ‘It’s Over’ by Roy Orbison, and how if the words of that song were saying anything, they were telling me something about Mona and me. And how all things, no matter how special they might have been in the past,
must eventually come to an end. The most important thing for me to remember, I reflected, swinging the wagon on to the main street (Boo Boo was always dropped off first) was that when feelings are that strong — as strong as mine were for Jacy — what you’ve got to do is face up to the fact. For if I didn’t, I knew, all I was going to succeed in doing was prolonging the pain — for both of us.

Which was why — at home — I rehearsed in front of the mirror. So as to get it right.

I can see now that I was in denial about
Taxi Driver
. Even at that early stage, I had definitely been influenced by it to some extent. I suppose later on I just found it embarrassing to admit to, what with all the shit they wrote about me in the papers. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?

Sure I was influenced. I was even standing like De Niro, for God’s sake. With my legs apart and my two arms folded.

‘Mona,’ I said into the mirror, ‘we’ve got to talk.’

Also: ‘
I’ve got something here for you. I think we ought to talk
.’

I held it out. Then coughed and said: ‘
It’s a present, yeah
?’

It would make everything so much easier, I reckoned. I spun on my heel and grinned at my reflection.

‘We’ll always be friends, babe,’ I told her. ‘Now and for always.’

Then I blew my gunfinger and headed into town, unburdened and happy and walking as though on clouds.

One night, after a party in the bar, I put away so much drink that I thought:
This is it. This is the time
. The Now.
I’ll go out to the caravan now and do it, without presents. Or flowers or anything else
. Now.

I had everything figured out, down to coming past the dogs, having my boot ready if any of them tried anything, and repeating to myself: ‘This is it. This is the end of the line, Mona. I hope you’ll understand. We’ve been special to each other for a long time now. Except now I’ve got to say … it’s over.’

But I knew in my heart that it wasn’t to be. I could see it plain as day the way things would really happen. As they did, in fact, Mona standing at the doorway of the caravan in an old coat, hissing: ‘You’re
drunk.
Get in
!’ As I fell inside, becoming so excited that I couldn’t seem to hold on to anything. There was a steak and kidney pie that I took out of the fridge but I dropped that too and somehow — I think I must have stood on it — it all got mashed up on the floor.

Some of these pieces are so badly written it’s a miracle I can read them at all. One minute scribbled in something close to Arabic and the next in these huge childish letters, ringed in red like this one —
PIES
!

Which I’d spent plenty of time thinking about because, although I knew they were turning me into a bullock, I still wasn’t able to stop, all the time thinking:
I’ve got to build myself up, to keep my mind focused. Build up to that major decision! Keep your mind focused and eat eat eat
!

I don’t think it really hit me, though, until one day Austie said: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Tallon, you’re gone into an animal. What are you trying to do to yourself at all? You keep on like this and you’ll make Hoss Watson look like a clothes peg!’

We had a laugh about it but I can’t say I was laughing very much when I weighed myself on the chemist’s scales on the way home. I had gone up from twelve to sixteen and a half stone. I told myself I would have to work out a programme of fitness and discipline for I definitely was starting to look more like Hoss than Keith Carradine. It shows you how stupid I could be that there I was, working out my campaign of order and fitness right there in my mind — I had paid another visit to Dublin for the sole purpose of viewing
Taxi Driver
again; so much then for my subsequent denials! — and me halfway through another steak and kidney! Thinking about Jacy and thinking about Mona and how the ‘programme’ must be started once and for all.
From Monday on
— Total Organization! was all I could think. That was the way it had to be. ‘There’s no other way,’ I repeated. ‘Total Org, is the only option.’

(There is a torn piece of paper here marked ‘T. B. is God’s lonely man!’ T. B. being Travis Bickle, of course, the character in the movie. And, underneath — can you believe it? — ‘I must get in shape. Too
much sitting has ruined my body. Twenty-five push-ups each morning, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred knee-bends.’

I must have copied it out in the cinema, if the crazily slanted writing is anything to go by. No, I remember doing it actually — scribbling it on my knee in the Adelphi on Dublin’s Middle Abbey Street.)

‘Are you at it again?’ says Austie, pushing the pie aside as he hands me this leaflet about the peace and reconciliation rally they were planning for The Courtyard. It was Fr Connolly who had organized it, he told me.

‘He knows the crowd above in Belfast who got the whole thing started.’

I had seen them on the telly, talking about setting up a movement for peace after three innocent children got run over. ‘Maybe we could get Boo Boo and the boys to play at it,’ I said.

‘Like fuck we could,’ said Austie, rolling a keg along the floor in front of him. ‘Can’t you read? The word is “peace”, not fucking mayhem. Will you change that barrel there Joey and make yourself useful to fuck out of that!’

‘
Peace
,’ I said and smiled, giving him the ‘V’ sign just for a laugh. When I was changing the barrel, Hoss came in and I handed him the leaflet. He sneered, then rolled it up in a ball and tossed it on the floor. ‘Doddering old bollocks of a padre,’ he said. ‘Nothing better to do with his time than talk to them mad bitches.’

‘I think it’s a good idea,’ I said, although to tell the truth I didn’t think any such thing. I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I was thinking:
Soon it begins. T. O. Total Organization
.

‘Peace with justice — that’s all we’ve ever wanted,’ Hoss said and flicked a flame from his lighter. ‘And we won’t have that until those cunts are gone.’

‘What?’ I said as he jerked his thumb at the telly where a British officer was addressing the camera, explaining some action or other in the South Armagh area.

They said it was going to be the hottest summer for fifty years. Eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit, according to the weatherman, average twenty degrees above normal. The fire brigade was up and down the street the whole day long, off out in the country fighting gorse fires
and barn blazes. On top of that there was a water shortage. Then there was the bank strike, everyone cashing their cheques in Austie’s. ‘The country’s going mad,’ said Austie with a sigh as Paddy Cooney, the Minister for Justice, appeared on the screen and promised all-out war on the Provos. ‘There is a huge round-up on the way,’ he went on, ‘and an awful lot of people will be getting an unexpected holiday.’

And Hoss Watson would be one of them, if the cops got their way. Sooner or later he knew they’d get him.

‘A disaster,’ he eventually admitted to me one night, drunk, mumbling incoherently about the salesman. ‘A disaster, that’s what it was, Joey. Things go wrong in a war, you know? The wrong ones get it. Campbell Morris was an innocent man. But the British Ambassador? He deserved it, for Christ’s sake. He deserved everything he got. Because he was a spy all right, and make no mistake about it! I shed no tears for him, my friend! Even though I had nothing to do with it, I take off my hat to the volunteers who had!’

I managed to piece together a vague picture of what had happened that night with Campbell Morris. A few of them had decided they would act the big hard Provisional IRA men, drive him out to The Ritzy on the pretext of seeing some blues, then make a detour to the reservoir. Interrogating him all the way there in the car, accusing him of being an ‘agent’ and working for the British government. Snooping around border towns while pretending to flog pharmaceuticals. But then things had got out of hand: he’d started frothing at the mouth — Hoss reckoned he was epileptic — and they’d panicked. It all ending up with his body in the water.

‘But they won’t pin it all on me,’ hissed Hoss. ‘Those fucking cops, they picked on the wrong felon when they singled out the man from
Bonanza
!’

There was something about the way he looked at you …

You just knew he meant business. I didn’t want to talk any more about it so I changed the subject. I started talking about football. But I knew Hoss wasn’t listening to a word I said. He was miles away, breathing heavily and peering through the coils of smoke with narrowed, obsessive eyes.

(in thick black pencil)

The Mysteries of Love!!!??

How is it someone can come, be just there, appear, and it’s like you’ve known them all your life
? Steppenwolf
is about all those kinds of mysteries. Things I’ve always thought about but been afraid to say. I can just imagine Hoss if he heard me: ‘Mysteries! Mysteries! I’ll give you fucking mysteries! Reading too many effing
-’

Except the truth is, whether he knows it or not, all of my life I’ve secretly liked books. Right from a very young age. Even if I don’t know that much about them — yet. This being the first time since leaving school I’ve ever bothered with the library. And I know I have poor Una tortured. ‘Are you here again?’ she says every day, as off I go with a bundle. But I think she’s getting used to me. And I know it’s going to be worth it. Already I feel empowered. Like there’s been a muscle left slack for too long. Next on the list is the rest of Hermann Hesse. For putting me on to him, gracias, Seeker. Thanks, Eamon
.

I think of us sitting in the desert, just him and me and Hesse. Just talking away there about love. Where it comes from and what it means. I mean, you hear lots of things about it. You read about it all the time. But you never think you’ll experience it. That’s the thing you don’t expect. The most wonderful thing about it is not just the ethereal other-worldly feeling, but that once it strikes, you know things will never again be the same. Even the simplest thing like walking past Jackson’s Garage — whatever way the sunshine falls on it, the way it did today around two o’clock — you’ll find yourself saying: ‘Jackson’s Garage — it’s the same old garage and yet it’s not. It’s become something completely new. Somehow. I’m afraid I don’t understand it. I genuinely do not
.’

Which is perhaps the greatest thing of all about it — your not being able to understand. In the same way you can’t comprehend why you are being so personable all of a sudden. And which, by the looks of things, hasn’t gone unnoticed by a lot of other folks either! As Hoss said to me today: ‘Well, fuck me pink, who’s a happy camper? Monday morning and the shine off his eyes would blind you! I wouldn’t mind some of what you’re on, Tallon
!’