Howlin' At The Moon
It’s sometime in early 1996 and I’ve moved back in with my parents temporarily as I’m waiting to move into a new house.
I love these nights. I think it’s to do with the not knowing. Not knowing if I’ll make it home in one piece. Not knowing where or when the night will end. Not knowing who I’ll wake up as in the morning. And now here I am at the arse end of the night lying against the wall in Iskanders waiting patiently for my number to be called. Even though it’s 1.30am I do my very best to concentrate.
- 231! Doner and chips. – I step forward and jump back again before anybody notices. Thankfully I’m not the only one. We’re all fucked by this point. Otherwise we wouldn’t be eating kebabs at this time of the night.
- Jaysus, me heads rattled with the gargle. – The stranger beside me.
- You and me both. – The stranger inside me.
- Can of coke with that?
- I suppose. - Says 231.
The curtain is falling on another Saturday, the shite-talking over for another week. All the problems of the world have been solved until tomorrow at least. I left the lads in Grogan’s a few minutes ago arguing about the Middle East. The usual shite. It’s Nethanyahu this and Nethanyahu that. It was my intention to give Iskanders a miss, it always is, but my stomach is screaming out for food and thankfully time is on my side. My brain is screaming for bed. As for my legs, well they might as well be dead for all they care about Gaza and the West Bank. Too much talk of politics can make a stone of the heart. I don’t have much time for the political class. They seem to create more problems than they ever solve. In the end it’s the people who have to do the heavy lifting if anything really good is going to happen. The Renaissance. The Swinging Sixties. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I’ll be out of here soon and on the night bus home, that’s if I don’t miss it the bloody thing. Even though I’m pissed I know what I’m doing. I’ve done it a hundred times before and I’m sure I’ll do it a hundred times more. I know the exact time I have to leave the pub to set in motion the chain of events that will get me home safely. Nothing will distract me, not even the smiling girls going the other way or the drunk looking for a light.
Drinking during the winter is always more of a challenge. There’s nights when it’s so cold that we’d be better off supping soup. Here we are dressed up like Eskimos before we step into the warmth of whatever pub it is we’re in tonight. Hogan’s. Grogan’s. The Ha’penny Inn or The Long Haul. It doesn’t really matter. They all sell the same thing. Apparently a pint of plain is your only man in this town, but only if it has a big bollix of a creamy head on it.
It always feels like I’m somewhere else whenever I walk the streets of Dublin’s Fair City. This dreamland fairy-taIe full of weird and wonderful characters. This town that echoes London, New York, Berlin or any other city that’s worth it’s salt. I live in the songs I hear and the books that I read. These moments of inspiration that help me to push reality away whenever it threatens to get too close. The weekend is my warm bed. There’s nothing to hold me back, only the trouble that lies straight ahead. The streets are filled with laughter and pain and the silent footsteps of momentous history lived by too many heroes of renown to list them all here. There goes Michael Collins lurking in the shadows of the Castle. Surely enough a shot rings out as Sam is lifted into the air by Tommy Drumm before the adoring crowd on Hill 16. Heffo’s Army forever more etched in my memory. I am part of this place. We all are. Tonight the city’s on the lash, the batter, the tear, sure we’ll only have one and then one more for the road and then we’ll see what happens, sure we might as well and after that it’s anyone’s guess where the night will lead.
Right now there’s no mortgage to pay but I’ve always had the knack of finding something to worry about. It might be the fear that my girlfriend will run off with someone else, it’s happened once before, and the loneliness that will come when she’s gone, or Arsenal’s poor run of form or the dark shadows cast by a hungry Meath team lurking over Hill 16 as they wait patiently for the summer to come. I seem to spend far too much time making up my mind about life and what it means. Finally free of school I’m free to think. Ireland is a strange mix of the brilliant and the dead, too many of whom are still alive. There’s still a feel of the strait-jacket to it, a restlessness that’s hard to explain. As usual It’s left to the musicians, the buskers, the poets, the artists and the writers to loosen the heavy-handed grip of church and state. There are ghosts waiting around every corner. If I’m lucky enough I might even see Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett having a chat on the way home. The alcohol has indeed dimmed my brain, but somehow the magic tricks of its glorious kaleidoscopic revelry is still in full swing.
When I take a right out of Iskanders onto Dame Street the hallowed halls of Trinity College lie straight ahead. Somehow I made it through the gates by the skin of my teeth to study history after repeating my Leaving Certificate in a wonderful rough and tumble establishment called Ringsend Tech. It was the kind of place that chewed me up and spat me out and in the process made a man of me by introducing me to characters outside of the limited comfort zone I had inhabited up to then. It was ruled by a principal affectionately know as ‘Ma Doyle’, a tiny gun slinger of a woman who would have been right at home in the worst of Wild West. She taught us that the power of authority and respect didn’t have to come with big or angry attached to it. When I finally made it to college I found that I loved it as much as I had struggled with the academic side of school life.
After buying a ticket from the hatch down the street I watch the driver making the most of every last second of his break before he rolls the 2am bus forward and the doors open with a whoosh similar to a rocket-propelled grenade shooting overhead. Once onboard, I find a seat downstairs and slip my ear phones in and hit play on the Walkman I carry everywhere. Shane McGowan’s gravelly voice kicks in. I travel with two cassette tapes in either top pocket of my denim jacket, music that is chosen carefully for every occasion. The bus ride in and the bus ride out. The only two rides I’ll be getting tonight.
The Pogues are for when I’m pissed. They remind me of the summers spent in Lisdoonvarna with the lads. Wild days and nights when we managed to stay afloat on a sea of Guinness. Prosser. Quigley. Duff. Trev and Stu. The best of times. I still go back there in my head whenever I need to, even now, to the Roadside Tavern, the Ritz and the local Spar. As I listen to Shane I scribble my own words across the empty canvas of my imagination. The mad ones are up on the top deck shouting and roaring and singing songs and arguing the toss. There should be a competition for the most graceful disembarkation. There are a number of different styles. Take the Leonard Cohen, a slow waltz that involves several pauses for steadiness or the Ronnie Drew, a late sprint when the poor departing soul’s trajectory is helped on its way by the bus sweeping around an unsuspected corner throwing them down the stairs and off the bus before they even know they’ve left. Not to forget those who ring the bell a little too late leaving them desperately trying to match the tension of the screeching brakes as the bus grinds to a sudden halt. It’s more of a miracle that they don’t exit through the front windscreen. The dregs are dropped off one-by-one until fifteen or so minutes later it’s my turn to say good bye to the pair of brown eyes looking at me.
I make the short walk from the bus stop past the quiet houses on the main road and turn down the narrow alleyway that leads to the estate we have lived in since the late seventies. Nothing and nobody is stirring. Chapelizod is a sleepy suburb to the west of Dublin’s city centre. It’s situated along the banks of the river Liffey. I love looking up from our front garden towards the trees in the nearby piece of heaven that is the Phoenix Park. My room is at the back of the house. It was from there that I heard the Pope saying mass in 1979. A time when the world seemed to stop for a few days when John Paul came to visit and the roads emptied of cars and filled with eager pilgrims. Little did we know that it would prove to be the dying wheeze of a church destined to lose its hold over a significant proportion of the Irish people. To be honest it was like being lost in a land that time forgot and it wasn’t until U2 began to sing about a place where the streets have no name and Ray Houghton stuck the ball in the English net that some kind of light began to get creep in through the cracks.
Even then there were good times to look back on, days when God smiled down on great deeds. Like the rain soaked day in 1983 when Dublin’s ‘Twelve Apostles’ held out against a Galway second-half onslaught to bring Sam home again, the first All-Ireland Final I was lucky enough to attend. Or the magical Wednesday afternoon a year earlier when a heaving Lansdowne Road roared Ireland onto a famous 3-2 win over a French team inspired by the brilliance of Michel Platini. We only seemed to ever play against France, Poland and Bulgaria back then. There was also the occasion when I stayed up late with my mother cheering on Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins to his second World Snooker title in 1982. On the music front Live Aid came a little later, followed by Self Aid when a dark and brooding Bono paced the RDS stage like a man possessed and Bob Geldof sang about deserving to get pissed on a night like this. I remember how it made my father laugh. Freedom was in the air. It was as if our own Berlin Wall was coming down, but it’s collapse brought with it the uncertainty that often accompanies such a seismic shift, something we Irish have always struggled to comprehend.
There was plenty of darkness too. The economy was stuck in a cycle of never ending recession, leaving heroin to take the place of hope in the inner city. The guns were still raging up the north and memories of those darkest of days still remain with me. Like the time during the 1981 Hunger strike when it was too dangerous to go into town or the Friday afternoon of the bombings in 1974 when we were so relieved to hear the rattle of the gate telling us that our father was home safely. I was too busy worrying about what was happening up the road on the other side of Dundalk to be worried about places like Nicaragua. We had our own demons to be dealing with before we went preaching the gospel of peace and reconciliation anywhere else. I still wonder what it is that makes the Irish such efficient killers. We see it in gangland today. Maybe it was easier for people to worry about some other cause further away. Home was too raw, too close to our hearts. I remember being told condescendingly by one of my college friends to go home and watch the snooker during one particularly heated political discussion. It still hurts to this day. It’s funny how some things stick and others just float away.
I ease the key into the lock before I turn it slowly and push the door open. I creep up the stairs, tip toe past my parents room and quietly take one last satisfying piss before I step into my room and take my clothes off and put on a pair of football shorts and a tee shirt.
Before I slip into bed and fall asleep.
