The Thrill of It All

by Joseph O'Connor

  There are things I don’t want to say about my post-Ships years, matters for which no thesaurus has enough varieties of regret, having mainly to do with my drinking. But you’ll need at least some of the background facts if the day I’d like to tell you about is to make any sense. Fran used to say: lay the bass-line first. I’m no Entwistle. Who is? But let’s go.

  In 1991, I married the smartest and most forgiving person I’ve had the honour to know, Michelle Marie O’Keeffe, a Tennessean. We moved to France, where she worked for an international realtor, and downed sticks near the town of Mougins in the Alpes-Maritimes, an hour’s drive from the border crossing at Menton. Music was over. I hated even hearing it. We’d no stereo in the house, a seventeenth-century water-miller’s cottage that needed more work than we’d heart for. No radio in the car, no tapes. If a Ships track happened to come on, in the supermarket, perhaps, or in the bar down the village where the jukebox was long behind the times, I’d walk right out that door. There was too much pain, and no drunk can stand pain. That’s why he’s drinking. For immunity.

  For some reason that I didn’t and don’t understand, I couldn’t part with my guitars, mostly Guilds and old Martins, but I stacked them in the barn, didn’t open those flight cases, ever, and one night, bitter with drink, went to take an axe to the pile, Michelle stopping me at the last, dark moment. A neighbour called the town’s gendarmes, who, sadly, knew their way all too well to our door. I was arrested, then hospitalised, and underwent psychotherapy at a clinic back in Chelsea, London. For me, it made things worse, since poking at the past stirs up old poisons.

  But no unhappy marriage was always unhappy. The house was dark and old, its decrepitude oddly calming. We’d sometimes drive into Italy, just to hear the people speak. Lake Como in winter is beautiful. The hurts you brought into a marriage because there wasn’t time to push them out don’t bloom with the ferocity of youth’s cartoon hearts, but there never were two lovers at war every day. We’d cook. Walk to Grasse. Talk futures.

  My plan – God help us – was to own and run a vineyard, the equivalent of a heroin addict wanting to own a poppy farm. France, a gorgeous country, is not a good place for an alcoholic. Norway, where a beer costs a ransom, would be wiser. Or Iran, as Michelle used to joke.

  Seán moved to southern California the year the band split, as did a 21-year-old Mexican nursing-student, Consuela Villagomez Saavedra. They met while swimming at Zuma Beach. This Christmas will be their twenty-third together. In 2010, Consuela was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church, an organisation not universally associated with salsa dancers as extremely sexy as the Reverend Sherlock-Villagomez – but I guess the times are a-changing. Above my door is pinned a card she sent me at a tough moment in my life, with a text from Psalm 108, her favourite. Cantaré alabanzas, aun con mi alma. ‘I shall sing and make music with all my soul.’ They own several small businesses in downtown Los Angeles, including a bakery, a bookstore and a Mod boutique (I swear), the last being the most profitable of the lot. When not selling parkas to the groovsters of Rodeo Drive, Seán teaches music and composition in the California prison system. I must also mention his Jamaican-style ska band, Seán Sherlock and the Sheiks, which in varying incarnations tours the American college circuit and the Caribbean festivals every summer. He’s asked me to say, they work cheap.

  Fran, you know about. His star burned brighter the further it moved from us. Seán’s album, Montauk Sound, and Trez’s, Sure Thing Bilbo, were warmly reviewed but didn’t sell. Fran’s Glitterball Farewell went triple-platinum in the UK, the States and Japan. He wrote for Bowie, the Kronos Quartet, the Berliner Philharmoniker, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Mick Jones. Video was something we never did properly in the Ships. Given the budgets he now commanded, Fran’s own videos were astounding – sumptuous, usually animations, always self-directed. His album The Hardest Part is Waking Up was the first to have a video for every track. It sold seven million copies and won in nine categories at that year’s MTV Awards. He didn’t attend the ceremony.

  By the early nineties his rate for a song was said to be a hundred grand advance plus royalties of 4 per cent above standard. Like a lot of wealthy people who don’t work full time, he became ardently, perhaps obsessively litigious. He brought prosecutions against his managers, agents and lawyers, and a libel action against a tabloid that had described him as a bad role model to his children. Soon afterwards he disappeared from view, continuing to write, record and produce, but refusing to engage in publicity. He hasn’t given an interview or played a gig in twenty-two years. Winning Grammys, Ivor Novellos, and, twice, the Oscar for Best Soundtrack, he didn’t turn up to collect them.

  In June ’94, when Michelle and I were still together, I travelled from France to say goodbye to my mum. She died of oesophageal cancer. That a woman I can’t remember ever doing a deliberate wrong could be taken in such a way – it was crueller than I was able to stand. I’d been clean for a while, reluctantly, resentfully, but after the funeral there was unseasonably violent weather all over the south of England and Heathrow was closed for some days. En route to the ferry, I took a side-trip to London, and there my old trouble found me, along with some new ones. I’ll be honest, among the maelstroms of inchoate anger, I was furious with Fran for not attending the Mass. My mother had shown him no small compassion. The self-importantly flashy wreath he’d had his PA send to Jimmy fell short of the respect that was owed. In Soho my rage and I went drinking. My, we had a high old time. After several nights of pontificating at flicker-lit strangers and ghosts, I was arrested for possession of cocaine and assaulting a police officer. In a remand cell at Pentonville Prison a warder gave me the news that Michelle had given birth to our daughter.

  A change of subject is often eloquent, saying more than words might do. It isn’t that I wish to plead the Fifth. More that these years were so wounding to those I loved, and still love, that cataloguing my every failure would hurt them again. Also, my recollection is clouded, for obvious reasons, one of alcoholism’s very few mercies. Bottles hidden in the toilet cistern? I can even tick the clichés. Terrifying the mother who was breastfeeding our child. Talking midnight shit-and-vengeance to the mirror. I spent a few weeks in several hospitals, pretending to listen to counsellors and psychiatrists. All it ever taught me was a particular sort of tolerant silence. The kind you hear in the audience when the musician whose classic hits they’ve paid to hear says ‘Here’s some of the new material’.

  Trouble was, I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even sad. Not always, and rarely while drinking.

  When Michelle threw me out, I staggered back to England, divorce papers in pocket, signed into rehab, stuck it four days, and stayed for a time with poor Jimmy. Slaughtered by grief, he lost weight and got ill. We’d sometimes go to Scarborough, where I’d bought them the cottage, but he couldn’t bear seeing it any more. Christmas of ’94 he went to New Zealand to visit my brother, remaining three or four months in the end. Jimmy gone, I picked up the friendship with Trez, who was teaching at UCL by then. We’d go to theatre, do a gallery, tool around Hyde Park at weekends. She was single at the time – she and the Italian were ‘on a break’. You gathered that the relationship was intermittently stormy but it was one of several matters you knew not to raise. Another was the band. She’d never want to go there. Her line was that we’d all been innocent urchins ‘cast into a freakshow’, and outcasts get pushed together. She helped me find my houseboat, even signed as guarantor. Occasionally she’d show up with a suitcase and the kid. Elisabetta was nine by then, a mop-topped Botticelli cherub, the second-loveliest child I’d ever seen.

  ‘Buonasera, Zio Robbie. My parents fight again.’

  ‘All friends sometimes fight, pet. I wouldn’t be worried.’

  She’d give a small shrug. ‘Non importa.’

  The neighbours thought Trez and me an item, which gave us quite the kick, since by then we were more like an insane defrocked monk and his sister. My former teenage obsession wandered the boat in bagg
y tracksuit and moustache cream, irritated with the kid, stirring baked beans, marking her students’ essays, which were often not good, and filching my disposable razors to deal with her legs in prep for a forgiveness-date with the Italian. My wardrobe, such as it was, she regarded as her own. My T-shirts and sweaters, my socks and gloomy boxers – all were summarily borrowed. Off she’d wend into London, while I lullabied Elisabetta and emptied the ashtrays Trez’s anxieties had filled. Most nights she’d come home but the odd night not. Questions weren’t welcome, you felt. I was happy to have the company, and, since I didn’t like conversation, her silences were easy to live with.

  Trez would hate me to record it, but record it I must: without her, I couldn’t have stopped drinking. I’ve read and thought about alcoholism a great deal over the years, unsure as to whether it’s really an illness or just a branch of the leisure industry, but the one thing I can say, now I’m on the other side, is that what most drunks need is someone to talk plain sense. Even as a teenager, Trez was a scrupulous listener, not inquisitive but with a sort of settled curiosity. In her thirties she still had that skill, honed by time and tough lessons. But if you committed the mistake of uttering a single syllable of bullshit, she’d call you out, and fast. Nobody understands you? Get over yourself, babe. Why should you be understood when no one else is? Life didn’t go as planned? Has anyone’s, ever? ‘You’ve a child,’ she’d say. ‘It isn’t too late. Get on the phone. Right now.’ Writing those words makes her sound impatient, and she certainly wasn’t always a saint in the lava-lamp glow of my addict’s self-fascination, but she spoke even the harsh things with a celestial calm that made them impossible to ignore.

  I started going to France, to see Michelle and our Molly. That’s what I did for five years. I’d go over once a month, maybe kip in the barn. We’d spend Christmases or Easters together. It was over between Michelle and me, this was made clear often enough, but as long as I stayed off the rotgut I was welcome. It was a careful and generous accommodation, for which I’ll always be grateful to Michelle, but we knew it must be temporary too. A work opportunity came up for her in Montauk, of all places. She wanted to return to the States. I didn’t stand in the way. Indeed I drove them to Nice Airport on the morning they left, Michelle and I tearful and putting on smiles, the seven-year-old Molly oddly calm. We promised we’d manage. And somehow we did. It wasn’t always easy. Which family is?

  I went to Montauk a lot in those strange, aching years. By the time Molly turned twelve, I was missing her more, and I think she was missing me, too. Then, thanks to Michelle’s extraordinary gift for decency, Molly started coming to London in the summers. A child was permitted to fly unaccompanied at the time, if an adult put her on board and another met the flight. I’d look at this girl, this unfurling young woman, so insolent and insouciant and up for a scrap, so avid for the world and all it might throw, and I’d think Christ Almighty, I’m not nothing. She was a restless little shark, wanted bites of experience, like everything I’d once wished to be but wasn’t. She had all her mother’s gorgeousness and a scathing wit of her own, but something in the particular meld of those often-warring traits allowed for the possibility of more. This was a kid who would never need to be in a band. She was a band of her own. The full Clash.

  One day, on my boat, she found a yellowed old page in a shoebox of clippings I’d forgotten to throw away. It was dated ’86, from one of those questionnaires you see in magazines. I remember her pointing out that it said everything about the Ships. Looking at it again, she was right.

  Q: Imagine you win thirty million dollars in the lottery. What would you do?

  Sarah: Give it to my mum.

  Seán: Buy an island where inner-city kids could have a vacation and see wildlife.

  Robbie: I’m not sure.

  Fran: Nothing.

  A normal person would get something like that framed and hung in his loo. But that would mean seeing it, so I didn’t.

  27th July 2012 is a day you may remember because it saw the opening of the London Olympics. It was Jimmy’s seventieth birthday. He and I were in Dublin. It being an Irish summer morning, there was a thunderstorm. We left the city not long after dawn and drove down to Enniskerry, a pretty village in north County Wicklow. It was a place we used to visit when Shay and I were kids, in the summers before we moved to Luton.

  We’d a long day coming. I reckoned silence medicinal. The trees along the roadways had shed the occasional branch but the storm clouds were giving way to sunlight. A narrow country road at five of a July morning, with the hedgerows dreeping and the alders forming a tunnel, can be a place where you’d feel the presence of something. But I’m not going to start. You could also feel nothing. Forgive me, Mr Wordsworth, shut the latch on your way out. I am older but I’ve not forgotten your crimes.

  We didn’t say much in the car. Jimmy hadn’t slept. For reasons I’ll share in a while, reporters kept phoning the hotel until almost midnight, and no matter how vehemently he denied I was there, the hacks refused to believe him, poor Jimmy. Eighteen years had passed since the death of my mum, but he still hated the telephone ringing at night. I felt bad for having caused him upset.

  The news came on the radio. He switched the channels fast. Tony Bennett was crooning on Radio 2 and Jimmy doo-be-dooed along. It’s a while ago now but I remember efflorescence over the turrets of an old Protestant church. Rooks on a gatepost. A jogger in a high-viz. The apple-crisp sweetness of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. A signpost had been twisted in the wrong direction. By ‘gutties’, Jimmy said.

  ‘Mam always loved Powerscourt House. Will we take a run up there?’

  ‘They’d be closed,’ I said. ‘It’s too early.’

  ‘The waterfall, so? Sure they can’t close a waterfall. Not even this blueshirt government.’

  We headed up the sodden lanes, the pair of us quiet as swans on a brook. The rain came on again and he cursed it beneath his breath. ‘Bloody thunder. In July. Shouldn’t have gone messing with Tara, I tell you.’ For Jimmy, the motherland’s economic crash and dismal recent climate were caused by the decision to build a motorway through the Boyne Valley in County Meath, a place of pre-Christian archaeology. Age has not withered nor custom staled his fondness for the unusual theory.

  He’d brought bread and slices of beef from last night’s carvery. We ate them in the car park at the waterfall. ‘I won’t give them seven euros for a sandwich,’ he said. ‘It isn’t the way I was raised.’

  We got out and walked a while, up to the falls, then around the winding track that circles back on itself, Jimmy naming the birds wheeling by the spruces. Larks. A moorhen. A couple of dirty seagulls – ‘Sandymount Snow Whites’, he called them. A grey bedraggled fox trotted out from between the recycling bins. Jimmy clucked in greeting and I swear the damn thing smiled.

  The sun grew stronger. Everything was quiet. We came to the stream where there’s a bridge made of planks and we stopped there, a custom of old. He plucked a web of matted ferns from a clump near the signpost and crumpled them slowly, tossing them into the water, and we watched them float away. When I was a kid, he’d always tell me to make a wish at this point. But he didn’t say it today. I wanted to tell him he could. But the moment passed, like the ferns.

  ‘The world’s gone mad,’ he said to the stream. ‘You wouldn’t know which end is the sleeves.’ I offered him a chewing-gum and he accepted it with a nod. His hand was shaking a bit.

  ‘Well, there we are, anyway.’

  ‘There we are,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Ducks in a row, Rob?’

  ‘Ready to rock.’

  In less than thirteen hours, I’d have a date I didn’t want. You’d think I’d be scared.

  I was.

  The spring of 2012 had proved a difficult time. Michelle went through a cancer scare. Her dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Old misunderstandings with the taxman were causing me chewed fingernails. I was broke as a pox-doctor’s clerk. A couple of months earlier, I’d had to
sell the last of my guitars, my ’55 sunburst Strat. A rarity such as this, you can double your bid. Go again a few times. Add noughts if you’re expert. We’re talking a candidate for the glass case.

  I’d had it reconditioned in the old days by a master in New York, an ancient wizard in the East Village who didn’t come cheap, because he was the best in his beautiful trade. Fingelstein was his surname but musicians were permitted to call him ‘Professor’, for the exquisiteness of his work and his reverence. ‘You kids,’ he’d chuckle. (Everyone under the age of eighty he regarded as a kid.) Solly’s dead now, but he was a great man for a war story; in his time he’d fixed the lyre of Orpheus. To an outsider his shop appeared a graveyard for guitars: crates of necks and shattered bodies, rusted input sockets, webs of wiring. You wouldn’t want to venture in while suffering the DTs – you’d get an attack of Hieronymus Bosch. Browbeaten banjos, burst lutes, wrecked Dobros, a defeated army of crippled ukes and stringless Flamencos, playing a silent, eternal symphony of the might-have-been blues, implicating you, somehow, in the loss.

  Anyhow. Forgive me. I tend to digress. It cost more than my first car to have my road-weary Stratocaster put back the way God meant it. But the young woman in the London hockshop could only offer me half its book value, said I should hang back and give it a float in a big auction of pop memorabilia Sotheby’s had coming up. The Olympics were on the way. London would be jammed with wealthy foreign visitors, their ardour inflamed by beach volleyball and beer. The Far East was going bonkers for old-school rock. Her strong advice was to wait.

  I needed ready funds. When did I need them? Now was good, I told her.

  I’ve never been a bread-head, but to paraphrase Woody Guthrie: if you ain’t got the dough-re-mi boy, the world be a lonesome town. Michelle needed help with her medical bills. My case manager at the Inland Revenue, a connoisseur of fine Italian wines, is patient with a late-maturing Brunello di Montalcino but not with back-tax payments. And Molly was accepted by Princeton that month. The motto of that fine university is Dei sub numine viget; in English ‘Show me the Money’.