by AnonYMous
Anyway, well into my second year there, my fourth year off the booze, I was still refusing to get involved with any female. My favourite masturbation technique was to take a nice hot bath and soap up my baldy lad well and truly, and then give him a good old beating. At one stage I was going to write a screenplay all about my right hand, a love story. There would have been scenes where I let my hand brush against my thigh and I would blush. In another, my right hand would get jealous of my left and refuse to make love.
Many's the evening I rushed home to make passionate love to myself. Storing away the beautiful asses of the secretaries during the day I’d mentally combine them into one composite perfectitude of buttockness. It worked. As you can see from the previous pages, it didn't have any perverse effect on my mental or spiritual state. If anything, another room full of McDonald's patrons was spared the inconvenience of drawing on their medical insurance.
Also, I was saved the heartache of having to spend fourteen years married to some woman of Swedish extraction who was paid by my company to marry me in the first place. Imagine all those ice sculptures on my driveway every Christmas (I'm shuddering here and it's August).
Suffice it to say much masturbation took place during this Minnesotan period. You know, anyone reading this, you would be forgiven for thinking, “What's wrong with this guy? What's his beef? He lands a cool job in the States and all he's done since the beginning of this is whine.” Let me just say this, I'm whining in retrospect. At the time, I never whined. Not once. I was the picture of humility and gratitude.
“Oh, thank you. Oh no, thank you. Come in on the weekend? Of course, I'm not doing anything, anyway. I don’t even have a girlfriend so there’s no danger of anything like that getting in the way of your requirements. You don't like that concept? Course you don't, it's weak. I should have known better than to present it to you."
I'd all but reverse out of the room bowing. I had to. I was in no position to bargain. With a $3,500 a month mortgage, and no Green Card I needed not to piss anyone off. Jesus, looking back on it, it's even more scary than I let myself realize. Funny that, when things are dodgy and I don't like the way they're going, I move into just-for-today mode. It's an old AA trick for staying off booze. I don't have to do whatever-it-is forever, I just do it today. It makes even the heaviest shit bearable. But then later when I look back and see just how heavy it was, I exhale.
But hang on, I have to tell you about something that happened the first Christmas after Da died. Remember now, I’ve only been in Minnesota four months and I won’t meet Aisling till the following November. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen sizing each other up. We were both in shock; her from the fact that her husband of forty years was suddenly missing, (she told me she had a dream where they were on holiday and she couldn't find him) and me from losing my father and being uprooted to live in the Arctic.
A roasted turkey with no legs was steaming in the space between us. It was the first time my mother had bought a turkey on her own and it had seemed like a bargain to her to buy the one that had no legs. It was considerably cheaper that the able-bodied version. After a lifetime of having a man to deal with all financial matters, the cost of living had become urgent. The turkey-steam softened our image of each other that Christmas.
Later during that visit I was doing the Chair at local AA meeting in Kilkenny. Doing the Chair meant a member told his story. How he drank, how he stopped and what it's like now. At smaller meetings they got tired of hearing the same people again and again so when someone came home on holiday they were often asked to speak. It was my turn this Sunday. Amongst the regular attendees, many of whom I'd gotten to know quite well over the years, was a very young well-dressed red-haired girl, slender, tall, elegant, definitely stood out. Could have been a model.
Probably was.
I tried not to embellish my story too much for her sake. I began telling the assorted morning circle about how I used to enjoy hurting people, girls in particular. I touched on the pleasure I got from it, the pleasure I felt when they reacted with such abhorrence. The need I had to hurt. Not unlike some of the stuff I’ve shared with your good selves but in a more general way.
I went on to say how I now believed this behaviour was linked to my alcoholism, and that I didn't feel the need to do it anymore, and that I still felt like I owed an amends to every one of those girls, but that the AA way was not to go back to places where we might cause even more pain. The best amends I could make was to stay out of their lives. I had no right to go back and make their load heavier just to relieve mine.
After I finished my talk, the red-haired girl came up and thanked me. Standard procedure. But she said some things that didn't sink in until a year, and much turbulence, later. She said she had a friend who liked to do what I'd been talking about. Only she did it to men. The kinds of things I described were very similar to the kind of thing her friend got up to. She said this friend lived in New York now but was originally from Dublin. A photographer’s assistant. And if I ever met her, I should be very careful. I must have had my polite face on because she suddenly said, ‘She knows about you.”
This girl was obviously out of her tree. It happened a lot in AA someone came in for one meeting and you never saw them again. I hoped this would be the case here.
She went on to say she was staying with this so-called evil girl’s uncle that weekend in Kilkenny and that she’d needed an AA meeting because she couldn’t handle the drinking and the sick behaviour. I imagined Satanic orgies going on in the uncle’s house and was even ready to hear some details until she mentioned his name.
Tom Bannister.
I knew the name very well because I had money with this guy on my father’s recommendation. I suppose you could say he was my financial advisor. She had my attention now but the significance didn’t register. Because there was nothing to react to.
Later, much later, I remembered that nine months before this encounter, when I was still working in London, an article had appeared in the Kilkenny People supplied and written by myself announcing my appointment as senior art director at Killallon Fitzpatrick. It was the kind of thing local papers loved. Kilkenny boy does well. I did it as much for my dad as anyone.
He loved to brag to his friends about me.
He even got a mention as the parent of the wunderkind along with the school I attended and my hobbies (I put writing and music) and I couldn’t help but include the fact that I was single. Well, why not? There might be a nice Irish girl out there reading it.
Apparently not.
Could Aisling have read this article during one of her Uncle Tom visits? It would explain how she knew about me. “She’s evil,” said the redhead. She herself had witnessed the awful effect she could have on some guys. She looked at me for far too long. Like I wasn't taking her seriously enough. I wasn't.
I thought she was just a rich Dun Laoighre type who'd overdone the coke and
was in AA to keep her rich husband happy. Now I think she was trying to warn me. She took on an even more serious tone as she turned to me before leaving, “It's her eyes…that's what does it…they can't believe she could be so bad.” I remember thinking it’s a pity she's so fucked up because she’s very tasty. But I also figured that who she was talking about had certainly put the fear of God into her. So I thought no more about it. Why would I? There are a lot of people, some of them strange, some of them not, who pass through AA
all the time.
I never saw the redhead again. So, off I went back with a heavy heart to the Tundra in January. I made a pledge to myself that I would leave there before the year was out. This was the second time I’d made this promise. It would take slightly longer. I was working on BNV. I was working on BNV only. It's tough when you are only working on one subject, you can't get any fresh air, so to speak. It's very tough when you're on it for almost two years. Also, it's very draining.
At one point, I would resist even making a joke with my small circle of AA friends, beca
use I feared the waste of creative energy would usurp my bank and I'd be depleted when BNV came to make yet another withdrawal. Oh yes. When you've been on it four weekends in a row, and there's no sunshine or vacation in sight, and you don't want to be in the country, let alone the office, it's important to refrain from spending your reserves.
You may still have a long way to go. And although I promised myself I’d be out soon, my cautious side reminded me that I had said that before. It was now February. Three, maybe four, more months of frightening weather still to go. A combination of hiding behind the big broad sheets of The Observer and the warm glow of the TV screen, I somehow made it to…Spring which lasted about a week and then the Summer was upon me.
Everything transformed. Where once was a white sheet of paper there now began to appear, the most delicate crayon flicks of grass and leaves and bud and flower.
And the girls.
Unbelievable Aryan examples of breast and thigh. Healthy to the point of insulting. Like well-trained troops circumnavigating the lakes on bikes, roller-blades and, of course, on foot. The Sexual Infantry. I very quickly learned they were married or about-to-be. Snapped up early by canny investors. Go ahead, leer. They'd scratch their noses or adjust their various straps, sending me a clear Morse message with the glinting rings.
N-O--C-H-A-N-C-E--P-E-R-V-E-R-T.
Fair enough. The more beautiful and clear-skinned, the bigger and more blinding the glint. It was their fiancé's voice warning me by proxy. Saving me time. How very Minnesotan. Polite. There also seemed to be a great deal of pride in the bulbous nature of a pregnant belly; a phenomenon I had not yet encountered. In London, pregnancy was associated with failure and social death. Here it was encouraged. People got promoted after having a kid. A little fleshy anchor prevented the minds of America's corporate soldiers from drifting too far from its assignments.
Not the place for single males.
Especially single males from somewhere else. Summer in St Lacroix is as hot as The Winter is cold. Humidity makes the very air thick to breathe. All bared flesh becomes prey to the mighty mosquito, Minnesota's State Bird.
My first Summer was worse than my first Winter. At least, I had been forewarned about The Winter. I had to make my own decisions about Summer months. Also, Victorian houses don't usually have that coveted air-conditioning installed. It wasn't even invented until the 1960s or 1970s. How's that for an accurately researched fact?
It is my humble opinion that a lot of the civil rights protests and indeed, a good portion of this fine country's problems including the Civil War, and the assassination of more than one president, can be attributed to the absence of air-conditioning.
You innocently open your windows in the hope that a breath of a wisp of a breeze
of a wind will exhale itself into the airlessness that has become your life. Instead you are prey to a procession of winged and world-weary insectoids trained in the art of psychological warfare.
During the Summer, these gaping mouths of Hades disguised as windows belched torture unheard of into my tepid home. I sought refuge in a bath full of cool water, but I needed to stay submerged for as long as lungs allowed. I could still be bitten on the face.
I learned.
Early evening was when I was at my most succulent to the winged carnivores. There are ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. That's a lot of humidity when it gets hot. Humidity means mosquitoes. There's a story going around. An elderly couple went camping. They’d been warned of the locust-like mosquito presence. They pitched their tent. They smeared themselves in what they believed to be mosquito repellent.
They were both found dead. A can of mosquito-attractant lay empty between the two corpses. The product was designed to be left outside the tent, thereby attracting the 'pesky critters' away from your sleeping body. According to the story, the husband woke up covered in bites and said to his equally be-cratered wife,
“Just imagine how bad it would be it we hadn't put on the cream, honey.”
No, I don't believe it either. But the Summer had its moments. Eleena was one of those girls with a caricature version of what a girl’s body should look like. She was also a member of St Lacroix AA and therefore more than qualified to attend the St Lacroix Annual Barbecue. She was tanning herself on a little collapsible sun bed when her mobile phone roused her.
Flicking it open, she squeezed out the following words in a voice at least three times higher than her IQ, “Hi Jimmy, I'm just lying here toasting my buns. Wanna come flip me over?”
She looked like Sophia Lauren juxtaposed on a Minnesotan lawn. It was difficult not to attribute the sizzle from the nearby grill to her. Later that day, I masturbated furiously over this image in the coolness of my own bath. Oh yes I did.
Summer, though, is not what we're here to talk about. Come September, things cooled down a little bit. It was the nicest time of the year. The leaves went all amber and the air got fresh and there was even the odd breeze. Oh happy day. Along with it came yet another BNV assignment. Not so happy day. At this stage, I was sick of working on the account. The very sight of one on the street (I've never owned a car) made me wince. Still does. But that doesn't matter, they'd spent all their money bringing me over to this fine country and they wanted me working on BNFUCKINV.
I had no offers on the house, so I had no leverage, so I bit my already scarred tongue and mumbled something about this being the last time I was ever going to work on this silly car account. They knew and I knew they were just nodding at me out of boredom. With a copywriter, I set to work on the project, and pretty soon we had something not
half-bad.
Next, we needed a photographer. I took a notion, or the notion was gently introduced to me by clever account executives, that a still-life photographer called Brian Tomkinsin would be an interesting change. Still-life guys normally shot knives and forks and shoes and shit. Never or rarely, cars. This, of course, made BNV nervous, but not for long. I did a sell on them with my Irish/English accent, and soon I was on a plane to New York with a whole week of shooting ahead of me. This is my favourite part about working in advertising.
The shoots are superb. Even the print shoots. Normally, you get a cool hotel, you get everything expensed, you get a week away, maybe more, from Minnesota, you get a half-decent shot for your book (portfolio), you get some time off working on new concepts with which to feed the furnace. You get a breather.
All I knew about New York was what I'd gleaned five or six years before during St Patrick's week. Basically, I was out of my fucking mind the whole time I was there, and it struck me as a miserable dark and dangerous place. This, however, was not the New York that greeted me now.
'Twas October and Autumn was having its way in what I soon learned was Soho. Beautiful to the eye, comely to the touch, mesmerizing in abundance. To the starved eyes of one such as I, there seemed to be an excess of muchness. Colours, smells, textures, nationalities, you've heard all of this before. The studio was, still is, on Broadway right on the lip of Soho and the brow of the East Village and the cusp of Nolita. I can remember being afraid to look, lest I increase the inevitable sadness of having to leave.
I shopped. An unheard of luxury for me. Oh, they had shops in Minnesota, but in New York no one asked where you were from. They-just-didn't-give-a-fuck.
God, I loved that.
The shoot went well, and though I wasn't thrilled about the hotel they put me in, The Roosevelt on 31st and Madison (not very nice), I was enjoying the porn channels. Why not, it was on expenses. And my hotel was changed after the first three days. So anyway, the initial shots of the car were done in a different part of town housing a bigger "stoodio." I still couldn't tell you where that was, not too far way from Broadway, is all I can remember. So the next stage of comping needed to be done from Tomkinsin’s Broadway HQ.
Suited me. I turned up there the first day and was treated like a minor celebrity. Obviously, they were just licking my arse, but it was hard not to enjoy it. I’d end up critici
zing how well they were doing it. Almost as if I were leaving my arse in the air and saying, “Excuse me, you missed a bit.” Terrible really. It was an unspoken thing. They knew you knew they knew, etc.…recurring to infinity.
So after a particularly successful day of having my arse licked, a young girl approached me nervously and said,
“What part of Ireland are you from?” She'd heard me bragging I was Irish.
“Kilkenny,” I said, noticing how very pretty she was, if not a little young. I'd seen her around the place earlier, but naturally thought she was one of the many assistants photographers seem to need. She was.
“Oh that's gas.”
I've only ever heard Irish people use that expression.
“Are you Irish?”
“I am, yeah, from Dublin.”
Well, I can't tell you I thought much of it, but I've retraced these few moments
many times since. Looking for clues. Anything that might help me explain what the
fuck was going on.
She went on to say that there was a whole gang of us over here and that if I wanted to, she could show me around. I really thought she was too young. Dangerously young, if you know what I mean. But after talking to her a little longer, I learned her mother was actually from Kilkenny and her uncle turned out to be the same guy I had a lot of money tied up with. He also happened to be someone my father used to speak very highly of. She was very pretty. Very innocent looking, and the fact that she was Irish and had connections in Kilkenny, and the fact that her uncle was my investment advisor seemed to mean something. I allowed it to mean that she was sent by my dead father as a gift to redress the balance for the suffering I'd endured in St Lacroix.