Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  I didn’t know that one.

  Library

  Una Halpin the librarian got it for me. ‘I didn’t know you read so much,’ she said. No, I said, I didn’t — only lately. ‘It’s a fabulous read,’ she told me then. ‘I read it all the time.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. What next? I thought. Una Halpin starts the revolution with Charlie and Family? In that little crocheted dress she’d be a very likely candidate all right.

  But I thanked her anyway and went off to read my book. It was all about this guy, deep and complicated with so many layers to his personality that you got dizzy even reading about them. I’d sit up all night just reading it and smoking roll-ups, every so often lifting my head and turning to her to say: ‘Your face in the light when it shines …’ and then smoothing back her hair, long and blonde and fine and just streaming out there to touch them stars.

  I leaned forward to kiss her ear. And it was then I sang it softly: ‘Oh but California/California I’m coming home’ — the Joni Mitchell song, of course. I could see her eyes shining and it did my heart good.

  ‘Big Sur,’ I murmured to myself as I closed old Hermann and fell on the bed. ‘Big Sur, you’re looking good.’

  One night I heard her say: ‘Let’s just go, let’s just take off and —’

  ‘Where we gonna go?’ I asked her and lit another smoke.

  ‘Joey,’ she said. ‘Don’t even ask such questions.’

  We were rolling across the Midwest when I heard myself speaking the words.

  ‘I feel I can tell you anything,’ I said.

  To which she replied: ‘You can.’

  ‘When we get there, what will it be like?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s like heaven, Iowa,’ she said. ‘I spent all my childhood summers there. And that’s how I’ve always thought of it. With the golden corn swaying and the big blue sky seeming to stretch for ever — it’s the way a child might imagine it to be. Paradise, you know?’

  I could sense my eyes glittering. Glittering like that stretch of water I saw whenever I melted into Mona. Except that this was even more beautiful.

  ‘How a child might imagine it,’ I heard her saying again, as she slipped a cassette tape into the dash and the fluid country shuffle of J. J. Cale went sweeping out into the weighted air as we cruised on down the interstate.

  ‘You like that one?’ she asked me.

  ‘“Call Me the Breeze”,’ I said, drumming my fingers in time on the hood.

  ‘OK, I will, then! I’ll call you that!’ she replied, as J. J. Cale sang out and on we sped towards the heart of the sun.

  Dublin Community Radio

  Things were going from strength to strength for The Mohawks — the name they eventually settled on after hours of arguing. I had to work so I couldn’t go to the studio but when I switched on the radio in Austie’s there’s Boo Boo going full throttle. ‘Records?’ he said. ‘We don’t make records, Dave. Psycho fucktunes is what we make. We piss on vinyl.’

  ‘OK,’ said Dave G., ‘so what do you do apart from urinating on plastic? The music you make, could you describe it for us?’

  ‘Sure I’ll describe it for you suckers!’ said Boo. ‘The Mohawks from Scotsfield — you wanna know what music they make, what kinda sounds those mothers lay down? Well, I’ll tell you what we are and what kinda sounds! We’re the screaming psychobilly cowboys, a garage band with music to melt your brain!’

  ‘And what might punters expect to hear if they go along to see you guys?’

  ‘Expect the terror of low-flying Stukas! Hank Williams on amyl nitrate!’

  ‘So there they are, folks! The Mohawks — a loud, dirty combo with lots of sheer, aggressive bad-ass attitude! And they definitely are not punk!’

  ‘Punk’s for queens!’ sniffed Boo Boo as, with scabrous, paint-stripping guitars, the band launched into a driving, raw version of ‘76’, one they’d written in the van in ten minutes flat.

  Thirty and thirty and ten and six

  How many’s that? It’s seventy-six!

  Seventy-six! Seventy-six!

  The British Ambassador’s in the grave

  The British Ambassador’s in the grave

  Number plate 6, 6 M-I-K!

  On this beautiful summer’s day!

  Seventy-six! Seventy-six!

  What the fuck do you make of this?

  The minute the show was over, the switchboard was jammed with calls of complaint, mostly from in or around the Scotsfield area. One woman said: ‘Those foul-mouthed hooligans don’t represent us!’

  Dumb motherfuckers, I thought, as I lit up a spliff and had me a laugh. Then I opened up The Family.

  And the more I read it, all I kept thinking of was that old good Charlie — the Charlie before things had to go and get themselves fucked up — hooking his thumbs into his belt and grinning: ‘You’re looking good, man!’ not realizing for a minute or so just who it was he was talking to — me and ‘My Lady’. Jacy strumming her guitar as she sat in the sun and Charlie slapping me on the back as he said: ‘She’s one good chick, man! One hell of a chick, believe me!’ The two of us sitting there as he opened his tobacco pouch and thought for a long time before asking: ‘You ever been to India?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m gonna go there one day,’ he said. ‘When the revolution’s done. I’m gonna go up to the mountains and seek out the prophets.’

  ‘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.

  Romantics

  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.

  Showbands

  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 w
hen 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.

  The Now

  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.

  Pies

  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.)

  Peace and Reconciliation Rally

  ‘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 mi
stake 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.

  21 July 1976, Late — Clock Broke

  (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 -’