Call Me the Breeze: A Novel

by Patrick McCabe

  It’s only now that I can understand her position and see that what I had been attempting in those days — although it must still be considered a worthwhile experiment! — might have been asking too much of the students. Even so, there can be no doubt that many of them did, in fact, benefit from it, and in so many different ways. And maybe will one day succeed, having pursued a career in film or the related arts.

  Further Reflections on Dr C. and ‘The Confrontation!’ (from the actual ‘Community College Ledger’ itself, some weeks later)

  (After lunch — free class until 2.15 p.m.)

  You know something? There can be be no doubt about it. People are the strangest bunch of fucks. I mean, there’s you-know-who, the most fantastic woman who just couldn’t do enough for you in the beginning have you this Joseph have you that Joseph remember there’s lots of money available oh yes the arts it’s wonderful absolutely wonderful to have someone with your ideas on the staff I’m sure you’ll waken us old fogies up ha ha oh yes and then next thing you know she’s looking at you like you’re fucking Saddam Hussein. Oh fuck her, man! I got work to do!

  Later – 4.25 p.m.

  The class this afternoon went really well. Some fantastic kids in there, make no mistake! All I can say is, if Carmody has got one thing wrong, it’s to start thinking that she’s gone and put the brakes under me. ‘Once and for all sorted him out, the famous Mr Joey Tallon! We won’t be hearing from his like again! Oh no!’

  Well, what a mistake to go and make, you silly girl, Mrs C! One big motherfucking whopper there, I’m afraid! Yep, one great big giant boo-boo, I’m sorry to have to say! But for which there is one happy dude who will remain forever grateful! And do you happen to know who that might be, Mrs Drive-the-Big Motor-I-Own-the-School?

  It’s fucking me, lady! Mr Joey fucking Tallon, that’s sitting right here!

  Eureka! Reprised

  I began to realize that all she’d done — far from dissuading me from making my movie or ever writing again — was to, in fact, provoke quite the opposite, i.e. a galvanization of resolve. Which — eureka reprised! - was the very moment that I’d been waiting for. Once and for all to put an end to my dithering!

  And the instant that I’d made that decision — to make myself a movie, in other words, not some time but right now, this very second, any movie! — I took myself off down the corridor, filling my arms with equipment from the technology room. As much as I could carry —Canon camcorders, eyepieces, Minolta Maxxum 28mm zooms, long-lens cameras, tripods. Then I went and got some of the students and instructed them that it was time to get our ass in gear. They responded immediately like a well-oiled military machine. I was amazed. But isn’t that what they say? That creativity can employ adversity and use it to its own advantage?

  Well, that’s what happened with us that day, let me tell you! That was our experience. Like it was something that had been waiting to happen.

  ‘Action!’ I kept calling as we shuffled off down the corridor. ‘Action on a rainy day!’ for it was pouring out of the heavens! But that wouldn’t stop me now, that was one thing I knew for sure! Nothing could stymie this project, a little short called Joey’s Movie!, shot on video and only three minutes long, in preparation for the ‘main feature’.

  (The ‘movie diary’ turns out to be more readable than the others. All of it written in fountain pen and black ink — ‘very intellectual’!)

  The ‘Movie Diary’: A New Beginning! (p. 25 onwards …)

  There is no doubt about it — once you take a decision and resolve that you’re going to stick to it, you are a new man. So key, Mrs Cormody, thank you for that! Maybe I’ll credit you on the movie! But now I gotta go — you wouldn’t believe the work there is to do, even on a project like this, which is nothing compared to the big Hollywood stuff. But it’s not that kind of movie, is it? And often independent low-budget pictures can do the most amazing things, come along to these festivals and knock the socks off everybody. So here’s hoping we get the picture I’ve been dreaming of!Between you and me, I’m harbouring high hopes …

  Pre-Production Notes …

  What I find guite difficult to express is the sense of achievement I’m getting from simply having decided once and for all. From just going out and making the decision to get things up and running and stop this … procrastination. For I have been faffing around — I realize that now — thinking up all sorts of excuses so I wouldn’t have to bite the bullet. The script isn’t ready, we haven’t the money …! All the usual shit that you read. But when is a script ever ready, and what production company ever has enough money?

  Anyway, I was on to the caretaker in the community hall (they’ve built a new extension with all the European money! It looks fantastic!) and he reckons there should be no problem once we get the paperwork and the deposit sorted out. Which surprised me, I have to say! What a change from the old days! Deposits! Paperwork! I told him we were rehearsing a very important play so there shouldn’t be much interference on set. We want as little intrusion as possible, I said, ‘No problem,’ he said, ‘We’re expecting delivery of a new set of light which I’m sure you’ll find useful. Thanks to the European money combined with the Access funding which has just been approved, they ought to be state of the art! The new stage too is absolutely second to none. A long way away from the community hall of old, Joey! Yes indeed!’

  Which is a pretty good sign, isn’t it? I have a terrific feeling about this movie. Well, gotta go. Am auditioning some kids in the office at twelve.

  Technology Suggestions …

  I think I’ll shoot it on 8mm. The camera I bought — it just arrived today and looks absolutely fucking stupendous! No doubt Carmody’ll be down complaining. ‘What’s this I hear about a brand new camera?’ It doesn’t matter now. The way things are beginning to look, it’s like this project is literally unstoppable. We are going to rehearse in the hall today, run through the first scene just a couple of times and establish the feel of the movie. There is great interest building. All the kids are talking about it.

  Notes from ‘The Shoot’

  (There is no shortage of these, mostly concerning camera directions and ideas for ‘plot development’, which are interesting considering the completed film was a little less than three minutes long. Most of them, however, appear more concerned with actors and the problems the director encountered …)

  The Shoot: Day Two (Afternoon)

  That fucker Mangan! Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I don’t know how many times I’ve told him! How many times do I have to explain it? ‘Look, I said, it’s just the story of Mona. After my father left she went off to Dublin. Do you understand that? She goes off and has an abortion! Which breaks her heart, right? Which leads us then to her relationship with me! And I’m thinking. “OK then, Mona. I’ll be your child! And together we’ll transform the world!”’

  It seemed pretty simple to me. Except that he looked at me as if I had just asked him to recite the entire works of Shakespeare. ‘I can’t do it,’ he says, and starts hiding behind his hands. ‘I uniuver acted in fillums before!’

  ‘Right then,’ I said, making sure the kids didn’t hear me — I didn’t want to embarrass him — ‘if that’s the case I’ll get someone else to do it. But that’s the last errand I’ll ever run for you in Dublin!’ (I got him a stack of blues last week.)

  And I meant it when I said it. Does he think I have nothing better to do than go running up and down to the city doing messages for him? Ever since acquiring Luscious Linda (‘Not a cardboard imitation! Not an undersized toy! But a genuine, inflatable, life-size simulated sex object with two working love openings!’), he’s become obsessed with the subject of sex. At night you can hear the fucker groaning now. He’s far worse than I ever was! At least I had a name for my Mona, and one that I never changed and never had any desire to change. He has a different one every fucking night!

  Anyway, in the end he relented and said: ‘All right. I’ll do it, Joey!’ as I led him back to the set.r />
  And, boy, what a performance he turned in. ‘Mangan,’ I said, ‘you’re as good as Burgess Meredith! No, better! You’d top Jason Robards any time! Fantastic! The best old-time actor I’ve ever laid eyes on! The camera loves you, Mangan!’

  He was chuffed, and when we all sat down to watch the rushes you could see him starting to swagger a bit. It was like he was on the verge of clicking his fingers and demanding this, that and the other. ‘You there!’ I could hear him saying. ‘Go and get me fags! Get me coke! Get me beer! And fast!’ It was hilarious to watch!

  I can’t be enthusiastic enough, though, about the performances we’ve so far seen. What’s the word? Cathartic, I think. It’s been fantastic so far. Here’s hoping for tomorrow.

  (There is a drunkenly scrawled note stuck in here with the rest of the papers which is … well, let’s say it doesn’t readily yield up its meaning. That’s because I never wanted anyone to know about what I’d seen that day, coming home happy as Larry after the day’s shooting. There are only a couple of words on it, actually. ‘The Only One’ and ‘Heartbroken’.

  … It happened. I had just come out of the newsagents, collecting my magazines, Film Monthly, Empire, Hot Press, et al., and was crossing the street when I saw Jacy. I went white and my first impulse was to run.

  I know since the first night I seen her that she’s been working as a receptionist in the Fuck Me hotel ever since the shirt factory closed. Boyle Henry probably got her in there seeing as he’s one of the owners. I blanched as I saw her swaying in the doorway of Doc Oc’s, trying to light a cigarette. Her hair was hanging down in front of her eyes and her handbag was lying on the ground. She dropped the cigarette and bent down to pick it up. I ducked into the phone box in case she might look over and see me. She started laughing half hysterically to herself and then went stumbling on up the street. I touched my temples as I closed my eyes and spoke her name: ‘Jacy!’

  I went into a tiny, anonymous bar and spent the rest of the night there, shivering. The old owner stood by the window, bemoaning the changes in the town and how nobody any more cared about anything. ‘Fucking like dogs from morning till night, falling about the streets, tearing around in their foreign fucking cars. The fucking dollar is all they want, everything else can go fuck itself. Including Jesus Christ! Not that I care — soon I’ll be gone and they can do what they like. But in the past in this country I believed in the future.’

  ‘So did I, my friend,’ I said, as he poured me another drink and I heard the mighty surf crashing, ‘so did I.’

  Day Three (Post-Wrap)

  Having finished the film, the way I feel is that I could do absolutely anything. Just get my hands on a camera and start shooting my major feature right here and now! It has been a wonderful experience and I see so much more clearly now the pitfalls and problems, etc. Obviously the visual quality of I Want to Be Born 2 (the title we’ve agreed on — a cast decision, picked from a number of my own suggestions) leaves a lot to be desired (it can be quite foggy at times, the titles rolling from side to side at the beginning, some unsteady camerawork — not all of it deliberate in the Cassavetes style — and a few little problems with the dialogue — due to wind noise you can’t hear some of it). But it is a first effort after all. Problems such as these will be ironed out with Psychobilly (not the final title), which we should be getting up and running very shortly. And, in any case, the piece itself is so original (forgive my immodesty but I really do think it is!) that I don’t think an audience will be all that bothered.

  It opens with the camera tracking along the rubber doll’s legs — we’ve bought a new one specially (hope Carmody doesn’t find out, for we borrowed the money from the kitty!) — and then taking in the pubic hair — for which we had to use horse hair, for they don’t come supplied with that. Before coming to rest on Mangan as he disappears — pretend! — inside her, all of him seeming to vanish.

  That’s it, more or less. It’s a very short film, remember. With one of the students, u/o, going: ‘I want to go back! Please let me go back! To live in the cave of our dreams and there at last to be once again born!’

  You just know when something is good, don’t you? And there can be no denying the response Mangan’s performance received — astonished, rapturous. I don’t know what word you’d use or what one might be most appropriate. None at all, maybe, or none that exists. Especially when I played them the music — Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, which is really going to be stupendous, especially when experienced in tandem with Dead Souls — the lovely passage about the coming ‘new spring’, what else?

  The music and the prose rise together — fusing — as we see Mangan slowly disappearing under the skirt — ‘No! We don’t need to see your face! It’s gonna be OK!’ I kept telling him! — and the screen is consumed by a sheet of blinding light as — boomph! — he’s gone, at last one with the world.

  The only hard job I’ve had today, the thing went so fucking well, was persuading the students to stop clapping for a while as I could tell them to stop praising me and convince them that, it anything, film is a collaborative art and that no one person’s contribution is more important than the next man’s. ‘Or woman’s!’ I corrected myself, to the good-natured amusement of a lot of the chicks.

  The more I think of it, the more I want to dedicate it to Mona. To label that cassette with these typed words: ‘In Memory of Mona Galligan — A Film by Joseph Mary Tallon: I Want to Be Born 2.’

  (There is just this one single page of foolscap — with a drawing at the top of me posting the package! — headed, in what is clearly triumphant lettering:

  Off She Goes, Me Boys!)

  … Was up at the post office this morning and have sent the video cassette off at last! It was like everyone knew I was doing it. They were all chat!

  ‘You look in good humour!’ says your man behind the counter as I handed him the jiffy bag. ‘Pay day, I suppose?’

  ‘I guess in a way you could say that, all right!’ I said, but didn’t elaborate.

  Which, of course, in a sense, it genuinely is. Pay day in so far as all our hard work now looks like it is going to be worth it.

  The more I stood there, staring at the pasted label ဓ Attn. The Commissioning Editor, Debut Series, New TV Drama, BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London WC1 – the more insignificant it all began to seem, this occluded little world of Scotsfield. Worrying about Carmody, Boyle Henry, et al., who probably isn’t even aware of the way he’d looked at me in the pub that day. This town is so small and you see people so often that after a while you start to imagine things. I feel stupid for ever having allowed myself to think along those lines, not to mention investing a throwaway comment regarding a waistcoat with all sorts of pointless significance. Sandy probably just meant it as a joke. Yeah. Course he did. Yeah. I’m sure of it.

  The Big Issues

  Which was why, all the way down the street, having cleared my mind of all that nonsense, I went back to what, I suppose, you might call the ‘big issues’ — like the magazine says! Ha ha! — life and death and why we’re here.

  And the more I did so, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about myself up there on the director’s chair, considering the best possible composition of an upcoming shot, now possessed of a belief no mystic had ever inculcated, my books and notes tucked beneath my arm as I swung into Austie’s a completely changed man, from that day on only thinking one thing: ‘So hey! How you doin’ there, y’all? It’s Wonderful Pictures from the town of Scotsfield! And we’re here to shake your tree!’

  The End of Misunderstanding

  Which I suppose you could think of as another new beginning, the beginning of the end of misunderstanding and all that other stupid imaginary stuff that seems to go along with it — eyebrows that had never been raised and smirks which didn’t exist but which resulted in you vacating pubs almost the minute you went in. Getting it into your head that it was you, specifically, they were all looking at. Not to mention thinking: Ther
e he is! There’s the kidnapping fucker! The same treatment as Detective Tuite, that’s what he deserves! When clearly now that wasn’t the truth or anything remotely approaching it. The more I thought about it, the dafter it seemed that I’d even considered it for a second.

  Extract

  (from J.T.’s Nineties Diary, a separate book with asstd random entries — not in chronological order — often scribbled in when the ‘ledger’ was not immediately to hand)

  Turns out I was right. About the misunderstandings and so forth — if today is anything to go by, at any rate. I was just sitting in Austie’s going through my notes, trying to look as if I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around me but actually, in fact, trying to determine once and for all if I had imagined it all or not. Without a doubt, I’m absolutely delighted to be able to report! For Boyle Henry was there, sitting with some fellow down the back, in the exact same place as before. But this time not even bothering to look in my direction. Far too busy talking business with your man and working his way through a great big feed — you want to see the grub in Doc Oc’s! They do the most amazing lunches now. As a sort of celebration — from now on, no more of this ‘paranoia’ nonsense, for there’s no other name for it, really — I decided to treat myself to the fillet of lamb with spiced pumpkin puree and green beans. ‘There you are, maestro!’ says Austie, and slaps it down in front of me. As I worked my way through it, I reflected on just how good an idea it had been to conduct that ‘little experiment’, which, really, in a way is what it had been, the road ahead being totally unimpeded now because of it. If I fucked up this time it would be nobody’s fault but my own. Except that that wasn’t going to happen.