Mondo Desperado

by Patrick McCabe

  A Note from the Publisher

  When I first received this manuscript from Phildy Hackball, I was at once confused and astounded, but knew instantly that it was inevitable I should have to meet the author. You can imagine my surprise (me being an ingenue of an English publisher who had never been in Ireland before, much less Barntrosna) when he greeted me in a leopardskin swimsuit, smoking a large cigar, repeatedly peppering me with questions regarding the works of Franco Prosperi, Giuliano Carcanetti and ‘the other Italians’, of none of whom, I was ashamed to admit, I had ever heard. Much of what happened after that is shrouded in a foggy haze, I am afraid, induced by any number of bottles of the finest whiskey and brandies produced by my host. But what I do remember is being privy to some of the most inspiring conversations it has been my privilege to encounter in all my many years as a publisher. ‘Wait till I tell you this one!’ and ‘The best of the whole lot is . . .’ are phrases which now come wisping from the vaults of memory as I recapture the image of Phildy astride the television with the waste-paper basket on his head, triumphantly beating his chest as he sings for me, in its entirety, the wonderful ballad ‘The Wolfman from Ardee’ (not included here), or lighting another Cuban cigar as, behind billowing clouds of smoke, I hear his rich brown voice intone the first sentences of ‘My Friend Bruce Lee’ or ‘The Boils of Thomas Gully’.

  Memories I shall treasure always.

  That was three years ago. As to how the opinion-makers and custodians of the sacred literary flame might react to Mondo Desperado, one can only speculate. For my own part, there is little doubt but that these stories establish a new high-water mark as far as English literature is concerned. No one, I feel certain, who comes into contact with them can fail to be affected by them, these wondrous journeyings, eclectic voyagings into the interior, which, for the first time, permit us a glimpse – in the company of the peerless Phildy Hackball – into a world which is truly desperate.

  Simon Mitchell

  Editor

  Phildy Hackball: An Appreciation

  What can I say about my buddy Phildy? That it comes as no surprise to me he has produced a book which is about to burst the literary world wide open? Because it sure does not! Right from the very first day I met him, I knew! ‘Phildy,’ I said, ‘you’re going to do it! One day you’ll send a book flying out of that typewriter that’ll leave them all standing!’ But little did I know it was going to be a ‘mondo’! Although I should have, because me and Phildy – why, we spent our lives sneaking into them! Nudies too – you bet! But mostly mondoes! If we’d been caught, we’d have had our arses kicked into our necks, of course! After all, we were only eight or nine! Oh but boys was it worth the risk or what, watching all them old tribesmen beating each other senseless with poles, bulls having their heads hacked off – and, best of all, of course – sex-change operations taking place somewhere in the backstreets of Asia! Powerful! No surprise then when, years later, Phildy turns to me and says: ‘Tell me this, Pat! Did you ever think of becoming a woman at all?’ Or when, one day in the Bridge Bar, he looked at me and said: ‘Listen, amigo! Who is to say there aren’t alien life-forms standing right here beside us now at this very minute?’

  A lot of people have said to me lately: ‘In all seriousness, Pat – what do you think of these stories of Phildy’s? Are they based on his own experiences or what?’ To that, I would say that the answer is – yes and no. There is no way, for example, that Phildy would have anything to do with the blowing up of student priests, or the filming of young girls in their pelts. He just isn’t that type of person. ‘No way, baby!’ as one of his characters might say! All he is doing is listening to the stories he hears around him and turning them into literature. And what literature! Not that I’m any expert, mind you! (Phildy says: ‘I’m afraid, Pat, you know as much about Chekhov as my arse knows about snipe-shooting!’), but you won’t get better than ‘The Hands of Dingo Deery’ or ‘I Ordained The Devil’ in my book. You want to know what I think of Phildy? I think he’s fantastic! To tell you the truth – and I don’t care who hears it! – if he asked me to marry him in the morning, I’d be off down that Asian backstreet like a shot!

  Pat Cork

  (Friend)

  17 Main Street,

  Barntrosna

  Contents

  Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge

  The Bursted Priest

  My Friend Bruce Lee

  I Ordained the Devil

  The Hands of Dingo Deery

  The Luck of Dympna Wrigley

  The Big Prize

  The Boils of Thomas Gully

  The Valley of the Flying Jennets

  The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan

  Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge

  It’s hard to figure how in a small town like this a mature woman of twenty-eight years of age could get herself mixed up with a bunch of deadbeat swingers, but that is exactly what happened to Cora Bunyan and I should know because she was my wife. It is now exactly a year since the nightmare began, when my good friend Walter Skelly first voiced his suspicions, taking me by the arm as we left Louie’s Bar and Grill on our way back from lunch to the offices of Barntrosna Insurance. ‘Larry,’ he said, ‘look here. I don’t want to alarm you but there’s something I think you should know . . . it’s women – Cora. They have needs, you know what I’m saying? You gotta pay them a little attention, that’s all.’

  When Walter had finished his story, I could just about stand up. I looked at him and barked: ‘I can’t believe you’d say such a thing! You – of all people, Walter! Why, you oughta be ashamed of yourself!’ He tried his best to apologize but I had already turned away for I wanted to hear no more. ‘Get your hands off me!’ I snapped and I completed my journey back to the office alone.

  But all that afternoon, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. By three thirty, I could stand it no longer. I strode out of my office and stood in his doorway clutching a bottle of ink. ‘Walter!’ I snapped, and just as he raised his head, I shot the contents of it directly into his face. Before he had time to respond, I was already gone. I knew now why Skelly had tried to poison my mind against Cora. Sure I did – because ever since we’d moved to town, he’d had his eye on her like every other man in this two-bit backwater. I swore to myself that if he ever came near her I would kill him stone dead. With a .357 Magnum I’d put a hole in his head big enough to sleep in. ‘You hear that, Skelly!’ I snarled at the mirror in the restroom.

  If only I’d known then one tenth of what I know now, I would have seen that Walter was only trying to help me. That he was doing what any friend would have considered his duty. But I was blind. Blind! I only had eyes for Cora and she knew that. She’d known it all along.

  That night, as I left the office, I had a few more words with Walter Skelly. I told him long as I lived I never wanted to see him again. ‘You got that, Skelly?’ I growled and flipped a thumb and forefinger at the brim of my hat. He started into saying something about Cora but before he got too far I stopped him and told him that if he was figuring on finding another ink bottle heading his way then that was fine by me; and maybe a smack in the mush for good measure.

  I didn’t know it, of course, but that was the last opportunity I was to have to do anything about the tragic chain of events about to be set in motion. And now, it was already too late.

  As I drove home, I turned the events of the day over in my mind. Even the thought of what Walter had done was enough to sicken me right to my stomach. Sure, I knew Cora was a pretty gal and that there were guys in Barntrosna who had wanted me dead when I married her. But to stoop that low, to try and poison a guy’s mind against his own wife? The more I thought about it, the more I thought: Walter Skelly is a very sick man.

  That wa
s what jealousy had done to him, you see – like ’em all! Hell, even the day we got married, they couldn’t let up. Grown men crying! Crying because she’d married me – Larry Bunyan. Who would ever have believed it? The sweetest doll the town had ever seen and what does she do – hooks up with Bunyan! Poor old Larry! Who sits behind his desk all day threading paper clips!

  But that was where they had got it wrong, you see! Way wrong! No sir, we Bunyans don’t spend our lives threading paper clips. We spend it just like Pop Bunyan did, working our fingernails to the quick building up an insurance firm second to none in this country so that a man can take care of gals like Cora Myers the way they oughta be taken care of – jewels, mink coats, you name it! ‘Larry,’ she said to me that night by the pool out in Sandlefoot, ‘I love you! I want to have your children!’ If only she’d known the effect those coupla words had! Why, I guess I must have grown about ten feet tall right there and then! I could see old Pop standing in front of me, puffing on his pipe and resting his hand on my shoulder, saying: ‘You see, son? You have amounted to something, after all! Son – let me say something! Hell, am I proud of you! Proud, my boy!’

  You see, Cora, I want you to know the truth. Fact is, me and Pop – we didn’t get along so well when I was a kid. I guess you could say I had disappointed him and which was why he used to meet me coming home from school and say: ‘Well, son! What dumbfool thing you do in school today, you goddam useless hobo?’ All I wanted was one chance to prove myself – that was all I wanted. And that night in Sandlefoot when you said you loved me and wanted to marry me, why, I felt like tossing my hat across the water and shouting: ‘How do you like that, Father! Weren’t expecting that, were you, you grizzled old windbag! Ha ha ha!’

  Just like the rest of them hadn’t! And, boy, did they go half-mad! Now that I had something they’d never get their greasy paws on! Because Cora Myers – small-town beauty, swimsuit model – she belonged to Larry Bunyan now!

  Or so I thought. Before the words of Walter Skelly started clinging to my skin like black shining beetles. They say a thought can grow in a man’s mind until it becomes an obsession; a tiny grain of salt swell and grow until it fills up a room. They’re right.

  I had my mind made up. I was going to buy the largest bunch of flowers I could lay my hands on, fling the door open and rush into that house, calling: ‘Cora! Stop everything! Put the goddam ironing down! We are going out on the town!’

  It had seemed like just about the simplest thing in this world.

  Quite what happened that night is still not clear to me. All I can say for sure is that somewhere between the Golden Noodle and the shop where I bought the flowers, something unpredictable happened – a kinda shifting of the psychological axis, maybe you could call it. With the result that as I was returning to the sedan, I found myself thinking: ‘What if what Walter says is true?’ Perhaps if I hadn’t been standing directly outside the newsagents the whole thing might never have happened. But I was, staring through its plate-glass window, in fact, at a stack of magazines, some of which had been robbed of their colour through age, others glossily vivid and – I’ve got to say it – startling in their directness! One of them in particular caught my eye, depicting the heavily made-up figure of a woman holding aloft a cigarette, her head turned towards me as its trailing smoke curled about her slender white neck, like a scarf of softest silk. And, just underneath, almost defiantly stamped in bold black type: LOVE WAS CHEAP; LIFE WAS HIGH!

  It was the lopsided grin on her face, I reckon. Somehow it reminded me of a look that Cora had given me during one of our, I got to admit it, now regular rows. Then there was the blonde – a coiffured lynx in pink knee-high boots and matching spangled swimsuit rolling her eyes at a sweating, skirtless drummer shrouded in cigarette smoke. And across her forehead, in dribbling crimson, the words: Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge!

  Suddenly – I took out my handkerchief – it was as if the window display had become fiercely, insanely alive! The wailing sound of out-of-tune guitars and thundering, palpitating percussion somehow seemed to mingle with a primitive, hysterical laughter that filled the entire street! A redhead in a leopardskin bikini and curves in all the right places leered after me as I fell towards Louie’s.

  As I sat there in the corner banquette I had it all figured out, and for the first time saw the game my so-called ‘beloved wife’ was playing. A game called ‘Larry Bunyan – sucker’! By the time the last shot went down, everything was clear and I could have hugged my buddy Walter Skelly. How could I have been so foolish? I asked myself. Why couldn’t I have seen that all he had wanted to do was warn me! How many times had I seen that look on Cora’s face? That pouting mouth, the slightly narrowed eyes that somehow you couldn’t trust? And had taken it – for love! The Big Kisser! Had taken it to mean ‘Yes! I love you, Larry Bunyan! No matter what anyone else thinks, I love every inch of you!’ when, all along, every time she put her hand to her breast and spoke in those mock-dramatic tones was: ‘I’m fooling you up to the two eyes but you’re too blind to see, Bunyan! Bunyan, the poor fool! Why, he doesn’t have enough to stick a stamp!’

  As the sedan turned into the curving driveway and cruised towards our neat little white frame house with its wide yard and two palm trees, I had never felt so good in my life! Boy, did I owe Walter a favour! I owed him now and hell I was gonna pay him back first thing tomorrow with a bottle of Louie’s best bourbon!

  When I had put a certain little matter to bed once and for all, that is.

  To bed once and for all!

  *

  I decided to play it cool, just like nothing had happened. I hung up my coat in the hallway and tossed my hat onto the stand, just like always. Then I called out, ‘Cora? You home, honey?’ and smiled when I heard her reply: ‘Yes, dear. I’m in the kitchen.’ Boy, you really had to hand it to women. One minute they’re jitterbugging in some basement dive, fooling around with every two-bit dipso and loser musician, next they’re coming on like the sweetest little angel you’ve ever set your peepers on. But Cora – she was something special! Standing there in her cute little rubber gloves and that dandy little gingham apron – why, she was just about the last person on earth you’d ever figure for a hophead or sex freak.

  ‘So – how have you been, honey?’ pulling off my tie and freshening up a little in the kitchenette.

  ‘Oh, you know, dear,’ she smiled, ‘the usual. Went up the town, got things for the dinner. Paid the gas bill. Nothing special.’

  No, nothing special, I thought, as I wiped my face with the towel, just a little ‘exotic dancing’ and a handful of reefers with your sleazeball friends, a little bit of ‘twisting’ with some dubious photographer and his beatnik pals, sure, why the hell not, go right ahead – get out of your minds! Flap your arms and shake your beehive heads to some crazy trashy instrumental rock! After all – it’s nothing special, is it? No, ha ha! Nothing much special ever happens in the Go-Go Lounge, does it? Does it, Cora?

  Cora Myers who used to be my wife!

  Not that I said it, of course. Not yet! I might be dumb like Pop said but I sure wasn’t gonna blow my wad straight away! Oh no. I was gonna let her have all the rope she needed. Besides, I was curious to see just how long she could keep her little charade going.

  ‘So – how are they?’ she said with a smile would make dead roses bloom.

  ‘What? How’s what?’ I said, kind of taken aback by the sudden realization of just how beautiful my wife was – them sparkling blue eyes, blonde hair, finely chiselled features – quite aristocratic – and foolishly almost blowing my cover.

  ‘The chops, of course!’ she said, gliding towards the kitchenette and humming to herself as she stacked the crockery on the draining board.

  ‘The chops! Why – they’re fine!’ I called out. ‘Matter of fact – they’re just about the damned tastiest chops I’ve ever had, in this house or anywhere else, Cora!’

  ‘I’m glad!’ she said, and continued humming – just a soft, regular tun
e, just about as far from ‘Beat Girl’ or ‘Bachelor Party Bunny’ as it was possible to get and showed you just how clever little Miss Cora Myers could be! It was difficult at that moment not to dump the chops on the floor right where I sat and get it all over with there and then. To cry: ‘Why! What has gone wrong! Why all of a sudden are you behaving like this! Maybe it is true! Maybe I don’t have enough to stick a stamp but you could have told me! After all we’ve been through, Cora, you could have told me! You didn’t have to go running off – there! Where to after this? The Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks? The Mini Skirt Mob? Nightmare Rampage of the Hellcats? Cora! You hear me – Cora Myers?’

  *

  As I sat there I could hear it all plain as day. See myself standing right there in front of her, pulling no punches as I said it loud and clear. But it wasn’t the only thing I could see. I could see her too. Miss Cora ‘I swear I’m not a man-eater’ Myers, with her arms outspread and her innocent eyes, going: ‘Larry, I don’t know what you’re talking about! Have you been drinking, Larry Bunyan? Because I don’t understand a word you’re saying!’

  I figured on those last coupla words snapping me like a dry twig.

  ‘No! Sure you don’t!’ I’d snap as I smacked my fist down on the table.

  ‘Honey! I don’t understand!’ she’d say with, sure as hell, that old trembling hand placed against her throat, those same old mock-dramatic tones!

  ‘No – sure you don’t! And you don’t slip out of this house every day just as soon as you get me gone, either! You don’t climb into your figure-hugging pants and hit the club in your dragster to meet your so-called “with-it” friends? Just who in the hell do you think you are, Cora? Mamie Van Doren? Go on then – laugh! Laugh at him, the mutthead of a husband who hasn’t the faintest idea what you’ve been up to! Except that’s where you’re wrong, baby! Sure, I’m a mutthead, a mutthead who happens to be lucky enough to have a good friend by the name of Walter Skelly who put me on to you just before it was too late. Surprised, huh? Thought you might be! Yeah, your little wheeze has been rumbled, Cora baby! And now the whole world’s gonna know it – and you know why? Because I’m gonna see that they do! This time around, Larry Bunyan’s through taking it! I’m gonna show you and I’m gonna show them! Hey! Hello there! I’m Larry Bunyan – I don’t have enough to stick a stamp! But what I do have is a little self-respect! You listening to me, drop-out wife?’