“What do you think of Dublin?” he asked me. But like most soused micks, he didn’t wait for an answer. His face screwed up and he leaned forward, rattling the table. The black stuff didn’t move. “It’s not Ireland,” he said. “It’s England’s
version
of Ireland. You know you can’t smoke in pubs over here now? Legislated. We’re losing our culture bit by bit.”
“Aye.” Thinking,
Smoking’s part of your culture, pal?
“Sure, you know all about that, don’t you? I been to Edinburgh, I seen what they did to that place. Shops on Princes Street all full of See-You-Jimmy wigs, am I right? Fuckin’ English screwing you out of your heritage. Tourist tat. Am I right?”
“Aye, you’re right.”
“Dublin’s the same. Temple Bar, I was down there the other week, it’s full of coffee shops.
Theme
pubs. Feckin’ yanks coming over here claiming they have ancestors from the feckin’ bogs. You know what I say? I say
feisigh do thóin féin,
that’s what I say.”
“Gesundheit,” I said.
A young lad came over to the table. He was stringy, had a mean look about him. He put a bottle of clear liquid on the table and Phelan’s eyes lit up like a cheap fruit machine. “Now that’s more like it. You’ll join me, so.”
“I’m all right, Mr. Phelan.”
“My brother died, the name’s Tommy, and you’ll join me. Won’t he, Barry?”
“Course he will,” said the stringy lad. He took a seat. I knew he was a wanker, because he turned the chair and straddled it.
“My nephew’s just come back from your neck of the woods,” said Tommy. He poured three deep shots from the bottle. “Barry, this is Shug. He’s an Edinburgh lad.”
“Pleased to meet you,” he said. But his eyes said different. His index finger ran down the side of the shot glass. Brown flecks under the nail. “It’s done, Tommy.”
“There’s a good lad. You take care of it yourself?”
Barry looked across at me, like he was trying to work out if it was safe. Then: “The auld bastard was dead when I got there.” He cracked a grin like a graveyard. “Fucker was sitting in front of the telly, Tommy. Sitting in his own shite.”
I smiled. My mouth was open. Some fuck had put vinegar on the roof and it hurt to breathe. I reached for the shot glass. “What’s this, vodka?”
Tommy’s face flickered. “
Poitín,
Shuggie.
Sláinte.
”
“
Sláinte,
” said Barry.
“Whatever,” I said, and necked it. It burned my throat. That, or something else.
A rat always knows when he’s in with weasels. That’s the way the song goes.
I drank with them, tried to hold it down. Kept wanting to twitch right out of there. Barry didn’t drink so much, and neither did I, but Tommy got wasted. His eyes glazed over, his chin got loose. It looked like he was melting. “Your da would be proud of you, Barry-son. He’d be
proud
.”
“I know, Uncle Tommy.”
Barry Phelan, son of Barry Phelan. The fuckin’ Irish, they keep it simple, eh? They have to, the amount they pour down their necks. I got a measure of Barry right away. This cunt clocked on who I was, likes. That’s why he told me what happened to Big Yin. Laughing at me. It tore at my gut, made me want to chew his fuckin’ nose off.
Shug Sutton. The last of the Boyos. The rest all up and fucked off with other firms. Shuggie stayed put. More fool me, eh?
I waited until Barry got to his feet and announced that he had to take a pish. Waited another three seconds and did the same thing. Tommy out of it. I walked into the toilets and Barry had his back to me, pishing in one of the cubicles. Too insecure to use the urinal, hung like a fuckin’ hamster, eh?
“I don’t hear pissing, Shugs,” said Barry, shaking his wee man. Took more than three shakes, the wanker. “Which means you’re thinking about doing something rash, am I right?”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t find the breath.
Barry turned in the cubicle. He smiled. His bottom set of teeth was all skew-whiff, likes. “Yer man’s dead, Shugs. He was dead before I got there. So you go back out there and you raise a glass to the new crew, all right? Because if you don’t, I’ll have the whole family rip you a new arse to match yer fuckin’ face.”
I thought about that for about five seconds. And the cunt Phelan made to push past me. I stood still.
“You fuckin’ simple, Shugs? It’s over, pal,” he said.
Right enough. It was over.
I clamped a hand over his mouth, grabbed his balls with the other, and pushed him back into his cubicle. His breath was hot on my palm. I cracked his skull against the wall until he went limp. Lost myself for a second, then came back with blood on my hands and saltwater hanging from my mouth. My lungs hurt. I couldn’t breathe proper.
Slapped the lock across the cubicle door and let Barry’s head drop against the toilet bowl. Fumbled for my Stanley and pulled the cunt’s drawers down. Wiped my nose with the back of my hand and sniffed hard, slumped down onto the floor with him. Got to work. Had to keep wiping my face because I couldn’t see through the water.
Outside I heard people singing country songs. Cunts didn’t cry at the funeral, but stick on Patsy Cline and they greeted like bairns.
“Crazy.” Of all the fuckin’ things to hear.
I leaned back against the toilet, mopped my face with my sleeve. The cunt had bled all over the shop, the tiles sticky. And there was me, sitting right in the middle of it, man. Britches all fuckin’ bloody and that, my shirt a mess. It stank of Barry’s last pish and blood and shite. I let my head fall back and I stared at the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, red dots in front of my eyes.
Barry Phelan didn’t kill Big Yin; God did. And it didn’t matter which Barry Phelan did the London Road blag, didn’t matter that Big Yin wouldn’t give a fuck if I had the cunt’s balls or not.
I promised him, ken? You can’t go back on a promise to a dying man. Especially when you was all the poor bastard had.
And aye, there was no way I was getting out of here alive. If I’d had that gun I put Lee to the lino with, I’d have had a fighting chance. But right then, my arse wet through with Barry Phelan’s blood, I didn’t have the strength in me to do fuckall but sit there and listen to Patsy fuckin’ Cline and Tammy fuckin’ Wynette, tears rolling down my cheeks.
Took they cunts an hour to realize Barry was a no-show. Took another fifteen or so to check the bogs. And daft fuckin’ micks, took them a bucketload of mouth and one hard kick to bust down the door.
I heard a lad puke. Heard the hammer of a revolver thumbed back and oaths yelled, proper nasty Irish shite.
It’s not every day a lad admits he died with another man’s balls in his hand. But what else was I going to do, eh?
I was a Boyo to the end.
T
his was back in ’94, in the middle of a planned three-month stay in Prague. I thought that by soaking up a little Bohemia and wading through Joyce’s
Ulysses,
I’d become a writer. But that was a joke, largely because I spent each night drinking with Toman, a six-foot shaved-bald Czech who passed his days in the gym. He liked buying drinks for a writer, and I liked having drinks bought for me.
“You come to Dublin on this weekend.”
“I don’t know. I’ve got to work.”
“A
writer’s
work,” he said, puffing out his chest like a Cossack, “is to living. Only one night. Weekend. You come.”
“I’m broke, Toman.”
He slapped my back. “We stay with Toman’s friend, Sean. The plane—Toman will pay.”
“You have a friend in Dublin?”
“Toman, he has friend all over world!”
He liked referring to himself in the third person.
Toman must to pee,
or
Toman must get to work.
I never knew what his work was, but he had enough money to keep me in drinks, which was all that mattered.
We landed at Dublin International on January 22, a Saturday, then took a taxi to a posh southern neighborhood called Ballsbridge—a name that got a giggle out of me—where the bay winds blew down a narrow street of matching brick Victorian houses. It was very fucking cold. The door Toman knocked on was opened by a skinny Irishman with a beard that made me think of the drunks lingering in the corners of pubs in
Ulysses
—everything I knew about Dublin came from that book.
“Shite. Toman.”
“Toman and his American writer friend are here for until tomorrow. You have a floor?”
I was embarrassed, because we clearly weren’t expected. All I could do was introduce myself as Sean reluctantly led us inside.
“How is our Linda?” asked Toman.
“Gave her the boot. You know.” Sean took a green bottle of Becherovka, the Czech national liquor, from a cabinet. It was the last thing I expected to drink in Dublin. He handed me a shot. “Whaddaya write?”
“Trying to write like Joyce.”
He raised an eyebrow, his expression not unlike scorn.
So I said, “How do you know Toman?”
Sean lipped his glass, then poured it down and wiped his mouth. “Real estate investments. In Prague. Toman, he helps me out. He’s the go-between.”
“Toman helps,” said Toman, “so my good friend Sean can buy all of Prague for his friends.”
“What friends?” I asked.
But the Irishman didn’t hear me. “A pint, lads?”
A pint, it turned out, meant ten pints in three pubs—the Paddy Cullens hidden in the embassy area; Crowes a few doors down; and by 11:00 I was dizzy in Bellamy’s, where at this hour all the surfaces were sticky and rugby boys were singing to each other and businessmen at the bar swapped jokes over Guinness. Toman and Sean drained their Harps and roared over jokes about Linda-who’d-gotten-the-boot (
“Och, ochón,”
said Sean, “she had an ass onner!”) and others whose names I couldn’t keep track of. They liked my Zagreb drinking stories from five years before, where after finishing most of a bottle, we’d pour vodka on the dorm floor and set it alight or spark a match at the mouth of a bottle and watch it shoot, rocket-like, down the corridor.
Toman preferred the ones about running into Zagreb police at 3 a.m. This was still during the Communist times, but my Croat friends would drunkenly yell at the militiamen, calling them idiots and just daring them to arrest us. “I don’t know why we didn’t end up behind bars.”
“Because they know it is true,” said Toman. “Police, they are idiots.”
“The Gardaí wouldn’t arrest you,” said Sean, wiping Harp from his wet beard. “They’d bust your head, strip ya starkers, and toss ya in the Liffey, ne’er to be heard from again.” He shook his head. “I’m pissed.”
We watched him get up and stumble to the toilet.
Toman leaned close with the atrocious breath that would often portend a shift into Czech seriousness. “Olen, you want to be writer?”
I was drunk enough to answer with soulfulness. I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Toman, my friend, a writer is the only thing I want to be.”
“True?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then come,” he said as he stood up.
On his feet Toman was steady, but I wasn’t. “Where we going?”
“Toman helps you become writer.”
“Dandy,” I muttered.
He led me to the bathroom, and through the alcohol I became hazily worried, but for the wrong reason.
“Not all writers are queer, Toman.”
He didn’t answer as he pushed through the door. It was empty save for Sean, who was trying to focus his wobbly stream into a urinal. He noticed us. “Aye, I’m
óltach.”
That was another thing I didn’t understand. Later I learned it meant
drunk
in Gaelic.
Toman looked back at me and whispered, “Watch, writer.” Then he grabbed Sean from behind, a thick arm over his trachea muting his yelps. He dragged the Irishman back into a stall. A spastic fountain of urine shot from him, but the only sounds were his kicking heels dragging across the tiles, then the crack of bone inside the stall.
It was very fast, and by the time Toman had placed Sean on the toilet, shut the door, and started using paper towels to wipe the wet spots on his pants, I was still unsure what had just happened.
My body figured it out before my head did, and I threw myself into the next stall and regurgitated my ten pints.
“You was watching?” I heard him say behind me. “You watch, writer?”
I don’t know exactly how, but soon we were out in the biting cold, Toman helping me walk and explaining that Sean’s clients were from Belfast, laundering
IRA
proceeds by buying up most of Prague’s old town.
“We kick out Russians, no? And now these Irish criminals, they think Toman will not to kick out them?”
We were in front of Sean’s apartment, me trying to twist out of the Czech’s grip. “You’re a fucking murderer.”
“And you are writer!” He helped me up the front steps as he jangled the keys he’d taken from Sean’s body. “Toman help you find story. No?”
We were inside by this time, but I was still so goddamned cold.
“This is world, Writer. And now you see it. No more like you live in university.”
It seems strange to me now, but I wasn’t afraid of Toman. I was only repulsed and angry that he had pulled me into his putrid underworld.
“Fuck you, Toman.”
“Fuck me?” he said, mimicking
Taxi Driver
with a big grin. “You do not see. Toman, he help his writer friend.”
I dropped into a chair and didn’t look at him. I spoke slowly so he’d understand. “All I see is that Toman is a psychopath who thinks killing someone is a good fucking
ha ha
to show his friends.”
“But Toman—”
“I hate you.”
He opened his mouth, then thought better of it. He started to button up his coat again. His voice was as wobbly as a dying man’s stream of piss. “Toman, he work hard for his friends.”
Then he left.
Over Sean’s Becherovka, I considered going to the police— the Gardaí. That seemed reasonable. But after that, could I return to Prague? Toman didn’t do this for just a
ha ha
—he was working for his Czechs, who wouldn’t take kindly to my intervention.
Hell, I didn’t even want to return to Bohemia now, and I didn’t want to stay in Dublin. I knew what I’d do: I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I’d just count my stuff in Prague—some clothes, a laptop with a terrible, pompous novel on it, and the paperback of that unreadable
Ulysses
—as losses and just fly home to Texas.