Call Me the Breeze: A Novel Read online

  Murder in Sandyford

  I remember getting back early the next morning with a fucking ripper of a hangover. It was around eleven when I hopped off the bus and made straight for the pub. Austie gave me an unmerciful slap on the back as I sat at the bar digging into a steak and kidney pie — I always seemed to want to eat whenever I got nervous or excited. He said: ‘Jasus but you’re the happy-looking boy! Did you have a good time in Dublin?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. All I kept thinking of while he was talking was the album — the one I got ‘her’. Wondering would she like it. It was called The Only One by a band I’d never heard of — Spontaneous Apple Conclusion. I had come upon it completely by accident. Which is a load of nonsense, I thought, for nothing ever happens entirely by accident.

  ‘Will you like it, Jacy?’ I asked myself.

  I didn’t even even have to ask. I knew she would. Of course she would. The Only One. She who is …

  The Only One, she who is —

  the only one,

  driving beneath the Californian sun.

  I wasn’t listening very carefully to what Austie was saying now. But you could see that it was serious. He was telling me about the British Ambassador and his secretary. They had both been killed in Sandyford — blown up by a landmine.

  ‘A crater twenty-feet wide,’ he said. ‘Now we’ll be fucking for it. After the salesman, we’ll be fucking tormented, we will. They’re convinced they’re all hiding out here! Fucking Provos — they’re going to ruin my business! Why don’t they all get around a table and settle it all, pack of fucking —!’

  3 July 1976 (late a.m.) Thoughts/Reflections to Self …

  Some of the things I’m asked to do I don’t like them any more, even though I used to look forward to them. I don’t have a problem admitting that. But it’s different now. Ever since Jacy all of that has changed. Now all I want to do is say: ‘Go away, Mona, don’t come near me tonight, don’t ask me to -’

  But she always gets around me, standing there with that crooked smile she has whenever she’s been drinking. Running her fingers through my hair and -

  She lifts her own skirt up. Ever so slowly, till it billows around your head like a parachute. And then it comes — that blissful feeling. When you put your thumb in your mouth and you see the glittering stretch of water with her just standing beside it, staring off out to the horizon. She doesn’t speak but you know what she’s thinking. ‘Out there is the precious harbour. That wondrous place where we’ll all feel safe. One day we’ll get there, Joseph.’ ‘Yes, Mona. I know we will’ you are about to say, but when you look again she’s gone and all you can hear are groans.

  (There is a little notebook here marked BAND NOTES. With some fantastic little doodles in it by Boo Boo. Kind of like Marvel comics, or Robert Crumb. I remember him laughing whenever he’d do them, to keep himself awake on the way home from gigs. Odd bits of lyrics, too, some of them really good. I don’t think they were ever used, though.)

  Psychobilly

  Looking over the cuttings brings that time back, those first few weeks of the band getting together and Boo Boo setting his plans for world domination in motion. ‘Make no mistake, this thing is going to happen. I know you don’t believe it, Joey, but we’re gonna prove you wrong. We’re gonna take the place apart and you’re in it, my friend, whether you like it or not.’ He was right — I didn’t believe him but he sure put the smirk on the other side of my face when I went down to hear them in Jackson’s Garage. Some of the songs were fucking great, no doubt about it, especially ‘My Daddy Was a Vampire’. The yowls out of Boo Boo during it were unbelievable, so much so that Jackson came round in his overalls with a face like thunder. ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he said, but Boo Boo told him to lighten up. ‘Easy, baby,’ he said as he wound the microphone cable. Jackson knew his father, otherwise I think he’d have knocked the bollocks out of him right there on the spot. In the end, though, he just fucked off, wiping his hands with an oily rag and warning us all to ‘Watch it!’

  I agreed to be the roadie all right — I didn’t see why not if I could work it OK with my shifts in Austie’s.

  Keith Carradine

  When there weren’t many in, I’d maybe leaf through a novel or just stand there staring way out across the town. I could see it all plainly, me arriving in this deadbeat hole where she lived with her husband, some old motherfucker of a bank clerk who’d bored her half to death since the day they got married. I’d be standing at the edge of town in my long leather duster coat, the sun lancing off my eyes as I gazed first into the sky then up and down the drab, unpainted buildings that seemed to hold each other up all along the winding street. ‘So!’ I’d say. ‘Old timer!’ Bout a room for the night, maybe, huh?’ and he’d show me to the motel where I’d wait till dark, just oiling up my Winchester pump action. Then it’d be time to go. Soon as she saw me coming she wouldn’t be able to speak. The pump I’d keep well hidden right in there beneath the duster, not thinking about producing it at all unless there was some kind of trouble. Which there wouldn’t be for the jerk bankman or doctor or whoever she’d somehow managed to get holed up with wasn’t going to be that foolish. For if he was —

  ‘How you been then, Jacy?’ I’d say, not taking her hand just yet.

  ‘I … I …’ was all she’d say. She wouldn’t be able to speak.

  It would be beautiful making love that night, running your fingers through her hair, her jeans cast away there on the floor beside the bed. ‘I love you!’ I’d say. ‘I’ve waited all this time.’

  ‘Joey,’ she’d say. ‘Joe Boy, my lovely darling,’ just the simple sound of her voice making everything you’d lived till now nowhere close to living at all.

  Nights I’d drift towards sleep with a single word on my lips. ‘Iowa,’ I’d hear myself whisper, and with its swell and ebb it would remind me of the sea, even though I knew there was no water there. I’d borrowed a book from the library, just an ordinary guide to the Midwest. Of course there was no sea there. There was in California, though, the Pacific Ocean crashing just beyond the Big Sur sands. I’d read about it in The Family by Ed Sanders, which Eamon had sent to me. ‘Check this out,’ he’d written. ‘He used to play with The Fugs.’ I thought he meant Charlie Manson but it was the author he was talking about.

  The more I went through it the more sympathy I had for Manson. In the beginning his ideas were kind of OK. Called himself The Gardener and collected all the flower people. Maybe if the karma hadn’t gone wrong, things might have worked out different. Who knows how it would have ended up? It was just that old karma going wrong, that’s all. It was a pity but that’s the way things are sometimes. They just go kind of astray. The karma gets … I don’t know, turned inside out, I guess. According to Ed Sanders, he was a really good player. Guitarist, I mean. Maybe if the recording contract had come through, that might have turned things around. But it didn’t. A shame. Yeah. ‘I’m The Gardener. I collect flowers. I see they get light and then I watch them grow’ he used to say to people as he drifted along the road. In the days when the karma was good. I wrote a short little lyric in the pub, just scribbled it there on a beer mat to pass the time when there was no one around. It’s just called ‘The Gardener’ or ‘Song for Charlie’.

  They call him The Gardener

  The flowers he collects are people

  They bloom in the Californian sun

  His name is Charlie, he lived out in the desert

  Charlie, Charlie, garden while you can.

  Easing Up

  When I told Boo Boo I’d been thinking of easing up on things he said that it was a good idea, especially the acid, he reckoned. Then he said he was going down to Glenamaddy at the weekend. ‘I have to pick up an echo box,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to check out some support gigs with the showbands.’

  ‘Good thinking, Boo!’ I said, but I wasn’t really thinking about that. In fact, all I could think about was how great it was that we were all getting ourselves to
gether. Not that we’d been doing all that bad, but you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a bar sweeping floors and scouring glasses. I went down to another practice and the boys were coming on great. They’d managed to get an interview with Dave G on community radio. Also Boo Boo and Chico came back from Glenamaddy at the weekend and said they reckoned there’d be no problem — as regards the showband gigs, that is.

  My heart was beating fast all evening in the bar just waiting for Jacy but in the end she never showed and later on that night I heard them saying she’d gone to Dublin. I know I shouldn’t have dropped the acid tab but I was so disappointed that I -

  But then the electric tingles started at the tips of my toes and before I knew it I was as happy as Larry.

  Barbarella’s

  The pub was going great guns now, after the disco and the building and all was finished. The best of it all was the big paved enclosure in between the old bar and the new, the bit they called The Courtyard. They were going to have all sorts of functions in it, they said. The disco was stuffed nearly every weekend. I often went in for a few jars after work, admiring the decor and whatnot — neon strip lighting, a flashing multicoloured glass floor. About as up-to-the-minute as you could get. It sort of provided comfortable surroundings for the way you’d be thinking. About how you were going to break it to Mona, etc. The words you would use, what exactly it was you were going to say. It was like Austie’s place and the way it had gone — an old-fashioned bar outliving its time and inevitably giving way to the new. ‘Like I mean, Mona,’ I said to myself, ‘who would have ever believed there’d be a place like Barbarella’s in Scotsfield? Things change. It’s the way it is.’ ‘We can still be friends,’ you could hear her saying, nervously adding: ‘Can’t we?’

  ‘Of course we can,’ I’d reply. ‘That was never going to be an issue. It was never on the cards, baby. You know?’

  It would be good saying that and I felt so good about having worked it out that I dropped another trip. And sitting there in my old caravan it was like looking out on a mystical country. ‘It’s just like Charlie’s garden, Mona,’ I’d say. ‘A garden that could have been.’

  Then I’d burst out laughing when I’d realize what I was actually looking at!

  The Tinker Camp

  For the so-called ‘garden’ was nothing more than a couple of old tents with the canvas rotted away and any amount of other old rubbish, including bicycle frames and bedsteads, a broken pram, a burst mattress and a dying-looking piebald pony standing tied to a tree. Not to mention God knows how many car wrecks. With anything that might have been of value on them long since stripped and sold. Travelling tinkers came and went but the only one there on a permanent basis was Mangan. In the nights when they came, you’d hear them all arguing, playing Johnny Cash and Elvis, getting violent then, and drunker, as the half-starved mongrels howled along with the galloping music. Sometimes you’d get edgy and you’d find yourself shouting: ‘Can’t you play something else for a change? Can’t you play some other fucking song?’ and standing there twitching, not realizing how edgy —

  It was the acid, of course, mostly. Looking back that’s plain to see, but in those days you mightn’t attribute it to that. You’d think it was to do with Jacy and what kind of day you’d had in the pub. You’d be nearly in tears with frustration, trembling on the bed and repeating: ‘Why won’t they listen? Why?’

  As the dogs howled and the shrill, off-key rockabilly guitar scraped on through the night …

  (You can tell by the shaky writing just how edgy those days could be.)

  12 July 1976, 4.15 a.m.

  The dogs the dogs the dogs! They never let them off the leash you see and that’s why they howl like fucking dingoes. It really gets on my nerves. Why can’t they let them off the chain for a while? Why don’t they play something else? Why do they never play some other record for a change? I’m going to go out and tell them. Fuck them! Fuck them and their dogs! I don’t have to put up with this! I don’t! Oh, Jesus, I feel so cold.

  Nervy

  You could be particularly nervy, I remember, if a certain number of things were to happen. If Mona didn’t come home, say …

  That was what I was like the night they started up with this accordion, the dogs joining in, some fucker then screeching on a fiddle …

  All you could think of was that, when she did come home, you’d say: ‘I’ll never say those things about Jacy again. Ever.’

  ‘You’ll never love anyone else,’ she’d say. ‘You hear me? You won’t! I won’t allow it, Joseph!’ as she stroked your hair, and if you sobbed it would only be because she spoke the truth.

  But then in the morning it would all be quiet again with the tinkers having departed and not a sound to be heard, from the woods, across the fields and right into the town. No Johnny Cash, no accordion, no dogs. Peace and silence would reign once more. And you’d take the record by Spontaneous Apple Conclusion out of the drawer and, without even thinking, you’d lift it to your lips. And kiss it. Kiss it as you spoke the single word: ‘Iowa.’

  Ten Men Dead

  I remember exactly when the argument started. We were all just sitting there, and the next thing you know they were at each other’s throats. When he heard about it, Austie went fucking mad. ‘Why didn’t you throw them out?’ he bawled at me. ‘They have no business arguing about things like that in here! We have enough trouble with the cops as it is!’

  It was to do with the Kingsmills massacre and the ten Protestant labourers who’d been assassinated on their way home from work.

  ‘That’s what we’ve descended to! A fucking sectarian murder gang! Well, if that’s what it is, it’s not my war and I want no fucking part of it!’

  Carson was a well-known Provo. But not any more, by the sound of it.

  ‘We need you so bad,’ sneered Hoss, ‘for all the good you’ve ever been.’

  ‘Ten men dead in the snow, slaughtered for sweet fuck all!’ he snarled, finishing up his drink.

  ‘If you’re not in it then stay well out of it!’ snapped Hoss as Carson the former Provo banged the door behind him.

  Big Sur

  I wondered what The Jace — I felt I knew her so well now it was OK to call her that — made of all that stuff, the killing and bombing, I mean. It was a long way from California, that was for sure. I had a fair idea she didn’t give a fuck. ‘If that’s how they want to live their lives, well, that’s fine. All I can say is, include me out.’ The unblemished sands of Big Sur stretching out for miles behind her and the Pacific surf crashing. I couldn’t stop thinking about things turning out differently for Charlie if he’d gone down the road of Carlos Castaneda and stuff and not got stuck with violent revolution and shit — just how great it all could have been. I’d been reading in the Ed Sanders book about how they used to live in the desert and drive around in these dune buggies, and I’d see myself then just sitting on a rock, sharing a toke with Charlie. And him nodding as he said: ‘You know what? You’re right. You’re right about love, you and Jacy.’

  ‘Me and The Jace,’ I’d say, ‘I think we got it right. Two flowers in a beautiful garden.’

  As, behind a monster spliff, Charlie ‘The Gardener’ twinkled!

  Cops

  Hoss got his name from one of the Cartwright brothers in the TV Western series Bonanza and was built like a brick shithouse. One man you didn’t argue with was Hoss Watson for he’d take you apart without even blinking. Ever since the salesman’s death the cops had been shadowing him because they were pretty sure he’d been in on it. And now that the British Ambassador had died they had got it into their heads he’d been involved in that operation too, because of a comment he’d made to the sergeant one night. ‘Good enough for him,’ he’d quipped, or something like that. But they had nothing on him they could make stick.

  You couldn’t move now without the cops watching you. One night I got talking to one at the corner, the radio on his hip spitting static. ‘What do you think of this to
wn?’ I said, not really caring what he said, just to make conversation more than anything. He was a young fellow not much older than myself, looking at me with his face so pale. ‘What do I think of this town?’ he said. ‘I think it’s hell.’

  I felt sorry for him that he had to think that. Thinking that about anywhere, in fact. Especially when things were going so well for me. Not knowing what to do when only minutes later I’d seen her and her pal coming out of the office where she worked. I ducked down into the entry and watched the two of them going up the street. The other chick I didn’t know but she was completely different to Jacy. Definitely no Charlie Manson joints there, or trips in dune buggies, I kept thinking. She was just an ordinary country girl who, I figured, worked in the bank or some place, with this little skirt and jumper on her. But any friend of Jacy’s was a friend of mine, I reckoned, and all I could think was that it was real good to see them together that way, just rapping away there the way chicks do.

  In the nights now I couldn’t sleep at all — just thinking of the flowers on her collar and the way she slung the bag across her shoulder. I wondered what was in it. A diary, some books, perhaps some dope. I wondered what she read. I had found myself being amazed by some of the writings Charlie’d been influenced by — it gave you a list at the back of Ed’s book and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some of those. They sounded like fantastic reading material. Even better than the stuff The Seeker had given me. Lyric poetry. Philosophy. ‘The printed word is the key to the truth. Knowledge is power,’ he used to say to The Family. There were quotes in there from The I-Ching. Robert Heinlein. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.