June 12, 1976

Girls always look at me the way a dog looks at a bare bone and desires the meat. There is definitely something missing, but for some strange reason, it never kills their ardour…

Three nights ago, Joan Wilson invited me to her seventeenth birthday party like a duchess commanding a waiter.

“I’ll expect you at the house by nine, properly attired.”

Properly attired? Nobody in Sugartown knows how to dress. Most of us look as if we smeared our naked bodies with glue and then rolled around in a jumble sale.

The Wilsons are Cathostants—Catholics who can pass as Protestants. Players of rugby and wearers of waxed cotton, they live in a stone mansion six miles from town, placed elegantly beside their British car dealership.

“Morris and minis?” I asked.

“Jags and Jensens,” replied Joan, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

We met at an inter-school debating competition, but how I got on the team was anybody’s guess. The teacher in charge told me to wear a dark polo neck jumper and stare at the girls.

“You’ll unnerve them with that scary expression.”

When I offered to draw a threatening finger across my throat, the teacher frowned.

“The polo neck and the scary expression will suffice.”

The moderator machine-gunned our team with armour-piercing cynicism, and by the time the night was over, we had suffered a crushing defeat. That I appeared to be arguing on the wrong side of the issue probably didn’t help the situation.

Arriving at the Wilson’s house, I can see a line of cars running down the driveway: Jaguars, MGs, a Bristol and even a Bentley—a who’s who of English junk that won’t start on a frosty morn. Fortunately, parking will not be an issue for me because I have arrived on a Honda Fifty, which I prop between the rose bushes.

“Wot is that?” asks a posh teenager sitting on the steps. He’s pointing at my steed.

“Well, imagine a Triumph and a Norton got together to have a baby, and things didn’t work out. This is the abortion.”

From the back garden, the music is loud and pathetic: Helen Reddy and the fucking Carpenters, followed by Status Quo. Inspired by the latter, groups of old farts in cardigans jump up and dance like dogs who have just learned to stand on their hind legs. Lights flash and illuminate a DJ with mushy features. He points a finger in my direction.

“New arrival! What do you want to hear?”

“Silence,” I reply.

Some of the older women wear evening dresses with slits up the side, revealing legs as sharp and skinny as letter openers. Their husbands, or boyfriends, drink whiskey and exchange derogatory comments about Japanese cars.

“I mean, what the fuck is a Corolla?”

“It’s the Jap name for a fucking heart attack.”

“Haw-Haw-Hawdy-Haw!”

With my four years of Christian Brothers Latin, I might inform them that Corolla translates as Little Crown. Or it could describe a circle of petals, a vaginal image, and an interesting contrast to the flaccid cock-cars parked outside.

There is no sign of Joan, but I guess she is off somewhere grooming a pony or polishing a hockey stick.

“Hi there,” says a little brunette in a black ensemble with frilly white collar. She looks like a cat dressed by Laura Ashley, and her head tilts when she speaks.

“I’m Joan’s cousin, Deirdre.”

We check each other out: up, down and side to side. Everything seems to be in order.

“I saw you at the debate. That was an… unusual performance.”

“You’re too kind,” I reply, “but that’s what happens when one forgets to take one’s anti-psychotic medication.”

Deirdre’s eyes open wide, but settle back into a relaxed stupidity when she realises I am joking.

“All the convent girls were looking at you, and they were wondering…”

Deirdre cannibalises her lower lip and pretends she doesn’t know how to finish the sentence, but we both know what passes through the minds of such girls, and it is not pretty.

“You interest me,” I say.

This is a line I use quite often, especially with people who do not interest me. If I say, “you’re hilarious,” it means you are as dry as chalk dust. People never recognise insults when they are disguised as complements—the art of lingual camouflage.

“But you’re here for Joan,” she protests.

“Come for a drive with me.”

“That wouldn’t be right.”

No, it would not be right, but I always do the wrong thing when the opportunity presents itself. I am like a shoplifter who can afford to buy but prefers to steal.

“Joan isn’t really my type,” I say, “but given a little coaching, you might be.”

Deirdre tilts her head to the other side.

“You really think you’re God's gift to women, don't you?”

“A mere gift?” I say, “I like to think that God would sell me to the highest bidder.”

She is intrigued, of course. Unfortunately, there is one minor problem, and it is parked at the front of the house between the rose bushes. With a ‘born to be wild’ sticker on the rusty chain guard and a rip in the vinyl seat that allows rainwater to seep into your bottom, it is a disease on two wheels: Motor-sickle cell.

I bought it for ten pounds from a man called Mutton who lives in a Sugartown shack that smells of damp dogs and his sister’s cheap perfume. As part of the deal, Mutton threw in the helmet, a white fibreglass dome the size of a salon hairdryer; I never wear it, preferring to have my skull crushed under a truck.

“Come on,” I say, “let’s do something exciting. Let’s tear up the black velvet night and let the wind brush our cheeks.”

“Have you got a convertible?” she moans.

“It’s more what you might call a ‘pervertible.’”

Deirdre giggles and touches my arm.

“Come,” I say. “Come, come, come.”

When we reach the front of the house, I do a magician’s swirl with an imaginary wand and cape.

“Tada!”

There is a moment of confusion before Deirdre’s hand races to her mouth and covers a gasp.

“You’re excited,” I say.

“You must be joking. I wouldn’t be caught dead on that... thing.”

“And I wouldn’t want a corpse as a passenger,” I say. “They have a tendency to fall off.”

A moment ago, my good looks temporarily disabled her social radar, but now her senses return. She bites on a fingernail and tries to think of something clever, but nothing comes. The connection between us fizzles like a cigarette tossed in a puddle.

Turning away from me, she pretends to see a friend. This happens to me a lot: the imaginary-friend-escape-routine. Ten minutes in my company is enough to transform any woman into a romantic Houdini. Twenty minutes, and she will try to saw herself in half and run away on stumps.

“I have to go. Maureen is waiting for me.”

“I could probably fit Maureen on the handlebars. She’s not a big girl, is she? Not too broad in the beam?”

Deirdre disappears into the darkness, and it is clear I will never see her again.

Once alone, I find a quiet corner in the garden. Under a flowering laburnum, where the poisonous pollen drops like golden talc, I take out a fiver’s worth of black Moroccan hash.

On the tennis court, two of the women with letter opener legs try to entertain the court-side men by pretending to be lesbians, but the men don’t notice; they are too busy making tasteless jokes about Datsuns.

“It sounds like something an Alabama cotton-picker would say: ‘Dat sun’s burnin’ me up’.”

“Haw-Haw-Hawdy-Haw.”

I crack the hash with a thumbnail and sprinkle a few pellets on a Rizla. In the sky beyond Wilson’s garden, a burst of night steam rises from the sugar factory like a genie emerging from a lamp. It is a reminder of where my future lies. People like me will always end up punching cards and packing boxes in the factory. The Wilsons will graduate from Trinity College or the King’s Inns, and I will spend my days stuck to a sticky floor, under a banner that says, “Sugar is Life, and Life is Sweet.”

Eventually, Joan appears, and it is so amusing to see her wearing the regimental black dress with a slit up the side. This girl is far too young to be sexy, with slight arcs instead of full-blown curves—a Joan of Arc, if you will—and the underperforming cleavage makes me think of week-old balloons, with most of the air vacated.

A boy’s peaky face peeps out from behind her, and we hate each other in an instant.

“Eric’s father imports all sorts of interesting stuff from Africa,” says Joan.

“Slaves?” I ask.

“You must be the hooligan on the scooter,” says Eric.

I smile sweetly and reply, “and you must be the perineum.”

Not having the benefit of my advanced Latin, Eric waits dumbly for an explanation.

“It’s somewhere between a cunt and an arsehole.”

Now, sometimes, it’s possible to tell from a woman’s expression when you’ve gone that little bit too far. Joan touches her chin with an unsteady hand, and her exposed leg disappears back into the slit, like a scared creature running for cover. This is probably the first time she has seen me, truly seen me.

At the school’s debate, she engaged with an intense young man in a black polo-neck sweater. And granted, he seemed to have an interesting method of debating, crossing over the fence and joining the other side, but that made him all the more intriguing.

Now, for the briefest moment, her eyes scan the damage, taking it all in: the grubby sneakers and the torn Wrangler jeans; the T-shirt with the word CLASH scribbled on it. How could a boy who cares so little about himself ever care for anyone else?

Eric wears slacks, brogues, a polo shirt, and a sweater tossed over his shoulders. He is fully evolved; he has the membership.

Wherever I belong, it is not here.

At the front of Wilson’s house, I find that someone has tipped the Honda Fifty into the rose bushes. I pick it up and sweep it clean.

On the ride back into town, the hot air turns cool at thirty miles per hour, and a hole in the exhaust pipe wakes up every farm dog along the way. I arrive at the Shamrock Square to find the carnage of a Saturday night has already started. Men fighting like drunken gladiators, their kicks and punches hitting more air than flesh. Their kung-fu yelps sounding like Bruce Lee with his finger caught in a closing door.

Outside the Cafe Napoli, a girl calls her best friend a “fucking whore-bitch” and bursts into sobs that can be heard clear across the galaxy. The green neon flickers outside the Harp Bar, and the town transforms into an emerald city where every staggering drunk is a scarecrow in search of a brain. When a chartreuse couple kiss beside the bus stop, their bodies meld so perfectly, they might be carved from a single block of malachite.

I ride past the cinema, the toy shop, the pharmacy. In the Potato Market, the Auld Triangle pool hall is still open, servicing the late shift men from the sugar factory: creatures who live in darkness and squint along their cues like patient snipers.

On Castle Hill I receive a wave and a cheer from a bunch of young men in leather and denim, the Lonely Ones hiker gang, so-called because most of them don’t have motorcycles, and they hitchhike everywhere.

Outside Dirty Dick’s chipper, a place that specialises in deep-fried blood pudding, offal burgers and crispy tripe—the splatters from the slaughterhouse walls, mixed with the scrapings from the butcher’s floor—I see a schoolmate, Joe Kelly, sucking on a trotter that protrudes from a paper bag. There is a pig’s toenail stuck to his cheek.

It is good to be back amongst my own people.