June 12, 1976

July 23, 1976

Just after the last Easter holidays, Brother Roland stood at the top of our classroom and introduced Proinsias Bán Breathnach, a prominent Irish playwright who was, according to Roland, “very important in two languages.” This was evident because the man’s name was unpronounceable, and he had a wispy orange beard that looked like attic insulation.

The Christian Brothers absolutely hate artists. An artist to a Christian Brother is like garlic to a vampire. Five minutes’ exposure to a sculptor/painter/writer will have a Brother hissing like a steam iron in a Chinese laundry, but Proinsias Bán Breathnach had been dispatched by the Department of Education to supplement our knowledge of the Great Dead Irish Literary Figures, and needed to be treated with a certain element of respect.

Brother Roland’s bluebottle eyes buzzed restlessly around the classroom and refused to settle in any one location. His loose strands of grey hair revealed liver spots and cherry-coloured blotches. A bloated Adam’s apple dangled over his white collar like an old dog’s bollocks. Taking a seat behind his desk, he called Proinsias Bán Breathnach to the top of the class with the curl of an index finger, like a doctor stroking an overripe prostate.

“Good morning, boys,” said the writer. “An bhríomhar lá faoin spéir gorm gheal Dé!”

Despite our many years of being force-fed the Irish language, we all looked at each other blankly, and I heard one boy whisper at the back of the class, “Does anyone here speak Polish?”

Undeterred, Bán Breathnach switched over to a more familiar tongue.

“What do you lads know about the national theatre?”

I knew that their logo featured a winged woman giving a reach-around handjob to an Irish wolfhound, but I didn’t offer this up. Everybody else in the classroom covered a yawn because time was about to solidify into a solid block of boredom. Even Brother Roland looked as if his savagery was in danger of fading into an uneasy calm.

The writer explained how the theatre was established at the turn of the twentieth century and almost immediately became attached to the revolutionary movement. It produced a huge variety of plays, set mostly around funerals and wakes, and in 1916 the entire management team, front of house, actors, stagehands, and scenery movers united with the general citizenry, rushed to battle at the GPO, and promptly died for Ireland. Repeatedly. And to standing ovations.

I raised my hand, and the writer nodded.

“They could have called it the Citizens United National Theatre,” I said.

He clapped his hands together and pointed a finger, like Macbeth’s dagger, directly at my chest.

“Maith an fear!! There you have it. The Citizens United National Theatre. I can almost see that name carved in stone above the canopy.”

I found it hard to believe that no one else in the classroom realised that the acronym for such an establishment would be C.U.N.T. Brother Roland taught Latin, Greek, and Irish, and thus was always uncomfortable with living languages; the rest of my classmates were too sleepy or dim to get it.

“Citizens United National Theatre,” repeated the writer. “By God, that gets me right here.” He pounded his cardiac area with a fist.

Brother Roland scratched some grime from his desktop with a thumbnail, and then glanced at his watch. The Christian Brothers could spend ten hours on a rainy Saturday watching junior football games followed by intermediate hurling games, followed by senior handball. They could even waste an hour watching the under-elevens trip over their bootlaces, or twenty minutes snickering as the girls played camogie, but they could not spend more than five minutes listening to a full-grown man talking about creativity, or, God forbid, artistic vision.

“Theatre,” said the writer, “is not just about words—movement and action are every bit as important. If you were to write a play, say, set at a funeral or wake, it wouldn’t be about the dead man in the coffin, but the life that revolves around him. You have to handle the corpse with care, but don’t be too reverential.”

The writer turned to the blackboard and picked up a stick of chalk. Brother Roland was instantly alert to the violation. This chalk was the property of the Christian Brothers; it even came with a small cross on the front of the packet to indicate that it should not be touched by mortals.

The writer wrote the word “action” in the middle of the blackboard. He circled it. Beneath that, he wrote the word “drama.”

“Without action there is no drama. And by action I do not mean shooting and car chases.”

Brother Roland looked disappointed.

“Action can be something as imperceptible as the smile of a widow at a burial, or the sob of a mother at a wake.”

I raised my hand.

“Is it possible to write a play that doesn’t involve a funeral?”

“It’s a valid question,” said the writer, and to illustrate this, he drew a large question mark on the blackboard. The hook and crook emerged in a single stroke, but he banged the dot with such force that half the chalk snapped off and skittered across the classroom. Brother Roland’s lip trembled. His eye followed the chalk, his ears twitched, and drool gathered in the corners of his mouth.

“The short answer, young man, is no. In the same way that people expect certain tropes from Japanese kabuki: the masks and the posing. Or, in the case of the Commedia dell’Arte, where would we be without the zany servants or the dim-witted lovers? Irish theatre hinges on bereavement.”

The writer went on to describe great funerals on the national stage, and I began picturing my own play, which would almost certainly involve hard narcotics and sexual intercourse in the bushes at the back of the town swimming pool.

As he prepared to wrap up business, the writer scanned the classroom and asked his final question.

“Is there one amongst you who is a potential author?”

Every head turned in my direction.

“You should be our dramatist,” said the writer.

“Uh-huh,” I replied.

“The chronicler for this classroom, what!”

It was a tossed-out phrase with no real significance, but that was not how the distracted Brother Roland saw it. With his attention still focused on the broken stick of chalk, he barked sideways across the classroom.

“You, boy, will write a play for Mr. Bán Breathnach, and send it directly to him.”

The writer appeared shocked. The purpose of his visit was not to encourage young people into a threadbare life of theatre. No, his stipend and train vouchers came with the understanding that he visit a list of schools, scribble question marks on blackboards, and prance around for thirty minutes; nothing more. Before the writer had time to protest, Brother Roland stood up and slapped his hands together.

“That’s it, táimid críochnaithe. Now, there’s a football game in need of a referee; let’s have a big round of applause for the writer.”

We duly obliged. Brother Roland scooped up the splinter of chalk, stuffed it into his frock pocket, and departed. Proinsias Bán Breathnach looked around at twenty-five dead faces and realised he had killed any curiosity that existed in the hearts of the young.

And that is how I ended up writing a play for the C.U.N.T.

***

Sadly, the C.U.N.T. did not like my play, despite the serious hours I put in, scribbling in the library and fantasising in my bedroom, and this morning I received a rejection letter. The response did not come from Proinsias Bán Breathnach himself, but from someone I initially mistook to be a “dramaturd”—the result of a worn typewriter ribbon slapping against poor-quality paper.

“Dear sir,

Thank you for your submission, but this work is not for us. In fact, we’re not sure that it will find an audience anywhere. It is mean-spirited, vulgar, and malicious. In fact, in places, it appears to step over the line into outright pornography. If you wish to have your work produced by the National Theatre, you should refrain from having (a) a Greek chorus of semi-naked women; (b) prolific onstage use of cannabis; and (c) direct insults aimed at the Christian Brothers.

The plays that find most success with us usually have (a) a rural setting, (b) a bereavement or deathbed sequence, (c) a homecoming involving a prodigal son. Also, bear in mind that plays written in our native tongue will receive preferential treatment.

Is mise le meas

Judy Flynn”

Stung by this dismissal, I decide to pay a visit to the only other serious writer in Sugartown—Capall Hogan.

After work, I buzz down to the Blessed Clara Fornari Institute and park the Honda 50 beside the Grotto of Impossible Miracles (maybe I’ll come out and find the bike has been miraculously fitted with a new set of tyres.)

Until about fifteen years ago, the hospital had a high wall to prevent escape, and the inmates wore a costume of grey herringbone suits with matching caps—the sort of thing you might see these days on the catwalks of Paris. Now, the gates are open and the ornate grounds feature an extensive pitch-and-putt course, allowing psychiatric patients access to golf balls and clubs in an area surrounded by hospital windows and parked cars.

Smashing idea.

At the nurse’s station, an attendant runs his finger down a neatly written page until he finds the name, “Hogan, Capall.”

“Are you family?” he asks.

“Just a friend.”

The attendant studies me with suspicion.

“Sometimes he pays people to smuggle in alcohol, and then he goes fucking crazy.”

“Isn’t he already crazy?”

“Extra crazy,” says the attendant, as if he is talking about a sauce or a relish.

He hands me a ‘ticket’ that resembles a library card, except I’m not allowed to check out any of the lunatics.

“You have two hours; you’ll need that ticket to exit. Don’t lose it, or you’ll be stuck here for life. He’s in the recreation room. That way.”

I find Capall playing billiards with a man who shouts the word “collision!” every time a ball is struck.

“What’s up, chief?” says Capall.

I produce the rejection letter and Capall nods. He takes his shot and drives the cue ball right off the table and into a jug that might contain a yellowy lemonade. Or something else entirely.

“Don’t pay any attention to rejections, boy. You might be rejected, but the person who sent it is the real reject.”

Capall’s companion retrieves the cue ball and sets it on the table. When he strikes, hard, it leaves a damp trail on the baize.

“Collision!!”

“Let’s go somewhere peaceful where we can discuss this further,” says Capall.

He leads me down a dim corridor with resting benches on either side, past a statue of the fearsome Clara Fornari who, Capall explains, was once thrown down the stairs by Satan.

“Banged her face on every step, by the looks of it,” he says.

We enter a narrow door and climb a winding staircase to a turreted room which is a bibliophile’s fever dream. Books colonise every surface. Leather-bound tomes balance precariously on ledges, and paperbacks climb up the wainscotting and duck beneath the bed. The walls themselves are papered with his writings—pages thumbtacked directly to plaster, creating a textual wallpaper of manic inspiration. One of the windows is crammed with encyclopaedias, and the light from outside comes streaming between them in a beam as narrow as a knife blade. Capall catches my gaze and says,

“Books provide their own illumination.”

Clearing a spot on the bed with a wave of his hand, he sends a bunch of pamphlets flapping to the floor.

“Sit, sit,” he urges. “Sorry about the mess, but the orderlies don’t come up here. They’re afraid of catching literacy.”

I pull out a ready-rolled joint with a little trepidation, for we are surrounded by piles of perfect kindling, thousands of dry pages hungry for flame. When Capall flicks his lighter, I notice burn marks on the bedsheets, tiny constellations of past close encounters with incineration.

While I’m taking a blast from the joint, Capall squeezes through a tight valley of books and reaches for a pile of envelopes on a shelf. They are tied together with a black ribbon.

“Rejection letters,” he says. “Over a thousand of them.”

He tosses this bound monument to literary crucifixion into my lap, and it is heavy.

“One editor called my work criminally unreadable,” he says with pride.

I undo the ribbon and the pile starts to breathe and expand. Some are yellowed parchment from the 1960s, others glossy corporate letterheads with pre-printed signatures.

“Another editor said I was a ‘lethal shiv in the eyeball of common decency.’ Pay attention and you’ll see they do this sort of thing all the time. They try to weave linguistic fairy-dancing into two paragraphs of absolute doggerel. If I strapped a Biro to my masculine member, I’d come up with better prose than half the editors in Ireland, and have a damn sight more pleasure in the composition.”

He bares his teeth like a beaver getting ready to attack a tree.

“And don’t talk to me about fucking dramaturgs, with their frizzy hair and pursed lips; wet stains under the armpits and a Guiney’s bra doing its best to catapult two floppy bags over the rim of a Dunne’s Stores T-shirt—and that’s just the men.”

He wipes his brow and smiles like a demolition expert pressing down the plunger on a detonation switch.

“Jesus, I should be writing all this down. These creatures, these dramaturgs, they all acquired their jobs by means of the old paternal harp.”

“Excuse me? The old paternal harp?”

“It’s that great Irish instrument where your Daddy pulls the strings. And tell me something else: how did you deliver your magnum opus to these morons? Did you use the postal service?”

I shake my head. “No, I hitchhiked to the city and delivered it in person.”

Capall draws in a whistling volume of air through the gaps in his teeth.

“Big mistake, boy. Big mistake.”

“Why?”

“You must never show your handsome face until you’re halfway down that road to fame.”

I must look puzzled because Capall goes to a bookcase and starts prodding the spines. “Hemingway, Chekhov, Rimbaud, and Plath, all very easy on the eye, but do you think any of them were foolish enough to walk into a publishing house and flash their sexy smiles? Who would have taken them seriously?”

He prods more spines.

“It might be different if you had an ugly mug like Dickinson, Swift, or Proust. Then you could march in anywhere and dribble on about ‘intense emotional immediacy,’ and a ‘revelatory use of ambiguity and omission.’ Someone would be bound to feel sorry for you.”

Capall takes the C.U.N.T. rejection letter from my hand and uses it to slap me lightly across the cheek.

“This Judy the Dramaturg is probably living in a tent with her own Mr Punch, their lives rougher than a Friday night in Finglas, and you come sauntering into her theatre with your baby blue eyes and your slick, black hair.”

“Dark brown,” I say.

“She knows she’ll never fuck you, boy, but she will do everything within her power to fuck you up.”

Capall sighs and takes the half-smoked joint from my hand. He draws down two deep puffs, exhales, and studies me through the haze.

“It’s only human nature. Anyway, my advice to you? Just keep on going. Never stop. The stories are waiting for you—they’re circling, circling like shadows behind your eyes. Sometimes they’ll explode out of your head and splatter on the page, and other times they’ll ooze out of you like an infection.”

He gathers up his letters and catches them in a loop with the ribbon.

“Keep going,” he continues, “because you’re halfway towards becoming a writer.”

“Only halfway?” I say. “I thought I was nearly there.”

“Ah no. You see, a young writer is like a blade that needs to be tempered. First comes the heat of rejection, but this is nothing until it is accompanied by a sudden plunge into the iciness of grief.”

“Grief?”

“Yes.”

“I’m only seventeen years old. Where am I going to find grief?”

“Don’t worry, my son. You won’t have to go looking for it. It will always find you. Grief is like a heat-seeking missile and the human heart is an afterburner that runs on joy—I absolutely have to write that down.”

I start to ask another question, but Capall is rummaging, searching for a fresh notebook. He mumbles the same line as he grabs a fountain pen.

“An afterburner that runs on joy…. Yes. Yes. Are you still here? You need to go. Get out there and find that other half of yourself.”

He shakes the fountain pen and releases a spatter of green ink onto a musty page. He starts to scratch and the words spool from the nib into a wavering line of hopeless nonsense. He is gone somewhere else, and I must be gone too.

At the nurse’s station, I slide my visitor’s ticket across the counter and the attendant scrutinises it.

“Enjoy your time with Hogan?” he asks.

I don’t answer because I’m stoned and confused. I’ve moved into another realm, beyond the smelly sanctum of the Clara Fornari, and I need to get to the Legion and see Tina. We need to plan our future together.

At the Grotto of Impossible Miracles, the Honda 50 is much as I left her, a pathetic assemblage of Japanese engineering and Irish neglect, but she starts on the very first kick, blowing out a sickly vapour like a Victorian consumptive.

I wonder if grief has started its journey in my direction, and what sort of speed does she travel at. I can’t go faster than thirty-five miles per hour, and yet…

I am

Halfway

To becoming a writer.