Book recommending & Spreading the WORD

The written word that is, I encourage all and anyone who wishes for success of their book as I do to take interest in little old me too. I have decided to throw a chapter in here for you guys to get an idea of some of the journey within the covers of TWO sons TOO many. I look forward to comments, questions and reviews, did I mention reviews these are unfortunately a key role to all of us writers and so I request them every chance I get. thank you.

Chapter 6.
Now I had in my head always and now that the muscles were starting to develop, that with my new skills of how to be fast with my hands and ability to fight I had a few scores to settle. So I caught up with one of the older guys who used to be beat me up on the boat when I was a youngster, of course I was still a youngster in the realm of normal society but 15 I was a man, I had been “at it” for a few years now. 15 when I think back or come across a young man of 15 today these days I do not put them on the same caliber as me as I just seemed older in many ways of how I conducted myself. But I was as dumb as any 15 year old that’s for sure, but for me in a clever way. In around fifteen years of age in Ireland we have a national exam in school called the inter cert, they call it junior cert now.

I used to spend days out fishing, at sea when you are standing there tailing prawns well it is just like a factory job really except the boat keeps going up and down, but may times would smoke a joint and get into deep thought and I thought to myself, fuck I have fucked off my brains and school there is just no going back now and I should be doing my inter cert this year, staring into the ocean and thinking dam what have you done. I thought to myself , to hell with it, the world is made of two thirds water, I have been learning a skill becoming a fisherman I can fish all over the world what do I need an education for I am educating myself in what is known as a unskilled labour profession.

Another Saturday evening at the bar at the top of the harbour, the drinks are going down well and what do you know one of the guys who used to always beat me up is at the bar. There were four of us and so we drank a few pints headed outside to share a joint and when he was sitting on the windowsill of the bar rolling another joint I took all my might and bust him straight up under the jaw with an uppercut of great proportion, his head went back the joint went everywhere and I stood there waiting for him to get up and said, “come on get up and beat me now” “get up”. He put his head down and his hands up around his head curling up his knee and stayed sitting on the windowsill, “no I am sorry, I am sorry, I don’t want to fight you” I could see the blood running from his nose and all I wanted was for him to even lean forward and think as to get up I knew in my head straight through the window is where I will put him.

The other two guys, Bo being one of them pushing me back saying come on leave it , he is not worth it, while I kept saying , trust me Fagan, let me think you want to have something with me I will leave you eating through a straw for months, tubes will be feeding you. I walked up the town along the harbour road that evening with a feeling of being unstoppable, this guy used to beat me when I was a new kid on the scene but I wasn’t 12 anymore. I was a strong 6ft2 well-built fighter now.
Of course it wasn’t all about fighting, I was a fun loving guy I used to tease and make fun of my friends and others and hang out and have the laugh, I loved to be having a good buzz with a few joints and a few beers, what the hell is wrong with that is what I always thought. Except now the laughs could turn ugly at any moment because I was ready for the fight regardless. What was life then, chaos would be a good word for it. I would never dare to go near a bar where my dad would go. He had his local and I stayed well clear of that place cause he knew I was drinking, he didn’t know much about the drugs side of things, some evenings on a Saturday night he would give me a lift down to the town when he was heading out for a few pints himself and he would lecture me, saying look, I only go out at 9.30 pm because I know I can have 4 pints nice and comfortable in that time frame and go home just a social drink and a bit of craic (crack) it is an Irish word meaning “having a laugh” or “having fun”.

I would sit sometimes thinking about my dad and his four pints of Guinness and think what the heck, it is 9.30 I better get two into me before ten and then another 4 before 11 and another three or four before closing time.
The drugs were getting to be as a necessity as the booze at this time, I would head off into the city, take a train or the bus into the city head around the flats in the middle of the city because that is where you could find someone to buy hash from, now you had to be careful that the inner city street kids wouldn’t rob your money first on the way in or on the way out rob your drugs, so yeah the innocence was still there in that sense, In the city people would stab each other rather than fight, if it came to fighting we, me could hold my own but there always was that fear of getting robbed. Me and a crew mate of mine Willie headed into the city one Thursday evening to go and buy some has for the weekend, we were finished fishing for the week and had our money. We ended up in a guy’s flat where he had only a couple of small 10 pound deals of hash we wanted like 100 worth, he hadn’t got it.

But what he did have was a couple of micro dots, I played along micro dots, yeah sure gives us one each. I had not got clue what a micro dot was, but we paid for them and off we went. We looked at each other, and said go ahead you take it, alright we take them together then, ok go. I didn’t swallow mine, two little things looked like pencil lead he had given us, Willie swallowed his so I said, ok here goes as we walked out the parking area of the flats, the Oliver bond flats in Dublin city. We started to walk along the quays as the Oliver bond flats are along the river liffey in the centre of Dublin and is near to the Guinness factory, always a great smell of roasting hops from the factory in that part of town. As we started walking down the quays there is a garage there a petrol station and who is filling up their car, a new sports type car well not really sports but a little bullet type car a sporty Volvo or something like that anyway, my uncle yup my dad’s brother who lives in the city, he says what are you doing I am waiting for this acid to kick in and trying to make an excuse, ah nothing me and my friend are heading for the train station to head back out home, “come on he says I will give you a lift” we jump in and head down to the train station. Luckily for us the timing is perfect, there is an express train that leaves Dublin going to Belfast and the first stop on the way is skerries, so we are first stop perfect.

My uncle drops us off, we are a little giddy, nothing happening for him yet nothing happening for me, we are a little scared cause we are not sure what is supposed to happen anyway. We jump on the train and away for skerries, now it is about a fifteen minute ride maybe twenty when on the express the usual commuter train would be about half an hour to fourth five minutes. This train goes at I believe 8.10 or 8.15 maybe. We had standing room only, the train is full of suits and business people who commute to the city every day for work, Off we get with all the commuters at skerries and we walk with the crowd under the train tracks there is a little brick tunnel type passageway under the tracks and out the other side to the housing development and we are in skerries, we are a little giddy still and the crowds are jumping into cars and walking fast and I turn to Willie and say I am tripping dude, he says me too and we laugh our asses off all the way along the pathway down through the neighbourhood, we have no idea what is happening to us most of the commuters are giving us the weird looks , like what is wrong with them, those who recognize us, because skerries is not really big place, give us the look of “ oh they are from the harbour, the boats, they must be high” it was a stigma attached to the group of us as everyone even the Guards, had said to me one time when they stopped me for a simple routine search procedure, where is the hash we know you all live on the stuff over there on that harbour.

Me and Willie were as high as we could ever be, we could not figure out how we were in Oliver bond flats about what felt like five minutes ago, my uncle drove his new care like a race car through the traffic of the city along the quays to the train station and the express had us in skerries in minutes, we were so high and beginning to freak out that how did we get here and was this even real. Willie came up with the great idea of we need to get indoors so we headed to our local pub were we were regulars, there was a good crowd in for the night, for a Thursday at least, Willie ordered a beer, Carlsberg more than likely and I had a club orange in a pint glass with ice, club orange is probably one of the sweetest orange drinks you can get but ice cold not much can beat it, I was too afraid to mix the alcohol. We sat at the table, the tables were like big old beer barrels and we sat on the high stools like two perch monkeys freaking each other out about who in the bar knew we were on acid. Who knew the “craic”, who knew we were on acid, looking at folks in for their few pints of a Thursday night and smiling and saying hello to people as they went to the bathrooms and passed us by, and then they would return to their company and their drinks, me and Willie are sitting opposite each other trying to convince each other that, they are over there talking about us and they know the “craic”, they are cool they won’t say anything.

So the bar tender that night Willie could not help himself but to tell him that we were so high we didn’t know what we were doing and if we didn’t anything strange help us out. Well, the worst thing was telling him, every so often he would come over and empty the ashtray and wipe down the table with a few words muttered out the side of his mouth, things like, “ would ya look at two of you, 400 cigarettes smoked in an hour and ashes everywhere, no wonder people are talking about yous” then he would come back again and say “the couple over there want to buy yous a drink but Willie you have one sip out of your beer in the last hour, and your date well look at her on the club orange”, that was me. So me and Willie are trying so hard to keep our shit together and people are coming cracking jokes and we are freaked as to think how are we supposed to act and how are we supposed to respond, keep it together is what we keep telling each other. I was sitting there scanning around the whole bar area wondering who really knows that I am higher than I have ever been, and who really cares, when I noticed Willie wasn’t even there any more, seemed like an hour I started getting edgy where is he, where did he go , what happened, now I was freaking out. I made a screwed up high decision to go to the restrooms, the toilets, to just get out of the crowded bar, and who do you think is standing in the toilets in front of the mirror like a zombie, good old Willie, he is delighted to see me and I am delighted to see him, what are you doing,

I don’t know he says, I can’t get out of the mirror, I am freaking man you left me behind out there alone, they all know now, the whole place is looking at me weird sitting there on my own. Willie is just staring into the mirror, I said come on man we have to go back out, we both stand there at the door of toilets, inside the toilets, we straighten out or clothes and shirts and take deep breaths are you ready, yeah you, no but let’s go, ready on three we open the door and head back out to the bar. This was like we were going on stage for a concert or a play or the theatre or something we had to psych ourselves up to the challenge. The bar tender keeps it going now he is telling us under his breath as he comes to wipe down the table, they know and that couple over there know and so on and so forth. For our first time on acid we were a mess. We headed out to the fish and chip shop and stood there in line and ordered nothing and left, smoked a couple of joints and headed home. I had walked home and it was about 3 am I thought I would never come down, I creeped into the house and into my bedroom all my brothers were asleep I woke my older brother, they were all good guys school going children at the time, I woke my older brother anyway and told, hey man I am on acid, you have to try it is amazing, he was all groggy waking up, what? Go to bed and shut up, he said I was pleading with him no seriously you have to try it; eventually I was lying in bed and fell asleep.

Acid a weird experience, we got lucky we scored some good acid and had a great trip and all returned to normal the next day, I can tell you it does feel like it might never end. Which does happen, and the reason I can say this for sure is, there were many more trips after that but we found the cheap easy way, where we grew up in the countryside, in loughshinny there were fields a plenty where magic mushrooms grew. I remember being like 4 or 5 and all the punk rockers used to be in the fields around our house and the story was they were getting mushrooms and getting high, cause the punk thing was big then and so they used to be there with Mohawks pink and green and so you could see them miles away, but we had grown now and it was our turn to be hunting mushrooms. One buddy of mine one day was running through the field eating sheep shit and rubbing it all over himself and trying to get us all to eat with him and laughing, he kept saying “I have a great life”, “I have a great life” chasing us around trying to offer us sheep shit to eat. His sister used to hang out with us and we told her take him home, after we were finished tripping for the day we went to his house to check on him he was asleep and his sister, said all the way home he was trying to hitch a ride with every car that passed by waving his dick at the car, and when they finally reached the town he walked into a little shop and the rack that has all the birthday cards he just went behind it and took a piss, Just another fun packed day getting high.


One evening on the mushrooms, we were on one of the boats eating mushrooms as many as we could and getting high high high, and one of the guys started freaking out saying we were all thrash and no good, I was drunk at the time I didn’t eat the mushrooms, but we were sitting over there in the harbour on one of the boats, everyone there, ten or twenty of us, rolling joints drinking cans of beer and everybody high and he started freaking out, I went upstairs with him and said hey man what’s the problem, if you don’t calm down I will beat the shit out of you, he said I don’t care every one of you and them down below are all scum. I want nothing to do with you, then someone whispers to me he is out of his head on mushrooms, I am making a pact with him that I will beat the living shit out of him but not today because he is on mushrooms, tomorrow when I see you it is on. He wants me to beat him then and there, as he just keeps talking a whole bunch of tough shit. My friend who had been drinking with is down below, we had been drinking all day and he comes up and says , nobody wants to come up because I had taken this guy up from the cabin saying no one was to come up to me and him we are going to settle this in private, we were having a full blown heated argument and I told him tomorrow you are a dead man.

Now that guy stayed in his moms house for about 8 months, his mother didn’t know what was wrong with him, he would not even go to the store for a pack of cigarettes. After about five months me and a friend called up to visit him and he was just real blank and watching TV and not talking much, I felt guilty that maybe all my hard talk and threats killed his trip from the mushrooms or whatever, when me and my buddy left from our visit with him, I remember we both said, man those mushrooms are dangerous. Look what they are after doing to him, he still seems high from them. 5 to 6 months later. So yeah the mushrooms and the acid are a dangerous gig. In the town of skerries we had another known associate for want of a better phrase, one of the guys who would have been eating mushrooms back when I was a kid seeing the punks, well he was permanently high, he would come over the boats some evenings when we would be in and smoking a few joints in the galley and he didn’t fish anymore because everyone knew he was just permanently high. He would smoke about 10 cigarettes in ten minutes and tell the wildest stories and every one tolerated him because they knew him from before, but he was out there, he wouldn’t smoke any hash with us, because he was into god now, and his teeth were so rotten looking from the smoking, he just chewed cigarettes, he took mushrooms one time and never came down, for years, and years. Joey is his name, the most unfortunate thing and what can bring you up to speed, that night when I was supposed to be the one that was dead, that weekend when everyone thought I was dead, well the guy that bust his head open on the rocks was Joey, he tried to dive head first into the sea or into the rocks who knows, and mashed his whole head up.

Maybe he wanted to stop his own madness and finish it or maybe he was just still high and thought he was going swimming, but he didn’t die, I had heard updates from time to time about Joey that he was in intensive care and they were going to try and start teaching him to type and write stuff by using a pointer type thing, like a pencil taped to his head where he could punch things out on a keyboard so they could do some therapy and try and teach him to communicate all over again. One of the Last times I was home in Skerries, I saw him in a wheelchair being pushed by his sister I believe, for a walk down the harbour and he had a blanket across himself, looking like a vegetable for want of a better expression.

So yes indeed the mushrooms were great fun but not everyone can withstand them and the devastation can be catastrophic when someone ends up stuck there on a trip permanently high. My friend Willie, who I or we took our first acid together, is no longer with us, suicide a few years back. Willie another true friend gone. He had a tough run with prison and robberies and beatings and more prison. I will always remember Willie when I was a complete out of control lunatic, standing square in front of me on the boat one evening when I showed up with 6 cans and was all high asking, me what is wrong with you? Do you want to go to prison and fuck up all the rest of your life, what is wrong with you, you need to give it up and stop the madness. Just another great true friend through all the crazy goings on through our adolescents that, is no longer with us. Always in my mind Willie for the laughs we shared. It didn’t stop me of course I couldn’t wait to get more drugs and keep it all going.
Chapter 7.
One of the tough times when fishing is the winter, the weather is worse and so less money to be made, so the best way is to save some money and buy some hash in big quantities and sell it

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TWO-sons-man...