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“Am I alone in thinking that the world becomes a more repulsive place every day?” asked Marigold, glancing across the breakfast table toward her husband, Christopher. “Actually,” he replied, “I find that—” “The question was rhetorical,” said Marigold, lighting a cigarette, her sixth of the day. “Please don’t embarrass yourself by offering an opinion.”
Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.
“You don’t strike me as a bad lad,” she told him. “Ah, you should see me when I get going.” “I’ll bear that in mind. So tell me about this friend of yours. How long did you say he’s been up in Dublin?” “Just over a month now,” said Seán.
in her eyes. I think of it now and wonder why my mother was applying for a job in the Dáil at all when she should have been across the Liffey giving an audition for Ernest Blythe.
“I heard it was the cancer.” “Oh yes,” she replied. “I meant a terrible misfortune. That she got the cancer at all.” “They say it carries down the family line,” said Lizzie, who must have been the life and soul of any party.
1952 The Vulgarity of Popularity
Amazing Chapter
we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably toward isolation and disaster.
I love girls, even though they’re crazy and mentally unbalanced, according to my father. Have you ever seen a pair of breasts?”
“What’s a pervert?” I asked. “It’s someone who’s a sex maniac,” he explained. “Oh.” “I’m going to be a pervert when I grow up,” he continued. “So am I,” I said, eager to please. “Perhaps we could be perverts together.”
“No, Cyril is seven,” she replied, shaking her head. “I was asking how old you are.” “Well, I’m seven too,” he said. “We both are.” “Both seven,” she said almost in a whisper. “Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence?” “I don’t think it is really,” he said, considering it. “Everyone in my class at school is seven. And everyone in Cyril’s too, I imagine. There’s probably the same number of seven-year-olds in Dublin as there are people of any age.” “Perhaps,” replied Maude, unconvinced.
“Homosexuals in prison aren’t picky, Mrs. Avery,” said Julian. “They’ll take whatever they can get.” “No, but they’re not blind either.” “What’s a homosexual?” I asked. “A man who’s afraid of women,”
“Every man is afraid of women as far as I can see,” said Julian, displaying an understanding of the universe far beyond his years.
“That’s true,” she said. “But only because most men are not as smart as women and yet they continue to hold all the power. The...
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down she went under the water, bubble bubble, goodnight and good luck to all.
didn’t have sex for almost two weeks afterward out of respect for her memory.
Prison, he believed, was something that happened to other people.
“Of all the women in Ireland, you had to fuck the wife of the one man who’s trying to keep you out of prison,”
“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.
“Absolutely ridiculous.” “A trip across the water to the island of Lesbos.”
“That’s hardly the point,” said Maude. “Elizabeth’s a friend of mine.” “My dear, don’t be ridiculous. You don’t have any friends.”
Max was living proof that it doesn’t matter if people love you or loathe you; as long as they know who you are, you can make a good living.
Papua New Guinea is closer. We studied it in geography class.” “There’s no such place,” she said. “Well,” I said, uncertain how I could go about proving it, “there is.” “Stop flirting with the poor girl, Cyril,” said Julian. “She’ll be on you like a bear on a beehive if you keep this dirty talk up.”
which one I have more fun with.” I smiled, the drink beginning to affect me a little, considering it quite a compliment to be higher ranked in his estimation than his penis.
“I read your book, Mr. Behan,” said Julian before she could hit him. “Please,” said Behan, raising a hand while he smiled beatifically at us all. “No formalities, please. Call me Mr. Behan.” “Mr. Behan it is so,” said Julian, laughing a little.
“And is your wife on her way in to us too?” “I’d be shocked if she was,” he said. “Maude died a few years ago. Cancer. She beat it when it was in the ear canal but once it spread to her throat and tongue that was it. Curtains.”
but I really hoped for his own sake that he would say tits. Sometimes I wonder where I went wrong. It’s not as if I brought him up to respect women.”
Julian’s bed staring up at the ceiling, I began to come to terms with who I was. I had known from as far back as I could recall that I was different from other boys. There was something inside me that longed for the intimate friendship and approval of my peers in ways that others never
“It’s another word for a…you know, for a thing.” “A thing? What do you mean, a thing? What class of a thing?” “A thing, Father,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I leaned in and whispered through the grille. “A penis, Father.” “Holy God,” he repeated. “Did I hear you right?” “If you thought I said a penis, then, yes, you did, Father.”
Why in God’s name would you call a priest in your school a penis? How could he possibly be a penis? A man can’t be a penis; he can only be a man. This makes no sense to me at all.”
“Well, whatever it is, just stop doing it. Call him by his proper name and show a bit of respect to the man. I’m sure he treats all the lads in your school well.” “He doesn’t, Father. He’s vicious and he’s always beating us up.
sometimes when he’s asleep I pull my pajamas down and I have a right go at myself and I create an unholy mess in the bed and even after I do it and think that I might be able to go to sleep I start thinking about other lads and all the things I want to do to them and do you know what a blowjob is, Father, because I started writing stories about the lads I like and particularly about my friend Julian and I started using words like that and—” There was an almighty crashing sound from opposite me and I looked up, startled. The shadow of the priest in the darkness had vanished and in its place a
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Mrs. Hogan and her son, Henry, however, lived in the house next door—the former entirely mute, the latter completely blind—and yet between them they monitored our comings and goings with all the efficiency of a government intelligence agency.
rate of tuppence for five, we would hear their four feet slowly ascending the staircase, the mute leading the blind, and Henry, who seemed to have no interest in anything, would ask the questions that his mother, an inveterate busybody, wanted answered.
“The funny thing is, Cyril,” he said in his most withering tone as I sat curled in the corner, my hands modestly covering my groin, “I’d have a lot more respect for you if I came in here and you were taking her up the Khyber Pass.
“Fair enough.” I glanced down at the crotch of my pants. There had been no movement whatsoever. If anything, there had been what could only be called A Great Shriveling.
We were sitting in the yacht club at Dun Laoghaire when I broached the idea, eating lobster and drinking Moët and Chandon, but he refused me instantly, declaring that he didn’t loan money to friends, as such acts of philanthropy always ended badly. “But we’re more than friends, surely,” I said, throwing myself on his mercy. “You’re my adoptive father, after all.” “Oh come along, Cyril,” he replied, laughing as if I was making a joke. “You’re twenty-five years old now—” “I’m twenty-one.”
“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “I’m both physically and sexually attracted to men.” “Well, sure that doesn’t make you a homosexual,” he said, opening his hands wide in a gesture of acceptance.
While we were talking, he dropped his cigarette, it fell to the floor and he simply bent over to retrieve it before the whole car could go up in flames. If anything, he was performing a heroic action and should be commended for it.” “And as he did so,” said Mr. Denby-Denby, “your belt fell open, your trousers fell down, his did too, and somehow your cock landed halfway down his throat. Makes perfect sense. I can’t see how anyone would question an explanation like that.”
“Why do they hate us so much anyway?” I asked after a lengthy pause. “If they’re not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?” “I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,” she said with a shrug. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re none of us normal. Not in this fucking country.”
“You did what?” I asked, wondering whether my head was about to spin around my shoulders in three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turns while my eyes popped from my head, like that little girl in The Exorcist.
Over the years, I had created two fundamentally dishonest portraits of myself, one for my oldest friend and another for my newest ones, and they had only a few brushstrokes in common. Revelations from either side could see the whole artifice fall apart and with it the plans I had made for my future.
“I think they’re what are commonly referred to as socialites,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “The dictionary definition would be a bunch of self-regarding, narcissistic, physically attractive but intellectually hollow individuals whose parents have so much money that they don’t need to do a day’s work themselves. Instead, they go from party to party, desperate to be seen, while gradually corroding from the inside out, like a spent battery, due to their lack of ambition, insight or wit.”
“But why on earth did you go through with it?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just go home? Or, you know, jump on a flight to Mars or someplace?”
the difference between love and sex could be summed up for me in eight words: I loved Julian; I had sex with strangers.
my grandparents were being buried side by side that same afternoon, having being run over by a speeding car as they left the funeral Mass of Father James Monroe, the man who had banished my mother from the town some twenty-eight years earlier.
“We all fall in the shit many times during our lives. The trick is pulling ourselves out again.” I nodded, unsure if he was being philosophical or simply stating facts.
but nevertheless I had grown up in his house and buried inside me were tender feelings toward him, feelings that seemed all the stronger for our estrangement.
Still, in my naïveté I assumed that enough time had passed for them both to have moved on and perhaps to have forgotten me. I couldn’t possibly have guessed the things that were taking place in my absence.
and wishing that Emily would either go into the other room and get dressed or leave. Or perhaps go to the fridge again, trip over on a piece of loose linoleum and fall out the window into the middle of 55th Street.
