Tales Of The Gurrier

There is a tradition, here amongst us Dubs, and when I say tradition, I mean a perverted and horrifying compulsion on my part, to scribble ugly little tales of our unmerry band. My ‘friends’, if so benign an appellation can be used to describe this band of hairy perverts and criminals, will cast their eyes skyward and mutter, ‘Oh, that Gurrier, remind me to cut off his fucking thumbs one day,’ and cheerfully break a pint glass on my head.

Occasionally, just occasionally another fellow traveller will wash up upon the filthy streets and be clasped to our grubby hearts, the better to steal from them, their bulging sacks of foreign dollars and untarnished humanity, to add them to our own, dwindling, stock. These poor unfortunates often wander the streets in their undergarments lamenting the loss of their pants and that little part of their souls we kept, whilst down in the gutters The Gurrier’s ‘friends’ cackle and squabble over who will get to eat the left pant leg and wear the spoils home.

On rarer occasions still, the pantless foreigner will rise up and demand the return of said pants, with menaces, gutter talk and low threats. Such is the tale you are about to read ladies and gentlemen, a dark and baleful thing, full of spite and lies. A tale of horror, violence and Yanqui devilry…The Tale of The Gurrier, O’Brian and The Bloomsday Massacre

**********************

The rain fell in never ending sheets of grey wetness, tumbling down onto the rooftops and spires of unhappy Dublin. In a dingy bar, somewhere in the rotten depths of the city centre, a cadre of broken souls gathered to meet the latest crisis facing the city.

‘O’Brian is arriving today,’ said Kesey, sweeping his gaze over the assembled minions.

‘Ah Jaysus, not him again, wasn’t he just here,’ said Red Presley, licking the drips of booze from an upended bottle of lager.

‘Yeah, well now he’s coming back again,’ Kesey said, with a tight smile.

‘Who’s turn is it?’ said Presley.

‘Not mine, I looked after him the last time,’ said Ingoldsby from the corner, involuntarily shuddering at the memories. ‘All them poor little fishies,’ he muttered under his breath.

‘It’s you Murphy, you’re up next,’ Kesey said, pointing a curled, yellowed, fingernail at The Gurrier.

‘Me! But I got rid of that last fella. The one who was mad for the Welsh.’

‘It’s no good Murphy, you have to do it,’ said Kesey, with an air of finality that brooked no argument.

‘Why do we have to do this every time they turn up off the computer,’ moaned The Gurrier.

‘Look it,’ said Kesey, exasperated, ‘we all know what Ingoldsby gets up to on the internet. It’s best if we deal with these people personally. Take them in hand, so to speak. It wouldn’t do for the country if any of his activities were to get out.’ Kesey looked darkly at Ingoldsby, who shrank back and mumbled something into his drink.

‘What’s that you hairy pervert?’ snarled Kesey.

‘I said they likes it like that on the internet.’

‘You’re banned from the fucking internet Ingoldsby and you know it. I warned you,’ said Kesey, gripping him by the scruff of the neck. ‘What have you done? What does the Yanqui devil want,’ he demanded, shaking Ingoldsby violently.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know anything,’ Ingoldsby gibbered, ‘it was all for research purposes!’

‘I’ll get the squirrels,’ said The Gin Lady from under the table.

‘Deadly,’ said Red Presley, furiously scribbling in her ‘buke’, ‘wait ’til I get me electrickery picture box ready.’

‘No more pictures of filth on the internet,’ roared Kesey, slamming his fist onto the table and hurling Ingoldsby into the corner. ‘Now Murphy, get up off your hole and go up there to Kildare street and see what this maniac wants. If he needs paying tell him we can raise two hundred yankee dollars, but no more. If that doesn’t satisfy him, tell him he’s welcome to carve the rest off of Ingoldsby in chunks.’

Ingoldsby whimpered from under the table. ‘They said it was all legal.’

‘Yes, but legal where you fool,’ said Kesey, sending a swift kick into his kidneys and calling to the barman for another pint of his horrible meat cider.

With that terrible, familiar sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach The Gurrier Murphy set off from the pub, in the steadily falling rain, in search of O’Brian, the mad cannibal playwright of Chicago. It was said, and he had never heard tell it was a lie, that O’Brian had once eaten the ears of his leading man for failing to follow stage directions. Some said it was only his eyebrows he ate, others, it was a knee cap or an elbow, but all were sure of one thing, the crazy bastard had eaten something belonging to that poor fucker and it wasn’t his lunch.

No one knew how O’Brian had found them, but his abrupt arrivals eerily coincided with Ingoldsby’s egregious bouts of internet criminality. These forays into the hillbilly backwaters of the web often left Ingoldsby mute with shock and prone to floods of tears for weeks on end and sure enough within a day or two the call would come through, O’Brian was coming.

The problem with O’Brian was, he was not satisfied with the mere veneer of cod Irishry, spread like a film of green snot over Dublin’s filthy streets, to entertain and amuse the average clueless eejit just fallen off the plane. Not for him a quick dip into the boozer where Brendan Behan once did a shite on the bar, or where terrified Lithuanians are forced to dance jigs for overfed tourists eighteen hours a day. Oh no, not for a him a feed of salty pig bacon and mouldy cabbage in Maureen O’Reilly’s ‘Pub O’ Good Grub Agus Craic’ and then a glass of the black stuff before a picture be the statue of Molly Malone with the big boobs. Oh no, this bollix read ‘bukes’, he studied things, he wanted the ‘real’ Irish experience. He wanted things no guidebook would ever dare say existed, the stuff even the Irish denied happened in their own back yards. The things the Irish government spent it’s time covering up the way other governments covered up alien bum probes and mind control experiments. O’Brian wanted to do things, terrible things, Irish things.

He wanted to murder a donkey in Stephen’s Green and run naked down Grafton street swinging fat ropes of gory intestines over his head, he wanted to drink jugs of lighter fluid and whiskey under the bridge at Baggot street and toss whoors into the Grand Canal. He wanted to fling bags of dogshite off of Liberty Hall and scrawl ‘Tiocfaidh ar La’ and ‘Up the Ra!’ on the jakes in Dublin Castle, he wanted to kick an auld wan down Fishamble street and pass out in a pool of his own piss in front of the G.P.O. He wanted to fire up a pitch capping crew and catch a bunco booth politician out on the piss on Kildare street or saw the legs off a giraffe in the a’Zoo.

It’s not that The Gurrier had a problem with any of this per se, lord knows he’d done the same himself many a time and worse too, it was only that O’Brian wanted to to do it all in one night. Damn those Yanquis and their enthusiasm, The Gurrier was getting too old for this shite.

‘Murphy, ye big ugly shite!’ boomed a voice out of the rain and there was O’Brian striding out of the mist dressed in several dead cows. He gripped The Gurrier in a huge handshake and pumped his hand furiously. ‘Good to see you again, don’t mind the outfit, it’s raw buffalo skin. I heard ye were having some weather over here so I came prepared. This stuff will stop a 9mm round at thirty paces.’ He tapped the hide of his buffalo arse jacket confidently.

‘O’Brian,’ said The Gurrier, ‘they let you back in then,’

‘Only just,’ said O’Brian, whispering conspiratorially, ‘I had my equipment sent on ahead.’ He patted a long leather bag slung over one shoulder that The Gurrier had taken to be some additional wing of the dead cow jacket.

‘Come on and we’ll have a drink before getting down to business,’ said O’Brian, ‘I know a little place around the corner here, none of the tourists know about it yet.’

Indeed it was well none of the tourists knew about it, for if they did, no doubt they would promptly have left the country never to return, pausing on their arrival home only to burn their passports and all of their luggage.

‘The Rancid Badger,’ was just such a place.

‘How in the name of God did you find this place?’ said The Gurrier, lowering himself gingerly onto a septic looking bar stool. The stool emitted an obscene squelching and an unidentifiable liquid began to seep into the seat of his pants. He made a mental note to renew his hepatitis injections and buy some new pants.

‘Isn’t it grand!’ O’Brian replied, beaming into the sickly looking brim of the oleaginous pint of stout set before him. ‘Only locals here, but it’s all right I know the owner.’

‘You know the owner?’ The Gurrier was incredulous. The owner of this hellhole was a well know criminal maniac by the name of ‘Boylan The Boiler,’ so named for his penchant for boiling his enemies and no small number of his acquaintances, alive.

‘Oh yes, Kevin’s a lovely guy,’ said O’Brian, ‘he helped me get together the rest of my equipment.’ He patted the leather case again, an action The Gurrier viewed with increasing alarm.

The Gurrier pushed aside his glass of whiskey and turpentine and broached the subject at hand.

‘So O’Brian, what’s the plan for this trip eh? Want to drive a bus through Clery’s window? Flash your arse at the President? Drink a barrel of stout and puke your ring up on the Book of Kells?’

‘No, none of that shite this time Murphy,’ said O’Brian, his eyes shining like wet rocks. ‘This time, I’m here for Bloom.’

‘Oh thank Christ,’ said The Gurrier, a wave of relief flooding over him. ‘Why didn’t you say so, there’s loads of Bloom stuff to see, the hoi polloi go mad for that shite. You’ve missed Bloomsday though, that was back in June.’

That strange light was back in O’Brian’s eyes again. ‘Every Bloom has his day Murphy,’ he said, cryptically. With that he downed the greasy pint of stout and smacked his lips.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘we need to bait the trap.’

————-

‘How’s the play writing business,’ said The Gurrier, hoping to change the subject.

With those words a terrible change came over O’Brian. The colour drained from his face and he shook with emotion.

‘Bastards!’ he screamed, ‘They’re all bastards Murphy,’ he said, gripping the table and fixing The Gurrier with a wild stare.

‘Who are bastards then?’ said The Gurrier, innocently.

‘Who? Who!’ he said, giving The Gurrier a look of incredulous contempt.

‘The critics, that’s who, you bog brained savage. Who else! ‘Oh, I’m ruined, ruined,’ he wailed, burying his face in his outstretched hands.

‘What happened?’ said The Gurrier, silently planning his escape route to the door should the yank turn crazy or demand manhugs. The Gurrier watched American television broadcasts for research purposes, he had witnessed with his own eyes the monstrous things Americans did to one another for entertainment. He knew what happened with Dr. Phil or Professor Springer. It was fight or flight syndrome with Americans, they lived life in a fine grained world of hyper-reality, tainted with madness. One spark to the touch paper and it was hump or kill. Fifteen steps, it was fifteen steps and he would be out the door to freedom. But it was too late, O’Brian grabbed him by the arm and began his terrible confession.

‘One mistake, it was just one little mistake,’ O’Brian was burbling into his pint.

‘What did you do O’Brian?’ said The Gurrier, the familiar tendrils of The Fear curling around his gut. The man was clearly insane and he was in no position to take down a class five Yanqui devil in an hostile drinking establishment where they practiced the art of human stew.

‘It was genius Murphy, genius. You should have seen it. They came for miles around to bear witness. The greatest story ever told, The Nativity, with animals.’

‘Animals?’

‘Animals.’

‘Like in the manger scene with the donkey and the lambs and so forth,’ said The Gurrier, groping for comprehension.

O’Brian sighed. ‘This is why you people will always be potato eating savages Murphy, Philistines to a hairy palmed man. This was no mere retelling of The Nativity with fucking donkeys. This was my masterstroke, The Nativity…with animals.‘

‘What, playing the characters?’

‘Yes of course playing the characters.’

The Gurrier felt the air around them suddenly shrink and the light grow dim.

‘Oh God and baby Jesus,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said O’Brian, ‘Oh it was all going so well, until…’

‘Until what man?’

‘Until the three wise monkeys started throwing their shit into the audience, Joseph the Alsatian started humping the donkey and Mary bit one of the shepards on the arse.’

‘You crazy bastard,’ said The Gurrier, ‘what the hell did you expect.’

‘Oh that wasn’t the worst of it,’ said O’Brian rubbing the palms of his hands back and forth across his head. ‘The critics would have forgiven me for that faux pas. No it was what happened to the baby Jesus that doomed me Murphy. Oh God, I wish I could take it all back.’

‘What did you do to the baby Jesus?’

‘It wasn’t just me, the producer was in on it and all the backstage crew. They hate me you know, all of them. They filled me up with whiskey and pills one night and told me it’s what he would have wanted.’

‘What did you do O’Brian, in the name of all that is holy, what did you do?’ said The Gurrier, fear gripping his bowels like a vice.

‘I, I, I ate the baby Jesus,’ he blurted.

‘You ate the baby Jesus!’

‘With applesauce. Oh God forgive me, he was delicious.’ O’Brian collapsed into tears.

The Gurrier stared at the shell of a man before him.

‘You’re doomed O’Brian, doomed. The Republi-christians will gnaw on your brains for that blasphemy. Christ, what were you thinking, it’s America you live in, not France.’

‘I know, I know, they’re after me now Murphy, that’s why you have to help me. I need Bloom. Only Bloom can save me now. Otherwise I’ll have to stay here forever. Have you got a basement?’

The Gurrier gazed at the stricken playwright and the full horror of the situation became clear to him. By now, blackhawk helicopters stuffed to the gills with gibbering, steroidal supersoldiers and cruise missiles were probably en route to this very destination, with orders from the President to bomb Dublin into a smoking black pit of charred ash. Gangs of bible gobbling fundamentalists flown in on secret CIA black flights with specially designed thumb removers and lobotomy machines. Septaugenarian fire and brimstone spewing preachers; veterans of Iwo Jima and Vietnam, who tested assault weapons on their huge American balls and ate raw steak for breakfast were even now parachuting into Rathmines and napalming the library and the Tesco’s. All this and more fled through The Gurrier’s mind and one thing shone like a beacon through the fear and loathing; this criminal pervert wanted to live in his basement.

There was only one course of action open to him.

‘So tell me about this Bloom plan then,’ he said.

O’Brian’s eyes lit up and he regained some of his former garrulous nature. ‘You’ll help. Grand, I knew I could count on you Murphy, I never believed any of those things the others said about you.’

With that he rummaged through his leather bag and produced an eye patch and a battered copy of Lord of The Rings.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘here’s the plan. You distract him with this disguise and I’ll,’

‘Hold on, hold on,’ said The Gurrier, interrupting. ‘Distract who? With what? I know Joyce had an eyepatch, but Leopold Bloom is in Ulysses not Lord of The Rings.’

‘Leopold Bloom? Murphy if you were any thicker I’d swear you really were an Irishman. Fuck Leopold Bloom. How the hell am I supposed to make my come back with a fictional character from an unreadable doorstop, by some inbred Irish arsehole who’s been dead for sixty odd years. Fuck that. You’re going to help me apprehend and kidnap Orlando Bloom, star of Lord of The Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean and my next production ‘Angels over Applesauce’. They’re going to love me again Murphy or so help me God, I’ll eat every last one of them.’

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Tales of the Gurrier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.