Here Noam happily shares his expertise on Balkan anorexia with Serbian TV (2006).
“That was the photograph of the thin man in the concen- eh, buh, behind the barbed wire…”
Historians will wonder how it wasn’t all over for the oracle after this.
Dublin in the Nineties. The nights spent darkening the door of the Gigs Place in later years – it could take some time to get in – could be counted on one hand but all the key details had been sketched at the outset.
1996
7 September, Saturday
Gigs Place: out of the corner of my eye I saw a young crew-cut slipping out with a Groucho Marx walk (a runner). Then there was the long-haired musical type who insulted me after roaring for pepper. Got into a slanging match over pepper, saw a guy do a runner, met two women: a fifty-one-year-old female Dorian and a doctor in the house (her niece). More wine. The pinch test: Dorian showed me the difference between the skins of ‘old’ and ‘young’ via the elasticity of the back of the hand.
8 September, Sunday
On Sunday morning the ends of long streets…
View original post 205 more words
Dublin in the Nineties. The nights spent darkening the door of the Gigs Place in later years – it could take some time to get in – could be counted on one hand but all the key details had been sketched at the outset.
1996
7 September, Saturday
Gigs Place: out of the corner of my eye I saw a young crew-cut slipping out with a Groucho Marx walk (a runner). Then there was the long-haired musical type who insulted me after roaring for pepper. Got into a slanging match over pepper, saw a guy do a runner, met two women: a fifty-one-year-old female Dorian and a doctor in the house (her niece). More wine. The pinch test: Dorian showed me the difference between the skins of ‘old’ and ‘young’ via the elasticity of the back of the hand.
8 September, Sunday
On Sunday morning the ends of long streets in their post-dawn haze – all cities look the same then. Awake, shake scenes from your awareness. Bed at 7.20 AM.
17 October, Thursday
Gigs: people crashing out left, right and centre. Of a group of four women across from us, the one good-looking one lost the plot after making a pudding sandwich with her toast. She had to be helped out, while I never saw what happened to another member of her group who’d dipped first.
Behind us, one of a group of three women lay stretched out like a corpse. I only spotted the horizontal human-like shape on rising to go to the toilets.
Over to my right, beyond the dried-leafy trellis, a ginger-haired fella rested his head on his table, with his clean fry-up and a tall glass of milk. Vermeer might have captured it. Every so often a waitress would make a token effort to wake him. The Gigs Place is some place.
21 October, Monday
Words for a review of the Gigs Place: fare with no exotica and no frills. Optional chips with everything. Bad wine, the list consisting of red & white.
16 November, Saturday
Gigs: the sight of the night was a fella puking like a muck spreader.
1998
Dublin
26 October
A strange, unsettling outbreak of paranoia in the renamed Billboard (“Leroy’s”) on Camden St: I was upstairs, waiting patiently, admiring the voluptuous new waitress. Thirty-something, a dyed blonde, bobbing up and down the stairs she came and went.
Three guys sat quietly at the table behind me, the farthest one back, in a raised corner under a translucent skylight. As I was eating the indifferent brunch, one of the other staff below discreetly called the lady in charge about an issue upstairs. Whatever the problem was, I was suddenly keen to find out. I just felt that I should know what the matter was but it wasn’t being broadcast.
Looking down I could something of a contagion spreading among the black-attired waitresses, an almost silent but visible effect like the chill in The Masque of the Red Death.
I wanted to know more. The problem created a paralysis, like it was frightening, at least to women. I wanted to know but all I managed to make out was a simple exchange.
“Have you been up there?”
“No, I haven’t been up there,” replied the one in charge.
“Well, there’s something up there.”
It didn’t get any more appetising, what was on my plate. Those three guys behind abandoned their table and didn’t pay. When they had left, I was alone in the eye line of the anxious women in black, down below. They couldn’t stop themselves raising their eyes in my direction, in that of the skylight. Remember Harry Dean Stanton and the cat in Alien.
Don’t look back. It was time for me to leave. I paid but wouldn’t be back. If we only knew, we’d go nowhere. Start a panic. If I’d turned around before the door and demanded to know what was going on, I’d have been the one to start that stampede.
1996
The group of long coats passing down the hospital corridors on a night before Christmas carried no flowers. The nurses who spotted them knew they could only be visiting one patient. It had to be the one with the smashed wrist, which had been acquired after climbing up a drainpipe. It gave way and cast him down by a dark basement door, below the steep stone steps to the main entrance of the block.
One of the nurses brought in a plate of triangular ham sandwiches for the patient’s tea. The inhabitants of the coats sat on and around his bed. He shared the room on the ward with a couple of elderly men in bathrobes. They shuffled in and out.
The pair seemed to be looking for something, in the background, as the patient recounted what had happened to his wired-up wrist, as the eyes on and around the bed watched the good hand find the barest two triangles of bread, lay them out face up, and then methodically extract all the ham triangles from the others in order to stick them in between those two.
“They use industrial butter in here,” he explained.
Then he got one of the visitors to pour a soft drink into a plastic cup in order to wash that one thick triangle down. When finally allowed liquids after the operation, he’d polished off a couple of two-litre bottles of lemonade in the space of fifteen minutes.
Next a female visitor entered. Space was made for her at the foot of the bed. His girlfriend revealed she had told his father the truth – it had been her window over the ledge by which the drainpipe had given way – but the patient in the bed equably rationalized this confession. Damage done, there was nothing he could do about it now.
“Oh, it’s OK. I’m sure if somebody didn’t tell him he would have smelled a rather large rodent.”
The elderly men in the background were by now beginning to get a little agitated. They were looking for something.
“What’s wrong with those two?” whispered one of the visitors.
“They’re looking for the remote. They want to watch Glenroe.”
Watching the Sunday night soap was a simple pleasure, not to be missed.
“Eh, have you any notion where it is?”
“I’m sitting on it.”
The patient explained the apparent meanness of this concealment in a further murmur.
“At seven this morning the guy on the left there decided to empty his colostomy bag.”
Heads recoiled from the bed in distaste.
“While I was having my egg.”
Dr. John Flynn 