Call Me the Breeze Read Free

Lady
’.
    ‘A pint of Guinness,’ she said, and it was like I was kind of swaying in space.
    Afterwards, when I went home, I thought of her all night.
The One
, was all I could think, for that was how she seemed:
The One who is The Only One
.
30 June 1976
    In Dublin today to score some acid but Boo Boo didn’t have any. Said he’d be getting some at the weekend, that one of the guys he busks with is definitely scoring — windowpane, I think. So we just had a spliff and rapped about her and things in general. ‘She sounds like a cool fucking chick,’ he said and started what was probably the only argument I ever had with Boo
.
    ‘
I don’t like you saying “fucking”, Boo Boo,’ I said. ‘Not when you’re talking about her
.’
    There was a bomb scare in the Film Centre during
Taxi Driver
but it turned out to be a hoax, not that it would have made any difference for we were too out of it to know what was going on. After that we went to Zhivago’s to get more wine. Boo Boo met some doll he knew and she asked us back to her place for more booze and who knew what else. What else, as it turned out, being mostly Boo Boo blathering on about his band and what they were going to do, world domination starts fucking here. ‘You’ve heard The Sonics,’ he says
.
    ‘You’ve heard The Voidoids, The Mojos.’ He cupped his hands and blew the jay: ‘But, baby, you’ve heard nothing.’ The last thing I heard was him saying: ‘And that man there — Big Joey — he’s gonna be our roadie!’
Murder in Sandyford
    I remember getting back early the next morning with a fucking ripper of a hangover. It was around eleven when I hopped off the bus and made straight for the pub. Austie gave me an unmerciful slap on the back as I sat at the bar digging into a steak and kidney pie — I always seemed to want to eat whenever I got nervous or excited. He said: ‘Jasus but you’re the happy-looking boy! Did you have a good time in Dublin?’
    ‘Sure,’ I said. All I kept thinking of while he was talking was the album — the one I got ‘her’. Wondering would she like it. It was called
The Only One
by a band I’d never heard of — Spontaneous Apple Conclusion. I had come upon it completely by accident.
Which is a load of nonsense
, I thought,
for nothing ever happens entirely by accident
.
    ‘Will you like it, Jacy?’ I asked myself.
    I didn’t even even have to ask. I knew she would. Of course she would. The Only One. She who is …
    The Only One, she who is —
the only one,
driving beneath the Californian sun.
    I wasn’t listening very carefully to what Austie was saying now. But you could see that it was serious. He was telling me about the British Ambassador and his secretary. They had both been killed in Sandyford — blown up by a landmine.
    ‘A crater twenty-feet wide,’ he said. ‘Now we’ll be fucking for it. After the salesman, we’ll be fucking tormented, we will. They’re convinced they’re all hiding out here! Fucking Provos — they’re going to ruin my business! Why don’t they all get around a table and settle it all, pack of fucking —!’
3 July 1976 (late a.m.) Thoughts/Reflections to Self …
    Some of the things I’m asked to do I don’t like them any more, even though I used to look forward to them. I don’t have a problem admitting that. But it’s different now. Ever since Jacy all of that has changed. Now all I want to do is say: ‘Go away, Mona, don’t come near me tonight, don’t ask me to
-’
    But she always gets around me, standing there with that crooked smile she has whenever she’s been drinking. Running her fingers through my hair and
-
    She lifts her own skirt up. Ever so slowly, till it billows around your head like a parachute. And then it comes — that blissful feeling. When you put your thumb in your mouth and you see the glittering stretch of water with her just standing beside it, staring off out to the horizon. She doesn’t speak but you know what she’s