Call Me the Breeze Read Free Page B

Eamon had sent to me. ‘Check this out,’ he’d written. ‘He used to play with The Fugs.’ I thought he meant Charlie Manson but it was the author he was talking about.
    The more I went through it the more sympathy I had for Manson. In the beginning his ideas were kind of OK. Called himself The Gardener and collected all the flower people. Maybe if the karma hadn’t gone wrong, things might have worked out different. Who knows how it would have ended up? It was just that old karma going wrong, that’s all. It was a pity but that’s the way things are sometimes. They just go kind of astray. The karma gets … I don’t know, turned inside out, I guess. According to Ed Sanders, he was a really good player. Guitarist, I mean. Maybe if the recording contract had come through, that might have turned things around. But it didn’t. A shame. Yeah. ‘I’m The Gardener. I collect flowers. I see they get light and then I watch them grow’ he used to say to people as he drifted along the road. In the days when the karma was good. I wrote a short little lyric in the pub, just scribbled it there on a beer mat to pass the time when there was no one around. It’s just called ‘The Gardener’ or ‘Song for Charlie’.
    They call him The Gardener
    The flowers he collects are people
    They bloom in the Californian sun
    His name is Charlie, he lived out in the desert
    Charlie, Charlie, garden while you can.
Easing Up
    When I told Boo Boo I’d been thinking of easing up on things he said that it was a good idea, especially the acid, he reckoned. Then he said he was going down to Glenamaddy at the weekend. ‘I have to pick upan echo box,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to check out some support gigs with the showbands.’
    ‘Good thinking, Boo!’ I said, but I wasn’t really thinking about that. In fact, all I could think about was how great it was that we were all getting ourselves together. Not that we’d been doing all that bad, but you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a bar sweeping floors and scouring glasses. I went down to another practice and the boys were coming on great. They’d managed to get an interview with Dave G on community radio. Also Boo Boo and Chico came back from Glenamaddy at the weekend and said they reckoned there’d be no problem — as regards the showband gigs, that is.
    My heart was beating fast all evening in the bar just waiting for Jacy but in the end she never showed and later on that night I heard them saying she’d gone to Dublin. I know I shouldn’t have dropped the acid tab but I was so disappointed that I -
    But then the electric tingles started at the tips of my toes and before I knew it I was as happy as Larry.
Barbarella’s
    The pub was going great guns now, after the disco and the building and all was finished. The best of it all was the big paved enclosure in between the old bar and the new, the bit they called The Courtyard. They were going to have all sorts of functions in it, they said. The disco was stuffed nearly every weekend. I often went in for a few jars after work, admiring the decor and whatnot — neon strip lighting, a flashing multicoloured glass floor. About as up-to-the-minute as you could get. It sort of provided comfortable surroundings for the way you’d be thinking. About how you were going to break it to Mona, etc. The words you would use, what exactly it was you were going to say. It was like Austie’s place and the way it had gone — an old-fashioned bar outliving its time and inevitably giving way to the new. ‘Like I mean, Mona,’ I said to myself, ‘who would have ever believed there’d be a place like Barbarella’s in Scotsfield? Things change. It’s the way it is.’ ‘We can still be friends,’ you could hear her saying, nervously adding: ‘Can’t we?’
    ‘Of course we can,’ I’d reply. ‘That was never going to be an issue. It was never on the cards, baby. You know?’
    It would be good saying that and I felt so good