Chapter 1 - Class Erection 1984
The year was 1984 and the future was bleak. Not bleak in an ‘Orwellian, dystopian, relentlessly unrelenting’ kind of way. More ‘bleak for the next little while’ kind of way. Short term bleakness. Thirty minutes tops.
So picture the scene: a teenage boy in a North Dublin secondary school. A sixth year, 17 years old, crammed into a desk barely large enough for a first year. John Lydon, a foot taller and three stone heavier than he probably should be. And almost definitely not a sex pistol. Isn’t that the problem with famous people becoming famous after you’ve already made your own entrance into the world? That old baptismal nomenclature of choice coming back to haunt? For nine years give or take, JR had lived a relatively trouble-free existence (well ok, moniker wise anyway) until BANG 1976 awakened popular music from its six-year progressive/glam rock induced slumber and this flame-haired lunatic from another planet began ranting raucously about ‘cants’ and telling everybody to fuck off. But it was The Sex Pistols after all so not that troublesome for JR really. There was an audacious rebelliousness to the whole thing so instead of being embarrassed by it he was instead quite proud of the fact that he was in some small way ‘connected’ to them, however innocuous the link might be.
But moving on from that in a semi-related kind of way; is there really any excuse for parents to be such complete arses when it comes to choosing names for their offspring? Paul McCartney from Longford knew a thing or two about that. Paul was born in 1969. I mean seriously, where had his parents been living until then, under a fucking rock? So the school (and by the school I mean of course the kids) universally deemed John Lydon to be a little unfortunate on the name front but not unfavourably so in any meaningful way. The whole issue was beyond his control and besides, Johnny Rotten was the dog’s bollocks so what was not to like? McCartney however quickly found himself on the receiving end of a pretty merciless plethora of wedgies, nurples, wet willies and/or any other such form of wanton playground torture conceived by random juveniles within his general vicinity. It became open season on the poor bastard before long and all as a result of the fact that his culturally challenged parents had burdened him criminally from the outset. Their staggeringly below par knowledge of popular late twentieth century music would lead to a lifetime sentence of derision and ridicule for McCartney. Yes of course they should have known who The Beatles were but didn’t. Ergo, they were halfwits. Ergo, McCartney was a halfwit. Not fair I know but then again neither is the hair on a gorilla’s arse. That’s just the way it goes in the teenage stratosphere. It’s not supposed to make sense. Fair enough so the whole thing was out of McCartney’s control also, but he was such an annoying little bastard that general berating and castigation would doubtless have been the order of the day anyway, no matter what his parents had deigned to call him all those years ago. They called him Paul McCartney though. Not John Lydon. So there it was really. If you broke it all down into nicely compartmentalised snippets of the whys and wherefores and how everything eventually came to pass, the two boys’ respective popularity was probably as simple as choosing which figure from popular culture you’d rather be if someone was to put you on the spot and actually ask you. So what about it then? Who would you rather be? Think about it. John Lydon or Paul McCartney? I think we all know the answer to that one. As questions go in fact it’s as undeniably rhetorical as they come. Hardly worth even posing really when you sit back and weigh it all up.
But that’s not the story. As a matter of fact it’s completely unrelated to the story. Other than to explain to you how JR got his nickname.
So yeah. The story.
I’ve known JR a long time. We met as teary-eyed four-year-olds on our first day of primary school, both nonplussed in our infantile way as to who this loud, ghoulish and ‘as far as you could possibly imagine from being maternal’ tyrant was; stationed implacably and stone-faced at the head of the room. A crazed and maniacal harpy whose apparent speciality was to rant and gyrate about the room with as much fear-inducing menace as she could muster, terrorising confused and defenceless children with impunity as she went about her business. Why she was yelling and screaming like this was a complete and total mystery to us but we reasoned in later years that her total irrationality was probably brought on by an all-encompassing absence of any discernible competence in her chosen profession. We were eventually obliged to take our seats on this first day anyway, but poor JR was so large even then that he was ordered to sit to the side where the children usually took their lunch, a little bit off to the left of where the rest of us were situated, just next to where the lukewarm milk and processed corned beef sandwiches the Department of Education had provided were haphazardly scattered in see-through plastic wrapping on the floor. Perched like that above everyone else served merely to give the impression that he was even larger and taller than he actually was so psychologically not that great a start for him in fairness. If Adler was alive today he’d be spinning in his grave! He ended up sitting adjacent to me in the end anyway and from then until the day the following events unfolded we’ve been mostly inseparable. These ‘following events’ I refer to by the way take place in Double Maths in 1984, and JR as I mentioned before, had forced his oversized girth into an undersized desk. He was almost certainly in some kind of a precarious predicament also, which I could ascertain clearly from the look of misery that was etched across his youthful visage. The reasons for which as yet, were unknown to me.
“Psst,” I whispered over. “JR! What’s the problemo?”
He shushed my attentions away with a sharp and surreptitious swish of the hand. Indicating definitively that he was not desirous of any undue attention being brought upon him from the top of the class. You don’t ever want any undue attention to be brought upon yourself from the top of any class but particularly so here. Put plainly, Brother Anthony was a raving lunatic which aligned him I suppose to a group that was constituted of well over 50% of the Christian Brothers ‘working’ in the educational ‘system’ at the time. More than half of these nutjobs were actual sociopaths, so when you add that to the considerable crew of lay teachers dotted around who were madmen also, it was pretty clear and definitive proof of the fact that evolution can indeed go in reverse. It made for a pretty torrid time as well if you were attempting to endure a relatively peaceful existence as a teenager in a North Dublin comprehensive secondary school in 1984.
So let’s get to the nub of the problem then shall we? Straight to the point as they say. If you’ve ever been a 17-year-old boy you’ll almost certainly be aware of the scenario I’m about to present but if not you almost certainly won’t. But it should hopefully be a source of amusement to you all the same.
Let me begin so by verifying the undeniable truism that impromptu erections are pretty much, 100% of the time that is, unwelcome in all public places. And that bus and train journeys can and will exacerbate very badly your already dicey situation. It’s the vibrations you see. The erections can be as random and untimely as to be absurd also, that is when there’s an absolute abundance of punters in your immediate environs. They may strike at any moment and in any jurisdiction and are by no means also brought on by contemplations of a sexual nature. They often just arrive unannounced for no clear or obvious reason. A bumpy bus or train journey will almost always aggravate the problem further, as I’ve said already, with the uneven nature of your journey being of considerable nuisance value to you as you embroil yourself in the painstaking and ‘much concentration required’ process of retrieving images of the most asexual nature from your cerebral arsenal to combat your increasingly worsening state of affairs. These images must be the grimiest musings imaginable and of a grotesque enough nature to counter the exponentially deteriorating situation. You know the kind of thing. Sucking warm diarrhoea from a pig farmer’s sock. Or sticking pins in your eyes.
More often than not however everything imagined is futile. So if you’re heading into the city centre on a 29A, you could quite conceivably be required to wait until everyone gets off on Marlborough Street before you can even think about alighting from the vehicle yourself. And if you’re on a Dart you may end up in even choppier waters. I’ve heard of poor bastards looking to get off in Tara Street but travelling ten stations further on then to Dun Laoghaire before they felt even remotely confident about any kind of inconspicuous or vertical gait.
But it isn’t all bad news my friends so don’t worry. There are measures you can put into effect that can make things marginally more bearable. They don’t always work of course but are definitely worth a shot if your situation becomes unendurable. First of all you must wait until everyone’s looking the other way. Your next move then will involve a split-second contortion which could potentially raise an unsuspecting eyebrow here and there. Be prepared for this. If your move is executed in the correct fashion however, the vast majority will return to their newspapers or magazines or whatever, assuming hopefully that you just have a bit of an issue with random and uncontrollable spasms. The whole thing is all about delivery and timing to be honest; but then again isn’t everything in life?
So the trick is this. With one swift move of your right hand you must reach down to the sock on your left foot and pull it very sharply further up your shin. This action must be carried out with clear and purposeful exactitude and your facial features must wear an expression that says that your life might possibly have ended if you hadn’t been able to pull that sock up in that exact way at that precise moment in time. Your look must be pained. At the same time as your right hand is carrying out this part of the operation, your left hand, in an act of the most clandestine dexterity, must reach inwards towards your general crotch area and push the erectile offender into a completely upright position, ensuring that it now rests against the top inside part of your fly or belt area. You can complete your journey now in the peaceful knowledge that even though your knob stings like absolute fuck right now you will henceforth not be the laughing stock of the bus or train going proletariat today. Your militarily precise manoeuvre has saved the day and you can alight at your leisure now, whenever you choose to do so.
So back to JR’s similarly damnable predicament. It had taken me a minute or two to grasp the situation but I could see now that this was the very problem he was at present confronting.
So we must now at this seemingly inopportune time consider the whole notion of being in love. ‘Why now?’ you ask and well you might. JR is in an emergency quandary of the stickiest nature and you’re throwing this whole Mills and Boon shit at us? What gives dude? Well OK as untimely as it all may seem, it is of critical importance that you to consider the following. That most teenage boys between the ages of 12 and 17 develop crushes on practically every girl they encounter at all times of the day, 24/7, 365 days of the year. A simple statement of fact really, and no less true of JR then than anyone else who had come or gone before. At this present juncture in time in fact, JR had a crush on at least six of the girls in the class, all of whom were present and accounted for on the infamous day.
“Fortune, ye little FECK! What the feck are you doing?”
Shit. I’d been rumbled. Bubble had ears like Lindsay fucking Wagner. Brother Anthony was known to us as ‘Bubble’ which as a nickname was an uncompromising reference to the generally corpulent nature of his overall carriage. Put more colloquially though, I suppose I could just cut to the chase and call him a fat bastard.
“Nothing sir. I was just saying something to JR, sorry, John Lydon there sir,” I said, pointing fixedly at JR. Actually pointing at him. Rotating my outstretched forefinger around a few times also in the air in front of me for, you know, effect. I mean seriously. What a complete fucking jerk? Knowing what I knew about his bulging midriff.
And confounding that with:
“And it wasn’t me sir. He started it.” Which was a complete lie of course. Again, like I said; a complete fucking jerk.
What you need to take on board here now so, is that most teenagers by and large are totally spineless bastards. And that includes me of course at the very top of the list. I don’t know why this is to be honest, something Darwinian perhaps, but there was absolutely no way in hell that I was getting nabbed here. No matter what I had to do or say to get out of it. Bubble was as unstable as they come so whomever he chose to drag to the top of the class today would almost certainly be in for an unquestionably torrid time. And there he was. My best pal. Sitting directly across from me with a boner to beat all boners and no way on earth he can even think about standing up without the whole class seeing it for what it was. And there I was. Still not prepared to take the fall for him even though I was patently aware of his totally drastic situation. Like I said. Spineless. Another issue to consider also was the fact that Bubble absolutely detested JR, but for some unclear reason had a semi-begrudging fondness for me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but if I’m being totally truthful with you, I’d probably have to admit that it might perhaps have been related to a fervid desire on his part for the two of us to partake in mutually beneficial acts of a deviant nature ’behind the bike sheds’ as they say. So following on from that it was probably 70/30 ‘for’ that JR was in line for a call up. But I wasn’t taking any chances on it just in case. Hence my lowbrow and underhanded tactics.
“Right,” said Bubble. “It’s Lydon again, haw? Up here now Lydon ye little feckin’ feck!”
‘Little’ was not the operative word here really, which Bubble realised as soon as he’d said it, which in turn made him even madder. It didn’t take much for this guy to lose it to be honest but that’s chastity for you right? The brothers and the nuns all lived in the same house behind the school near the Raheny Road, and I’d always maintained that if just one of them had the foresight to buy a litre of Black Bush in the offy on the way home and you know, let things take their natural course, that the whole situation might have ended up a whole lot funkier chez maison clergé. A loosening of a collar here and a removal of a wimple there and before you knew it there’d be a fresh and breezy air of bon vivant about the place. Common sense would waft through the house like a Sirocco on a humid day and all as a result of one or two liberally poured Shirley Bassey’s at the end of a long and tiring shift at the seat of learning. In no time at all the brothers and the sisters would be hopping about the corridors of the old alma mater, sprightly young gazelles one and all, high fiving unsuspecting students for no apparent reason and singing ‘Celebration’ by Kool and the Gang http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M It’s been said before but I’ll say it again. Relatively regular sexual encounters almost always represent remarkably positive fillips for the soul. Anything else is unnatural. And sure wasn’t Jesus riding Mary Magdalene as well? OK well maybe not. But it’s fun to say it all the same just to watch the pious faces contort with horror.
But I digress. The problem looming for JR was unenviable. It was twofold as I saw it and a fairly complicated conundrum to unravel for even the best of minds. The first element of it was this: if he was to be called up by Bubble (which as you know was already the case) how was he supposed to get to the top of the class without anyone seeing the trouser tent? The second part of the dilemma was how he would take the shit that was sure to be doled out by Bubble in whatever form that might take, and then make it back to his seat without any of the ruses he might have employed to avert the imminent catastrophe being uncovered by all or any of the populace in attendance – including the six or more objects of his desire that were dotted here and there throughout the classroom.
So Act 1, Scene 1. Getting his lumbering torso out of the desk. If we refer to the solution outlined before, i.e., the bus/train scenario, you can readily conclude that even though things looked fairly ominous, he did have a vaguely outside chance of getting away with it if he applied himself correctly. One must always be prepared to see things from a different perspective you know, adapt and survive and all that, and JR was a smart and resourceful guy at the best of times. So all was not, as yet, lost. In true McGyver fashion so he had a quick look around his general person to assess what tools he had at his disposal. A quick itinerary revealed a black ballpoint pen, an A4 foolscap pad, a similarly sized Maths text book, a protractor and a compass. Meagre enough fare really, but provisions of a kind at least. And something is always better than nothing right?
What to do though, what to do? Protractor, useless. Writing pad, semi-useless. Textbook, semi-useless. Pen and compass his best options almost definitely, but how? He was up against it and time was not on his side. I reckoned he could stall Bubble for twenty, maybe thirty seconds tops, before the lunatic lost it big time and started throwing dusters. Oh yeah and one other thing. When I talk about compasses here I’m not referring to those circular, magnetic gizmos that seafaring and orienteering types can’t do without. A mathematical compass is a technical drawing device that’s used for drawing arcs and circles and the like. So of absolutely zero use to you if you happen to be at the top of a mountain and a dense fog is forming around your feet. As a matter of fact if you’d offered one to Magellan before he set out on his trail-blazing journey to the Pacific, there’s a fairly good chance he’d have poked you in the eye with it for being such a fucking halfwit. Which would have been decidedly unfortunate for you as it goes, as the mathematical compass has two needle-sharp points at the end of both of its’ arms. So a poke in the eye with one of these won’t be the nicest thing that’s ever happened to you. This particular compass gizmo has a cylindrical slot attached to one of its arms also, through which you’re supposed to slot a pencil for drawing curves onto paper. All of which is mostly irrelevant by the way, especially when we reconsider JR’s enduringly dodgy predicament. A point not irrelevant however was the sharp one I’ve referred to already at the end of JR’s compass. An excellent design feature indeed, the potential merits of which were becoming increasingly more noticeable to JR the more he perused and weighed up his options. He wasn’t entirely sure how the compass would assist but knew that he had about fifteen seconds or so at best to figure it out. He was growing in confidence though from what I could see, and a plan was definitely formulating in his mind. In order to get himself out of the chair he was essentially wearing, without the whole class observing his acute dilemma, he concluded that the only way he could ensure that this present debacle might have any chance of arriving at an ultimately successful conclusion would be to deploy some kind of a decoy. Without further delay so, and with a level of execution not seen before on any glorious battlefield of yesteryear, he put his elaborate plan into action.
Timing was critical. Timing was everything. With great mental fortitude he grasped the compass in his left hand and stabbed Paul McCartney in the back. McCartney squealed in pain as JR dropped his compass back onto his desk, before grabbing his maths text book with the same hand. He squeezed his considerable frame out of his seat then, and with his free right hand made a furtive adjustment to his erect penis with his fingers and his thumb. Now standing, JR shielded his crotch with the text book and strode confidently in the direction of the psychotic cleric.
The whole procedure went like clockwork. So much so in fact that even McCartney hadn’t realised that the sharp pain in his back had actually been caused by JR’s compass. Besides McCartney’s protests to Bubble so, about something he could neither explain nor blame on anybody else, the whole thing went off rather swimmingly.
But this was only half the battle with foreboding and general apprehension still present in considerable spades. JR still had a fuming Christian Brother to contend with and McCartney’s shrieks weren’t lightening the mood either.
“McCartney, if you don’t shut the feck up, I won’t be held responsible…” Bubble glowered.
“But sir, I have a pain in…” moaned McCartney, before being shot down decisively and definitively.
“McCartney! If you don’t shut it I’ll leather you ‘til your mother thinks you spent the day at Dollymount without your Ambre Solaire!”
Silence reigned in the classroom eventually as McCartney realised he was getting nowhere fast. Bubble refocused his attention on to JR who was standing in front of him now with the Maths text book still placed strategically across his front.
“Right then Lydon, ye feckin’ scut,” he hissed. “I’m not going to waste your time and you’re not going to waste mine. I will ask you one question and by Jesus you’d better get it right. Otherwise there’ll be hell to pay, so help me God!”
“Yes sir,” said JR. Not a great retort admittedly but under these fairly extenuating circumstances, pretty impressive I think that he could speak at all.
“OK then,” Bubble continued, regaining some composure. “Tell me now Lydon, if you add A2 + B2, what do you get?” He spoke slowly and with purpose. But something dark was a-brewing. You could tell.
“What sir?” said JR, not really listening to him now as things were. Which was mainly as a result of his attempts to will his erect penis into a state of flaccidness by imagining Bubble taking a shit. Which was a risky enough strategy for sure. Bubble was a loose cannon as I’ve said already, but JR had to try something, anything really, to turn the tide. The ongoing issue in his pants was still very much extant. He needed to channel his mental efforts on to just one thing alone so made a conscious effort to focus in the short term on this attempted deflation of his continually burgeoning lunch box. An answer would have to wait.
“You answer me now Lydon or I’ll leather you, so help me God,” continued Bubble, who was shifting excitedly now from foot to foot as he spoke. Not a good sign. Not a good sign at all. Ominous. He was gearing up for something.
So if you ask any mother anywhere in the world across the centuries and down through the annals of time, they’ll all tell you the same thing: that a growing teenage lad really is quite something to behold. This is based primarily on the amount of clothes they go through over a ridiculously short period of time and Mrs Lydon was certainly no exception to this rule. Quite the opposite in fact. These were recessionary times and mothers would usually push it to the nth degree if they could get away with it. Families were large in the 80s so we’re not talking about one or two kids here. It usually hovered around the five or six mark at least and was very often a lot more. The point being anyway, that on the day in question JR was modelling garb that was fully two sizes too small for him. His trouser legs were three inches higher than they should have been and the waist area – notwithstanding his current predicament – was barely held together by the most meagre of clasps and makeshift zips imaginable. It wasn’t anyone’s fault per se, but that was the situation as it was. So not ideal. Particularly when JR’s primary goal at present was to seem as inconspicuous as possible to anyone looking on. His vision of an imaginary turd leaving Bubble’s arse wasn’t improving his situation either, so he knew now that at this stage in the proceedings that he’d probably have to have a stab at some kind of an answer. And while he stood there considering that, having barely understood or even heard the question in the first place, he became convinced of one thing and one thing alone: that if he got this question wrong Bubble would be coming down on him hard. The brother was at least a foot smaller than him but that didn’t matter. He packed one hell of a punch when his back was up. JR was usually pretty fearless but in his current disadvantaged position, he could ill afford to be taking any chances dodging this crazed man of the cloth around the room. Particularly when at any moment his whole ensemble might fall asunder leaving him standing there in all his glory with nothing to cover his decency but a tattered old Maths text book. So he chose his words carefully.
“A2 sir,”