“So these are your buddies yeah?” she continued.
“Yep,” JR responded. “Here they are. The ugly pack o’ fucks!”
Charming. Thanks JR! She looked us up and down and seemed reasonably impressed. OK well maybe not that impressed but certainly not overly disappointed. Her fidgety friends were giving us the once over also, and the overall reception whereas not especially exuberant, was far from being as negative as we’d imagined it might. As I said, things were looking up. The facial golf ball got a few glances for sure but nobody recoiled with any major degree of disgust. So that was a good enough start. At this point I was wondering which one of them was the infamous Gladys, but if I’m totally honest with you I didn’t really care too much. They were all OK to some degree. One or two were better than one or two others but beggars can’t be choosers, do you know what I mean? JR must have read my mind as he piped up again in his usual inimitable fashion.
“So which one’s Gladys then Jenners?” he said, looking her companions up and down with a degree more forensic attention than was perhaps necessary or warranted. “See Freak Show here?” he continued vulgarly, pointing at my crotch. “He’s got a massive boner for her already!”
A tad juvenile of course but I let it go. And besides he wasn’t entirely wrong. That old hair flick thing of Jenny’s had raised a flicker of its own down below.
“Ahh, she’ll be back in a minute,” said Jenny, laughing momentarily at his little joke, “she’s just gone off to the loo.”
I can’t say to you that I was overly worried as such right then, but I was definitely conscious of a growing sense of mild concern stirring within me. Was this Gladys character the ugly duckling of the piece? There’s always one you know. Where was she exactly? Was the ‘loo’ a conniving metaphor for ‘gone to clean out the buffet?’ Just then a grave feeling of dread actually did come over me. You know that sixth sense when you’re absolutely certain that something drastic is about to occur but aren’t quite sure what it is yet exactly? I thought that I’d imagined it at the time also, but I was almost certain that in addition to this general feeling of foreboding, another other-worldly kind of supernatural shadow had cast its sombre breadth over proceedings. As it happens, this turned out afterwards to be just that - a shadow. But not of a supernatural nature in any way, shape or form. Just your everyday common or garden shadow. An inordinately big one though. Which believe it or believe it not, belonged to an actual person.
Were my initial fears moments earlier about to be realised? It would seem so. To make matters worse also, the guys were having a good old snigger at my expense, with boorish guffawing and derisory insults the general order of the day. Something was definitely not kosher. I still wasn’t certain what the mockery was at this precise juncture, but was certain all the same that the ultimate outcome was not looking overly favourable for yours truly. It wasn’t the boner issue either as my buddies’ eyes seemed to be trained on some other target beyond me rather than on my rapidly expanding nether region. The bastards were queuing up to have a pop at me now, with things very soon going from decidedly bad to a whole lot worse.
Marcus weighed in first by tapping me on the shoulder and unleashing the following opening salvo:
“Johnny my old friend, I don’t mean to alarm you but I feel the need to inform you of recent events that have taken place in the celestial stratosphere. You may or may not be aware of this but earlier this evening an intergalactic explosion of gigantic proportions occurred adjacent to the ring system of the planet Saturn, leading to a very unfortunate shifting of one of its larger type moons, Titan I think, from its lunar orbit. This truly seismic event resulted in said moon being catapulted off into the far reaches of the galaxy where it eventually and subsequently re-aligned itself onto an altogether new orbit, quite coincidentally next to our very own dear planet Earth. To make matters worse my friend, this very moon is rolling up behind you right now in this dancehall in North County Dublin. It is also for some inexplicable reason, sucking ferociously on a foot long hot dog!”
More was to follow. Stretch chipped in.
“Johnny, what I’m about to say may unease you somewhat. There seems however to be a hippopotamus in leggings coming your way. Also the area between its’ chin and general shoulder area seems to be devoid of any, oh what's that word I'm looking for, it'll come to me, it’ll come to me. Oh yes. I have it now. Neck.”
And so on and so forth. Random dudes in the vicinity were weighing in too. Here are some of my personal favourites.
“Hey, Freak Show, I’d hate to see your bird’s face if the cake shop burned down!” And “Hey bollock features, tell your mot to take the chipper off her speed dial!” And “Ha ha, ye chubby chasing wanker, don’t forget to slap it on the arse later and come on the waves!” And “Ha ha numb nuts, forget everlasting gobstoppers, your bird stole an everlasting cream bun off Willy Wonka!”
And so on and so forth.
So there I was, resigned to the fact that another grossly unedifying disaster was looming. I hadn’t even seen Gladys yet but knew already from the sustained level of abuse coming my way, that portliness was a potentially understated description of her girth. I bit the bullet so and turned to face her. I was expecting the worst. What I was not expecting though was a 7 foot tall red headed atrocity, who’d decided earlier that evening that it was apparently OK to leave the house wearing white three quarter length leggings of the most dubious nature. Additionally there was a really quite extreme camel toe situation going on. Extreme. OK so as you probably know from before I tend to have slightly peculiar musings when situations become testing or weird. Which led now to my being rather bizarrely transported back momentarily to an English class that had taken place the week before, when we’d all been ponderously slogging through one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the one numbered 18 out of 154. I found myself now replacing the first words in that most celebrated of poems so that instead of it reading ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ it was rewritten now in my wandering mind as ‘Shall I compare thee to Dublin Bay?’ Gladys really was a sight to behold. As in building sight! Ha! I laugh now you see but with a sombre sense of hollow irony. It occurred to me then also that this ‘Hot Dog Gladys’ nickname that others had apparently bestowed upon her was possibly less related to her desire for fellatio as intimated by JR, and more to do with a raging penchant for guzzling down truckloads of the standard American classic. She had arrived eating one after all.
JR was not best pleased at how everything was panning out either, and right now was giving Jenny the absolute daggers. He was happy enough to take the piss out of me regarding unintentional boners but he did still have a reputation to uphold when it came to his matchmaking prowess. OK so he hadn’t exactly assumed that Gladys would be a page three model, but he did think that the very least he could have expected from Jenny was some kind of warning as to the magnitude of the subject in question.
“For fuck sake Jenny!” he said bitterly, shaking his head with genuine disappointment.
“What lover?” said Jenny, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Gladys is it? Come on now, give her a break lover, she’s just big boned. Oh yeah and I think she has some sort of thyroid issue as well now that I come to think of it.”
Which was complete and total bollocks. Gladys just liked eating pies. All the pies. So the next time you hear anyone singing that song ‘Who ate all the pies?’ you’ll know exactly who it was. It was Gladys. Gladys ate all the pies. And besides, that whole thyroid thing is an absolute crock as well. The last time I checked, people who stop eating lose weight. It’s simple enough really and related I believe to basic metabolic principles.
So Gladys eventually wandered over to where we were standing and our perilous scene was set. Rudimentary hellos were meted out amongst the girls and chuckles and sneers abounded aplenty amongst the boys. It was hard to imagine things getting any worse to be honest but believe or not, that’s exactly what happened. I don’t want to sound overly downbeat here right now but I was definitely thinking then that it was surely about time that someone else took a bit of the shit for a while. But no, it wasn’t to be. Providence determined once again that yours truly would be in for more of the same for the foreseeable.
“So where is he then Jennikins?” said Gladys loudly, and not without an impressive degree of confidence. I don’t know why but I think I imagined that before she spoke that someone this big, with the amount of piss-taking she must surely have had to endure for God knows how long, would have long since before tonight been whittled down to a shell of a nervous wreck and incapable of surviving any major length of time in any given social situation. But no. Quite the opposite it would seem. She was ballsy to a tee. And referring to me also obviously, which brought home with even greater resonance the precarious situation I was presently in. I suppose I thought that she’d be too nervous to talk or even communicate but this was clearly not the case. Johnny Freak Show was in her sights and she was looking for action. So Jenny pointed me out and the Valkyrie began to look me up and down, checking me out with as much brazenness as you like.
I’ve mentioned the dreaded providence before and here it came again. Conspiring once more to poke its nosey old beak into my affairs. Up until then the music had been pretty upbeat (a ska medley if I remember it correctly) but what do you think the Gods contrived to do just then? To put me in an even trickier fix than I was already in? Throw a slow set into the mix that's what! The bastards! Just what the doctor fucking ordered! Without further ado so Gladys dragged me by the hand to the dance floor and threw her Christmas ham arms around me. One of giant hands had enveloped mine so even if I’d wanted to pull back or make an attempt to escape I was practically off the ground before I realised what was happening. She entrapped me on the dance floor then in a kind of a bear hug, and it was all that I could do after that to just continue breathing. To make matters worse also, the tune that was playing at the time was a real tear jerker, ‘Stay with me ‘til dawn’ by Judy Tzuke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLfNkwLr1U. Which as you probably know is a song that’s strictly boyfriend /girlfriend material and definitely not at all for two people who’ve just met and have no specific ‘understanding’ as it were. We’re talking heart-rendering chords here, to inspire and encourage a couple to stare blissfully into each other’s doleful eyes; and for knowing glances to bounce back and forth then as they verify soundlessly what they and only they know to be the truth. That there’ll be Nat King Cole to be had later tonight, nothing surer. Absolutely guaranteed.
So here’s a truism for you to digest folks. A fit of giggles is never that good an idea if you have a golf ball sized boil attached to the side of your face. Let’s leave that to one side for the moment however and come back to it later. It had got to the point now where Gladys was grabbing me so tightly that my face was upturned towards her jaw with my chin jabbing hard onto the upslope of her monstrously sized bosom. Lodged there basically. To anyone looking on it might have seemed like we were gazing into each other’s eyes lovingly and perhaps a stone’s throw away even from a gentle whispering of sweet nothings into our respective ears. The reality of the situation however was quite the opposite. I was petrified to a frazzle and willing the earth to open up and envelop me as quickly as possible into its welcoming depths. The most pressing problem for me however was the relentless ribbing I was still on the receiving end of from the lads. I could feel the giggles coming but was aware also that if I laughed too hard, the boil was almost certainly liable to blow. But they kept it up and up to a point where I was finding it practically impossible now to control the muscles in my face. Their jibes were relentless and arriving thick and fast. Here are some of my personal favourites.
“Freak Show, ha ha, ye jaysus muppet! So if you want to know what your ride will be like later, just imagine yourself throwing a sausage up O’Connell Street!”
And..
“Ha ha, ye fucking clown Johnny, don’t forget to stop off in the bakers on the way home for a bag of flour. How else will you find the wet spot? Dick features!”
And so on and so forth.
Believe it or believe it not even worse again was still to come. I hadn’t reckoned on Gladys’s amorous public persona, but was about to find out now how unequivocally wrong that languid presumption actually was. Hard enough as it was to keep a straight face while all of the above was going on, it soon became nigh on impossible to maintain that composure. Especially after she moved her chubby mitts downwards and rested them on to both of the cheeks of my arse. I just about managed to keep it together though. Just. The leers and cheers were getting louder however and when she moved her right hand around and pushed it under my belt and onto my sausage and two veg, well the noise became quite honestly, indescribably loud. Some fucker started a chant as well, I’m not sure who, but to the tune of ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go,’ this smartarse began to sing the following: “Wank him off, wank him off, wank him off. Wank him off, wank him off, wank him awwww- offfff!”
Which of course was the tipping point.
My face couldn’t hold it together any longer and the giggles, which were akin to a kind of temporary insanity, were let loose in all of their glory. OK so giggles themselves aren’t much to write home about really, I mean what’s the big deal there you might ask? Align that however with the fact that the largest boil in the northern hemisphere is being held together on my cheek by the thinnest of membranes and the situation really does become quite doomful. Rather than feel it or even see it so, I actually heard it first. A kind of whoosh, not dissimilar to that noise you get when you turn a bath tap on and the shower nozzle having been left in that mode by the previous bather, sprays a geyser of cold water all over you just for a second or two, before you can quickly reach down and switch it back to bath mode again. I don’t remember much of what happened after that, which is hardly surprising really given how traumatic the episode was. I have it on reliable authority however that my cheek just exploded. A fountain of yellowy green pus flew directly from the virulent blemish to the bulbous nose situated in the centre of Gladys’ unsuspecting face, and her transformation from lusty trollop to incensed crazy woman was complete. She pushed me away in disgust, taking care first of course to remove her oversized meat cleaver of a hand from my general genital area. She wiped her nose with this hand and realised immediately then that the offending secretion was now smeared not just over her face but on her hand also. So not that good a look. Not that good a look at all. The mood had quietened considerably in the hall over the preceding moments, and as Gladys ran angrily out of the room with the ground vibrating in her wake, I tried to consider the positives that might be gleaned from this generally unseemly affair. Touching my face I realised that the boil had been more than halved in size as a result of the embarrassing suppuration, so my appearance would probably be back to some degree of normality within a week or two at most.
So an actual pus, sorry, plus, what about that? After which I headed back to the lads whose jaws if I’m right about this, were by now somewhere around the general vicinity of the floor.
Chapter 3 - Monday Morning Blues
‘Michael Collins and not Eamon De Valera, was the principal architect in the ultimate demise of Ireland's faint hopes for total independence in 1922, and this was the single most important reason why the country descended into a bloody and unforgiving civil war, the aftershocks of which are still being felt throughout Irish society even to this day. Discuss.’
O’Mahony chalked the words manically on to the blackboard and turned then to face the pupils vegetating presently in History 2B.
"Ok peeps" he beamed. "Get to it.”
So one thing you always needed to remember here was that your final mark depended not on how well you knew early 20th century Irish history but more so on whether your political persuasions fell into line with O’Mahony's. His question was ambiguous enough to get you thinking but everyone in the class was still wondering where exactly he was meaning for us to go with it. Did he personally believe what it said up there in scrawled white longhand or did he instead believe that De Valera was at fault for the whole debacle and was therefore looking for you to argue the case? Was he on the other hand in the Collins camp and hoping that you might refute the statement emphatically, utilising salient facts to substantiate your case, and thereby verifying what he himself had always known to be true? That Collins was the dog's bollocks and De Valera a megalomaniacal lunatic.
"Sir, I have a question," I said, raising my arm nervously.
"What now Fortune?" he snapped impatiently.
"Sorry sir,” I continued, undeterred despite his obvious irritableness, “but I was just wondering who you voted for in the last election."
"Ahh OK Fortune, a good question, I can see where you're going with that. Fair enough so, I’ll answer you.”
He paused momentarily for effect.
“On the one hand you're possibly wondering if I'll mark the assignment based on what I think you should be writing and as a result of this presumption, you might perhaps feel compelled to massage my ego in a shameless and mercenary bid to corroborate my own personal feelings on the matter. You may on the other hand however be wondering if I’ll mark the assignment based on whether I think you know what you're talking about, and that in purporting this knowledge across to me you have displayed a sound and robust understanding of the subject. Regardless indeed of whether I agree with your point of view or not.”
“So following on from that Fortune,” he continued unabated, “what you really need to understand here is the following. I don’t require you to attest my views on the matter. Your approval is not required for me to validate what I believe myself to be historically correct. So please just furnish me with what you believe are the facts yourself and I’ll mark all of the assignments, your own included, as fairly as I always do and based on just one single premise. That you’ve given it your best shot and have at the very least formulated an opinion of objective substance within your own mind.”
Which was total bollocks of course and we knew it. O’Mahony was a rabid Free-Stater to the core, so of the view that De Valera was the greatest bastard that ever drew breath http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVlMeIetRHw. So you could think whatever you wanted but if your views fell on the side of the anti-treaty mob you were staring an F in the face. Nothin’ surer. If the great Irish political figureheads of the past couldn't figure it out all those years ago, then what chance us grimy layabouts in History 2B at half past three on a wet Thursday afternoon in October 1984?
"OK guys” he resumed, all business-like again, now that his self-obsessed monologue had finally come to an end. “Let's get on with it now shall we? You have 35 minutes left to complete the assignment and I'll have the marks back to you by..."
"G-G-GEEBAG! GEEBAG! G-G-GEEBAG!"
OK so this hadn’t happened for a while. FuckFuck was up to his old tricks again.
"Michie, what the hell are you...?" blurted a shocked O’Mahony, who for once in his life was totally and utterly flummoxed.
"G-G-GEEBAG! P-PIG'S ABORTION! F-F-FUCK! F-F-FUCKING FUCK! F-FUCK! F-FORNICATE!"
The teacher was new to the school and even though moderately cool and a genial sort of guy all up, there was only so much a person could be reasonably expected to endure. He hadn’t experienced FuckFuck and his affliction in full flow before also, so for him this was an entirely new experience. He wasn't sure exactly what was happening to be honest, that is if there was something actually wrong with FuckFuck mentally, or if he was just taking the complete and utter Michael.
“Sorry sir,” said FuckFuck, in a futile attempt to both apologise for and explain the situation to O’Mahony at the same time. “It’s not my F-F-FUCK, F-F-FUCK, fault sir, it’s a C-CUNT- CUNT FEATURES, condition I have, I can’t H-HOOR, H-HOOR, DIRTY SLAPPER OF A HOOR, help it sir…”
This was where it always got really funny. When he tried to explain himself but was in mid-rant simultaneously. When he arrived at a word where the starting letter was the same as the one at the start of a known profanity, he was unable to restrain himself from involuntarily changing that word to the obscenity in question. So supreme amusement for all in attendance I’m sure you agree. O’Mahony of course couldn’t be expected to let this shit go. He was a teacher after all so there were limits.
“Michie,” he said, “are you taking the complete and utter Michael? I’m a reasonable man but Jesus Christ, there are limits!”
He had a point. If you hadn’t been aware of FuckFuck’s condition previously you’d have every right to believe that he was taking the piss. So the way I saw it someone had to put him straight. Especially after FuckFuck decided unwisely to give his ‘explanation’ another go, which served merely to make a very bad present situation a whole lot worse.
“Sorry sir, it’s called C-C-C-COP OFF WITH YOUR OUL ONE, sorry sir, it’s called C-C-COCKFACE, sorry sir! I can’t H-H-HOORBAG, help it sir!”
O’Mahony was mystified. In all his time as a teacher he’d never experienced such a sustained and insolent barrage of abuse. But even though he was clearly very pissed off with things as they were, he at least had the sense to realise that the situation wasn’t all that it seemed. The proof of this being that if anyone else had carried on in such a fashion, under anything other than the seemingly unusual circumstances prevailing right now, they’d have been out of his classroom on their arses in the blink of an eye. I decided so that it was time to lend a hand, before the whole episode veered even more irredeemably out of control. O’Mahony was a decent enough skin though as I said before, and unlike a lot of the other nutbag teachers around a