Simon Kerr

by Rainbow Singer (lit)

  Do I agree with Freud's theory - aye, I do like fuck.

  And this time by saying that I mean, yes I fucking do.

  A criminal brotherhood. The Metal Mafia. That's what the Project father figures. Tyrant Holdfasts every one of them, forged with their peace-mongering that middling Sunday.

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  Phil phoned us up Monday morning. He sounded none too happy. 'Let's do something today,' he said, dead quiet so's not to be overheard by the Kuntz-z-zs. 'We've got to get out of this house.'

  'What about the Mall,' I suggested.

  'Strike one,' he said.

  'Bluebelles?'

  'Strike two.'

  'Where then?'

  'Strike three. That's a turkey,' he said. 'What are you on about?'

  'Bowling,' he said. 'Although I'm mixing my metaphors up with baseball too.'

  'You're weird, you know that?' I said.

  'Aye,' he said. 'Can you collect us? The Spunky Kuntz Taxi Service is on strike due to the fight.'

  'I don't know,' I said. Then I remembered Derry's ace of spades and corrected myself. 'Yeah, Tiara'll do it. What time?'

  'Eleven,' he said.

  I was the mafioso who blackmailed Tiara the second time for a lift. She'd just come out of the bathroom, face still dripping with morning water and moisturiser and god knows what else when I knobbled her.

  'Derry and me need a ride,' I said.

  'Phone a cab,' she said.

  'What?' I said.

  'You heard me,' she said.

  'Blow job,' I said.

  'You little Irish creep!' she yelled and tried her best to hit me round the head with her towel.

  I ripped the towel out of her hands and pushed her back. 'Let's get two things straight here,' I said. 'One, I'm not Irish. Two, we need a lift and you're it, or else.'

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  'Or else what?'

  'Or else - I don't know.'

  Or else I don't know: yeah I used the magic parental threat words to get us that lift. In protest against them, Tiara tried to use the Void. She didn't say a single word as we collected Phil and Helmut, but we didn't care. And she stayed silent for the rest of the journey too, which was just dandy. However, when we arrived at the bowling alley and were getting out I said like Phil would: 'Ta Ta Tiara. See you back here at oral six.'

  It was meant as a joke but it blew the top clean off her Void. 'I'll get you, you little Irish creep,' she swore, 'Just you wait!'

  The joke was good, but the come-back nearly killed us. Derry and me laughed. Phil and Helmut too.

  Tiara sped away from us like a drag racer.

  'Ten-Pin Bowling rocks!' said Helmut as he put on his bowling shoes.

  'Did he really say that,' I asked Phil.

  'He did,' said Phil. 'And he's right.'

  'But there's right and there's right, and there's wrong and there's wrong.'

  'What?' Phil said, and added, 'Now who's acting weird?'

  But he knew what I meant. I wasn't just saying Helmut made everything sound uncool; I was saying Helmut shouldn't be part of our group but, because of Phil's newfound like of him, we'd do our best to tolerate him.

  It is compulsory to try to change the names of individuals within your group when you're truly bonding. Programming the bowling computer was just the process for such a rechristening.

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  Derry had the advantage in this nicknaming process because he knew both how to work the computer and unlike Helmut, got there first. Now, nicknames are always handed out in the reverse pecking order of the group. And being aware that the illusion of every man being equal under God does not stand the testing of a group, it should be obvious who would be bowling first.

  'You're up, Helmut. Who do you want to be?' asked Derry.

  'Tom Cruise,' Helmut said.

  That was beyond knock-out funny. Derry and me were in stitches. Phil laughed at Helmut. Even Helmut laughed at Helmut. We were all in stitches. After a while Derry recovered enough to say, 'No, seriously, what'll we call him?'

  It was Phil who said, 'Purple.'

  I don't think I've ever laughed as much at anything. I mean, I just crumpled into the curve of the seat.

  Phil laughed so much at his own joke he started crying.

  Derry laughed so much he misspelt the nickname and had to retype it.

  Helmut didn't get it though. 'Purple,' he kept saying.

  Every time he said it we just laughed more. In the end I had to tell him to stop the rib-crushing convulsions. 'Purple - Helmut.'

  'Oh I see.' That's when it sank in, with a dorky grin.

  When we'd recovered Derry said, 'OK, Phil, what are you going to be?'

  'How's about Re?' I said, but rePhil wasn't funny enough.

  We all thought about it some more.

  'Adelphia,' said Helmut like it was eureka. (With hindsight, naming Phil after the city of brotherly love, where he'd died and been buried in 1994, would have been appropriate, but it just sounded ridiculous then.)

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  Phil came up with his own name soon after we stopped laughing. 'Heron,' he proposed.

  'Heron,' Derry said. He didn't get it.

  I didn't get it either.

  And you can forget about Purple.

  'Phil Heron - "Fill her in",' said Phil.

  Then we got it. That was kind of witty.

  'What about you, Derry?' said Helmut.

  'Aw no, we're doing Wil next,' Derry said.

  'Willy,' said Phil without thinking.

  That was worth a laugh even though it was getting sore to.

  'Fool,' said Helmut. 'Wil Fool - Wilful.' That wasn't.

  'Wil-o'-the-wisp,' said Phil. Funny but no cigar.

  'Wil E Coyote,' said Derry, and although it wasn't hilarious, he typed it in and it stuck. I became known as Wily Coyote in our group. I didn't like it. But I wore it. As things turned out, I didn't have to wear it for very long.

  Derry stood there, looking at us. Waiting. He was ready for it. The name he deserved. 'Londonderry,' said Phil.

  I liked that a lot. But - 'Nah,' I said, 'Derry's The Hulk.' And so he was.

  Wouldn't you know, Helmut was a hopeless bowler. He threw his toady weight-Eight bowls way off-target.

  Phil was only slightly better, but at least he didn't take it seriously. When he released the Ten-ball he just shouted, 'Gutterball.' And sure enough that was where it went.

  Derry now, Derry was one of those Fourteen windmill

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  bowlers who make you look bad, all whoosh and swoosh, style and spin. And rightly he won three out of the five games.

  I took the other two in spite of having to bowl a Twelve, and that being only my fourth time playing the game. See, they only got an Ice-Bowl in Belfast the year before and it was way too expensive for the likes of me.

  So, now you know the score.

  The bowling itself wasn't that important though; we all knew who was going to win. They say it's the taking part that counts and in the case of our group that was true. You see it was early days for us and we needed to do stuff to bind ourselves together more; that is if we were going to survive - which of course we weren't going to.

  When you have four people playing a game of bowls it lasts a fair time and is worth the money, so by the time we'd played five, it was more or less lunchtime.

  We took off our sweaty red and black shoes and were all set to hand them back - only there was no one behind the counter to hand them to. Whoever's shift it was must have been having a quick lunch-break, or in the bog, but that was their loss. See, it was then Derry spotted a case of Miller Beer behind the counter.

  'Look,' he told me.

  The hoard was ours for the taking. And being as you have to take what you can get in this life, I was in like Flynn.

  Leaving nothing but the aroma of our teen-feet behind, we were out of there like nobody's business. Out on the street we took turns running with the crate. I'm telling you, it was heavy, but you could just hear the ra
ttle of those twenty-four bottles of cold fizzy gold inside and that kept you going.

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  Needless to say, our criminal brotherhood had outlaw beer for lunch. We broke that red, white and blue patriarch Uncle Sam's prohibition on under twenty-ones again!

  On a nearby patch of urban decay that had grown wild, we hunkered down and divided the spoils. Everyone got a fair share, if not an equal one. And then, we all set about the manly business of getting drunk. But Helmut couldn't handle his drink; he had to go and get mindless legless eyeless bombed-drunk on two bottles. I've never seen it hit someone so fast or hard as Helmut. Of course that was a lot to do with the fact that he'd never touched a drop in his life before.

  Helmut started singing. Wild Boys by Duran Duran. It was sad man.

  'Shut up,' we told him, but would he shut it? - nah.

  Phil took him by the arm and told him, 'Sing some Metal man. We're all Metallers here. We're like, the Metal Mafia, man.'

  And that's where the name came from. It wasn't anything more sinister than that - unlike what the papers reported after the killings.

  So Helmut heeded Phil and switched tracks like a jukebox, on to Judas Priest's Breaking the Law.

  That was Metal so we all joined in. Head-banging and air-guitaring and chest-bouncing off each other followed. Yeah, it was a mental Metal afternoon all right, until way later when it started to rain.

  The pissing rain sobered us up - all except Helmut. We had to take him to a diner and pour coffee down his neck for an hour before he could stop giggling and walk unaided. Two bottles. Jesus.

  Anyway, at around five, Derry phoned Tiara and told

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  her to pick us up outside the diner. The diner was a dodgy wee hole of a place, but it was better staying there than returning to the scene of the crime to hang around for a lift. I mean, we had left our shoes on the counter in the bowling alley - it wasn't going to take a criminal profiler to work out the Metal Mafia was the beer thief.

  Derry had the bright idea of buying us all two packs of chewing gum each, and Helmut got an extra packet of mints, to try to get rid of the smell of drink. When Tiara turned up - half an hour late for badness' sake - we were all chewing mint like madmen. I'm surprised we got home in one piece. Tiara's eyes must have been watering with the heat of all that spearmint. I know mine were'

  Or maybe, that was because I was something akin to happy? See, we killed the Father that day and we dance'' on His grave and pissed our own warm flat gold on His Holy Ghost.

  If only we'd known He'd come back to haunt us. If only we'd read some Freud in school we'd have seen you can't kill God the Father. He's inside you. You can fight it all you like but inside every son is a father, inside every individual is a group, and inside every group is the pecking order of, if not the primal horde, then the criminal brotherhood of civilisation.

  I

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  22

  The Beasts of Green Bay

  Yeah, if you're wondering, we did get away with it. The drinking that is. Pops wasn't in when we got home, again. Mom Horrowitz had a headache or something and had gone to bed. And Tiara, well, she still wasn't speaking to us.

  I got away with the other thing too - I blanked the Void right out with hazy remembrances of the Metal Mafia carrying on. Helmut was such a dork! We went to bed early and slept like the dead. I would not think of Teresa that night. I would not dream of the Fonz.

  We wanted to hang out as the Metal Mafia in the Mall the next day, but Mom Horrowitz got us up early and told us she had a surprise for us.

  'What is it?' Derry asked.

  'You'll have to wait and see,' she said.

  'But Mom,' complained Derry. 'We said we'd see Phil and Helmut today at the Mall.'

  'Cancel it,' she said.

  'For what?' Derry said.

  'You'll have to wait and see.'

  'Where I come from. Mom, you don't break your word to your mates,' I said. 'No matter what.'

  Mom Horrowitz shrugged her shoulders at me and

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  then said, 'OK, if you don't want me to take you up to Green Bay to meet the Packers, that's OK.'

  'The Packers,' I said.

  'The Packers,' Derry said.

  'Yeah the Packers,' she said. 'They're in off-season training but it's open to the paying public'

  'Today,' I said.

  'Today,' Derry said.

  'Yeah,' she said. 'Want to come?'

  Not knowing I would be spending most of my life in Green Bay I said, 'Yeah!'

  'Yeah,' Derry said too.

  'OK, we'll have some breakfast and then we'll drive up there.'

  This was all a major minus-guilt trip for Mom Horrowitz and I knew it. She was trying to make up for our run-in with the Rev all by herself. It was nice of her too to think about us but the problem was, she'd given us a major plus-guilt trip to think about too. I mean, how were we going to tell the other members of our new group that we had sold out, that I cared more about getting an American Football helmet as a souvenir than I gave a hoot about their feelings? We weren't, was the answer. I came up with a different plan while dressing.

  Over breakfast - of flapjacks and maple syrup - we were to argue loudly about how best to betray our mates.

  'You phone them,' I told Derry.

  'No way,' he said. 'You do it.'

  'No way,' I said. 'It's your house.'

  'Phil's your friend.'

  'Helmut's yours.'

  'Oh yeah!'

  'Yeah!'

  That's when Mom HorrcJwitz came in line with the

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  masterplan and decided that there was room in the station-wagon for Helmut and Phil to come along.

  I can tell you those two were mighty grateful to Mom Horrowitz when we collected them and hit the road, Jack. I took that as a compliment to myself even though later, I would see their gratitude as a terrible insult.

  Derry sat up front with his Mom while the rest of us mucked about playing Trumps in the back - I think it was a pack of motorbike cards Phil had.

  Anyway, there isn't much to say about the trip because we couldn't be ourselves in front of Mom Horrowitz. It was a good three and a half hours solid driving to Green Bay. And after three and a half hours of being somebody else, never mind a lifetime, I guess fellas can get a bit funny on it.

  At the home of the Pack we got out, stretched and looked around open-mouthed like tourists do. Some guy came up to us and handed us this out-of-date programme.

  'Pretty impressive, huh?' said Mom Horrowitz, pointing at the stadium.

  There was no arguing with her. The big green stadium dwarfed any football stadia I'd ever been in. I mean even Windsor Park, home of the Blues and the Northern Irish national side, was tiny in comparison.

  'How many people does it hold?' I said.

  'About sixty thousand,' said Derry. 'Soldier's Field -The Bears' one in Chicago holds something like seventy or so.'

  It was and still is hard to imagine a group of people that big in one place at one time just to be cheering on their team.

  'Wow,' I said.

  'Wow,' Helmut said, trying to get in on the awesome

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  act, even though the dork admitted he'd been there before.

  First stop was the practice ground.

  We watched all these Packers kick seven shades of shite out of each other, and the occasional one throw or run with the ball. It was fascinating; like spectating on a game of murderball or a microcosmic war.

  Mom Horrowitz cheered at some of the big hits from Number 66. 'Alright, Beast!' she yelled.

  The Beast was this black man-mountain who was the Packers' star defensive lineman apparently. You should have seen this guy: he destroyed anybody in his path. I had my camera with me so I took a stack of photos of him, and I mean a stack: I filled films with his violent sacking plays.

  Derry thought it was funny me running around trying to get the best angle of the Beast and not get a face
full of the fence which shielded the ground from fans. 'Maybe hidden deep in Wily Coyote's genes is the will to be a sports photographer,' he said.

  Phil quipped, 'The only thing that's hidden in Wil E's jeans is his willy.'

  I didn't think that was funny.

  Helmut though, he thought that was so drole he slapped Phil's arse -

  Now, I did think the arse-slap was funny, in a way different way, but I let both my reactions slide. Why? - I had Beast photos to take, sports fans!

  When the Beast's hits had all but decimated the rest of his team, the coach blew his whistle and ended the practice. The players all picked each other up, slapped a few high fives and each other's arses, and left the pitch. (So that's where Helmut got that move from, I remember thinking

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  and feeling somewhat relieved there wasn't something funnier going on.)

  The others dragged Mom Horrowitz away to get a hot-dog at the stand by the ground, but instead of going along I went to the exit gate to the field. I had a sudden desire for the Beast's autograph, see. And I got most of the team too, even though to this day, I haven't a clue who any of them were. I just ran round shouting 'Oi, mister!' and shoving my programme at them and, wouldn't you know, most of them signed it.

  The last guy off the pitch was the Beast. He was kicking his yellow scored and dented helmet along in front of him. He mustn't have liked it when the game ended or something. Yeah, I could see he was singularly pissed off like my Da, but this was my only opportunity to get his mark, so I said, 'Oi, Mister Beast.'

  The Beast did his best to ignore me and bent to pick up his helmet. It was then I saw that written on the back of the helmet was the number 66 with an additional red 6 sprayed on beside the other two.

  'Sign this, mister?' I said.

  The Beast looked down on me. 'You sound strange, kid,' he growled. 'Where you from?' 'Ulster,' I replied.