Murphy, The First Irish Cosmonaut

I was drinking Southern Comfort in the Mutton Lane when all of a sudden nothing happened. Outside the rain came down in sheets. “Sammy my boy”, I said, “let’s go down to the Hi-B and get smashed drunk.” Sammy picked up his prune face off the bar and pulled me by the ear down Oliver Plunkett street singing Badín Fheilimí. We jumped into a taxi and roared for the driver to take us to a brothel. The taxi turned out to be a squad car but the lads were on their way there anyway so they brought us.

I noticed the sergeant fiddling with the metre adding two euros to make it iambic. The Gards were fierce polite and recommended us to a Lithuanian pimp who ran all the best girls in Cork. I was slavering over the thought of catching some exotic venereal disease that I could boast about to the lads back at the city library. We had a VD pool going and the first one to collect the set would win a weekend for two in Mitchelstown; I’d nothing but crabs to my name and was lagging far behind the other guys. A dose of syphilis would really get me into the running.

The pimp should have looked like a cross between Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver and John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing but the truth is he didn’t. He looked like a Kerry footballer in a nylon suit. He directed us into the Sunset Ridge Hotel and told us to go to room 5. Sammy was fidgeting at this stage worried about his capacity to perform. I told him that I could do his bird if he couldn’t make her. In the end it didn’t matter as the girls never came.

After we finished the girls got up and left, they didn’t even charge us. “We’re whores” they said “we get paid for sex, not comedy.” Anyway outside it was lashing rain, or would have been had this really happened and it had been raining at the time. As it was we’ll just say it was raining. Pathetic phallacy they call it. That’s what the girls called it too. In the taxi on the way back, which turned out to be an early-morning milk float, Sammy did his party trick of stretching out the skin on his face as far as it would go until he looked exactly like that Le Brocquy painting. “Put it

away you dunce” I warned him. So he rolled it up and I took it home and later sold it to the Fenton Gallery, pocketing 100,000 smackers for it.

The next morning when I woke up, having only slept for 10 column inches, I was still bone-tired. I fixed myself some coffee and sat down on the toilet to gather my thoughts. I wasn’t real, I knew that much. No matter, I thought. No matter at all. The stool seemed real enough and pained me on the way out. I thought in Cartesian circles but it was getting me nowhere. I needed some good old fashioned Celtic mysticism. From stool to spool I suppose. I will arise and go now, and go where drink is free, I decided. So I went to an art exhibition opening in the Triskel.

Exhibition openings are funny in Ireland. They’re rahly rahly mahvellous. I drank sixteen bottles of wine. The artist had put together a series of drawings that represented the juxtaposition of urban and rural with Foucault’s theories on heterotopias. Anyway, the exhibition was a great success. The artist promised she’d give me head in the toilet if I bought a picture. She sold out. I went home with a canvas that had one line in biro scrawled waywardly across it and a throbbing knob. Artists have become a bit like weather girls these days. I took her number and promised to buy a picture from her every Wednesday evening after work when the wife was out.

I yearned for the simple life away from all this parochial backwater shit-slinging. I wanted a quaint uncomplicated life in New York or Tokyo, where I could work in call-centres or mug tourists by the train stations, at one with human nature. But something kept me here, some deep-seated lack of imagination and courage. I was an exile that hadn’t got around to leaving yet.

On Wednesday I went dolefully to the dole office where they doled out the dole. They asked for a financial statement and so I emptied my pockets onto the counter at hatch B. Something in the blackness of my fingernails or the wet butts and miraculous medals that came out of my Johnny rockets convinced them and they straight away handed over the much coveted disability book. I was delighted, I’d get my own toilets and

parking spaces from now on and could lord it over the plebs with near diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

Cashing my first cheque in the post office on Barrack Street I went straight to Mok’s on the Bandon Road. I am not the first short story writer to come out of Mok’s alive, but I might be the only one to write my fictions outside of interrogation room C in the Bridewell. Annie cleaned my slate and slapped the beer down on the table in front of me. I spent my first day on disability reeling up and down the bars from Mok’s to the Enterprise and back again. I had four pints in quick succession in the Quinryan before I realised that I’d left my liver in the Brown Derby. I had a great night.

At closing time Annie took me upstairs and beat the shit out of me in that very sexual way of hers. I woke up in the morning beside her and her husband. Both were snoring loudly. My ribs ached and two of my teeth were looser than they had been previously. I kissed them both gently on their heads so as not to wake them and snuck out quietly into the grey dawn.

Well I suppose you’re waiting for the bit on how I became Ireland’s first Cosmonaut. That’s not surprising as I’m kind of curious myself. I suppose it must have happened at an Anarchist party meeting upstairs in the Sin é. Comrade John, who was the only Irish anarchist to have met Josef Stalin and lived to tell the tale, was giving a lecture on the Russian Federation’s program for firing alcoholic anarchists of all nations into space. The program was part-funded by NASA and part-funded by Fás. I was the only one that night to sign up for the singular reason that the rest of the assembly were all undercover Gards, stoolies or CIA agents. I reckoned that it was a scam but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get as far away from Cork as was humanly possible at this point of the early twenty-first century.

When I got home I posted out the application forms, complete with twelve tokens collected from Rice Krispie boxes, to the Russian Embassy in Dublin. For twenty-eight days I waited like an expectant housewife for

the postman’s double knock. When at last it came I received a parcel containing my Visa, aeroplane tickets, Russian phrase book and a copy of an essay by Vladmir Putin called Georgia On My Mind. I was dizzy with anticipation. Finally I’d be out of this tubercular polder town and into the broad horizon of space. I should have known that there’d be a catch.

Batt O’Keefe met me at the station and warned me that the state police were watching me and that an operative at An Post had intercepted my packet and had tipped off the special branch and the local cumann of Fianna Fail. I pushed him away and ran for platform four and onto the awaiting train.

I had only sat down when the tiny figure of Willie O’Dea climbed up into the seat beside me with a trenchcoat folded over his right arm. “I’m warning ya right now” he squeaked, “underneath this coat I’m carrying a decommissioned Smith & Wesson revolver you commie pig-dog.” I knew he meant business. I’d seen him on the cover of the Times and had read cold death in his beautiful steel grey eyes.

The rain pelted down onto the platform as Willie ushered me off the train. The sun shone in the blue sky. It was pitch dark and the clouds obscured the pale moon. The night was hot and sultry. Willie took me for breakfast in the Uptown Grill on MacCurtain Street. The bathos wasn’t lost on me. I was in the clutches of the provisional Fianna Fail and there was nothing that the FSB could do for me now.

I thought of Sean. The man who stayed and invented sin. It dawned on me that I could stay too and I could invent some sin of my own here in Cork. What did it matter if I rushed the story. Who’d care anyway? I was staying, I could play out my glories in the bars of the city and there’d be nobody to trump the story of Murphy the First Irish Cosmonaut. Just some old soak who’d once drank with Frank O’Connor or some bullshit artist who’d screwed Rory Gallagher’s sister.

I went for a drink with Willie and Jimmy. They sat on high chairs at the low table. The rest of us sat beneath them on stools and drank our pints. We knew that John and Anne were across the road in Longley’s drinking Rioja and signing autographs. Bollocks to them I thought, they’d never die for Ireland. This was my local, but secretly I always wanted to cross the road and sit with the smart set, they had all the best parties.

There were two types of Irishman: those who drank in Longley’s and those who drank in Deane’s. I got up and staggered out of the bar gesturing to Cleary the barman to call me a cab, I’d heard of a new bar opening up. I hoped to Christ that I could find a snug in it where I could forget everything I knew.