Writing

3 PUNKS

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3 PUNKS (extract)

By

Tom O’Brien

A bare stage. A bar with some stools stage left. Some drinks scattered about. A screen to back with images of Punks etc. Spotlight no 1 on JOHN LYDON. Spotlight no.2 on SHANE MACGOWAN. Spotlight no. 3 on JOE STRUMMER.  All three acknowledge the audience. Hold the spotlights for a few moments, then they all step forward and sing a verse each from 3 songs. John sings ANARCHY UK, Shane sings IF I SHOULD FALL FROM GRACE, Joe sings LONDON CALLING. All are dressed in the punk styles of their generation; Lydon wears an I HATE PINK FLOYD tee-shirt;  Joe carries a guitar.  It has a label which reads – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS ; Shane has a pint and a fag in his hands.

JOHN:            I consider myself working class. And we, the working class, we’re lazy good-for-nothing  bastards. We never accept responsibility for our lives – that’s why we’ll always be downtrodden. We seem to enjoy it in a perverse sort of way; we like being told what to do, led like sheep to the slaughterhouse, as it were.

JOE:               I was born John Mellor in Ankara, Turkey, in 1952. My father worked for the Foreign Office, with the result I had a life moving around different places when I was young; Cairo, Mexico City, West Germany, before we finally settled in the UK. My parents were still posted abroad though so at the age of eight I was packed off to boarding school, along with my elder brother David. That was our home for the next nine years, seeing our parents just once or twice a year. I suppose that’s why I became so fucked up.

SHANE:      I grew up in Puckaun. Back of beyond Tipperary. On a farm. My mother’s people. My uncle Jim used to sleep in the haystacks, ya know? He’d get pissed off about how overcrowded it was because there were about fourteen people living in the house.  You’d be playing in the haystacks and you’d suddenly realise Jim was asleep in the hay, under the tarpaulins. It was either that or sleep in the same bed as uncle John – and uncle John used to fight in his sleep. ‘Fock yez, I’ll fockin kill yez, ye conts’. So uncle Jim got so sick of it he would sleep in the haystacks, and in the end he never slept in a bed again.

JOHN:              I loathe the British Public School system with a passion. How can anybody have the right to a better education just because their parents have money? I find that vile. They talk with this sense of superiority , the upper classes, and they have it. They have all the right connections once they leave school, and they parasite off the population as their  friends help them along.  You never see that with the working classes.

JOE:               Our school’s initiation rite involved a choice of being beaten up or lying in a bath of used toilet paper. I got beaten up! I guess it toughened me up, taught me to be independent, but there was always this sense of abandonment; having to pretend your parents didn’t exist. There was this ‘Lord Of The Flies’ feel to the all-male dorm and bullying was rife; it was a really brutal school and they filled you with crap.

JOHN:              Because with the working classes, if you have any kind of success your friends, your neighbours, will turn round and hate you instantly.

SHANE:           I know. “You’re not working class anymore!”

JOHN:            That used to worry me when I was younger, but I couldn’t give a toss now. I regard myself as working class and that’s all that counts. It was similar if you managed to read a book – and actually understand it! Then you were a snob, a poof, or a sissy. Labels, that’s all they were. Meaningless fucking labels.

SHANE:        (to Lydon) I remember the first time I saw you. You had long hair and wore a bovver hat. You were quite fat.

JOHN:            Fuck off you seldom fed culchie.

JOE:               That’s a Brendan Behan line.

JOHN:            And you can fuck off too, Strummer.

SHANE:         The next time you had blue hair. I’ll say this; it took some bottle to wear blue hair in Finsbury Park in those days. Chee…chee.

JOHN:            If you don’t accept me as I am then don’t accept me at all, that’s always been my motto. I was practically unlovable most of my early life. I wouldn’t even let my parents go near me. From a very early age it was – “get off! Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!”

SHANE:         I bet you fondled yourself.

JOE:               Well, isn’t this cosy. Three old punkers livin’ it up.

SHANE:         More like the three stooges, fuckin’ it up. Chee…chee.

JOHN:            Wait a minute! What are you doing here, Strummer? What’s he doin’ here? He’s fuckin’ dead. (He looks around)       Where is this place?

SHANE:         Yeah, Joe, what are you doing here?

JOE:               I thought you believed in re-incarnation, Shane.

SHANE:         Yeah, I do. But you can’t come back as yourself, can you? A dog, maybe. Or a chicken. Chee…chee.

JOE:               Maybe it’s all a dream.

JOHN:            The question is – whose dream?

JOE sings a few lines from Bruce Springsteen’s THE RIVER  and glides away

Now those memories come back to haunt me,

They haunt me like a curse.

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,

Or is it something worse?

JOHN:            Yeah, I fondled myself. But I never screamed as a youngster. That shocked my mother when she first heard the Sex Pistols. I had always been so quiet. She’d never seen that side of me. She probably thought she had raised a lunatic.

SHANE:         And you proved her right. Chee…chee.

JOHN:            Yeah. Had I not had my family I would have turned into a psychopath or something. Looking at how other people behaved I was definitely weird. I always had this sense of detachment…isolation… even when I was part of the Pistols this continued. I was never part of the group in any meaningful way. I came and sang my songs and then went home alone. I was never invited to any parties or get-togethers; I never felt really belonged.

Joe returns.

JOE:               It’s Tuesday today. Just another I-wish-I-could –get-this-monkey-off-my-back fucking day. Have you got a smoke?

JOHN:            We were the very first people – as a band I mean – to call each other cunts. We just didn’t like each other, simple as that. Steve Jones was probably the most important member of the group. He was our procurer. Instruments, mics, speakers, you name it he would acquire it. He was a thief – a very good one – and had been since he was six years old when he watched his parents steal from the local Tesco’s. It was all he knew to do. He managed to get us great gear. (laughs) We still couldn’t play properly  even when we had great gear. One of our best sources was the Hammersmith Odeon where rock stars would be regularly playing. Steve knew his way round the back and when all the roadies were asleep or whatever, he’d sneak in and get us what we needed. The Pistols could never have come into being without nicked gear ‘cos none of us had any money. I was invited to Join the band and become the lead singer by Malcolm. Malcolm McClaren. I was down the Kings Road every week, looking absurd, and Malcolm’s shop ‘Sex’ was the place to hang out. It had a jukebox and you could play music and have a chat with Malcolm. I had green hair and one evening Malcolm just said ‘would you like to be in a band?’ I said ‘I can’t sing. Just let me sing out of tune. Would that be alright?’ I knew every Alice Cooper song upside down, backwards and inside out so I did my version of ‘EIGHTEEN’

Johnny throws him a packet of cigarettes.

 

JOE:               A proper fucking smoke. A spliff.

JOHN:            I don’t fucking indulge.

They all sing Lydon’s version of EIGHTEEN (c Alice Cooper)

 

ALL:                          Lines form on my face and my hands
Lines form on the left and right
I’m in the middle
the middle of life
I’m a boy and I’m a man
I’m eighteen and I LIKE IT
Yes I like it
Oh I like it
Love it
Like it
Love it

                       

SHANE:         It’s election day today. Have you even voted?

JOE:               Have you?  Where I live it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.

SHANE:         Oh yeah, Somerset isn’t it? Bit middle-class for you. But I forgot,

you are middle-class aren’t you Joe. Chhh…chhh…

JOHN:            Nah. That was John Mellor. Son of a Foreign Office diplomat, private-

school boarder, art student , and all that fucking crap. Tell me Joe, has John Mellor been buried under so many years of being Joe Strummer that he no longer exists?

JOE:               You’re a two-faced cunt Lydon. You’re more establishment than any of us.

JOHN:            Nah, you got me confused with somebody else.

JOE:               What about that butter ad? You …a country gent! You sold out early.  (he points)  He used to be Johnny Rotten

                        (sings)

                                    God save the Queen. She ain’t no human being.

There is no future in England’s dreaming…

Hypocrite. And you, McGowan, you went to Westminster Public School.

SHANE:         No  I fucking didn’t. I won a scholarship there, yeah, but did I attend? No fucking way. It was full of toffee nosed bastards like you. I went on a shoplifting spree my first week. I never looked back after that. Drink, drugs, you name it. I didn’t just get kicked out, I was fucking catapulted out. Chee….cheee    (he drinks copiously from bottle)

     JOHN:        I think the first words Steve Jones said about me were “I can’t work with that fucking cunt. All he does is take the piss and moan’. There was rarely a time when the four of us were friends. Right from the start – at rehearsals –  I’d tell them I was going for a piss then listen at the door. And I would hear them;  “That cunt! Fucking hell!”  Then they’d go off in someone’s car, probably Malcolm’s, leave me standing behind. I’d go home by myself on the train. That would be it night after night. Me, the outsider. Malcolm said it was because he wanted me to be the ‘mystery man’. Bollocks!

GILMARTIN – A NEW PLAY READING

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27-06-2015 20;00;42

When Bertie Ahern resigned on May 6th 2008 after 11 years as Irish Taoiseach and more than thirty years all told in the corridors of power, it was as a direct result of the fall-out  that occurred from the treatment meted out to Irish businessman, Tom Gilmartin, which only emerged in its entirety at the conclusion of the Mahon Tribunal, which had sat for almost 15 years before reaching its conclusions in 2012.

Tom Gilmartin had emigrated to Luton in the 1950’s from Sligo, and over the years had built up a successful business in construction and engineering, in Luton and South East England. Now a multi millionaire he decided in the late 1980’s to invest his experience – and money – in some projects in Dublin, where unemployment was high, and where poverty had once again seen many young Irish people cross the water in the hope of a better life.

Tom had ambitious plans for several major retail developments in the city, which he hoped would provide work for hundreds, if not thousands, in the city,  but little did he know that in order to do business in Dublin, senior politicians and public officials would want a slice of the action – in large amounts of cash.

Embittered and impoverished by his experiences, Tom finally blew the whistle on the corruption at the heart of government and the city’s planning system. His complaints resulted in the setting up in 1997, by order of the Oireachtas, of the Mahon Tribunal to look  into ‘certain planning matters and payments’. Ironically, it was championed by none other than one Bertie Ahern.

Length…2 hours approx./Setting…Dublin 1990’s – 2000’s

IRISH GO DOWN

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IRISH GO DOWN (an excerpt)

By

Tom O’Brien

I sin for a living. Not venial sins, oh no, but big black mortal ones.

*

She was a looker alright. No doubt about it. As soon as she stepped off the train I could see it. Her auburn hair, wavy but not ostentatious if you get my drift, fluttered ever so slightly as she looked around her. Her height alone set her apart from everyone else — a six-footer at least and statuesque to go with it — but it was something else, something less tangible that had my pulse quickening. There was — I reached for the word — a wantonness about her. Yeah, that was it I decided.

No luggage either. That was good. Well, better without than with anyway. Less for me to dispose of afterwards. She was looking for someone and the wave of her hand suggested she had found him or her. I switched my gaze quickly towards the exit barrier and found a middle-aged man returning her wave. She hurried towards him and kissed him perfunctorily on one cheek. Though I had never met this man I knew his face from countless magazines and newspapers, and numerous appearances on television. A mover and shaker, you could say.

They disappeared quickly, headed for his chauffer-driven limousine I imagined. I wasn’t too concerned about tailing them. I knew their destination.

*

I met The Greek in a tiny Italian cafe across the road from the Gaudi Cathedral. Sagrada Famila; one of the many legacies dotted around Barcelona of the great Catalan architect who must have been more than a little bit crazy judging by some of his designs. It was said that he once hoisted a donkey up the facade of the cathedral building to see how it would look in a sculpted nativity scene. He never finished it in his lifetime, and it was only now, one hundred and thirty years later, that it was beginning to look less like an abandoned monstrosity from a deranged mind and more the stunning building of his imagination. I had come outside with the canned ecstasy of the Hallelujah Chorus still ringing in my ears and spotted Kostas twitching in his seat and checking his watch. You can wait you fat bastard.

‘I am a busy man’, he stood up to greet me.

‘I needed to say a few prayers. Never know when I might need them’. We shook hands. ‘ Why not a Greek place?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t eat that shit anymore,, he said and slapped me on the back. ‘I gotta good job for you, Irish’.

‘ Irish? Why do you call me Irish?’

‘You look Irish’.

‘Ugly, you mean’.

‘Nah, not that. You mean you aint?’

‘No, I bloody ain’t. Never even been there’.

I forgot to say that I am good at lying too. Well, what this Greek slimeball doesn’t know won’t bother him.

‘Funny, I thought I heard someone say you was a Paddy once. Well, it don’t matter a shit anyhow. Your nationality is your own business’. He paused to order two cappuccinos from the kiosk window. ‘You followed her?’

‘Yeah’.

‘And she met him — Jellicoe?’

‘Yeah’.

‘You know your trouble, Irish? You talk too much’.

‘What do you want me to say? I followed her like you asked. She met the guy’.

‘You know what he is?’

‘I know who he is’.

‘Everybody knows who he is, not many know what he is’.

‘Is that right?’ I sipped the coffee slowly. Not bad at all. ‘I expect you’re going to tell me’.

‘He is a paedophile. A fucking paedophile. He do things with little girls’.

You look like one yourself, I almost said. ‘Thank heavens for little girls, eh’

‘Thass not funny’.

to be continued….

FALLING

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FALLING
Clubbed by kindness
I sit here stunned
By the knowledge that
You loved me once
Possibly.
No room for any doubt on my side
But you were forbidden fruit
About to fall from the tree
Trouble was
I never tried to catch you
Not really.
And now I have fallen further
Than you ever could
And there you are
Somehow
To pick me up

GATWICK by Craig Raine

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I think Craig Raine’s new poem, Gatwick, deserves an airing, if only because of all the controversy it appears to have caused. It’s a great poems imo; funny, clever, and contemporary. His work reminds me a lot of Philip Larkin. Any poem that gets a line to rhyme with ‘Gatwick’ deserves to be read!

GATWICK by Craig Raine

I
Tom Stoppard sold his house in France: ‘I was sick
of spending so much time at Gatwick.’

II
At the UK Border,
I double
and treble
through the retractable
queuing barrier.

Now I have my passport splayed
at the requisite page.

She glances, she frowns,
she turns it upside down
so it can be read by a machine.
She stares at a screen.

And then she asks,
looking up from her desk:
‘Craig Raine the poet?’

We have less than half a minute.
‘I studied you. For my MA at uni.
I did an MA in poetry.
Now I’m in the immigration service.’

I want
to give her a kiss.
But I can’t.
Why is this
so marvellous?
So hysterical?

We are close. We are both grinning.
We have come
together by a miracle.
Two sinners simultaneously sinning.
In passport control. No shame.

III
She is maybe 22,
like a snake in the zoo,
shifting, tightening, dwindling,
stretching, lost in her Kindle.

I want to say,
I like your boots. The way
the laces criss-cross
under, without piercing the eye-holes’
white majolica gloss
rising like perfect bubbles.

I want to say, hey,
I like your moles.

Which you get from your father.

This family of Swedes
sit in different seats,
directly behind each other
on the Gatwick-Oxford bus.

I want to say I like your big bust.
Which you try to disguise with a scarf.
You’d like it smaller by half.

I want to say,
you’re so young today
it’s almost painful.
For both of us.

And slightly disdainful
to your grateful parents,
patient, tamed creatures.
But when you get old,
(gradually, without a fuss,
because it makes sense)
you will have the handsome features
of your mother.

(I choose to ignore
her mother’s pelvis, large bore,
and the two foot span
of her hefty can.
Which is older and wider,
and also lurking inside her.)

I can say these things, I say,
because I am a poet and getting old.

But of course, I can’t,
and I won’t. I’ll be silent.
Nothing said, but thought and told.

SEX, CHOCOLATE AND STATINS

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SEX, CHOCOLATE AND STATINS

Want to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke?

The answer is to have more sex,

At least two orgasms a week.

This will reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event,

But only if you are a man.

For women – well, you have to take your chances!

Eating chocolate can also reduce your risk

As does listening to music

Though Nessum Dorma might be more beneficial than Taylor Swift.

Moving out of the city, living with others, having a good boss

Also helps;

But men with a high orgasmic frequency do best of all.

So forget about Statins;

Chocolates, Vivaldi, and bashing the bishop

Are much more beneficial

And a lot more enjoyable.

PADRAIC COLUM – AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

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Colum was born Patrick Collumb in a County Longford workhouse, where his father worked. He was the first of eight children born to Patrick and Susan Collumb.[1] When the father lost his job in 1889, he moved to the United States to participate in the Colorado gold rush. Padraic and his mother and siblings remained in Ireland. When the father returned in 1892, the family moved toGlasthule, near Dublin, where his father was employed as Assistant Manager at Sandycove and Glasthule railway station. His son attended the local national school.

When Susan Collumb died in 1897, the family was temporarily split up. Padraic (as he would be known) and one brother remained in Dublin, while their father and remaining children moved back to Longford. Colum finished school the following year and at the age of seventeen, he passed an exam for and was awarded a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House. He stayed in this job until 1903.

During this period, Colum started to write and met a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ. He also joined the Gaelic League and was a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. He became a regular user of the National Library of Ireland, where he met James Joyce and the two became lifelong friends. During the riots caused by the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, Colum, with Arthur Griffith, was the leader of those inciting the protests, which, as he later remarked, cost him his friendship with Yeats.

An Old Woman of the Roads

O, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped up sods against the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there’s never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying Him night and day,
For a little house – a house of my own
Out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.

AN APPRECIATION

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AN APPRECIATION

Looking at a lovely woman

Is like eating chocolate all day long

When they look that good

They can do no wrong.

Her loveliness is a line

That runs from her crown to her toes

There is music in her smile

That follows her wherever she goes.

THE REMOVAL MEN

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THE REMOVAL MEN

She sat huddled on the wall by her front door

More scarecrow than human being

Her dog cuddled on her knees

Looking at nothing; the sun-kissed morn unseen.

Her inner world was hers alone

Who knows what her dreams were?

She, who had passed many a word with me,

Now looked at me as if I was a stranger

Which I was, standing on her sun-dappled steps:

She didn’t know me from days of yore,

I don’t think she even knew herself any more.

The puzzlement on her face was evidence of that,

As the men dodged round her

Carrying her belongings in black bags

To the waiting car.

She was a child again,

A lost child;

A few months ago she was lively and bright

Chattering inanely about this and that

About how the seagulls carried away her cat.

Now she tottered along, clutching at the railings for support

Walking her dog

And sometimes forgetting to come back.

She watches the men now,

Their loading almost complete.

And as they move towards her

There is puzzlement, almost defiance, in her  face

Who are you, and why are you taking  all this stuff from my place?

TO WALT WHITMAN

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A Pact by Ezra Pound

 I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman-- 
I have detested you long enough.
 
I come to you as a grown child 
Who has had a pig-headed father; 
I am old enough now to make friends.
 
It was you that broke the new wood, 
Now is a time for carving.
 
We have one sap and one root-- 
Let there be commerce between us.