There’s Yer Dinner!

Would you like me to tell you a wee story?

NO?!
– Well I’m going to tell you anyway.

The year was approximately 1989…

…and in 1989 my Mum was a barmaid.
When my Dad wasn’t working day shifts, he was working night shifts and so quite often, my folks were left with only 3 options:
1. Leave me home alone.
2. Pay some babysitter to be terrorised by me.
3. Take me to work with them.
So, more often than not, I’d get to go to the bar with my Mum to watch her work. It was brilliant!

I’d get to sit on a barstool which I had to jump up onto and drunks would pay me to draw pictures of them. They weren’t all drunks but they mostly were. Old guys with rambling stories and lived in faces. Deep lined faces. Interesting faces. Drawing-wise, it was a real school for me.

There was this particular guy. A horrible guy. An old miserable bastard of a man. Every day he would sit hunched over whatever the hell it was he used to drink pints of and mutter swear words away to himself until he was too drunk to talk.

I loved Elvis at the time (Still do!) and I remember this old git who we’ll call…Auld Norrie, telling me that…
(a) Elvis couldn’t play guitar.
(b) People who play the guitar are idiots.
(c) Elvis never wrote his own songs.
(d) People who wrote songs were poofs.
(e) Elvis dyed his blonde hair black.
(f) Elvis was a Mummy’s Boy.
(g) Elvis was probably a poof.

As you can imagine, Auld Norrie was a delight.

He used to steal loo roll from the bathroom, Auld Norrie. His pockets would be stuffed with it.

I never saw him ever talk to anyone in the bar. I never saw him with anyone. His skin was yellow and he was dirty and greasy. I remember thinking to myself that he probably had no one in his life. But I was wrong.

Because one day, the doors of the bar flew open and a woman marched in! A woman in her 50’s who was quite made-up, but you could tell that the make-up was having a tough time trying to conceal the obvious years of misery she’d put up with.

She was carrying something shiny and silver. She had bags with her…

She marched over to Auld Norrie and banged this silver thing down in front of him and said…“THAT’S THE LAST SUNDAY DINNER YOU’LL EVER GET OFF ME!” and then stormed out without looking back.

There was stone silence in the place and I was fixated on this old git. Everybody was.

He peeked under the silver foil and seeing that indeed, there was a full Sunday roast dinner on a plate, he took the foil off and I’ll never forget what he did next.

Very slowly, he opened his manky jacket and put his hand carefully in his inside pocket and pulled out…

A KNIFE AND FORK!

And then he wolfed the whole dinner down! Scranned the entire lot in about 2 minutes flat!

Then after that, he just went right back to being hunched over and drinking and muttering away to himself about “fucking bitches”.

I was about 8 or 9. It was amazing!

He’s dead now, Auld Norrie.
He lay dead for about 10 days at the bottom of his stairs before anybody noticed.

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“New York City: A True 8th Avenue Tale” By Bob Heaney.

My friend Bob works as a bouncer on the doors of The Tempest, a great little dive bar on New York’s 8th Avenue. A few days ago, Bob had this utterly jaw dropping story to tell…

A true 8th Avenue tale. Apologies in advance for the use of profanity and one particularly offensive term, but the story wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if it wasn’t quoted verbatim and uncensored:

It was a typical Friday night at Tempest and the evening had thus far been uneventful. We were expecting a decent crowd to file out of the Knicks game and into the pub, but until the final buzzer sounded in the Garden we would have to settle for the slow but reliable business from the handful of regulars and the odd passerby that stopped into the pub. Hoping to kill some time, I stepped out front for a smoke. Within moments of me lighting the cigarette, an unusual-looking fellow approached me. His clothes were far too big for his body (although his build was anything but frail) and he had a manic look in his eyes that was unmistakably the gaze of someone who wasn’t, as they say, “all together”. Far younger and more spry than the usual derelicts who mill about on 8th Avenue, I kept at an arm’s length as he made eye contact with me.

“Yo man, I need two dollars and sixteen cents” he announced with the trademark specificity of so many of the beggars and con men that practice their trade around Penn Station.”I don’t have any money” I replied.

Reaching into his pocket, he produced a Discman that had to have dated to the mid-1990s.

“But my motherfucking batteries is dead, man! I need to listen to my jams!”

“I’m very sorry, buddy,” I reiterated, “but I don’t have anything for you”.

At this point his glare went from crazed to menacing. His eyes assumed a steely clarity that was unsettling, to say the least.

“Is that how we going to play it, motherfucker?” he snapped, the inflection of his voice rising and becoming noticeably louder. “I just got out of motherfucking Rikers, asshole,” he continued. “Do you know what that means? Do you know what that makes me, motherfucker?!”

I took a step back and squared my shoulders, keeping my arms to my sides but otherwise assuming a fighter’s stance. I fully expected him to attack me at that point. Although his dress made him appear comical at first glance, he was nonetheless powerfully built. Just when I thought he was about to swing, however, he began gesticulating wildly to himself.

“It makes me a faggot!”

I looked at him with an expression of utter bewilderment.

“I got fucked in the ass every day there, and now I’m a faggot! Yeah! I’m a faggot! I’m a faggot! Whoooooo!”

He repeated the phrase over and over again, each repetition louder and more enthusiastic than the one that preceded it. As quickly as he had approached, he turned around and began walking away from me into 8th Avenue’s perpetual tangle of traffic. He raised his arms triumphantly above his head and continued to repeat his new mantra:

“I’m a faggot! I’m a faggot! I’m a faggot! Yeah!”

Halfway across the street, he approached an off-duty yellow cab that was sitting in traffic. With one abrupt motion, he grabbed the handle to the driver’s door and swung it open violently. The terrified driver cowered in fear as our hero leaned in and screamed into his ear:

“I’M A FAGGOT!”

Without another word, he calmly walked away from the cab with his arms still raised skyward, sauntering down 30th Street like the heavyweight champion of the world.

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