at Harold's grave

The sun was out when we woke up and we had this hired Volkswagen Eos and so we dropped the top and headed out of Islington, out of London.

At the Tesco near Tottenham we loaded up on cheese and yogurt and bread to tear apart, and a white chocolate Easter cow, and kept going. Dylan on the mp3 player. Laughing and eating. "Look out kid Don't matter what you did Walk on your tip toes Don't try "No Doz" Better stay away from those That carry around a fire hose Keep a clean nose Watch the plain clothes You don't need a weather man To know which way the wind blows."

In Essex we found ourselves in Waltham Abbey. King Harold started building this church in 1060. Wasn't king yet, of course. Short reign for the last Saxon to rule, though the current royal family is quite German. Redux. rebirth. By the time we find a spot in the tiny carpark it is raining. This is England.

We go inside. Holding hands. There is intimacy within these ancient walls. There is the warmth of human touch which fights off the chill of a thousand years. On the wall of the guild chapelis a 12th Century Doom Painting. We stare. I think, sitting here in this empty space, that we could snog like teenagers in the back of a theatre, but it seems inappropriate.

Outside we stand by Harold's grave, between the base of the pillars of a part of the church lost long ago to Henry VIII's semi-Protestantism. It has turned cold and the rain stings, but histories hold me here for a moment. The first coronation in Westminster Abbey on the Ephiphany, 1066. Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Effort and loss. My father was Harold. Effort and loss. The sky is a thick and twisting grey.

Across the churchyard there is a pub. We share the world's best chips, massive and sizzling hot, and a pot of tea. We are warmed.

copyright 2009 by Ira Socol

toward Cockfosters

Charlie lived on Gillespie Road just past Plimsoll Road, so I walked from Trafalger Square where she and I had gone separate ways, leaning heavily on my cane, and made my way, indirectly, in the direction of the tube stop at Leicester Square.

Portuguese university students struggled to film the traffic. A frustrated man chased late leavers from the portico of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and loudly clanged the gates shut and locked them with chains. A gaggle of Irish women, Newry if my accent-tracker was working, rushed past gushing about Judi Dench in the play they had just seen. Outside the Coliseum two French twenty-somethings appeared on the verge of orgasm even if they remained mostly clothed.

Near New Row I paused, exhausted, pain spreading from my leg through my body, and I stumbled toward the door of The Angel and Crown, while reaching with my free hand for the small box of meds in my pocket. A barman held the door for me. "Need a pint?" "And perhaps food." "Can you make it upstairs?" "Slowly." We went through to the back and up the narrow stair. I sat between two groups of French students, the pint in front of me, the West End Saturday night playing out beyond the window I turned toward. It began to rain.

She appeared in the doorway with wet hair. "That was just dumb," she announced to the room. "Buy me dinner?" I nodded toward the chair next to me. She sat down. "You know I'd rather sleep on Charlie's couch with you than in Alex's guest suite alone." "I'd love that." "You just piss me off sometimes." "Sometimes?" "Sometimes."

Later, I limped down the stairs toward the Piccadilly Line. She guarded my back from the flow of people. The train toward Cockfosters was crowded as expected. Two young men gave us their seats. I closed my eyes. Her head fell on my shoulder. "You can make the walk from the station?" she asked. "Oh yeah," I told her.

copyright 2009 by Ira David Socol

on the way home from normal

I followed Jesus's Camaro on the way home from Normal last night. It bled into view as the rain came down somewhere north of the Michigan state line. A 1990s version, spoilers and with huge tires. "JC" in ornate type on the back of the trunk lid. His long dark hair falling over the headrest as the dim sunset illuminated the passenger cabin. What (else) would Jesus drive?

I crossed America on the way home from Normal last night. The remnants of the tall corn crop pressing in on the highways. Barns pulled from Hopper's palette the only skyline (save the silos and roadside McDonald's signs). The malls of the south Chicago suburbs rising along Interstate 80, the nation's main street. The colors of the autumn framing the Great Lake shore.

I let my mind drift on the way home from Normal last night. Cut free from unmasked moorings, held only by tidal pulls (rarely understood this far from the salt water seas), chilled by the water below and heated by the fading sun. The cruise control set just below "pull-over speed" - the clouds running too fast for me to catch up.

(c) 2008 by Ira Socol

A River Runs Through It

I stand in the Winter Garden looking down. My back toward the grand stairs and the vast room and the palm trees and the mirror-like polish on the floor and the Hudson River just beyond. It is the 12th of September, four years after, and I stare into the vast site that once held the World Trade Center - now just an odd-shaped concrete tub with trains sliding through a loop inside. Between that place and I West Street buzzes with traffic and this glass wall, so consciously engineered, stands. When this was first created it looked directly into the gap between Tower One and the hotel. A taught skin wrapping an urban panorama. Now it seems more a hastily erected barrier. Crime scene tape rendered in the architecture of our post-industrial age.

It is almost four centuries since Henry Hudson first sailed past this spot on a vast, wide salt-flavoured river that seemed as if it must connect sea to sea. In fact, he might have sailed on this spot, for it was river then. Looking into the Trade Center foundation you can see, quite clearly, where the edge of the island was in 1609. They filled that space in. Then two hundred years later they dug it back out to build the world's tallest buildings. And they took the same dirt and moved it over here. The land is valuable but the river is relentless. Beneath the towers of this World Financial Center pumps hum constantly. And everything being built right now in the empty pit before me relates directly to shoring up those concrete walls that continue to keep the river from re-seizing what was once its bed.

I used to work over there, in that ugly black building. It was a fantastic place to be. We were stunningly lucky. The department had somehow picked up a cheap sublease on these extraordinary offices that had belonged to some bank, and let us move in. The bank had signed a 20-year-deal and merged out of existence the very next year, so were settled in to our dazzling views of the Trade Center plaza for the long haul. But old-timers hated that building. It was built on the site of - the same phrase was always used - "the tallest building ever demolished" - the incredibly beautiful 1908 Singer Building by the wonderfully named Ernest Flagg. The Singer Building didn't ever make it to see the Trade Towers complete, not even to see the steel topped out. It, and its unprofitably small floors in that gorgeous slender tower, fell to the wreckers less than sixty years after completion. It's a fast-paced city you know. There's hardly a moment to be sentimental about the loss of something brilliant in the skyline.

The World Trade Center didn't last sixty years either. Didn't last thirty. Whether capitalism was also the cause of its demise can still be debated. Will still be debated. But it was beautiful as well. Beauty comes in many forms. Hudson saw a beautiful island from the Half-Moon, swathed in massive trees and running with clean rivers, in a bay teaming with fish and oysters. Alexander Hamilton went to what's now Columbia University just to the left of here, on a small rise in the beginning of Tribeca, and he wrote of long walks in the beautiful countryside. It was a beautiful city that welcomed the 20th Century, filled with its new white towers, and a beautiful city that pushed the skyline in the years before World War I - the Woolworth Building, the Singer Building, the Equitable Building. It was a beautiful city that embraced the thin gothic arches of the Trade Center in the 1970s, arches that stretched 107 floors and reflected every mood of the sky.

Behind me a string quartet has started to warm up in a corner of this vast space. The sounds echo richly off the curving roof, off the stone stairs. The instruments touch briefly on great pieces of music, and then three go silent, leaving just the Bach Cello Suite No.1 filling the scene with passion.

And that is too much. So I turn, and walk down the stairs clumsily, and burst through the doors onto the broad plaza by the river. The river flows down from Lake Tear in the Clouds, 4,293 feet above the sea in the Adirondack Mountains. It carves its way through the strongest of stones along the way. It is slightly narrowed, yes, but it remains relentless.


copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

meeting family

The present I brought, a two-DVD set of bootlegged copies of The Aristocats and The Aristocrats wrapped in a custom designed collaged cover promising “entertainment for the whole family,” made only half the people laugh, and they really didn’t appreciate the Belgian beer I’d spent a fortune on. “Belgian?” I realized that they neither knew where Belgium was nor knew anything about monks brewing beer nor what a Trappist was nor had they seen – or heard of – the funnier of the two movies. After all, we’d been the only two people in the theatre the night we saw it in town, and it only played three nights.

The sun was out and it looked like spring and I sat in the room wanting to be outside, but the wind was wicked and it was really just a degree or two above freezing, and so I snuck out on each half hour for a cigarette, and went to the bathroom a lot, and nursed the great beer because an already uncomfortable event can become a disaster mighty easily if you speed the drinking to ease the pain.

“Wanna get out of here?” she finally said. “Uh, huh.” “I think we’ve put in enough time.” “Uh, huh.” She circled the room, saying goodbye. I offered small waves and smiles and perhaps two, “it was nice to meet you”s.

As we reached the driveway I handed her a DVD so I could light the cigarette. “You stole the movie you gave them?” I found the keys and unlocked the car. “Thought it might be best.” “Might not have been the best idea in the first place.” “Maybe not.”

We drove home from that small city to this. “You really don’t have to like my cousins, we’ll only see them once or twice a year.” “No problem,” I said, “next time I’ll bring cheaper beer.” I turned a corner, there was clanking from the back seat. “You stole the beer back too?” “Uh, huh.”

copyright 2008 by Ira Socol

Editor

eagarthóir



"You should meet me at the Apple Store on 59th, right now." I can tell this is about to become a really stupid conversation. "I'm in City Hall Park, why don't you carry your damn new Macbook Pro down here. It's hot, I don't want to get on the subway." "No, no, no..." he stutters this, "I've got this video I shot last night on two of the big cinema displays, it's gorgeous, you've got to see it." "But I am a long, long way away from you right now." "I can wait." "I bet you can."

I've just walked from Brooklyn, over the bridge. It is ninety-something, and I fried out there above the East River, even succumbing to buying a dollar bottle of water by the New York tower. Now I sit in the park, in the shade, and the breeze is blowing mist from the fountain over me. I have kicked my shoes off. I have even pulled an ancient paperback of The Great Gatsby, just purchased from the used bookstore on Montague Street for twenty-five cents, out of my pack, and am flipping through looking for the greatest lines. My own literary YouTube. I really do not want to go anywhere. But.

The phone rings again. The Persuasions, "I Just Want to Sing with My Friends." Him.

"You on the train yet?" "No." "You're not still sitting on some park bench drooling like some old man?" "That is exactly what I'm doing." "Fuck man, c'mon, I can't be waiting for you forever."

"Fuck, fuck." I shout this. Now I really am the crazy old man. I close the book, drop it in my backpack. Pull my shoes back on. Stand up. Pull the pack onto my still sweat-soaked body. I walk over to the fountain, lean in, scoop up water, and dump it on my neck. I consider direction. My first thought is to walk over to the 6 train, but that's old memory, going the other way, catching the R, will get me right there.

It's only fair, I suppose. I have called him up at four in the morning, his time, often. Telling him to get up, check his email, read a paragraph or a story, and tell me how to fix it. I have stumbled into his homes at many bizarre hours, drunk and depressed. He has done the same to me. The drunk and depressed. When he wants me to see things they are always visual. Photographs, films, videos. It goes way back to him as a film student at NYU when he dragged me through abandoned ancient Lower East Side synagogues as he shot his senior thesis. He filmed. A huge old 16mmm camera lugged on his shoulder. I scared him by pulling out my gun and shooting at rats the size of fat house cats.

And there was the joint venture in illegal Irish immigration filmed on the streets of Belfast and The Bronx. And there were those early moments, when I showed him my initial attempts at cop stories. And then, later on, those first tries at the childhood stories.

The subway station is damp but cool. The train is mostly empty and crisply air-conditioned. I sit with my pack between my legs, watching the tunnel lights flash by, and the stations roll into view, one by one. The R reaches from 95th Street in Bay Ridge out by the Verrazano Bridge and goes all the way to Forest Hills near the leafy parts of Queens. It used to go to Astoria, terminating among a sea of Greek diners, but then Mayor Bloomberg decided to confuse everyone , and switched the way the N and the R go on the Queens ends. Either way, I'm sticking with Manhattan right now, so I'm wasting thoughts.

I get off at 59th and Fifth, and climb out into the sun. The Apple Store looms ahead of me. The great glass cube with the Charley and the Chocolate Factory glass elevator (the book or the Gene Wilder movie - not the Johnny Depp one). I cross the street. Enter. And glide down.

He is waiting. He has been connecting and conniving as well. As I approach his video of one night at Nathan's Famous explodes across twenty huge screens. It is him at his visual best. The camera sweeps and lurches, the colours explode, the people's essences burst through. He has even edited it pretty well already. And thirteen minutes later it concludes to loud applause.

He bows dramatically.

"Four hours last night, barely left the place at all," he says. "Wanted to do the beach on a night this hot, but I got sidetracked." We spend the next three hours re-editing. I help - I suspect. In little bits. In saying, "no, that one," when he might have picked something more for just him. We show it big four more times. People like it again and again, even those who have been here, working on whatever, the whole time.

Then he says, "got anything?" I pull a jump drive off from around my neck, and plug it in. The lanyard lies on the table, still wet from sweat and fountain water. "I'm struggling with this, been fighting this chapter for a week."

'"You've never looked at a city the way I have," I told her, as I took in the entirety of the street, the entirety of the moment, in a way most people never learn to do but which is the key to survival if you find yourself chased. "Thank God for that," she said, "you know, you may be getting a bit scary." We were right there. At the spot. The rain polishing the footwalk's pavement. If I saw ghosts and Caitlin did not, what of everyone passing by in the rain this afternoon? If I saw ghosts here could I walk the eight or ten blocks over to Donegall Street and make it through that? "I am more than a bit scared," I said in surprising confession. "I do not like this city at all, and I want it to stop raining. I want fewer reflections." "We should find you a pint," she said, "we should find pints for both of us. And maybe you need to tell me a story I have yet to hear." '

It appears on the screen, this paragraph filling the pixels.

He grabs the keyboard. Changes some things. Hands it to me. I change some more. He takes it back, a touch violently, and types for thirty seconds.

'"You've never looked at a city the way I do," I told her, grabbing the entirety of the street in my eyes, the entirety of the moment, in a way people never learn to do unless they know what it is like to be chased. "Thank God for that," she said, "you know, you may be getting a bit scary." We were right there. At the spot. The rain polishing the footwalk's pavement. If I saw ghosts but Caitlin did not, what of everyone passing by in this rain this afternoon? If I see ghosts here can I walk the eight or ten blocks over to Donegall Street and survive there? "I'd be a bit scared," I said in surprising confession. "I do not like this city, and I want it to stop raining. I want fewer reflections." "We should find you a pint," she said, "we should find pints for both of us. And maybe you need to tell me a story I have yet to hear." '

"That is better," I say honestly. "It is," a woman nearby says, and now I realise that my words are illuminated across an entire wall, "but either way it's beautiful writing, really, a book?" "Shut up," he says sharply, "this is private." I look at her, past him, and mouth, "Thank you, and sorry he's an asshole." She smiles - she may be older but she is very beautiful - and goes back to her email.

"You're a fucking eijit," I say. Pushing a few keys, shrinking my words back to just this display. "Yeah, he says, "but people ought to be paying to read your shit."

"We should all be rich," I tell him. "Then it wouldn't matter." "And we could do this shit all day?" "Yeah, and we could do this shit all day."




copyright 2007-2008 by Ira Socol

Nicotine

(an old favorite in honor of all those grading papers these weeks)Exhausted with their lives they find themselves sharing seven minutes of intimacy smoking in a cold rain outside a coffee house neither of them want to be at. He grading papers for high school history classes that just don't seem to care. She bored with everything in this stupid little town she's been dragged to, staying away from her house and seeking past acquaintances on-line through the only wi-fi connection around.

Water falls on her dark hair and his artificially tan face and on the thin white t-shirt that shows beneath her jacket and on the tops of his beat up Reeboks. He tans because he hates the winter here and needs sunlight. He goes to the worst place in town with the dullest bulbs in the oldest beds because they let him lie in that warm Plexiglas coffin for a half hour at a time. She wears shirts that let her equally thin bra and in this weather she knows nipples as well show through because it gets her husband mad and at this point she'll take any attention she can get. Even the kind of attention that would have made her feel like kicking a guy's ass maybe just two years ago.

He stares at her but somehow it is not obvious. He stares with the edge of his sight as he looks past her shoulder at the steel gray sky and the Burger King end of a faded downtown. The old "Standard" gas station sign with the torch is now a "bp" sign with green leaf shapes. The only change apparent. She looks at the ground, mostly, but manages, with each drag, to pick up details of his face, his hands, the un-ironed nature of his shirt, the way the blue is worn away at the knees and fly of his jeans.

He knows there's a bar across the street. He wants to say, "fuck the papers." There's not one kid who'd give a shit if he threw them all away. As long as he gave out As. Most even if he didn't. Maybe one kid. Alright, maybe four. Does that matter? He'll give out As anyway. Who cares. He wants to dump the papers in the bin with the remnant disposable plates and napkins and plastic forks and take her to the bar and drink with her and talk with her and take her home and have sex. He doesn't know who she is. He noticed her a half hour ago and thinks she is equally lonely. He imagines that. He likes the way her hand curls around a coffee mug, the length of her fingers, the way she pushes the hair from her face. He doesn't care. He wants conversation with an adult outside a teachers' lounge. He wants to be drunk. He wants to be touched.

She thinks there's a place in the next town. She's driven past it. It looks old, kind of Chicago neighborhood Italian and she wants this guy to take her there and drink real espresso with Sambuca, not this semi-Starbucks crap, and deep red wine and eat extravagant pasta and she wants him to reach over and touch her hand and talk to her and say the kinds of things she used to hear but doesn't now. She's been watching him for almost two hours from across a room full of small-town pretenders. She's making assumptions based on a vaguely familiar look, on the hurt in his eyes, on the way he sighs with frustration, on the fact that she thinks teaching is a noble thing. What she imagines is diligence, empathy, and care. She's not sure how much she wants to get back at her husband. Has no plans for an affair, really. She just imagines that getting "picked up" that way might restore her knowledge of her sexuality. And fill her time tonight.

He drops the butt of his Camel into a puddle and it makes a tiny sizzle. He shakes the rain off his hair. She flicks the remnant of a Newport into the street. He turns toward the door, his features highlighted by the typical red and blue neon "open" sign. She turns toward the door. He opens it and holds it for her. She walks back in to cold coffee and two messages from friends 1,700 miles away. He sits down and picks up "World War I and Woodrow Wilson," sighs. Writes an A in red at the top, picks up the next.

copyright 2003-2004 by Ira Socol
image: Michellious Peyne 2008

the weight

an meáchan



Taj said he'd meet me in the Sheep Meadow at four, but I was there by two, feeling kind of loopy from the too early summer heat that was saturating the city, and I pulled off my shirt and lay on it on the grass with a bottle of Gatorade and the Daily News and a book of Gregory Corso's poems that had been jammed in my back pocket.

Over there a father kicked a soccer ball to his two sons, maybe two and four. Over here a baby climbed from mom to dad. In the distance three preppie types, no doubt from private schools in New Jersey or Connecticut, tossed a ball back and forth with their expensive lacrosse sticks - posing with every catch. Beyond them four Koreans practised a slow-motion Asian exercise routine.

"I stand in the dark light in the dark street / and look up at my window, I was born there. / The lights are on; other people are moving about. / I am with raincoat; cigarette in mouth, / hat over eye, hand on gat. / I cross the street and enter the building. / The garbage cans haven't stopped smelling. / I walk up the first flight; Dirty Ears / aims a knife at me... / I pump him full of lost watches." and I fall asleep, the smell of just cut grass fueling the softest of dreams.

In a wide glen an hour west of the old stone city my Da played football with us in the thick clover. He was teaching us how to get air under the ball, how to pass over the midfield, but really, we were just playing catch in the sun. And over there Ma sat and read in the quiet of having all four children occupied by things other than herself. She smiles to herself - it is the most vivid of memories - as if all the cares had been lifted.

I woke up with a shadow thrown across my face. "You're probably claiming you're on the clock right now, aren't you?" All I could see was a looming figure against the sun. I closed my eyes and re-established which grass I lay in. "Some job you've got." "It's tough, ya know, but someone's gotta do it." He threw a thick pile, held together with rubber bands, down next to me. "Check out the pics of Hunt's Point," Taj said, still looming. I pulled the package apart, opened the string closure on a department reuse envelope that was stiff to bend. Photo paper. "When were these taken?" "Wednesday night into Thursday, maybe twenty-three hundred to oh-two-thirty." "You ran all the plates?" "Yeah, that's in there too." I followed along by pulling out the print outs.

I got to my feet. Pulled the shirt back over my head. Taj continued to loom. He's got a foot, maybe more, on me. "Mighty tall for undercover," I've said, but he could be a Bronx goon, so he's not out of place prowling the terminal market in the off hours. "Where you off to now?" "I'm supposed to try and crash a birthday party in Long Island City. You know, work, I hear you used to do some of that." "Not really." "Yeah." "Yeah, well, I guess I should go downtown and see how this adds up." "Gonna let us know?" "We always do." "No, you don't." "Well, we've got funny rules," I told him this, but nobody really understands what the Intelligence Division does. "Yeah," he said, and walked casually off toward Fifth Avenue.

I bent down and picked everything up and slipped the papers into the middle of The News, somewhere between Dear Abby and the classifieds. I stuffed the book back into my pocket. I'll go back downtown, I figured. I'll walk down toward Rockefeller Center and find something to eat in an air conditioned restaurant and catch the train and go start adding this stuff into a database that might suggest the details we need on these particular dope dealers. And then I'll see if I can make some assumptions. They were paying me to make assumptions. But I knew that I wouldn't do that for a day or two. It was too hot, and I felt too lost in time. "Of course I tried to tell him," Corso wrote, "but he cranked his head / without an excuse. / I told him the sky chases / the sun / And he smiled and said: / 'What's the use.'" All around me I heard the sound of kids free on a summer day. I drained the Gatorade as I walked through the field, and tossed the bottle in a trash bin. It made a hollow "thunk" as it hit the rim. But the still air remained silent, and my footsteps on the lawn made no sound at all.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol
first poem is Birthplace Revisited by Gregory Corso from Gasoline.
second poem is Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway by Gregory Corso from The Happy Birthday of Death.

trinity

one

In this night as the storms rage above and below and I climb the boxes and then the shelf in the closet and slip through the hatch into the attic, my own passage through the wardrobe I find myself believing, and push the blankets and pillow I have dragged up as far into the eaves as I can fit – I could not have been more than seven and so I needed very, very little space – then I know that the fear from downstairs might begin to soften.

two

Wrapped in this nest I absorb the rhythm of the wind-driven rain on slate roof shingles so ancient they have been thinned visibly by centuries of Atlantic precipitation. The air is sharp and cold but inside the blankets my body warms and relaxes. In the full-dark I fumble for my secret box, a tin that once held chocolates brought by a cousin from London but now holds votives secreted from the cathedral, matches from the pub, and all of the postcards received from cousin Michael in America. With blind dexterity born of too much experience I set out the candles, and strike the fire.

three

The trinity of flames create more shadow than light but I hold the postcards. There is New York, and the dome of the Capitol in Washington, and a fold-out set from Cape Kennedy, a boat on the Mississippi by New Orleans, even the Astrodome. But the one I always hold is just from a hotel in a place called "Arizona." The building is so new. Palm trees stand in front. The cars are like spaceships to a lad who knows no one who even owns one of the tiny boring cars people have here. And the sky. Oh the sky. It is bigger than any I have seen and a kind of blue I have never imagined.

ar maidin

That postcard is in my hand as I fall asleep. It is still clutched there when the first ray of dawn cuts under deep gray clouds and throws itself through the dusty attic window and for just one moment makes my world absolutely my own.

copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

Morning Arrivals

1:28 AM One World Trade Center, New York, New York, USA

The party was in that artist's space on the north side of the 67th floor and I'd walked through the late summer storm all the way from the Canal Street Station on the BMT because it hadn't been raining when we'd crossed the Manhattan Bridge and I hadn't considered that possibility. I was soaked: t-shirt and jeans stuck to my skin, water squishing out of my adidas. The elevator up to the 44th floor skylobby was cold, and I shivered. I noticed the trail of water I left on the polished floor as I changed to the 'local' for the rest of the climb.

The music shook the walls when I stepped out onto the floor. Flashing light leaked into the central corridor. There was a girl I desperately wanted to be with inside. And at least two guys I did not want to see at all.

5:23 AM Craigovan Bridge, Derry, Ireland

Behind the sky was just beginning to be touched with the sun now dawning over the Netherlands. Ahead it was a pure dark backdrop to the pinprick lights of the bridge and the city. I had left Belfast too late and too depressed and probably a bit too snoggered for my own good, but I'd kept the music roaring and my eyes open and the almost vacant A-6 hadn't thrown me anything I couldn't handle.

When I curved through the rotary just east of the Foyle I already felt like I was home, but I didn't want to show up just yet. So I crossed, drove through the Ferryquay Gate and up the hill. I parked at the Diamond, and sat on the car. The war memorial seemed reproachful, the streetlamps blocked the stars.

8:23 AM Dublin Airport, Dublin, Ireland

The flight from Chicago had crossed a cloudless night. I had watched the cities and forests of North America run beneath in the fading evening light, had noted the tiny spots of light that mark Canada's Atlantic coast. I thought I woke up at one point and saw a ship crossing the ocean, the smallest flare of illumination in a vast, deep universe. Or maybe I dreamed that. It doesn't matter.

Ireland glittered as morning struck the plane, the Shannon silver against the fabric of the land which held it. Only Donegal smothered itself under tufted grey. I knew she would be there at the airport. We'd said we'd meet them by the giant winged pig by the car park. I thought that suggested many things. The line for those with EU passports went this way. The line for others was over there.

11:41 AM Indian Trails Bus Station, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

I'd taken the first plane from LaGuardia to Metro. American Airlines. "Fly the American Way." Everyone else was wearing a suit and carrying briefcases. I had a backpack and a pillow and had checked a dufflebag. It was just about everything. The stewardess thought my nervousness was about flight and was very nice. At Detroit I claimed the duffle and found the bus going north and west. Not Greyhound or even Trailways, but 'Indian Trails.'

East Lansing emerged out of an empty landscape. The tops of the football stadium visible long before any other object save huge chimneys. It was the end of the summer and the air was hot and full of dust. I felt myself start to sweat as I lifted everything onto my shoulders. Around me others were being be greeted by old friends or family. And still others walked off as if they knew where they were going.

copyright 2008 by Ira Socol

violence

foréigean



There had been so many chances to get killed this year, and last year, and the year before. I just thought about that. Not as a list or anything. Nothing specific. Just a vague sense of a life uncertain. A life lived just a few steps beyond the razor's edge. These things flashed through my head as the landscape of Brooklyn wheezed outside the windows of the F train as it drifted along the el above McDonald Avenue, heading south, toward the sea.

Night was just starting to fall. It was getting late, but not late enough. Still, I was going now. I didn't want to ride out here later, in an empty subway car, being one of just two or three getting off a train. The best way to be anonymous is always to be in a crowd. So I was on my way. I could surely kill five hours on Coney Island. Anyone could.

The meet wouldn't happen until two, over in the abandoned lots past the Thunderbolt. This was a scary buy. Anytime you're buying guns it's fucking scary. I mean, if you're buying guns there's no doubt that there'll be guns around, right? But these guys made me twitchy. They seemed less like people interested in getting money than like psychos. Maybe that was cultural. I might have been misreading Eastern European shit the wrong way. They might just be sane criminals. I'd keep repeating that to myself, hunting some shot at calm.

I got off at West Eighth Street and walked. I walked all the way to Nathan's. Grabbed two dogs and a beer and walked along the boardwalk, going back east. The sun had vanished, the neon was exploding. The night was hot and the crowd smelled of alcohol and sweat and baby oil and Coppertone. The boardwalk felt small, and I decided to get above it.

So I got in line for the Wonder Wheel, and climbed aboard with two twenty-something girls who said they liked my earrings, and rode up into the August sky.

We laughed. They rocked the car. They shared some toxic liqueur they were carrying. I pulled out a joint and shared that. The ocean breeze cooled us, quickly, in a way that heightened the moment of sexual tension. I looked down blurrily on the scene. Three and a half hours ahead I'd meet these guys. I'd be so scared sweat would be pouring down my body, but it would come off clean. I'd drop the evidence on two cops sitting in an old Ford Galaxie stopped at the boardwalk stairs west of the Parachute Jump. And then I'd walk away - on the empty streets - not even really knowing where I was until I found the Brighton Beach station and boarded a train back north. There were never any arrests. The three guys I bought from were found dead in Sheepshead Bay two days later - we were never sure why - or I was never told - or I never asked.

But now I was just looking down from our date on the neon-carpeted night. Girl Two had her hand on the inside of my thigh. Her little finger just brushing the denim that covered my balls. "Wanna come party with us tonight?" she asked. The way her hand was placed she knew I was ready to do something, and I knew she knew, but I just said, "Sorry sweetheart, I'm working tonight." "Working?!" Girl One laughed. "Working? You a cop or you clean up at Nathan's?" "A cop," I told her. "Yeah right," she said, as Girl Two removed her hand. "Think of me and whack yourself off when you're cleaning up the french fry machine."

We were back down at the bottom. "I'll do that," I said, grabbing my crotch as they climbed out of the ride. "I'll think only of you."


copyright 2007 by Ira Socol
images from The Bridge and Tunnel Club

Tea in Dublin

Tae sa Baile Átha Cliath



She had the organic porridge with Drambuie and cream. I had the "famous" Irish breakfast. We're both coffee drinkers but on this morning we had a pot of tea. It seemed more proper. And if we were actually meeting again and actually spending the money for breakfast at Bewley's, it seemed important, or perhaps simply logical, to be proper.

"What about ya?" I asked. An unconscious fall into northern phrasing. Her laugh was just as I had left it seven years ago, a dangerous combination of lovely and vicious. "You'd think after all these years you'd have learned how to speak." "Ah," I answered, "you wouldn'a have changed at'all." She only looked at me then, her dark eyes slashing though they barely moved, and sipped her tea.

We'd been lovers. Briefly. Wildly. Cataclysmically. I had been in Dublin short term. She had assumed that meant a meaningless fling. I had deluded myself into believing something else. I had deluded myself into believing many things. I flew home shattered. What's that song, "I awoke with a broken heart and a ticket home?" Maybe, but, in retrospect, she was not truly the object of real love. It was my fantasy of conquering the high-powered Dublin woman, bringing her to love me. It was that which had likely mattered, and it was that which had ended up broken. So, in my memory I was not fair to her. It is always more reciprocal than we want to admit. Always.

There was much less conversation than I had imagined or prepared for. She looked much older, much more tired. I might have as well. She seemed less self-assured, less confident, and that made me sad. Her angry self-centeredness had made her attractive at the start - in that way that I often seek out the bad drama - and thus she was easy to hate in the aftermath. Now there seemed less of a point to all of the emotional energy that had been expended.

"There's a rumour," she said, "that you want to go to UU." "Nuh," I told her, "well, perhaps. I'd go back to Derry if something came up at Magee, and maybe to Coleraine, but I wouldn'a necessarily move to take something at Jordanstown." She wasn't really listening, it had just been her habit of repeating stories. So I asked about her new book, and she described that in detail. She likes her work. She's damn smart. And that was always attractive.

There were some other things exchanged. Her kids, mine, in surface description. Her research and mine, again, skimmed. A few places she'd been, places I still was.

And then, breakfast was done, and so was the second pot. And it was time. She hugged me momentarily at the door, I responded with one arm. She walked on up Grafton Street, back into her own world. I looked her way, then looked the other. It was nearing noon, and the street was aflood with shoppers and walkers and buskers and tourists. I walked back toward College Green, stopped for afternoon pub cash at the ATM at the Bank of Ireland. I said to myself, "I should go into this building more often - it is so beautiful." Then I crossed the street, and walked through the gates of Trinity. From the light of the day, to the dim of the ancient corridor, and back out into the light of the day.



copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

pizza on Tuesday

Thirty-six hours into watching we are all going insane. We moved into this filthy space above an abandoned pizzeria on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Kevin at two or so, me at six, the others in between, and now it is a rainy Tuesday morning, colder than it should be, nothing is really happening, and the roof is leaking.

"You gonna do anything here?" Mario asks me, "Watch, maybe, or listen to the phone?" "Nah, you guys are all much better at this stuff than me." "Then could run go get more coffee and lunch, none of us fits into this neighborhood like you do." "I could," I say sighing, "You assholes all do look like cops." "Go get coffee and pizza and fuck yourself while you're at it," Kevin suggests smiling. "Ní dhéarna mé coir," I say, repeating the basic phrase we used with the RUC and Paras back in Northern Ireland years ago. They don't get it. I barely do. But as an adolescent lad it suggested both innocence and rebellion in the same short sentence, and I feel like proclaiming that status at this moment. Nik throws two twenties at me, "Get your potato eating ass in motion." I get up literally as slowly as possible. Climb the stairs to the roof, cross to the third building to the west, and head back down.

I emerge into the downpour in a trash filled alley and pull my Mets hat deep over my eyes. When I was small I had this old cap from my Uncle Eamon. It was way too big, and I could barely see when I wore it, but I always kept it on my head. Eamon was in prison in Long Kesh having done nothing wrong, and the cap was a connection to someone special to me and a quiet argument. But the adults in the city just thought I looked stupid.

I walk two blocks to what might be the best pizza place in New York City, which is saying something big. I order three pies and five coffees to go and one for here, carefully describing the required contents. "Two regular, Two no sugar, one black no sugar, and black no sugar for here." And I sit twisted and hidden in a booth by the window, looking out, both hands wrapped around the hot cup.

Minutes pass. Then a scene begins to play out. And even from underneath the hat brim I see it before it occurs. An elderly woman with an umbrella and a grocery bag and a purse on her arm, and a kid who wants quick cash. And suddenly I bolt. I yell, "Call 9-1-1 with a mugging and I'll be right back." I grab the shield out from inside my shirt and pull my gun from an ankle holster as I swing through the door and race down Neptune Avenue, my sneakers slapping the wet pavement. Just as the kid strikes I dive into a tackle and take him down. The woman screams. The kid starts to fight until I punch him in the face with everything I've got. Then he says, "Yo man, I didn't do nothing." Blood runs from his broken nose. I smile. He takes my memory for dangerous insanity and shuts up. A radio car bends around the far corner and rushes over. I let go of the kid with one hand to hold up the shield to I.D. myself before I get taken out.

I get up. My jeans are soaking wet. "Your collar," I say to the smaller of the two cops, "I gotta go." People are watching, and that, in my line of work, is bad. I back away into a gathering cluster of watchers, then turn and slouch back to the pizzeria. "Thanks," I tell Nunzio who waits behind the counter. "Nice work," he says. "You've never seen me," I say, and carry the pies and coffees back to my more observant partners.

copyright 2006 by Ira Socol

alone

He sat in the back of the classroom. Sometimes staring at the fluorescent lights flickering and humming above. Sometimes looking out the window toward the traffic flowing on the street beyond the playground. Sometimes following patterns invisible to others in the woodgrain of his desk or in the tiles of the floor or in the cotton of his jeans.

Beyond him he knew the teacher was usually talking. That other kids were reading or writing, passing notes or hitting each other, talking or rolling pencils off the desk so that they could bend down and pick them up. He knew that numbers and letters and words were being tossed around, but none of it could really touch his attention. He knew that he didn't need them anyway. He told his own stories as he watched his worlds, he added and divided his own sums as he let time wander, he found his own sciences as he watched the earth spin through its day. And he knew that the teacher knew that if she tried to force these things his way, he had very good ways to resist.

So there he sat. Holding an uneasy truce with his captors. Waiting for the best days, the rainy days, when water would streak across the window and the passing cars and trucks would toss spray in the air, and when he was finally paroled at the final bell he could walk slowly home, letting the water from the sky bathe him in its chill embrace.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

on Flatbush Avenue

Nobody really gave a shit that Carlos sold smack from the corner table in the back of the cafeteria in the Sears on Flatbush Avenue, except that Carlos was getting his dope from a guy who was also selling discount assault weapons from Virginia to all sorts of bad guys around central and southern Brooklyn.

So I went there a few more than a dozen times I guess. Drinking the bad coffee, eating the just a bit too chewy to be real meat hamburgers, and after seven visits Carlos and I talked, and on visit nine I made my first buy.

After the third buy - the ADAs always wanted three - I showed up a day or two more just for cover's sake and then vanished. I was on another task, five weeks later, when they busted Carlos at his apartment on Church Avenue and dragged him to Brooklyn South's major case detectives and scared him to fucking death and got him to talk. He was nothing, of course, just a tool salesman with a bad habit and a need for a little extra cash on the side. That's just like all of us, right? He was no more selling heroin in a Brooklyn department store by choice than any of us were doing anything by choice. We'd all been sucked to this capital of the American Empire by forces so massive they were invisible. And we were all committing crimes and finding ways to collaborate as we tried to survive. It's the way it is.

The information from Carlos proved valuable. It led to a series of very good arrests. He got cut loose as carefully as they could - a faked "dismissal of the evidence" in court. Everybody tries. There are few real villains here.

Still, Carlos was dead twelve weeks after I last saw him in the cafeteria. Shot from a car as he walked past the Kenmore Theater on his way home on a dim and wet January night. Another murder never solved.

The next summer, buying a drillbit from under a disguising Mets cap, I overheard another Sears clerk say that his wife had fled back to Puerto Rico with the two kids. I felt sick. So I went up to the second floor, and found a corner table in the cafeteria. And drank two or four cups of the bad coffee. Around me the city swirled and pulsed, moving on, as it always does.

copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

Once

Once, a generation ago, very drunk and very desperate about far too many things, we’d lain near this tree, by this gravestone, in this cemetery, and made love in a very dark night. Not just shagged. Not just. It was more than that. It was, I want to think for both of us, an act of dressing wounds, of offering sanctuary, of providing respite.

Today the sun is bright and it touches us with warmth and we are older, safer, surer. Fuchsia climbs wildly up the ancient marker. Birds serenade us.

“I am so glad that you rang me this time,” she says, her voice not having changed at all, “I’d’a begun to imagine you were avoiding me.” She laughs, a perfect laugh. “No, I’d much more than begun. But now, it is wonderful to see you, to hear you.” I look down into the not cut recently enough grass. “I was nervous about it, too nervous, you were my mate’s girl, even if he was away.” I wait. I listen to the silence of her breathing. “I thought we shouldn’a done it.”

She puts a finger to my lips. “Don’t,” she simply says. “The best friends give the gifts we need when we need them.”

In the sun, in this place, we sit beside one another and say nothing. Later, in other places, we will tell each other of the twenty years past. Not now though. Not in this sanctuary.

copyright 2008 by Ira Socol

silent night

From the windows that faced South Oxford Street I could see the clock at the top of the Williamsburgh Bank Building, grey in the daylight and glowing in the night. My lighthouse in the heart of Brooklyn. The apartment was always too hot, you couldn't shut the radiators off and they hissed and steamed and I sat there, wearing just underwear, staring at the tower against the fading December day, cassettes of a law book scattered around me but Joey Ramone screaming instead through mammoth JBL headphones plugged into a huge old Heathkit Amp I'd bought used on the street for way too little. It was filled with vacuum tubes and lit up the corner of the room like a mad scientist's laboratory while adding it's own great heat to the situation.

As I stared snow began to drop from the dark clouds and the tower's edges faded behind a white curtain until only the glow of the clock remained, a false red moon, and then, I had switched now to a tape of a friend's band, the snow came much faster and the landmark completely vanished. The street below slipped back into its own time. I leaned against the window, elbows on the center rails, looking down on cars and asphalt made invisible and streetlamps reduced to ancient wattages by the thickness of the crystals in the air.

I heard a knock at the door. An impatient, obviously second or third knock. That surprised me. You had to be let in downstairs here. No direct access and no buzzer system either. No one would just knock unless it was one of the guys who owned the brownstone and lived on the ground and first floors. But, they had become friends, so I dropped the headphones and opened the door. Katie stood there, wrapped in wool, covered with snow. "Oh," she said, "Mark told me you'd be naked and to just come on up. But I guess, not quite." "I can solve that really easily," I told her, waving her in, perhaps putting a finger to the waistband. "Put your pants on Ulster boy, don't be afraid of winter." She paused, let her eyes roll across me. "We're going out into the storm."

I put on clothes, and a sweater, and a jacket and scrounged around until I discovered a misplaced hat and gloves, and we went down the stairs and out the door. The stoop we stood on, and all the buildings left and right, were from the 1840s, and now, that was obvious. There were no sounds, the city had gone into hiding, leaving this path to the past to us alone.

We walked toward the park and climbed the hill. Manhattan, usually a backdrop so close you were sure you could touch it, was gone. I laughed, and kissed her. Then we went back down, walking toward Fulton Street, hardly speaking. The snow was so thick you couldn't see more than a half block in any direction, so buildings suddenly appeared, as if ghosts in a Dickens Christmas tale, and just as quickly receeded. It was perfect.

We walked all the way to the bridge, and out to the middle of the river, where the wind swirled the flakes into van Gogh-Starry Night streaks. "Let's go back and find hot coffee in the Heights," I whispered. "Sure," she said, "but hold onto me first, right here."
_________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - photograph is the Brooklyn Bridge in snow.

The Drool Room now available everywhere including Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
A Certain Place of Dreams now available everywhere including Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

Bridge Work

droichead



They gave me the gold shield cause I could develop great databases. I thought, "you've got to be fucking kidding?" but this was true. All the shit I went through for them - all the desperate nights undercover - all the risks - all the injuries - all the collars that I made or that couldn't have happened without me - that got me nothing. I could'a stayed a Patrolman for ever. But, sitting in a strange little office with a computer, stretching out the recovery of a shattered knee, I had mixed a healthy appetite for Flight Simulator with a few simple approaches to recording crime data, and - presto! - they told me to come downtown and be a "Detective."

Actually, no, they did not say that. They called on a Tuesday morning and said, "How do you know this stuff?" "What stuff?" "How to program computers." "I don't know how to program computers." "Those databases." "That's not programming - I'm just making columns." "How do you know how to do that?" "Make columns? Don't know - It's easy."

This is why I never succeed in business.

Whatever. They said, "Come downtown and work on this stuff at headquarters." And I said, "Why the fuck would I want to do that. It's expensive down there. It's a long commute."

We argued over the next few weeks. But I was right. I worked fifteen minutes from my house. I knew everyone. They liked me. Why switch for nothing?

"Make me a detective," I offered. "Can't do that." "Why not, you should have made me a detective years ago." "Why's that?" "Look me up in your personnel files."

And I suppose they did.

"We'll make you a "Field Services Specialist-Detective Third Class." "Wow," I said, "that's a hell of an honor." But I went. The title came with five thousand more bucks a year, a complete lack of supervision, and bizarre little office with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The work was boring, more or less, but I would spend an hour on task, and then sneak out and wander Chinatown, or Little Italy, or just, if my leg hurt that day, sit in City Hall Park, or, especially in the dark winter evenings, drift out onto the bridge, embraced by the ribbons of light, and breath in the vast salt smell of the Atlantic tide pushing up the harbor from the Narrows.

And then I'd wander back to that tiny office, and rifle through cases, looking for ways to assemble patterns, or discover patterns. I was probably catching criminals. I really was, but I didn't feel like a cop anymore. But when I stood out on the bridge, in the depth of the winds, I really didn't care.
___________________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

a thrice told tale...

iomadúil



I wish I had gotten there just a bit earlier. Of course I do. First, I would have been ahead of the rain, once it began to fall heavily, and I would not have seen dripping wet after the run from the bus stop three streets over. And second, more importantly surely, I would have been there before Liam. He might not have said that to her if he had known I was in the room. And who knows? The party might have just gone along swimmingly.

I couldn't get there earlier. Not really. I suppose that I must say that at the start. Oh sure, I could have stopped checking email before I did, gotten into the shower, gotten myself dressed and all, and out the door and to the bus stop. The busses are supposed to be about twenty minutes apart that time of the day, but even if I had been twenty or even forty minutes ahead, you understand, this is Dublin and the Dublin Bus system and, when I did get to the stop, three busses were forming their own queue for the seven people waiting. A full hours worth of mass transport lined up into a single minute. I simply would have waited longer, probably become more frustrated myself. That, combined with being soaked to the skin by the downpour between the stop on Baggot Street and her home, might have made the over-reaction - if it was an over-reaction, because I'm not quite ready to admit that just yet - even greater. At least that's possible.

Yes, yes. I should not have hit him. Yes, not like that. Damn close to a sucker punch. He really never saw it coming, though he should have, and I caught him right on the side of the mouth, knocking him sideways off his feet, leaving blood pouring from a split lip. But holy fuck, ya know, he deserved it. You just don't pull shite like that. If you're gonna come already snockered to a party, you better arrive as a happy drunk, not a belligerant arsehole.

When I was in the shower, the hot water coursing across my body, I imagined that the night would go differently. Absolutely I did. But that's the nature of being naked in warm water, it creates optimism. The reality of the evening was built on other bodily sensations, the clinging to the skin of cold, wet cotton and wool. That forces the harshness of the universe right into your face. So, when I opened the door, dripped on the aged oak flooring, saw the tears and heard the anger, the romantic allusions had already drained away, and I was just a tosser blown in by the storm.

True. I shouldn't have hit him. I should have found words. Used words. But there were too many things in my head at that moment. And I only found the action that lay on top of that mental pile.

She was in tears, and she was shouting, "Get the fuck out! Just get the fuck out of my house." And everybody was just staring. I walked into this frozen scene, with only her in movement, and only her sounds. I moved into a circle of ice, and shivered as she looked at me, and then hardened as I saw him.

She was in tears. He had loudly announced that her ambition was the cause of her kid's problems. Which is something you do not say to a mother who has tried that hard, or to anyone in their home in front of guests, or if you've been invited to an ex's "Tenure Party" - since the very invitation is an act of grace that you should accept with silent thanks. But he is an arse. And he thinks he looks strong if he can make her cry.

Right. I should'na hit him. That's something else guests are not supposed to do.

Had I been there before him, as I said, I would have been near her, and he would have stayed away. He might have, drunk as he was he surely would have, made snarkey remarks to others. He might have even said something about what had happened. But he would not have said it loudly, or directly, and he would not have attacked her ability to parent that way. Liam's a coward. He's afraid of lots of people. And one of those people he's afraid of is me.

I hit him on an impulse. I did. It wasn't planned. He had insulted the woman who might have been on the way to becoming "my" woman. He had not just insulted her, but had suggested that her accomplishments, the very reason for this gathering, was some kind of crime.

I hit him because I wanted to sleep with her again. Yes. I wanted to be the knight in shining armour. Because I was raised on the belief that nothing was more romantic than defending the honour of your woman. King Arthur, of course, was a Celt.

I hit him because I'm an idiot. An impulsive idiot. I do shite and then, well, I fuck myself over all the time. I do. I'm a fuckin' ijiot. So I hit him. Looked around. People were shocked. He was bleeding. She didn't say anything. Not like in a movie where she'd rush to me and thank me. Of course not. I'm a juvenile moron for thinking that. So I turned around, mumbled something, and went back out into the rain.

I left. Furious at many things. Thumping down the stairs, treading heavily on the footwalk. The rain had turned into a soft mist. It was full dark and the streetlamps lit the water molecules around them. I went one block, then two.

I left. Sometimes I just disappoint myself. Sometimes? Often. Oh well. I'd walk to the bus, with, perhaps, a stop for a pint. Or two. Night had fully fallen but the rain had slackened, then faded further into a mist. My trainers squeaked on the damp stone of the footwalk. Couples walked past, some looking happy. I kept my head down, the lights of the lamps wavered in the puddles. Then my mobile started playing Norwegian Wood.

I could see Baggot Street at the end of the block. An old Jaguar was parked at the curb beside me and I had let my eyes follow its sinuous curves up from the footwalk. It was the first object I had really looked at since I left the house. My mobile rang. It was her. For reasons all too clear I had linked her to an ancient Beatles tune about love lost. I waited. But then pulled it from my pocket and opened it. The text read, "Come back you arse."

So I turned around, there on the footwalk, and I went back. I went back and was very quiet. I went back and stayed the night, and all the next day.
_________________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

Now Available: The Drool Room

by Ira David Socol

"I ain't crazy," declares the narrator of this stunningly original novel-in-stories, "I'm not."

But sanity is always an elusive thing in this tale that carries the reader through a life torn apart by anger, frustration, and disappointment - but held together by an absolute refusal to "give up."

A first grader who can neither read nor sit still. An angry junior high student lashing out at those trying to help. A self-medicating high school athlete. All this leads us to an adult police officer on the streets of The Bronx at the most crime-wracked moment in New York City history.

The Drool Room may not make you love its complex protagonist, but it will force you to see life through the fascinating eyes of a remarkable character.

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Now Available: A Certain Place of Dreams

by Ira David Socol

With more than four dozen pieces of microfiction set in and around the northern Irish city of Derry, Ira David Socol carries you to places of incredible beauty and vicious nightmare, times of absolute joy and moments of complete terror. In stories which tread a blurred line between poetry and prose, a never named and not-quite described narrator reveals a story both national and personal, played out upon a canvas filled with stunning landscapes and fascinating characters.

"When I need peace, I think to myself, I have always come to where the sea meets the land. Because it is at this most primal borderline that we can see in the most directions. Not just up to the heavens and down into the briny deep, not just endlessly north or west or east or south, but forward and backward along the timeline of creation."

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Look Inside This Book

labours

The great hunter Orion slumbers at the south-eastern edge of a cerulean field, his great arm not, as usual, holding a bow, but now gently wrapped around his head, shielding shuttered eyes from the bright light of the sun the spills down from above in the reflection of a newly polished moon.

I have fallen asleep too early and now awoken too early and walk with the dog to the top of the small hill. The street curves below me, dropping down not steeply, but enough to add romance to the landscape, as the ground falls off toward the sluggish midwestern stream a half-mile that way.

In the house the woman sleeps but the cat prowls. The televsion flickers with a black and white drama from the years of the World War. The power lights on the computer monitors flash in their synchronous way, the screens dark to the powers and allures of the internet. Six books that need to be reviewed for student use, four articles that need to be read, and three manuscripts in various stages of final editing rest on my desk, in both digital and paper form.

In three or four hours we will probably have breakfast, gather ourselves for the day. Football games will appear on television. Emails will arrive. There will be the outdoor market to get to, the garage to re-organise, and all that work to do. As I walk back toward the door with the dog I consider brewing the coffee and starting early. But the great hunter Orion sleeps so soundly, and I yawn. And we go back inside, and I pull off the clothes, and fall back into bed.


___________________________________________________
copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - Traversee by Humberto Castro

independence

There is a line in the Jewish Passover Seder which goes something like this: "Even as we remember tonight what it was like when we were slaves in the land of Egypt; even as we think of our Jewish brothers and sisters who are still enslaved in various lands and places, so do we tonight remember people (whether they are Jews or not) who still suffer from slavery, hunger, and/or repression." It might be a great way to celebrate the American Fourth of July - to remember that none of us are truly free as long as any are not...

neamhspleáchas



Sometime quite late in the summer of 1969 the Irish Army began to appear just beyond the border. That was a real border back then. Today you would only know the line because the speed signs switch from "100" - meaning kilometers - to "60" - meaning miles and because the always spying UK "speed cameras" appear. But in those days there were checkpoints and customs stations and police, and, at least for a bit on each side of the road, fences, though crossing by foot was never an issue.

We'd cross to see them. A real Irish Army. Not Brits, not Protestants, and no masks. Real Catholic Irishmen carrying real guns out in the open. They were instantly our biggest heroes.

The year had already seen the whole world become unglued. You'd think a "revolution" would begin with violence from the "revolting" side, but this did not happen. Protestant Unionists and their Royal Constabulary co-conspirators had already attacked peaceful democracy marches, planted a half dozen bombs, killed a few people. The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland's government had resigned to stop any hope of implementing a "one man - one vote" law that would have let Catholics be citizens as Protestants were. The leader of the Unionists had hope for the future though, "... if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants, ... They will refuse to have 18 children." This thinking had led the Protestant "Londonderry Corporation," rulers of a 90% Catholic city, to tear down much of the Bogside to build highrise flats and such in a desperate attempt to encourage birth control.

The Irish soldiers gave us candy and sang songs with us. They shared their food. They told us about Dublin and Cork, Galway and Kilkenny. And then they'd shoo us back towards that line. "Better be gettin' home lads, don'na want your mas to be gettin' worried."

And then the Battle of the Bogside broke out. The Apprentice Boys, those Prod thugs, attacked our neighborhood, backed by the RUC. Three days of war followed. On Wednesday the B-Specials, the worst enforcers of the government, started shooting people. And that night Jack Lynch, the Irish Taoiseach , went on the telly and said they'd be setting up field hospitals close to Derry and Newry to save lives and that, "...the present situation is the inevitable outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont governments. It is clear also that the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse."

And the armies came. The British Army flew in from Scotland, tanks and armoured personnel carriers and helicopters and very big guns. The Irish Army camped just over the hill, medical tents and food and lorries and, yes, guns as well.

We crossed the border and asked "our" soldiers, "Are ye coming? Will you come over the hill, at least to the river?" But they'd just say, "Don' know lad, don' know." Our parents talked of troops massed in Counties Donegal and Louth, ready to free us and Newry too. The places that should never have been beyond the partition. The oldest talked of those ancient Brit lies of "boundary decisions in 1924," but England wouldn'a give up their Naval Base at Catholic Derry nor Belfast's water supply at Catholic Newry. "The Brits will never do a thing unless you kill enough of them," Johnnie said. It was a scary thing. The room went silent. There were men there who remembered the real wars. 1916 was just a half-century in the past, you might be just sixty and still clearly recall 1920 and Michael Collins and the Black and Tans.

It was the summer that the lights went out. It was the summer when your ma became afraid if you went out the door. It was the summer that great terror mixed with great hope. It was a summer when we stood on an edge, and could not be sure which nation we'd go to school in when school began again, our nation or their's. It was a summer when people began dying all across the six captive counties.

And it was the summer that we all, no matter what age we might be, grew old.

The Irish Army didn'a come over the hill - they said they feared a bloodbath in Belfast if they liberated Derry. The British Army did not leave - they said that freedom and joining the Republic could only come if the Prods agreed. The Prods did not give Catholics the vote - they said we were uneducated "Popist Communists." The Americans did not come to help - though we had great faith in America - which looked down on us like gods from their perch on the moon. The next year the people of Britain elected a right-wing government that turned their Army in Northern Ireland from peacekeepers to murderers.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose" was first sung in 1969. Two years later, before even the slaughter of Bloody Sunday, Janis had sung it, and we listened on Radio Free Ireland coming from Inishowen, along with Don Maclean's song, which got to the end, "I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news. She just smiled and turned away..."

And so, we were left completely on our own.


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copyright 2007 by Ira Socol - images (top and bottom) are of The Battle of the Bogside - 12, 13, 14 August 1969. The center is the Rossville Flats under construction, 1965 (?).

darkness

There are many ways in which the world divides, and one is this. There are those who, as children, have lived in places where disturbing sounds in the night turn lights on and bring people to windows and doors. And there are those who, as children, have lived in places where those sounds engender darkness and silence and invisibility.

When I am back home I walk up the hill from the Foyle. Everything has changed. Everything is different. The dim and tiny terrace homes that had stood for centuries to hold the overcrowded families of the Catholic lower class have disappeared, first swapped for the horrors of sixties and seventies urban rebuilding, places like the highrise Rossville Flats, and then again for the colorful stucco of the homes that today line these streets. Now there are real furnaces and real waterheaters and good plumbing and they do not tilt the way the old ones did. The roofs and windows truly keep out the rain and the North Atlantic wind, and new smaller families fit comfortably in new larger bedrooms.

But none of that is important. Because I tend to see what was there. Between the sky and the paving stones my eyes and ears fill with phantoms. If it is daylight children run down streets laughing as grim-faced soldiers hold automatic rifles. If it is night then the demons run wild, no matter what I try to do. In those nights every shot, every wrong footfall, every yell, every heavy vehicle tyre sound – and all these came with every sunset – were greeted by people shutting lamps off, and drawing curtains, and shushing children, and keeping them out of the range of windows and doors.

And there is nothing more frightening to a child than to see fear in their parents' eyes.

So yesterday I sat at a dinner table, and was introduced to a compatriot, as she called herself, or another expatriate, I wanted to counter, but attempting politeness did not. "From what I hear," she said, "you must be delighted by the breakthroughs this weekend. Now things can really start to be over." She was, I had learned, Protestant, from Hillsborough, the big-treed, high-tea, old "Royal Suburb" south of Belfast, but had lived in West London for the last 20 years. Life in nice places, I thought, must be wonderful, and you cannot really hold it against them. "I suppose," I offered, "it suggests a chance, and a chance is better than nothing." I shifted my speech to sound as fully a Derry Catholic as possible. That sound that a Dublin friend calls "Irritable Vowel Syndrome." "You wouldn't be one of those Sinn Fein hard-liners now would'ya?" she attempted to sound Irish. "Nah," I said, "the other end of the spectrum. John Hume was a friend of my Da's. I've always been on the side of the angels. And like all angels, I'm just waiting for humanity to understand."
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copyright 2007 by Ira Socol

voyage

There's the story of this woman. You've probably heard something about her. She survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. She survived the sinking of the Britannic in 1916. I thought she had survived the sinking of the Olympic whenever the Olympic had sunk, but she didn't because the Olympic never sank, it was cut into bits in 1935 just a couple of years after being modernized and rebuilt – one more victim of the Great Depression. But this woman, who was a nurse and a stewardess, was on the Olympic in 1911 when it collided with a Royal Navy cruiser that left its shaft twisted and two watertight compartments flooded. I don't think that collision killed anyone, but it was still a pretty big deal. Among other things they had to grab the propeller shaft off the still-in-dry-dock, yet-to-be-completed Titanic to fix the Olympic. This delayed the Titanic's launch and thus maiden voyage from March 1912 to April 1912. Not a long time, but long enough, in that cold year, to create the difference between clear winter sea lanes across the North Atlantic and spring lanes filled with floating ice. Maybe the Titanic still would have struck an April iceberg, but if it had done so on its third or fourth crossing the story might have been, perhaps, a touch less compelling, and maybe, just maybe, that damn movie would've been shorter. I swear that Titanic was filmed in real time and when it first came out I was stuck in that theater for four days, and being on a second date I could barely even complain, but maybe, if I let false memory run away with me, I can remember that the food on-board was quite good.

All things touch all things, more or less.

The Titanic, Britannic, and Olympic were all built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, in the world's largest dry-dock, on a peninsula called Queens Island, in what is now called Northern Ireland but, of course, back then was just Ireland, part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a political entity that lasted, quite uncomfortably, from 1801 until 1922. Whether this union was created to insure proper mental health care for the insane British monarch of the time (one theory: the English not trusting the Irish Protestants who made up the Irish Parliament to go along with their plans for a regent) or to punish the Irish for the rebellion of 1798 (theory two), does not really matter. Over the nineteenth century, Scot/Protestant dominated Belfast industrialized, led by the Harland & Wolff Shipyards whose massive cranes ruled the skyline. The rest of Ireland stayed rural and agricultural and the tallest things in the other three big cities, Dublin, Cork, and Derry, remained the towers of the churches.

If you stand today on the edge of the River Lagan, looking across and east, there is still a working waterfront there. Still a dry-dock, still ship repair, or mostly either repainting or fixing offshore oil drilling platforms. It's a long way from the glory of building the world's largest, most luxurious means of transportation, but then, hell, that part of the city is now called, for tourist purposes, "The Titanic Quarter" – which may not be the best advertisement., all things considered. Though I have always wanted to attend a football game featuring the team from Harland & Wolff, The Welders, so that I could lead a chant of "Iceberg Ahead." But I do not go to Irish League games, even first division games where the Welders play, my club having been, hmmm, "dismissed" from the league because it was unsafe for them to play anywhere after Bloody Sunday. So they now play across the border in the League of Ireland, though the "all-Ireland" Setanta Cup had Derry City playing at Belfast's Windsor Park last winter for the first time in over 30 years.

Things can change, if given the chance.

Belfast was once Béal Feirste which means something like "Mouth of the Farset." The River Farset flows into the Lagan someplace north of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge which is way south of those Harland & Wolff shipyards, or where, at least, you'd see them across the river. But you cannot see it. I think it runs underground now through pipes under High Street, and people have told me that Bridge Street is where people once crossed. The kind of victory of man over God's water that the Titanic failed to be.

Violet Constance Jessop died on the Fifth of May in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-One. She was alive, this amazing survivor of Belfast's repetitive contribution to disaster legends, while I was alive. We were on the planet at the same time. I thought about her as I listened to something on the radio about Americans wanting to go back to the moon. How these "do anything" countrymen seemed to have lost both their nerve and their belief in the cooperative citizenship we call government during the Challenger/Reagan era, but now there was a new generation that could not quite understand the thought that you could go to the moon, but would choose not to. Space exploration - real exploration - is a big waste of money, surely, but it is also absolutely magical, and absolutely human. When humans can try something big, something huge, something that will reach toward heaven, I think that they should, I think that they must.

Violet Jessop kept drying off and heading back to the sea. We should all do that.
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copyright 2006 by Ira Socol - photograph: Titanic Releasing the Last Rope, 1912.