Ken Bruen - Green Hell

The day began. . badly.

For Jack, this was like breathing. Natural.

It was never a plan to write about Jack Taylor. I’d come to Dublin as part of a Rhodes scholarship to conclude a treatise on Beckett. To end up living in Galway, drinking as if I meant it,

. . how’d that happen?

As Jack would say,

“Fuck knows.”

This is not. .

A Boswell to Dr. Johnson

Or even. .

A Watson to Holmes gig.

But rather a haphazard series of events leading me to abandon Beckett in pursuit of the Taylor enigma. Little did I know it would be an ironic reflection of one of Jack’s favorite novels:

The Wrong Case .

As Jim Crumley had once said of a book,

“This is not a crime novel, it’s a story with some crimes in it.”

Quite.

I met Jack Taylor at a time of odd disturbance.

James Gandolfini,

Cory Monteith,

Alan Whicker

Had all recently died. Jack mourned all three. He had heard of only the first. The second was the star of Glee and the third had presented a show called

Whicker’s World .

Jack said those last two represented (a) the youth he never had and (b) how old he was not to recall Whicker.

Both ends of his booze-soaked candle. James G of course was in The Sopranos , demonstrating, Jack said,

“How depression and brutality are uneven dance partners.”

This, like many things he said, made sense only to him.

I hadn’t, he claimed,

“Drunk enough.”

To truly grasp absurdity. Accounts in part for my name. My mother is Irish and steeped in the iconography of a blood saturated in epic/tragic history and so, after

Brian Boru

My first name.

My father hails from Boston though, alas, is not of the infamous immediate family. Though they do say all Kennedys are related.

Yeah, right!

That dog doesn’t hunt. I haven’t come within a spit of the Hyannis Port compound. I will admit to a certain strain of impetuousness. Spring break in Cancún the year of my graduation, I came to from a tequila slammer ruin with a tattoo on my arm, reading

P.T. 108.

When I’d jokingly suggested to Taylor I write of his life, he’d gone deep.

Then,

“Do a Tom Waits.”

“Huh?”

He sighed, said,

“Shall I tell you the truth or just string you along?”

The heft of the man. Jack was, he claimed, exactly six feet tall, adding,

“Like the Pale Nazarene.”

For such a ferocious derider of the Church, he was sodden with its

ritual,innuendo,

propaganda.

I’d told him I was an atheist and he laughed, loud and warm. He had one of those truly epic laughs. It was so rare but when he let go, it was all-embracing. His eyes and his wounded spirit on song.

Said,

“See how that flies when a fucker shoves a gun in your mouth at three-thirty in the morning.”

Riddle me that.

The books he was reading in those last days. As if he knew something.

Satan, your Kingdom must

Come down. .

(Massive Attack)

Playing as I perused the book titles.

“Perused.”

A fifty-euro sound bite, Jack said. Adding,

“That track used in two TV series:

Hannibal

and

Lecter.

The connection?

Jack’s coked taste.

Those books:

Reconstructing Amelia

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Lottie Moggach, Kiss Me First

Sara Gran, The Bohemian Highway

Lynn S. Hightower, Flashpoint

The Universe Versus Alex Woods

Malcolm Mackay, The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

And of course, the boxed DVDs:

House of Cards

Breaking Bad

Les Revenants

Borgen

The Americans

And I wondered how a perpetual drunk, pill-popping, on/off nicotine freak could focus long enough for any of the above. I asked.

He said,

“Practice.”

July 2013: The Galway Races on the shimmering horizon. I’d known Jack for three months. In truth, with him,

The rush.

The intensity.

The sheer hard core.

It felt like three years.

How we met? Not as you’d hazard: in a pub.

I was on the ground, my top teeth crushed by a steel-toed Dr. Martens. Two thugs, trainees almost, no more than sixteen. . collectively had waylaid me as I came out of McDonagh’s Fish ’n’ Chips. Bottom of Quay Street but a bad poem away from the Spanish Arch. I was balancing my smartphone and the food, authentically wrapped in the weekly Galway Advertiser , the first one asked,

“Gis a chip, cunt.”

The richness of Irish youth vocabulary. The second one, I’d carelessly allowed behind me.

Come on.

I’m an academic, not a kung fu fighter.

He hit me hard in my lower back with a baseball bat. The shame, not to be even mugged with authenticity, like, say, with a hurly.

Oh, America, we export too well.

Shock and pain swamped me as the first took my top teeth out with his boot. Shame too, mortification, I was taken down by. . fuck’s sake. .

Kids!

Seriously?

Amid blood and dizziness, I gasped as both kids stood, ready to, as they chanted,

“Let’s kick the fuckin be-Jaysus out of this bollix.”

A figure loomed behind, then I heard,

“What’s the craic?”

And he literally cracked their small, malicious skulls together. They reeled apart, moaning, and he dropped the first with a kick to the groin. He reached a hand to me, said,

“Take it slow, Pilgrim.”

As. . was I hallucinating?. . John Wayne.

With his help, I was able to stand, even spit out some teeth. I mumbled,

“Thanks, I guess.”

He smiled, said,

“A Yank.”

I asked, as I tried to fight off nausea and tremors,

“Is that like. . bad?”

He was staring at the second kid, who, though on his feet, was dazed. He answered,

“Long as you got the bucks, we love you.”

Then checking my ruined mouth, said,

“Better get you to A amp; E.”

Used his cell, called a cab, urging them,

“Get here like yesterday.”

Again a faux American intonation, as if he was subtly mocking me. Sure enough, a cab screeched to a halt in, as I’d come to know Jack’s term,

“Jig time.”

Helped me to the cab, then turned, moved back to the seriously fucked kids, and, get this, frisked them.

The kid still standing, utterly dazed.

Jack slid into the seat beside me, holding the kid’s money wedge, said,

“Cab fare.”

Contempt

Prior

to

Investigation

From Boru Kennedy’s Notes/Journals

He sees the little girl, Serena May, delighted with the new trick he showed her. How to make a silver coin disappear. He’d thought, ruefully,

A trick the banks had perfected to an inordinate degree.

The sun had been uncharacteristically hot. He’d opened the window on the first story and watched as the little girl gurgled happily on the floor.

Then he dozed.

Woken by a small cry.

Barely a whisper, more a tiny whisper of utter dread. Jumped to his feet.

The child was gone.

Thus began a whole fresh circle of hell. Later, when the full truth was revealed, he might have been partially absolved.

But forgiven?

No.

Never that.

Least of all by himself.

I worry about anyone who is lighting himself on fire for our enjoyment.

The New York Times wrote in 2012 about Cat Marnell, a confessional columnist who described her vampire hours, soulless sex, fragile mental state, and drug-fueled lifestyle. Her job, she said, was to be: