The Batter

A short story by Blindboy Boatclub ‘The Gospel According to Blindboy in 15 Short Stories’ is a collection of surreal, genre-defying short stories and visual art exploring the myths, complacencies and contradictions at the heart of modern Ireland. The firs

‘I’m currently eating chorizo from Listowel and Gubbeen cheese on rye in my new gaff on Sitric Road. Lol.’ That was my Twitter status, but it’s true, it’s what I’m doing right now.

I moved in three weeks ago. The landlord is my dad’s best friend so I got a serious rate. Whole place to myself. Theo and Ocras came over last week and did the space up with deadly graff, not the stupid cliché tagging shit for thirteen-year-olds — next-level graffiti, loads of

hentai-type stuff, with a Die Antwoord vibe, and up on the back wall over the plasma a whopper throw of Kurt Cobain getting sick into a toilet except emojis are coming out of his mouth. We live-streamed the whole thing and Harbo even shared it on Lovin Dublin. Ocras nearly decked a lad for trying to Insta the Cobain piece with a filter on it, fuck off.

I had a pizza oven set up, I got it off Amazon for 300 yoyos, and I just started banging out free slices of pizzer to anyone who walked in. Spanish Martá made a tomato sauce based on a family recipe from Seville, and we put gouda and Centra ham on it. Fucking mentaller I am, Italian pizzer base, Dutch cheese, shitty rubber Centra ham, wood-fired but with a Spanish marinara. What are we like?

Aoife came over with a set of Technics and we had chewins. Before long someone had hashtagged it #BANTERGAFF and even Kav mentioned it on his Snapchat story the next day and he wasn’t even there, deadly. The guy who runs Body & Soul festival saw the live-feed and now we’ll be curating a pizzer and grazzer space there in June. Ocras graffing up plywood with insane shit and me pumping out pizzer slizzers from the oven like a food DJ, hahaha. Cans of Dutch and loads of K, lol.

If you’re from Tipperary or somewhere, you need to know that Body & Soul is only the coolest boutique festival in Ireland. My mate’s dad is a big music promoter and reckons he can get Syd from Odd Future to drop by our space to hang out.

Because of the housewarming going crazy viral, I’m now known as the lad in Stoneybatter who owns the pizzer oven in his gaff, and everyone started dropping in after the sesh. Buzzing. After only three weeks of being here, I can say that this neighbourhood utterly destroys Wicklow, it’s ten times infinitely better, and the ’rents are happy too. They can head over to the Palermo house as much as they like now that I’m standing on my own two feet.

Myself and Ocras were totally ripping each other last Tuesday. Ocras said that as soon as Joe.ie mention the oven, we’re throwing it in a skip up by Smithfield and the junkies can have it, hahaha. But even if that did happen and the pizzer oven became old news, I’d switch it up for Body & Soul and do a big giant paella pan instead, get Spanish Martá involved. Make the space a genderqueer friendly zone too, it’s very important to create genderqueer spaces and not label people with the pronouns they were assigned at birth by society. That’s what Sorcha told me and she goes to NCAD.

Things have pretty much been that insane for the past three weeks, non-stop knocks on the door, everyone dropping over, tweeting about it, snapchatting the oven and the deadly graff.

I gave one of the Ukrainian bouncers from the Grand Social a bag of green and he looked after the door to keep the dickheads from DIT from ruining it, like that group of engineering students selfieing themselves dabbing in front of the Cobain mural like it was 2016. Dorks. Le Galaxie played a secret gig one Wednesday, the bald guy on the synth and the other just banging pots and pans with a wooden spoon. It was so creative. They did Fleetwood Mac covers and made it sound fresh and uncringey. It was all so whopper.

It’s kind of slowed down a little now though. I blame Síofra Condon with the bull-ring in her nose. She’s in the middle of her Masters in Trinity. She did a Facebook post about why my #BANTERGAFF supported patriarchy, because I’m a man and my pizzer oven was a symbolic representation of a woman’s reproductive organs, and by giving out free pizzer I was reinforcing men’s control over and entitlement to women’s bodies, and my pizzer gaff graff parties were a brothel that condoned rape. It got like a thousand shares, and my phone almost crashed from all the DMs calling me a pig. So I responded by apologising on Tumblr, and also by giving Spanish Martá control of the oven and charging money for the pizzer, and anyone buying pizzer had to ask the oven for consent. Nobody showed up anymore after that, and Evan Fallon called me literally Hitler for being a capitalist. Evan is a Trotskyist and listens to Bad Brains on tape, on a Walkman — he’s really creative — so that hurt bad.

I’m not feeling too good right now, so after I finish tweeting about the chorizo and Gubbeen I take one of the Xanax that my step-mum Caroline gave me. Xanax is so mellow and cute. Even though I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I’m now abso the biggest loser in the Batter, I can’t feel what I’m thinking, if you get me. Does that make sense? Like, if I was watching cats having sex out on the road from my room? But I’ve got really good doubleglazed windows, so I can’t hear them screaming, but I can see them? Coz it’s always the sound that’s the most annoying part. That’s what Xanax is like. It turns down the haters.

Ocras totes ignored three texts and a FaceTime request. There’s definitely lots of talk going on behind my back. So I leave the house, wearing my REPEAL jumper with three-stripe Adidas trackie-bots and Docs. Now that everyone thinks I run a rape brothel and am literally Hitler, I have to show face, raise myself up the flagpole and see who salutes. There’s this really quirky pub called J Morrison & Sons, it used to be a SuperValu. It’s totally like a culchie pub from down the country, but don’t be fooled, it’s really unique and creative. The menu is teeming with outside-the-box ingredients, mixed in with regular Dublin pub food. There’s even some old locals that go there, from back when Stoneybatter was just plain rough. The barman gives them free pints so they don’t leave, coz they couldn’t afford it on the dole anyway, hahaha.

I walk in the door, and it’s so dark. The bar has loads of rare cask whiskeys for the new cocktail menu. Guff the mixologist was washing a glass and talking to the old locals. He’s got this tiny leather book in his breast pocket from America in the ’30s that cost a bomb. It’s all about bartending and he reads it when he’s not serving. His new sleeve of ink is rocking, I better tell him it’s dope, and then maybe show him my back tatt of the triangle. But when Guff looks my way, he defo snubs me. Oh no, he’s turning his back and pressing the volume up on the system. Shame on a Nigga by Wu Tang btw, classic old school.

I decide to sit down somewhere abso obvious, beside the fire, hoping that if Guff makes eye contact again I can do that Wu Tang W sign with both hands, so he knows I’m down with Shaolin. The fire has actual lumps of feckin turf burning in. Lol, they look like square hairy poos. I mean, where do they even get those up here? So cool. It smells so fragrant and smoky in the pub. Guff told me once that the smell of turf in the pub opens up the palate and complements the notes on the menu. Guff used to slum as a voluntary homeless person in East London before hipsters ruined it and once got into a knife fight with an African guy at a bar in Dalston. He’s, like, 30. He knows Disclosure from before they were famous, he used to serve them when they were underage because they’d heard of Frankie Knuckles and that meant they were men and not boys.

Guff comes over and says, ‘What will yizzer have?’ He’s not even from Dublin, he’s from, like, Kildare, but he says ‘yizzer’ because he’s friends with the old Dublin characters at the bar. The moleskin notepad is out to take my order and I kind of freak out a little. Guff always sits beside you at the table when you order, like, always. Even if he doesn’t know you, he sits right beside you and says, ‘What will yizzer have?’ That’s what Guff does, he invented the sitting beside you to order thing. They even copy him out in like GBK in Swords Pavilion, yuck. But he’s not sitting beside me today, he’s just standing there with his pencil, looking pissed off.

My fucking nerves made me blurt out, ‘The cheese toastie with house-made jalapeno mayo.’ Yikes, total cringe. What a basic thing to order. I sooo should have gone for the Northside coddle with tripe sausage and Croatian truffle oil. That’s what people who like their palates challenged eat, and I just ordered the

“I cup a hand of rainwater from a puddle and slurp it down with the pill and wait for it to stop the shame”

cheese toastie like I wandered in from Finglas.

Guff writes it down. ‘Drink?’ he says next. My face is so warm, which means it’s red, and I hope Guff blames it on me sitting beside his deadly fireplace. My thoughts are all over the shop. I have to redeem myself. I could go for one of the saltwater IPAs, weissbier or a cacao stout? But even tourists drink those now. Guff just sighed impatiently, oh no.

I look up at the bar, at the old Dublin characters with their Guinness and Heinekens, and then I take a big risk. I look at Guff and say, ‘I’ll have a Harp.’

Guff pauses, and says, ‘Niiice.’ Success. Only a select few know that even though it’s mass-produced, Harp is actually a really balanced lager with a traditional craft recipe that’s often overlooked.

He puts his fist out and we bump. Then he looks at my pro-abortion jumper and says, ‘Repeal, ya?’ and I say, ‘You know it, bredren,’ and then he says really loudly, ‘Dude, yes, do it for the sisters, show them respect. We got their backs man,’ and walks backwards to the bar with his hand clenched in the air like that black lad on the podium at the Olympics in the ’60s from history documentaries, #blacklivesmatter.

After about five minutes — masso speedy service, I know — he returns with the toastie, which is amazing, by the way. The bread is plain Brennan’s sliced, toasted golden, but the cheese is really creamy manchego made with ewe’s milk from La Mancha, melted perfectly. It washes down well with the Harp, which totally sets off the jalapeno mayo. The old Dublin characters are at the bar shouting and burping about the Luas workers’ strikes. Guff tells them that his grand-uncle taught James Connolly how to play hurling in Edinburgh, wow, and that when Guff was younger, he thought about joining the INLA but was talked out of it by a Catalan anarchist. Double wow. Then he pours the old Dublin characters another round of free pints.

I’m feeling pretty good, all things considered, the Xanax has even worn off, giving serious thought to planting myself up at the bar, getting Rothmans or John Player from the fag machine, and chatting with Guff and the characters for the day. Imagine the stories they’d have? Maybe later they’d invite me back to one of their flats, and their wrinkly wives would feed me stew or Crispy Pancakes or something. Then the fucking unthinkable happens. I get an email on the iPhone from Body & Soul saying they’re cancelling my pizzer and graffiti space because it would make patrons feel unsafe. That they’d read Síofra Condon’s post about my ‘patriarchal pizzer oven’. My throat drops. I feel stunned, and my face is freezing and wet. I’m having a full-blown panicker. Sitting here on the stool with my half-drank Harp.

Oh fuck, now Guff is calling me up to the bar with the old Dublin characters. I cannot let him know that I get anxiety attacks. The song Inside My Love by Minnie Ripperton comes on over the system, vintage ’70s soul/ funk, but I prefer the original by Leon Ware. I get up off the stool and walk sideways towards the door like that crab I saw when I was eight, on the rocks in Portrane Beach with Uncle George. I pinch the chest of my REPEAL jumper with both hands and pull the fabric out like tits, because Minnie Ripperton died of tit cancer and I abso have to let Guff know that I’m familiar with her music. He looks at me with a bit of a confused look as I leave, but I’m sure later he’ll understand what I meant.

I run out the door of the fucking pub. Oh shit, there’s Conor on the unicycle who got an interview for an acting job in the Abbey. I hide behind a delivery van. My chest is pumping. I legger down Sigurd Road, noticing noise from Dúsallaigh Ó Ceallaigh’s open window. I look up. My God, he’s playing Limp Bizkit really loudly, they are due to be cool right about now. Go Dúsallaigh, ironic as fuck, dude. I scarper down an alley and curl into the shape of crumpled paper, where I can have my panicker in private. I feel myself up, looking for one of Caroline’s Xanax.

I find it, it’s beside my condom in the pocket of the trackie-bots. It’s raining hard. I cup a hand of rainwater from a puddle and slurp it down with the pill and wait for it to stop the shame. Ya, I know I’m fucking drinking out of a puddle like a crow, but it doesn’t matter once the xanny kicks in.

It kicks in. I am level. The cats are screwing but I can’t hear their screams, lol. I sit down on a bench and watch the sheeple on the Luas with their normal uncreative boring jobs. The concrete has that oil smell that rises when it rains for the first time in weeks. They look so upset and pale, huddled together, scowling at each other like they all just want to vomit into the air. Stuffed on the tram, each person is the other’s ugly reflection, and they hate the guy across from them and themselves. Forced to stare ahead in a wet moving bin full of mutual failure. Gross.

I’m devo about my Body & Soul space getting cancelled. Dad told me last month that I’d have to get a job in Dublin, that he’d ring one of his ad agency buddies because they always need highly creative people like me. I asked him to chill the beans a bit, because I had something big planned for the festival that was probably going to make me famous like Andy Warhol.

So he agreed to keep topping up my account with a few grand every month until I had that sorted. He was already impressed with #BANTERGAFF and how I’d proven my ability to curate a space. He bragged about it to all his friends in Palermo, especially Aidan Holmes the economist from Foxrock whose son Zach got addicted to coke and now has a colostomy bag and can’t even go to college.

I’m defo fucked. There has to be a solution. I gotta think of something so big that Body & Soul simply cannot ignore it, and has to reconsider giving me a space to curate. I need something huge that will go sooooo viral, something on trend, but risky, and not like other stuff that content-creators in the Batter go for.

Something that Huff Post or Broadly would pick up. Maybe I could, like, do video profiles of all those old Dublin characters up at the bar in J Morrison & Sons? Like, follow them around for the day and profile their lives. Give them GoPros and they can vlog. Follow them with a drone. I bet they were all molested by Christian Brothers or GAA coaches when they were kids, and they don’t even know it. Like, I could interview them, about their gritty lives drinking Heineken, watching soccer and smoking Rothmans, and get them to start crying on camera and talking about when a priest had sex with them when they were five, or how their dads used to beat their mothers in front of them or something.

I’d use Freudian stuff to get them to remember all the ugly incidents that happened to them. Do it in black and white and show their little flats in Smithfield with Thin Lizzy and Aslan music playing over it, but then switch it up and add like Burial or Autechre tracks too. That could be fucking huge.

Like La Haine, but with ould lads. It would be such engaging content and really heartfelt, and I’d be like a new Ken Loach but better. Then maybe Ocras could, like, sketch their faces up like anime characters and we could graff those on the window-display of Brown Thomas, and I’d hand out free paella. Caroline is a manager there, she could swing it. Body & Soul could not walk away from that. It’s subversive community-based art and branding in one, so creative.

But what if it’s dangerous? What if I got one of the old lads to confess that he’d been molested on camera, but then his son didn’t understand art and came to try and kill me for putting family secrets on videos? Threw me into the boot of a stolen car and burnt it out in Darndale? The boot would be like an oven, it would probably be the hottest part of the car, so it would turn me to ash, vaporise me. I heard on Breaking Bad that when it’s that hot your teeth explode like popcorn and you can’t be identified. There’d be nothing left of me, I’d actually totally disappear and never be found. Oh my God, what if that happened and then everyone thought I’d committed suicide? Like, jumped in the canal and that’s why my body wasn’t found? How morto would that be? People thinking I’d topped myself and then anytime my name would be mentioned at a party, you’d have to go quiet and change the subject. Oh no, Ocras would totally do a suicide awareness video about me if that happened, he’d defo do that, the snake, and that’s all anyone would remember me for. I’d be remembered as a loser.

I take a third Xanax. I chew this one, it tastes like hairspray. But I absolutely can’t do the video with the old Dublin lads just in case, bullet dodged. My brain is overloading with creativity, so I take out my iPhone and open Facebook, which I hardly ever do because it’s just for dads these days. My young cousin Conlaoch had been online. He plays Xbox for days on end, and his profile photo is that meme of Pepe the Frog wearing a red Trump hat. He’s a self-confessed alt-right shitlord, a total racist sexist little dick, but he’s a good kid at heart and mostly does it for fun. He’d been sharing conspiracy theory videos that he makes on his timeline. It’s just him shouting into a camera, while gaming with his headset on, then lots of loud noises and memes. One was called ‘SHILLARY CLINTON TO REDUCE EUROPEAN POPULATION THROUGH AIDS CARRYING RAPEFUGEES’, self-explanatory. Another was about lizards building the pyramids and using them as broadcast towers to control radios inside our heads. It was called ‘LIZARD BRAIN RADIO CUCK PROOF. EYE OF HORUS. CHILD DIES ON CAMERA AT THE END’.

He has tonnes of these conspiracy videos, crazy stuff. But holy shit, he’s getting, like, 80,000 likes a post. I click on the Hillary Clinton video, and wait a bit for the YouTube app to open, not long though, 4G around here is super-fast. Suffering shitballs, it has 15 million views and comments are streaming in. That is totes insane. How is Conlaoch getting all these views? Some of these omments are from, like, South Africa and America. I DM Conlaoch immediately.

Me: Hey cuz, watsup dude, how you get so many views. Rad stuff. *smiley emoji* *black clapping-hand emoji*

Conlaoch: Reeee. I hear you’re Lord Cuckington in Dublin?

Seen those feminazis shut you down. Should have doxxed them IRL. *laughing-crying-face emoji*