31/10/2024
When the writer died.
No one knew it, for a long time, I believed he was angry at being born, as time passed, it became clear he was pi**ed off with life as well, excluding his friends and family, he was not able to do anything about it, he felt he had no say.
He spoke in a Tipperary-accent and that pi**ed him off a bit, he didn’t like it, as the sounds in his head never fitted the stories in some of the books he like to read, he could read a book in a day, and take the p**s out of it for years, but his accent what was that left him opened for p**s taken and Banter.
Banter must be understood that the moment it leaves the lips, he told me, all hell can break loose, one like him was lucky that he came from a place where banter is how all let off steam and no one got insulted, the Craíc was always fierce.
He writes stories and would tell all none have accents; they only have the Banter.
But sometimes they don’t have that, so, all you get is a story about Banter.
He wrote his stories on a computer and likes to let the world know he gets a lot of help from spell check, it’s a great thing he would say as he watches for red marks on its screen appear and disappear.
He said his wife who he called –herself- allowed him to take over the sitting room for hours during the day, but when the TV was turned on at the end of the day, he had to share the room with tea breaks and chat from all who come and go.
That might have been the reason his stories were seldom deep, well, he felt it was the banter with himself and his imagination and the words he would use to make a point, for most of his characters were friends who had come and gone in his life and his stories had local plots with a little smell of truth.
His characters were made to look human, no super-men or woman all had the flaws of them he knew, but they all had the gift of Banter, so he wanted people who read his stories to understand them as most who knew him did.
He typed as he spoke and gave endings that said think, think about what you know about life and if his stories can or have happened, as his stories are never difficult to decipher because the people in them are the ones who live in his world and he himself has never been difficult to decipher.
He posts his stories on face book so that no one could say he was hiding opinions on the things he wrote or felt.
He always included a name known to his friends, a place where people could look up or google and never spoke about then who read his stories.
Now and then, someone would write, and say, I know him or her, I been to this place, or I would love to live in a place like this.
He loved those e-mails, he showed them to me and put each one into the same folder that he kept his stories in, that he called, this is what I have learnt.
He would sit on a stool next to me and lean into me and say, what a great time not to be alive, but he would have said it so other could just about hear it, and someone would bite, and the banter would begin.
What I first looked at his stories I found a combination of travesty and chance—the story’s contained the darkened spaces of his mind and the highs and lows of his everyday pains.
He liked beer, but always said that if you are eating a curry, you need a Chinese beer, ice cold.
In the past when we sat to share a beer, he always spoke about the right one at the right time and would always ask a dumb question about something at the time did not make sense.
He wondered who invented sound and why can’t people skip a day or two?
Take Mondays no one wants them, so why not skip it, and jump to Tuesday.
He, spoke of the old times and its beauty and its treachery, things that happened in his hometown and on the street where he lived a good part of his life, if families were countries no war would last more the time it took to order a drink.
He told me about his dark days when a million ideas would run through his head, but when he sat to write all had vanished, like the friends who had come and gone.
He talked about how he believed that friends on Facebook could become friends and how he went to New-York to meet some of them and how right he was to have called them friends.
I keep the gun unloaded he would say, we never know when the dark times might come, one never gets the chance to regret one’s su***de, how many have gone who if they could come back would tell us how different they would do things.
He spoke as a boy one time, a river, and a town, even as a computer when he tried to write as God, he told me why cousin can ruin you and families can be good and bad at the same time?
I could’ve have written without the help of people who will never know me, he said.
He never just lent books; he held them out to you, almost making you take them, explaining the joy he found in them, with the words pass them on when you are finished with them.
Irish writers have a magic like no other, he would say as he reversed back into his dark times.
When he was very ill in the hospital, he asked me to go through his papers, I saw a list that consisted of items a character could return for: Recipe, Schoolbooks, the book, God for Gods, and some Personal papers.
A package and his passport, this is the stamp that’s makes me Irish he wrote, but what’s is my blood makes me an Irish man.
Most of his stories are magical and light, but the dark ones he reads alone, he told me that in the hills around his hometown have a magic that he had yet to find as he walks their lanes.
A man, who loved words he would say, can get tongue tied.
His hand held mine as he whispered, I’ve eaten soup all my life, and I could never understand why we did not drink it.
His stories, you can read them and never know the one who sits alone in front of a computer and never hears what others think.
He says, the day he dies people will say, he was talking about them.
Copyrighthayesp. 2015©
To the ones who give us the laughs, the music and the pride of been Irish post your music, pictures and the kitchen sink here.
