"Tonight"   (Belfast, 1964)

You have to go back, back to innocence. We get to where we are from there. "Gavin! Glory! What are you doing here? Da will kill me. Off with you! Go away. Jesus, go, before anyone sees you!" Katharine was emphatic enough, but there was no dismissing this love starved puppy. Her father would be furious if he knew that Gavin was here on this street. Da, William MacCullah, raised in Scotland, had been impressed here - his own term for working in Belfast - by his employer Host~Continent Hotels. Katharine had good reason to be alarmed. Da's concern was realistic no matter how bigoted it seemed.

The MacCullah name, though long Anglicized, had considerable respectability here because of its ancient Ulster origins. In a sense this family had returned to its roots. Yet, the longer his professional stay in Belfast, the more Da felt alien and the thicker his Scottish burr became. He found himself continually trying to insulate his children from the cultural iciness of these arctic people.

So why does a young boy's infatuation raise such anxiety? There is something off in these surrounds. Something basic. You lose it in the details. But he, a born writer, had captured it, exactly, in one of his notorious essays which found their way into print in a progressive college daily. You wouldn't know that he was too young to attend, as he wrote:

Chill suits this place. Drink up. Thirsting men suckle on her inviting foamy breasts, for nurturing Leann offers the only real warmth to be found here. Her amber brown puckering nipples will warm to your lips too, as she kisses back. Suck another pint from her, she won't run dry. Besides, you need that magic which is in her milk to endure. Hers is the last enchantment. All others have long faded. Magic indeed! Was there ever any other magic here? If so, it's too removed. Salty stray from off the Irish Sea will never pierce this smaze. Smell her, instead. Press in close to her navel. Breathing, savoring her. Wrap yourself in her perfume. Draw her in and roll her in your lips.

And listen. Past her fermenting crackle, ships in the harbor - steel talking to steel - bellowing deep, somber, occasionally strident - groaning and trailing off, all somehow subdued from within her lap. Listen hard. Shhhhh. There are no sounds of nature in this dominion of industry. So, console yourself with her effervescence away from the distant shrill commotion - at least for a while. You know you can't stay here. If you do you will soon enough lack her price.

Then, just go home. Go, back into your pallor. Let the rich beery tincture of muddled tipsy bleach away, slipping you back into the dim drab of what you really are and never had hope enough to go beyond. In release - rejoice to an empty bladder. What else is there? Endure me, friend. She is only glorious until she owns you. Stay the last raise and abide. You will ache in her absence, but free your mind. Besides, the yellowed slut will merely consume your seed and never bear you children. Soak yourself in that reality.

And one other. There, carved in flesh, traced upon that killer map which lies at your feet, lined in blood, the boundary scars of Ulster cut as deep as hell through stone and sod, but not of art by hand of God. Barriers, as these, mock celestial consciousness. And - THAT - is why this place is so grey. God refuses to color within these lines. Behold - Belfast - where men shun His likeness with daily blasphemies hurled at self.

Christ, use your eyes! Harbor? Harbor? That implies safety, tranquility, sanctuary. Where in God's name do you find any of that? Are we content only by low expectation, frenzied only to political masturbation? Go home. Climax to your own contingencies until you go blind to the bleakness of this shit hole called Belfast.

- Gavin McGuinness

 

Da had not only read this, but had it shoved into his face, as it had been copied by many people and passed around as a contentious point of argument in the community. "So, young man, you seem rather attracted to my daughter."

"Yes, sir."

"You also seem to be curiously conversant about nipples. Know all about them, do you?" maintaining an icy Scottish big eyebrowed stare as the youngster groped on about artistic insights.

"It's about perception, sir. It is about, uh, beer."

"You're a beer drinker, then?"

"Well not, uh.. mmm.. No! No, no, not me. I am way too young at this point in my life."

"So, then, how do you know all about puckering nipples?"

"I imagine them, sir. They're nipples of the mind," which was all that panic allowed him at that moment.

"Brain knockers? Folks around here are suggesting that you are making remarks of public indecency based on my daughter's teats..."

"NO! Not so! And her nipples wouldn't be amber brown, now would they?"

"You KNOW THAT?"

"Ohhh my. I, uh, I, I'mmmm, uh, I,m only assuming, given her fair complexion and chastity..." but the bug eyed glare of his audience stoped that line of pleading stone cold. "I just love your daughter, sir. And I like to write. I swear, nothing indelicate was meant.." This wilting confession limped over his listener's unrelenting low growl. But that was another day. Now, the street was empty and the young interloper was oblivious to all this. En route he shuffled to the rhythm of his heart along the road edge whistling The Flower of Sweet Strabane. He didn't feel the cold or see the gray. He didn't choke on the air. His was a mind of bouquet, and her name was Katharine, Katharine MacCullah. To her shooing he began to sing, "Says my aul' one to your aul' one, come to the Waxies Dargle. Says my aul' one to your aul' one, I have not got a farthing. I've just been down to Monto Town to see young Kill McArdle.." at which point she punched him spitting breathless in the gut.

"Gavin I'm telling you, go away!" Her fists were clenched on her hips. Her face was emphatic.

"Caitlin, you are the air I breathe. You are flesh of my being. I've only come for your promise." Katharine blushed when he addressed her poetically as Caitlin. Caitlin ne' Houlihan was, as popularized by Yeats, the womanly essence of Ireland, an endearment which reliably brought the flush of rose that he sought to her cheeks. Caitlin was a name bowing to a heroic past, romantic and elegant, yet an identity embracing the very conflict he rejected. The cleave was already within him. He had written of the

Sunless grim of irritability, Belfast, whose only cast of color is that reflected of myth. Raging Cuchulainn! Slaughterer. Vainglorious warrior of self serving narrow murderous purpose. Icon of two cultures. Hero to both ever at each other's throats. Appropriate exemplar blind in cause, terrible in moment. But you have to wonder about manhood clinging to this ideal - man as monster. For centuries Lillith has spread her legs here, welcoming all, generous in her spawn.

Gavin rejected the Belfast present which he foolishly, youthfully, misread as the past. After all, this was the modern world. Old antagonisms were - well - old. Who the hell was William of Orange anyway? Just one more unopened jacket among many of unread history? Irrelevant. Just so much more dust to blow away. People were evolving. Equality and tolerance were flourishing. There was a new world order. Yet, his endearment, was an egg of romantic poetry dipped in the tint of cultural warfare.

Da enjoyed Gavin's company at the hotel he managed, made him welcome - but not here, not at his home. This concern went beyond the youngster. Da was not a bigot. He was just a realist living among bigots tattooed all over with bad history. That bad history bore this kid's last name and likeness as a canker. To the locals, In and of itself proof of IRA connection, Gavin was a Catholic. But not just that. He was a McGuinness! His name was a name of carnage! A call to war! For three generations Ulster consumed itself in hell fires fanned by McGuinnesses. His was a lineage of republicans of wild audacity, a birth line of genetic savagery. Heroes in the slums where they belonged, the McGuinnesses were terrorists here. Papists! Killers! All of them! To make it worse, McGuinness men were devilishly personable, outwardly appealing and engaging. Conversationalists. Talk you right out of your better judgement. And they want rights? Killers? Papists? And he, of the lot of the worst of them? What was he doing, trying to seduce one of our very own girleens?

Pity that Gavin's mother died when he was two. Her artistic nature might, arguably, have won out. She was survived also by her sister, one year her younger but so like her that the girls enjoyed all the mischief for which twins are known. But this aunt who had taken vows had little contact and thus little tempering influence on the boy. Even for such lovely sisters judgement came hard. The younger sister married God. The older married the devil. McGuinness men, devils. Gavin was a McGuinness. Just another face on Old Scratch, Satan. He'll want to vote, next! Those people! The lot of them, wanting the vote to bring down a democracy of - of - some of the people - the good people.

Equality? To them? Hell. What do they think this is, America? God save the Queen! And Christ, they breed like flies! Equality? Not while we have our guns! Not while we have British rule! Kill'em, jail'em, deport'em, push'em out, its all the same. They may have been here first, but we beat'em and they just don't belong! Anyway, there's not enough of anything to go around. Somebody has to leave.

But outsiders have different perspectives. MacCullah felt more and more distanced each year. His tolerance could be interpreted as worse than Catholicism, easier to sell, more infectious, and much more dangerous to the youth. At the hotel, tolerance was simply formality, business. Even there, beneath the roles imposed by employment, factions distrusted each other. But tolerance in his house in a population armed to their orange sashes and all too willing to preempt any deviation from their accepted order of things - that was dangerous. They could not see what he could not miss seeing, the root cause of their depressed regional economy, foreign rejection. Clearly. It was rejection of the very mentality of this place, to say nothing of the insecurity brought about by repetitious retaliative violence. The world disapproved Northern Irish partisan violent orthodoxy. Seething elitism was obviously bad for hotels. It must be similarly bad for exports, bad for investments, bad for local development - just bad. To not see that required a deep abiding faith in hatred.

There was plenty of that kind of faith to go around, especially at the marches. Da remarked, "Good for nobody. Bad for us all." Marches communicated: We are thoroughly unified. We are armed to the teeth. We are irretrievably stupid, short sighted if sighted at all, and we enjoy inciting hungry beasts pent up in flimsy cages.

Why did he come? He had no telephone and thought that love was exempt from contempt. "Tickets! I got me hands on two! Caitriona, me very own Caitlin ne Houlihan, they're putting together a dance at the university! Would you be going? Would'ya be liking my company? We could practice all the new ..." Gavin not only borrowed the name of Ireland incarnate in femininity, he toyed with the spelling as Katharine, Kate, Ca'it, to draw it closer and closer to its historic root, Catherine the Martyr of Alexandria as brought west by the crusaders. She was no mere infatuation. She was Celtic womanhood and history, together, seeking its pinnacle. Somehow he was born to help in that elevation.

But pinnacles can be sharp, "GAVIN! Get! Now! We'll be flayed! An' besides, we're not old enough to be prancing about the university, not by ourselves. I think you've been in the yeast. Git! Git git git. I'll meet you at the hotel tonight. OK? Go on now!" She wouldn't allow him even a peck on her cheek as she arms and finger lengthed him, quickly scanning her eyes up and down the hopefully empty street. "I have to go to the bakery for Da. Now git. I'm telling you!" She granted him one linguistic concession, "Anocht." as he liked her to practice Gaelic. He was always testing his poetic ancient tongue on her discriminating ear.

Campus was another world. There, young men and women were demonstrating a new intellectuality, singing songs of peace and equality. They were not like the songs from America, they were the very same songs from America. The times they were a changing, right? Well, actually, no. Not really, although campus had become more open. The more people of like mind gravitating there, the more there were to assert change in air. Change in the air is not a change in the gut. The gut still told you that many folks, hereabouts, were just plain mean.

Anyway, air is inspiration. Gut is augury. And heart? Mmmm. Possibility? And that includes danger. So, tickets - well, flyers- to a dance, in fact a peace rally with music, were to be had and he had them. "Tonight!", he affirmed in a backstep, giving her the space she needed for her fears, but beaming as he left. He floated her a kiss and eased away on a breeze of fancy that was shaping up to become a typhoon.

A radio, somewhere down the block, was playing I Want to Hold Your Hand. It must have been turned up quite loud, as it penetrated closed windows. This newest cultural import, would local musicians even know it yet? Culture was being crossed in so many ways. Barriers were falling. Surely, change, in the air, carried from afar. Heart said yes but gut said no.

Given the choice, always listen to your gut. Winds of time are always blowing. This place was directly down wind of ignorance and hate. Houses flaunted the same shut up windows of a half century ago. Garrison windows framed curtains not much different from those of the last six generations. Old habits, old curtains pulled an inch or so, as they might have been for decades, all along the street, in observance of intrusion. The youngster's presence was more than noted. Some change in the air! Plague had come to this community.