Here Are the Young Men (17 page)

‘Relax …' she began.

‘But what's going on? Why isn't it hard?'

I was freaking out, close to despair. She tried to calm me down but I felt humiliated. Visions of lifelong impotence bombarded me, smothering me in horror.

‘Just relax,' she said. ‘Here, lie back.' She took it in her mouth and kissed it, licked the tip, flicked her tongue over it. I watched in extreme anxiety.

‘It's no good,' I moaned. ‘Why is it happening?'

Eventually, through Jen's licking and coaxing I achieved what felt like a very precarious half-erection. ‘Now, put it in me,' she whispered. I obeyed: as soon it was inside her I could feel myself coming. I tried to stop it but it was too late. I closed my eyes, devastated. Something in me seemed to expire, with a final, humiliated groan.

I lay on top of her and buried my face in her shoulder. She was trying to comfort me, saying sshhh and stroking my hair, while I stared in shock and agony at the wall. ‘Don't worry, it's fine, it happens to lots of men. It's all the drugs you've taken. That's what happens, it's normal.'

But I didn't believe her: it wasn't the drugs, it was something badly wrong with me, an affliction I had now for life. I was ruined; there was nothing left for me but to kill myself, or live like a hermit on some mountain, reading books and shunning society. I was ruined.

I pushed her away from me and lay on the bed, shivering with the comedown, helplessly viewing an inner montage of disgrace, humiliation and shame. She put her hand on me but I shoved it away. After that she didn't try any more. She turned away on to her side of the bed and we lay there in silence, no longer communicating, no longer together. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

27
|
Kearney

He awoke to find a black T-train driver shaking him roughly by the shoulder. ‘Okay son, gotta get off now, this the last stop.' Kearney gazed up at the man, bewildered – and was blitzkrieged all at once by the fork-stabs in his brain, his heaving, sloshing gut, his parched mouth. As he stumbled off the train, squinting at a sign to try and work out where the fuck he was, it all came back to him – the party, the club, the fighting, the after-party, the wanking into a cake for a laugh, and finally everyone pouring on to the morning train to get home from the other side of the city. Then he must have passed out and the cunts had just left him there. Thinking of it, he started to giggle, despite the stabbing in his head and his ravaged condition.

He boarded a T-train going in the opposite direction, hoping it would get him back home. Whenever the train hit open air, rain slammed against the window, blurring up a near-black sky; Boston had been enduring a three-day torrent of rainfall, as if the blazing summer had imploded under its own extreme pressure. It showed no signs of letting up. Kearney tried to distract himself from his
headache
by listening to the Spanish conversation of the Latino man and woman who shared his carriage. They spoke quickly but he made out the words for food –
hermano
– and for party –
mañana
. Not bad, he thought, considering he had hated Spanish in school and surely failed it in the Leaving Cert.

An hour later, racked and raped by his hangover, Kearney finally found his way through the city's polluted deluge to the apartment. (One of the lads had previously told him, ‘If you ever get lost, just follow the sirens and the screams of dying crack babies.') The apartment was empty: despite the interminable downpour all the lads were up on the rooftop terrace, shirts off, roaring and stomping in pools of water, drinking cans of Budweiser. A Pogues album was playing on a tiny CD player kept under shelter, Shane McGowan's feral howl an incitement to lunatic drinking. It was eleven o'clock.

A big cheer met Kearney when he stepped on to the rooftop. The lads grinned and congratulated him: ‘So you made it back. Good man, Joe, you've passed the test. Give the man a can of wife-beater!'

‘We were about to start takin bets on whether ye were raped and then murdered, or murdered and then raped. But it seems they didn't bother to kill ye after the rapin. Fair play to ye though, ye made it.'

‘You're a fuckin mad thing, Joe. Takin after your brother so ye are.'

Kearney grinned. His T-shirt was soaked and water streamed down his cheeks. He didn't mind that they'd abandoned him on the train after he'd passed out – all that was part of it. He loved having the chance to hang around with these older lads.

Now Dwayne approached and gave Kearney a brotherly punch in the shoulder. ‘Good man Joe. That was a rite of passage. Gettin abandoned on the train in a foreign city when you're too hammered to even stand up. Fair play though, ye made it back in one piece. You're becomin a man.' He slapped Kearney's back. ‘So how's the head?'

‘Not too bad now. I bought some Aspirin in a 7-Eleven on the way back.'

‘Good man. Get a few drinks into ye and ye'll be grand. We've
all
had a bit of speed as well, let me know when ye want some. Last night was good craic but that's only the start of it. This whole weekend is gonna be fuckin mental. And listen, Stu is comin tomorrow. I'm dyin for ye to meet him. He's a sound cunt. He keeps tellin me about this special surprise he has. Fuck knows what it is. But c'mere, I have somethin for you as well, a little present for me kid brother. C'mon and I'll show ye.'

Kearney followed him down the stairs, into the sepulchral filth of the apartment. They stepped over bare mattresses and strewn clothing, dripping everywhere. The stench of beer, cigarettes and a million farts was repulsive even to Kearney. Dwayne found his own mattress in the corner and rooted out his money belt. From it he retrieved a little plastic pharmacist's jar. He opened it and spilled the contents into his palm. Kearney leaned in to see as Dwayne held something up between his finger and thumb: a green plastic capsule.

Kearney started feeling excited. ‘What is it?'

His brother paused dramatically, then said, ‘Date rape, Joe. Rohypnol. Pour this into the drink of some young one and she'll do whatever ye want. She'll be as horny as fuck and then ye can do her whatever way ye fuckin like, and in the mornin she'll just think she was drunk and mad up for it.'

‘Have ye tried it?' said Kearney, fascinated by this drug he'd heard a lot about but never seen for himself.

Dwayne laughed. ‘What ye should be askin me is, how many times have I tried it. Trust me Joe, when ye have this stuff on yer side ye can punch
well
above your weight. Not that a brother of mine needs any help in that department. But still, why have cotton when ye can have silk, know wharray mean? But here, I'm only givin ye the one; I don't have many of these. Save it for the right moment, when the romance is high.' He handed Kearney the capsule.

‘Nice one, Dwayne.' Kearney beheld the capsule rolling innocently in his palm. This truly is the land of opportunity, he thought – date-rape opportunity!

‘
That's what family is all about, Joe. Just never let it be said, d'ye hear me, never let it be said. Now c'mon upstairs and we'll show this gang of mickey-swingers how to drink, wha?'

Kearney put the pill in his wallet and climbed the creaky wooden ladder, behind his brother, and together they re-emerged into the relentless rain, and the sky the colour of war machines.

28
|
Matthew

On Monday my work shift passed like a sinister dream. The other staff kept looking furtively at me and turning away when I caught them. Customers made bizarre remarks and jokes I didn't get. It all felt unreal. My body ached and I had no energy. I smoked a spliff around the corner but it just made the paranoia worse.

The next day I still felt dreadful. I wasn't working so I stayed in my room with the door locked. Rez rang me in the afternoon.

‘Do ye want to come over for a while?' he said when I answered. ‘I've something to show ye. We could have a smoke.'

‘Are your parents not there?'

‘No, they're in work. Stall it over.'

‘Right, see ye in a little bit,' I said, relieved at the chance of company.

Half an hour later we sat in Rez's living room, skinning up and talking.

‘How was the comedown, man?' Rez asked.

‘Not very good at all. I still feel down.'

‘
Yeah man, suicide Tuesday. Do ye know about that?'

‘No. What is it?'

‘It's like, after people started usin ecstasy in the eighties, Tuesday was the day when everyone started toppin themselves on. Ye go out droppin yokes on a Friday and a Saturday, and it takes a couple of days for the full lag to kick in, so ye feel shit on a Tuesday. Then ye go and hang yourself or drive your car off a pier or whatever.'

Music videos were playing on the telly. Christina Aguilera was simulating various sexual manoeuvres, wearing a skimpy denim miniskirt and thrusting her ass at the camera. I watched it and felt nothing. I thought of Jen and then reflected, for the thousandth time in two days, that I would never be able to satisfy a woman sexually. I pushed the thought out of my mind.

‘So what was it ye were going to show me?' I said.

‘Me album,' he replied. Rez had been talking about making an album for some time, but I hadn't realized he had actually been working on it.

‘Ye mean it's all done, you've finished it?'

‘Yeah, more or less. It's not really an album, though, more one long track.'

‘What about the songs ye wrote, aren't they on it?'

‘No. I can't even look at them any more. They were totally fuckin delusional. What I've made now is more …' He searched for an expression, licking the backs of the skins in the meantime. ‘More honest,' he said eventually.

‘Well let's hear it, then. I'm dead curious.'

He went up to his room and returned with a CD.

‘Let's have a smoke first,' he said.

We lit up and then he put in the CD and turned up the volume. Straight away, the peace of the room was violated by searing sheets of noise, screams of feedback and harsh metallic clanging. There was no rhythm or melody, and it was hard to even tell what instruments, if any, were being used. The noise constantly mutated but didn't go
anywhere;
it sounded like a black, amorphous worry-cloud. Random shrieks flared up and then died. Drills and hisses rose in volume till they smothered everything, then dropped away again into more clanging and hammering. It was the most discordant, abrasive din I'd ever heard.

Then, emerging from the squall of noise, human voices could be heard, arising for a while before being swallowed back up by the black cacophony. I heard what sounded like a child weeping. Then there was a cold, deep male voice with an English accent. I strained to make out some of the words: ‘… took him out to the factory where we had the cameras and the equipment. It was three hours before he finally died …'

The voice fused into a steam-hiss of static noise and vanished, then there were more sobs, and screams of fear and pain, like the sound of people being tortured. There was a ranting voice in a foreign tongue, maybe Asian, furious like Hitler. Then it was Hitler himself, and more crying and wailing in the background. The screeching, metallic din kept warping, disfiguring itself further, slowing down and speeding up without any kind of pattern.

Now a racist thug was gloating about how he and his friends had beaten a Pakistani man to death in a public toilet in some deserted park. An American woman described how she had microwaved her baby. After several minutes, many voices, sobs and screams converged together, merging into a featureless panic of sound that rose in pitch until it was a single, shrill tone. The tone played out for a few seconds. Then, abruptly, everything stopped.

There was silence but for the whirr of the CD as it came to rest.

Rez exhaled smoke, looking ahead of him at the CD player. I studied the side of his face. Neither of us said anything for a few moments.

Then, stubbing out his joint in an ashtray on the arm of his chair, Rez said, ‘So, what do ye think?'

‘Well …' I didn't know what I thought. ‘It's fairly fuckin powerful.
I've
never really heard anything like it. Do ye have a name for it?'

‘
King of Pop
,' said Rez.

My stoned imagination was hurling out all kinds of speculations about the black sprawl of noise he had played me. I had a vivid, thrilling insight into just how fucked up Rez was getting, how lost he was. It occurred to me that this recording, this
King of Pop
, was Rez's cry for help, the aural equivalent of a half-hearted suicide bid.

A few minutes later I awkwardly tried to respond to the appeal. ‘Listen, Rez, are ye alright these days? It's just, ye seem different, you've changed a lot. Ye never seem happy any more.'

‘Of course I'm not fuckin happy,' he snapped.

Stung, I proceeded more gingerly. ‘Right, relax, I'm only talkin to ye. It's just, I mean, yeah. Ye need to relax man, you're too wound up. Look, I know that the way things are in the world is horrible, and that life is meaningless, and all this stuff we've talked about. But … but there's more than that.'

‘There's nothing more to it than that.'

‘There is. Or maybe there isn't, I don't fuckin know. But what I mean is, ye seem in a really bad way and, and I'm worried. So is Jen and so is Cocker. I think you're only seein the world the way you're seein it because you're depressed or something. Maybe ye need some kind of help. Ye know? I'm worried that you're going to, ye know, do something to yerself.'

Rez scowled. ‘Do something to meself. Jesus Christ, don't give me that.' He looked right at me with an intensity, an anger that unnerved me. I was feeling more and more uncomfortable, wishing I was elsewhere, wishing I wasn't stoned.