Chapter Two (Part Two) of An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan

“An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan” is a mock, surreal autobiography by a fictitious Irish television and radio personality. It parodies misery memoirs (such as Angela’s Ashes by the late great Frank McCourt) and cannibalises and plagiarises from various sources.
Please check out the first part of the first chapter here. The second part of chapter one is here.

The first part of Chapter 2 (this chapter) is here. See the second part below.

  

CHAPTER TWO: GARAGE DAYS REVISITED (PART TWO)

                The second time Bully-Boy Breathanach pulled a stunt on me, I was still unaware of his evil intent, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He told me that Mister Veracci wanted me to go out and pull the legs off the guard dog. Now, the guard dog was more of a blackguard dog in all honesty, and, unlike the Homosexual Lion, his predilections for human flesh weren’t confined only to penguins. Or the penguins that migrated from Antarctica for that matther. He had huge, almost comical jaws on a small head, a big, woolly fur coat which he’d stolen from the previous garage owner, and he had a kind of androgyny about him whereby he had not only male but female genitalia as well as autoreproductive propensities that would put the fear in any man. So out I went into the fhreezing weadder, and I called out the hound’s name.

                “Coo, Colin!” I says, “Coo, Colin!”

                And the great wolf appeared in the forecourt, expecting his meal, so he sees me, a young child, and I could see in his eyes that he wanted me for lunch, and I don’t mean a dinner date, I mean eating me. And he charged at me full speed, and I didn’t know what to do, but it was just as well I had my hurling shtick with me, what was known as a hurley, or a big spoon as it’s called nowadays, and I withdrew the shliothar out of my pocket and tossed it into the air and whacked it with a force unbeknownst to man, so fast, indeed, that wasn’t there a great big wake of Cherenkov radiation following after it? Only the ball missed the dog entirely, my aim wasn’t what it should have been, and the ball went crashing through the window of Mister Veracci’s office, and didn’t it only lodge in the boss’s head, the removal of which we were told later, would ultimately result in his death. So there the shliothar remained, stuck in the Italian immigrant’s skull, until years later, when in a vision - or so I was told - Mister Veracci saw Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci being hung upside down on tenterhooks, and Veracci was so angered by what he saw that didn’t he only fall into a rage, and the shliothar pop out of his skull and he died on the spot?

Anyway, the wolfdog was still bounding towards me, tongue lolling out of his mouth and the spittle flickering off the tongue in slow motion and landing in huge drops on the ice, where dirty big holes would be burnt and didn’t I only take the spare shliothar out of my pocket and toss it into the air and WHACK! The ball soared into the jaws of the leaping mutt and plunged into the gaping cavernous mouth and went right through him and out his anus and he collapsed on the spot, much like Mister Veracci years later? Except, of course, with an entirely bursted out rectum. So I took the legs off the dog and returned to the factory floor and I threw the legs down before Pat Breathanach and all stared at me in awe and my Father was so proud of me he bought me a pint and a glass of Kelly’s cola and four ground up, soluble pillules of morphia and we went clubbing all night, and that’s where I picked up my love of the thumping beat of the bodhrán with the ‘visual’ sounds. And when people talk, green and red comes out of their mouths and the beautiful butterflies and the tangible shenanigans and the tactile tomfoolery. Just three or four times a week and not as often now, mind, and it’s never done me any harm, but I did look after mysel’, going to Switzerland to have all the pysened blood drained out of me in the clinic to be replaced by fresh blood.

                But anyhow, back to the garage days. The third trick that evil man Pat Breathanach played on me was the one that ended his life, for God help him, he messed with the wrong four-year-old child. Pat came up to me one morning a fortnight later and he says to me, he says,

                “Would you go and get me a bucket of blue steam?”

                “What’s blue steam?” says I in response, knowing full well he was setting me up for another murther attempt.

                “Sure, isn’t it a kind of dethergent?” says he.

                Now, I knew full well there was no such a detergent as blue steam, and that Pat Breathanach was out for my blood. I made the decision there and then that it was him or me, dead and alive, and that was perfectly logical when you put it into an equation of logic.

                “I’ll get it for you indeed, Walshy,” says I, sourpuss on me, and everyone gave loud whispers and took a step back, because they knew full well from the way that I’d called Pat Breathanach by his Proddy name that one of us would be gone to Hivin by the nightfall. So I promptly made my way over to the furnace and didn’t I only put on the rubber glove and I opened the carbon-14 cubicle in the furnace and re-aligned the molecular field so that the matrix wouldn’t be so stable. And everyone except Pat Breathanach knew what was going to happen, but Pat Breathanach didn’t know, bereft as he was of any kind of technical acumen. And all the lads hit the deck, and quick as the wind through the cheeks of God I swung the furnace door open, and pulled the door off its hinges so that it hung free in my arms, and charged at Pat Breathanach with all my might, swinging the furnace door down onto his skull, smashing his nose into his brains and his eyes into his shtomach. He collapsed on the factory floor, shtone dead, and I pointed at the furnace doorway, where the door had been moments before and a little wisp of blue steam came out of the furnace and I says to Pat Breathanach’s broken body, I says:

                “There’s your blue steam, baby.”

             And I got a round of applause, applause almost as cogent as the time, years later, when I told a woman on the train that she was ugly in the extreme and I was totally drunk, but I wasn’t so drunk that I couldn’t see that she was very ugly. And so as you can see, I developed my wit early on in life. And from that day to this I’ve encountered a great deal more respect from people, be they young, old, indifferent, highly intelligent, or stupid females. Sometimes I’ll be giving a talk, and I’ll look into the crowd, and won’t there only be a young man or an old woman there, and I’ll see from their manner that they’re hanging on my every word. Sometimes I’ll even see them mouthing my own words back at me in silence, and I’ll point to that particular disciple, and I’ll say:

“Look at that gimp, mouthing my words back at me just two seconds after I’ve said them!” And everyone will point at that particular individual and roar with a kind of teasing, mocking laughter that isn’t real laughter at all, but merely the kind of ostracising behaviour typical of a mob’s group disfunction. Or dysfunction. Or what have you.

Chapter Three begins here.