Billy O’Hanlauin has been entertaining his Facebook friends with his wry, acerbic observations of Dublin life for a good while now. In this, the first in a new series of regular columns for Totally Dublin, we aim to give his musings a wider platform.
Dessie Hogan was a demon on the altar. His intentions there had little to do with veneration, he seemed mostly concerned with derailing what little was left of my dwindling belief in the rituals we performed together as altar servers in Glasthule parish church.
We’d arrive fifteen minutes before mass and enter the dimly lit sacristy, the half-light punctured by flashes of polished brass receptacles and silver candle sticks that rested on deep purple cloths on top of the presses that lined the walls. The dark pine wardrobes where our soutanes and surplices hung felt smooth like well-worn leather. I liked to slide my fingers along their surfaces and make out the braille chiselled initials carved there years before by former altar boys.
“Damo and Gar 68” “Danny Healy 71” “Gibbo 78″…
Damp, warped and stiff, the wardrobe doors would only open with a strong yank, so the garments inside were slightly swaying on their coat hangers, fanning the dead air, when I’d see them. When serving mass alone on winter mornings this unholy apparition would unnerve me. I was sure that these starched and wax stained robes were haunted by the spirits of deceased altar boys.
Was I, unwittingly, wrapping myself in the purgatorial trapped souls of Gar and Damo? Would they, through some diabolic intervention, somehow seep from the soutanes and attach themselves like blasphemous barnacles on my soul, their sins accruing with my own plentiful supply?
The smell of stale incense, quenched candles, and unwashed male body odour hung rancid in the air.
Dessie Hogan seemed to survive on a diet of Caffrey’s caramel Time bars. He’d arrive at the sacristy, his mouth full of toffee spittle as he’d spew out the same questions a few times with puerile urgency.
“D’ye see Joan Jett on Top of the Pops? She’s a bang-she’s a bang. D’ye see her? D’ye see her?”
He’d have the soutane half pulled over his tuck shop bulge, the question, for a moment, muffled by the garment.
“D’ye see her? D’ye see her?”
I had seen Joan Jett alright and dreamed of obeying her by putting a dime in the juke box, but no such luck in a country of pounds and pence. I wasn’t so happy that Dessie had seen her too, it was as though he’d managed, against all physical considerations, to sneak in through the cat flap of my earliest rock’n roll reveries.
As we took our positions behind the priest to form a perfect Trinity before walking on to the altar, his face would contort into a grimace, the kind that seemed to belong to somebody much older than him, his lower jaw stretched out like a drawer pulled from the kitchen unit of his face, his whispered breath smelling of penny sweets, “Joan’s got a big pair, Joan’s a bang”.
These words ricocheted like pinballs all through my body – terror, thrill, and fear, let it be over, I’d plead with myself, just like I did when enduring my monthly ear wax removals in Saint Michael’s hospital. I’d try focussing on the stained-glass windows that looked like illuminated Quality Street wrappers, Hogan’s knee nudging into mine as we knelt too close together, as the priest mumbled the creed:
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.
Dessie and me, in our different ways, both believed in all that was unseen, or at least longed for all that was unseen. My own search for the unseen often took me to one of the many travel agents in Dún Laoghaire. I’d go in to them and approach one of the women at the desks and tell them that my mother had asked me to pick up a travel brochure for holidays in places I knew we’d never be going to. Places like Marbella and Benidorm.
The chances of my family ever going to one of these hotel resorts with swimming pools were even slimmer than of me putting a dime in a juke box. It was the photos my fevered eleven-year-old self was after. I had a scrap book at home full of photos of women from JWT brochures in swimsuits who leaned over swimming pool tiles drinking concoctions of fruit with tiny umbrellas that might, at a stretch, shelter a mouse from a sudden shower.
Many nights, after boarding Joan’s Jet and flying to Marbella, I’d swim towards these women in dreams of being a waiter and serve them exotic umbrellaed drinks.
One morning Dessie’s carnal concerns were far more local.
“Have ye seen her? Have ye seen her? She’s on a poster outside The Forum? Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton. What d’ye call Dolly Parton in a bath? Islands in the Stream, d’ye get it, d’ye get it?”
I didn’t get it, I had no idea who Dolly Parton was, but I knew where The Forum cinema was.
Daydreaming of dimes and juke boxes, Marbella, and women who looked like members of the Dun Laoghaire golf club lazing about in swimming pools, I barely made it through my altar duties without skipping a cue.
After mass I walked towards The Forum.
I stood there looking at the poster. Unable to fully say the name of the film, The Best Little who-House in Texas. All that is seen, the tall wooden frame of an American house with women in the windows in garments that would make the JWT women blush. And all that is unseen, the vast, soft continents of her skin. I raised my left hand to blot Burt Reynolds out of the frame, and swooned, the mass was but a memory now, Fatima, Lourdes, and Knock, such tame apparitions, I surrendered to the sacred, secret heart of Our Lady Dolly, I wanted to run my fingers through the bleached tangle of her Texan curls, and take the key from her hand, the one she seemed to offering me, and tremble as I opened every door in that house.
Our Dolly who art in Texas, beauty be thy name, blaspheme was bliss on my tongue, and now, to find a dime for the juke box, baby…
Words: Billy O’Hanlauin
