Small town, hard times and now the fog of mediocrity are more than I can handle, writes MICHAEL HARDING
DESPITE THE GOOD weather, I stayed in the house all week, getting depressed by the economy. My usual melancholy has turned to dread, as if the world was on the brink of something terrible that cannot be named.
So on Friday evening I decided to walk into town to cheer myself up. I wanted a drink.
On Dominick Street I saw the Silver Cloud coming out of a pub. I don’t know his real name, but he hangs around with the daughter of a friend of mine. They’re both young and wild, and she calls him Silver Cloud, because he has long hair as black as raven feathers, and I suppose she saw too many movies about Native Americans when she was young.
He’s got a Nissan that growls like a lion, and burns the rubber on the wide road at Shandonagh Bridge, where young people like them have sometimes met their death.
As he revved up the car on Dominick Street, she looked out the passenger window at me. The car shuddered into life, and it shook her frame, and she laughed, like she might be happy if he took her down the road at 100mph, just to scare the daylights out of her.
I nursed a pint in Wallace’s Bar until about 9pm, and fled before the news came on.
On my way home I passed Daybreak Filling Station, where two Traveller girls with big earrings stood eating Kinder Buenos, and a dog played with an empty cola tin, and beneath the white and pink cherry blossoms of suburbia people were arriving home with car-loads of shopping.
Behind the lace curtains I could see couples settling in for the evening. I imagined them, eating dinners from the microwave, or from Apache Pizza, delivered by bike, with maybe a bottle of wine. I imagined them glazed on the sofa all night, watching the Late Late Show, and saying things like, “There’s not much on tonight – but Tubridy is great gas.” The fact is that there are not many people in Mullingar reading Heidegger on Friday evenings. The uneasy existentialism that has swept Europe for a century doesn’t impinge much on streets dominated by the smiling statue of Joe Dolan.
There was a maroon scarf around Joe’s shoulders on Friday evening. It’s always interesting to see what he is wearing on his head, or shoulders, or what he holds in his outstretched hand. It’s usually flowers, or scarves, but sometimes a handbag swings from his arm, and occasionally on Sunday mornings I have seen him holding very naughty things, after the hordes of young revellers have gone home from the discos.
Mullingar is a cozy zone; people don’t do alienation. Some of the young boys, like Silver Cloud, have cars with blackened windows to keep themselves aloof. A few hoodies hang around the archways, behind the off-licence, and there are two head shops, up to now anyway, less than five minutes from Mojo’s nightclub, but that doesn’t make it New York. A small town just doesn’t have that much edge, no matter how many young people pretend otherwise, no matter how much they spend on tracksuits, or how well they can imitate the cadences and emotions of starlets on America’s Next Top Model.
And the really awful truth is that when the money runs out, a small town closes down. Only head shops have reported improved business – with their garish facades, and interiors as dazzling as an ancient shebeen – where the poor can soak their brains in the soft juices of despair.
People say there aren’t many options for young people any more: it’s either the road to Dublin airport, and beyond, like all the other generations that went before, to Argentina, Montana, or New York, or else the Ballymahon Road, in a cheap car, pushing the accelerator to the floor.
And it’s not just the poor or the young who are tranquilised in the fog of mediocrity that envelopes a small town in hard times; even in the willowy suburbs, an alarming number of people try to dissolve their anxieties by calling radio talk shows, and sharing the pain on air, as the laurel hedges and the ornamental shrubs close in, and cloister everyone in bland conformity.
Even I sometimes wish I had a fast car, and a Silver Cloud to drive it for me, and frighten me to death, because I’m certainly too old for Argentina.