He started a limousine business in London, drove film stars and judges about, slept in swanky hotels, not always alone, and even got to play a waiter in the Bond movie Octopussy,writes MICHAEL HARDING
BOB DYLAN used to say, “you either got faith, or you got unbelief, and there’s no neutral ground”. Well I still have faith, although Ireland has become a hostile environment for people like me, who still use religion as shelter from psychic storms and still hope to meet a guardian angel at the end of the day or at least a nun, just one more time, at a bus stop outside Trinity College.
I adored the nuns. I remember a young sallow-skinned Italian with eyes like big chestnuts and black robes to her ankles; she gave me ice-cream in a monastery in Venice, in 1981. Later I saw her in an oratory, her eyes closed and her body absorbed in contemplation, and even now, as I think of her I am filled with nostalgia.
My local butcher also suffers from nostalgia. I was buying a leg of lamb last Wednesday and I asked him did he have any free-range eggs. He said he’s not allowed to sell them. “If the health inspector came in here and found me with a free-range egg, it would cost me five grand in fines. I can’t even put up notices on the walls for babysitters,” he said.
He wrapped up a leg of lamb and half a pound of sausages, slapped them on the counter and said “the world is a changed place”, with the innate pessimism of someone who understands the impermanence of life.
Later I drove to Athlone to meet a friend in Seán’s Bar. I parked outside the Liturgical Apostolate Centre where, long ago, young clerics used to buy vestments for their ordinations with the intensity of virgin brides picking wedding dresses. It was a strange and lonesome adventure I suppose, for boys on the brink of all that razzamatazz associated with summer ordinations, in parishes up and down the country, before the Irish people’s respect for priests was buried with Brendan Smith under a ton of cement.
Seán’s Bar is a shadowy old world, with guns and fishing rods hanging from the ceiling inside the bar, and a log smoking on the open fire.
My friend was worried about an operation he’s having later in the week. I wanted to say “I’ll pray for you” – but I didn’t, in case it sounded corny, though the unreconstructed Catholic in me secretly prayed that his guardian angel would hover above the scalpel’s point when he’s asleep.
The man behind the counter made us tea but he had no buns, so we went next door for a muffin, brought it back, divided it on the counter and consumed it like a sacrament with our tea.
In fact I only know one angel. The Angel Gabriel, to be precise; he’s 74 years old and lives up a lane outside Mullingar, and he drives a Mercedes Benz. He has a guitar in the corner, custom made in Nashville, and a plaque over the mantelpiece that proclaims him a “Golden Gloves Champion”.
Gabriel Robbins was abandoned soon after his birth on the side of the road, and was fostered out to families for a few years, before being dumped in a reformatory in Galway, where the clerics abused him and Seán Thornton from Connemara taught him to box.
He escaped by slipping onto Inis Mór in a currach, where he lay low for a week, eating turnips from various gardens. When the guards stopped looking for him he went as far as Kilrush, where he worked in a shoe shop long enough to gather the money for the boat to England.
He never looked back until he had won the Golden Gloves in New York, started a limousine business in London, drove film stars and high court judges about the town, slept in swanky hotels, not always alone, and even got to play a waiter in the Bond movie Octopussy.
I went to visit him on Wednesday afternoon. He made me tea, and we watched a video of his 50th birthday. He doesn’t have fluttering wings, but when he jogged on the streets of New York in the 1960s and punched the air, and watched his reflection in the glass walls of fancy stores, the cops would say, “There goes the Angel Gabriel,” because his punch was unambiguous, like a messenger of God.
They used to shout at him in the ring, “You can do it, Buddy.” And he did it; he did it all, like an angel, in a gritty, Bob Dylan kind of way.