CC13: Seatown Peripatetics

Paidi’s band were known as Underbelly Dogs, but the group of people he’d arrived with were known as the Seatown Peripatetics. Factions were a norm in the town. When you belonged to a group of some kind, you surely wouldn’t disappear, for then someone knew who you were. And best of all, someone always had your back, though sometimes they had your hands tied behind it also. Clubs were walled off from one another, but easily communicated on account of their shared ideal of the cooperative. You weren’t out there on your lonesome hanging upside down from a tree, shaking about like a mad thing in the senseless struggle of it all, with no-one willing to hack you down. That was the kind of thing John Carroll was now, though in the past he’d been a member of at least one group I knew of, which I’ll get to talking about in a sec. John Carroll’s type, the far-flung and uncontrolled lunatic island, was maligned by groups like the Seatown Peripatetics, and the Bridge Street Bandits, standing near them now, and the Jenkinstown Junkies, to our left, and the White Widow Heads, and the Jobhunters, and the Tablecloth Cunts, who were all inside.

The Seatown Peripatetics were all college graduates who’d come back to the town now with all sorts of additional smarts about them. They’d been there (Dublin, mostly) and back (Dundalk, of course) and pursued (scrambled after) any opportunity to test (wiggle) their gained knowledge (little dicks) in discourse (bloody shit-talk). If I’d stuck my ear out a little further just then, it would have been bitten off by one of their pompous fucking ideas. You’d see them walking around town together like the lords of learning while folks going about their daily effort looked on incredulously. Sometimes you’d see them stopping and standing over a Romanian orphan sitting outside the Credit Union playing a fiddle badly with their thumbs on their chins and their pouting gobs considering the social implications of the whole thing. I could see now Serena’s place in the team. In there, she fit like socks you’d wear for a year. I should have known she’d eventually join the Seatown Peripatetics.

Here’s another thing I’ll say: I’ve never been against education and learning. I’ll say also that in some ways I respected the Seatown Peripatetics for at least trying out all that claptrap in a way that meant using up some critical sweat. Too many of them of late were going to college just to get their foot in the door of some designed scheme for crazy riches. It was all programmed thinking nowadays. Success and the status perks all depended on how well you could memorise the answers. I never found answers all that bloody exciting, to tell you God’s honest to God truth. When we used to play Trivial Pursuit at home every Christmas Day, I’d more than often find the questions ten times as interesting as the answers. The answers only closed a door, whereas the questions probably opened more than one. But then again, listen to me, philosophising, and didn’t I fail the fuck out of myself at school.

Sometimes I feel a bit sad about not doing well in my education. I bashed in my promise as a student quite early on following some advice from my idol as a boy. That was Avenue Elvis. He said to me, Don’t bother with the place, son (being school). You’ll only wind up shitting yourself with worry. Is it worth it? That man was Avenue Elvis. My idol. My youth along the Castletown Road was sprinkled with scenes of Avenue Elvis sliding down the streets singing like a wild man and dancing on car bonnets. He told us he’d had a load of Motown records compressed and surgically implanted in his head. He even showed us the scar, which was shaped like the wee USB port on your computer. My favourite Avenue Elvis performance was ‘Superfreak’ by Rick James. He really put the effort in when he sang that one and it often inspired him to do good deeds like helping old women with their shopping, and even superheroic ones like moving bags of coal off the coal truck with his mind. I never saw him do this, but many of my friends did, and I believed them. He was a fucking magician, Avenue Elvis.