A Roomful of Power Ballads

To our right in the harbour, there sat a big rusty cargo ship and we could hear music coming from inside.  What is that? we thought, our ears being wrenched up to it like someone on the boat had hooked us with a fishing line.  Power ballads. Maybe Belinda Carlisle, I thought.  Starship, thought Coral Express.  Bao didn't make a guess because he didn't know power ballads too well.  But when we realised it was China In Your Hand by T'Pau, Bao pumped out his chest in a smug and self-congratulatory way as if he had just won a competition.

I always had a thing for power ballads.  In the taste wars between Emer and I, power ballads brought us together in a daffy way.  In the summer after we finished school, we would often go to Jimmy's Tavern on Crowe Street to stay in the B&B upstairs (we both still lived at home at the time, and we 'd also moved beyond crackly painful trysts in the woods so needed to feel like real sex adults in the sex world) and they always played power ballads in the bar as we sat biding our time with a drink in the run-up to sex.  The relationship we had with power ballads was not an intense one initially; they were more like funny acquaintances whose company we enjoyed being in even if we didn't have much in common with them.  But an odd thing would happen as we sat in Jimmy's Tavern.  A song would come on, provoke laughter at first, then next thing you knew, we'd be singing along happily, and the next thing, we were stuck like glue, tongues crashing up against each other like battling serpents of the sea, bodies in hard embrace in a preposterous show of fancy and ...you know....eventually we had more in common with the power ballads than we first thought.  The people in Jimmy's Tavern were always an older crowd and they would eye us with envy.  We were about eighteen at the time.  The women wanted to kill Emer, the men wanted to kill me.  There were more men, so I had more to fight off.  But the women looked more dangerous, so Emer looked to have a tougher battle if it came to that.  It never did.  Anyway, the power ballads would accompany us upstairs to our room, wait for us to undress, and then begin to bellow their full hearts out as we got down to it; they egged us on without restraint the only way power ballads can.  Power ballads are good for that.  Well, for us, they were.  Maybe in another room, a couple were being egged on by Val Doonican; it's a sexual mystery that will continue as long there are drunken couples and rooms to fuck in. 

 As I remember it all now, I think mostly of the smell of our dirty warm sex and lingering piss smoke in the air and power ballads.  How on this Earth did Jimmy's Tavern secure the premier location for the scenes of our early lovemaking?  God knows, or he wants so very much to know, like the rest of us.  In our last year, when the sweat in our passion had dried up so to speak, I knew that both of us had it in mind to go back to Jimmy's Tavern and its scummy B&B, to find our way back to the wildfire of our lives and the earnest power ballad soundtrack of our past.