CC7: Lucky Charm Honey Ran Out

I was unused to girls back then. I pretended I wasn’t, but I was. You try telling those little fuckers about your inner feelings and all that, your shyness or whatever. Good fucking luck to you! I remember me and my friends used to tease Emer back in the day. I’d join in feverishly in order to impress the rest of them, though the feverishness was like Picasso painting my subconscious for a bet, I know now. We’d call her names as she walked past us on her way to school. I even hit her with an egg one day. I wept later that night revisiting in my mind the drowsy yellow sun falling sadly down her lovely green jumper.

I humbly apologised to her later on at a Therapy? gig and she punched out my front tooth. That gap remains in my gob. When we eventually started kissing, I asked her why she wasn’t repulsed by the gap, and she answered she enjoyed sliding her tongue in and out of it. When I mentioned Freudian envy, she punched me again, this time demolishing my first and last pair of glasses.

We were united in full contact. After I overheard her name-dropping Cynthia Rothrock, an American martial arts star, in conversation, while I was eavesdropping nearby one evening in the Mineshaft, Dundalk’s premium heavy metal hangout, I was shown the pathway to her heart. From a young age, I was an academic in terms of kung-fu films, so my sprawling knowledge of the genre was destined to work in this case, against all those fearless odds presented by conventional Dundalk cynicism. By the fucking Christ, it hadn’t worked before, but the gap in my mouth convinced me –it needed to be filled – by that girl’s tongue, or a cock in a sunny LA production. And I knew it was to be the former. I was such a kung-fu sort that, at the age of 8, I’d written a biography of Bruce Lee. I published it myself, rewriting it fifty times into a load of old copybooks and putting the whole lot of them through all the letterboxes on the street. I received my only feedback some years later, a criticism of its ‘mawkish reverence and rambling formless prose’ on the back of a Valentine’s Day card.

Throughout our early life together, me and Emer were merely devoted martial arts enthusiasts who used to kiss now and then. She was quite a different kind of enthusiast – a successful competitor in full contact kickboxing. I watched her decimate a champion in the ring once. I was teary-eyed with excitement and fear.

My only ability lay in watching the movies. I was fucking great at that. We’d go to practice together in St. Gerard’s Hall and she’d be up sparring with someone, kicking heads, while I was down the back talking my tongue off, but at the same time, I must add, taking heads clean right off in arguments like ‘who was better: Bruce or Van Damme?’

In the recent, Emer had lost the spark that sent her battling into martial combat. She still liked to keep fit though. She was paying shitloads to go to some gym every week. I wasn’t sure what she did there. Machines, I guessed. Twice a week, she went. Myself, no gym, but I still liked to watch kung-fu films – two a week became ten a week when I lost the job.

‘He’s a bastard. I’d still fuck him though.’

Carol was talking about her job when I arrived back at the table with the drinks.

‘How did he get promoted then?’ asked Emer. ‘I thought you said he was an idiot.’
‘He is! A complete tool! But I’m not a brown-nose, you know, so he always gets his foot in the door before me. But it’s not just that. He must have some sort of fucking lucky charm around his neck.’
‘Ah, where’s your lucky charm, honey?’

‘Lucky charm honey ran out before I was born, ya manky bitch!’