Issac's in Dublin
Share Article My temporary home is Isaac’s, a cheap run down tenement factory serving as a hostel near the Busarus in Dublin. Years before economic tigers.
Victor, 52, is the owner. He went to a local school run by the Christian Brothers but never had the courage to speak up about the conditions. His parents were in business and his interests lay in Ireland’s agricultural development. He graduated from school, failed his agricultural entrance exams and lived outside Dublin near granite quarries.
Then he found some Dublin buildings in good locations but needing maintenance. Attracted by the granite exteriors he became interested in restoration and created a guest house, a small 200 bed smelly hostel for £1.5 a night.
I lived at Isaac's for a long hard desperate month.
At 11 a.m. closing time, Kay from New Zealand, sits on the high brown chair behind the desk welcoming new arrivals.
Issac routine never varies; splashing cold water on face, brushing teeth, clothes arranged, dressing, going downstairs to fix a sandwich of cheese, white pudding mixture, banana, greens and carrot.
I pack my green bag, mark down job hunting locations on a city map, arrange clothing and food for the midday meal, books and pens. The general weight distribution is aligned and shifted, boots tied over warm comfortable heavy wool socks. I record early morning silence.
I endure weeks of potential journalism job meetings with The Irish Times, Independent, Evening Press and IN Dublin magazine. I have no work permit, feeling I'm in the right place at the wrong time. Media people are encouraging but cannot promise anything. The economy is tight.
Filled with hope, expectations, disappointments, frustration and anger I walk up and down empty streets clogged like sewers with humanities best and worst, all of them, handing out resumes.
Beautiful girls and women catch my eye — they seem afraid, psychologically unaware yet so intuitive as if to say “come on to me” - all in my imagination — shoppers, with bags loaded with sweets and the people — faces etched in my mind — faces, eyes, alive. Blank eyes stare into mine, off into space, into someone else's eyes.
"Don't waver from your path," I tell myself as conditioning runs rampant and sniffles from somewhere in the esophagus zone foretell intuitive understanding. I remain confused but content, serene in knowing I have it good. This is what life is about and I stand out like a sore thumb, a cancer on a scab refusing to be picked although musical instruments are strung and plied with nimble fingers.
Fates of self pity tempt, then they give in, succumb to the human morass of self neglect and trust to the heavens, to the god within never letting them down for one instant — stranger’s faces cast empty looks on blank page fears.
In a pub full of talking wee words, photos of people are displayed above the bar; wedding cars full of laughing couples, two local boxers, a master of ceremonies in a shiny black tuxedo, a famous author, athletic teams, friends of owners, all comrades in arms. The images are held together by scotch tape and friendship stronger than human existence.
Turf accountants, where gamblers place their wages on the horses, slam doors repairing laughter roofs while a child wonders out loud through veils of tearful joy. My pain sits quiet among drinkers. The pontiff’s miracle face lies plastered on glass windows for passing pedestrians. His 78 rpm records are a big hit.
Newspapers can’t do much no matter how many stories go across their desks and the waiting game gets on my nerves - going to send a wire asking for reinforcement funds to carry on - art modeling and domestic hopes - also considering going out of Dublin to try provincial papers north south or west.
Life goes on. Dinner is pealed, washed, buttered, served, swallowed, digested. Old newspaper table cloths find their way into the trash. The job selection is stained with grease and tomato juice seeds. I take out the garbage and go to the theater for a reading.
People gather in the basement of Burke theater to hear Seamus. Blue lined seats fill fast. Book sales in the lobby are brisk, copies of paperback writers - readers turn virgin thin extracts, his words grossing enough to pay electric bills, habitat haunts and train ride expenses back over the border to the north country.
He reads, looking into their expectant faces as they follow along in their newly purchased books. He’s the poet priest and they are his faithful followers, reading the words, following along in cadence, marching to the hinge voice, swallowing bardic throat sweetness.
He says digging is a metaphor. He presents me with data. I hear his thick, sweet honey voice excavated from ruins in earthen jars with dancing seasons engraved in circles.
In Dublin, I live my thin-threaded fate of existence, spinning, weaving, measuring, cutting my fates, staying alive in a hostile environment. I grind out a cigarette on a concrete floor with the heel of my well worn boot. My frustration clings to winter’s coming.
My cash supply is down to $160. I exist on handouts from a lover in another emerald place. A passionate woman with a vision of her dream. She’s an elementary teacher. I’m on a mission for both of us. She separated from her Indian husband and two kids, and we became lovers.
I told her magic stories casting a spell inside our mutual vulnerabilities. My travel disease kicked in and I bailed out of the relationship, out of school, out of the town and country with the Irish blessing of my lover. She sent me a small significant contribution each month.
Finding a job is hard. I have no official papers, can’t get a work permit to save my soul.
Pat, the parking lot man in his worn cap subsists on handout tips from the working class. He stays in a room for $3 a week where he once took care of an invalid, which is what we all are. The dead bones beneath the ground rattle in our sleep.
I fashion a string of yak bones around my neck - small definitive carved human skulls on threads and adjust to their weight, the swinging cadence of bone beads dancing their death on arteries. Reminders to meditate on my death. I finger my personal rosary as people close the confessional door behind them. They whisper their songs of guilt and suffering in darkness asking for forgiveness. For my penance I eat fresh algae three times a day.
I feel like I am on some strange life support machine in the maelstrom. I am dying a slow death as my torn, worn out lungs grasp, gasp for morning air. My spirit flies away. Someone lights a fire among children playing near burned out junked cars in a dead end. Bare wire and shards of glass decorate crumbling brown bricks surrounding their playground. They are laughing warriors. They wear standard issue blue and green school uniforms sewn by a seamstress slowly going blind. She works over her machine in dark corners in small rural villages using the industrial revolutions of her wheel for minimum wage.
Isaac survivors exist on bread, cheese, apples and hope as trains rumble through daybreak, creaking trestle joints. Above this a gull’s eye looks down the Liffey river flying the length of a harbor heading for land in a fog shroud.
I write on the second floor behind a rusting iron barred broken window. My tea cup is empty and my pen scribbles automatic writing energy.
Once white pages devoid of linguistic symbols - no names, no faces tell their stories here in ink. My stone hammered surfaces greet mallet and chisel, grainy black and white photographs bleed watercolors.
I feel like returning to a jungle country away from concrete swallowers, high into hills exploring discoveries - my hand is tired of writing yet wants to keep on past the point of inebriation. Ink no longer runs in spurts. It flows like the shit of ages, pure unadulterated shit passing through time’s alley, smashing slashing sledge hammers casting broken images of artists attempting to place their world into perspective.
My feeble efforts have known from the beginning they were doomed to succeed in the failure of attempting to try at all. It is all futility in the end. We are here, you and I and there is little left to do.
I keep losing pens and managed to lose the red and white striped toothpaste, the delicious substance which tasted so good and did so little to erase mouth traces of breath which tasted like decayed death. Maybe if I went to church and prayed long and loud with a wailing voice high above the clouds, a kind of personal offering, it would help me find a job. Some form of slave labor destined to provide sustenance and everlasting joy not to mention remuneration in kind for services rendered.
My heart is strong yet troubled by sadness, depression, Irish melancholy and imaginary cancerous growth. My lungs are hot furnaces. My heart remains strong and pulsating drum songs, thump-da-thump, thump-da-thump.
My feelings run dream mists. I am leading an endurance race dream and fall into a crevice trying to get across. I am chasing myself. I have to go back and end up rolling across a chasm, watching others pass me. My initial advantage evaporates. I tell myself I must keep moving forward.
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Dropped off dirty laundry at local place and checked post office to receive a letter from father containing birth certificate for genealogical purposes. I need to find work, maybe as a domestic, while attempting to piece together family information. Seems hopeless at times, finding all the proof yet I know it will turn up sooner or later, just need to keep searching records.
Made contact with Lensman, a private firm dealing with photos and the friendly woman couldn't offer anything but another reference. The Evening Press number two man in pictorial talked with me and suggested I speak to the head man in a couple of days. Hopefully he will give me chance in either news or photo. Situation is fluid.
Feelings dance into the mist of dreams. I should be in the arms of a sweet lady telling her my heart’s joy and disappointment. Another gray day is past. Blue skies came and went while I sat inside a pub putting pints away, drifting into and out of peoples’ conversations, writing.
A pub in Ireland is never empty save the holy hour of 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. established to get people to leave and return to work.
Boot music on steel stairs echoes less. My path is a hard question, an economics lesson of bread without butter - a wanton luxury. Necessities have a way of becoming luxuries.
I sit in St. Steven’s Green on a cold gray windy day near a small lake feeding pigeons and sea gulls small bits of bread after eating myself. I tasted delicious, warm thigh meat, tender to the taste, lips sucking warm bits of blood from cold growing veins. Internal organs are in the deep freeze for a holiday meal when company calls. Having been consumed I feel rejuvenated, living on forever. As pure spirit, pure essence I can no longer define myself.
Memory’s trace of someone I knew once, a traveling friend.