Drinking w Pogues II
Breakfast with a Champion {aka Shane MacGowan}
{Here is part two of my account of The Pogues’ first visit to NYC in 1985, written at age 21. This is the written version of the same section which I read at the Anti-Hoot Open Mic, 4 days after Shane died. Video below— Fab Chron #1—-
I’ve added a few 2023 footnotes, in {brackets}
Fabulous Chronicle #3: Breakfast with a Champion
Stepping from the doors of the rancid church, Shane and I were struck blind by the nasty bolts of morning sunlight bombarding us from above. I myself was the color of an oyster and Shane, I would venture, possibly two shades paler. We were not a pretty sight. “Here, hold this,” I said, handing him the album {Rum, Sodomy & the Lash} as we staggered up 20th street toward my home. He examined it as a child does a familiar, worn out toy. I emptied my coat of its pillage, “Will you carry these?” I handed him three of the tumblers and reclaimed my album. He took them with the sly zeal of an inveterate looter gave me a nod of approval. There were people going to work, there were men actually unloading things from trucks. How could they be doing such things with all this sun? We made it into my sorry tin box of an elevator, out of breath from the effort.
In the elevator we decided the best thing to do would be to go out for breakfast. This was a good idea. I dropped off my things and changed my clothes while Shane lugubriated on my sofa and stared with faint recognition at old photos of Rick and me that were hung on the wall to his right.
{Rick Trevan had been arrested days prior to Christmas in 1982, based on a false accusation of theft made by an insurance-scammer lady who had a workshop at a warehouse where he had been purchasing leather ties wholesale and then reselling them on Fifth Avenue. She, wrongly, pegged him for a foreigner who wouldn’t have any local friends or contacts to defend him. His bike-messenger company boss and my musician cousins had put up the bail money, and we’d found him a criminal lawyer at the topless bar where I worked. He refused to take a plea and eventually the case was dismissed, but not before much angst from his parents— I’d called Marcia’s mother, Jean, to get their number, it was all very embarrassing for Rick, who didn’t want his parents to know, much less for me to find out that he was a middle class doctor’s son from Sussex and not a bad boy from East London.}
{But it did earn him legendary status with buddies like Shane back in Kings Cross: he’d survived New York jail, at Christmas Eve! Rick also turned me onto J.P. Donleavy, a novelist he and Shane and Jem — and I—all read. I recall discussing Donleavy’s novels and those of Flann O’Brien, another favorite, as Shane waited. }
Walking back down the street again, in his black sunglasses and his thin coat hugged to him, Shane could hardly walk, so stunned was he by the combination of New York City architecture and the light of day.
He collapsed several times against factory warehouse walls laughing heartily. I’d slow down:
“What is it?”
“Dis is Noo Yoak!”
“Yes it is”
Then I’d start laughing too.
Presently we made it to my favorite Cuban diner, a little joint called The Havana-Chelsea on Eighth Avenue…
…featuring a paper placemat titled “FACTS ABOUT CUBA” with a green and pink depiction of that island’s geography and fascinating data such as: “Three quarters of all Cubans are WHITE, of Spanish descent” and “The United States established a military government which made much progress in education, public works, and Health.”!
Shane ordered a potato omelette of all things a glass of orange juice a glass of milk and cafe con leche.
I ordered a sandwich Cubano mediano a glass of orange juice and large quantities of that lovely Cuban coffee thickened by scalded milk.
We were eating—I remember the sensation of not being sure that the food was real as I swallowed it, so swollen was my brain with drink sleeplessness and the peculiar pleasure of misplacement; Shane and the others made me feel as if I were visiting in my own city— they’d brought London with them, it hovered in the air around them, saturated their clothing, scented their breath— in London I’d been the stranger from New York, now here I was in New York, no longer a stranger but, from their point of view, in a strange place— with familiar people. Couple that with the fact that my breakfast companion spookily evoked my ex-boyfriend to the point where a phantom Richard Trevan had joined us at the table and was eating my fried plátanos.
“What’s this?” said Shane.
“”Fried sweet bananas.”
The coffee did nothing to assuage my thirst for sobriety, not to mention sanity. The round waitress in a blue smock was pouring steamed milk behind the counter — a few Cubans sat there drinking coffee and smoking, two men with moustaches and one young woman who spoke in Spanish to the cook. Cuban music interjected with news in Spanish wafted from the radio. The walls white and the narrow glass windows being steamed obscured the street outside and suffused the room in a milky radiance. I began to imagine waves lapping at the door, banana trees and sand, military maneuvers on the beach. Was this Cuba?
Somewhere in the midst of this Cuban holiday, I found myself talking to Shane about—of all things LOVE. Fortunately, we were both so drunk, exhausted and wired we wouldn’t hold it against each other for spouting inane truisms or inept profundities.
Our Conversation went something like this:
Heather: Well, have you ever been in love?
Shane: Yeahr………………Naoww………..
Heather: You have?
(Shane shaking head)
Heather: You haven’t
(Shane shaking head)
Shane: You have, haven’t you? Gulls do.
Heather: Yeah I’ve been so in love i been crazy. When I came to London I was running away from someone like that. If I hadn’t left New York I’d have—
Shane(Quietly):—Died.
Heather: That’s right.
Haven’t you been in love, don’t you love anyone?
Shane: Weww, I’ve been so fucked up in the past free yeahrs. When you last sawr me in London I was drinkin’ all the time
Heather: You still are
Shane:Yeah, bu’ I was takin’ speed as weww. Every day. I was a totaw speed addict. An’ you forget things, you know.
The past ten years I can remember but before vfat , the last ten are getting cloudy. I can’t remember things I used to know. About my friends.
He pushed aside his omelette and asked for another glass of milk.
The drinkin’ so’t of ruined my aptitude for being in love.
Heather: Yeah (bruising my lip of the corner of the bread as my hands falls off my wrist— my eyes float over to the hemisphere of Shane. I say with a motherly tenderness which his intelligent eyes warn me he catches every condescending nuance of though he may be too kind to articulate this knowledge, I say):
Would you like a bit of my sandwich?
Shane: Wha’ is i’?
Heather: Cheese and ham and this weird other kind of meat, I’m not sure.
Shane:Oh naow fanks, I don’ eat meat
(I turn on him) Heather: What do you mean? You don’t like it?
Shane: I don’t eat i’.
Heather:You don’t mean You’re a vegetarian??
Shane: Yeahr, I’m a healf fanatic.
Heather: You? (laughing) No wonder you’re still alive.
Shane: You ever hear of the Eye-Ching?
Heather: Yeah, yeah (sigh sigh) I grew up in California. That’s the state religion out there.
Shane: The Yin and the Yang, a perfect balance. That’s what. I want.
Shane’s pale face, charmingly disastrous, is before me, the glazed eyes focused for once on me, his long hand dangling a cigarette. When I look at his hand I remember that earlier in the evening he got me off the sofa at Slimelight Lounge to help him look for the bracelet his sister gave him that kept falling off his wrist. We found it by the piano where he’d been playing. Now the bracelet, inscribed for good luck with everyone’s names, safely encircles his large bony wrist.
Heather: It seems to me you’ve got a lot more yang going than yin.
Shane: Yeahr, well I haven’t gotten the balance yet. But I’m still workin’ on it—I’ve just got to get my yin and my yang sorted out.
Heather: I’m sure you will.
Shane: (wheezing laughter): If I live!
Heather: Well, you will if you stop drinking.
Shane: I don’t like nobody tellin’ me what to do. Not even myself.
Heather: The problem with dying young is, by the time you know things worth knowing…..…. You’re dead.
Shane: You’re right about fvat. That’s the troof.
And we both thought about how it would be to be very old and smoked and stared through the steamy windows.
Next Up: Part III, “Slimelight Revisited”
Lovely chronicle! 💕