Chuck Murphy’s Last Run
Oh, I tell you now we were six proud and memorious old men as we rode our gleaming Harleys across the midland plain. We had the wind in our beards and the roar of the devil’s thunder in our ears and our needles were tipping the dials at a steady five kilometres per hour below the speed limit. We rode with our heads held high and our bellies tucked, and beneath our storied leathers we all wore the black T-shirts that had been ordered especially for the run, which Barney had found online someplace and couldn’t resist—I suppose he wanted to introduce a lighter note to the day’s proceedings, which was thoroughly understandable.
Durrow and Roscrea and Belmont we passed through in a loud and formal procession, under the gray-white skies and along by the saturated fields—Mountrath, Kilcormac—and the sidelong September light was elegiacal somehow, as if aware of our purpose. On this early autumn Sunday, outings were general across the country but ours had a sad ritual in tow, and we’d all been a little on the emotional side before we even set off.
For decades gone by we had ridden out as a seven.
•
All week I had been nervous about the run. I felt that there were going to be scenes, inevitably—we were not made out of stone—and I wasn’t certain we could get through the day without it turning into a bit of a blub fest. I was worried there could even be hugging and I would have to remind the lads sternly that we were not Italians.
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Coming up to the Applegreen station on the far side of Athlone we gathered the bikes into a tight formation and rode in—two by two by two—and parked each gleaming machine on a slow turn with a curving finish, which was immensely satisfying. We took off our helmets then and shook out manfully as much hair as was left, which was still a most lustrous rug in Tall Paul’s fortunate case, though poor Barney was down to his last few flyaway strands, and there was as much in his ears by now was the gang’s consensus. We unzipped our leathers to reveal the T-shirts, which showed the traditional skull and bones of our outlaw kind and, above and beneath it, in Gothic lettering:
Sons of Arthritis
Ibuprofen Chapter
Yes, wry old men on hogs were we, with scarred hearts and woejus hips, but we had never lost our sense of fun or of peacockery.
“We’re about halfways to Palookaville,” Rog Dockery said jauntily, so as not to betray his mood. “Which is what again? Is the reference I’m tryin’ to make here?”
“Palookaville is ‘On the Waterfront’ is the reference,” I said.
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“Is it my opinion,” Tony Mulvane said, “and I mean this in no judgmental way, but is it my opinion or was Marlon in his heyday actually quite a girlish-looking bloke?”
“Marlon was definitely on the full-lipped side,” Barney said.
“With a kind of dreaminess about the eyes,” Tony M. said. “With kind of a faraway look?”
“Are we having coffees,” I said, “or are we going to stand here natterin’ like fishwives about Marlon bloody Brando?”
“I can’t stop thinking about death,” Ned the Impaler said.
“Ah, look,” Tony M. said. “At this stage we’re all in extra time and penalties, aren’t we?”
“We’re in injury time and we’re a goal down,” Tall Paul said, refining it, “but we have a corner and we’re going to throw the kitchen sink at it. The keeper’s coming up and all.”
We cheered with all the raucousness we could muster and made for the Costa Coffee concession in the evil strip-lit glare of the station.
“Palookaville, County Buttcake,” Barney said. “What time will we get there for a finish?”
“We should make it for about half past four,” I said. “Depends if we have buns as well with the coffees.”
“I’m for buns,” Ned the Impaler said.
•
It is a dismaying aspect of the Irish bike tramp’s lot that even the most epic of journeys tend to run out of road after three or four hours. This is a small island, our horizons are cruelly foreshortened, and even if you decide to head way out west you’re still in County Sligo long before teatime.
Strandhill on the Sligo coast was our Palookaville, and our business today was ceremonial—the cremains of Chuck (Boyo) Murphy were in Tall Paul’s carrier, the little plywood box triple-bagged and Gorilla-taped for safety. He was the best of us in many ways, poor dead Chuck, and we were all he had by way of family in the end—he’d never married and had spared the world any offspring. He was properly gone now, vanished, his line all ended.
“How in the name of all that’s holy do you go and get yourself conceived in Strandhill, County Buttfuck?” Barney said.
“I imagine it was a ’round-back-of-the-chip-shop job,” Tony M. said. “Bank-holiday weekend? Salt and romance on the air? Join the dots, Barney.”
“Chip shop?” Tall Paul said through an outraged mouthful of banoffee doughnut. “That’s disrespectful, Tony. This is a dead man’s mother and father you’re talking about here.”
“Will there be chips?” Ned the Impaler asked. “In Strandhill? Or what way are we thinking supper-wise generally?”
“All we know is what Chuck told us,” I said. “He was conceived there and he wants to bring it all back home, so to speak, wants the whole full-circle vibe . . . wanted, I should say. He wanted.”
•
Chuck Murphy on his deathbed? All asunder in the face and his eyes like a frightened bird’s? Now there’s a scene I did not want to go back to but I could not stop myself. I’d been playing it over and over again, especially in the small hours between 2 and 5 A.M.—the hours of the wolf, as my mother always called them, and there, by God, was a woman who’d know.
But it was the way he looked up at us, Chuck, one by one and eye to eye, let his medicated glance run a slow, dramatic swivel of the bedside and croaked out the whole Strandhill spiel: a summer night, long ago, in the pale moonlight, and we could hardly breathe as we stood there, gulping back the tears and wiping the snot away, and finally he gets to the upshot—to the night it all began, when passion took in a seaside frenzy—and that right there, lads, is where you’re to spread my old dust. On the beach up at Strandhill.
The six of us left the hospice that last night with our legs like jelly but our mission fixed.
(The only heartening thing, I suppose, was that Chuck hadn’t really lost that much weight in the course of his quick demise—it would take more than death to get the love handles off Boyo Murphy.)
•
Frenchpark, Roscommon town, Boyle we rode through.
The sky was weird now coming off the Atlantic and a great kestrel soared in the smoky pink air as we crossed the Sligo line. The road was slick after showers and slid out and twisted like a long black tongue. I remembered Chuck on every passing stretch. I remembered him on the seafront at Tramore one time, swinging a tire iron above his head and bellowing the most vile abuse at the Limerick mob, who had been minding their own business, really, and for once in their lives were entirely blameless, but this did not lessen the imperious affect of Chuck’s warlike stance. He had led us into battle not a few times back in the energetic and easily riled days of youth but the rucks and rumbles were long since done with now. It was much as we could do by this stage to get up on the bikes at all—I mean, Tony M. was seventy-four years of age, and I could hardly be called the baby of the posse at a pale and watery-eyed sixty-six.
Through the south county of Sligo we rode.
We turned our snouts seaward, saw the long, billowing green ribs of the Atlantic from a rise above Collooney, and I could feel the hot gushes of emotion surging through the pack. Tall Paul, I knew for sure, had a touchy-feely side to him and he was inclined, certainly when deep in his cups, to lean in bravely and start talking about meaning and purpose in life and stoutheartedness, and how important it was that we maintain the sense of community we had built together over the slow, painful decades, and how important it was that we all loved one another, at which point I would tend to retreat back into my beard and blush ferociously.
Of course, he was not wrong about the pain—as a group we had been through the usual vile plethora of sicknesses and losses, broken hearts and occasional incarcerations, addictions coming out the wazoo, screaming, locked-ward breakdowns, you name it. We had really been through a great deal but still we rode on, with our engines growling at the sodden farmland and the exurban sprawl.
•
So it was that Chuck (Boyo) Murphy arrived at his final destination, but his dispersal, as requested, was by no means going to be straightforward. As we rode into Strandhill, we noted with baleful glances that an ignorant wind was gusting hard along the beach, turning the sand in quick swirls and making an eerie, rattling music from the grains.
It was a high westerly off the Atlantic—the waves were awesome and rolling in at a fast, reliable clip, which meant that all the surfer types were out, and, as always, we had mixed feelings about the surfing cohort. Though we are creatures often of the same habitat, we tend to find ourselves at odds with those blithe assholes. This Sunday, their vans were sprawled all down the Strandhill front like they owned the place and they loped about in their slick neoprene suits, with their easeful airs and big shit-eating grins, with their perma-tans and bleachy hairdos, with their little beady bracelets and their elaborate yoga stretches down on the sand. None of it sat right with us, and, even as we were pulling up on the front, there was a bit of a run-in with this stringy-looking blond twat who was holding up his palms and shaking his head, smiling and gesturing defiantly and yelling at us to “back up, come on now, back up, please?”
“Room for us all, girls!” he cried in a cheerful Australian accent. “Like, leave a little turning room here maybe?”
Ned the Impaler coasted to a halt beside the twat and calmly raised his visor.
“Fuck off or I’ll hit you a box in the jaw,” he said.
“No need for that, friend,” the Aussie said. “Just back your ride up and we’ll all have some room here today, O.K.?”
At this, Tony M. was off his bike with his helmet swinging in a clenched fist—he may have been seventy-four years along the highway and with just one and a half functioning lungs to his name but he was still as broad as a country bus and had a dangerously wonky smile that could strip paint.
“Back in the olden times?” he said. “You’d have been halfways to fucken Accident and Emergency already. Do you understand me, friend?”
“Oh, please let’s not get into the threats here,” the twat said.
And now Barney was off his bike.
“Go off and play with your little pals,” he said, “or I’ll haul the fucken man bun out of your head.”
“O.K., O.K.,” the grinning Aussie said, his palms aloft again as he turned swiftly on his flip-flops. “Happy trails fellas, O.K.?”
•
In truth, there was a great unease lurking behind our narkiness. The moment had come to show ourselves and we were not ready. We idled on the tarmac, kicked at our heels, watched as the wind whipped ominously across the silvery sands. And then, sure enough, Tall Paul was at his husky and mortifying business.
“What I believe,” he said, “is that we were brought together as a group for a purpose.”
“Oh, here we fucking go,” said Rog Dockery, who stood more or less where I did on the matter of emotional intimacy—beyond the far outer rings of it, as far out as Saturn’s rings.
“Don’t back away!” Tall Paul snapped. “Stay with me on this. Just listen, O.K.? We are none of us long for the stations of life and that’s a bloody fact. I mean, on any kind of actuarial level and based on the life-style choices that were ours to make? These days of ours are ending and we fucking know it and we should be able to talk to one another. I mean, if not to each other, then to who? Who!? Let’s face it, lads. We are all of us very, very afraid right now and we are all in pain and—”
“Please?” Tony M. said. “Can we not just do the deed with the poor dead bastard’s ashes and relax about it?”
“Do the deed,” Barney said. “Spread the fucker’s dust. And we’ll raise a glass to his memory.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And please let’s try not to get too fluffy.”
•
A tactical retreat seemed the best option, to see if the winds might drop. We arranged ourselves in the dim of a lounge bar. We nursed a morose round of long-neck brews and tried to block out the chatter of the wittering civilians and the TV sports. We were careful with one another. Our energy was tamped but it had an unpleasant potential. We were labile old dudes, unsettled by love, and I felt like things could skitter off madly if we were not careful.
“I have never loved my wife,” Barney said.
“Oh, sweet Jesus fuck,” I said.
“I mean she’s lovely, Alice,” Barney said. “She’s my best friend and the mother of my children and all that and absolutely I fancy her still but love? I’m not sure it’s ever felt like that to me.”
“Barney?” Rog Dockery said. “Have you thought about keeping this stuff to yourself?”
“Even when we’re in the midst of the act,” Barney said. “Even during our lovemaking—”
“Barney, please,” I said.
“Even then,” he said, “when we’re eye to eye and in the heat of the moment, so to speak, I feel like there’s a distance between us and if we haven’t managed to bridge it at this stage? After forty years?”
He shook his head sourly and gobbled a few beads of warming beer. For a cold moment the silence locked a grip on our table, though it was broken, at the edges, by the golf commentators moaning and harrumphing, Rory McIlroy having had a canary on a seventeenth fairway somewhere this championship Sunday.
“That wind is going nowhere,” Ned the Impaler said.
•
And the wind scoured the sky and ran the clouds at a scudding pace toward the sulking gray citadel of Sligo town, with Ben Bulben above it, the table mountain coming and going in the race of clouds.
On the sea’s horizon, the surfers were at their tricks and feints, grabbing their fins with insouciance and turning the boards skyward to ride the great green waves while their buddies barked like seals from the shore in hoarse appreciation and they were all just filming each other fucking incessantly.
We huddled against the storm-break wall in a black-leather cluster and grimly smoked a doobie or several. We gathered ourselves as best as we could. And then, without the moment even being announced, Tall Paul fell to his knees, as if called to prayer, but actually he was just cradling the cremains with his back to the snapping gusts—this was very tender. With some difficulty he peeled off the Gorilla tape and took the little plywood box from the plastic bags and we were all instantly in puddles then, six grown men weeping loudly as we ferried our fallen hero across the sands. There was really no point in trying to read the wind—the surfers toppled and flipped, the gulls were flung about madly—and we just thought, Ah, fuck it, and Tall Paul held the box aloft, like a sacrificial offering, and it was Barney, I think, whose trembling fingers reached up and tipped back the lid’s hinge, and at once Chuck (Boyo) Murphy was on the Strandhill air, rising as if by dark magic from the box as a single eminence, like a twisting and twirling genie of bone-white ashes, like a djinn or laughing sprite of the shoreline, turning and twisting away from us in the grainy afternoon light, and now he was risen, and now he was gone.
•
The small-plates scene in Strandhill is excellent and between the three gastropubs we visited we must have put away a couple of dozen of the little devils. It turned into quite a boisterous evening, actually, and we were in surprisingly good cheer over delicate saucers of lemony squid and pale trembling burrata and big fat sexy Greek olives brazenly flecked with chiles and feta and garlic and oh, a most memorable hank of braised lamb’s liver that had been interfered with in some highly innovative fashion. We almost relaxed, I believe. We almost let our guards down. At one point of it I shaded my eyes with a proud salute as I gazed into the sunlit uplands of our shared future.
“So how’s about a mid-winter run to Spain?” I tried. “Mid-January, we load up the bikes, we take the ferry to Santander . . .”
“We could drift into Asturias,” Rog Dockery said dreamily.
“Extremadura,” I said, drawing it out. “All those witchy old villages. Down to Andalusia. Get some proper road miles under our belts, go into the mountains, get some nice winter sun, the Vitamin D will be shining out of our whatcha-call-its.”
“Down through the desert to Almería.” Rog was sold.
“Home of the paella western,” I reminded the gang.
The others poked politely enough at the idea but I noted that they would make no commitments to it. Silently I scolded myself—I’d forgotten that even raising the possibility of a major run these days can send most of the boys to their morose places, can remind them of all that might get in the way of such an outing. It’s become much harder to make any mid- to long-range plans, what with the many appointments that choke a more senior man’s schedule, the physical and mental therapies, the endless scans and random probes, not to mention the late-onset agoraphobia that is not unknown to gentlemen of a certain age who’ve travelled more than their fair stretch of rough road. And of course developing a fear of the outdoors is never ideal in the hog-riding-outlaw kind.
•
By ten we were abed at the hostel—we had booked a room of double-up bunks just for ourselves, and this kept us a safe remove from the surfer knobheads and the backpackers. I suppose there was something of a jailhouse vibe as we lay in the dark for a while after lights-out and talked drowsily, talked more easily now after the few drinks and quality eats, talked of what dreams we might have left, what aspirations. It was all going along nicely enough until suddenly Tony M. dropped a hand grenade.
“I’m thinking of selling the bike,” he said.
He was in the bunk beneath mine and as the room gasped in wordless outrage I swung my head over the side to check down on the poor man.
And it was heartbreaking, actually, the way he lay there bug-eyed in the dark, just staring into the abyss, staring into the great pool of black oily nothingness that we all knew would be life after the open road. How could you live beyond this life that we have so loved and still call it living? How could you give up the throb of urgent throttle and the surge of roaring power that take you through the gates of fear to a state of nerveless bliss, to motorcycle emptiness, where you can lean into every fast turn as it comes? It was Ned the Impaler who spoke up to put a swift end to Tony’s insane notion.
“You sell that bike and I’ll open your fucken face,” he said. “I am not messing about here, Anthony. I’ve known you since you were eleven years of age and I know what you’re like. You’ll sit in that house and you’ll go into your old song again, the ‘What’s it all about Alfie’ bollocks. That house will turn into what your own doctor called it—‘a place of morbid introspection.’ And look. We know you’re lonely and we know you think you’re on the way out. Well, here’s the news, fella—we all think we’re on the way out and we’re not fucken wrong about it! But we persevere! We keep our shoulders back and our chins high. And I tell you now I’m going to go through every last blasted ad on Done Deal and wherever bloody else you think you’re going to sell away your life and if I see an ’87 stone-gray Harley Electra Glide up for sale, I’m going to be right around to your sad-arse house and I repeat, old pal, I will open your fucken face.”
This was the longest speech Ned the Impaler had made since the night Meat Loaf passed. We were all knocked out by it. We were very moved by it, too.
“Thank you, Ned,” Tony M. said.
•
We were shy with one another in the morning. Our outings, in truth, had become infrequent and we weren’t used to mucking in together the way we used to. We danced about one another a little too gently, and I was concerned that it was all getting a bit too pleasant and kindly. I thought we needed some ribbing. Tall Paul, I was astonished to see, was sitting cross-legged on his bunk doing some kind of breathing exercise or meditation hack, inhaling very slowly and deeply and then making a long drawn-out foghorn sound as he patiently exhaled. I couldn’t help but sneak a quick video on the phone and I was caught in the act.
“What?” Tall Paul said.
“I’m not calling it out,” I said. “I’m not passing shade.”
“You’re interfering with my process,” he said. “I’m trying to cultivate a mellow fucking buzz here to set myself up and face the day and whatever it might bring. And you’re fucking with my buzz, brother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Just leave me at it, please?” he said. “Go and evacuate your bowels or something useful. Organize your own affairs, Stephen.”
“O.K.,” I said. “It just strikes me as a little bit . . .”
“What?”
“It’s maybe a little bit . . . woo-woo,” I said.
“It’s not woo-woo,” he said.
“It’s on the woo-woo side,” Rog Dockery said.
“It’s not not woo-woo,” I said.
•
We approached our bikes parked on the front before a smooth and nerveless sea. The waves were ankle-lickers now, the surfers all departed. The sight of the bikes as always lifted me. They are beautiful and obsessively well-tended, but it’s more than that. Perhaps it’s the way they are set always in a squadron formation, to bring us onto the road as a pack and make real for a while the old lost dreams of warriordom from which, in the mid-century, our kind emerged.
People judged us, of course. They saw hair and beards and leather and made assumptions. But maybe we were no longer who they thought we were. There was a kind of gentleness now, even as we barked and slapped the backs of one another’s heads and gratuitously libelled each other in the pale sea light. With the years, and all the trials of the years, we had become an unusually sensitive bunch.
“If we don’t want to do the whole kerfuffle of a sit-down breakfast,” I said, “we could just grab some croissants and flat whites at the Statoil on the N4 and a litre jug of O.J. maybe.”
“Who died and made you our fucken mother?” Ned the Impaler said.
•
I had dreamed all night of riding alone through strange country and unknown places, had dreamed of nameless valleys and broad mysterious fields, of sombre mountain roads, all of it sweeping past me in a blur, as this life sweeps past, and streaks of pale gold reached out across the ripening fields. These dreams, I felt, had the certain weight of a foretelling—they told me of the lonelier roads to come.
•
We snarfed down some egg sandwiches on the tragic forecourt of a Circle K station somewhere in deepest Offaly. We were trying to slip back into our old banter and routines but none of us could quite buy into them. We had been remade by our loss.
“If we don’t bloody well watch ourselves,” Tony M. said, “we could turn into what I believe they call new men. . . .”
“You mean like those horrible little internet bozos?” Rog said. “With their not drinking and their skin regimes and talking about how much sleep they’re getting?”
“Oh, they can fuck right off,” I said.
•
Two by two by two we rode through the cold bright air and we were content for now with our shining machines and with the choices we had made. We knew, too, that each as deserves it gets a moment in the sun, as surely as Chuck Murphy did, and for just a moment I could see him again, twenty-four stone of pure fat and muscle as he climbed off his ’71 Harley Super Glide in black-cherry pearl, and the motherfucker was Mister Charisma, with a sneer on like Marlon Brando’s. ♦