Slappy sunlight coming down, collapsed trusses of 3pm light breaking in through the miasma, we would run down the valley, me and the kids, in the Honda at Christmastime. This was years ago, but I don’t know when. The kids were younger. Charlie and Henry were in kid seats in the back. Violet was still Violet then. They’re Blake now. The seasons come and go.
In the rustic country where we live there are these ridges that go leafless dirty in the late fall. Everything returns to the earthy tones/ spreading from the tawny cut cornfields back towards the bleak horizons in the distance/ and on the way there are the hills/ ‘the mountains’ as we call them/ old and tired and hammered by time.
That’s where I would play the music. On the Spotify, I’d search it up and find it fast and play it suddenly with no words. It was the surprise. That was part of the deal for me. I wanted to see the kids react in that instant when the basic hum of the ride was destroyed in an instant by the burst of music from far away.
The transitions are often the thing in life. But capturing them or clocking them in real time is tricky. More often than not, being able to watch a single instant turn that corner, to see kids go from staring out the window listless and bored to eyes lighting up at the onslaught of magic, it’s easy to miss. It doesn’t even happen that often to begin with so knowing how to catch a glimpse of it becomes a kind of witchcraft trick for those of us with the experience and the desire.
And for such sorcery, I learned after a while, it was going to take a special blend of madness and beauty, of fogs and snows.
Which is why I always went with The Pogues.
Not your Pogues either, you pain in my fucking ass.
I’m serious. I’m not going to piss around the facts here. Nothing makes me angrier than having to share The Pogues with you. It’s personal, I guess, and I can own that. You and your Pogues have always pissed me off a little because I always got the feeling that they didn’t like you all that much. And also, that you didn’t like them as much as you pretended to either.
Selfish jackoff talk from me right now?
Hell yeah. I have to own that as well. But this is how these things go with art. With the brilliance we stumble into upon the trail when our bodies are still young and the moon is high and the years are yet to have made any difference in any part of our existence. I discovered The Pogues when I was a kid/ a teenage chunk who was smoking weed and eating sausage grinders and ‘buying’ cigarettes from my friends who worked at gas stations/ and they were mine from the start.
Irish Smirish, I never really cared about that shit. The whole cultural landscaper thing didn’t mean anything to me then. And it barely does now either if I’m being up front with you. I’m from Conshy, outside Philly. Back then, back when I was a young punk, I didn’t know a thing about Ireland or England or ‘The Troubles’ or any of it.
Here’s what I did know.
I knew how to pack a bowl.
I knew how to conjure up a perfect image of wet t-shirt boobs when I was alone in my bunk bed.
I knew how to throw a baseball.
And light a Marlboro with a Bic.
And cast a Mepp’s spinner at scrawny river bass.
But I knew nothing whatsoever about most of what Shane MacGowan (or the other Pogues for that matter) wrote or sang about. There world was over there and mine was over here and while I could listen intently to Springsteen or Steve Earle or the The Ramones or even Robert Johnson and kind of catch their American drift both musically and lyrically, The Pogues were a different story altogether.
And not just because of the brilliant words of a poetic nature or fifty fucking traditional instruments banging away on the dead skull of punk with stark raving violence and pure, pure hearts.
I fell for The Pogues because they injected themselves into my skin like a dirty smack needle. Like a bot fly. Like a hunk of lead fired from a musket by MacGowan himself. Pissing himself with laughter. Hissing as he pulled the trigger and the recoil knocked him backwards into suburban Philly, late ‘80s, where he had no real business except watching me watching him.
I had my own Shane MacGowan.
Not the goddamn Shane MacGowan you say you cried for last week when he died out of nowhere even though he should have been dead long ago. Not the rollicking monument to cigarette butt poetry that the band became over time. Not the Subaru Pogues or the 21st century Pogues that new generations have ‘discovered’. Fuck you and fuck them. You had The Replacements and whatever. I never wanted that shit. I only wanted The Pogues. Deep in my bones, the bounce around bullet. Pinging off my young man guts/ singing of my grooves and ruts.
I would often start with Gridlock. The very first notes of a song become instantly recognizable after you listen to it enough, but with kids, I don’t know. They’re just faster at it somehow. They seem to be able to tune into a current that more mature brains lose to the dulling of too much information after a while. Our bucket brains get filled with decades of rain, but the kids only have like a splash down in theirs.
You know Gridlock?
If you don’t, it’s fine. I don’t want you to know it. I never want you to hear it at all if you haven’t yet. But if you have, I don’t want you to listen to it anymore. Because remember? It’s all mine. The Pogues. Shane. The thundering roverness. The insatiable vibe. Every time you listen to it or post a photo of Shane now on Facebook I get stung by a hornet or bit by a passing bird. I’m dead serious.
I made a deal with some kind of piece of the cosmos and now I’m linked to this dead MacGowan and his mates in ways that remain unfathomable to me. I don’t get it. But you are hurting me with your fandom. Or your poseur middle age hipster bullshit.
Ugh.
Death complicates things for us mere mortals, huh?
The song, Gridlock, the high hat racing, and then the drums attaching themselves to the fever dream, in its opening moments it would send my kids into a tizzy. This was a gift that I managed to gift myself for many years. Now it is different. Everything has changed and the kids are older. The songs that I once played them/ played them because I wanted them to feel the music down in their tiny throbbing possum hearts dancing through the ribcage woods/ those songs have sunk back into the mist. Back into the strips of woods along the roads around here where a person could hide out if they really needed to and there were no bloodhounds sniffing their old underwear along the shoulders in the lights of a hundred cop cars or anything.
Innocent runners could hide in the woods along the roads that my kids would be staring at shooting by us so fast in the moment before I hit the play button and Gridlock broke the trance they were in and moved them into a different trance altogether. An action trance. A popping up out of a grey afternoon into the shifting beams of gunky sun trance. A living trance designed for lambs.
They would fucking freak out back there in my rearview then.
The cacophony coming down.
Their bright eyes bursting into the reflection of the mirror just to meet mine just so that we could all lock gazes for a fleeting second just so that we each knew, in our own way, that we were right now/ at this very second/ pushing off from the shores of one land in search of another.
The journey never ends either.
Although we probably didn’t realize that at the time.
Shane MacGowan’s dying hasn’t hit me like it hit you, I guess. I know that you are likely really broken up by his liver and his esophagus and his veins and his brains and all of his smoky intestines giving up the ghost last week. And him kicking it right when Fairytale of New York was coming back around for another attempt at ruining everything, well, I know that must have really rubbed salt in your open wound there, huh?
Listen, okay? Don’t get all uptight about my attitude here, alright? You can’t let my wildly intimate soul bond with a band or a singer hurt your feelings. Okay? That isn’t what I’m trying to do here. I’m not trying to paint a portrait of a middle-aged man coming to terms with his own mortality by assuming some kind of weirdo proprietor of the music position or whatever.
That’s not what is happening here at all.
What I’m trying to tell you is that back when I was playing The Pogues for my kids in the Honda on the road that cuts up and down the valley as the dirty snowflakes drifted down through the haphazardly leaning poles of cloud hole light illuminating random points on the faraway hills is also when Shane MacGowan came to me in a late-afternoon driving daydream and told me what he told me.
You are my brother, mate, he snarled.
And we will always be this way, just me and you and them.
And he pointed at Violet and Henry and Charlie dancing inside their unforgiving seat belts as he cackled and stuck his wet pinky finger in my right ear hole.
And it’s still fucking there, too.
So, you get why all this dying and commemorating is irritating me now?
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
