Hogan's

South Great George's Street, Dublin 2

It was an indifferent Autumn evening in old Dublin as Heinous and The Gurrier Murphy, their wasted bodies fortified against the twilight chill with copious Red Bull and vodka, wended their way through the scabrous back alleys of their home town in search of devilment. Things were afoot, plans were being hatched. Emaciated cats leaped from overflowing dustbins to hiss at the pair from the shadows. A gang of young solvent abusers scuttled from their perch on the bonnet of a burned-out car, hurriedly secreting their bags of thinners about their person, lest these two vicious gougers divest them of their chlorinated hydocarbon goodness. Their shadows peeled paint from the walls, their basilisk gaze burned out streetlamps. It was Thursday, it was Dublin, and they were pissed off.

Their attention was suddenly drawn from thoughts of violence and hate to a great mass of gibbering humanity cowering in the doorway of a derelict house. The geometry of the form was familiar to them, but its demeanour... surely not! But a second glance confirmed it: it was indeed their old drinking companion and partner in evil, The Bastard Kesey. But what baleful transmogrification, what dreadful diminishment was here wrought? The Bastard Kesey, reduced to so much organic wreckage, half-sitting, half-lying in a puddle of his own filth, sobbing like a bullied child!

Truly, it was a horrible sight to see a bastard of Kesey's stature brought so low. A righteous anger built in the breasts of Heinous and The Gurrier: someone would pay for this outrage! They rushed to the side of their stricken companion, taking care not to step in the filth.

"It was my own fault," he moaned, rocking back and forth, his hulking mass racked now and then by frightening spasms. "Me, the Bastard Kesey! Me, whose name is muttered with ill-favour where publicans congregate! Me, whose egregious bastardy shamed a nation thought shameless and horrified good and evil alike! ME! The Bastard Kesey," quoth he, spitting a great misshapen Brussels sprout of discoloured phlegm into the greasy gutter, "brought low by my own damned hubris and bad stout!"

"The pints were muck then?" inquired Heinous solicitously.

"Oh aye," replied Kesey bitterly, wincing at the memory. "The pint finished off and it standing on the bar! No careful tilting of the glass, no skilled rotation of the vessel to ensure a good creamy head! A real Dublin barman would have killed himself before producing such an article. A Protestant pissing into a quicklime pit full of dead nuns would have shown more respect. And the music! Oh God, the music!"

"You don't mean to say," interrupted Murphy, "They weren't... they wouldn't. They would. The feckers were playing jazz wank, weren't they?"

"Jazz wank would be the sweetest symphony to my ears compared to this, old friend," moaned Kesey, fixing his companion with an anguished stare.

"Not the fearsome tin-whistle playing of the amorphous pipers that attend the Blind Eejit God Niall O' Thotep who blasphemes and bubbles in the many-angled Chaos at the centre of all Creation?" puts in Heinous, incredulous.

"You could've danced to that," says Kesey bleakly. "Or at least held a conversation over it. God! that such nameless cacophony be unleashed on an unhappy world! It won't stop! Mummy, make it stop!" cries Kesey, placing his great hands over his ears.

"There must be more!" exclaimed Heinous. He shook Kesey's shoulder. "Come on, Kesey! Pull youself together! Tell us!"

"The faces!" squeals Kesey. " All about me! Grinning out of the sulphurous tobacco smoke, mouthing soundlessly in the infernal din! Hieronymous Bosch, how are ye! This was a vision of Gehenna no amount of mouldy bread could summon up! Those faces, those faces, leering at me from the depths of tacky sofas. They were..."

"Yes?" prompts Heinous.

"They were... they were all..."

"TELL US!"

"... FUCKING POSERS!!!" roars Kesey, before the weeping takes him over once more.

The Gurrier's brow furrowed in thought. "But this sounds like..."

His hand withdrew from Kesey's sodden brow as a terrible knowledge filled his eyes. He stood towering above the quivering Kesey, his claw-like hand curling to point an accusatory finger. His voice boomed out, rising up, up above the roofs and spires of old unhappy Dublin, up to the apathetic clouds that hung above the storied city itself:

"YOU FOOL! YOU'VE BEEN IN HOGAN'S, HAVEN'T YOU?!"