Picture this: me in a smock, the birds flocking round my easel - if I can keep this ort thing going, I won't have to worry about the economy
YOU CAN SEE ME, can't you? It's, like, eleven o'clock in the morning and there I am on Vico Road, in all the gear - smock, the lot - with a dab of paint on my brush and View of Sorrento Terrace up on the easel and it'd be fair to say that I'm practically fighting the birds off with a Taser.
I hadn't realised, roysh, that women really love orty types. I've got, like, three numbers already, all total randomers, who just stopped by to admire my etchings, including this, like, Dutch bird - the spit of Blake Lively - who's invited me up to her gaff in the Geary to do her portrait. Imagine: "Just pop your clothes off there, Anja." Of course the only problem is I couldn't draw pus from a septic finger. I'll think of some way around it, though - tell her she's too beautiful a subject for even me to capture, shit like that - because I'm on fire at the moment.
Just an example, roysh, of how seriously I'm taking my new career - I've storted watching, like, ort programmes on TV and I'm picking up the whole jargon like you wouldn't believe. The only thing is I've got to stop saying pictures when I mean paintings.
So there I am, roysh, happy as Larry Flynt, when all of a sudden I hear a cor pull up behind me. For a moment, I think it's Sorcha - her old pair live on this road? - but then I remember she'll be busy in Dalkey, with her ongoing battle against Big Coffee.
"Hello, there," a voice goes - a voice I'd recognise anywhere. "Bit surprised to find you here, Kicker." I see him give the picture the quick east to west but he says nothing. I go, "It's one of the ones my grandmother left me." He's like, "Excellent!" and for a second I wonder has he, like, misheard me? I'm there, "Er, what I'm actually doing here is, I'm passing her work off as my own in an attempt to get a) laid and b) rich." "Wonderful," he goes, like it's the most natural thing in the world. I suppose it'd be a bit rich - a lecture from him - given that he's just finished a stretch for planning corruption and tax evasion. But with parental guidance like that, it's a wonder I've turned out as well as I have.
"What are you doing around here anyway?" I go, "You dickhead." He's like, "I'm popping out to see your friend and mine, Mr Hennessy Coghlan-O'Hara Esquire. I must say, Ross, we're both terribly excited by all this talk of recession." "Recession?" I go. "That's not going to affect me, is it?" He's like, "Good lord, no. I'll see to that." I go, "You better," then I go back to pretending to paint.
He's like, "But it's terribly exhilarating, isn't it? Construction slowing to a near halt. House prices plummeting. Economic growth at a twenty-year low. Tax revenues billions below Government targets . . ." I'm there, "Er, how is all that an actual good thing?" like a fool actually encouraging him.
"Because," he goes, "it's a return to the bad old days. That's when we all made our money - JP, Dermot, my good self. We're big game hunters - never been interested in chasing anything that's easy to get. You see, any old fool can get rich during a boom. But it's the bad times, when money's like some rare, protected breed, that bring out the true entrepreneurs - and you can cap up the T and the E, if you've time." I shake my head, as if to say, what a tosser.
He whips out a Cohiba the size of Isaac Boss, which he lights, then goes, "When I put on Six-One in the evening and I see old Dobbo there with his woe-is-me face - what's that Brian? Another factory shutting down? A return to net emigration forecast? The ESRI saying build a bunker, fill it with tinned food and don't come out until 2025? - I feel a charge, Ross. Like a thousand volts of electricity going through this fiftysomething-year-old body." I'm like, "Excellent - you can up that standing order then. A grand a week. I'm practically on the breadline," which he totally ignores.
"Look," he goes, "I'm not - what's this young people say? - dissing the boom. It was very good for some people. All it did for me, though, was make me soft. Dulled my instincts. But now - my mind is racing with ideas again." I'm suddenly thinking about One F. He told me two years ago to put any spare dough I had into tomato ketchup. When times are hord, he said, people go back to eating from the freezers. Did I listen? No - I was too busy buying Cosmopolitans for Andrea Roche. Now One F's a millionaire and Andrea Roche still thinks my name is Rod.
I'm there, "Is there much more of this shit or are you going to be moving on soon? It's just you're frightening off the birds." The next thing, roysh, my phone rings. I check caller ID and it's Susie, as in Susie Bastible, an old interest of mine who works as an ort dealer and thinks I'm the new, I don't know, Picasso.
"Are you sitting down?" is her opening line. I'm like, "Sitting down? Er, yeah?" "I've had an offer," she goes, "for Dalkey Island from Coliemore Road." I'm like, "If someone's prepared to actually pay for that piece of crap, maybe there is still money in this country."
"Twenty thousand euros," she goes.
I end up nearly falling off my Patrick Jouin fold-away artist's stool.
I'm like, "Twenty thousand yoyos!" I look at the old man. He hands me a Cohiba and lights it while Susie tells me that I'm already being talked about as the find of 2008. She asks me then what I think of the offer.
"Excellent," I go - dirty big Cuban burning between my knuckles. "Wonderful," and I suddenly realise, with the kind of shock that I'm sure comes to all goys eventually, that I've become my old man.