Monthly Archives: July 2010

Some years back I worked in Luigi’s chipper after he’d had a bad accident and spilled a load of hot oil on his face by having his face held in the hot oil because of some money he owed a nasty fucker from Celbridge. Me and Jimmy used to do some shifts in there just to offer him a bit of protection and for the love of a fish supper.

It’s easy to forget, as a gainfully self-employed gadabout, what a vast range of people you meet. There was Elegant Bob, who always wore a dapper, pinstriped three-piece suit. Immaculate it was. And every Tuesday and Thursday he’d come in for a ray and a small bag of chips.

Luigi didn’t do kebabs, he felt the idea that a chipper should sell all kinds of fast food diluted the quality of the product, but that didn’t stop a young lad, with a face like a spoon, asking for one every time he came in. ‘Fuckin cunts’ he’d mutter when we told him he could go to Iskanders if he wanted a kebab and then he’d order a ‘bunburger, no onions, can o’ cidona’. Good old spoonface. Jimmy liked the look of one girl but Bulimic Mary only got her name when she began vomit one chip at a time moments after leaving the shop.

That summer Jimmy had to go away and see his son that he had with Michael from The Bangles. There was some kind of issue, he’d been hanging around with the wrong kind of people in school and had come home with a gun. Apparently it was a .38 special. Jimmy had to go over and sort it out. ‘No son of mine is going to be messing around with guns … well, not rubbish ladies guns anyway’, so we were a bit shorthanded.

Luigi indicated, via the medium of notepad and pencil (because his lips hadn’t yet uncrisped) that he was doing a favour for his sister who had, much to his dismay, gone and married a German just after the war. They made up eventually and now he and Immacolata were quite close. So it was that Immacolata’s daughter, Belladonna, had a family of her own and her youngest son Torsten, named after his father, wanted to come and learn English.

I thought this was fine and immediately set about ensuring the young man could swear properly. “You vucking cont”, he would try as I would laugh and help him to say ‘cuuuuntt’ like a real Dubliner. He was personable enough, for a German, and came in handy for the inter-chipper 5-a-side league as he was training to be a professional footballer. This was his life’s ambition and to be fair to him he did go on to represent his country years later. He scored the winner against the sneaky Borzas one night which was poetic justice as they’d drafted in Claudio Gentile as a ringer.

After a while though we noticed some odd things about him. He would only refer to himself using his surname and despite the need to be an eager, hard working multi-tasker in the high pressure, exacting world of fast food, he would only carry out specific tasks. These consisted of the duties his grandmother had told him he would have to do when she waxed lyrical about her brother’s ‘restaurant’ – cooking fish, putting salt and or vinegar on them or going into the back room to bring out buckets of the coating for the sausages and the fresh cod.

One day when I asked him if he might go back there and bring out another tray of coca-cola for the fridge he lost his shit altogether, ranting in Genglish about how this slapdash approach to job related tasks was just the exact reason Ireland was in such a state and why our economy and workforce was a joke to everyone in Europe … even the French. Ouch.

“But Torsten”, I said. “I just asked you to carry out some cans of coke”.

“How many times have I said zis?”, he replied, as if I were the dummkopf. “Frings will only get batter”.