For John Waters, the Co Roscommon town was personified by ironic stereotypes - and was home to his garageful of cars and his first football team.
I grew up in a place halfway between nostalgia and prejudice. Others know it as Castlerea, Co Roscommon, but that name comes, as does the name of any place, with other people's understandings, and these have nothing to do with the place I know. It is mine alone.
Thirteen years ago, when I began writing for The Irish Times, I embarked on what I now recognise as a fruitless exercise in explanation and justification of the place whence I came. I was reacting to the shocking level of ignorance around me, a risible set of perceptions that placed my home territory, and others, beyond a boundary separating sub-modernity from some place called the present. This landscape of prejudice was dotted with icons of a lately proscribed Ireland: smoke-filled thatched cottages, Marian statues, country 'n' western, cute hoors with facial tics, and the occasional skeleton of a Morris Minor.
Describing what my "home" was actually like, in the face of such prejudice, was impossible, not least because the landscape did include all the things the prejudiced descriptions asserted. Yes, there were Marian statues, and Big Tom was indeed the King, but these phenomena had quite different meanings to those attributed by outsiders, which had removed from them all irony, mischief, wit and subversion.
I used to think I could explain home by describing, for example, how when you walked out the back door you were in the country and when you left by the front you entered the city. Painting pictures of a walk up Main Street, stopping at the Fair Green for a chat with a Gortaganny sheep farmer about the price of lambs or drink, and then on to the Roma Café, where you might get into an argument about what Brian Eno meant when he said that lyrics can obscure the meaning of a song, I would explain how this represented a walk through three centuries, none of which prevailed. But it was a waste of time, because you can never explain things to people who aren't listening.
When I contemplate Castlerea today, it strikes me that what might be called the objective essentials haven't changed much. For all the talk about progress, apart from laptop computers and mobile phones, the changes to Irish life in my lifetime have been mainly superficial. Some 20-odd years ago, when I first wrote for Hot Press, I had to forage around town collecting five-pence pieces to ring Dublin from a call box, in the usually doomed hope of getting Niall Stokes on the line. Now I can plug in my computer and blah blah blah.
Otherwise, there is nothing significantly different about the town, except the prison, which is what outsiders think of when they hear it mentioned now.
And yet the place I grew up in has gone, mainly because it existed in my head, an improvisation on reality that transformed a small western town into the centre of the galaxy.
It is possible to talk about Co Roscommon by drawing on its rich history, important landmarks and scenic spots. You could write about Douglas Hyde and Sir William Wilde, give a mention to Rockingham and Rathcroghan, enthuse about the beauty of Lough Key and the unfathomable Lough Allen. But this would mean little to most who grew up there in the past 40 years. From the moment that Elvis wriggled his pelvis and Brendan Bowyer came to the Casino Ballroom (now the River Island nightclub) purveying a passable imitation, the significance of the location changed for ever in the minds of its young. Then it became a backdrop to lives lived at the centre of the universe, in which everything was invigorated by the connections with the universal that invaded every young mind and heart.
Alongside the Casino, the venerable River Francis still followed its ancient course to the Suck, and the statue in the Marian shrine on the bridge still smiled benevolently on the one-night-standers who walked hand in hand to the lovers' lane that was the Riverside Walk, set discreetly behind her back.
But nothing of this could be taken literally any more. You "squared" a woman, or, I suppose, a man; you bought, or had bought for you, a mineral; you danced a little, if you could, and parodied if you could not; you took the hand of your one-night beloved and strolled beneath the moon's gentle beam, down the drive by the murmuring river, across the old rustic bridge and warily past the statue to where unmentionable things were said to happen, although mostly to other people.
The music was ever-present, draped in an irony that seemed to bypass the intentions of those who made or craved it. And as you nibbled the forbidden fruit, the voice of the King could be heard, calling down the river, with a phlegmatic simplicity that seemed, after all, to be aware of both the joke and the prejudice, embracing an ambiguity hovering halfway between mawkishness and blasphemy. Maybe it was just me but I don't think so: "Someday when we meet up yonder / We'll stroll hand in hand again / In a land that knows no parting / Blue eyes cryin' in the rain."
And somehow this kind of kink of happenstance, or the mood of mockery or incongruity it generated, was enough to render meaningful the meaningless, to dignify the undignified, to imbue absurdity with a certain playful tenderness, to make memorable the banal and send us home laughing. That was why, when I got the chance, I conspired with fate to get Big Tom on the cover of Hot Press.
There are those, God help them (and some of them write for national newspapers, God help us), who consequently filed me under "country". Although the songs that colonised our heads were Lovely Leitrim and Old Log Cabin For Sale, in our hearts echoed Crosstown Traffic and The Bewlay Brothers. We were no more country than Gavin Friday.
This distance, the topography of my youth, is distinguished not by hills or rivers but by three interconnecting phenomena: soccer, cars and rock 'n' roll. The connection was that all three represented windows facing onto the possibility of escape. All three came replete with heroes - George Best, James Hunt, Rory Gallagher - and enabled the environs of Roscommon to be reconstructed into a fantasy location that might have been anywhere. But their centrality in our lives bespoke, ultimately, a desire to leave Roscommon behind. In a sense, we lived not in Roscommon at all but in the shadow of Old Trafford, within earshot of Silverstone, down the road from Woodstock, by the side of a clear crystal fountain, in the field where the wild flowers grow.
A small patch of commonage at the back of our street became Wembley or the Aztec Stadium. Hacker's Lane FC, the creation of myself and two friends, was a living organisation, every day for four or so years between the World Cups of 1966 and 1970, before dying away as we focused on other matches. Located along the River Suck between the Mill Race and Roddys' Field, the commonage had a slight slope but was otherwise level, and on it we made a five-a-side football pitch. Others might have been content to use jumpers for goalposts and argue about scores, but Hacker's Lane had real goals, real flags, real markings and even a clubhouse, an improvised affair made from branches and galvanise. We erected a sign: "Hackers Lane FC", with no apostrophe, like Finnegans Wake. Bird Featherstone named it, because every time he played there he went home with black shins.
There were no goalies, and a special rule about not entering the semicircle around the goalmouth unless the ball went in first.
The goals were about three feet high and four feet wide - white, precise miniatures of the real thing, constructed from lengths of timber "borrowed" from my father's shed, with proper joints and bolts to hold them together. The nets were made with onion bags from Egans shop, sewn together with twine and held in place over discarded bed ends.
At Hacker's Lane, we learned that magic actually worked, that if you ran out after watching Brazil there would be an hour or so of grace when you seemed to float a foot above the ground, when nothing you tried could fail or be frightening, when the ball became attached to your foot and did precisely what you decided.
Tostao. Rivelino. Jairzinho. Waters. Pelé. I suppose the reason I lost interest in sport afterwards was that this access to magic seemed to be the whole point of it, that there was no point in admiring other people's magic unless you could learn it and do it for yourself.
When I was 20 I had a garageful of sports cars (although no garage), including an MG Midget, an MG BGT and a Triumph Spitfire. I inherited a certain mechanical bent from my father, or so we pretended for a time, and we would have long conversations about fuel mixtures, compression and brake-pedal adjustment, usually when I had made the mistake of soliciting his mechanical advice with a view to making the Saturday night dance in Glenamaddy. At 9.20 p.m., he would be leaning into the engine, his glasses perched on his forehead, enthusiastically proposing stripping down the twin carburettors - a job somewhat analogous to the work of a planning tribunal - while I looked at my watch.
"Excessive idling," he might pronounce at last, setting me to pondering if this was a verdict on my character or a hint of insider knowledge concerning late-night lay-by activity with the engine running.
"Too much idling," he would elaborate pointedly, "brings the plug temperature down, so that the combustion deposits are not burned off."
He would pause for a moment to allow me to explore the labyrinth of moral speculation triggered by this ambiguity.
"Your plugs are dirty," he would translate, and go back in to his newspaper.
The Midget was my favourite. I was in love with her (we could call cars "her" then, without fear of a visit from the Thought Police). She cost me £150, six weeks' wages. I called her Brigid, a name inspired partly by a hit song of the time and partly by the buxom shape of her wing sections but, for the avoidance of doubt, in no way connected to the matriarchal goddess from Kildare.
Red, with a soft top and a 948cc Morris Minor engine, she had the best vehicle registration number in the history of motor cars: 700 VRA, which read in the subconscious as 700 VRAOOOOM!, and turned into a babe magnet a car that, in truth, had difficulty getting over 60 miles an hour on a straight road.
She is gone now, having shuffled off her oh-so-mortal high-tension coil.
All I have left is the number plate, which sits in the window of a shed in our back yard at home, begging me to shine it up into an artefact to decorate some 21st-century mausoleum living-room wall. So far, I have resisted, perhaps because the intensity of its innocence would eventually break my heart.
The past is a complicated phenomenon and the human memory is a slippery commodity: we edit and filter as best suits our purposes. Nostalgia and prejudice are equally unhelpful. All we can do, I've finally decided, is say how it was, and if they, whoever they are, decide that we were all in thrall to priests and Big Tom, then let them at it. But that should not prevent us speaking to one another in a language that transcends both prejudice and nostalgia, to create, recreate, the secret history of a time that was not unlike the present, except that it was, because we were younger and travelling the road for the first time, sweeter and more, in a quite literal sense, sensational.
Series concluded