The past does not control the future, unless given authority. Riff Clancy lived his life in the now. As a child, it was from meal to meal. What he ate yesterday didn’t matter as he was hungry today.
As he couldn’t read he didn’t get his version of reality from books or newspapers. He lived. He knew which restaurants put their un-eaten food in a bag separate from other trash so could fill his belly without having to pick through garbage.
He knew which stores put unsold unseasonable or damaged clothing where and when. He knew places he could sleep safely. These were survival facts. These were important.
He was about ten years alive, hiding in the basement of Maude’s whore house, when there was a raid. He waited until the shouting ended, the footsteps stopped, then went upstairs to see what he could find, and among other things, was a guitar. He took it.
He ate what food he found, pocketed what valuable had been left, then went returned to the basement and taught himself to play. He could sit for hours, forgetting he was hungry or cold, and focus on the sounds.
When Pinky Rose left Maude's and opened her own place, she took Riff off the street. She gave him a little room under the stairs. He now had a ‘home’, food to eat, clothes to wear, and his guitar. One of her clients showed him how to hold the chords. For hours he would sit alone and play.
Being agile and acrobatic he became a useful burglar. The gangs found him helpful and brought him in. He learned to fight, to use a knife, and because his life was so good; his belly full, he was not cold, not in rags, with a place to sleep, he was happy.
He didn’t think about what he didn’t have, he was thankful for what he had, and it was this which attracted people to him.
He was doing well. Then he was arrested and convicted, and sent to prison. It wasn’t bad. He was taken up by friends and relatives of the gangs he’d run with, and new made friends. For Riff, being in prison was less chaffing than the upper class boy sent to a fancy boarding school.
When he came out he went to the Dragon’s Tooth, for one of his mates in prison had a brother who played lead guitar for one of the groups which performed there. Riff soon became a fill in bass player for a number of the bands.
As one of Pinky’s clients owned the building of flats down one block and across from the brothel, she got him a job as the ‘super’ of that building on Crescent Street.
Riff lived in the basement apartment, sleeping much of the day, up at night. Between liming with the gang at Jack’s Pub, playing at the Dragon’s Tooth, and helping Pinky with her ‘shipments’ he had a full and busy life.
He shouldn’t have dabbled with drugs. Smoke Gage, fine, but nothing more. But he did more and became somewhat useless at the Club. He stopped coming the day after he fell off the stage.
He hung with the Gang, which at the time had nearly one hundred members. There was a lot of internecine fighting, and Riff was shot. He was taken to the hospital where he first tasted morphine. He soon became addicted. He needed money for his fix, made a bad choice in his burglary site, wound up back in Prison.
Again Prison was not a problem. Many of his old friends were still there, and his sentence was rather short as the Judge was a client of Pinky Rose.
When he came out, he went back to where he’d been. Back to Crescent Street, to Jack’s Pub, to Pinky Rose.
The dynamics of the gang had changed, there was a split. Fourteen men pulled out, created their own gang, and made Riff the erstwhile leader and they called themselves the Fifteen.
He had wanted to go back to the Dragon’s Tooth, but never seemed to have time. There were gang wars, a periodic need to get out of Dublin, making his connection to the IRA more important than it had been.
He had avoided arrest, avoided being killed, and was as safe as he’d always been, the day he was shot and rescued by the Rebels. The day he met ‘Jody O’Shan’.
The connection to the Rebels gave him an endless supply of gage, money in his pocket. He kept thinking about going back to the Dragon’s Tooth but never got around to it.
Now, dropping Lollisa at the airport, riding back, he saw the club. Riff parked the bike and went in. And there were the men he’d jammed with those years ago, welcoming him as a brother.
He admitted he was rusty, so spent a few days tightening his skill, then was able to perform.
The group had adopted a crazy disguise of painting their faces and wearing short masks, which he found Halloween like.
He was on the stage, playing guitar, feeling at peace. There was nothing but the music. There was no fear, no loss, no danger, no thoughts, except the music.
Music had always been his safe space, and he found it again.
After landing in New York, Lollisa took a taxi to her usual corner of Brooklyn. She spoke with Herbie, then went to the apartment he allowed her to occupy.
Herbie rented three different apartments in the building numbered 1406. 4G was he usual home where he kept his documents, his money and much of his clothing. 4A shared the fire escape so that in case of difficulty he could quickly get into that apartment. It was also used when he brought some gal home. He kept his drugs in 5G.