We've met Wislen before, walking a telephonic tightrope
between a Toronto Hausfrau and her husband, whose erotic adventures with a
Hoover Powerdrive vacuum cleaner had left him in the care of the municipal ambulance
service.
I asked him how he'd honed such diplomatic skills.
"I'm a meaty, bearded bear of man with bowed arms and a short fuse,"
he explained from under an absurd hat, "And being a Goldwater Republican
gives me plenty of scope for practicing patience in this fag-hag country of
yours."
"How come?" I asked.
"Because I come from Dallas , and have to sit through under-considered
recollections of where people think they were when President Kennedy was shot
every goddam week."
"You didn't like him, then?"
"I come from Dallas ,"
he repeated evenly.
I soon had occasion to witness Wislen's subtle social
savoir-faire in action on the bracken-buckled battlefield that is Wales - the bar
of The Torrent Walk Hotel in my hometown Dolgellau, to be precise.
Our frontiersman friend had taken the stone-wheeled funicular
up from England
to visit me one college summer holiday. He enjoyed the journey through the Berwyn Mountains
- "reminds me of my winter wolf-herding round the Borgo Pass
Three rounds into the barrel of St Trisant's Landsker
Special, and Wislen felt expansive enough to wander up to the bar rather than
rely on my native disdain for vowels.
As Chwarthbell the barmaid heaved the hoppy slops into a
pair of slate jugs, Wislen lit up the cosy gloom with his American smile.
"Know what I like about Wales ,
Boyo?" he bellowed thoughtfully. "Back home I'm not such a tall guy,
but - shoot! - I'm a head higher than every peon in this bar!"
The guttural chatter of goat-gelding ground down like
badly-filed teeth. All was still, save for the rasp of breath over bevelled tongues
and the growling gale without.
Wislen's Texan élan bore him blithely over these breakers
of Silurian resentment, although I knew that, even as he arranged his denim
rump back on the lacquered tree stump, a phalanx of firebranded fanatics was
circling his parents' Panhandle ranch, kindling aloft and coccyges aquiver.
Wislen quaffed on undaunted. I was about to broach a brace
of cultural recommendations, before the hunchbacks by the hearth could finish hawking
into the ritual coal-scuttle, when the weighted boulder rolled back and my cousin
Wilma shouldered her way in.
Like so many Welshwomen Wilma craved human company, and so
bore down on Wislen, shandy in hand.
It was the work of moments for her to ascertain that our
guest was single, solvent and not from around here, simply by surveying his even
number of digits.
"Where you from then?" she whistled through her
front row of teeth, primping her ebony bangs with a divining stick.
"These United States of America ,
ma'am," he declared.
"Oooh," she cooed, "whereabouts?"
"Texas ."
He was as buttoned down as a Brooks Brothers shirt by now.
"Big and bright!" yodelled Wilma, setting off an
atavistic chorus of 'Hen Ferchetan' from the council puddle-heating crew dripping
proudly in the corner. "And from where in Texas ? The Salammbô?"
"I was coming to that." Wislen shrivelled like a
jellyfish in the shadow of a seaside shovel.
"I'm from Dallas ."
"Aaaah, I remember where I was when your President
Kennedy died!"
Now it was Wilma, but it could have been any and every
barfly or border guard from Dún Laoghaire to
Luhansk.
"Do tell," whispered Wislen, prodding me towards
the heaving kegs.
"Well, I'll never forget that night. Boyo was just a
baby, and I was minding him while his parents were out on the town. I was
hosing him down after a game of 'cormorant' in the witches' pool when the news
came over the wireless - I had to turn up the Bunsen burner to get the valves
working right..."
There followed a pleasant few hours of explaining that New
Mexico is a place in its own right, not simply a more recent version of Mexico,
before we waded out into the evening ichor and headed home to our respective huts.
Wislen lit a Cohiba and generously scattered some Chesterfields to the pre-teen
tokers at his heels.
"I'm a rye-based, red-eyed lifeform, Boyo," he
ruminated. "And I'm not set on living forever. But I like to hope that one
day people will remember my hometown for its extensive marshalling yards and enigmatic
underpasses, not just because some Cajun nut done shot one of our many
presidents there."
I suppose I could have said that for most of us Dallas already meant amoral
oilmen dangling off Sue Ellen's shoulder-pads, rather than the messy dispatch of
JFK to the great pool party in the sky.
But I was too busy trying to understand how Wilma could
have doused me on 22 November 1963 when, according to the squid-ink inscription
in the Boyo family Bible, I first swam ashore from our Bardsey Island
At least I have the right number of fingers to figure it
out.
