Jinx Lennon has a standard Paddy resume. He worked on building sites in London after school and poured beer at South Street Seaport for a while before he returned to his hometown in the northeast corner of the Republic of Ireland to make music. Here’s what an article in the Village Voice said about him:
Chances are you’ve never heard of Jinx Lennon. Even in Ireland he’s far from famous, and except for a 2015 house party I got to attend, his only NYC-area gigs came in 2005 via Lach, whose amorphously contrarian “antifolk” catchall suits Lennon as it does few others. Structurally, he’s a singer-songwriter, earning his musical pittance performing his own songs over acoustic guitar. But that not only undersells his hyperactive show and ignores his live beat gear and studio horns, it misrepresents the aggressiveness of half-rapped, power-strummed rants far less predictable and more propulsive than, for instance, the rote metrics of original “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke. It misses how irrepressibly Lennon shouts and how insistently he repeats linchpin phrases. And it evokes a limpid lyricism he almost never trucks with, although he knows full well that his sing-along choruses are what render him inspirational in the end.
Albums include ‘Know Your Station Gouger Nation’, ‘Hungry Bastard Hibernia’, and ‘Thirty Beacons of Light for a Land Full of Spite Thugs, Drug Slugs and Energy Vampires’. Song titles include, ‘Accept Yr. Hair Loss’, ‘Sultans of Sickness’, ‘Pushing Patients Around’ and ‘You Must Forgive the Cunts’.
The last one stuck with me when I heard it. There are so many cunts in the manufactured housing business. To stay sane and solvent, you must forgive them.
(Note that, when Irish people use the C-word, they mean something different from what we do when we use it. I, personally, dislike the term and use it rarely, and never around women. In Ireland, it has the same force as the term ‘asshole’ in this country, or ‘turtle egg’ in the Chinese-speaking world. For purposes of the present article, I will use it in the Irish sense.)[1]
The office at my park in northern New York has a large red button marked ‘Bullshit’. When you press it, a loud voice intones, ‘Bullshit alert!’ There is also a beckoning cat to pull in money and an octagonal mirror to ward off evil spirits. If I print a banner that says, in large type, ‘YOU MUST FORGIVE THE CUNTS and hang it over the door, the setup will be complete.
In March of this year, I ordered three new TRU homes from Clayton. They arrived early this month. The process with the two in my park in northern New York has been smooth, but the cunts have had their way with the home in central New York. When the maintenance guy poured the pad, the front was a foot higher than the back and the surface of the cement looked like a bowl of oatmeal after you add raisins and give it a stir, only hard as, well, cement. The delivery driver brought the home a day earlier than instructed, when nobody was there to receive it. He knocked over a lamp post, damaged the roof and fascia, and left it sitting half on and half off the pad. He played a game of frog baseball with his escort driver before he headed home. After the installer finished cleaning up the mess the other two guys had made, he called me and said, ‘The neighbors across the street’. I said,
‘You mean the guy with the ax-throwing target on his lawn?’
“Yeah. They told me that the extra skirting vents were theirs.’
‘They are assholes. If I were Irish, I would call them –‘
‘I told my guys to put the vents in the home. I told you that there are lots of dumbasses in this business.’
‘You know, they call them ‘cunts’ in Ireland?’
‘You’re shittin me!’
‘For real.’
Two days ago, I advertised the home for sale on Craigslist. Then, early this morning, my phone farted and I learned that my Craigslist account had been hacked. Some putz with the email address sus77rbt@gmail.com and the telephone number (470) 236-8426 posted twenty-three ads for the sale of the same Cadillac Escalade for $19,800 in Nashville, Boston, Cleveland, New Haven, Providence, Louisville, Baltimore and Jacksonville in the space of half an hour and charged the $5 fee for each ad to the credit card that I had put on file with Craigslist. When I called Mastercard to say that I wanted to dispute a transaction, a middle-aged-sounding woman with a heavy Philippine accent asked me, ‘Do you know the merchant?’ I said,
‘It’s Craigslist.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Everybody knows this merchant.’
‘In that case, you will have to wait for these charges to post to dispute them.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Five to seven business days.’
‘Is there anything I can do in the mean time?’
‘Sorry, no.’
If I get my hands on that motherfucker, I thought, I will rip his eyeballs out. And then, I remembered, That’s not what I would call him, if I were Irish. And I must forgive him.
Printed lyrics to the song You Must Forgive the Cunts are not available online. I have reached out to Mr. Lennon through the Contact page on his website to request these, but have not received an answer yet. From listening on Youtube, the song appears to begin as follows (lacunae represent sections unintelligible to me):
Some of the biggest arseholes you have ever, ever seen
The bastards treat us like swill
Like shit flowing downhill
But somehow, you must rise
Or else somehow you ***** inside
‘Cause you must forgive the cunts….yeah
You must forgive the cunts…..yeah
The ones who walk upon you
Who walk all over you
You really must forgive them
I know it’s really hard
If you don’t forgive the cunts
You won’t find peace within yourself
Pending a reply from Mr. Lennon, I will ask a maiden aunt, who wrote her college thesis about another Irish poet. Maybe she will have some insight into how that type think. Regardless of the precise wording of the song, the message is clear. These people are here to stay. You have to live with them, forgive them, and bake enough of a cushion into your lot rents and sale prices to soak up what you lose to them. You will go broke and crazy if you take them personally.
[1] Having a name like ‘Lennon’ could easily have a chilling effect on any creative. The first person one thinks of when one reads that name is John J. Lennon, the currently-incarcerated journalist who has written about the criminal justice system from the inside for The Atlantic, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and Esquire. Lennon (John, not Jinx) grew up in the projects in Sheepshead Bay, became involved in the drug trade, and shot someone when he was in his late teens. He is now in the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, NY, serving a 28-to-life term. His stories are typed on a typewriter made of clear plastic, to ensure that they do not hide contraband. He will be eligible for parole when he is in his late forties or early fifties, which will be, he says, ‘Not early, but not too late’. Those are big boots to fill, but that does not seem to have stopped Jinx from doing good work.
Your knowledge of how ugly words are used in different countries is all very well and good, but this is the USA and and I read this essay with disgust. I suggest you deep six it.
Maiden? Aunt?