Tanner’s Tiger

In the meantime, she has purchased a blonde wig. I haven’t yet managed to turn up a Frankenstein mask, but we have hopes. Mi

We see Seth and Randy now and then. They drop in for meals. Most of their time is spent haunting the campuses at Trinity College and the National University, convinced that there must be some way to obtain marijuana in Ireland. If there is, they’ll find it.

Corrigan flew home a week ago but as a passenger this time. The day he left, every Dublin newspaper covered the event and expressed the hope that he would return soon. I think he will; he enjoyed the city as much as it enjoyed him, which was considerably. The pubs hadn’t been so lively since Behan died.

I guess we’ll have to go back sooner or later. I must have a metric ton of mail at the Post Office by now. I’ll have to find out whether A

And he can’t get in touch with me, because he doesn’t know where I am.

I hope nobody tells him.

Afterword

Evan Michael Ta

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Ta

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen A

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time Magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopedia Brita

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple more years before Ta

Lost causes?

Don’t count on it.

One thing that’s become evident to me, in the course of chronicling the adventures of Evan Michael Ta

For instance…

In his first appearance, in The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, Ta

Well, no, they weren’t. Within five years of that book’s publication, I had the curious experience of riding through the Bogside in Derry while it was under IRA occupation. Streets were barricaded, and we passed a flat-bed lorry captained by a gaunt fellow wearing a mask; small boys were bringing him empty milk bottles, and he was filling them with petrol. If reclamation of the Six Counties was a lost cause, surely no one had told any of the people we saw that day.

And so on.

Ta

And so on.

What could be less a hot-button issue than the Armenian genocide of 1915? Ta

I could go on in this vein. Causes, lost and found, burn hot one day and cold the next. When I first wrote about Ta

Lost causes? I’ll tell you, causes don’t get lost. They may get misplaced, but sooner or later somebody finds them all over again.

Which brings us to Canada.

Huh? How does it bring us to Canada?

Irony, as you may have noticed, is frequently in the picture in the Ta