Self-Portrait: After Joe Brainard
Ruby Eastood | Tolka Issue Nine, October 2025
Not finding a four-leaf clover in the playground. Taking two leaves off one clover and holding the stalk up to a full one, then going around boasting about my fake four-leaf clover, knowing in my heart it could only bring bad luck. My mother in a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit at the hot sulphur pools in Fontpédrouse, and the snow on the mountains behind her. The colour and shape of the fallen maple leaves in Phoenix Park, walking around on my own after taking oxycodone. Ice-creams in the corner shop like little pink feet. The girl from the school next door who used to hang out in the bushes where we went to smoke. She had cigarette burns all down her cleavage. She said she let her boyfriends do it and seemed to find it funny. Watching a video of a bullfighter being gored to death and the camera panning to the wife, now widowed, swooning behind her fan. Wanting to be the bull and the bullfighter and his wife, to loop between the three of them forever. Learning to make pesto in the yellow kitchen of our old flat, standing on a stool, helping my mother dry each leaf of basil. She had her hair in a long plait and she was singing Billie Holiday. Accidentally hoovering a diamond at my first job in the jewellery shop. Telling no one. Going to the hairdresser and showing them a photo of Debbie Harry and being so sad when I saw that they had only given me her hair when what I had wanted was her face. Memorising the Aramaic inscription MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN from the Book of Daniel: you have been weighed on God’s scales and you have been found wanting. The long wooden benches in the park, before they were replaced with anti-homeless benches. Learning that you could look like Serge Gainsbourg and still go out with Jane Birkin. Watching gay prison porn at a sleepover with a Lithuanian girl called Agatha who wore too much eyeliner. My orange cat called Serendipity, who fell off the roof and died. Finding a starfish on the seafloor. Long grass, thin cuts like latticework. The old man who never said hello back, who came out of the nursing home every evening to smoke his cigar, pushing his wheelchair down our street with his one good foot. The Vietnamese café on Queen’s Road where Kit told me that Adrienne had stopped having visitors at the hospice because she wanted us to remember her as beautiful. Listening to Bjork at Adrienne’s funeral, and going to the pub afterwards. The man who made a living selling doughnuts on a Barcelona beach. He balanced them on a tray on his head and once danced with Shakira for the ‘Loca’ music video. Dropping acid by the Sea Life Centre in Brighton and running into Jeremy Corbyn coming out from a speech. Ollie went over to shake his hand. Miles said: this can’t be happening. Charlie said: I think this is the best day of my life. Charlie sitting on the carpeted steps of his parent’s suburban home, absentmindedly smelling a glass of water, then putting it down and saying: odourless as usual. Getting my first period on Valentine’s Day, after eating a peppermint heart. Looking at the Seagram Murals and feeling nothing. Threatening suicide for romantic validation. That park in Milan where we promised to carry on seeing each other in secret, even if we married other people and had children with them. Thinking my whole life would be different if only I had a name like Isaiah Berlin. Thinking my whole life would be different if only I had shoes with light-up soles. Thinking my whole life would be different if only I could afford a pair of cherry-red Miu Miu kitten heels. Schemes to make money with Luna selling beaded bracelets on Etsy but our beads were cheap and nobody wanted them. Schemes to make money with Luna selling sex on OnlyFans but our videos were amateurish and nobody wanted them. Fried egg sandwiches with my father after school. The dusty shipyard where he worked, with the radio always on and the smell of hot oil coming from an old shack. His habit of looking at me and saying just like your mother. The darkroom in Adrienne’s Brighton flat. Her mysterious, fleshy pictures hanging everywhere. Getting fired from the Shelbourne Hotel for thinking that a grown man can unfurl his own napkin. Orchids for Julia when she came back from hospital with the baby. Coked up, bumping into Xavier and the girl he’d dumped me for outside a chip van and telling them that Kanye West was the greatest genius of the twenty-first century and anybody who disagreed was just racist. Reciting the emotional crux of ‘Hurricane’ to prove it. Using Febreze after cigarettes and thinking it was foolproof. Nico bringing Viceroys back from America because Mac DeMarco smoked them. Tracing the faint, silvery scar on my mother’s lower belly when she explained what a caesarean is. Trying lychees for the first time, out of a white plastic bag, on a fire escape with Xavier. Peeling back the alien skin and feeling that I was eating an eyeball. Pale rubbery flesh and hard, dark pit. Trying to make it to the water over the burning sand. Whispering secrets into seashells and throwing them back into the sea. Misting up empty classroom windows and writing secrets with the tip of my finger. All my life, confessing and then covering my tracks. On the train from Belfast with Khalid, listening to him complain that women just treat him like a sex object. Newroz with Khalid and Gina in Stoneybatter, eating pomegranate seeds and drinking Buckfast. Lighting wish candles in the garden, wishing for better taste in men. Meeting Franco’s great-grandson at a party in Madrid and wanting him to fancy me. Heathcliff standing over Cathy’s deathbed going: Haunt me then! Drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Being sad to leave the hospital after I recovered from pneumonia because they had beds with remote controls that could sit up and down, whereas I just had an average bed. Pink balloons. Nitrous. Notting Hill Carnival. Bette Davis descending the staircase in riding boots and a silk blouse, looking around her and saying: what a dump. A spotty boy in Oxford who tried to impress us by cutting lines of coke on the pub table with his Mensa membership card. He got kicked out and we never saw him again. Limestone in the late afternoon sun, the way it seemed to glow. Feeling like all the best stories ended wrong: Dorothy clicked her heels and returned to boring old Kansas, Alice woke up and it was just a dream, Wendy wanted to leave Neverland to get back to her parents, and Lucy left Narnia for a dusty wardrobe. Brats. Vowing that when I got taken into that beautiful world I would never look back. Going to Sotheby’s with my mother to try to sell a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing that she had wrapped in a towel in her bag. Watching the old men’s livestreams on Omegle to find out how a penis worked and feeling like I had one over on them because they were unwitting case studies in my own personal research. The morning I found out Leonard Cohen had died, standing in Brighton Station with all the people moving around me, crying. Snow falling over Baldoyle Industrial Estate. Saying I love you when it was a lie. Saying I love you when it was the truth. My mother cutting my hair in the kitchen, making each side shorter to get it even until there was none left. Sitting in the front row of a Slavoj Žižek lecture and feeling a droplet of his spit land in my eye. Lobster-catching in Yorkshire with Hal. Tying little bits of bacon inside the cage and dropping them into the sea, but the wind blew us out and we never got the cages back. Hal said the lobsters would die and more lobsters would crawl in to eat them and get stuck too. My job at the Marxist bookshop where my boss paid me under minimum wage and never gave me the money on time. The first room Nico had in Prague, a white box full of smoke with a projector. We watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I got the call from Adrienne. The thin mimosa tree with dusty yellow flowers in the square opening of concrete at the centre of the school patio. Plaça Catalunya, on the day Gil Scott-Heron died, chanting No pasarán, the sting of tear gas and people running wild. Garlic spaghetti with Meredith on the first night of the new rental in the Liberties, after we painted all the walls. We had 10 euros left between us and no furniture so we sat on the floor. Spreading the rumour that a girl in my class had nits and ruining her entire year. Now she is rich and famous, and I am neither. Summers when my hair was green from chlorine. Summers sat chewing salty pipas in the shade, spitting the shells out onto the pavement. Summers in the air-conditioned shopping centre with no money to spend. Digging my nails into mosquito bites to make an X because someone told me it stops the itch. Continuing to dig long after I discovered it had no effect at all. Morning-after pills and Fanta Lemon with Luna. Hello Titty T-shirts hanging in the bright windows of the tourist shops. Watching Lana Del Rey get bent over a slot machine by an ugly old man in ‘Ride’. Wanting so badly to be devout. Learning the word ‘monsoon’. Dressing up for the ball in Julia’s room in Meadows. I wore my mother’s red silk slip dress from the nineties, and Julia wore a long pink gown and flowers in her hair. Gold lamé shoes. Vomiting in the bushes behind the bandstand, then going back to dance. Taking small, white pebbles to put on Chopin’s grave at Père-Lachaise, but never finding him. Driving through the moors in late summer when the heather was in bloom. Reading that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had sex on the moors and caught a bus home as it started to rain. Dreamland in Margate. Arguing with Miles on the rollercoaster, calling him a wimp. Late at night, phoning Hal to ask if the caged lobsters were still there at the bottom of the sea, clawing away. He said no, he reckoned they were okay now.
‘Self-Portrait: After Joe Brainard’ was first published in Issue Nine of Tolka (May 2025). You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Ruby Eastwood is a journalist and writer from Barcelona living in Dublin.
