Post by CONOR DECLAN CALLAHAN on Jun 10, 2013 8:35:27 GMT -8
| [atrb=style,width: 420px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/0478144b9f16c95a37367d1aca56b45c/tumblr_mkfax8tDxp1s97ldco1_500.png); padding: 5px, bTable] CONOR D. CALLAHAN 36 | HETEROSEXUAL | POLICE OFFICER | EMERGENCY CREW | JOSH DUHAMEL THE INTERVIEW HELLO. THANKS FOR COMING IN TODAY. SHALL WE START WITH YOUR NAME? Hey lovely. You’re welcome, any time. Uh, name is Conor. Conor Callahan. Most everyone just calls me Conor to be honest with yous – it’s short enough, can’t really get nicknames outta it. You can try and I’ll respond and all, but it’s a bit of a wasted venture. THAT'S A NICE NAME. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING? Thanks, you’re sweet. What I do for a living is I’m a cop. It’s not exactly my calling in life, but I’ve yet to really figure out exactly what is… my calling in life. Maybe I don’t have one. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor, but things happened and I never ended up going to college. I’m married to a nurse, though, and everyone knows that nurses do all the real work anyway, so y’know, that’s as close as I’ll probably ever get. That’s fine. I’ve done a lot of jobs in my life. You know, think of something, anything you like, and I’ve probably done it at some point. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. But right now, I’m a police officer. Have been for a while, uh… since we moved to Brunswick and had the kids. I’ll probably stick at it. I had to go through training to get here and there’s no sense in throwing that away for some other job, so I’ll probably keep doing it… unless I have some insane epiphany and suddenly realise exactly what I was put on this earth to do, in which case I guess I’ll go… do that. But yeah, upholding the law and all that, that’s all right. Pay’s all right, and this is a small town. Not a lot goes on. Small towns, most instances of breaking the law is bored kids. S’fine. Nice and easy job most of the time. Also, my son, he loves the badge. Thinks it makes me kind of superhero. He’s six, so he thinks being a cop involves a lot more fighting bad guys than sitting around in a cruiser and killing time. So, y’know, it’s not all bad. INTERESTING. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN? What do I do for fun? Oh boy. Uh, well, I’m all about fun. I’ve never found satisfaction in my professional life, so I’m all about the extracurriculars. I’m a family man. I have two kids and a wife. A lot of my free time is spent with them. My kids are my world. I always have time for them. Spoil them rotten with attention. Seriously, most of my life is spent running around the in the back yard with the little blighters. I spend more time having tea parties and playing with lego than I do on any grown up, mature, adult kind of activity. Which is fine, y’know, ‘cos at heart I’m kind of still a kid myself. Maybe it’s some glitch in my brain, but I never grew out of thinking that playing leapfrog is fun. Yeah, lot of time and energy spent on the kids. And my wife. Kirby, she’s a nurse, like I said. Works weird hours – all over the place. Sometimes I don’t see her as much as I’d like, so when she is around we make the most of it. We’re always going on trips. Whenever we have time off, we’re at the beach. Kids love the seaside, and Kirby does, too. She’s a… Kirby, she’s a special lady. Her and me, we’re kindred spirits, y’know? She’s fun. She’s a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun together. We’re always playing practical jokes. Pretty sure she started it – and if not, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it – but we’re kind of embroiled in a prank war of epic proportions right now. She’s a mad genius. I think she might be winning, but don’t ever tell her I told you that. Tell her I’m letting her win. Yeah. Uh, what else? What else…? Uh. By way of hobbies, well I don’t get a lot of time to myself these days, but I used to try my hand at a few things. I’m fairly musical. I play a bit of this and that. Uh, guitar, ukulele, piano. Nothing overly well. Jack of all trades, like I said. Started with the guitar when I was twelve, because I was trying to impress a girl. It didn’t work. She was my babysitter. Nineteen. Age difference was a little much, I think. Yeah. But I kept at the guitar for the sole reason that it pissed my father off. He didn’t think it was appropriate, me putting all this time and effort into something as pointless as music, so naturally I tried twice as hard and played twice as loud whenever he was around. I still have it somewhere. In the attic, I think. And we have the piano in the sitting room, but the only person that really touches it is my daughter. When she was little, just learning to walk, she used to stumble over there on her tip toes and hammer at the keys. Now she thinks she’s Beethoven, God bless her. Anyway. What was I talking about again? Fuck it, I've rambled enough. Next question? WOULD YOU SAY THOSE ACTIVITIES REFLECT WHO YOU ARE? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. They’re very reflective. I mean, what do you get from that, what I just told you? I’m very into family. That’s absolutely true. First and foremost, I am a dad. That’s part of everything I am. Can’t quite remember who I was before I was a dad, y’know? I’m protective. I am. I’m not some territorial bugger who’s gonna snap at you for looking twice at my kids and I’m not some super cautious parent who won’t let them go outside and get a few cuts and bruises, but I am very protective. I don’t like people messing with my family, and I’m well equipped to keep them safe. Cop, remember? I got a gun. Not just protective, though, I’m… I’m devoted to them. I never knew quite what dedication was until the first time I held my son. You don’t ever know just how much loyalty you got in you until you’re holding your own flesh and blood like that. And that’s kind of saying a lot, being as I’ve always been a pretty loyal person. I always will be. I don’t believe in double crossing or stepping on people to get what you want. Ambition is the absolute enemy of humanity, in my opinion. I think if we were all a little more trustworthy, the world would be a little bit of a better place. I try and instil that in my kids. That, y’know, not being a dick is much better than being the absolute best at something. I try and set a good example. That’s what being a dad is, right? It makes you better, as a human being, ‘cos you gotta be as good as you can so your kids have something to look up to, right? That’s what I do. I try and be good above else. What is good? Y’know. Like calm, forgiving, understanding, selfless, generous. Y’know what good is. That kind of stuff. Some of it comes easy to me and some of it doesn’t. Calm, I have no problem with that. I was a pretty frustrated kid for a whole host of reasons, but that was a long, long time ago. I’m a lover, not a fighter. I don’t lose my head. Unless I’m driving. I do have a bit of road rage sometimes. That’s actually pretty surprising. I mean, people always act like it’s a huge shock when they get in a car with me the first time and I start mouthing off at other drivers. I’m so mellow the rest of the time, y’know. I guess when you’re as easy going as I am, people always think it’s a little surprising when you lose your cool a little. But y’know, doesn’t happen often, and it’s usually only when I’m behind the wheel. Generous, I got no problem with that either. I came from a wealthy family, so y’know, I always had too much when I was growing up. Some people like that. Some people don’t. I didn’t. I never did. I was never comfortable having too much. I was always trying to give people stuff. I was always bring extra money into school to buy lunch for my friends. I’m one of those people that’ll give you the shirt off their back. Some of the other stuff… is a little more troublesome for me. I’m not a forgiving person. I wish I was, but I’m just… not. I don’t get mad at people, like I said, but I’m not some happy go lucky moron who doesn’t know when he’s been wronged. I know when someone has stabbed me in the back, and even if I don’t make a lot of noise about it, I’ll still hold a grudge. I really am bad at that. I find it really, really hard to let it go when someone’s upset me. I’m still holding grudges that I’ve been holding since I was… five, six years old. I got thirty year old grudges. That’s not good. That’s silly and petty, I know, but I can’t help myself. Like I said, I try and be good, so that’s what they see, but no one’s perfect. I’m certainly not. A COOL CAT LIKE YOU MUST HAVE A TON OF SUITORS FLOCKING TO YOU, HUH? Cool cat, eh? Well, um, to tell you the truth, I haven’t had a great deal luck with women. I’ve been married three times and, uh, twice it ended badly. Very badly. First marriage, I was nineteen. Her name was Niamh. You say it like Neve. It’s Irish. She was Irish. She was my, my high school sweetheart, if that’s what you wanna call it. My parents moved our family outta Ireland and over to the states when I was sixteen, but when I turned eighteen I went straight back for her. My dad thought it was stupid as hell, so I, I married her. It wasn’t a smart move. We fought all the time. My dad cut me off, financially, ‘cos he didn’t approve. The pair of us, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and we were living in her mam’s house ‘cos we couldn’t afford a place of our own, and we were constantly at each other’s throats about everything. It was awful. I think we probably would have got divorced in the end, but she died eighteen months after the wedding. I guess that makes me a widower, but I was just twenty and… I didn’t feel like one. I still don’t. I think about her a lot, though. It’s been sixteen years, but I do still think about her. Anyway. Second marriage that was, that was Angie. I met her when I was twenty four and after I’d moved back to the states. She was… okay, I’m not proud of this right here, but she was only seventeen at the time, which technically made her underage, but… the heart wants what it wants, and mine wanted her. We were together a long time. We had fun together. We travelled a lot. Then she fell pregnant and we decided to get married. Rushed to do it actually, before the baby was born, so that it’d come into a stable family. We had my son, Finn. That’s why I can never regret Angie – things ended bad between us, but she gave me Finn, so… but yeah, they ended bad. We didn’t even make it a year before… y’know, things came to light that should’ve stayed buried, and the next thing I know, I’m serving her divorce papers and she’s skipping town. Then, third marriage – third time’s the charm – that’s Kirby. I met her not long after Angie left. Too soon, maybe. She also fell pregnant, but we decided not to rush things. We had our daughter, Carly. And we got married when she was about two, because it was the right time. And touch wood, it’s going good. It’s great. Things between us are rock solid, y’know. Waiting for the right time is key, I think. And I know how it looks to the outside world, I do. My brother says my wives are getting blonder and younger each time, which… there is some truth too. But it’s not how it looks. It’s coincidence. I keep falling in love with young blondes. It happens. COOL BEANS. THEY SAY YOUR FAMILY SHAPES WHO YOU ARE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOURS? As if the spouse question wasn’t hard enough! Uh, my family. My family. Um. My parents… hm. I had a bit of a difficult relationship with them when I was growing up. My dad and I, we never got along. We were at odds from day one. My mam, she was all right, but not especially… she wasn’t a strong woman, and my dad was a bit overpowering, so she’d kind of sit back and let the two of us puff our chests out and butt heads. She always took his side over mine, anyway. A lot of the tension with my parents was down to me brother, actually. Not his fault, I mean, but uh… Y’know, it’s a little messy and complicated. My brother and I, we’re twins. Rory is two minutes older than me. And I don’t know what he saw or did in those two minutes before I came out the womb and joined him, but apparently it made him the better twin. He’s always been better than me. Smarter, politer, richer, more successful, better behaved… I love my brother. That’s the bitch of it. It’d be easy to hate him or at least resent him, but you can’t. You can’t hate Rory, he’s too fucking good. Y’know? Yeah. He was the favourite child. The good son. Everything I did, my parents measured me against Rory and I always came up short. So pretty soon I stopped trying, and um, actively tried to piss them off. So things, yeah, they were never great with my family. Especially so when my dad decided to up and move us to the states. I really didn’t want to go. We didn’t speak for six months. And when I turned eighteen and moved back to Ireland on my own, we didn’t speak for four years. Then we kinda kept doing that. Speaking and not speaking, on and off, until he died a couple years ago. The bastard cut me out of his will and all, so fuck him. After he died, things with me mam improved, though. We speak a lot more these days, and she comes up to Brunswick to visit the kids a few times a year, so that’s nice. Rory and I, we’re still close. Kind of. We always have been. He’s always been there for me, even if our parents weren’t. He’s leant me money, given me a place to stay, bailed me out of the drunk tank more times than I can count, and been my best man three times with barely a judgmental word. He’s a good brother. But unfortunately, a couple years ago, he got married himself. My sister-in-law, Martina… um. With the best will in the world, she’s a bitch. I know I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. Martina, she might as well have gold digger stamped on her lovely forehead, y’know? And she has the balls to say that I’m the mooch? She thinks I’m a bad influence on Rory, and she doesn’t much care for the kids either because ‘children are sticky’ or some prissy shit like that, so because of her, I don’t see Rory as often these days. Or speak to him so often. And he’s stopped coming to visit. So… but yeah, y’know, that’s how these things go. And marriage isn’t permanent – I can vouch for that one – so maybe when Martina takes a hike, things’ll go back to normal. Anyway, that’s the birth family. The family I can’t do nothing about. But there’s also Kirby and the kids. And y’know, when you marry someone and have kids with them, that’s a more accurate representation of family, I think. ‘Cos you chose it for yourself, yeah? So yeah, uh, my proper family, that’s Kirby and Finn and Carly. I already kinda told you how that all came about. Finn isn’t Kirby’s, technically, but he doesn’t remember his mother. As far as he’s concerned, Kirby is his mother. When he’s older, we’ll talk about it some. Tell him. But Angie’s not on the scene at all, so we just got this nice little nuclear family thing going on right now. I love them. My relationship with them is great. I love my wife. I love my kids. As far as I can tell, my wife loves me. And the kids are still young enough that they think I’m great, rather than some kind of moron. It’s pretty perfect right now. Oh! And pets you said? Yeah, we live in a little zoo. A menagerie. We got the dogs. Three dogs. Kirby has a rabbit. She still calls it a bunny, but it’s much too big to be a bunny. You ever see Monty Python? Fucking killer rabbit. And uh, the kids have dragons. They’re lizards. Some kind of lizard, I don’t… we call ‘em dragons. So yeah, that is… that’s the family slash zoo, and it’s pretty much perfection if you ask me. AND YOUR LIFE? TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PAST. I'M EAGER TO HEAR. Okay. I warn you, I’m thirty six… I’m old. I got a lot of past to get through. So I was born in 1977 in Derry in Northern Ireland. Londonderry to give it the official, unionist name. I kinda told you how my childhood was a little bit already. I was a twin. Least favourite child. Rich parents. My dad had a, a business consultancy firm or some… something boring as sin but lucrative like that. He was also a pretty prominent unionist, which… it rubbed me the wrong way. Y’know, I grew up during the troubles. Things were pretty turbulent. Derry was something of a hotbed for provos, and um, it wasn’t uncommon for things to be blowing up here and there. I grew into something of a nationalist. Yeah, I know. Don’t look at me like that. I was a stupid kid. I was basically trying to do anything to piss my father off. My whole adolescence was just one long calculated attempt to give him a stroke. Playing the guitar instead of doing my homework. Multiple attempts to drop out of school – me mam kept re-enrolling me, though. And uh, violent nationalism. Don’t get me wrong. I do absolutely believe in the idea of an independent Ireland, even if I’m an expat these days and I guess I don’t have a right to an opinion anymore, but uh, yeah. I was really much too young and foolish to be trying to involve myself in politics that was much bigger than I could’ve understood. Me getting involved in nationalist rallies and the like was the final straw for my father. He decided he was moving us out of Ireland before things got worse or someone got hurt, and he hopped us across the pond and we ended up settling in Miami. Yeah. Moved to Miami in 1993, when I was 16. I hated it. Sorry, but I did. It was too hot. Americans? Fuck Americans. Well, y’know, that’s not how I feel now, having lived here so long and y’know… But at the time I fucking hated yous all. Couldn’t go anywhere without some wise guy commenting on me accent or mistakenly calling me English. Also your high schools? They’re nightmares. You don’t even know, because you just do it and you don’t know anything else. Fucking nightmares. School was much more bearable back in Ireland. I don’t know how yous all do it. Anyway. My dad was happy and his business was thriving and if me mam wasn’t happy she kept her mouth shut and so did Rory, and it was only really me complaining, so we stuck at it for a couple of years. Then Ror and I, we turned eighteen, and I decided fuck this, I was going back home. So I did, and like I said, I picked up things with my old girlfriend Niamh… and uh, we got married and lived in her mam’s house and started to hate each other. Then, then she died. That was 1995, that was. It was a car bomb. Provos, at it again. It took out half the street. Some old lady walking her dog down the pavement. Family driving past. And Niamh, carrying home the groceries for her mam. That was a rough time. I’ll be honest with you. After we put her in the ground I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I stayed in Derry for a while, then I headed down to the Republic because I thought it might be better there, but it wasn’t, really. In the end, I wound up going back to Florida. Me parents still weren’t talking to me, but Rory, he was living on his own by then, and he took me in. I spent the next three years living on his couch. I worked a lot of odd jobs. I busked a lot, ‘cos y’know, I couldn’t be bothered with having a proper job and busking wasn’t really a proper job so it suited. That’s something to be said for living stateside. Yous like an Irish busker. Back in Ireland, I’m just a beggar and people walk straight past. Over here I’m charming and European and yous all like the accent, so it’s much more lucrative. I didn’t do too badly to be honest with you. I probably could have supported myself, but it was safer living with Rory, and he never would have kicked me to the curb. Anyway. Then I met Angie. I told you a little bit about her already as well. She was seventeen when we met, so… so technically we couldn’t do anything for a year. But when she turned eighteen, we decided that fuck it all, we were gonna run away together. So we did. We spent a few years… um… adventuring. I don’t know what other word you would use for it. Like we just kinda went where we wanted to. Worked when we had to. Lived kinda like hippies. We did a lot of weed and lived out the back of a van for a while, so… yeah. This is another period of my life I’m not a hundred percent proud of. Anyway, after about five, six years of living on whims, we found out that Angie was pregnant. I thought I should do something about it, but I didn’t quite know what, so in the end I just ended up proposing to her. I don’t think she really wanted to marry me, even then. I think she thought she had to, but she… she said yes, so… we went to Vegas and got hitched there. Then we decided to move up back to the East coast. She had family in Maine. A spinster aunt. Her parents didn’t want anything to do with her. They weren’t too impressed with me or the way we’d been living, so… but her aunt took us in. We stayed in her spare room in Augusta for a couple of months, and then we found a little affordable place here in Brunswick. So we moved here in time for Finn to be born. Y’know, having a kid, that’s life changing stuff. I decided it was about time to buckle down and get a proper job, and I ended up seeing a flyer for police training so… I thought why the fuck not? That’s a proper job. Something my son will be able to look up to me for doing. So I went with that. Kept me pretty busy. Out of the house a lot. So I didn’t see it at first… I didn’t see anything was wrong. Not until Finn was about six months old, and I started to notice that Angie was off. In the end, it came out that she was a drug addict. She hated our domestic little life so much she had to get out of her head to smile her way through it. She’d been using while she was pregnant. She could have killed our son before he was even born. She’d been using while she was looking after him. Fuck the consequences. Having a kid, supposed to be life changing stuff. It was for me. Guess it wasn’t for her. I was so mad. We had the blow out to end all blow outs, and a week later I was serving her divorce papers. Rory, good brother that he is, he paid for the lawyers. They were good. They wiped the floor with her. She got nothing. I got the house. I got full custody. And Angie disappeared. For a while it was just me and Finn. That was rough. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, and all my family were down in Miami, so I didn’t have anyone to help. I was considering moving down to be close to them. I figured me mam knew what to do with a baby, so I could just sorta palm him off on her whenever he started crying and blunder me way through fatherhood like that. But then I met Kirby. It was actually because of a little parental accident. I may have taken my eye off him for a couple of seconds – and that was dumb. It was really dumb, especially because he was just at the stage where he was beginning to walk. Yeah. He managed to haul himself up, then went crashing down and smacked his arm something awful. Broke it. He cried so loud – you wouldn’t believe human beings could even make that kind of noise. It was the most awful thing I ever heard. I took him down to the ER and we met a very lovely nurse who set his arm for him and mentioned off hand that I wasn’t the first person to take my eye off their kid so I shouldn’t beat myself up too much. That was Kirby, bless her. We ended up dating, me and her, and uh… one thing lead to another. It was too soon after Angie, really. I see that now. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea, but it happened, and I definitely don’t regret it now. Anyway, Kirby ended up pregnant. Unplanned. Very early on in our little relationship. We decided to keep the baby and to see how things went and then Kirby gave birth to Carly, and in the end we did wind up living together and getting married, but it wasn’t something we rushed on account of having a baby. No, learnt me lesson on that one. Things are different with Kirby, though. They always have been. Better. Here’s hoping they stay that way. What about a secret? Everyone has a secret. Oh boy. I was hoping we’d got as personal as we were gonna get. Um. Okay. Oh boy. My secret is pretty bad. It’s gonna make me sound like a bad person, but you don’t – you gotta understand? Try and understand? Look at it from my point of view. Okay. So after the divorce with Angie, and my brother’s lawyers running her into the ground… well, she wasn’t quite defeated. She was gonna fight me. For Finn. I couldn’t have her take my baby boy away. She couldn’t even look after him. I would have done anything to stop her. I told her if she tried to take my baby from me then I would tell the whole town her dirty little secret. I told her I would call up her parents and tell them and they’d have locked away in some rehab facility and brush her under the rug. I blackmailed her, and I’m not proud of it. But it worked, because I’ve not seen hide nor hair of her since. As long as it keeps her away from my son, I won’t regret it. ALRIGHT. TIME'S ALMOST UP. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAMS. QUICK! I don’t really have any big dreams. I just wanna be happy. I want me family to be happy, and healthy. Nothing more than that. AND THAT'S A WRAP. IT WAS NICE GETTING TO KNOW YOU. It was a pleasure, lovely. BEHIND THE MASK PUN | 20 | GMT | MAGNETISM | BAH YOU KNOW MY CREW  |
