In the early hours of June 28, 2009, the Irish writer Julian Gough wrote on his blog: “I was crossing Torstrasse about an hour ago, round midnight, and I thought I saw Johnny Massacre coming across the road towards me.”

It would have been a miraculous sighting. Gough lived in Galway, as Johnny Massacre did during the last days of his life, in the summer of 2003. It was a decent summer by Irish standards, dryer than most. I lived there as well then, though I knew neither of them. Most people would spend six months in Galway and learn the star sign of everyone in town, but I clung to a shyness then that I hoped was aura. The closest I came to meeting Johnny Massacre was passing him at the top of Eyre Square one overcast weekday afternoon, lugging a giant suitcase. He looked world-weary.

Gough wrote that he soon realized his error. Johnny Massacre was still dead. I read this from my apartment in Dublin. I was surprised to grieve Johnny Massacre six years ago and even more surprised to grieve him again; a stranger.

It was not so much a nostalgia for a time past that saddened me but a lesson in natural justice which I had unremembered.

Johnny Massacre was born John Doran and grew up in the grimly named townland of Lisnamuck in Longford. The Irish Independent reported he was thirty-nine when he died, the Irish Times said he was thirty-eight. He wasn’t even thirty. Doran had managed a hotel in the UK and ran a club night called Dionysus in Longford before moving to Galway around the end of the 1990s. It was there that the persona of Johnny Massacre, a latter-day Vaudevillian, came to life. I remember him most on Saturday evenings at the bottom of Shop Street where Galway’s pedestrian traffic bottlenecks from three sides, in front of Fahy’s Barbershop and the King’s Head, just as the streets began to heave, dressed in a cheap suit and his voice reverberating. He never used a microphone and shouted like a maniac to be heard.

In the good months of the year, Galway is overrun by street performers. Human statues, puppeteers, bongo circlists, Christy Moore clones. Johnny Massacre could juggle fire and ride circles on a ten-foot unicycle and all the while maintain hilarious, sarcastic banter with those gathered to watch him. The word on Shop Street was Massacre was the only certified sword-swallower in Ireland. He single-handedly restored dignity to the ignoble, intrusive art of street performance.

I had a short run as a busker myself that summer. Digital MP3 technology was novel and I used to burn CDs from my laptop and sell them. One for four euro or three for ten. It was something to do. I’d arrange my CDs on a towel near the fishmongers on High Street, take out my book of Babel’s short stories and wait. It was boring as work and I quit after a few weeks, having made most of my small investment back.

I was twenty-three and purportedly in Galway to write, but mostly I idled. I wanted to write stories, but didn’t have any. The solitude of the laptop was crushing. I lived at the end of a cul de sac in Renmore with first cousins who were traumatized by the smell of fried garlic. But I had free rent and almost enough money to make it to Race Week. America was at war and I was fulfilled by being free of it.

Galway has long treaded on its reputation as an artist’s enclave, but most of the people I met in Neachtains or Tig Cóilí that summer were burnouts and hippies. They proclaimed their home to be the graveyard of ambition. They all had some talent they could pass off on Galway’s walkers. Or in the very least, an acoustic guitar. They aspired to Johnny Massacre’s stature, lived frugally and drank with their dole money. Their apathy was admirable to me then. It seemed nobler to diligently waste life than to be forever contemplating it.

There was a small beach not far from my house, at the bottom of the Ballyloughan Road, and some evenings I would stroll down to the rocks and look across the bay at the Burren. One night, I found the pages of a twenty-year-old eastern European porno magazine scattered across the sandy beach. Wonder is limitless for those with nothing to do.

In Boston, where I’d lived before, I knew many punks and anarchists, aspiring revolutionaries. I admired their moral rigor, but we all knew that rupture would never come. Not then, definitely not then, not ever. Yet in that small city by the sea, I thought I had stumbled upon the purest life of protest: the life of ceaseless wonder. Art is only imitation beside a life lived fully.

I’d spent summers in Galway, city and county, as a child. Mostly, we romped around my grandparents’ house in the boggy nowhereland along the Roscommon border, but my uncle Seamus owned a house in Galway, deep in the Westside’s labyrinthine housing estates. There was a clear view of the cathedral’s dome from the back garden and in my youth, Galway seemed biblical.

It’s tempting to warp history with our minor narratives. Was one age of that old town really giving way to another during that summer, as it now seems? No, but I was shedding skin. The country itself was stuck in a pregnant pause between the boom that revived it and the boom that would cripple it. The eastward view from the Lough Atalia trainbridge, particularly awe-inspiring during a drunken mid-summer sunrise, was yet to be sullied by a luxury hotel, a multiplex and a giant home-furnishing chain.

There were two routes to the city centre from Renmore: the long way, along the main road, then around Lough Atalia, or the direct route, down a narrow footpath beside the train tracks that ascended over the lake. Vagrants and winos haunted the trainbridge after dark. It was barely lit and considered unsafe to walk it at night. One Sunday evening, I was walking the trainbridge at dusk and encountered two men who exuded something evil. I braced myself, but they passed. Slowly, I built up the courage to walk that bridge in the middle of the night, cocky with beer and belief in my own good luck, encouraged by the thought of fifteen minutes saved, though every step was terrifying.

They were the last months of Taylor’s pub. That place fostered an anarchic impulse that jarred with Ireland’s sudden economic seriousness. It was later to become a more upscale house of sin, a strip club called Club Paradis. Before the ban, a smoggy cloud of cigarette smoke always hung low from the ceiling. There was a spacious beer garden for joint smokers and a moldy side room with a piano that had the feel of a catacomb. Musicians played in the back corner of the main room. I walked into Taylor’s one Monday night in June and found a ten-piece Bretagne folk group mid-harmony. Friday’s session was the best in town. There was none of the bleating heart balladry that roped in the tourists. The musicians were young and played like they’d been drinking Buckfast all day and wanted to chop down trees.

Those sessions were like punk gigs, but they were an exception. At quieter sessions around the city, it was difficult to avoid the arch sins of an Irish-American. The encounter with authentic culture would stoke something desperately sentimental in me. Sometimes, I’d get chatting to some American holidaymakers between songs, ideally Midwesterners. Five or ten minutes of small talk and I’d glean enough cultural superiority to affirm my place in that room. They always made it so easy.

One Tuesday, I took the bus thirty kilometers to Kinvara for a session. I’d been told I might catch John Prine or John Martyn playing for pints in Green’s on the right night. Only when I got there, the hostel was shut and it was seventy euro to stay at the Merriman Hotel. The session was middling and afterwards, I decided to sleep outside. I tried the high grass near the bay, but the ground was damp and I was eaten by insects. I headed up the back road to Gort, broke into a shed and slept in the back seat of some broken-down car from the 1940s. I was back in Galway by noon the next day.

Hitchhiking was my preferred means of transport that summer. It was a free way to acquire stories and improve my storytelling skills. I’d always end up telling the same handful of stories to the strangers who collected me. The one about how I quit my job at a Boston newspaper and moved to Galway, having met a Clare woman. Or the one about how my mother moved from Galway to New Jersey in 1974 with about twenty other Irish nurses and how they married Americans with surnames like Murphy, Mallon and Mahoney.

Galway can easily be hitched into, but not out of. E lived in mid-Clare, and I spent a lot of time on the side of the miserable Galway to Ennis road, the N18, thumb outstretched.

Only bored or lonely men desperate for company collect hitchhikers anymore. Stoic farmers are not as bad as they sound. There is only so much to say about the weather, and once it was said, I’d sit back and enjoy the scenery. Salesmen drone on. It was a lottery once that indicator was flicked. I consider myself lucky. I got lifts from two different crippled men within one month.

The first was an Englishman in his thirties heading to Connemara. He picked me up outside of Ennis and produced a lump of hash. “Can you skin a joint?” he asked. I assented, even though I am a dunce with hash. It was a black mystery. After twenty minutes, I produced something you might find in a prehistoric Rastafarian museum. Half of the lump was gone. He decided we’d pull over and sort out the situation. I suggested Coole Park. It was picturesque and spacious and literary. We parked, he reskinned the joint and then reached into the back seat for his crutches.

“I’ll just need a hand getting out,” he said.

He could barely put weight on his feet. I was dumbstruck to be so oblivious. We found a spot on the lush lawn, beside a high stone wall. It was crowded and we smoked discreetly. He said he was rock-climbing in Spain when his cord cut. He fell twenty feet and landed flat on his back. He’d probably never walk again without the aid of crutches.

We got really stoned. There must have been three joints worth of hash in that spliff. We pulled to the side of the road outside Clarinbridge for the hash to pass. There was a clear view of the Burren. He asked me if I had artistic ambitions. I said I wanted to write a novel. I threw the question back at him. He said he wanted to write a film. Neither of us sounded convincing.

The other cripple was a bespectacled man in his late fifties who collected me in Gort. He had been seriously injured in a car crash and drove a modified SUV with an automatic transmission that allowed him to continue his work on a horse farm. He seemed crushed by loneliness. There was a perviness about him that bubbled over when I mentioned I grew up near New York.

“Before the accident,” he said. “I used to go to New York every year. I used to go to this one place, this nice restaurant, and then go to the dances. I’d dance with a few girls. But I’d dance with a few of the boys as well,” he said, looking over to me.

“Do you ever do that?” he eventually said.

“No,” I said.

“Well, there was nothing wrong with it,” he said.

He would have driven me to Paris. We didn’t say much more to each other until we passed the site of his car crash, just at the turn for the Oranmore coast road. He explained that he had been hit in the middle of the night by a car full of Germans driving on the wrong side of the road. At Eyre Square, I thanked him guiltily and fled.

Galway thinks it is a city, but it is wrong. If Galway was a city, Johnny Massacre would have been like Zozimus or Mr Butch, the dread-locked, tin-whistle playing homeless guy who haunted Allston for years before he was killed in a motor scooter crash in 2007. A fringe eccentric with a theatrical name. But in a town like Galway, Johnny Massacre was a power station.

The day I got that lift with the pervy guy was the day I learned that Johnny Massacre died. A small crowd had gathered around Fahy’s Barbershop in front of a pile of flowers. Rain had ravaged the city that day, flooding houses near the Spanish Arch. The Corrib roared lustily to the sea.

A guy I knew named Mike or John was standing across the road from Monroe’s. He looked angry. I asked him what the vigil was about, although I probably knew.

“You know your man Johnny Massacre?” he said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead? How?”

“He was killed in a car crash,” he said.

We stood there swearing for a few moments. Then he left and I never spoke to him again.

Arts Week was underway, with Race Week to come right afterwards. Street performers could earn enough to make it to Halloween. A few days after Johnny Massacre was put in the ground, a few Peruvians arrived unannounced with big amps, pipe whistles and knowledge of the U2 back catalogue. The drunks and tourists lapped it up. This was all to add to the tragedy.

My money ran out just a week later and I took a job at Jury’s Hotel, washing dishes and cleaning bedrooms. I’d worked plenty of bad jobs, but labor had never felt as degrading. I was back in America for the World Series, though it was only an interlude.

Johnny Massacre deserved a dramatic, public death worthy of his own dangerous occupation. To choke on his sword or fall from his unicycle into the Corrib. Instead John Doran died in the early afternoon after smashing into a car driven by two off-duty Gardai in Westmeath.

That Sunday night, the city was electric with grief. Finally, we had been given cause for revolt. Death is always cruel but selectively treasonous. Johnny Massacre’s act was an affirmation of life. For it, he was struck down.

Piecemeal tokens of remembrance were made – toasts offered, candles lit – but the seditious moment passed. Galway is no place to raise an army. There is no overthrowing the true order, not with burnouts and hippies. Instead, they held a “memorial busk” a few days after the funeral. I took that long walk home, raw from the road. We all woke up the next day. Gough remembers a “huge round of applause” at Johnny Massacre’s graveside in Cullyfad. It is inspiring still, the roar of the living. I would have liked to have heard it. Galway’s soul remains deep in the trouser pockets of whatever suit he was buried in.

Donald Mahoney lives in Stockholm