Midlife Irish

by Frank Gannon

  We wanted a theme, something that you could approach in a more general way—something you could go after without a lab coat, but some great generality that floated around Ireland, Literary Ireland, if it could be arranged.

  We decided on our subject pretty quickly considering the vast panorama of Ireland that presented itself to us. It was a subject quite vast, yet a subject almost every Irishman had an opinion about.

  The Drink

  My dad didn’t drink very much and my mom didn’t drink at all. Even after thinking hard, I had to say that I never saw my dad in the Irish state of “a drop taken.” Even Saint Patrick’s Day and weddings never moved him to imbibe too much.

  I have to admit that I don’t really know many Irish people who drink way too much. When I come to think about it, the “problem” drinkers I know aren’t even a little Irish. Nevertheless, on the official “Irish Day” (March 17) in America, the standard thing to do is drink. You can also make jokes on that day, but a great majority of them involve Irishmen and their fatal love for liquid refreshment. Of course, in America, people drink at Christmas. But they also open presents and do a lot of other things. On Saint Patrick’s Day, there are no presents, just booze. Along with New Year’s Eve, the focal point is alcohol.

  In old American movies, whenever there is an overtly Irish man, he is often a guy who really likes to drink. He’s often a funny, garrulous, likable guy, but he’s also a drunk. In American movies “Irishness” is often almost exactly equivalent to the Irish character’s fondness for booze. It might have nothing to do with reality, but in most American movies of the thirties, forties, and fifties, the connection is hard to miss. If the character you’re playing is Irish you’re going to be drunk and happy about it.

  It’s not just the movies that have linked alcohol and the Irish. If you wander down Broadway in New York City, it is difficult to walk a block without encountering a bar with an Irish name on the sign. There may be no real O’Brian who owns O’Brian’s, but if you are stuck for the name of a bar, try one that starts with a “Mc” or an “O’.” When they market a new alcohol product, they often name it after an Irish person.

  In Ireland, every small town has a pub, and the pub owner has a well-defined, respectable role in the community. In the West of Ireland, everyone knows the pub owner, who is usually a very popular man.

  So it wasn’t surprising that my dad, an ambitious but poor Irish guy newly arrived in America, wanted to open a pub. He was, like so many of his post-World War II Irish-American brethren, doing what came naturally. “Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor” was born.

  There is, in Ireland, the pub-evaluation term, “good house.” A “good house” is a place where a decent man might sit and have a glass or two without being bothered by things like fights and, as I heard it called in Ireland, “the general tumult of the world.” In a good house a man can sit and sip his frothy beverages amid the company of other frothy beverage fans and be assured that he’s not going to hear “It’s All about the Benjamins” or something by Billy Idol. He’s not going to encounter young men attempting to “converse with members of the opposite sex,” unless those members are very, very familiar with those young men. Like they’re married. No one is going to eat dinner, or fight, or attempt to make money, or, perish the thought, obtain illegal substances. No one is going to do anything that detracts from the main objective: drinking alcohol-laden beverages while sitting on tall stools.

  Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor, located in Camden, New Jersey, was a good house for twenty years. Then, in 1966, it became, for my dad, something else. Something less.

  In October of that year a man walked into the liquor store area and asked for a six-pack of beer. The young man was overweight, bearded, and possessed a receding hairline. He was also seventeen years old.

  The young man was on a mission. The American Beverage Control Board had sent him to Gannon’s. The American Beverage Control Board was an organization charged with the unfortunate responsibility of determining whether every bar stayed within the law. The law in New Jersey at that time (it’s since been changed) was that no one under the age of eighteen was legally allowed to buy alcoholic beverages. The inordinately old-looking kid was a shill for the American Beverage Control Board. Every year they hired some seventeen-year-old kid who looked to be much older than he really was. I don’t know where they got these kids (the circus?). The kid “tested” bars by walking in and attempting to buy beer or liquor or wine. The kid would walk in, and if the bar sold him booze, he would leave and be followed in the door by the “ABC” men. Then the bar would be fined and shut down for a week. This was “fair” in Camden, New Jersey, and the gulag.

  My dad hated paying the fine and he hated losing a week’s worth of business, but more than anything else he hated the fact that the ABC would run a notice in the local newspaper informing citizens that a bar had willfully broken the law. That really sickened him.

  So Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor was, in 1966, for a week at least, no longer a “good house.” As the day for the announcement approached, my dad would grimly study the Camden Courier Post. His brow would wrinkle in concentration as he sat in the big green upholstered chair that was his and his alone. Dad’s chair sat in the corner of our living room right next to the console RCA television with the statue of the Blessed Mother on top. Woe to he who sits in that chair if his name isn’t Bernard Gannon.

  When the day of the axe finally arrived, I was sitting on the living-room sofa. It was about six o’clock in the evening. My dad stared at the paper with a blank look. He jerked involuntarily when he got to the legal notice informing the public of his “crime.” He read the notice, read it again, put down the paper, took off his glasses, stood up, and walked quietly upstairs. His face was the face of a man walking to the gallows. He stayed up there for the rest of the night. My mom went up to talk with him. I didn’t go near him. I just sat on the sofa and watched him slowly walk up the steps. A crushed man.

  He took it hard. He had always lived in dread of the ABC. He thought they were unfair, but his dread of them was almost frightening. Before his infraction, he talked of the ABC often. He rarely called them “the ABC.” He called them “the cursed ABC,” as if “cursed” was part of the organization’s name. He pronounced it “ker-said.” It emphasized, in an almost biblical way, his intense hatred for the vile organization.

  He talked about the cursed ABC with such bitterness that I remember wondering as a child why my dad hated those alphabet letters that were always in the front of my classroom right under the picture of God at Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School. (I confused easily as a child. Still do.) The cursed ABC was worse than the boogieman. The cursed ABC will find you. The cursed ABC will find you and, when he finds you, “He will ruin you for life!”

  Now, in 1966, just when I had left Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School for Camden Catholic High School, the worst had happened. By then I thought of it as some vague horrible event in the future. Now it was here. The cursed ABC had found my father. The cursed ABC had found my father and ruined him for life.

  The total devastation of my father was published in the Camden Courier Post, the local venue for devastation announcements. It was printed in tiny print and buried on a page near the back of the paper, but for my dad, it might as well have been tattooed on his forehead. For my father, it was Hester Prinne all over.

  ALCOHOL CODE VIOLATIONS, CAMDEN: Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor. Sale of alcoholic beverages to a minor.

  He had to pay a fine and close the bar for a week. When he was asked why the bar was closed, he said that he was doing some renovation.

  The bar reopened, of course, but things could never again be all right. Something very valuable had been taken from him. It was something that could never be returned.

  He knew, deep in his Irish psyche, that Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor, a place into which he had poured his soul, was no longer a “good hou
se.” The cursed ABC had finally gotten him.

  My dad took the whole thing much more seriously than he should have. For a couple of years he stopped attending Saint Cecilia’s Church. The church was a block from our house (church proximity was a major factor in my mom’s choice of residence), but on Sundays my dad would get up even earlier than he normally did and drive fifteen miles to another Catholic church. In that distant church, he was anonymous; no one knew of the place and the cursed ABC.

  I am sure that no one but my dad thought of the liquor bust, but no one could tell him that. He was like a Nathaniel Hawthorne character, a man haunted by his “sin.” He would ask me every week if anyone had mentioned “the thing” (he could not give it any other name). I would always tell him “No,” but he would stare deep into my eyes, searching for any sign of deception.

  Over the next few years, “the thing” was a frequent subject of discussion among the family, but we were very careful never to mention it outside the house. But around the dinner table, or driving to work, I heard the story many times. Each time it gained details. The kid the ABC hired got older and older looking (he was eventually bald and bearded with a lot of gray in his beard). If my dad had lived longer, the ABC kid would have looked older than he did. Eventually, my dad hinted that he strongly suspected that the American Beverage Control Board frequently resorted to cosmetic surgery. Nothing was beyond them. They were controlled by Satan, and they did his work.

  My dad’s brother, Uncle John, told me that my dad had talked about owning a pub from the time they were little kids back there is West Meath. According to John, Bernie Gannon thought that pub ownership was a great calling, second only to the priesthood. When William Butler Yeats described an Irishman’s ambition as “doing the most difficult thing that can be contemplated without despair,” he was certainly talking about Bernard Gannon, the hopelessly poor kid who wanted to own his own pub.

  Sometimes I would catch my dad just standing motionless outside Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor. He would just stand there with a very serene look on his face: portrait of a man in love.

  My dad’s attitude toward his pub was very typical of first-generation Irish. If mythology says something very basic about the people who produced it, we can see an ancient love/hate relationship between the Irish and the drink. For the Irish, as has been often noted, mythology and history tend to be blended, and this is very evident in their ancient myths. These things didn’t “happen,” but in a very real sense, they are always happening.

  The ancient Irish worshiped nature gods who lived in a world named Tir Nan Og, “the Land of Eternal Youth.” The big book is called Lebor Gabala Erenn, the book of “the taking of Ireland.” The book records the lives of six races of Irish inhabitants. Some are human, some divine, but, as in the Greek myths, everyone acts more like human beings than like gods.

  The gods are creative beings (poets, artists), and the regular people are farmers. The regular people finally “win” Ireland, and the gods have to hide themselves in nature. They live in the beautiful parts of Ireland, which is almost everywhere.

  These regular people are called the “Gael.” Their enemies are the Fomor, a race of one-eyed giants who live in the ocean. The great hero of Ireland is Finn mac Cumhal (often called Finn mac Cool). He marries a woman named Murna, and they have a son Ossian. They lived long enough to interact with the fellow who was responsible for replacing all this with Christianity, Saint Patrick.

  The Vikings destroyed the old writings about Finn mac Cumhal, so the oldest extant one dates from 1453. The book The Boyish Exploits of Finn mac Cumhal tells the story of Finn and Saint Patrick sitting down, having some drinks, and talking about things. In some versions, Saint Patrick actually turns old Finn into a Catholic. In some of them Finn remains a pagan. In the version where he rejects Catholicism, Finn’s son Ossian tells Saint Patrick what the best things in life are: “To share bowls of barley, honey and wine.” Even mythological Irishmen know, in the words of Flann O’Brian, “A pint of plain is your only man.”

  * * *

  Because alcohol and Ireland are so linked in the public mind, there are, according to my research, 21,982 jokes involving Irish people and alcohol. (All right. I made that up.) The archetypal joke is the one that follows. This is the Irish/Alcohol joke that exists in Plato’s world of essences. It’s labeled “The Irish/Alcohol Joke.”

  An Irishman is standing outside a hospital with a look of great worry. He seems on the verge of tears and he implores passersby. A wealthy Englishman approaches.

  Irishman: “Sir, please help me. My wife has to have an operation or she will die, and they won’t do it unless I can raise one thousand dollars. Please help me.”

  Englishman (seeing how distraught the Irishman really is): “Here is your money. God bless you!”

  Irishman: “And God bless you, sir!”

  Englishman (as an afterthought): “And you look like you haven’t slept in days. Here’s a pound. Go have yourself a drink and calm down.”

  Irishman (refusing the money): “Hey, I have drinking money.”

  This is generally acknowledged to be the “Danny Boy” of Irish drinking stories.

  The Irish fondness for alcohol, like many ugly racial stereotypes, turns out to have some actual, sociopsychological validity. It is, of course, impossible to get a full set of data on the subject. How do you measure “fondness” for alcohol? And, until the twentieth century, people didn’t go around compiling statistics on everything. Nevertheless, concerning the Irish-American, the evidence seems to point a massive finger at the Celtic drinker.

  In 1909, an early academic (with a very academic name), Maurice Parmalee, compiled some statistics on Irish-American drinking habits. He used, as his lab, the city of Boston, a place crawling with Irish guinea pigs. As his barometer, Parmalee used the total number of various ethnic groups arrested for public drunkenness in Boston that year.

  His results confirmed an ugly supposition. In the game of public drunkenness, the Irish were the big winners. Belgians, Scotsmen, and Canadians all scored above average, but the Irish took home the gold. (Unfortunately, this never became an Olympic event.) Other early studies showed the same result. Among “alcoholic case admissions” to a state hospital in 1900, the Irish were, once again, the clear winners. It wasn’t even close. The percentages broke down this way: Irish 37 percent. The Germans, English, and Scotch vied for the silver with scores in the low 20s. The Jewish population had a microscopic 5 percent.

  Richard Stivers, a professor of sociology at Illinois State University, has written the definitive study of the subject, Hair of the Dog. His well-argued thesis is that a negative stereotype was foisted upon Irish-Americans, but that later, Irish America actually used the stereotype to construct a mythical, positive image of the tippling Irishman. This “positive” image is the charming, funny, harmless drunk we see in so many American movies and plays.

  So the myth is, well, a myth. Andrew Greeley, an academic and sociologist as well as a best-selling novelist (and an Irish-American), had this to say after going over what was, by the end of the century, a mountain of data: “Among drinkers, the Irish are no more likely to have a serious alcohol problem than are many other groups in United States society.”

  However, the Irish are unique in celebrating their drinking, in presenting it as an endearing aspect of their culture. They got together, noticed the problem, and had a party for it. “A toast to pathological drinking!”

  Whatever else you can say about that, it is so Irish.

  Everywhere we went in Ireland, the subject of alcohol seemed to bob to the surface at one point in the evening (often late). So it seemed pretty clear that the Irish/booze equation has not completely vanished from the Irish mind. Despite the fact that Dublin is the hub of the new “Celtic Tiger” economic boom in Ireland (can’t see Gordon Gecko as a drunk), it is also the home of countless bars. It is very difficult to walk for five minutes in the town and not pass a drinking establi
shment. Nevertheless, it seemed to me, that by, say, 2050, the whole Irish/booze thing may be gone from the public mind. The big factor, I think, is all these dotcom kids walking around Dublin with the cell phones glued to their ears.

  Half of Ireland is under twenty-eight years old, and almost a third of the population is either in college or already college-educated. Almost 60 percent of them have or are about to earn a degree in business, engineering, or science. Partly because of this, a whole lot of American companies have set up shop in Ireland in a major way, and a lot more are about to follow suit. IBM, Oracle, Motorola, Northern Telecom, Microsoft, Sun, and many, many others are solidly established in Ireland. They even have their own version of Silicon Valley (they call it the “Silicon Bog”). Ireland is a great place to do high tech. There is a young, well-educated workforce, a favorable tax situation, a booming economy, an inviting government, and many other protech factors. In the twenty-first century Ireland isn’t going to be Yeats’s “ancient dreaming race.” There will be a lot more Gordon Geckos than Darby O’Gills.

  In a way, this will be very sad. It makes me feel horrible to think of County Mayo turning into Westchester County. There is, however, for me, a bright spot: I’ll be dead when it happens.

  While we were in Dublin, we were glad to see that we weren’t alone in bemoaning the inevitable. There were frequent editorials in the papers and on the television that had, as their general theme: “When Ireland gets rich, are we going to turn into the English?”

  A frightening thought. We kept out minds off this by pursuing our academic study, tentatively titled, “What is it with Irish people and booze?” Throughout Dublin, I found a lot of people who wanted to talk about it. Of course, I always asked about it in pubs, so my study might have lacked scientific validity. Still, it was fun.