Midlife Irish

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by Frank Gannon


  I heard a strange sentence more than once: “We have fun with the misery.” In general there seems to be three opinions: A, Drinking is good; B, Drinking is bad; and C, Complete and utter ambiguity.

  The clear winner seemed to be “C.” Even the clichés were ambiguous. I saw these words framed in a pub: “Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you fight with your neighbor, it makes you shoot at your landlord, and it makes you miss.”

  Among those in category “A,” the defenders of drink, the most popular defense is some version of, “Pubs are not for drinking; they are for conversation.” Since every pub we walked into had a loud, continuous, neverending (or even pausing) collective conversation, there was something to this argument. But, as was pointed out to me by a member of the “B” party, “There are no Starbucks in Ireland.”

  An English major can’t walk around Dublin without thinking of Ulysses and, in thinking about the book and Dublin, thinking about alcoholic beverages. As Bloom says in the novel, “A good puzzle would be (to) cross Dublin without passing a pub.” Indeed, at the Guinness Brewery at Saint James Gate, there’s a museum dedicated to the formal study of beverage-imbibing. Dublin is a lot more than the sum of its pubs, but the city seemed a great place to get clinical about the Irish and the drink.

  Drinking beverages that contain alcohol leads to many things. In Macbeth, Shakespeare said that it led to three things: sinus problems, excessive urination, and lechery. He pointed out that the last symptom was helpful in the prologue to the event, but a hindrance in the performance of the same. Time has confirmed him as the wisest of Englishmen, an admittedly handicapped contest.

  It also, of course, leads to violence and craziness and appearances on the television program Cops clad only in underwear. Fighting and booze are forever married in the Irish consciousness. John Wayne’s epic fight with Victor McLagen in The Quiet Man was punctuated, quite appropriately, by a midbattle stop at the local pub. If you’re Irish, goes this line of “thought” (hammered home in countless movies), you drink, and if you drink, you fight. It makes things rather simple.

  Recently the field of magnetic imaging achieved the technological ability to determine the exact points at which a human brain processes certain stimuli. Research scientists can now actually “observe” an idea. There is an identifiable place in the brain that responds to abstract ideas like “cuteness” and “morality.” The amygdala goes off when it sees little puppy dogs. A portion of the orbitofrontal cortex generates activity when asked about the death penalty.

  The sections for “Irish” and “Crazy” are, in the collective American brain, the same place. It’s difficult to say exactly when the “Irish” site appropriated the “Crazy” site, but the site for “Irish” contains “Crazy” as well as “Cop,” “Love of Mother,” and so forth. Billy Conn’s explanation of why, far ahead on pints, he tried to knock out Joe Louis and got ko’ed himself: “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be crazy?” turns out to be a very prescient observation by the Pittsburgh Kid.

  Irish America wants “Crazy” to be seen as “Lovably Deluded” rather than “Psychotically Anomalous.” We want using, “Heck, he was just being Irish,” as an excuse to carry some legal weight.

  The fighting Irish. Good participle, and, in my limited experience, largely true. I know several Irish guys who are, in toto, a big pain in the ass. The kind of guy who will, when aroused, attack a towel machine. No less a man than Paddy Flood, boxer trainer and ubermick, put it best: “The Irish love trouble like no other race. When God made the Irish, He made 99 percent of them Iagos.”

  I am Irish and I don’t ordinarily love trouble. Yet, in a car wash in Demorest, Georgia, it found me. We had a brief relationship. I actually punched a guy in the mouth. It was on Sunday afternoon and no alcohol was involved. There was just something about that guy. Something that said, “Please punch me,” to part of my lymph system. So I did.

  I had just finished listening to “Born to Be Wild” on the radio. If I had been listening to Kenny G it might never have happened. I was driving a Volvo, the least aggressive car in the world. I pulled into the little car wash. I took out the two plastic mats and hung them up on those hook things. I started vacuuming out my pacifistic Volvo.

  A guy in a pickup truck drove in. No one else was there. There were three stalls. Nevertheless, he selected the one labeled “trouble.” He didn’t know that he was in the company of Irish people. Me. I finished vacuuming and went over to ask him something. I left the vacuuming before my fifty cents worth of vacuum was over. I courteously wanted to get to him before he put his three quarters in the box to activate the “wash” experience. I was concerned and utterly affable. If you saw me you would say that I looked like the nicest guy in the world. Mr. Friendly.

  “Excuse me,” I said. My body language said that I was sorry that I had to inconvenience him in any way. “I have my mats hung up in that stall and the other two stalls don’t have those hook things for mats, so could you move to another stall?”

  “No,” he said.

  I could have said, “What?” or something. Or I could have just taken the mats down. My original reaction was “take down the mats and make a nasty sarcastic comment.” That’s the reaction that I was acting on when I looked at him. He had what I interpreted to be a smirk.

  So I did what anyone would do, any card-carrying Irishman. I punched him in the mouth.

  He didn’t fall down and my hand started to throb. He sort of stumbled against his truck. But I did see that he was amazed and shocked at what the old guy with the Volvo had done. Then he said the words that made it all worthwhile.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, and I thought, I think I just broke my hand but I am happy.

  Later, of course, the unfortunate moral side of me made me feel really bad. At the same time, the physical side of me was leaning on the pain button.

  But the Irish part of me said, Nice going.

  The Experiment

  I decided, like Doctor Jekyll, to use myself as a guinea pig in my investigation of the connection between booze and the Irish. I was Irish, so I was walking around with my own handy laboratory. Paulette is, regrettably, not Irish, so she was not a subject for study in this clinical situation. I decided that I would go to a pub in Ireland and drink until I became intoxicated. Then I would carefully record my data.

  So we went to a pub at approximately 9:30 P.M. I then consumed several pints of Guinness, more than enough to achieve my clinical goal. Paulette was not quite a designated driver. She had also consumed a few. There was a live band playing Irish music. They got better and better as the evening progressed.

  We met some young Irish people, Robbie and Lief. Lief was a girl. They had been dating for a few years. Lief told me that they like to go to pubs quite a bit. Robbie liked it a little more than she did. He seemed to want to do this on a regular basis.

  As an elder, I counseled him. I told him that it wasn’t a good idea to get wasted. As I told him this, we drank glass after glass of semipotent beverage until well after an hour when decent people were asleep. It was fun to travel to a distant country and then drink too much, even if it was a scientific experiment.

  By around two, the place started emptying out. It was a Tuesday, and as Robbie told me, it was a good idea to stop drinking at 2:00 A.M. on a work night. We said our goodbyes in the near-empty pub. I was quietly proud that we had, indeed, “closed the place.”

  That was when a quiet horror gripped us.

  Our Punta, our red, little, comforting Punta, was gone.

  At first we controlled our panic by walking up and down the street. Paulette suggested that perhaps we should call either our B&B or, maybe, the police. Our Punta was gone.

  I was, despite the nine Guinnesses, amazed and appalled. Criminal activity in a lovely land like Ireland! What a world we live in! If I hadn’t been drunk I’d have been even more appalled. As we walked through the streets and slowly got used to the idea that yes, our car had been st
olen, various near-desperate ideas ran through our alcohol-addled brains (okay: my alcohol-addled brain). Paulette offered the opinion that the group of Irish youths gathered near the corner might perhaps be a sort of Clockwork Orange ultraviolence group. I could not assure her that that was, indeed, not the fact. I reminded her that Clockwork Orange was set in England. It was also fictional, I think.

  We wandered up and down the street, searching in vain for our vehicle. The truth still hadn’t quite sunk in. Our rented car was gone. And it would remain that way. Our bright red minicar, the Punta, was now gone. Gone forever. Someone could write an opera about this.

  I thought of what things we had in the car. Not much. This wasn’t so bad. Tomorrow we’d call the rental place. It probably happens all the time. We walked a few desultory blocks, up and down. We had no car. I had no car and I was drunk. We were walkers. We were losers. I was a drunken loser.

  We happened to see a woman, an attractive woman, actually, but with an alarmingly white face. She looked like a woman in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. But she didn’t seem to be a lady of the evening, even though she was standing in the doorway of a shop.

  Paulette called out to her, and the woman with the white face responded to the desperation in Paulette’s voice.

  “Please,” said Paulette, “I think our car has been towed. Do they tow cars here?” I hadn’t thought of that. I made a mental note: Drunkenness in an Irish person often leads to stupidity.

  “Yes, they tow cars here, but not often,” said the white-faced woman, who was beginning to remind me of the ladies in Cabaret. “I am sure they did not tow your car. What kind of car was it?”

  “It was a rental,” I said, “a little red something-or-other.” I could not bring myself to say, “Someone stole our Punta.”

  “Are you sure it was parked here?” asked Lotta Lenya. “The block over looks exactly like this block.”

  “Oh, no,” said Paulette. “I know that it was right here.”

  I remembered the name of the store we had parked in front of. (I couldn’t remember it now without a whole lot of sodium pentothal.)

  “You know,” she said, “there is another store with that name.”

  I told her that I was sure we were parked in front of this store. At that moment I wasn’t sure of anything, but I faked it.

  “Ah,” said the woman with the white face. What did that “Ah” mean? I thought.

  Paulette and I looked at each other hopelessly. We were now sure that our car had been stolen. Stolen in Ireland. We came looking for our ancestors and someone stole our car.

  I tried to be philosophical.

  “Hey, we’ll call the police,” I said. “It will be an adventure.”

  At that point the white-faced woman said, “Is this your car?”

  I looked at the car. It looked a little bit like our car. As a matter of fact, it looked just like our car. But it was gray. Our Punta was red.

  But I looked at the car. It looked, except for the color, exactly like our car. I moved closer. I looked in the window, and what I saw was startling.

  The car had my “Irish” hat on the backseat. Maybe it was somebody else’s hat. They have those hats all over Ireland. Every Irishman owns one.

  I looked at the woman. I realized (much later than a rational person should have realized) that her face was so white because many of the streetlights in Ireland are yellow. Take a little red car; stick it under one of those lights. It looks kind of gray. Oops.

  Yes, it was our car. If I had drunk nine glasses of sodium pentothal, I still should have realized that.

  “Well, that’s good for you,” said the white-faced woman. She gave us a little smile. I looked at my hands. They looked white. Golly. Science in action. Spectrum stuff or something. Why hadn’t I paid attention in high school?

  We got into the Punta and waved to the white-faced woman as we drove back to our hotel. Paulette, of course, drove. I felt pretty stupid. I also felt pretty drunk. But the evening wasn’t a total loss. I had real clinical evidence of the effect of alcohol on the Irish brain.

  TWELVE

  Dublin: End of Days

  Dublin is a great city, a city where you can find anything that you are seeking. It’s the sort of place that you could spend a year in and still miss many, many things. We had two days. Rather than run around trying to squeeze in as much as possible, we continued with our casual meandering manner. It had been good to us so far, so why change now? We would miss a lot, but we knew by now that we would be returning more than once.

  If the West of Ireland seems like the nineteenth century, Dublin is right on the cutting edge of 2002. The population is a million and a half, but I got the strange impression from talking to people in Dublin that everybody knows each other. Nobody calls Dublin a “city.” It is a “town.” As in the rural parts of Ireland, the people were unfailingly friendly, and it is much harder not to get into a conversation than it is to begin one. Dublin is by far the friendliest large city I ever experienced. I’m not much of a world traveler, but Dublin seems friendlier than any large American city. Other Americans we met told us the same thing. I have no theories about this.

  Like New York, Dublin has the horribly poor and the abominably rich right next to each other. You can see serious-suit guys with their cell phones glued to their ears, and they’re walking by buildings where you can make out wash-lines hung in the rear.

  Dublin circa 2002 is the epitome of a “boom town.” Housing prices have gone up over 25 percent in the last year, and its economic growth rate stays about 8 percent. You can almost feel it grow as you walk around, but it grows, like New York or a teenage boy, vertically, not horizontally.

  A lot of places in Dublin have the juxtaposition of the old and the new. There are bars that look as if H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster should be sitting at a corner table, but the second floor of the same building looks like Clockwork Orange with an Irish accent.

  Many of the major streets in Dublin are the polar opposites of the roads in rural Ireland. They were the widest streets I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t really tell you how many “lanes” of traffic there were. The moving cars are only rarely in a straight line.

  It’s a great city for strolling, but a better city for stopping completely. You can’t walk twenty-five feet without seeing someone standing still or seated. Dublin is New York in the Bizarro world: I never saw anyone who was obviously in a hurry.

  Even though it’s a huge city, it seems to invite you to take it easy. The park, Phoenix Park, is huge. It seems appropriate that the largest area in the city is dedicated to nothing more serious than walking your dog. There are a lot of statues in Dublin. I saw a tour guide with some tourists and I thought he was talking about statues. He was pointing at them, anyway. I eavesdropped. He was talking about a statue of William of Orange that was exploded, melted down and rebuilt, and then exploded again. William of Orange was not unique. The tour guide talked about many other statues of famous people that the Irish had exploded.

  Maeve Binchy has said that a good way to write a novel is to go Ireland, go into a pub, sit down, and listen. Dublin is probably the best place to do this in Ireland. Some people would argue with that and say that the west is conversation central in Ireland, but my vote goes to Dublin. The west is more charming, but in the “pub talk” category, I’ve got to go with Dublin. I vote for Dublin because of the range of talk you can get there. If you look hard enough you can find almost any kind of conversation you like. The conversational range is vast: from meandering tale to urban speed-talk. The way Irish people use English is always amazing, and compared to a lot of American talk, it’s like listening to a guy come in and play something on the piano after you’ve listened to a guy tuning it for an hour. If the English language were an electric guitar, Dublin is Jimi Hendrix. Most of America plays on a Yanni album.

  In Dublin pubs, the simplest sentences can become a tangled web of words. I spent a few years teaching high-school English and, for me, Irish talk was
an amazing experience. No subject-verb-object. No present or past tense. Questions are answered by questions. Sometimes statements are questions. Everything has already happened, and we are recalling it or we’re pretending we’re in the future and we are describing it. Are you after having read that? Is it the next sentence you’re after?

  That may make it sound as if it’s difficult to understand (for a Yank). It isn’t at all. It does make you pay attention, though. After having spent some time in Dublin I no longer think that James Joyce was a completely and utterly unique writer. He was just really good at Irish.

  I am, I think, the only member of the extended Gannon family who ever got paid for producing words, but I am, to be honest, not in the top ten as a word producer, and I haven’t even met a lot of my extended family. I may be in the bottom of the top hundred, but by that statement, I’m being nice to myself. Irish people naturally love words. I am the only one in the family who ever wrote them, that’s all. I wouldn’t put a patch on an Irish writer’s ass, as my mom would say.

  My childhood was surrounded by words. A whole bunch of weddings and get-togethers and wakes and what-have-yous. I grew up in a big swirling ocean of words. They were technically “English,” but in every way that matters they were Irish words, or at least “Irish-English.” There was an occasional dip into Gaelic, but my mom and dad didn’t want us to know that language. It’s a cliché to say that Ireland has an “oral tradition,” but it’s more than a tradition. Silence must be filled. I remember many long, crowded car rides where a “Pinteresque pause” was, at the most, three seconds.

  When I was little, very little, I was “the quiet one.” My mom told me that they would sometimes forget me because I was so quiet. I was not quiet. I was just waiting for a break in the conversation.

  My first memories are of this endless torrent of words. An unending spiel. Even when someone died, they would put the deceased out there in his coffin, then they would talk to him anyway. The next day, they’d take him out and bury him. Then they’d go back to the house and talk about him.

 

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