“Should we get some Jack, too?” Billy asked, half-serious.
“Nah.” No fucking way.
We settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese crackers with peanut butter that cost a dollar for six packets—on account of welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm and, above all, on account of Christmas, we could dispense with our usual hippie health-food-store totally organic food pieties—and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and without Danny we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad, weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, but shouldn’t we go out for dinner?
“Shouldn’t we go out for dinner?” I asked.
No argument from Billy. “Let’s do it.”
We hit the strip—the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz—and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was either too expensive or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up to Mission Street. The vegetarian café was open. Of course it was open, but it did not do Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were at home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old; who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree; who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmassy, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a real Christmas, so different from Billy’s and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tofu and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen this? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.
We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into the homes of strangers, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking egg nog and, I imagined, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating “Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all—except for me, except for Billy—a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to our motel room, to our matching queen-size beds, to our already diminished six-packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home, but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule log and all its stupid Yule logness.
“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”
“You got it.”
And there we were. Two depressed teenagers far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, with no presents, no tree, no stockings, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.
Flick. On the next channel: The Sound of Music. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria—not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a von Trapp—comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles! And I thought of Ma back in New York and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather’s little library, listening to the original cast recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. And I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was certain that in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips and pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy’s case—but suddenly, damn it if we didn’t feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn’t singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp strumming his guitar. And that feeling of freedom returned, that sense that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, was right. We both cried; it was good. In my case, the tears flowed free and fast. Billy was more restrained, but a few droplets stained his cheeks, even though he was trying to fight them.
“Hey Billy?”
“Yeah?”
“Pass me another beer.”
“You got it.”
“Thanks. Hey Billy?”
“Yeah?”
“Merry Christmas, man.”
He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Yeah, Merry Christmas.”
• • •
A week later, the boys and I drove up to Oakland for the big New Year’s show, where Vancouver Ben pressed a miracle ticket into my ready and grateful palm, where I spun around the broad corridors of the Coliseum with people I loved, where the night shifted itself down into dawn, into a new decade, into the 1990s. Then back to Santa Cruz, where Danny and Billy and I, joined later by Marie, found a place to live up in the hills, in a century-old log house on stilts right on top of a fault line in a forest of scrub oak and redwoods, Pacific madrones and ancient ferns and pillowy green moss.
• • •
I’m not a Deadhead anymore, and haven’t been one in years. And there are some people who seem to regard that part of my life as a lapse in taste, a failure of discernment. That’s okay by me; I don’t regret it a bit. And I can’t think about this without starting to cry a little, like I did in that motel room that Christmas night, because I look back at my sixteen-, seventeen-year-old self, in some carnival of a parking lot somewhere in America, with no class to go to, no job to worry about, no parents on my case, with the certainty that somehow, through luck and providence and the kindness of strangers, there would be food enough when I was hungry, a place to crash when night came, someone to drink with or to hold fast to when I was lonely, and I get this pain, this pang, this awful, hopeless, close to desperate longing. I think I’d do anything if I could just go back there for one day, just one day. That’s all I’d need. I don’t think I’d want more. Nostalgia really is a bitch, and getting older is hard.
I grew up. And on the whole, I guess I’m glad I did. I left Santa Cruz. I got a GED. I went to college. Went to work. Got married. Moved on. Found other communities where I fit in, with other people I loved.
But I know that part of me will always long for that time, with its many joys and excesses and occasional terrors. I learned what it meant to go too far, to drink too much. And I had acquired something that would serve me immeasurably later on, when I fell in love with bars: I had become wide open to people, more capable of accepting them, and of enjoying them, and of loving them, for all their goodness, and badness, and general mishegoss. I grew bolder: I would talk to anyone, anytime. It almost always paid off; if not in friendship, at least in stories. I look back and what I see first are not tie-dyes and discarded nit
rous oxide cartridges and ticket stubs and spiny green pot plants in lividly illuminated crawl spaces; what I see first are golden-white quivering aspens in autumn on the road from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon. Sunset at Natural Bridges. I see a campfire in a backyard in suburban Rochester, where a very nice man named John Milton—for real—whose address had been given to us mysteriously by a bunch of bikers he didn’t know, let a host of hippies unroll our sleeping bags in his living room, built a campfire for us in his backyard, and made us eggs and home fries and toast the next morning. Mostly, I see those people, and I hear the songs we sang together. I never felt freer in my life than I did in one of those parking lots, or around one of those campfires with those sweet unwashed people, and I’m telling you, brothers and sisters, I never will feel that free again.
3.
AN AMERICAN DRINKER IN DUBLIN
Grogan’s Castle Lounge, Dublin
It is hard to say exactly when I became Irish. It’s not like it happened all of a sudden. It was gradual, incremental. And the Irishness I was interested in had nothing to do with the Kennedys, the Catholic Church, the Clancy Brothers, the green-beer-and-kiss-me-I’m-Irish swag of Saint Patrick’s Day in America. What I was after was an equally bogus and utterly ahistorical idea of an ancient Irishness that reflected, and galvanized, my vague, young, softheaded notions about poetry, revolution, and identity, and the romantic allure of islands, the way they are set apart from the rest of the world, isolated, troubled, special. My instinctive attraction to tribalism in many forms—from the fraternity of drinkers on the Metro-North bar car to the family of lost children I’d joined on the Grateful Dead tour—had found in the ancient Celts and their contemporary descendants yet another expression. Here was another tribe to which I wanted to belong.
For a Jewish girl from New York it was a questionable choice—why on earth would I trade my inherent identification with one historically oppressed people for another?—and a peculiar feat of self-reinvention. Yeats’s poems had a lot to do with it. The Pogues had something to do with it. And fairy tales, and myths, and legends. I was stirred by the stories of Hibernian badasses, from Cuchulainn to Brendan Behan. I was a total sucker for the stolid somber pulse—like heavy steady raindrops—of the bodhran, the big, round, moonlike frame drum that is the dark heart beating within spooky old ballads in which maidens were drowned in rivers by jealous sisters, or babies were abducted by malevolent elves, or plans were hatched to lead bloody midnight insurrections against colonial oppressors.
I had a sense that I would very much like the smell of burning peat in a small parlor on a damp evening, and like even better long leisurely afternoons in a pub on some Dublin backstreet, where gray northern light asserted itself through mist-streaked, half-curtained windows, where I might settle in with a pint of Guinness and a notebook, tinkering with my poems and maybe recording bits of overheard conversations, while regulars argued politics and poetry and talked and drank, talked and drank, talked and drank, until at last a white-haired barman with rolled-up shirtsleeves finally threw his arms up and shouted an exasperated “Last call.” I was sure not only that I’d fit in just fine, but that I could keep up with them all—if not drink them right under the table.
This is a landscape mined with cultural stereotypes, flattering ones and ugly ones, stereotypes all the same, and it is dangerous territory. Perhaps you have heard that we Jews love money and school. You may have also heard that we Jews don’t drink. “No one has ever seen a Jewish drunk,” my mother used to tell me.
Right.
You may have also heard that the Irish do drink, and prodigiously. So, for this and other reasons, by the time I entered college I had become Irish. And though I didn’t stay Irish for long, I was pretty good at it. Second semester, I took an Irish literature survey class. I paced around campus reciting “The Stolen Child” and “The Second Coming” to anyone who would listen. James Connolly, the courageous and unabashed Socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising, had joined Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci in my little pantheon of radical gods. I learned a smattering of Irish Gaelic. I bought a bodhran.
It was hard to explain myself, though, and I was frequently interrogated. My heart was definitely in it; I loved, and knew, Irish folktales, and traditional music, and poetry. But why was I so into this? I didn’t really know. Was it because my upbringing had been so secular, so open, so fertile for self-expression? Maybe, but I hardly thought about it that way. Really, I couldn’t come up with an explanation better than “because it’s interesting.” It was true—Irish history and literature are interesting, but wasn’t that also true of Turkish or Russian or Japanese or—heaven help me—English history and literature? I was deeply unsatisfied by my lame answer to an honest question, maybe even exasperated. I had dyed my hair red. I could easily pass. I was asked so many times if I was Irish that after a point I decided to say that, yes, yes I was, sort of.
• • •
My mother had often told me colorful stories about her paternal grandmother, Anna. She had lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in a mixed neighborhood of aspirational middle-class Eastern European Jews and Irish Catholics whose children fought one another viciously as soon as the parochial and public schools sprang them at the end of every weekday afternoon. Anna sang and played piano, was famously foulmouthed, had left her Hungarian-Jewish husband, my great-grandfather—by all accounts a decent and mild-mannered stationer—and, after the divorce, bore a second child, out of wedlock. She said “burl” for boil and “earl” for oil. She was tough. She had cred. “You’d have thought she was Irish,” my mother, herself a great fan of the whole green-beer-and-kiss-me-I’m-Irish Saint Patrick’s Day thing, said approvingly. And so it was that my great-grandmother Anna, whom I had never met, who was, conveniently, long dead, became Irish. Once I’d decided that, when people asked, “Are you Irish?” I would sheepishly answer, “Oh, not really. Just one great-grandmother.” It was a total crock, and I felt slightly sick to my stomach whenever I repeated it. But I did it anyway, because it made me feel just a little less like some kind of poseur Irish manqué. Which of course was exactly what I was.
In a hallway near the English department office at my school, I saw a poster for a summer course in Irish studies at Trinity College in Dublin. For months before I left that June, it was all I could think about and talk about. I just couldn’t wait to get to Dublin, where I would read good books, find the best pub in the world, and, I had it in my head, maybe meet a real live Irish poet, who would have a lovely soft accent and recite poems to me, and with whom, I hoped, I might have a brief but memorable affair.
The kids in the summer program were told to meet at a designated spot at Kennedy Airport, near the Aer Lingus check-in area. I spotted them right away. They were clean-cut and preppy in their khaki shorts and polos and fleece pullovers, well-adjusted and healthy-looking. I was not, in my black leggings and Converse high-tops and nose ring, a pack of Camel Lights distending the top left pocket of my denim jacket, the dark rings under my eyes evidence of the hangover that had resulted from my send-off at a bar in the East Village the night before. They gathered together in an excited little circle. I did not join them. Instead, I sat by myself in one of those contoured bench seats in a corner of the terminal, drinking coffee and reading a translation of the ancient Irish epic the Táin. And then I saw a guy walk in wearing a leather jacket, its blackness brightened by an ACT UP button: a pink triangle on a black field, Silence = Death. Rad. We gave each other a look. I felt a little better.
• • •
On the flight I sat next to an Irish couple returning from a New York vacation. “First trip to Ireland?” the missus asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m going to study there for the summer.”
“Oh, and where’s that?”
“Dublin. Trinity College,” I said.
“Top school,” the mister said.
“Grand,�
� the missus agreed.
They were done talking to me.
• • •
The in-flight movie was The Field. In it, the great Richard Harris (a film—and drinking—hero of mine, second only to Peter O’Toole) plays a pathologically bitter Irish tenant farmer who fears, not without justification, that he will be forced off his precious green field—which, the viewer is frequently reminded, he had nurtured and coaxed and agonized over and transformed by the sweat of his brow from a patch of hard rock into a lush and fertile pasture—by a rich Irish-American outsider. This does not go well. It ends with the deranged farmer driving his herd of cows off a cliff, into the roiling Atlantic, and unintentionally killing his dim-witted, sometimes violent son along with them.
It is not a film that makes Ireland look good. It depicts the Irish as insular, provincial, suspicious, incapable of adjusting to a changing world, and frankly insane. This was where I was dying to go to study? These were the people in whose history and culture I had so deeply immersed myself? I took a long look at the couple seated next to me. Maybe I’d made a serious mistake.
• • •
We arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and were shepherded to our dorm at Trinity. I’d be sharing a two-bedroom suite with a pretty, blond, sweet-natured California girl whom I strongly suspected was still a virgin. She wore long white nightgowns and a retainer. She seemed scared of me. Like I might hit her, or hit on her.
After a quick nap I walked back through the college gates to check out the city. Dull, familiar chain stores flanked both sides of Grafton Street. I was upset by the spectacle of dozens of children—young children, under ten—begging on the pavement, mostly in boy-girl pairs, members of the Travelers community, I was told later that summer. One little girl in one such pair looked up at me with cold blue eyes. “Spare some change, miss?”
Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) Page 4