The place is revolting. Giovanna is weeping and bleeding. She’s still drunk, but now she’s drunk, sad, hurt, confused, guilty, and slightly hysterical. As soon as the blood started to flow, I immediately went into my typical Mr. Responsible mode. After all, I was a conscientious husband for eight years. I was used to making the phone calls, and hailing the cab, and filling out the paperwork, and negotiating with the nurses for preferential treatment. I had actually gotten quite good at all the stuff that my wife expected of me. It had become second nature.
Colin had come with us to the emergency room. As I guess-timated Giovanna’s height, weight, and birth date, I explained to Colin how my marital history had prepared me to deal with stuff like this. He just looked at me, perplexed. Then he pointed to Giovanna.
“But you’re not married to her.”
I had to acknowledge that this was an accurate statement.
Then he asked, “Are you even banging her?”
I told him that I was not. And then he said something that changed my life forever. I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that Colin’s next statement did more to free my mind from the shackles of my past than twenty years of self-actualization courses and/or tantric chanting ever could have done. He said . . .
“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”
Wow, huh? Pretty amazing. Aristotle on his most profound day never hit that kind of depth or perspicacity. And Aristotle was a full-time philosopher. I think Colin is a paralegal or something.
“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”
A crudely worded but significant question. And as soon as I heard it, I knew that the answer was obvious. I was there out of a sense of obligation. I was there because I was supposed to be there. I was there because it was “the right thing to do.”
But what Colin was really asking me was, “Do you want to be here?” The answer was a resounding “No!” And, by extension, his question implied something powerful, liberating, and a little frightening. He wasn’t just asking “what the fuck are you doing here?” He was also saying “you don’t have to be here.” And he was right. If I just left, what would happen. Nothing. Would Giovanna be angry? Maybe. But why the hell should I care? She wasn’t my wife, my girlfriend, or even my friend really. I barely knew the broad! I’d spent a few boozy evenings listening to her whine about her boyfriend back home while I tried, unsuccessfully, to get into her pants. What kind of sap had I turned into that I actually escorted her to the emergency room and was sitting around worried about the quality of care she received? Hell, I didn’t break her nose on purpose. If I’d been sitting and she’d been standing, she probably would have broken my nose.
Until Colin uttered his query, I had been doing the exact opposite of what I came to Ireland for. I was not in a bar, drinking, singing, screaming, trying to squeeze some adventure out of life. I was filling out health-insurance forms.
You know how many times I’ve filled out health-insurance forms? 2.4 ass-billion times—that’s how many. And that’s an exact number. I always took care of that stuff for my wife. I knew her social security number, her driver’s license number, her insurance information—heck, I still get a Christmas card from the doctor who gave her Botox. I handled all the details and the information. I was like a human BlackBerry—except for the fact that my wife would actually touch her BlackBerry.
I was so accustomed to being the responsible one that it never occurred to me that I was no longer responsible for anyone but myself.
Had married life completely neutered me? Did all those cheese-appreciation classes and trips to the antiques markets in Rhinebeck actually alter my genetic code? Or had I always been a pussy? These are big questions, and they’re difficult questions to answer—especially when you’re sponging blood out of your brown suede wingtips while hemorrhaging drunks shriek in Gaelic. I knew one thing, though. I was going to find out the answers.
I turned to Colin and gave him my reply.
“I’ll tell you what the fuck I’m doing here. I’m getting the fuck out of here! Come on!”
And, with that, I tossed Giovanna’s medical forms onto the lap of an unconscious nonagenarian who looked like he could have played John Wayne’s grandfather in The Quiet Man and led Colin out of the most foul-smelling emergency room this side of Doodyville.
8
Okay, so two minutes after I left the hospital, I raced back in there and sat by Giovanna’s bedside until one of her roommates showed up to take care of her. What do you want from me? Thirty-plus years of being a good boy don’t die easy. But just coming to the realization that I didn’t have to be responsible for someone else all the time anymore had a sobering effect on me. And, by sobering effect, obviously I mean the opposite.
Q: What do you do after you have willfully acted like a callous heel for the first time in your life only to discover that, instead of being wracked by guilt, you feel fantastic? A: You take your recreational drinking to a whole new level.
This is not advice that I would offer to high school or college students. I don’t feel like seminarians or active-duty soldiers currently billeted in war zones would benefit from this suggestion. But, for middle-aged chumps like me who have suddenly realized that they’ve spent most of their lives acting like saps, suckers, and/or patsies, this is an ideal solution.
In the weeks and months following my abandonment of Giovanna to the hands (both literal and figurative) of the Irish National Health Service, I hit the pubs hard. From Davy Byrne’s to the Stag’s Head, from Walshes to Oliver St. John Gogarty, I made a conscious effort to maintain a steady level of inebriation throughout my waking hours. And I didn’t sleep much.
I fell into a routine that allowed me to perform at maximum capacity. It was probably similar to the routines that world-class athletes develop when they’re training intensively for the Olympics. The only difference is, instead of stretching, eating right, and working out, I would drink thirty-two different kinds of beer and whiskey all day and night, with the occasional dose of fish and chips thrown in (for protein).
My average day would begin around noon. The fact that I could actually sleep until noon was somewhat miraculous given that Dublin is extremely loud and none of its windows actually shut all the way. Without a doubt, Las Vegas is the window-seal capital of the world. Dublin is the getting-drunk-at-breakfast capital of the world. Hey, we all have our areas of expertise.
I would then attempt to clean my body to whatever degree was possible. This degree was never particularly high. During my time in Ireland, I stayed in a quaint attic apartment in Temple Bar. It had beautiful views across the Liffey, and James Joyce had once stayed there. Of course, if you trust the brochures, James Joyce once stayed at every single place in Dublin. Rumor has it that he wrote Ulysses at the Burger King on O’Connell Street. My charming apartment had a great deal of charming charm. What it didn’t have was a serviceable bathroom. There was a tiny tub that Verne Troyer could barely fit in, with a showerhead so low that the aforementioned Verne Troyer would have had to kneel to wash his hair (if he had any). In order to make this analogy resonate, it’s important to know that Verne Troyer is the actor who played Mini Me in the Austin Powers movies. He is very small. The fact that the dimensions of the tub were ridiculous was kind of besides the point as there was rarely any hot water.
But I’d splash some water on or around my body and I’d head to the pub. I worked out a strategy that allowed me to take in at least six pubs a day. At that rate I figured I could visit every pub in Dublin by the year 3017.
Usually I met up with Colin somewhere along the way. We wouldn’t call each other. I barely even used my cell phone the entire time I was in Ireland—which is a shame because the country’s cell coverage is stupendous. But somehow Colin would just find me. And wherever he went, good times followed.
There’s an old Irish word that the old Irish throw around all the time over there. It’s craic. Pronounced like “crack,” craic is one of those words that does
n’t have an exact definition but everyone always wants to translate for you. Basically it means “fun.” But not fun like the fun you’d have throwing a Nerf football to your nephew. Craic is the kind of fun you have at two in the morning when you’re so toasted you can barely stand up and someone suggests that you all go outside for a knife-throwing contest and every single one of you thinks this is an awesome idea. That’s the kind of fun they mean when they say craic.
And I have to tell you—they’re on to something. Sure, knife throwing sounds like an idiotic idea when you’re on your way to the office in your three-piece suit with your rolled-up newspaper and your thermos full of decaf. But if you’re in the right mood, with the right group of people, and the right kind of fuel pumping through your veins, it can be a blast. I actually embedded a steak knife about half an inch into Colin’s left forearm, and he was laughing harder than I was! That’s craic, man. The craic would last until they closed down whatever pub we were in. This usually happened earlier than I expected. A lot of places shut it down by midnight. The latest anywhere would be open was 2:30 in the morning. But there’s one thing you have to remember about Ireland—it’s full of Irish people. And they don’t take the closing of every single bar in their country as a sign that they should stop drinking. Oh, no. That’s what the streets, and the parks, and the garages, and the phone booths, and the riverbank, and the bridges, and the steps in front of the police station are for. So the cracking good craictimes would continue al fresco until all the alcohol was gone. Then I would stumble back to my James Joyce Autograph Charming Apartment, and I would fall blissfully asleep until the sun, the chirping birds, and the urban cacophony would wake me once again at the craic of noon.
9
Let me leave the description of my good times for a moment to address a pressing concern. I fear that I have been inhospitable in my portrayal of my wife (ex-wife). I don’t want to sound like one of those guys who complains about what an evil, crazy bitch he turned out to be married to. I hear that all the time and I can’t help but wonder, “If she was so horrible, why did you marry her?” They make it seem like, just because it ended badly, there was never anything good there. And that was definitely not the case with my marriage.
So, for the record, my ex-wife is not an evil, crazy bitch. When we first met, I thought that she was smart, beautiful, sensitive, creative, and interesting. And I was right. I’m still right. She still is a smart, beautiful, sensitive, creative, and interesting person. I just never noticed that she’s also the single most self-obsessed person on planet earth. And I’m factoring Sharon Stone and Kim Jong Il into this equation.
All things considered, my wife and I had a pretty good run. Out of the eight years together, I’d say that two were just flat-out fantastic. One was forgettable—as in absolutely nothing happened and I have forgotten the whole thing. Three were dry, cruel, spiteful, loveless, and bitter. And then things got bad.
You know how supposedly a bear will gnaw through its own leg to free itself from a trap? Well, in retrospect, I probably should have given that a shot. Because I can always buy a prosthetic leg, but I’m never getting those 730 days back.
As a man, my default position is “I’m always right.” But as a married man I made a conscious choice to reset my default position to “my wife is always right.” So right off the bat I created a certain amount of inevitable conflict in the relationship.
But was that really my fault? If she had tweaked her default position from “my needs come first” to “his needs come first,” then we might have made a go of it. But, as we all know, only pimply geeks with graduate degrees from Stanford should play around with your default settings. If you try and do it, it’ll just screw up your hard drive and you’ll delete some key files.
Okay, this computer analogy is getting exhausted—but I’m not quite done with it yet. I thought about this a lot during my year of drinking, playing, etc. And I came to the conclusion that, ultimately, men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus. It’s more like, some people are Macs and some people are PCs. These differences aren’t based on sex. It’s totally random.
Due to advances in technology (and human development), the Macs and PCs are not wholly incompatible. It just takes some work to get the two operating systems to communicate with each other. And sometimes even the best intentions aren’t enough to overcome software glitches.
Jesus, I’m really deep in it now, aren’t I? Let me explain a little more in a desperate attempt to make this make sense. I’m a Mac guy. And sometimes I have had to work on a Microsoft Word document with PC people. Now, super-smart trillion-aires have toiled long and hard to make Microsoft Word function on both platforms. So going back and forth was a breeze. But every now and then, for absolutely no reason, bizarre things would happen. Like, I would rewrite a paragraph and, when I sent it to the PC people, they would open their screen and see a thousand letter p’s arranged to look like the profile of Abraham Lincoln. (This happened only once, but it did happen.)
We could always restore the file, and usually we didn’t have any more problems, but there’s a basic difference there that can’t be ignored. Sometimes Macs and PCs simply can’t get on the same page. Sometimes people just aren’t meant to share their lives together. Especially if the PCs insist on sleeping with some guy named David.
Anyway, the whole computer analogy is a long way of saying, I don’t hate my ex-wife. I did at the start of my journey. And some of that animosity still flares back up every now and then out of the blue—usually when I meet someone named David. But, for the most part, I have learned to accept that we were just two people operating in different electronic planes.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to Alicia.
10
Meeting Alicia, like everything that happened to me in Ireland, was the result of drinking. After three months, I started feeling that Dublin was a little claustrophobic. I was known by my first name in almost every pub I visited. And there were at least a dozen spots where they had already crafted a nickname for me. This nickname was different at each locale, except for two bars where both groups of creative geniuses in charge of naming rights came up with “The Yank.” My favorite of all these nicknames was “The Goat,” which everyone at McDaid’s called me. I have no recollection of why they called me the Goat, but they were so committed to it that someone had it stenciled onto a beer glass which they gave me on what they whimsically and erroneously decided was my birthday.
I was snug and content with my Dublin routine, but I was starting to feel a little hemmed in. Knowing that Ireland is famous for its gorgeous countryside as well as its gorgeous alcohol, I decided to take a road trip through the great green greenery.
Once again, Colin’s assistance proved to be invaluable.
“Why the hell would you want to drive around the countryside? What are you—an idiot?”
When I explained my situation, he was much more accommodating.
“Jesus, you still sound like a moron,” he said. “If you really need to go for a trip, why don’t you at least take a tour of the Whiskey Trail?”
Now, that’s what I love about Ireland. They’ve found a way to incorporate drinking into every single possible activity that a man or woman could even dream of participating in. In America, trail hiking is the sole purview of granola-munching, bottled water–swilling health nuts. In Ireland, even the drunks look forward to it.
And speaking of drunks, whiskey, and Ireland, they get extremely worked up over the spelling of that specific intoxicated distilled spirit. The Irish (and most Americans) spell it with an e instead of just “whisky.” If, for reasons that I can’t imagine, you were to write down the word “whisky” in Ireland, and you were to leave out the e, they would all laugh at you. I suppose that if you were mute, and wanted to get your Jameson on, you might need to write it down. Or perhaps if you were working at a pub and taking a big order I guess you might write it down . . . Just remember—the Irish use an e.
&n
bsp; The Scottish, however, do not. They invented the stuff, and they’re adamant about spelling it “whisky.” Since the Scots are, like, the OGs of “whisky,” I guess we should all defer to them. But it feels like the Irish drink more of the stuff than everyone else combined, so, as far as I’m concerned, whiskey it is, and whiskey it shall remain.
As for the Whiskey Trail, what can I tell you? All you need to know about this marvelous adventure is that there is actually a place called Bushmills Village. That’s right—there’s an adorable, eponymous seaside town where they’ve been making that sweet elixir for around six hundred years.
Can you imagine if there was a town in America called Dorito Corners? Or Twinkieburg? There would be a line of tourists in pickup trucks and RVs stretching to the next county. Pilgrims would come from all corners of the earth to taste the freshest chips and “pastries” at their very birthplace. Obviously Doritoville and Twinkieburg couldn’t exist because Doritos and Twinkies haven’t been made in the same process with the same painstaking eye for detail for centuries the way Bushmills has. Doritos and Twinkies are made out of chemicals in big machines in factories in the middle of nowhere. Not a lot of tourist trail possibilities there.
But whiskey . . . that stuff is created in some of the most spectacular spots you’ll ever see. The buildings are stunning. The scenery is breathtaking. And the alcohol is cheap and plentiful. It’s also delicious—at least that’s what the experts say. I’ve always viewed this as an extremely subjective matter.
I love being drunk. I love getting drunk. I love hanging out with drunks. I don’t always love the taste of alcohol. Give me a comfy pub, a thick steak, a roaring fire, some dudes playing darts for money, and a chipped glass full of whiskey and I’m a happy man. Give me six splashes of whiskey in six different snifters, a snooty whiskey sommelier, and a fancy postmodern whiskey tasting room and I’m gonna wish I was back by the roaring fire. Because, as far as I’m concerned, whiskey just doesn’t taste that great. It’s the whole whiskey zeitgeist that I enjoy.
Drink, Play, F@#k Page 3