By and large, they keep things pretty homey on the Whiskey Trail. And they certainly keep the whiskey flowing. I started up north and slowly worked my way southward. After a week or two, I was somehow still conscious by the time we rolled into Midleton, just east of Cork. I don’t remember exactly who was doing the driving, but I’m pretty sure that he (or she) remained sober. Also, I seem to recall that we traversed the lush, wet countryside on some kind of smallish tour bus. I tried to sleep as much as possible during the drive to marshal my forces for maximum drinkability.
The Old Midleton Distillery used to be the primary plant for Jameson. That means that it’s ground zero for Irish whiskey. Which means that, for every cop, fireman, clog dancer, tenor, Massachusetts senator, and white bantamweight boxer, this place is like Eden, Jerusalem, the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and Mount Ararat all rolled into one. There’s a spiritual, almost reverential, quality to the buildings and grounds. It feels as much like a holy site as anywhere I’ve ever been in my life. Plus they’ve got one hell of a gift shop.
I was in the gift shop purchasing a Jameson-branded silver hip flask, which they swore was just like the one that James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and the guy from the Irish Spring commercials used to use, when I met Alicia.
A quick word about me and the ladies: there is no me and the ladies. I was completely faithful during the eight years of my marriage (and during the three and a half years that we dated before getting married). I’m not bragging or anything. This is just the way I’m built. The thought of being with other women truly never occurred to me on any practical level. I had my girl, and that was that.
After I discovered that “my girl” was banging some guy named David, naturally I went through the delightful roun-delay of emotions that follow: anger, sadness, confusion, a sense of worthlessness, and a desire for revenge. The revenge angle was going to be sweet and it was comprised primarily of me having sex with most of my wife’s friends and definitely her sister. However, the way I’m built is the way I’m built. The whole concept of revenge sex seemed like a good idea in the hypothetical. But when the time came to put plans into action, I immediately realized that none of it was ever going to happen.
If you’re walking down Tenth Avenue and you look at some guys a certain way, they’ll punch you in the face. If you look at other guys the same way, they’ll just walk on by. I’m a walk-on-by guy. I’m not built to punch you in the face for no reason. Sure, I’ll toss a knife at my friends, under the proper supervision, and only if I’ve got a few drinks in me. But I’m not built to do back flips off of the top deck of a booze cruise in Cabo. I’m not built to have meaningless sex with a bunch of women I barely know just to get back at my wife. Sometimes I wish I was built like that, but I’m not and I know it and that’s that. Perhaps those other guys are jealous of the fact that I’m pretty good at Scrabble.
The truth of the matter is that the spot in my heart reserved for love and romance and sex had, for over a decade, been filled by one woman. And just because she was now getting filled by someone else, it wasn’t any easier to renovate that space for new tenants.
So ever since my wife asked for a divorce, I had been celibate. Technically speaking, I had been celibate for at least three months before that. Like I said—those last couple of years were not pretty. I probably would have had to back up the final nookie date at least six more months if it hadn’t been for a certain rowdy evening in mid-March. We were at a Caribbean-themed office party and the missus got a little tipsy on two portions of some extremely strong rum cake. One thing led to another and my yearly marital sex quota was filled.
My infatuation with Giovanna was entirely alcohol induced. As drunk as I was most of the time, I still realized that nothing was going to happen between us. The main reason for this was how incredibly tedious she was to be around if one (or, God forbid, both) of us was sober. I know that there are a lot of different kinds of pasta in Italy. That doesn’t mean you have to talk about them all the time, does it? Yeah, great, whatever—they make pasta shaped like ears and hats. Big whoop. You ever hear of an invading army storming a castle to get its hands on a vast store of hidden pappardelle? I thought not. But the Irish have been killing one another for centuries over whiskey. And that brings us back to Midleton and Alicia.
11
I was in the gift shop browsing through a spinning carousel rack that housed a surprisingly extensive collection of books about alcohol, about to pay for my flask, when I heard someone with a broad Midwestern accent ask, “Excuse me, sir. Would you mind moving out of the way?”
I looked up and saw a beautiful young woman with long black hair and stunning hazel eyes. I smiled involuntarily and said something suave and sophisticated like, “Huh?”
“Can you move, please? You’re right in the middle of our shot.”
Maybe it was the long layoff from getting laid, or maybe it was all the drinks I’d been drinking, but I completely didn’t understand what she was talking about. I heard “shot” and assumed she was referring to a shot of whiskey. But how could I be in the middle of her shot of whiskey? I actually looked around me as if I expected to find small glasses filled with amber liquid hovering in the air. Then she took pity on me and spoke to me as if I were a small child, or a drunk grown-up.
“We’re filming a documentary here. And you’re kind of in the way of the shot we’re trying to get. Sorry.”
That’s when I noticed that a film crew was standing right next to the lovely woman with the hazel eyes. I don’t know how I missed them—there was a cameraman, a guy adjusting some lights, and another guy holding a long fuzzy boom.
“Of course,” I replied. “I’m sorry.” I remember thinking that this was an extremely gentlemanly thing to say. I then gracefully slid out of the way. Unfortunately, as I slid away gracefully, I also smashed into the spinning carousel rack, knocking it and myself to the floor and sending the flask and every single book about alcohol flying across the gift shop.
The lady helped me to my feet and asked if I was okay. I immediately noticed that she smelled like orange blossoms, which, along with night-blooming jasmine and fresh-cut grass, is one of the three all-time great smells ever created. I also noticed that I was grinning like an orangutan on thorazine.
“Why don’t you sit down? It looks like you’ve been hitting the Whiskey Trail pretty hard.” She smiled as she said this—but, for some reason, when she smiled she didn’t look like a sedated primate. She just looked pretty and nice. I can’t recall with total accuracy, but after the disarming smile I think that I actually rested my head against her shoulder and breathed in deeply. The fact that she didn’t mace me instantly is a real testament to her forgiving nature.
“Easy, big boy. Barry, want to give me a hand here?” She called to her cameraman who helped ease me over to a bench next to some old maps and an array of playing cards featuring the images of great Irish writers who were also drunks. (Those guys are like superstars in Ireland, which shows you what an addiction-tolerant society it is. Brendan Behan once famously described himself as “a drinker with writing problems,” and they teach him in schools. Britney Spears has one beer and we want to take her kids away.)
“Are you okay?” the sweet-smelling documentarian asked. I nodded foolishly. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t stomp my foot once for yes, like a trained circus pony. Seriously, this woman had me acting like a seventh grader with serious self-esteem issues. I decided that the time had come to rally the troops and get my act together. I introduced myself and thanked her for her help. She introduced herself and apologized for asking me to move to begin with.
“There’s nothing more annoying than a film crew that thinks it’s more important than everyone else. You give some people a walkie-talkie and they act like they rule the world. Can you imagine how much more damage Hitler could have done if he’d had a script supervisor and an assistant director?”
Now, I’ll acknowledge that this is not the kind
of thing that most people say to other people whom they have just met at whiskey distilleries in County Cork. Usually, off-color comments like these are reserved for private moments with close friends. And I can see why some might bridle at the suggestion that Hitler would have been even more evil if he had employed an IATSE crew. I, however, laughed out loud. I may have even snorted.
“I’m sorry,” Alicia said. “That was totally inappropriate. I’m exhausted and the whiskey fumes must be getting to me. I think I need some fresh air.”
Like a kitten eyeing a ball of string or Brendan Behan eyeing a goatskin filled with Inishowen, I pounced.
“Why don’t we go outside for a walk?”
Once again she did not mace me, which was extremely kind of her. Instead we went outside and walked along the banks of the Dungourney River for the next hour. We talked about all kinds of things, although the primary topic of conversation was why we were both in the Old Midleton Distillery at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday.
She told me all about the documentary that she was making in which she was highlighting great, underexposed travel destinations. I told her all about how my wife was sleeping with some guy named David. (Although by this point, I think that my wife had already screwed over David as well and was on some kind of whirlwind transcontinental spiritual journey. Yet one more idea of mine that she copied that I’ll never get any credit for.)
A few observations gleaned from my afternoon with Alicia.
1) That hour I spent walking and talking with her was probably the first waking hour I spent in Ireland when I did not drink anything, want to drink anything, or even think about drinking anything.
2) She made me feel stupid—but in a good way. Giovanna made me feel stupid in a bad way because when I was around her I was always drunk, and acting like a moron, and not being myself. Alicia made me feel stupid because she was clearly smarter and more clever than I am, which made me want to get smarter and more clever.
3) Alicia had an uncanny ability to make me appreciate my surroundings. Before I met her, I was just excited to be in the place where they made the whiskey. After I met her, I actually noticed the beauty of the place where they made the whiskey.
4) Damn, she smelled good.
After a while it became clear that, regardless of Colin’s theory of the relativity of time as it pertains to alcohol, the clocks had not stopped when I met Alicia. She had to get back to work. They were just beginning the segment of their film about Ireland’s Whiskey Trail. They had started in Cork and were filming several nearby distilleries. I had just finished my sojourn down the Whiskey Trail. She had to interview a vice president of Jameson, and I had to get back to Dublin to take care of some last-minute travel arrangements for the next leg of my yearlong trip to nowhere.
The timing could not have been worse. Not that there was anything for the timing to screw up. It’s not like our eyes met amidst the froth and foam of the Dungourney River and we pledged our eternal devotion to each other. Nor did we rip each other’s clothes off and make sweet, mad love on the banks of said Dungourney. The Dungourney’s not really much of a river, anyway. It doesn’t provide a very convincing backdrop for grand romantic gestures and/or passionate boffing. And, like I said, we just talked.
But I would have liked to talk to her more. I would have liked to hear about the other great, underexposed travel destinations upon which she would be shining her cinematic light. I would have liked to grin like a moron while she explained the differences between high definition video formats, while I surreptitiously sniffed her delicate scent of citrus flowers. But that’s not the way it happened. I went off to Dublin, and she went off to Ballymacoda, or Ballynaparka, or Ballykilmurry (I know that it was one of the Ballys but there are a lot of them in Ireland and it’s hard to keep track).
12
When I returned to Dublin, I couldn’t help but notice a different vibe in the air. It was kind of like that last week at summer camp when everyone’s still playing softball and swimming in the lake, but you can tell they’re all thinking about going back to school. The difference in this case is that no one in Dublin plays softball. Also, instead of heading to school, I was about to go to Las Vegas.
I wasn’t going to get hung up on the details of my trip, though. My whole life until that point had been all about the details. I had calendars at work and schedules at home. My wife and my secretary knew where I was every second of every day. And if, God forbid, someone couldn’t locate me by cell phone, e-mail, or GPS device, I would hear about it. Surprisingly, as controlling as my wife could be, my secretary was much more annoying when it came to keeping tabs on me.
So I was perfectly happy to have my upcoming travel plans almost totally unorganized. The only plans I had made involved my housing in Vegas. I figured that if I was going to go to the mecca of gambling, playtime, and wager-based recreation, I owed it to myself to stay in the holiest of holy hotels. I called in a favor from an old client in Vegas and asked him if he could hook me up at the Bellagio Hotel. He had recently left a message saying the room would be available soon. So it was time to move on.
Just before I left Dublin, I experienced one of my most pleasant evenings of wild-eyed inebriation. I had received a message from Colin to meet him at Grogan’s. It wasn’t a text message, or a voice- or e-mail. It was the usual kind of message I got while living in Ireland. I bumped into my landlady, a wonderful older woman with the staggeringly unlikely name of Teagan Scorcese (no relation to Martin). After conversing for what felt like seven hours about the possibility that it might or might not but it definitely might rain, I finally managed to break away by telling her that I had to take my emphysema medication. Of course, I don’t have emphysema—but Teagan does and she clearly had forgotten to take her medication. I figured that, by broaching the subject, it might trigger her memory and she’d live to bake shepherd’s pie another day. My strategy worked. As she headed back to her apartment she suddenly remembered something else. “Oh, that little, wee Colin feller stopped by for ya. Ay, he’s a delight that one—though I canna unnerstan’ him so well sometime. He wants for you to meet him up to Grogan’s.” And that’s how I got my messages. It was a lot more time consuming than checking my e-mail, but far more entertaining.
I headed out to meet Colin around nine PM. The sky was just starting to darken and the streets were full of people. As I walked down Anglesea Street, I passed a new bar that had just opened up. They were having some kind of private, invitation-only party and I watched the action for a few minutes through the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows in front. It was an extremely sophisticated, minimalist, modern space. Lots of polished steel, white plaster, and blond wood. And it appeared to be a wine bar. Dozens of slender, attractive people were swirling whites and reds in elegant goblets. A great deal of serious conversing seemed to be taking place. The front door was open, but I couldn’t hear any sounds emerging from within. From the look of the patrons, I could imagine that the new ballet season and the relative merits of acidophilus were being discussed while Scandinavian jazz played softly through the speakers.
The whole thing looked like a hundred parties that my wife and I attended back in New York—except there weren’t as many beautiful gay people or charismatic Puerto Ricans. I kept watching for a while until I was distracted by the sounds of someone hollering, “Hey! Get your ass in here already!” It was Colin, delivering a new message the old-fashioned way. He was leaning out of the front door of Gogarty’s and shouting down Anglesea to get my attention. Behind him I could see that the place was packed. The sounds of laughter, cursing, and music poured out from the pub. I could smell the fireplace, and the carving station, and the strangely appealing scent of beer-soaked floors.
“Come on already. I’ve been buying pints for an hour and I need you to take over. Also, there’s eight dudes from Australia in here and I promised you’d tell them about the time you punched a dog!”
I moved away from the wine bar and headed off to join Colin wh
o already had two glasses of Guinness waiting for me. As it turned out, they were both for him. But I more than made up for my late start. And the Australians enjoyed the dog story. We sat by the fireplace and drank, and sang, and bullshitted until they booted us out of there at 2:30 in the morning. Then about twenty of us kept the party going for a few more hours by the banks of the Liffey. We sang more preposterous Irish folk songs and bet on who could skip rocks more times across the river’s surface. Two policemen came by to shut us up, but I snuck them a bottle of Midleton Rare and took five euros off of one of them when my eight-skipper just edged out his seven. We broke it up as the sun rose, all promising to be best friends forever—even if we never saw one another again. Which we didn’t.
As I prepared to move out of my attic apartment in Temple Bar, I realized how much I was going to miss Ireland. There’s a pace of life there that’s quite unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. Much like the Swiss, the French, and the Spanish, the Irish put a real emphasis on appreciating and enjoying their lives. But while the Swiss bank, and the French make over-rated movies, and the Spaniards sleep their preposterous siestas, the Irish drink. It’s the cornerstone of their national identity. The Irish drink the way Americans work and invade sovereign nations. It’s what they’re all about.
After almost four months of joining them in their national obsession, I came to a significant realization: you don’t have to be Irish, or even in Ireland, to drink like the Irish. The best part of the whole thing isn’t even the drinking—it’s the camaraderie and the open, accepting attitude toward friends and fun. But I also realized that it was time to move on. My heart felt freer than it had in years. That was kind of the point of all that hanging out and drinking and telling crazy stories and singing weird songs. They’ve figured out over there how to free your soul regardless of the nefarious forces that are always lurking, trying to enslave it again. So my heart felt free. Unfortunately, the rest of my body felt like it had been beaten by marauding Vikings. My extended drinking binge was like that movie Supersize Me, only instead of going to McDonald’s, I went to McEwan’s (this joke works best if you know that McEwan’s is a kind of beer). I had gained fifteen pounds. My skin was pale and clammy. I was getting the night sweats on a regular basis and my hair had started thinning. In short, I was starting to turn Irish. So it was time to go.
Drink, Play, F@#k Page 4