Attempting Normal (26 page)

Roddy Doyle indulged me in the telling and, when I was through, quietly stared at me. I laughed alone and then we both entered an awkward silence once it occurred to me that he hated the joke, and probably me. I thought the joke was a great characterization of the Irish spirit. I never even entertained the idea that the two men in the joke were morons. I just thought they were ambitious and fearless and part of me thought they might pull it off.

The first time I went to Ireland was in 1999. I was recently divorced for the first time and newly sober. I don’t want to be hackneyed about it but people drink in Ireland. That is a reality. Sobriety is almost a mortal sin there, but that’s where I went to flaunt my recovery. I felt alienated and alone, rejected by the entire country. I remember going to AA meetings there, five of us huddled together in a church in a castle. That was nice. But there was a fortressed feeling about it. Like we were prisoners of rare blood and needed protection. Both are actually true.

I spent two trying weeks in Kilkenny performing for a half-rural, half-suburban Irish crowd who were not necessarily comedy fans. They were there for the festival. I would assume many of them went to comedy shows once a year. It didn’t go very well. I just don’t think my introspection and personal struggle could
compete with what I believed was a history of oppression. The Irish people had been through enough and whatever I was going on about seemed like indulgence. I even realized that.

It was a projection on my part. My brain seeks to make me unique even if it’s in a bad light. I scared myself into thinking I was alone and being judged by Ireland as a weak, whiny, gutless Jew with problems.

I still loved being in Ireland. I was shocked at how beautiful the place is. The intensity of the colors and the damp clarity of the landscapes are really stunning. I was moved in a deep way. And no matter what Roddy Doyle thought of my joke, I still respected the land and the people. Kilkenny was one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been but there was a heaviness beneath the beauty, the weight of history and the hardship that you can feel everywhere. But that potential darkness is countered by the lightness of the Irish approach to life—their cheerful embrace of the tragic and their slightly drunken acceptance of the way things are—that levels it out. My shows weren’t very good there and I was still slightly afraid of my audience and I left feeling defeated, but when I had the opportunity ten years later to go back, I jumped at it.

When I got there for the second time I started every day with a run that took me right by Kilkenny Castle, which is big and old and glorious to look at. I knew nothing about it beyond that, but I took that beautiful run every morning past that castle and thought it was awe-inspiring; someone important must have lived there. Probably many important people lived there, important relative to the history of Ireland, or maybe not important at all, just kind of powerful. Either way it was pretty. It turns out that the castle was built in 1195. Eleven ninety-five! My house was built in 1924 and it’s about to slide down a fucking hill. It turns out that it’s possible to build a wall out of rock and basic mortar that will last a thousand years. As an American, that’s shocking.

The run along the river was keeping me sane while I was there.
The air is so clean, maybe because of all the green, all the trees and plants, the relentless lushness everywhere. But it’s so damn clean. I was running along a river next to the castle and listening to the Rolling Stones. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” Here I was running through the freshest air, the cleanest atmosphere I’ve been in all my life, and I’ve got the Rolling Stones blaring in my head. So I turned the music off and pulled the earphones out and just listened to the water and my breath and watched the Irish scenery.

I was a better comic than I was on my first trip and I rose above my fear of Irish antipathy to eventually have some good sets there. I felt like I had finally put my Irish complex to rest, which freed me to enjoy my time there. Then I had a moment the last night I was there which I call “The History of Irish Poetry,” a better representation of the Irish character than the joke about the Indians.

It was very late, around three-thirty in the morning. I was walking down the empty streets of Kilkenny with another comic. There was a full moon. We had just left a wrap party for the comedy festival. The streets were so quiet we could hear our feet hitting the uneven cobblestones beneath us. It was a perfect night. All the pubs had closed and you could feel history haunting the ominous darkened rock walls that lined the street.

Out of nowhere a man appeared in the middle of the street like an apparition. He was a large man, fat with a white shirt. He was sweaty and his face was all red. He was holding a half-filled pint glass of beer. I had no idea where it came from. There were no open pubs around. When we saw him we stopped some distance away, warily, like we had come upon a wild animal. He stopped, too, looked right at us, raised the glass up, and exuberantly shouted, “It’s good to be happy!” Then, without missing a beat, he lowered the glass and lowered his head and said, almost under his breath, “There’s no hope.”

The history of Irish poetry.

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My mother lives in Florida so I visit there at least once a year. I used to hate Florida, until I realized it is a great American freak show. It is the most densely populated peculiar state I have been in. It is filled with people either at the end of their lives or the end of their ropes.

The old people are interesting; they are finally free to do whatever they want but don’t quite have the energy to do it, yet they aren’t letting that stop them. Combine that with the odd mix of locals. I don’t want to call them rednecks or hill people, but you get it. There’s a little taste of the South in the worst way possible. There’s also a large Latino community.

It’s a full-on, densely populated, always humid, senior salsa hillbilly hoedown all the time down here. The roads are very exciting because you just never know if someone is drunk or old or learned how to drive in another country.

On my recent visits I’ve become a bit concerned with my empathy for the elderly. As I get older I’m losing the excitement
about talking to them and engaging with them that I had when I was younger, when they seemed so wise and interesting. Maybe as I’m approaching old age myself—and I feel something happening to my brain—I am pulling away from the old people out of my own fear. In any case, I find myself wishing that somehow we could put all these old people down there to some productive use. The spirit of that thought illustrates a serious lack of empathy, but here we go.

I had a fairly revolutionary idea. I don’t know if it’s doable. I want to call it Googleheimers. Maybe it’s wrong-minded but let me explain. Florida is riddled with huge condo complexes with literally thousands of senior citizens in them. We need to create an interface that allows people to get on their computers and access all the wisdom and stories of the old people in the condo developments through a search engine. I’m not a technological guy so I don’t know how you would go about doing this. I’m trying with my limited knowledge to figure out how to make this work without the need to implant some sort of chip in their heads. That seems a bit totalitarian and wrong but it might be necessary. Maybe it could be pitched as some form of medical alert device. At their next doctor’s appointments doctors could talk to them about implanting a chip in their brains that would hook them up to a new service. If anything goes wrong with their health the chip will automatically dispatch an ambulance or generate a phone call with lifesaving information. The chip should actually do this. We have the technology, right?

When confronted with this new lifesaving technology they might respond with some version of “What? I don’t understand. A machine?”

“It’s not going to hurt,” the doctor will say. “And you’ll never need to call the ambulance. It will just come.”

There should be a representative from Googleheimers present to tell the prospective source brain, “Also, people will be able to
see into your brain when they search for information, like events in history and whatnot. You’d be helping.”

“I don’t think I want to.”

“We’ll give you a break on your medicine if you let us put it in.”

“All right. I’m not going to feel anything, right?”

“Nope, painless.”

“Okay, go ahead and put the gizmo in. I’m on a lot of medicine.”

There should also be a video element. Maybe in every apartment there’s a camera. When somebody Googleheimers something that the particular person in this apartment knows, maybe a little swing music or doo-wop plays and a light comes on to signal to the resident that they need to go to their computer.

Let’s say you Googleheimer the JFK assassination. All of a sudden a little light goes off in Murray Jacobs’s condo and the music comes on. He sits up at his little portable TV dinner table and says, “Oh no, here we go.” He goes and sits down at his computer and the camera comes on. He sees “JFK assassination” on his screen and starts reflecting about it to you. So you’re looking for information and boom, there’s Murray saying, “Oh sure, I remember. That was a sad day. We’d eaten lunch at the place on Seventh Avenue, me and Doris. We heard the thing about the guy—Kennedy. We liked him even though he was Catholic. He was a nice-looking guy. He seemed like he liked the right things. He liked the black people. We were very, I don’t know what you call it today; we didn’t call it liberal back then, we just called it being a good person. Then we heard the news and it was awful. Doris cried a little bit and we took home half of the cheesecake and I think I had diarrhea because of it. That’s what I remember.”

That would be the type of information you get when you search Googleheimers. You can use it in a term paper or perhaps for a speaking engagement. You could quote Murray, for example, if you were writing a paper for school: “This was an awful day in
November 1963, according to Murray Jacobs. It was sad and they didn’t finish their cheesecake and he got diarrhea.”

I think that would be entertaining information, sourced to someone who lived through it. It would run the range of people who were at the retirement community. However, I’m thinking I should change the name because Googleheimers might be considered a little derogatory, with its Semitic overtones. The name SeniorMatrix might be more fitting.

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