Midlife Irish (24 page)

So Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor was, in 1966, for a week at least, no longer a “good house.” As the day for
the announcement approached, my dad would grimly study the
Camden Courier Post
. His brow would wrinkle in concentration as he sat in the big green upholstered chair that was his and his alone. Dad’s chair
sat in the corner of our living room right next to the console RCA television with the statue of the Blessed Mother on top.
Woe to he who sits in that chair if his name isn’t Bernard Gannon.

When the day of the axe finally arrived, I was sitting on the living-room sofa. It was about six o’clock in the evening. My
dad stared at the paper with a blank look. He jerked involuntarily when he got to the legal notice informing the public of
his “crime.” He read the notice, read it again, put down the paper, took off his glasses, stood up, and walked quietly upstairs.
His face was the face of a man walking to the gallows. He stayed up there for the rest of the night. My mom went up to talk
with him. I didn’t go near him. I just sat on the sofa and watched him slowly walk up the steps. A crushed man.

He took it hard. He had always lived in dread of the ABC. He thought they were unfair, but his dread of them was almost frightening.
Before his infraction, he talked of the ABC often. He rarely called them “the ABC.” He called them “the cursed ABC,” as if
“cursed” was part of the organization’s name. He pronounced it “ker-said.” It emphasized, in an almost biblical way, his intense
hatred for the vile organization.

He talked about the cursed ABC with such bitterness that I remember wondering as a child why my dad hated those alphabet letters
that were always in the front of my classroom right under the picture of God at Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School. (I confused
easily as a child. Still do.) The cursed
ABC was worse than the boogieman. The cursed ABC will find you. The cursed ABC will find you and, when he finds you, “
He will ruin you for life!
”

Now, in 1966, just when I had left Saint Cecilia’s Grammar School for Camden Catholic High School, the worst had happened.
By then I thought of it as some vague horrible event in the future. Now it was here. The cursed ABC had found my father. The
cursed ABC had found my father and ruined him for life.

The total devastation of my father was published in the
Camden Courier Post,
the local venue for devastation announcements. It was printed in tiny print and buried on a page near the back of the paper,
but for my dad, it might as well have been tattooed on his forehead. For my father, it was Hester Prinne all over.

ALCOHOL CODE VIOLATIONS, CAMDEN: Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor. Sale of alcoholic beverages to a minor
.

He had to pay a fine and close the bar for a week. When he was asked why the bar was closed, he said that he was doing some
renovation.

The bar reopened, of course, but things could never again be all right. Something very valuable had been taken from him. It
was something that could never be returned.

He knew, deep in his Irish psyche, that Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor, a place into which he had poured his soul,
was no longer a “good house.” The cursed ABC had finally gotten him.

My dad took the whole thing much more seriously than he should have. For a couple of years he stopped attending Saint Cecilia’s
Church. The church was a block from our house (church proximity was a major factor in my mom’s choice of residence), but on
Sundays my dad would get up even earlier than he normally did and drive fifteen miles to another Catholic church. In that
distant church, he was anonymous; no one knew of the place and the cursed ABC.

I am sure that no one but my dad thought of the liquor bust, but no one could tell him that. He was like a Nathaniel Hawthorne
character, a man haunted by his “sin.” He would ask me every week if anyone had mentioned “the thing” (he could not give it
any other name). I would always tell him “No,” but he would stare deep into my eyes, searching for any sign of deception.

Over the next few years, “the thing” was a frequent subject of discussion among the family, but we were very careful never
to mention it outside the house. But around the dinner table, or driving to work, I heard the story many times. Each time
it gained details. The kid the ABC hired got older and older looking (he was eventually bald and bearded with a lot of gray
in his beard). If my dad had lived longer, the ABC kid would have looked older than he did. Eventually, my dad hinted that
he strongly suspected that the American Beverage Control Board frequently resorted to cosmetic surgery. Nothing was beyond
them. They were controlled by Satan, and they did his work.

My dad’s brother, Uncle John, told me that my dad had talked about owning a pub from the time they were little kids back there
is West Meath. According to John, Bernie Gannon thought that pub ownership was a great calling, second only to the priesthood.
When William Butler Yeats described an Irishman’s ambition as “doing the most difficult thing that can be contemplated without
despair,” he was certainly talking about Bernard Gannon, the hopelessly poor kid who wanted to own his own pub.

Sometimes I would catch my dad just standing motionless outside Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor. He would just
stand there with a very serene look on his face: portrait of a man in love.

My dad’s attitude toward his pub was very typical of first-generation Irish. If mythology says something very basic about
the people who produced it, we can see an ancient
love/hate relationship between the Irish and the drink. For the Irish, as has been often noted, mythology and history tend
to be blended, and this is very evident in their ancient myths. These things didn’t “happen,” but in a very real sense, they
are always happening.

The ancient Irish worshiped nature gods who lived in a world named Tir Nan Og, “the Land of Eternal Youth.” The big book is
called
Lebor Gabala Erenn,
the book of “the taking of Ireland.” The book records the lives of six races of Irish inhabitants. Some are human, some divine,
but, as in the Greek myths, everyone acts more like human beings than like gods.

The gods are creative beings (poets, artists), and the regular people are farmers. The regular people finally “win” Ireland,
and the gods have to hide themselves in nature. They live in the beautiful parts of Ireland, which is almost everywhere.

These regular people are called the “Gael.” Their enemies are the Fomor, a race of one-eyed giants who live in the ocean.
The great hero of Ireland is Finn mac Cumhal (often called Finn mac Cool). He marries a woman named Murna, and they have a
son Ossian. They lived long enough to interact with the fellow who was responsible for replacing all this with Christianity,
Saint Patrick.

The Vikings destroyed the old writings about Finn mac Cumhal, so the oldest extant one dates from 1453. The book
The Boyish Exploits of Finn mac Cumhal
tells the story of Finn and Saint Patrick sitting down, having some drinks, and talking about things. In some versions, Saint
Patrick actually turns old Finn into a Catholic. In some of them Finn remains a pagan. In the version where he rejects Catholicism,
Finn’s son Ossian tells Saint Patrick what the best things in life are: “To share bowls of barley, honey and wine.” Even mythological
Irishmen know, in the words of Flann O’Brian, “A pint of plain is your only man.”

* * *

Because alcohol and Ireland are so linked in the public mind, there are, according to my research, 21,982 jokes involving
Irish people and alcohol. (All right. I made that up.) The archetypal joke is the one that follows. This is the Irish/Alcohol
joke that exists in Plato’s world of essences. It’s labeled “
The
Irish/Alcohol Joke.”

An Irishman is standing outside a hospital with a look of great worry. He seems on the verge of tears and he implores passersby.
A wealthy Englishman approaches.

Irishman: “Sir, please help me. My wife has to have an operation or she will die, and they won’t do it unless I can raise
one thousand dollars. Please help me.”

Englishman (seeing how distraught the Irishman really is): “Here is your money. God bless you!”

Irishman: “And God bless you, sir!”

Englishman (as an afterthought): “And you look like you haven’t slept in days. Here’s a pound. Go have yourself a drink and
calm down.”

Irishman (refusing the money): “Hey, I have drinking money.”

This is generally acknowledged to be the “Danny Boy” of Irish drinking stories.

The Irish fondness for alcohol, like many ugly racial stereotypes, turns out to have some actual, sociopsychological validity.
It is, of course, impossible to get a full set of data on the subject. How do you measure “fondness” for alcohol? And, until
the twentieth century, people didn’t go around compiling statistics on everything. Nevertheless, concerning the Irish-American,
the evidence seems to point a massive finger at the Celtic drinker.

In 1909, an early academic (with a very academic name), Maurice Parmalee, compiled some statistics on Irish-American drinking
habits. He used, as his lab, the city of
Boston, a place crawling with Irish guinea pigs. As his barometer, Parmalee used the total number of various ethnic groups
arrested for public drunkenness in Boston that year.

His results confirmed an ugly supposition. In the game of public drunkenness, the Irish were the big winners. Belgians, Scotsmen,
and Canadians all scored above average, but the Irish took home the gold. (Unfortunately, this never became an Olympic event.)
Other early studies showed the same result. Among “alcoholic case admissions” to a state hospital in 1900, the Irish were,
once again, the clear winners. It wasn’t even close. The percentages broke down this way: Irish 37 percent. The Germans, English,
and Scotch vied for the silver with scores in the low 20s. The Jewish population had a microscopic 5 percent.

Richard Stivers, a professor of sociology at Illinois State University, has written the definitive study of the subject,
Hair of the Dog
. His well-argued thesis is that a negative stereotype was foisted upon Irish-Americans, but that later, Irish America actually
used the stereotype to construct a mythical, positive image of the tippling Irishman. This “positive” image is the charming,
funny, harmless drunk we see in so many American movies and plays.

So the myth is, well, a myth. Andrew Greeley, an academic and sociologist as well as a best-selling novelist (and an Irish-American),
had this to say after going over what was, by the end of the century, a mountain of data: “Among drinkers, the Irish are no
more likely to have a serious alcohol problem than are many other groups in United States society.”

However, the Irish are unique in
celebrating
their drinking, in presenting it as an endearing aspect of their culture. They got together, noticed the problem, and had
a party for it. “A toast to pathological drinking!”

Whatever else you can say about that, it is
so Irish
.

Everywhere we went in Ireland, the subject of alcohol seemed to bob to the surface at one point in the evening
(often late). So it seemed pretty clear that the Irish/booze equation has not completely vanished from the Irish mind. Despite
the fact that Dublin is the hub of the new “Celtic Tiger” economic boom in Ireland (can’t see Gordon Gecko as a drunk), it
is also the home of countless bars. It is very difficult to walk for five minutes in the town and not pass a drinking establishment.
Nevertheless, it seemed to me, that by, say, 2050, the whole Irish/booze thing may be gone from the public mind. The big factor,
I think, is all these dotcom kids walking around Dublin with the cell phones glued to their ears.

Half of Ireland is under twenty-eight years old, and almost a third of the population is either in college or already college-educated.
Almost 60 percent of them have or are about to earn a degree in business, engineering, or science. Partly because of this,
a whole lot of American companies have set up shop in Ireland in a major way, and a lot more are about to follow suit. IBM,
Oracle, Motorola, Northern Telecom, Microsoft, Sun, and many, many others are solidly established in Ireland. They even have
their own version of Silicon Valley (they call it the “Silicon Bog”). Ireland is a great place to do high tech. There is a
young, well-educated workforce, a favorable tax situation, a booming economy, an inviting government, and many other protech
factors. In the twenty-first century Ireland isn’t going to be Yeats’s “ancient dreaming race.” There will be a lot more Gordon
Geckos than Darby O’Gills.

In a way, this will be very sad. It makes me feel horrible to think of County Mayo turning into Westchester County. There
is, however, for me, a bright spot: I’ll be dead when it happens.

While we were in Dublin, we were glad to see that we weren’t alone in bemoaning the inevitable. There were frequent editorials
in the papers and on the television that had, as their general theme: “When Ireland gets rich, are we going to turn into the
English?”

A frightening thought. We kept out minds off this by pursuing our academic study, tentatively titled, “What is it with Irish
people and booze?” Throughout Dublin, I found a lot of people who wanted to talk about it. Of course, I always asked about
it in pubs, so my study might have lacked scientific validity. Still, it was fun.

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.”