Midlife Irish (25 page)

An English major can’t walk around Dublin without thinking of
Ulysses
and, in thinking about the book and Dublin, thinking about alcoholic beverages. As Bloom says in the novel, “A good puzzle
would be (to) cross Dublin without passing a pub.” Indeed, at the Guinness Brewery at Saint James Gate, there’s a museum dedicated
to the formal study of beverage-imbibing. Dublin is a lot more than the sum of its pubs, but the city seemed a great place
to get clinical about the Irish and the drink.

Drinking beverages that contain alcohol leads to many things. In
Macbeth,
Shakespeare said that it led to three things: sinus problems, excessive urination, and lechery. He pointed out that the last
symptom was helpful in the prologue to the event, but a hindrance in the performance of the
same. Time has confirmed him as the wisest of Englishmen, an admittedly handicapped contest.

It also, of course, leads to violence and craziness and appearances on the television program
Cops
clad only in underwear. Fighting and booze are forever married in the Irish consciousness. John Wayne’s epic fight with Victor
McLagen in
The Quiet Man
was punctuated, quite appropriately, by a midbattle stop at the local pub. If you’re Irish, goes this line of “thought” (hammered
home in countless movies), you drink, and if you drink, you fight. It makes things rather simple.

Recently the field of magnetic imaging achieved the technological ability to determine the exact points at which a human brain
processes certain stimuli. Research scientists can now actually “observe” an idea. There is an identifiable place in the brain
that responds to abstract ideas like “cuteness” and “morality.” The amygdala goes off when it sees little puppy dogs. A portion
of the orbitofrontal cortex generates activity when asked about the death penalty.

The sections for “Irish” and “Crazy” are, in the collective American brain, the same place. It’s difficult to say exactly
when the “Irish” site appropriated the “Crazy” site, but the site for “Irish” contains “Crazy” as well as “Cop,” “Love of
Mother,” and so forth. Billy Conn’s explanation of why, far ahead on pints, he tried to knock out Joe Louis and got ko’ed
himself: “What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be crazy?” turns out to be a very prescient observation by the Pittsburgh
Kid.

Irish America wants “Crazy” to be seen as “Lovably Deluded” rather than “Psychotically Anomalous.” We want using, “Heck, he
was just being Irish,” as an excuse to carry some legal weight.

The fighting Irish. Good participle, and, in my limited experience, largely true. I know several Irish guys who are, in toto,
a big pain in the ass. The kind of guy who will, when aroused, attack a towel machine. No less a man than Paddy
Flood, boxer trainer and ubermick, put it best: “The Irish love trouble like no other race. When God made the Irish, He made
99 percent of them Iagos.”

I am Irish and I don’t ordinarily love trouble. Yet, in a car wash in Demorest, Georgia, it found me. We had a brief relationship.
I actually punched a guy in the mouth. It was on Sunday afternoon and no alcohol was involved. There was just something about
that guy. Something that said, “Please punch me,” to part of my lymph system. So I did.

I had just finished listening to “Born to Be Wild” on the radio. If I had been listening to Kenny G it might never have happened.
I was driving a Volvo, the least aggressive car in the world. I pulled into the little car wash. I took out the two plastic
mats and hung them up on those hook things. I started vacuuming out my pacifistic Volvo.

A guy in a pickup truck drove in. No one else was there. There were three stalls. Nevertheless, he selected the one labeled
“trouble.” He didn’t know that he was in the company of Irish people. Me. I finished vacuuming and went over to ask him something.
I left the vacuuming before my fifty cents worth of vacuum was over. I courteously wanted to get to him before he put his
three quarters in the box to activate the “wash” experience. I was concerned and utterly affable. If you saw me you would
say that I looked like the nicest guy in the world. Mr. Friendly.

“Excuse me,” I said. My body language said that I was sorry that I had to inconvenience him in any way. “I have my mats hung
up in that stall and the other two stalls don’t have those hook things for mats, so could you move to another stall?”

“No,” he said.

I could have said, “What?” or something. Or I could have just taken the mats down. My original reaction was “take down the
mats and make a nasty sarcastic comment.” That’s the reaction that I was acting on when I looked at him. He had what I interpreted
to be a smirk.

So I did what anyone would do, any card-carrying
Irishman
. I punched him in the mouth.

He didn’t fall down and my hand started to
throb
. He sort of stumbled against his truck. But I did see that he was amazed and shocked at what the old guy with the Volvo had
done. Then he said the words that made it all worthwhile.

“You’re crazy,” he said, and I thought,
I think I just broke my hand but I am happy
.

Later, of course, the unfortunate moral side of me made me feel really bad. At the same time, the physical side of me was
leaning on the pain button.

But the Irish part of me said,
Nice going
.

I decided, like Doctor Jekyll, to use myself as a guinea pig in my investigation of the connection between booze and the Irish.
I was Irish, so I was walking around with my own handy laboratory. Paulette is, regrettably, not Irish, so she was not a subject
for study in this clinical situation. I decided that I would go to a pub in Ireland and drink until I became intoxicated.
Then I would carefully record my data.

So we went to a pub at approximately 9:30
P.M.
I then consumed several pints of Guinness, more than enough to achieve my clinical goal. Paulette was not quite a designated
driver. She had also consumed a few. There was a live band playing Irish music. They got better and better as the evening
progressed.

We met some young Irish people, Robbie and Lief. Lief was a girl. They had been dating for a few years. Lief told me that
they like to go to pubs quite a bit. Robbie liked it a little more than she did. He seemed to want to do this on a regular
basis.

As an elder, I counseled him. I told him that it wasn’t a good idea to get wasted. As I told him this, we drank glass
after glass of semipotent beverage until well after an hour when decent people were asleep. It was fun to travel to a distant
country and then drink too much, even if it was a scientific experiment.

By around two, the place started emptying out. It was a Tuesday, and as Robbie told me, it was a good idea to stop drinking
at 2:00
A.M.
on a work night. We said our goodbyes in the near-empty pub. I was quietly proud that we had, indeed, “closed the place.”

That was when a quiet horror gripped us.

Our Punta, our red, little, comforting Punta, was gone.

At first we controlled our panic by walking up and down the street. Paulette suggested that perhaps we should call either
our B&B or, maybe, the police. Our Punta was gone.

I was, despite the nine Guinnesses, amazed and appalled. Criminal activity in a lovely land like Ireland! What a world we
live in! If I hadn’t been drunk I’d have been even more appalled. As we walked through the streets and slowly got used to
the idea that yes, our car had been stolen, various near-desperate ideas ran through our alcohol-addled brains (okay:
my
alcohol-addled brain). Paulette offered the opinion that the group of Irish youths gathered near the corner might perhaps
be a sort of
Clockwork Orange
ultraviolence group. I could not assure her that that was, indeed, not the fact. I reminded her that
Clockwork Orange
was set in
England.
It was also fictional, I think.

We wandered up and down the street, searching in vain for our vehicle. The truth still hadn’t quite sunk in. Our rented car
was gone. And it would remain that way. Our bright red minicar, the Punta, was now gone. Gone forever. Someone could write
an opera about this.

I thought of what things we had in the car. Not much. This wasn’t so bad. Tomorrow we’d call the rental place. It probably
happens all the time. We walked a few desultory blocks, up and down. We had no car. I had no car
and
I was
drunk. We were walkers. We were losers. I was a drunken loser.

We happened to see a woman, an attractive woman, actually, but with an alarmingly white face. She looked like a woman in a
Toulouse-Lautrec painting. But she didn’t seem to be a lady of the evening, even though she was standing in the doorway of
a shop.

Paulette called out to her, and the woman with the white face responded to the desperation in Paulette’s voice.

“Please,” said Paulette, “I think our car has been towed. Do they tow cars here?” I hadn’t thought of that. I made a mental
note:
Drunkenness in an Irish person often leads to stupidity
.

“Yes, they tow cars here, but not often,” said the white-faced woman, who was beginning to remind me of the ladies in
Cabaret
. “I am sure they did not tow your car. What kind of car was it?”

“It was a rental,” I said, “a little red something-or-other.” I could not bring myself to say, “Someone stole our Punta.”

“Are you sure it was parked here?” asked Lotta Lenya. “The block over looks exactly like this block.”

“Oh, no,” said Paulette. “I know that it was right here.”

I remembered the name of the store we had parked in front of. (I couldn’t remember it now without a whole lot of sodium pentothal.)

“You know,” she said, “there is another store with that name.”

I told her that I was sure we were parked in front of
this
store. At that moment I wasn’t sure of anything, but I faked it.

“Ah,” said the woman with the white face.
What did that “Ah” mean?
I thought.

Paulette and I looked at each other hopelessly. We were now sure that our car had been stolen. Stolen in Ireland. We came
looking for our ancestors and someone stole our car.

I tried to be philosophical.

“Hey, we’ll call the police,” I said. “It will be an adventure.”

At that point the white-faced woman said, “Is this your car?”

I looked at the car. It looked a little bit like our car. As a matter of fact, it looked just like our car. But it was gray.
Our Punta was red.

But I looked at the car. It looked, except for the color,
exactly
like our car. I moved closer. I looked in the window, and what I saw was startling.

The car had my “Irish” hat on the backseat. Maybe it was somebody else’s hat. They have those hats all over Ireland. Every
Irishman owns one.

I looked at the woman. I realized (much later than a rational person should have realized) that her face was so white because
many of the streetlights in Ireland are yellow. Take a little red car; stick it under one of those lights. It looks kind of
gray. Oops.

Yes, it was our car. If I had drunk nine glasses of sodium pentothal, I still should have realized that.

“Well, that’s good for you,” said the white-faced woman. She gave us a little smile. I looked at my hands. They looked white.
Golly. Science in action. Spectrum stuff or something. Why hadn’t I paid attention in high school?

We got into the Punta and waved to the white-faced woman as we drove back to our hotel. Paulette, of course, drove. I felt
pretty stupid. I also felt pretty drunk. But the evening wasn’t a total loss. I had real clinical evidence of the effect of
alcohol on the Irish brain.

TWELVE

Dublin: End of Days

Dublin is a great city, a city where you can find anything that you are seeking. It’s the sort of place that you could spend
a year in and still miss many, many things. We had two days. Rather than run around trying to squeeze in as much as possible,
we continued with our casual meandering manner. It had been good to us so far, so why change now? We would miss a lot, but
we knew by now that we would be returning more than once.