The Road to McCarthy (19 page)

Right. Here we go. I step down into the mêlée and try and push through the crowd, only without pushing. Directly in front of me is a huge guy with a little green-dyed shamrock of hair on the back of his otherwise shaven head. Big mistake. Skulls as lumpy as that should be kept hidden from view, especially when they have no neck. His head just seems to grow straight out of his chest and shoulders, like a massive tumor with a face painted on one side and a shamrock on the other. He’d have been better off sticking with a center part and split ends, but who’s going to be brave enough to tell him? Not me. “Glasgow Celtic Supporters Club—TIMS On Tour,” says a green
lycra leisure top stretched tight as a lager-and-lime condom over the grotesque dome of his belly, giving him the alarming profile of a man who has recently swallowed Robbie Coltrane.

A frightening man who has just missed his mouth with his drink and has whiskey dripping from his chin seizes my arm. One side of his face is drooping in a way that suggests he may be suffering from Bell’s palsy. I hadn’t realized until now that it’s named after the whisky.

I manage to worm my way undetected through the Caledonian frenzy to the far end of the room, where a tiny handful of bewildered New York literary types with no previous experience of our glorious sporting traditions are trapped between the stage and the mob without protection of water cannon. Surveying the scene with arms folded and a hint of a smile is Chris from Seanchai.

“So, Peter. Are you ready?”

I do my best to convey confident and nonchalant enthusiasm, but it comes out as a nod, a squeak and a wince, as if I’ve just heard that Brother Dermot is going to hit me with the leather strap again and I’m trying to pretend it won’t hurt. Chris takes the mike and says a few words of welcome, but the decibel level doesn’t drop. This is usually a bad sign. He ploughs on in his deep, Donegal-Brooklyn brogue, and eventually they start to notice he’s there.

“I’d like to welcome all our visitors from Glasgow.”

There’s a huge roar, as if the blade’s dropped and another head’s just fallen into the basket.

“So please, this is his first appearance in the United States, so I’m asking you to give a big New York City welcome to ….”

Good. I’ve managed to get to the mike without collapsing. Okay. Loud and direct. Look ’em in the eye, don’t go backwards, and don’t leave any gaps for them to fill in.

“Thanks, Chris. It’s good to be here.”

And then a voice calls out from in front and somewhere to my right. I think it might be the singer from the Celtic Supporters Club band who are on after my death.

My reading! After my reading!

“Hey, pal! You’re fuckin’ English!”

There are times when life seems hyper-vivid, super-real, and this is one of them. It’s a special moment. Nerve ends are tingling. Never have I been more exhilaratingly aware of the fact that I am alive.

The only question is, for how long?

One of the many great things
about Billy Wilder’s
Sunset

Boulevard
is that it turns out the movie is being narrated by the corpse you see floating in the pool in the opening scene. Usually, of course, if a story is being told in the first person it’s a cast-iron guarantee that the protagonist will survive whatever scrapes life puts in his way, because otherwise he wouldn’t be there to tell the tale. I know it would be a great twist if I could say they stormed the stage and killed me, or just left me in a coma, but unfortunately it didn’t happen.

In fact, I owe those terrifying Glasgow drunks—there you are, I’m doing it again—an apology, because the terror was all of my own making. The deepest fears of death by audience are engendered by the most stereotypical and potentially extreme situations: like a children’s entertainer cornered by tiny evil-eyed
Lord of the Flies
psychopaths, or a petrified author reading a book to a bar full of paralytic Scottish soccer fans. But it’s never as bad as you expect. After all, how could it be?

So the upshot is that, when you take into account the presence of a
group of very jet-lagged men who’d had a huge amount to drink, had no interest in books and were not naturally predisposed to give me the benefit of the doubt, it seems to have gone quite well. Shamrock Head just gave me a hug and said something I couldn’t understand, so I smiled and nodded and said yes.

They’ve put the video of the match back on while the band sets up their gear. I went over to Phil so he could congratulate me, but instead he laughed and said, “You looked like you were going to die when you walked out there,” so I’m talking to Chris instead. In England you don’t often get the chance to talk to an ex-policeman who’s fronting a radical political hip-hop band.

“It ain’t too usual here either. I did the job for eleven years and what a great blessing it was in life. But I don’t like to talk about it too much, to use it as an angle for the music. I got too many friends who are still on it who would see it as transparent, you know what I’m saying? Hey, I left the cops because we got a record deal. What a fuckin’ jerk-off I was.”

So how did he come to spend time in Ireland?

“A lot of kids my age got sent over in the seventies to get away from the heroin thing. I had a cousin with a small farm, a cow, a heifer and a TV that didn’t start till six o’clock in the evening, and to be quite honest with ya I thought this was like absolute fuckin’ purgatory. But now I can see it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. On a Saturday night for something to do I used to cycle nine miles to learn from this other cousin, a blind flute player. He also played saxophone, and if he walked into a hall and there was trad Irish playing in one room and jazz in the other he wouldn’t know which way to go because he played both.”

He must be proud of the way you’re mixing up the music.

“I don’t think so, Peter.” He’s starting to laugh. “I think he’d be fuckin’ disgusted to tell ya the truth. But I’ll tell ya somethin’ else. Ya know what the really cool thing is about playing the uillean pipes? Whatever shit you play they still sound like Ireland. You could be playing ‘Hava Nagila,’ you could mix it with soul beats, reggae, hip-hop beats, still sounds like Ireland. Even the fiddle can’t do that.”

He says that the Troubles led to a big upsurge of interest in Irish politics.
Now that the war is over, a lot of that energy is going into culture, but not the backward-looking, preserve-the-past-in-aspic sentimentality to which previous generations of Irish Americans adhered.

“It’s like I was tellin’ ya. Seanchai has an Irish element, but it couldn’t come out of any city but New York. I wish people would do that in every city where Irish people are. Work with the local flavor and make somethin’ new. I think our music is a lot more honest than standing on Fifth Avenue singing ‘The Mountains of fuckin’ Mourne.’ You know what I’m sayin’? Don’t get me wrong. I love Ireland, but I couldn’t get up on that stage and sing ‘The Old Bog Road.’ A lot of Americans used to feel that the more they read about Ireland, the more they traveled there, at some point in their life they would achieve the rank of being Irish. See, I don’t aspire to that. I’m Irish American and I don’t want to be them. I’m real happy being me.”

So in what sense is he an unrepentant Fenian bastard? Is it just a cheap shot to wind up the loyalists and the Brits?

“Absolutely not. It’s the same thing as
nigger
, man.
Fenian bastard
, especially in Northern Ireland, was absolutely the equivalent
of nigger
. It was an insult I grew up with, same as a lot of these guys from Glasgow. Now I’ve got nephews, sixteen, seventeen years old, young Irish-American kids in Brooklyn and they say to their black friends ‘hey, nigger,’ and that’s great. Once you put the word back in usage, it takes all the sting out of it. I ain’t saying we’re Fenians, we bomb people and we’re proud of it. I’ve been accused of that and that’s completely missing the fuckn’ point. My attitude is, yeah, I’m a fuckin’ Fenian bastard, and I ain’t apologizing to no one about it.”

The band has started to play and the Celtic fans are going wild. I’d been expecting something with a bit of substance to it, maybe a Scottish equivalent of Seanchai’s Brooklyn-Irish hip-hop, but this is just new words to tired old songs. There’s a marked lack of enthusiasm among some of the Irish-Americans in the crowd, so at least I know I’m not a minority of one. Now they’re playing the old Lonnie Donegan song, “My old man’s a dustman,” but they’ve changed the words to “My old man’s a provo.”

An American guy near me just turned to his girlfriend. “This is sectarian garbage. I’m outta here.”

Chris says, “You should see the banner they wanted to put up on the
stage behind you. Irish tricolor, Pope in the middle, IRA slogans all over. That was too much, even for this place.”

The New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade
has inspired many imitators all over the world, not least in Ireland itself, where until the 1970s the saint’s day was celebrated by closing all the pubs so that a suitably pious and penitent mood might be observed. The only flicker of light at the end of the fun-free tunnel was provided by the Dublin Dog Show, traditionally held on the same day, which had a special dispensation to serve alcohol to the surprisingly large numbers of dog lovers who flocked to it each year.

The first New York parade was organized in 1766 by homesick expatriate Irishmen who were serving as soldiers in the British army, doing their bit to keep the colonies in their place. This delicious irony is not widely publicized these days, though the event’s military origins are acknowledged by the presence of a unit of uniformed soldiers, the Fighting Sixty-ninth, at the head of the parade. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was a simple, ad hoc affair, but in the 1850s the Ancient Order of Hibernians took control and an organizing grand marshal was appointed. Floats were forbidden, to ensure a solemn and patriotic tone as the Irish marched through the poshest parts of town in a bid to establish their credentials as solid U.S. citizens. Since then it’s grown to include a plethora of Emerald, Irish language and Irish county societies, though the Ancient Ones have retained control of who gets to march and who doesn’t.

Most notoriously, they have enforced a rigid No feckin’ Pooftas policy that ensures acrimonious protests every year from Irish gay groups angry at their exclusion. My research suggests that they are not alone in their belief that the Hibernians represent the past rather than the present, and certainly not the future, of Irish America.

In a radical departure from my usual methods of working, I have been conducting this research not through conversations with semicoherent dipsos in public houses, but in the reference section of the New York Public Library. Writing is a solitary occupation, so the opportunity to work in a room
full of other people qualifies as an exciting social event, and may also help defer the onset of madness. Being among other human beings acts as a civilizing influence, providing a concrete reason for getting washed and dressed in the morning, and discouraging dubious literary habits like talking aloud to yourself, and eating tinned soup. If you tried either of those activities in here, security would have you out on your ear before you could say “Shh! There are people trying to work!” Attendants in paramilitary uniforms patrol the reading rooms on constant red alert for any sign of deviant behavior. New York has made a conscious decision to distance itself from the liberal northern European tradition of public libraries being places where tramps and mad people can pop in for a sleep and a warm.

It feels good to take the handsome staircase up to the magnificent first-floor mezzanine, stroll through the room full of unstable-looking people staring at computer screens and emerge into the gilt-embossed splendor of the reading room. Eight enormous chandeliers hang from a vaulted ceiling decorated with pink and gray clouds on a radiant blue sky. High arched windows look out onto the sides of gleaming skyscrapers. Each beautifully inlaid beechwood table has four pewter and brass reading lamps and eighteen chairs. I’m in my favorite seat today, number 703, to which I’m becoming so attached that if I ever come in and find it occupied I may have to feign Tourette’s syndrome or pretend to be a Mormon missionary until the intruder sees sense and goes and sits somewhere else.

The level of concentration in here is fierce, and also highly contagious. I just looked up and realized that the elegant black woman who was sitting in 705 when I was counting the reading lamps has left and been replaced without my noticing by a cadaverous man with cruel lips who is probably here to read about embalming fluid. Though we’ve never met, he and I are now part of the same community. We understand the pleasures of collective silence and contemplation in a hallowed setting. If we ever bump into each other at the vegetable counter in Safeway, or at an S & M party in a rubber-walled dungeon, we’ll be able to catch each other’s eye and say, “Don’t I know you from the library?” The solitary life has a lot to commend it, but sometimes it’s good to belong.

It’s impossible to read about St. Patrick’s Day without delving into the
wider history of the Irish in America, a massive subject of which I have an even more fragmentary knowledge than previously suspected. As the days go by I find myself gripped by accounts of the impoverished Irish who arrived from Cobh and other ports in the wake of the famine, settling in the overcrowded tenements of New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Drinking and fighting were not unknown. Many clawed their way up from society’s basement through uncompromising careers in politics and law enforcement, professions to which they and their ancestors had traditionally been denied access back home. Others tried different routes: Billy the Kid, aka William Bonney but real name William McCarthy, was the son of Irish parents. Senator Joe McCarthy was another one who famously let the family down. I’m amazed to discover that 20,000 Irish died digging the New Basin Canal in New Orleans in the 1830s; and that a similar number of Irish once lived in a shanty town in what is now Central Park, where they raised goats and pigs. There are learned articles on how Irish music crossed the Atlantic and became country-and-western and bluegrass, and a passionately argued but borderline loony piece claiming that, when it comes down to it, all music is Celtic.