The Road to McCarthy (22 page)

I’m on a crowded platform waiting for the train when a mournful-looking Chinese man comes walking down the stairs wearing a long gray overcoat and carrying a large case. He chooses a busy spot near the foot of the stairwell, then carefully opens the case and takes out one of those curious Chinese string instruments that may be distantly related to the cello. He stands for a moment poised with bow in hand, then launches into a tender, heartfelt and authentically oriental rendition of “Danny Boy.” Heads turn all along the platform. It’s the best moment of the day.

I get off the train at 42
^nd
Street, but there’s a hold-up as I try and walk across town to my hotel. Fifth Avenue is closed because the parade hasn’t finished yet. It started at eleven o’clock, and now it’s four thirty, which means—hold on while I count—it’s taken five and a half hours to pass any one point, and it shows no sign of stopping. The hard nuts in the Aran sweaters will have been back in their bedrooms for a couple of hours now, doing their homework and posing in front of the mirror with their berets and leather gloves on. Any way you look at it, this is a long parade.

The cops eventually give in to the heckling and hold things up for thirty
seconds to let us cross the street, then off it goes again. My last glimpse is of a band of African-American college kids dancing on the spot and waving their trumpets and saxophones in the air as they play the old Drifters’ hit “On Broadway.” I don’t think the Drifters were Irish, but I suppose you can never be sure. One of them was called Ben O’King, wasn’t he?

In the evening
Phil comes round with a six-pack of Sam Adams beer from the grocery store so that we don’t have to use the hotel minibar. We’re running a bit late, but we stay and drink them because they’re saving us so much money. Outside it’s raining hard and there are no cabs, so we take the subway down to Greenwich Village.

In the 1980s a London Irish band called the Pogues reinvented Irish music, playing the traditional songs with punk frenzy and writing a clutch of classic new ones into the bargain. Their singer and songwriter Shane MacGowan was eventually sacked, or left the band, according to whom you believe, amid tales of alcoholic excess and worse. He’s due to play in a Greenwich Village dance hall tonight, presuming he’s arrived in the country. He had a warm-up gig in New Jersey last night but didn’t show, according to someone on the march today, so his new band, the Popes, played without him.

MacGowan seems determined to live out the role of terminally alcoholic Irish visionary in which he has cast himself, so there is always the added frisson these days that if he does turn up it may be the final show. A friend of mine saw him once in the latter days of the Pogues and thought it might be happening when he started bringing up green bile on stage—the full works, down the nose, catch it in a pint glass, the lot—but Nottingham is not a romantic place to croak, and it would have done little to enhance the myth. But to die live, as it were, on stage in Greenwich Village on St. Patrick’s Day, singing of drink, oppression and exile—now that really would be a fairytale of New York. As we splash through the streets south of Washington Square in search of the venue, I picture Shane in his dressing room drinking pints of martini while a priest gives him the last rites and the sound engineer gets ready to tape the show—
Live Death, The Album
.

Perhaps out of gratitude for not being thrown through the window of Rocky Sullivan’s, Shane has invited Chris and Rachel to play and sing on some of the numbers tonight. They’ve promised to put us on the guest list, but as we walk up the steps I don’t hold out much hope, rock-and-roll paperwork being a notoriously unreliable branch of bureaucracy. The safest bet used to be to try and read the list upside down and say you were someone who hadn’t been crossed off yet. They must have wised up to that, because a woman in black lipstick looks in a drawer behind a screen, then smiles and gives us two plastic laminates. “VIP,” they say. “Very Important Paddy.”

We pass through a couple of club rooms with cocktail bars and pool tables, head up a broad sweeping staircase, and go through an ornate double doorway. As we walk into the hall a huge roar fills the place. I look up and see people hanging over the packed balcony, waving to MacGowan and the band who have just walked on stage. He’s clutching a glass and wearing a traditional black Irish drinking suit, which is like an ordinary black suit, only with more stains. As the barman pours black pints into plastic beakers, I read the health warnings plastered on the wall. “Smoking permitted—but breathing secondhand smoke can be harmful,” says one, though it’s done little to dampen the increasingly wild mood of the crowd, many of whom look as if they may have ingested secondhand smoke before. Next to it is a poster full of small print under the banner headline: procedure to save a choking victim. They probably stick these up wherever Shane plays these days, just to be on the safe side.

The sprung dance floor is bouncing up and down under our feet as he launches into “The Irish Rover.” Plastic glasses arc through the air, the cascading beer dramatically lit by the stage lights as it soaks the audience in what is almost certainly a witty postmodern reference to St. Patrick baptizing the Irish. Teenagers, aging punks and superannuated Greenwich Village hippies are careering into each other with wild abandon as the band crank through their repertoire of high-octane laments. Next to us a group of college boys have gone for a hokey-cokey formation.

“Awesome, dood!” shouts one.

“Excellent!” replies his friend.

“Say, man, this the dood used to be in U2? Far out!”

“Excellent!”

“Awesome!”

These guys make Beavis and Butthead sound like Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal. I remember the Ted Nugent conversation in Rocky’s and decide to move before they throw up on my leg.

Chris comes on to play the pipes, but it’s hard to hear him because all the other instruments are turned up to eleven. I spot one of the college kids apologizing to a Neil Young lookalike for barfing on his back, and then Rachel is on stage, singing the achingly beautiful “Fairytale of New York.” MacGowan is waltzing her round the stage and grinning, and the show’s a triumph.

The rain has stopped so we decide to walk uptown to Rocky’s. On the way we pop into a couple of bars, and pop straight back out. The day’s festivities have taken their toll and the broken glasses, glazed eyes and incoherent shouting suggest terrible postfestive trauma, as if the place has been turned over by marines on shore leave.

Up at Rocky’s a man is lying unconscious on a bench outside the toilet, like a carved knight on a medieval tomb, only sicker-looking. The place is littered with crushed plastic glasses, and the floorboards are stickier than an Ibiza dance floor on a Pour the Free Baileys Over Your Head promotional night. All my life I’ve been a fan of seedy, chaotic bars, but this is so extreme that drinking Aqua Libra in an art gallery tea shop is beginning to look like an attractive proposition.

I get trapped in a corner for a while by a wild-eyed ginger man who wants to tell me that everyone who failed their school exams in Derry was left-handed, so he does. I’m talking to the third homicide detective of the week, wondering why I’ve never met one in England, when Phil suggests we call it a night. It’s almost three. “Stay awhile,” says the cop. “MacGowan will be here soon.”

“Tell him I’ll see him another time.”

“I’ll tell him,” says the cop, “but I don’t know he’ll understand. Hey, take it easy out there.”

As we leave Rocky’s, a black Range Rover driven by two women with big hair pulls over to the curb. “Where are you going? You getting in?” shouts one of the women. We say No, because we are married, and because men with daggers will be lying on the floor in the back. A yellow cab driven by a jovial Russian picks us up. “In Moscow everybody is drunk like St. Patrick’s Day all the time.”

In the silence of my room I notice I am suffering from rock-’n’-roll tinnitus, so I brush my teeth and turn on the miniature TV next to the bathroom sink to drown it out. “Do you have an overactive bladder?” demands a nosy man on the screen, for no apparent reason.

I don’t know, mate. I’ll let you know in the morning.

As I fall asleep I realize I haven’t seen a single pint of green beer all day.

I’m feeling a bit rough
when I surface at eleven, probably on account of all the secondhand smoke. I’m too late for the hotel’s complimentary pastry served with choice of beverage, so I’m sitting in a Greek diner reading
Be Cool
by Elmore Leonard and eating cinnamon toast.

There are padded counter stools, a few booths and a guy who shouts, “You gaddit!” every time someone orders something. The door opens and an old guy in a corduroy hunting cap, checked shirt, stained tie and threadbare overcoat comes in and sits at the next but one counter stool. Yougaddit pours him a mug of black coffee and takes his breakfast order.

“Chicken salad on rye, lettuce and mayo, no tomayto.”

“You gaddit!”

Then to the person on the other side of the serving hatch, “Chick-inn salad on whiskey, no tomayto!”

The Hunter looks across at me. “That an Elmore Leonard thriller? Y’know, he wrote some pretty good westerns in his time. That movie.
Apache
, was it? Burt Lancaster.”

He takes a sip of coffee.

“Gee, but books are expensive these days. Took a paperback to my brother in the hospital last week. Eleven dollars. In the Depression they
were twenty-five cents. Idea was anybody could have one. Not anymore. Same with movies now. Ten dollars for a movie? Jeez! Say, where ya from? I thought so. I took a trip to the British Isles fifteen years ago with that Irish airline, Aer Lingus? Said they’d never lost a passenger, so that was good enough for me. Scared a flying, see. Made my life insurance out to my brother. Enjoyed Ireland. Wanted to see the Abbey Theatre, though, but didn’t get to see it. Didn’t see the zoo either. I like zoos. Liked Edinburrow too, but didn’t get to see the Highlands. What they did, though, in the end of a meal in a castle, gave us haggis? In a sheep’s stomach? Jeez. And I thought my grandmother’s cooking was bad. And then ….”

He pauses for a moment, suddenly distressed, as if he’s suffering from haggis flashback; but it’s worse than that.

“Then we went to Wales.”

He averts his gaze and stares into his cup. A deep sadness has clouded his face.

“Wales was …. bleak.”

He has the mournful tone of a man whose heart has been pierced by an arrow of cold steel, or who has been served laver bread for breakfast. Whatever the horrors inflicted on him in the principality, he can’t bring himself to share them with me. There is a terrible silence as he sits for a moment contemplating Wales; then he shrugs off the memory and snaps back into life.

“Hey, gimme a refill, would ya?”

“You gaddit.”

“Hey, here’s one you might like. About the Irish Catholic priest in Alaska? You know it? Bishop comes to visit him, asks him how are things.

“‘Oh, okay I guess, but y’know it gets very cold and dark.’ The priest shudders. ‘Don’t think I’d make it through, wasn’t for my rosary and my martinis.’

“And the bishop says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’

“ ‘Ah, not to worry,’ says the priest. ‘Say, would you like a martini?’

“‘Why, thank you,’ says the bishop, ‘I do believe I would.’

“So the priest shouts, ‘Rosary!’ And this beautiful girl comes in. ‘Rosary, get this man a drink!’”

The place is filling up. A guy orders coffee to go, then stares at two exhausted-looking yesterday’s doughnuts in the clear plastic case on the counter.

“Are these the only doughnuts you have?”

“Yessir.”

He almost leaves but changes his mind.

“Ah, okay, I’ll take ’em. And gimme a lo-fat creamer, and some sweetener.”

“You gaddit.”

He leaves, gets into the van he’s parked right outside the window and drives off. Yougaddit waits till he’s turned the corner, then reaches under the counter, takes out a pristine box of today’s freshly baked doughnuts and lays them out in the plastic case. The Hunter is just finishing his sandwich. His lower teeth don’t fit too well and slurps of mayo keep escaping, but he’s managing to clean himself up okay with a napkin. He gets to thinking about air travel again.

“Did ya see that, what was it, Concorde? Jesus.”

A fifty-year-old woman in last night’s makeup and clothes eating a Spanish omelette on the next stool to him takes this as her cue to join in.

“I worked on the Virgin account for a few years. I met Richard Branson once.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

She pauses to pursue some diced red pepper.

“People say he’s an asshole, but he’s not.”

It’s nice here. Like being in a village. As I get up to leave I say to the Hunter, “Hey,” because that’s what they all used to say to each other in
NYPD Blue
when they were entering or leaving a room. “Hey,” I say, remembering his threadbare coat, “Better stay warm today.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Throw another Irishman on the fire.”

I smile and slap him on the back, even though I haven’t got a clue what he means.