Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  Me, I manfully procured four wheels by buying a small “estate” car, or station wagon, that had a sign in its front window two hundred feet from our house. Something’s not clicking? Take your clicker out of your pocket and click it, said the avant-garde composer John Cage. The kindly Welsh owner, whose name sounded something like Brynbrrryn, handed over the keys three days before being paid, which was very trusting indeed for a locksmith. Click. A celebration seemed in order, and I instinctively thought of that curious upstairs pub I had espied on our first walk about town, the Hi-B.

  “Wigs for Hire,” a wiggy sign said on the floor just above it, but never mind. In no time at all, I climbed those dingy stairs to the linoleum landing, and then opened a black door to an aria blast such as emitted by Mahler in one of his more bellicose moods. Behind a crescent-shaped bar, a man with flying wisps of white hair stood waving an imaginary baton beside shelves thick with whiskey, his pupils rapturously dilated. He was singing something that went – dee, Dee, DEE! It definitely was not B.

  Before the maestro, a number of curious-looking individuals hunkered over cylindrical columns of black stout. One had an unruly beard whose tendrils looked as if they might store months of famine-resistant nutrition. Another with a goatee expelled the heavyweight word “procrustean,” albeit garbled in the Urdu-like thickness of West Cork speech. Beaming at him was a dark-haired woman with a puppy at that moment raising a hind leg as if contemplating releasing a benediction on the floor.

  I found a free stool and gazed about in wonder. The proprietor, who I quickly learned was named Brian O’Donnell, offered some fleeting curiosity my way as he fussed with his Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.

  “That’s a sad light tonight,” he pronounced about an element not much of which looked to have ever touched his milky white skin.

  “Drive a man to seek refuge,” I tried, not realizing that our interchange could have long-term consequences.

  “I take it you are from America. Americans are not often intimate with the word ‘refuge.’ Nothing personal, but I am just thinking, isn’t vocabulary diminishing everywhere?” Brian said and turned away. His voice was peculiarly shrill and his attention span short. He lost himself for a while in fishing through a stack of papers with a manner not unlike that of an eccentric collector of antiquarian books. My kind of man, I thought, while mentioning that I was from Connecticut.

  “Ah, the Constitution State, I believe,” Brian countered with that astonishingly pinpoint knowledge that the Irish often manifest about places halfway around the globe.

  “That’s amazing! Most Americans don’t even know that’s what it’s called.”

  Here, my interlocutor produced a self-pleased smile. “Ah, ah now, I do know a thing or two about the world. And I had a particular friend from a period when I was in medical school who ventured that way, a certain Michael Buckley from my, ah, shall we say, salad days.”

  Gasp. “You’ve got to be kidding. He’s a friend of my parents!” Serendipity being my guiding Irish star, it soon developed that Brian had spent some of his riotous youth with the self-same Cork-born doctor I knew in Connecticut, a retired friend of my parents.

  “My, I’m just saying now, isn’t it a small world?” said Brian, amiably squinting through his nearly opaque glasses.

  Seizing on the connection, I dealt forth a quirky story which involved my posing, in 1974, as a young American psychiatrist beside a real Irish one – a friend of Bun’s named James O’Brien – in a Dublin schizophrenia ward. At Gaffney’s I had badgered James with questions from my recent readings about the intersection between creativity and madness until he finally invited me to come and see for myself as he made rounds. The first patient on our tour was a diminutive man who called himself Daft Jimmy. DJ promptly held out his hand, demanding, “Cut off these four, Doc, and I’ll be okay.” Jimmy explained that if he had but one finger, he wouldn’t be troubled anymore by thoughts of strangling innocent pals. “If you can do it, Doc,” Daft Jimmy beamed my way, “I’ll invite you to me house for a spot a’ tay.”

  Brian drummed his fingers on the bar, wondering where I was heading. Somehow, I felt compelled to demonstrate that I could spin a tale with the best of them. I hurried on, “So Daft Jimmy is there chuckling when who walked in but the hospital’s chief.”

  “Sticky,” Brian said.

  I explained that James O’Brien quickly introduced me as “Doc Monagan from the States.”

  “Where in the States?” asked the arch-browed chief.

  “Connecticut.”

  “Connecticut, is it? Where exactly?”

  “Why, Waterbury,” I had said.

  “Isn’t that remarkable! I worked there myself. In which hospital do you practice?” chortled the major domo.

  “St. Mary’s,” I had groaned like a cornered rodent, having been born in that one.

  “Then you must know Dr. Buckley? How’s his wife, Hylda?”

  “Who?” I had gulped.

  “So in other words you were a stuck pig?” laughed Brian, grasping that this tale was all about the serendipity that stalks through Ireland, in this case nearly thirty years ago and now newly repeated between him and me.

  “Exactly.” I told how James O’Brien yanked me away by the elbow, thus ending one of my first object lessons in the need to watch one’s every move in the improbably interconnected warp and weave of Irish life.

  “Extraordinary,” Brian clucked, making me feel as if I had just passed a challenging entrance examination for acceptance to the Hi-B. “And to think that this is the same Mick Buckley I knew so well. I have great time for that man.”

  A rambunctious punch of Wagner muscled forth, and Brian began introducing me to various figures inhabiting neighboring stools.

  “Would you mind if I had a cup of coffee?” one asked, a civilized-looking sort with neatly parted brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses such as university lecturers wear.

  An inexplicable darkness spread across the Hi-B owner’s face. His voice assumed an oddly mincing quality and his hands began to tremble as if confronting a shocking transgression. “Would ye know what a public house is for, fella? Well, you ought to after all the time you have warmed that stool. We do not serve buttered scones and coffee, as you well know. Or perhaps ye intended to call into a sandwich shop?”

  Men up and down the bar began sniggering into their pints, knowing the Hi-B’s ways intimately. Brian, looking pleased, topped off his already plenteous cognac, as the would-be customer poodled away in a huff. “Summertime, and the living is queasy,” he began singing for no particular reason, and then abruptly stopped to point out a nearby pencil sketch he had drawn of the great Gershwin. There were a dozen similar portraits on the walls, likenesses of famous composers, movie stars, and authors he had sketched with fair talent, back in the days when he cared to pursue that kind of thing.

  People came and left, conversation eddied and flowered, then Brian’s face suddenly contorted at the sight of some fresh affront in the back precincts of his small pub.

  “It is as distasteful as eating chips in a bar,” he blurted toward whatever was bothering him. The regulars sniffed trouble, knowing (as I later learned) that Brian once took such a visceral disliking to the bright colors of a customer’s tie that he surged forth from the bar with a pair of scissors and severed it at the knot. He then abruptly shoved the shorn ends into the man’s pocket and said, “Now you’ve got a hanky to match.” Another time, a lady in a hat rejected one of his bawdy overtures so indelicately that for the next three months he refused to serve drink to any haberdashery-crowned customer who ventured into the Hi-B.

  “Ye would not eat chips in a bar, would ye?” Brian now demanded over my shoulders, his eyes bulging like those of a foraging fish. “That is enough!”

  My curiosity was itching. Were the marauders behind us smoking grass? Drooling? Picking their noses?

  “I think ye had better leave! And don’t come back too soon!” Brian suddenly yelled as a young woman a
nd her tall male friend sheepishly exited in confusion.

  “Would you mind my asking what they were doing?” I asked.

  Brian moved closer. “Osculating,” he cackled.

  “How horrible,’ I said, knowing this peculiar Latinate word for kissing.

  Someone with a red beard saw me chuckling. A shopkeeper with a penchant for placing hefty sums on the races (a weakness shared by about every fourth male in Ireland), he warned that Brian’s mood swings were not the only thing to worry about in this vicinity, because when the moon was full and the tidal conditions unfavorable, many lanes in downtown Cork could gorge with rising waters from the Lee.

  “It hasn’t been too bad lately, though,” he offered, as I began to wonder if anybody in this place or this town or country talked straight. “And you should have no danger of drowning here, thanks to the protection of the stairs. Plus you appear to be lucky in general,” this penetratingly eyed creature, who turned out to be an immediate neighbor, continued.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the place where you have chosen to reside is the best park in Cork, because you have just found the best bar in Ireland, and because Brian seems to like you, which is not always or even often the case and which could of course change.”

  “I like it here,” I said, thinking this was all gorgeous theater, just what had been missing in the careful coordinates of our pre-Irish days.

  “You should. Even to have found a stool is like a pishogue.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s a word for a kind of superstition. Like a foxy lady.”

  “Who?”

  “If a fisherman sees a foxy lady on the pier, he knows he will drown and so he does not on that day go to sea. There are good pishogues and bad ones, various classes that we might call pisheens. It is a good sign to have found a stool here, because in doing so you have assumed a seat in the senate, the Roman senate. Here we sit and judge the world, while the plebeians sit at our backs.”

  Some might say this was madness. But the scene was resplendent to me, and suggested that a life of vibrant color, unpredictable and spontaneous, was ours now for the taking. If only I could collect all these impressions in a jar and get them home safely, I thought as I sipped, the wife will love me, and our adventure will be blessed with hilarity. Okay, I was already tipsy.

  “We all must contribute something,” offered Brian, helping his glass to a fresh dose of rocket fuel. “This is not a pub in the ordinary sense. It is a contributory to the great river of words. A club of a peculiar sort.”

  Nod.

  A swarthy man in his late forties made it plain that he’d been eavesdropping. He had sensitive brown eyes and a Scottish accent softened by many years spent in London and now Cork. We exchanged pleasantries. “The thing you need to know about Cork is that this is not like any other place you’ve likely ever been, at least not in Europe or America. This isn’t Europe; Cork’s not even Ireland really. It’s altogether strange. In other places people are valued for being organized, for being predictable and reliable and straightforward. That is the worst way you can possibly behave here. In Cork, people are valued for being unpredictable, for being chancers and dreamers and misfits, and above all for being characters. If you are odd here, you might fit in.”

  Just what my wife wants to hear, I thought.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 5

  The true symbol of Ireland is a circle, and the country’s dull tricolored modern flag does not fit the bill. Runic whorls and spirals speaking of a cosmos without end are inscribed on the walls of countless caves and prehistoric passage-tombs and repeated on ancient Celtic crosses in hidden cemeteries: the circle is Ireland’s talismanic shape.

  The country remains a place where one never stops reconnecting with that which has been encountered before. Two years after Bun’s death, Jamie and I ventured to Ireland on our honeymoon. We ranged the west, and I even had time to catch a couple of spring-run salmon in County Mayo, while my watchful ghillie nestled with a collection of beer cans into a sheep hollow and celebrated my casts with burps. Then we visited Paddy and his wife, Anne, at the timber house they had built in Carlow’s Blackstairs Mountains, where they were struggling at tending beehives and renovating canal barges on the River Barrow, after selling their pub in Tipperary’s Terryglass, which had become quite famous since my last visit. That wasn’t the only noticeable change. Their daughter Gwen, a toddler at our last meeting, had become a gangly beanstalk. “No one can replace the relationship you had with my father, but I will always be your friend,” said Paddy.

  We also visited an odd nearby pub called Mary Osborne’s. The proprietor had wild shocks of gray hair and eyes as inscrutable as a cat’s. You could travel far in those. The back wall of her dingy establishment was lined with wooden drawers into which Mary randomly deposited bills and coins in a way that suggested a more likely future as mouse bedding than circulating currency. A grandfather clock by the door picked its way through the hours. Old farmers shambled in with threadbare tweed jackets and twine-cinched trousers caked with sheep’s wool and manure. The customers nodded between sips and eyed us as if we were strange beings indeed. Mary’s brother occasionally retreated into a back room with Guinness cream dripping from his nearly toothless mouth. After a while, his screechy serenades on an ancient accordion – better known as a “squeeze-box” – began to filter through his lair’s open door. Old men sang through yellowed teeth, their noses exhaling sour jets of smoke.

  For honeymoons, other grooms accompany their gorgeous brides to the pleasure palaces of the azure Caribbean, for romantic larks in Paris, Rome, or Bali; but, no, I had delivered mine to Mary Osborne’s.

  “Where’s the ladies’?” Jamie asked.

  Mary’s slate gray eyes fluttered. “Cross the street and open the gate there and you’ll be sorted.”

  My blond bride soon discovered that she had been sent to the local cemetery, which doubled as Mary Osborne’s outhouse.

  While she was away, an old codger tipped forward on his seat and warbled, “I weep for Donal dead,” or something close.

  “Will you give us a song?” Mary Osborne demanded before Jamie was barely settled back into her stool.

  “I’m not much of a singer,” the new wife tried.

  Mary would not have it. “Every human being has a song.”

  “I can’t remember the words to any,” Jamie protested.

  “Look at you now, all beautiful and young and newly married. You must sing, for your husband and all of us gathered now.”

  “Go on lass, give us a song,” the fella nearest added.

  My bride looked at me helplessly, perhaps gazing into our strange future.

  “You must,” I chuckled.

  So it was that Jamie, whose love of silliness I have always adored, bequeathed upon Ireland, land of haunting ballads, the immortal words of a ridiculous advertising ditty that started: “I went looking for a noodle, a different kind of noodle, that is golden light, tastes just right. And I found what I was after . . . a golden noodle.”

  She’d found her noodle all right. It was me.

  The next day we drove up to Howth. Bun’s gate lodge, the arch of vines, and undoubtedly my robin had all vanished, replaced by four concrete bungalows that looked as if they belonged on the moon. Flash money was already contaminating the land.

  More recently, the producers of Riverdance, that spectacular of modern stage-Irishness, purchased a “tear-down” bungalow by the now unmanned Baily Lighthouse for £1 million and replaced it with an 8,500 square-foot house with indoor swimming pool and subterranean parking for five cars. Then they grabbed up a neighboring Georgian house for £3.9 million, followed by another dwelling on the other side – such is life in the new Irish Beverly Hills.

  If only Ireland’s new rapaciousness was confined to a single address. In 1984 it was impossible to know that the carefree days of even those back-of-beyond pubs like Mary Osborne’s were num
bered, like so many other pages from Ireland’s past. Developers now pay hundreds of thousands of euros for any pub license that can be transferred to city establishments worth ten times that; these reincarnated city pubs are then dressed out in Paris-Los Angeles-Prague chrome ’n’ leather fittings meant to evoke swank foreign dreams. Meanwhile, Dublin syndicates have filled warehouses with sufficient bric-a-brac to create endless reproductions of these supposed icons of Irish authenticity all over the world – six hundred export kitsch pubs were thrown up in the year 2000 alone, in places like Beijing, Paris, Houston, and Milan (there are ninety others in Italy). I once met a Cork musician who had been dispatched to belt out ballads in the six Irish pubs a syndicate had recently created in Dubai. He loved it.

  Irishness – “Oirishness,” as the natives ironically pronounce it – cannot be trapped in a jar. Often, only a wild blunder can lead to the country’s elusive heart. Heading back to Ireland on our first anniversary in June 1985, Jamie and I ploughed west from Dublin in a rental car until exhaustion set in. We randomly located a former “glebe” or vicar’s house on a side road that now took in travelers. Bordered by lush pastures, it looked perfect. We strolled, ate, and retired for the night.

  While preparing to pay the next morning, I examined a map of Ireland on the entrance wall. Something odd at once caught my eye. “Sorry,” I said when the owner appeared, “but I couldn’t help noticing the pins stuck into your map. Inishbofin, Brittas, and Borris, Terryglass, Mulhuddart, and Howth – I’ve been to every one of these places.”