Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  “Are you happy here?” I asked as we climbed back into the car.

  “You mean sitting in a car?” he responded, always wry.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Ah sure, it’s grand,” Harris said, proud of the new expressions he was picking up.

  I probed. “Not everything is going to be grand, you understand that?”

  “Well, I miss Robert. Most of all I miss catching snakes with him and exploring the woods, and I don’t like it that there’s no snakes or woods outside our door.”

  “I can understand that. But you’ve got so much else, so many new friends, and for the rest of your life you are going to be a larger person for having experienced what is happening now. It’s going to be difficult sometimes, but when things bother you, just tell me, and we can try to fix them together.”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” he said and abruptly offered a hug.

  A sweet silence fell over our trip back to Cork City – there was love in it.

  Things were going so swimmingly, I received sanction for another Friday afternoon visit to the Hi-B as September waned. Voilà, I instantly gained a stool at the front ranks of the Cork senate, and there my education continued. Apparent, it soon became, that the cantankerous Brian O’Donnell was far from the only star attraction in this place, because the pints de jour this afternoon were being poured by a woman with an opposite, boundlessly warm nature – Esther.

  Never had I seen a more engaging bartender. Discreet enquiries quickly revealed that every afternoon two-dozen men or more wander into the Hi-B simply to be cheered for a pick-me-up or two by Esther’s rollicking charisma. Some stay longer, and one could easily understand why. Here, the regulars whispered, was a woman who always appreciates and never scolds or asks one to take out the garbage – the male dream.

  There must have been some kick in that first pint, because I became instantly enraptured. A painter, I thought, could exhaust his palette in portraying Esther’s long brown streaks of hair falling nonchalantly from either side of a jolly moon face, and her glowing blue eyes, never tainted by a ripple of hostility. No supermodel, I would learn, captures as much attention as Esther does every day.

  Fresh customers inquired, one after another, “May I have a pint of Guinness?”

  “Of course you can, love,” was her invariable response, regardless of whether they had been seen before.

  Time drifted, and I heard three different men ask her to run away with them for the weekend.

  “I don’t believe running is something you should undertake without a medic,” Esther chortled, which was gracious considering the appearance of some of her suitors. She said that her boyfriend, Toss, of these last eighteen years wouldn’t bother being jealous – “not with the customers I serve here,” Esther roared.

  Suddenly, a certain velvet-voiced gent made his presence felt in the bar. By now, I’d learned that half the adult population of Ireland shared an obsession with this crooner, whose insouciant, seductive tones emanate from every third pub, shoe shop, and bank. “Nel Blu Di Pinto Di Blu – Volare, oh, oh, oh!” Those were the immortal words echoing now through the Hi-B, where Dean Martin, R.I.P., rather than the viper-vanquishing Patrick, seemed to be regarded as Hibernia’s true patron saint. The Las Vegas Brat Pack boy may be enjoying a brief posthumous surge of attention in various countries, but his boozy aura clearly reigned supreme over Ireland. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was all but forgotten, although his portrait had once reigned in every Irish foyer, along with companion ones of the pope and Jesus, the latter with an exposed, and often electronically illuminated, giant red heart. Now it’s Dino Crocetti who croons eternally in the let-the-good-times-roll soul of the modern Emerald Isle, with a fag in his lips, a drink in his hand, and a girl on his arm – the way every other Irishman would like to carry on to the day he dies.

  I’d tasted the Hi-B’s seductive fruits before, but nobody had warned me about what was coming next. Here now was Esther, who never touched the booze or nicotine herself, crooning giddily “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me” and “Memories are Made of This.” Suddenly a half-dozen customers began belting out in unison, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie – that’s amore!”

  Merriment washed through the place in waves. An irresistible smile spread across the small face of Jimmy Cosgrave, a former butcher close on eighty and a classic of the ever-amiable, retired gentleman-laborer type still ubiquitous in Ireland. Jimmy, dressed to the nines in a white shirt, tie, and suspenders under a neatly pressed jacket, proved good for a few pints – until his wife gently steered him toward the door. Geezers in Florida beach-chairs do not have it so good.

  Sitting close to the pay phone into which he incessantly dumped coins for brief, cackling calls to mysterious contacts, presided the Hi-B’s resident sculptor, John Burke. “Burkie” had an inimitably gruff voice so rasped with drink and cigarettes that it sounded like it emanated from a clanging boiler stationed hundreds of feet down in his torso. The son of a Tipperary IRA hitman known as “Two Gun Thady,” Burkie soon showed himself to be a softie at heart.

  In his younger years, he was acclaimed for massive abstract sculptures in the Calder mold. Fellows at the bar now sniggered that as soon as one of these was installed at the grassy center of one particular Cork roundabout near the airport, numerous drivers dialed “999” to report the wreckage of a fresh plane crash. Nowadays, Burkie tended to work on intricate tabletop constructions, as the money for the kind of big projects that he favored had grown tight.

  “You come from a strange nation,” offered Burkie, with dark sunglasses obscuring his mischievous eyes.

  When Burkie said something was bizarre, I quickly learned, it was stone guaranteed. “I mean where else would you get pornographic ice cubes?”

  No argument there.

  “I used to love a bar in Manhattan called Maggies. It was just off Fifth Avenue somewhere. There was this Jewish fellow in there named Bob Goldman who once asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and said ‘Half five.’ He says, ‘Half five is two thirty.’ Christ, didn’t he have a point?”

  “Nice one,” I said.

  “That was how we hit off, like. He took me up to the top of the Pan Am building and the next thing you know he’s packing me into a helicopter and we’re flying all around the fecking Big Apple half-cocked. After a while we came down again and had some more drink. Then he says he’s taking me to New Jersey, where he lives. So I said, fine. We drove his car onto the Staten Island ferry.”

  “The what?” I asked, remembering the geography differently.

  “The Staten Island ferry. I just told you. Anyway, Bob has this flash car with a driver and we head off down these huge highways. Then we stop in front of some factory and he says, ‘I have this bunch of assholes working for me and I have to check that they’re still awake.’ There were all these Vietnamese or some goddam thing hunched over conveyor belts and an enormous machine in the back throbbing and belching exhaust and shooting out endless pink ice cubes shaped like tits with little ice nipples on them. I said, ‘Holy Mother of Mercy, what’s this, Bob?’”

  Burkie was cackling, sipping, and furiously sucking on a cigarette. “‘Everybody loves porno ice cubes in the clubs these days,’ says Bob. Then he throws a switch and out come pink ice cubes shaped like girls’ asses, thousands and thousands of them. I said, ‘Bob, do you have anything for the homos?’ and he throws another switch and out come thousands of iced pricks.”

  “Tell me you’re making this up,” I said.

  “How could you? How can you not love America when it’s capable of things like this? Then he tells me we’re going to a Halloween party in some club and gets me to dress up like Richard Nixon. And guess what kind of ice cubes were in every glass?”

  “What town did this happen in?”

  “I told you, New Jersey,” Burkie responded.

  A silver-haired man exuberantly joined our conversation. He had an extraordinarily lilting voice, the kind that C
ork people use to singsong their way giddily through everyday speech, as if swinging happily through some diphthong-ridden forest of their imagination. The one declaiming so exuberantly now was a jazz pianist who presided over rollicking, impromptu sessions in the pub every Wednesday night. He was but a month old the first time his mother ushered him into the Hi-B so she could chat to friends who were taking a break from their shopping.

  “I liked the place so much, I’ve come back for seventy years,” the musician laughed.

  “And we’re wondering when the hell you’ll ever leave!” Esther chortled. Then she leaned closer, saying, “Dave, this is Dick O’Sullivan. He’s a dote.”

  This was high praise, because being called a “dote” in Ireland is an epiphany, a verbal halo. The word is untranslatable, not only into foreign tongues but also into English. It has to do, obviously, with being doted upon. But in Ireland, women – it is always women – take the verb and suffuse it with so much loving emotion that the word becomes burnished into a noun of all-encompassing affection. The replenishing of reality with wellsprings of warmth is of course what Irish women do all day long, thereby preventing the country from turning into a madhouse of nonstop homicidal bickering. After all, the most celebrated of ancient Celts in the eighth-century Tain manuscript, the boy-warrior Cuchulainn, a.k.a. “The Hound of Ulster,” merrily lopped off the heads of about two thousand rivals, often for a single comment that displeased him.

  “Oh, your daughter’s nearly a teenager, is she? Well, good luck,” offered Dick. “Maybe you’ve heard about the American, the Englishman, and the Kerryman who had the same problem,” he said, proceeding to offer a rollicking off-color joke about the blindness of fathers toward developmental changes in their daughters.

  By now, my head was spinning, yet my thoughts were already fixed on the idea that I could never leave Cork. At that moment, a narrow-eyed old geezer sat down on a stool and started rummaging at his side. “Esthaher!” he wheezed with his head drooping in dismay. “I’m sorry but I seem to have no money.”

  “Ah, not to worry John, I’ll pour your pint and you can pay me another time,” the patron saint of Cork smiled.

  A moment later, John wheezed again, “Esthaher, I have no pockets. They’re all gone.”

  Esther’s devilish eyes now flashed the length of the suddenly gone-speechless bar. The geezer took a long quaff and, with lips rimmed in stout cream, stood up to head for the gent’s. Only then did it become apparent that he had put his pants on backward. Laughter unto tears rained.

  The time now was about 4:30, although it had begun slipping, slipping. A friend of Dick O’Sullivan’s arrived, sipped, and commenced belting out an aria from Puccini, his eyes closing soulfully and his right hand lifting as if he were on the stage at Covent Garden and not standing unaccompanied in the middle of a bar where neither sanity nor sobriety is held in high regard. And why not sing? It was Friday after all, the flagship of the seven most appealing days of the Irish week, and the September sun, whose future appearances were likely to be scarce, was yet shining.

  Brian O’Donnell slipped in, his fussy prosecutorial eyes darting about for miscreants as he helped himself to a prodigious brandy. He happened to train his glare upon me.

  “I see you are further acquainting yourself with the asylum,” Brian winked. “Ah, I think you’d better watch that fella beside you. He may claim to be a Richard, but he’s been a Dick all his life.”

  A change of music, and the bar began to levitate to the strains of a brass section muscling into a bout of Wagner, with Brian waving his imaginary baton at the crescendo.

  What a place. “I’m at the Hi-B and it’s mad fun with a cast of characters you wouldn’t believe, but I’ll be home soon,” I told Jamie over the phone, possibly without registering the desired effect.

  But then I hadn’t figured out that the clock on the Hi-B’s wall was dangerously defective, as indeed are baffling numbers of Irish timepieces – every street corner clock in Cork tells a different time, just like the Liar’s Tower. At that point, the Hi-B’s hour hand hadn’t yet climbed to six, and the world still resembled the one I had left at the bottom of the stairs. I met a roguish carpenter named Kieran to whom I warmed instantly; a statuesque Mary Louise; and several Denises who began to blend into a single composite grinning Denis.

  Lo now, there was Owen McIntyre suddenly bursting in with marvelous stories broadcast in his Donegal birdsong, in fact a raving monologue that seemed, as usual, to be launched rather than spoken from his lips. This saga had something to do with a fellow with a “savage” appetite for a “fierce” woman with “deadly” looks and a “mighty” wit, which energized the suitor’s “massive” thirst along with thoughts about something “shocking.” But the punch line was lost in his inevitable digressions. I told him I had a “wicked” need to go home for dinner.

  “Come here to me,” Owen said, which, even in my waning condition, obviously signaled an invitation to shut up. “You have plenty of time to make it back for dinner now – it will be at least twenty hours until the next one – so you might as well have another pint.”

  There are reasons why Irish people are not always punctual. The ritual of shared pint-buying is sometimes part of it. This rite never, ever comes in ones, but always in units of two. If you accept the first offer, as any polite soul must, but do not return the favor in an equal and opposite amount soon, you will be blackguarded for the rest of your days in whatever pub your ass has been parked. So we had a deuce times two.

  “What we are doing here is not about drinking per se,” Owen suddenly explained.

  I stared in consternation at the various twenty-ounce glasses arrayed before us – drained, working, and due up next. It didn’t seem like we were nibbling hors d’oeuvres.

  “Drink is nothing more than opening a door,” he started again.

  To a flight of stairs I am about to fall down, I thought.

  The talk, which flowered and digressed in all directions, was not easy to walk away from, until my wandering gaze discovered the clock’s hour hand just completing its fifth revolution since the last spot-check. Where was Father Theobold Mathew when one needed him?

  The taxi driver I found on Patrick Street did a good impersonation of that celebrated scold. “Do you know about the three stages of the Irish drunk?” he asked as I amiably swayed beside him in the front seat – in Cork, it is disrespectful for passengers to retreat to the back of a taxi and impede the flow of nonstop wisdom from the lips of the driver.

  “I don’t actually.”

  “The peacock, the monkey, and the pig.”

  “Sorry?”

  “They all start as peacocks and turn into monkeys and the pig comes rooting around after.”

  “But I thought monkeys were a barrel of fun?”

  “For a while, but they have to be watched closely because they will turn into pigs in a flash.”

  “How does one spot the change?”

  “When they begin pissing in alleyways, and fighting for no reason, and vomiting on their shoes, they are pigs. Take a close look at the behavior of the young people of Ireland now and you will see the impact of two hundred years of a nation being continually jarred.”

  Charming. “I gather you’re not fond of the drink yourself,” I said as the bright lights of MacCurtain Street finally dimmed behind us, and I began to weigh the euphoric sense of discovery that informed my last sips in the Hi-B with the sour truths that were yanking down the drooping lobes of my formerly contented ears.

  “Oh, I am,” said the taxi man. “But I drink alone, at the farthest possible end of my local bar whose name I won’t tell you and where you will never find me anyway.”

  Who would want to, I thought, fumbling for change as he came to a stop.

  For some reason, my key and the front door lock exchanged greetings clumsily. But I pasted on a happy face and tacked with high hopes down the hallway into the ominously clean and silent kitchen, at the far end of which I discovered my wife
scowling from a chair. Talk about adapting to our new land. She might as well have been rocking impatiently before an open hearth with a rosary bitterly twisting in her hands.

  “I met the greatest people, especially Owen,” I started, smiling perhaps as slackly as some other customers had done while evacuating the Hi-B hours earlier. This was no time for moral equivocation, so I steadied my feet. “I really feel we made the right choice in coming here. Our lives are going to work out great.”

  “That’s good, because I was just reading a short story,” Jamie said, “and it reminded me of your behavior tonight.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, it was about a man whose wife had just given birth to a baby boy. The midwife sent him out to get fresh towels. But he was so excited that on the way he stopped in at the local pub to tell all his friends the news. Everyone was so happy for him that they bought him drinks and he bought some back. At some point, he remembered that he was supposed to be on an errand, but he was too far gone to remember the thread. So he left with some coins in his hands and stopped in at the shop next door. When he got home he called up the stairs to announce his purchase. ‘Honey, I’m back! I got the fish!’”

  “At least he returned with something,” I said, wondering if I had left a haddock at the Hi-B.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 10

  The perfect antidote for bedtime sourness is to aim for higher altitudes in the morning, so the family, on some expedition or other every weekend, was wrested to search for an ascent into Waterford’s Comeragh Mountains, irresistibly called the “Magic Road.” Contacts from the night before had vowed that we would see things there that would turn our heads as they never had been before. Of course, in Ireland, people will promise whatever falls onto their lips.