by Chris Lynch
I looked away from him, looking everywhere, for some sense, for something that made sense to me. My head hurt worse and worse. “Sure ain’t much of a celebration, is it?” I asked Sully, as low as I could. He shook his head.
“What the fuck are we doin’, Sul?”
“We’re not doin’ nothin’. We’re just standin’. We’re clean.”
I shook my head, and shook it more. “Are we, though? I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t. Are we clean?”
Sully shrugged.
The bagpipes, convoluted and weaving, somehow unearthing a tune and looking around for something better at the same time, welled up slow and soothed a lot of the stuff. A lone piper, in a kilt of blue and green tartan with a matching cap and high socks, had a section of the parade all to himself. He floated through like high clouds, like a thick slow breeze, quieting everyone, humming us all to sleep and brushing away everything that came before him. Bad weather, anger, dissonant chords, dissonant people, were no longer a part of the day, as he left nothing but honey in his wake.
But that too was swept away when the end of the parade came up. The Irish-American Gay Pride Coalition marched along, in numbers that matched any other group, under a banner raised high on ten-foot aluminum poles. The crowd in our area had swelled with people who had finished marching and doubled back to where everyone knew the action was going to be. There wasn’t even a hesitation this time.
Little boys were scraping their fingernails on the pavement to get up every speck of snow to throw. Every ball seemed to be a motherball, maybe just because of the ferocity of the throws, but the street became a war zone.
“Screw, this ain’t no St. Pansie’s Day parade. Get them faggot asses outta here.” Terry had quickly switched from snowballs to eggs, then from throwing them to running right up and jamming them in people’s faces.
“Youse is all lyin’ anyway, ’cause there ain’t no Irish faggots,” Danny proclaimed to several shouts of “Damn right!”
I was frozen, my hands at my sides. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sully said, grabbing my arm. But I was transfixed, watching it all. “Come on!” Sully yelled.
Suddenly Augie appeared right in our faces. He stuck an egg in my hand. “What are you two doin’ standin’ around wit ya thumbs up ya asses for? Throw this.”
I stared at the egg in my hand.
“Here,” Augie said, trying to put the other egg in Sully’s hand.
“I don’t want that,” Sully said.
“You better want it.” Augie lifted Sully’s hand, placed the egg in the palm, and forced his fingers closed around it. He then whirled around, pointed to a group of the Cambodians who had drifted back to the other side of the street, and said, “There ya go. Now throw it.”
Sully coolly looked into Augie’s vacant blue eyes, and went into an imitation of Muhammad Ali. “I ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong,” he said, and dropped the egg to the sidewalk to splatter both of their feet.
Augie was incensed, at the voice as much as what was said. He balled a big fist and stuck it in Sully’s face, asking the big question again as he showed off his other tattoo, the green lettered WITE across his knuckles. “Are you forgettin’ who you are?”
Sully didn’t answer, which finally made Augie maddest yet. Augie then drew back his fist, behind his ear, to pound Sully. But just as he was about to let it fly, I reached out and grabbed the fist. When Augie paused, stunned, Sully bolted. He’s got a good heart, Sul, but not a very stout one.
Augie turned on me. “You got balls, boy. So much I’m thinkin’ about breakin’ your head. But I won’t.” He lunged, gripped my shoulders, and spun me around to face the other side of the street. “Throw the sonofabitch.”
I balked.
“Throw it or I’ll kill ya. And don’t think your brother’ll stop me.”
I was looking straight into the mayhem. The street was filled with Terry and Danny and the Cormacs and a few freelancers pushing and spitting and slapping marchers, who covered up or ran or swung madly back at them. But mostly the scene was filled with a lot of people watching and doing nothing. Like me. Until now.
“Throw the muthuh,” Augie said from over my shoulder, and as he said it, he clamped down on my earlobe with his teeth. “I’ll rip it right off,” he garbled.
I only hesitated for a second, and he bit. First, a little pressure. Then a pinch. I squinted, gritted through the pain. I felt a tearing as he bit and pulled the ear away from my head at the same time.
I threw the egg. I threw it over everything, into the harbor, probably, I threw it so far over everyone. Augie chomped and I felt the blood. “People are gonna think you’re a stray from the Gay Irish-Americans,” I said, and he yanked his head so violently I thought I was going to lose the ear. He pulled another egg out of his jacket pocket and placed it in my hand.
I threw this one for real, as the clamp on my ear made my eyes tear. I watched the trajectory, its gentle arc as it crossed the road, sank, and landed dead in the face of the Cambodian woman who had earlier wrapped herself around her husband after the motherball. She stood like a statue as her friends made a fuss around her. Her husband turned and lovingly wiped the egg away from her face with that same scarf, picked pieces of shell off her coat.
Augie let go of me, lingered long enough to chuckle like the devil in my ear, then joined the fray.
I felt the tears in my eyes spill over as my ear burned and I watched the scene play out. There was a lot of chatter in the Cambodian group. I started making my way over there, feeling a need to get to the woman and do I don’t know what—to undo the humiliation I knew couldn’t be undone? But I was going. As I hit the street, I saw the leader, the woman’s husband, leaning to listen to a white man, a friend of my parents, who was pointing me out. In a flash, the Cambodian man locked on to me and came running my way. I wasn’t going to fight him no matter what, so I just held my hands up and yelled “Wait, wait,” but he steamed my way anyhow.
I was going to let him. I prepared to be bowled over, closed my eyes and stood. But it never happened. When I opened my eyes, Terry and the man were wailing each other, going toe to toe, the man giving as good as he got while crying tears of rage. Until two of the good old cops came over, one grabbing the Cambodian man from behind in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his sides, the other grabbing Terry in a similar way, only holding him by the waist, leaving his hands free to hammer off two and three and four more unanswered shots to the man’s purple, bloody nose.
The sound of sirens from the distance of every direction broke things up quickly. Terry knew that the police on the way to the scene now would be different, not as sympathetic as the St. Patrick’s volunteers. As soon as the officer let him loose, he booked, followed by the boys. As he ran he grabbed me by the arm, yanking me, my wheels spinning under me just fast enough to keep me from falling on my face, as I ran along out of blind stupid instinct.
What’d I Say?
HOW DOES NEWS TRAVEL the way it does? When we ran, we ran of course to Bloody Sundays. It didn’t take us any time to get there, Terry rushing back to the place all flushed and giggling like a little boy bringing home his first perfect spelling test crushed in his hand. Still, word beat us to the bar.
“On the house, on the house, on the house, on the house, on the house,” Brendan the bartender called, shooting each of us with his finger gun as we strode through the door. The annual corned beef and cabbage and green beer and bullshit crowd was gathered inside already, one big sweaty blob of people pressed from wall to window, from bar rail to door. The odor was ten times as strong as it had been the night before, that and the ten thousand back slaps I got on my way in nearly drove me to the floor.
Which would have been fine, actually. I would have just lain there the way smart people do when there’s a fire, letting the smoke and noxious fumes float over them, the flames lap away everybody else. I would keep my nose pressed against the dusty floor, my arms covering my head, and then in a while
I’d get up and walk calmly out, stepping over all the dead bodies. No such luck though. They wouldn’t let me go down.
“Here, here, c’mere, boy, here, have this.” Some old duffer I recognized but didn’t know was jamming a slab of corned beef between a couple of slices of Wonder bread that had some meat-juice stains around the crust. “Here ya go. They’re all outta the free dinners, a-course, but here, you take this.” The meat kept wiggling out of the bread, and the old guy kept wedging it back in with his cracked, brown-speckled, sclerotic hands, then waving it all in my face again.
“No, really,” I said, turning my head ninety degrees and closing one stung eye. “I want you to keep it.”
He didn’t hear me, or wouldn’t accept it, because once again, the sandwich was in my face. “Here, son, have this, you earned it.”
“I don’t want it,” I screamed, drawing some looks, making the old man stare down into his plate and mumble. “Sorry,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. He brightened, tried to talk to me. I walked away. A spot opened up at the bar and I snatched it. As soon as I took up my spot on the stool, Terry was there.
“You could give up that seat,” Terry said to the man next to me, one of the part-time, green beer, St. Patrick’s Day rent-a-micks. The man hopped right off the stool.
“So, whadja think? Fun, or what?” Terry said to me as Brendan slammed two cold ones down in front of us. I pushed mine away.
“Get this out of here, man,” I said.
Brendan pushed it back. “Get outta town. You’re a hero. Drink the beer.”
People are always trying to force me to swallow things. “I’m not a damn hero,” I said, and before I could slide the beer away again, Terry grabbed it.
“He’s right, he ain’t a damn hero,” he said. “He’s just an apprentice. I’m a hero.”
“That you are, boy,” said Tommy Coughlin, an off-duty firefighter who draped both big hands over Terry’s shoulders. “You’re the man, Terry, preserver of the faith, keeper of the flame, righter of all things—”
“Shut up, Tommy,” Brendan laughed. “Go home to the wife.”
“Don’t stop him now,” Terry said. “I think he’s soundin’ pretty good. Just a little full a the old blarney today, that’s all he is.”
“Full a the old barley, ya mean,” Tommy said, laughing, exchanging fist smashes with Terry. “But no shit, man, y’know, I ain’t no prejudiced, you know that, but what you guys done today, that was right, it was the right thing.”
“Preserved the purity of the day, is what ya done,” said Mrs. Doherty, a sixty-year-old semi-widow with her husband, Jim, slumped at a table across the room. “Now I ain’t no bigot, mind ya, but them people had no business in our parade. You fellas did the decent thing.” She slapped me hard on the back, nearly sending me into the cheap bottom-shelf booze. The admiring crowd gathered in a semicircle around us. Terry loved it, swinging all the way around to survey his flock from the pulpit, leaning back with his elbows on the bar. I held my face in my hands, looking into the yellow mirror with the fake marbled squiggle all through it behind the bar.
Up on the big TV, cable access was playing the annual St. Patrick’s political breakfast, where the dwarfy needlenose president of the state legislature sings lame sappy Irish ballads and ridicules everybody who has a real job. It’s like a TV Mass around here, but this time Terry had the senator beat for attention.
The Milkman came over to solemnly shake Terry’s hand. They call him the Milkman because he is, actually a milkman. Drives a silly truck painted like a Jersey cow for his father until he inherits the little empire himself. “I deliver to some a them people, y’know, Terry, and, well,” he shook his head grimly, disgustedly, “well, you know what I’m talking about.”
Terry nodded, nodded, soaked it up, winked, and let the Milkman kiss his ring before clearing out. The band started warming up. My god, the band. Please, not the band. Had it been a year already? This is the thing people wind up talking about most when the gas clears from another March 17. The band is a three-piece outfit made up of a drummer with only a snare drum; his wife, a versatile instrumentalist who alternates between tin whistle and accordion; and on vocals, every pipefitter and bookkeeper with inhibitions quelled enough and strength raised enough to grip a microphone. The three stand on a makeshift stage in the front window that takes up the space of two round cocktail tables, making for big fun every year when three or four soloists end their sets by plunging accidentally into the crowd.
The first singer, a priest new to the parish, tore right into “My Wild Irish Rose.” The earnestness. That’s what I could kill them for. The earnestness. The senator was up on the TV screen screeching the same song at the same time as if it was some kind of bozo celebrity lip synch contest. Same heartfelt squints, same sour notes.
“Brendan, man, you got a couple of Advil for me?”
Brendan slid me another beer.
“No, no, no, I don’t want another beer, I want something for my head.”
Brendan slid me a shot of Jameson. And the copy of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy that was always on display right beside it.
I didn’t try to talk to Brendan anymore. Talk got harder anyway as the caterwaul grew louder all around us.
“Semper friggin’ fi!” Borderline Bob screamed in Terry’s face. They called him that because he was, even by local standards, psychotic. He was pointing at the inscription tattooed on his large, heavily veined biceps. “Semper friggin’ fidelis,” which is exactly how it read. “Always friggin’ faithful. That’s me, Terry, man. That’s my motto. It was the motto when I was in the corps, and it’s even on my family’s goddamn coat of arms, if you can believe that.” Which I couldn’t, because old Bob’s not exactly semper fi with the truth. “But today, man, it’s you, Terry. You’re the faithful one. You are the true one. Y’know, I wish I could tear this sucker right off myself, and I would, I’d rip it right off and I’d stick it right onto you ’cause you’re the guy that deserves it.” And with that, Borderline Bob began what appeared to be a sincere effort to claw the tattoo right off his own arm.
“Hey, I appreciate the thought, Bob, but could you maybe do that over there,” Terry said, motioning toward the corner by the one brick wall in the place.
“Sure. A-course,” Bob said as he headed off in that direction, scratching, scratching, picking, as if he were just trying to lift a postage stamp off an envelope. “I love you, Terry, man. I love you,” he muttered, then, as he passed me, “Hi, Mickey.”
“Hi, Bob.”
“I ain’t no racist,” Marion said as he shook Terry’s hand. Marion, with his mother behind him, nodding. Marion lived with his mother and not with his father, who went out for a quick cold one twenty years ago and never came back. Marion Junior was named after his father and not after his mother, who was named Marian by some freak of luck that they just made worse by dumping the name on the kid and giving him probably the full set of nervous acne he still has at age twenty-five. “I ain’t no racist, Terry,” Marion Junior said.
“He ain’t,” Marian said, and the two passed along to me, shaking my hand in what had become a sort of receiving line.
“I’m workin’ for the Edison now, y’know,” Marion said. “Anything you need, you just let me know.”
“They had it coming though, didn’t they?” Marian said to me. I thought to answer, couldn’t, shrugged instead. “Ah but you understand that, I know, after all what you said the other night.”
“What did I say?” I begged, taking her hand in mine.
“Oh you’re a divil, just like my Marion. And you know what else, you’re a throwback. I ain’t heard words like you used in decades. Nobody says jungle bunny no more. Nobody says jigga-boo or chinky—”
“I fuckin’ did not say—” I snapped.
“Y’know, boy,” she prattled on, “it was just the way we talked in them days, so everyone knew who everyone was. Now, with them all breathin’ right over our shoulders instead of stayin’ wh
ere they belong, we can’t say the words we want. But you—”
“Me, nothin’, all right. That wasn’t me. You know, you drink a little too much, and your memory’s a little screwed.”
This made Marian chuckle. She pulled her hand out of mine and threw me a wink. “Don’t you worry, now,” she said. “We know how to take care of our own.”
Marian’s words shoved me further into sickness, the vile taste coming back up out of my belly again. Did I need taking care of now? I was not one of their own, goddamn it.
And there was no way, even drunk, even in that atmosphere, that I could have said those things.
I was pretty sure.
“Go have a drink, Marian,” I spat, wanting her and her words out of my space.
She took my words as encouragement, and went off to find that drink.
A cheer rose up as the local entry in the upcoming mayor’s race bought a round for everybody in the place. Not one of the once-a-year bums, this man was in the Bloody four or five nights a week. The difference was that he was buying, this one time. He knew how many miles he could get for his beer buck, guaranteeing the votes of the sloppy, soggy clientele for a one dollar draft on the one day it would work. The man stood across the room and raised his glass slyly to Terry, not risking the political jeopardy of sitting with him.
Another priest—where do they all come from, and why do they all want to sing?—stood on the stage. Slyly, again slyly, always slyly, he nodded and winked at Terry before revving up a ferocious, dissonant “Wild Colonial Boy.” Augie ran up to Terry and they exchanged warm, excited head butts. Terry drank my drinks, Augie’s drink, everybody’s drink, held both fists high in the air, and roared. He was king, and he knew it.
“Where are the Cormacs?” Terry asked.
