A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  Time passed slowly at Mulligan’s, or maybe it ceased to exist. Somewhere my pint rested, and as I waited for it my mind began to drift. Again I was taken with the sleepy nature of the lounge, its very implacability, and I remembered another Christy, the one J. M. Synge had conjured up in The Playboy of the Western World, and how he’d burst into a similarly tranquil pub in County Mayo and startled the regulars by confessing that he’d killed his father. Synge’s knowledge of pubs derived in fair measure from his stay on the Aran Islands, where he constantly had to yank his boatmen out of their local.

  “With their usual casualness they had not seen to the leak in the curragh,” he wrote on one infuriating occasion, “nor to an oar that was losing the toll-pin, and we moved across the sound at an absurd pace . . .” Under the influence of too much porter, the men were “unusually voluble, pointing out things to me that I had already seen, and stopping now and then to make me notice the oily smell of mackerel that was rising from the waves.” Even in rough weather, boating accidents were rare on the Arans, Synge learned, and when they did happen alcohol was responsible. Two men, heavy with drink, drowned one day, and their curragh floated to shore “dry and uninjured, the sail half set.” Three fishermen from Inishmaan, the second-largest island, also tipped over while drunk, and though a steamer saved two of them, the third perished.

  At pubs and in his rented rooms, Synge listened to stories, mostly in Gaelic, and they planted the seed for Playboy. One story involved a refugee from Connacht, who fled to Inishmaan, swore he’d killed somebody with a spade while in a passion, and begged his relatives to protect him. He spent weeks hidden in a hole, and nobody revealed his presence despite the offer of a reward. Synge understood that the “impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west [of Ireland]. It seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feeling of these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime, that a man would do no wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresponsible as a storm at sea . . . Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, ’Would anyone kill his father if he was able to help it?’ ”

  For Synge, the pub was also a source of revelations, a theme Conor McPherson vamped on in his brilliant play The Weir, set in a small rural bar in either Northwest Leitrim (a county blessed or cursed with the most pubs in Ireland) or Sligo. Four gents, testy friends—the publican, a garage owner and his mate, and a real estate agent—tell tales to impress Valerie, a Dublin woman who’s just bought a house in the area. The tales are all ghost stories, and each takes the unconscious narrator by surprise, revealing a previously unacknowledged dimension, until the last tale changes the play’s direction when Jack, the garage owner, relates a self-lacerating truth that undercuts the earlier evasions. It’s the neutral space of the pub as a third place that allows for the confession, which will be left behind when Jack goes out the door. The publican, Brendan, asks, “Will you be okay in that wind?”

  JACK. Jaysus, I should be used to that road by now, says you, ha?

  BRENDAN. I’ll get you the torch.

  JACK. Am I a moaner?

  BRENDAN (going). There’s well fucking worse, I’ll tell you.

  What McPherson captures, as well, is the lingua franca of pubs—the slagging (“to criticize abusively,” says the Oxford Concise Dictionary) that some regard as a tactic to puncture any pretension, pierce any inflated egos, and reinforce the democracy of a third place. When Valerie asks for a glass of wine (Jack says, “It’s not too often the . . . the . . . wine does be flowing in here.”), Brendan goes into his house—the pub is part of the house, common in rural Ireland—to get some. The real estate agent Finbar remarks, “He probably has a bottle of the old vino, from feckin . . . Christmas, ha?” The slagging goes on when the group examines the photo of a dedication ceremony at a weir built to generate hydroelectric power. Finbar singles out a boy in shorts and asks, “Who would you say that is there?”

  VALERIE. Is it you?

  FINBAR. Would you go ont? The big fucking head on that yoke! Excuse the language. That’s Jack.

  VALERIE. Oh, my God! How old were you there, Jack?

  JACK. Em. Oh I was about seven.

  VALERIE. I wouldn’t have said that was you.

  FINBAR. You must be joking, you’d spot that big mutton head anywhere. The photographer nearly had to ask him to go home, there wasn’t going to be room in the picture. Isn’t that right Jack?

  JACK. That’s right, and your dad nearly climbing into the camera there.

  FINBAR. He was a pillar of the community, Valerie. No one had anything against him. Except headers like your man there. (Indicating JACK.)

  JACK. That’s right, Finbar. And I’m just going in here to do something up against the pillar of the community now.

  All literary thoughts fled when my pint arrived at last. The stout did not froth, bubble, or threaten to erupt, nor did a ripple run through it anywhere. Instead it radiated a sense of calm, if such a thing were possible, and Christie delivered it precisely when the beer had completed its gyrations and fully settled. The pint was picture-perfect. A quarter inch of foam topped the black stuff with its slight ruby tinge, and the stout was cool, not ice-cold, and crisp and very clean on the palate. Could Christie perform the same trick twice? I put the challenge to him, and he accepted. His second pint duplicated the first in every detail, a feat worthy of a citation in, well, The Guinness Book of World Records.

  My praise was excessive—probably too excessive, to judge by the ironic look Christie gave me. He’d heard overawed Yanks spout such nonsense before, I’m sure, but I hung in there and asked why every pub didn’t serve a pint as splendid as Mulligan’s. The duties of a barman aren’t as demanding as they once were, after all. Before Guinness introduced draft stout in sealed aluminum kegs in 1961, the barmen participated in the weekly bottling carnival, when the beer was transferred from barrels into bottles that needed to be washed, sterilized, and capped. Each pub had its own label, and it was pasted on by hand. The art of the pint seemed simple in comparison, so why did it go awry?

  “Too many young people,” Christie mused. He might have added, “Haste makes waste.”

  Here was the voice of experience. How many times had a callow lad slaving for the minimum wage brought me an unsatisfactory Guinness? Too many to count, in fact, although you couldn’t blame the poor rookie, because he’d never been trained except in the most basic skills. When I checked Mulligan’s Web site again, I realized the barmen were men in their thirties, forties, and beyond, who cared about the pub, their jobs, and teamwork. Tommy and Con Cusack, the owners, seldom lost or fired an employee, I guessed, but you couldn’t go down Ranelagh Road without seeing “Help Wanted” signs in the pub windows, often with the tag “Must Speak Fluent English.”

  When I next visited Mulligan’s, I saw the principle in action. Con Cusack worked the bar with three others, Christie among them, so that made four pint-pullers in all, or double what you’d find in most pubs of the same size, where you have to scramble for a drink as in a rugby scrum. They had no floor staff for support, either, but they weren’t rattled and almost seemed geared up to meet and defeat the pressure. In some ways, the pub still reflected the manly attitude James Mulligan had tried to prompt by throwing out the stools and chairs. There’d be no coddling of the patrons, clearly. When your pint was ready, you stepped up to grab it or risked a barman’s ire.

  Mulligan’s by night was a different proposition, though. The manor had come alive. A second bar opposite the lounge, locked during the day, had opened, and it was as crowded as the first. My compatriots from the afternoon before, apart from the Trinity students, were of the gray- and snowy-haired variety, retired or just killing time, but a broad cross-section of Dubliners surrounded me now. There were young office workers from Poolbeg Street, and a good number of dads with teenage
sons in tow, who focused on the match between England and Russia that played on two TVs I hadn’t noticed last trip.

  Tradition or no tradition, it appeared as if television was an unavoidable circumstance of pub life in the modern city. As far as I knew, only the maverick Kavanagh had the nerve to do without one, but maybe he didn’t feel the pinch. For most publicans, a big match like England versus Russia, available at home only to those who subscribe to a premium sports channel on cable, provides a welcome shot in the arm. (I heard no rousing cheers for England at Mulligan’s, by the way. The Irish have long memories.) As in the U.S., the big breweries buy ad time for these events, and when I looked around the pub, I witnessed a vision of male bonding that replicated to an astonishing degree the carefully staged scenario onscreen.

  Soccer bores me, so I bonded with the only other uninterested person at the bar, a German tourist flicking through the pages of Irland, his guidebook. He spoke English well, and when I mentioned my California ties, he told me how much he liked the cowboy novels of Karl May. He’d never been to California and placed it next door to Monument Valley, John Ford’s old stomping ground—there were some weird coincidental overlaps in the conversation, although I did not, for once, drag in The Quiet Man—where, years ago, I’d come across a stack of May novels at a Navajo trading post popular with Germans indulging in Wild West fantasies. This fellow was very meticulous and had drunk a pint at sixteen of the pubs recommended in Irland so far—an excellent country, he agreed, and second only to Germany in its appreciation for beer.

  I consulted my two guidebooks later for fun, curious about their take on Mulligan’s, if any. The Rough Guide repeated the line about the “best Guinness in Dublin,” but it touted the pint at the Guinness Storehouse, too. Lonely Planet also used the “best Guinness” line, noted that the pub had been a stand-in for Daniel Day-Lewis’s local in My Left Foot, and commented on the “wonderfully varied collection of regulars.” (That would be the daytime bunch, I surmise.) LP listed twenty pubs that deserved a visit, not counting twelve “trendy bars” I won’t enter in this lifetime, while the Rough authors logged thirty-eight pubs to try, leading me to the conclusion that the public house is a vital aspect of Ireland’s tourist industry.

  The most recent Visitor Attitude Survey (2006) of the Irish Tourist Board offered qualified support for that idea. As usual, The Irish People were the number one attraction, although the admiration for their sociability and all-around charm has been declining steadily for the past five years, perhaps due to the turmoil and edginess that an infusion of new money can create.

  Next on the list were The Scenery (inarguable) and Culture/History (somewhat arguable unless you have an insatiable appetite for ruins and castles). If you skip over the next three “attractions” as attributes rather than entities (English Speaking, Access/Easy To Get To, Restful/Relaxing), pubs hold down fourth place, yet most visitors insist they rely on them for food instead of drink, a contention that may require another survey to determine the relative honesty of tourists.

  Those visits to Mulligan’s gave me a boost. If the pub didn’t tick all the boxes, it came awfully close. It might not be as pure as the Gravediggers, but it stuck to the faithful middle ground between the old deadbeat dives of the dockers and such recent aberrations as the new Baggot Inn with its ear-splitting pop music. (In an odd twist, few pubs in Dublin, traditional or otherwise, play recorded Irish music, while the IPC formula practically demands it.) The Baggot Inn has glittering fixtures and promotes its gimmick-of-the-moment, a tabletop device that accepts a credit card and lets you pour your own pint, thereby reducing the contact between people even further. At Paddy Power, you could probably get odds of 5-2 that some young vigilante would soon figure out how to jimmy it and drink for free.

  One Saturday afternoon, I walked from Mulligan’s to the site of the old Corn Market in the Liberties, only minutes away. Corn meant wheat or oats back then, while maize was the word for the crop that grows on cobs. It used to be an Irish staple, essential for bread and a valuable export. Account books show that the king’s armies in Scotland purchased 113 shipments, each packed in a wicker hamper, in 1229. The market, considerably reduced in size, made its last stand on Thomas Street around 1727, where the traders and farmers reveled at the Bear Tavern and the Hibernian Chophouse. Haberdashers, wool drapers, and purveyors of coarse linens were as prominent as corn merchants, and they hired “pluckers-in,” famous for their sheer aggression, to buttonhole pedestrians like barkers and beat them into submission with fantastic promises of bargains never to be met.

  The Liberties was buzzing with activity. Even more so than Ringsend, it has the feel of a neighborhood holed up in a bunker to ward off the future. Cranes hover at the edge of it, harbingers of the first high-rises, and tower over the little cottages on Brabazon Square and the statue of Jesus in a gazebo that forms a traffic roundabout nearby. The lure of Grafton Street has no visible impact on the residents, even though the boutiques are just around the corner. Instead, everyone congregates at the junction of Thomas and Meath streets, a free-fire zone of commerce that ought be called Bargainland. Here the discount butchers, bakers, and greengrocers compete with a squadron of open-air vendors, who block the sidewalks with their monumental, vaguely sculptural displays of toilet paper and paper towels in sixteen-piece bundles.

  Anyone who’s short of money makes a beeline for Cash Converters, where the pawnbroker’s three gold balls (a symbol appropriated from the Medici coat of arms) signify a willingness—nay, an eagerness!—to deal. We Loan, We Cash Cheques, We Buy, We Sell, Cash Loans, no financial transaction is beyond the Cash Converters’ widely thrown net, and many people choose it over a bank because the formalities are few and don’t always require as much documentation. Those who are flush pass it by and upgrade their wardrobes at Bing Bing Fashion or the Bull Ring, an indoor loop of stalls where the selection of track suits, virtually a uniform for the neighborhood youths and some of their parents too, is exceptional.

  Amid the hurly-burly, a skinny sad-eyed woman, no doubt a junkie, tried to sell me some black market cigarettes. Drugs are pervasive on the streets and have led to an epidemic of petty crime. The novelist William Carleton (1784-1869) wrote about the Liberties’ criminal element in his autobiography, remembering the night he slept in a “thieves’ kitchen” after failing as an apprentice taxidermist—he couldn’t stomach the process of stuffing dead birds with potatoes and meal. “The entrance of Dante’s Inferno was a paradise compared to it,” said Carleton. A host of phony beggars lay on straw mattresses or ragged sheets and drank liquor of every description, while crutches, wooden legs, artificial cancers, scrofulous necks, artificial wens, and sore legs hung from pegs on the walls. Sickened as he might be, Carleton confessed to admiring the thieves’ “perverted talent and ingenuity.”

  Far more noble were the exploits of Robert Emmet, the revolutionary, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered on Thomas Street for his attempt to foment an insurrection in Ireland by seizing Dublin Castle in 1803. The veterans of an earlier rising had promised to send help, and when they failed to deliver, Emmet’s men lost their drive, joined the habitual excesses of a Saturday night, and started a drunken mob riot. Armed with muskets and pikes, they inflicted more than fifty casualties. At his public execution, Emmet held a hankie in one hand, obliged to drop it when he was ready. “Not yet,” he responded to the hangman’s first query, and again “Not yet” to the second, but on the third go-round, he only got as far as “Not—” before the hangman did his duty with apparent zeal, parading around with Emmet’s skull in hand and cursing him to the heavens.

  Outside St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church, a white stretch limo pulled up at the curb and released a trio of giggling bridesmaids brilliantly arrayed in pale blue gowns, every inch of them groomed to their own personal ideal of perfection. A gentle mission statement was posted on the church façade (“We are an ordinary people wishing to create a parish where we all feel Welcomed and Valued”), but there�
�d be nothing ordinary about the wedding ahead. No matter how seriously in hock a family in the Liberties might be, they’ll dig deeper to fund a ceremonial bash of any kind—baptisms, christenings, weddings, or wakes—piling on the food, the drink, and extras like a stretch limo and a honeymoon in Bali. Some stores on Thomas Street display basic white “no-frills” communion dresses priced at $500 a whack.

  In such an busy, vigorous, integrated neighborhood, the pubs might yet be unspoiled, I thought, but the first three I passed on Meath Street were ordinary, no different than an average corner bar in the States. I lingered for a pint at the Fountain, anyway, just to soak up the atmosphere among the shoppers taking a breather in the late afternoon, who were worn out from toting their bags of pork chops, Kerr’s Pink spuds, and knobby Brussels sprouts. A trio of TVs each commanded a distinct audience, with the racing fans following the action at Ascot and the soccer fans invested in a Manchester United match. The third TV, mounted high up in a rear alcove, was tuned to a Western for the delectation of two elderly women who ate ham sandwiches, shared a pot of tea, and speculated about whether Randolph Scott was really gay.