A Pint of Plain

by Bill Barich

  “Banagher is a great little spot on the banks of the River Shannon, fast becoming a boaters’ favorite thanks to the buzzing new marina.” That was the Lonely Planet’s verdict. “It’s rapidly turning into a relaxed and elegant tourist center for the Irish Midlands,” concurred the Rough Guide. Maybe on a mild July afternoon, with no Martin Gale special effects overhead, you might ignore the eerie, gigantic plant of Banagher Concrete, Ltd. at the gateway to the town, but it was a spoiler for me, and so, too, were the streets, just as congested as Birr’s. At the marina, I listened for a buzz, yet all I heard was the clank of bells and the chafe of ropes as the docked boats rocked on the tide. I wished I’d never left Clonaslee, and since that was a wish I could actually fulfill, I turned around and headed back.

  Obsessions die hard, and so do fantasies. To avoid the mayhem in Birr, I took a side road to Cloghan and crawled toward Tullamore, Offaly’s big city, ready for a shot of Tullamore Dew whiskey, its signature product, to calm my nerves. (The “dew” stands for Daniel E. Williams, once the brand’s general manager and part-owner. His initials featured in a famous advertising slogan, “Give every man his Dew.”) Despite Tullamore’s size, the traffic flowed smoothly compared to what I’d experienced elsewhere. There were trucks on the streets, but they didn’t function as instruments of torture, so I had a quick look around downtown, where the first Christmas lights were blinking merrily, and noticed a building on Kilbride Street with a thatched roof.

  This was the Mallet Tavern, the oldest pub in Tullamore. It predated and had survived the great fire of 1785, when a hot air balloon crashed and torched about a hundred houses on nearby Patrick Street and much of Kilbride Street, too. The tavern is whitewashed, with a blackish thatch of either reeds, heather, or straw—I couldn’t tell. All I knew about such roofs was that thatchers are hard to locate and reputed to share a finicky, artistic temperament. They’re difficult to pin down about the timing of a job, because they’re in such demand, and everybody wants to be next in line. The best way to engage a thatcher’s sympathy, they say, is to engineer a “chance” meeting at a job site and admire his craftsmanship, thereby promoting yourself in his eyes.

  I must accept a degree of blame, potentially large, for the expectations I laid upon the Mallet. I’d put the Quiet Man business to rest in Cong, after all. Why did I imagine that I’d be greeted by a glowing hearth rather than the worn green felt of a pool table? Even for a fantasist, the blast of heavy metal was a cruel shock at that hour, although the sleepy patrons seemed not to care. They were a midnight crew forced to operate in full daylight, the type of guys and gals, all five of them, you might run into at a bar in Chicago after the Bears had lost to the Packers—downbeat, that is. As for a jolly publican, forget about it. The youth on duty refused to field any questions about the Mallet’s noble history.

  Only Blooms offers rooms in central Clonaslee, ten clean but spartan cells above the restaurant, still closed that night, but I’d reached Damien, the proprietor, by phone, and he agreed to put me up, anyway, although there would be no other guests. He could supply a bed but no breakfast, so he knocked ten bucks off the price to drop it into the Motel Six range, then gave me the keys to the front door and took off. Alone in the echoing silence, I could have been mistaken for a character in a low-budget remake of The Shining. Had it really come to this? Maybe curiosity truly is its own kind of punishment. Just yesterday, I’d been reading Walter Benjamin on authenticity, and now I was about to march to Antonio’s for a chicken burger and another portion of chips prepared by the maestro’s son, a slimmer, fitter, jauntily pierced version of his dad.

  Night had fallen in the Slieve Blooms. The streets were quiet now, and a fine, elegiac mist colored the air. You could feel an element of surrender in it, that sensation of old Clonaslee fading away. A gang of bored high school boys stood outside the supermarket, each in a hooded sweatshirt. They were full of attitude and determined to ignore the drizzle, too tough by half to let a little rain disturb their macho pose. They couldn’t drink legally, but they’d scored some cigarettes and smoked with a practiced cool, spitting between puffs and nudging the sidewalk with a toe. Whenever an older boy wheeled by in a car and blew his horn, they roused themselves for a salute, pumping their fists and leaning hopefully toward the driver as they might toward a cherished vision of the future.

  The Mallet had left me so shaken I almost reneged on the mini-pub crawl I’d assigned myself as a last-ditch effort to make the trip worthwhile. I had to steel myself to begin, inching into Fallons for a pint, where I read the Irish Farmers Journal and admired the weanling bullocks. Fallons was as quiet as the night and very friendly with a wholesome, Rotarian attitude, the kind of pub that a chess club might embrace for its weekly meeting. It hosts music sessions on Thursdays, but this was a dead Tuesday, and there was no rustle in the atmosphere to suggest the craic might descend later, either, so I crossed over to the Cosy Bar, ready to surprise T. J. and be welcomed like a prodigal son. T. J. wasn’t around, though, and the farmers were gone. For company, I had five strapping jocks who drank Buds and watched a soccer match, while the barman sent text messages with his cell phone.

  As I departed, McDermotts Clonaslee Inn next door abruptly came to life, an event that couldn’t have been predicted by its ramshackle exterior. You could be forgiven for thinking it had slipped over the brink and now rested in peace, but a small group of men were at the bar, some farmers among them, all hefty fellows built on the T. J. scale, and they nodded affably when I joined them. They were involved in the Nine O’Clock News, the same program I’d earlier figured would be broadcasting my obituary live from Birr, and they talked not so much to each other as to the TV. A story about three Dublin housewives who picked up a shipment of cannabis at the airport, got lost on the way home, asked the police for directions, and were arrested kept them howling.

  The jibes and pokes evoked the fun-loving quality of frat house banter, where everyone riffs on the absurdity of it all. When the news ended, I assumed the talk would turn to other subjects, but the TV stayed on and remained a major player. There were asides, of course, and the men employed a verbal shorthand that I couldn’t grasp at times, so I probably missed some nuances, but my amusement still dwindled along with my beer. An archaeologist could do some fruitful work at McDermotts, it occurred to me as I glanced around, perhaps starting in the gents’ toilet where a Baege Super Hand Dryer from an epoch when such machines were heralded as a technological breakthrough was nailed to a wall. A set of instructions was even posted for the uninitiated.

  1. Shake Excess Water from Hands

  2. Push Button

  3. Massage Hands in Airstream

  4. Stops Automatically!

  As a sailor wets a finger and lifts it to test the wind’s direction, I stepped outside and tried to gauge the drift of the craic, if any. I followed the main road to a bridge over the Clodiagh River, glittery even in the drizzle, that led to M.D. Hickey, a tidy white house with red window sashes. The house looked so private I almost knocked before I entered, but I could hear the faintest trace of voices, so I threw open the door and felt not unlike Synge’s playboy when he bursts into the shebeen. A near-capacity crowd of four—two men and two women—was gathered in a front room only slightly bigger than a walk-in closet. They fell silent when they saw me—an unfamiliar face, an apparition—but that only lasted for a second before they were swept up in great swell of hospitality, waving and shouting for me to come in, come in, as if to rescue me from the night and its terrors.

  At first I wondered if I actually could fit inside, but I managed to squeeze onto the fifth and last stool, where I was promptly clapped on the back by a mechanic from the village garage, who had a beaming face and a broad-beamed body. “Good man, good man!” he cried when I took a sip of my Guinness and passed over some money to an elderly woman. This was Mary Hickey, who was petite, sweet-natured, and bright-eyed, and wore her hair in a flattering permanent. She was dressed so meticulously that she might have
had a Sunday school class to teach rather than a pub to run, the very archetype of a beloved grannie. If she’d brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies with my pint, I wouldn’t have blinked.

  Mary had been born in the house, and she still lived there. She opened the pub around eleven thirty most mornings whether or not she had a customer, because she couldn’t stop herself. The force of habit was too strong to overcome, she told me. (When I mentioned the O’Connors’ failed stab at retirement to her, she laughed and exclaimed, “Go on!”) Between orders, she rested in a chair and sat there like a muse, arbitrating any differences of opinion and contributing her own when appropriate. She seemed to float in and out of the talk, and sometimes retreated into a private space that her guests—I’d begun to think of us that way—respected. It was extraordinary that she could handle Hickey’s on her own, without any support at all. Clonaslee and the Slieve Blooms were still so benign, apparently, that she didn’t feel vulnerable.

  I saw what looked like a closet door at the end of the bar. Could it really be a closet? When I opened it, I anticipated a heady whiff of mothballs, but it led to a second room, where a solitary man sat by a coal fire, absorbed in thought and soaking up the heat. The pub had a third room, too, which Mary used for storage, chiefly of a dusty upright piano whose keys sounded only four notes in tune. “I should get it fixed,” she said wistfully, but she had more important repairs on her list. In such an old house, the repairs would stack up like cordwood. Her regulars once played the piano and sang, she recalled, but Clonaslee had been thriving then, and the workers from the peat bogs had money to spare.

  Mary set a fresh pint in front of a man spackled everywhere with flakes of plaster. He had plaster in his hair, sprinkled on his cheeks, and powdered over his clothes and shoes. “I’m a builder,” he announced happily, as though I’d never guess. Mary returned to her chair and puzzled over a leaflet that came with her new blood-pressure medication until one of the women at the bar—another Mary, a nurse from Dublin home for a visit—took it from her and translated the legalese, writing down the significant points on a napkin. She and her friend were protective toward Mary Hickey and helped with the chores, collecting the empty glasses and spreading around fresh coasters. I’d never been in a less commercial establishment. The money, though present, was incidental to the camaraderie.

  Even the mechanic was proud of the pub—of belonging to its charmed circle—and he whispered to me, as if to divulge a secret, “Hickey’s is very special, you know.” The builder raised his glass to second the motion, while Mary, the nurse, endorsed it, too. Feisty and intelligent, she gossiped with her friend about their old school classmates, charting the rise and fall of reputations, but it made her uncomfortable to leave me out. Her nature demanded inclusion, so she’d switch to a more universal, less personal topic—the hiking trails in the mountains, say, or the beauty of the waterfalls in spring. We talked freely, sudden intimates in the crowded front room, and though everyone’s tongue was lubricated, no one acted ornery or caused any offense. To misbehave in Mary Hickey’s parlor would be worse than offending Jack Birchall.

  The mechanic had no opinion on the hiking trails or the waterfalls, but he conversed brilliantly about the intricacies of sparkplugs and pistons, with a poetic intensity. If my car had needed a valve job, I’d gladly have entrusted it to him. The room was awash in trust, in fact, warm to the core from a mutually generated heat. I thought about ghost stories again and sensed that our gathering recaptured the spirit and flavor of thousands of other gatherings at Hickey’s over the years. The ease we felt with each other, the simplicity of our communing, they were informed by what had preceded us—so many lives and so much history, to cast it in Berger’s terms. As closing time drew near, I was reluctant to go, aware that the fragile bonds of an evening would be broken, but I finally put on my coat. “Thanks for calling by,” Mary Hickey said, as if we’d known each other forever.

  Chapter 12

  JOURNEY’S END

  When I woke in Clonaslee the next morning, still the only person rattling around at Blooms, I felt strangely disoriented. The village was as sleepy as ever, and I missed my comrades from M.D. Hickey, who’d returned to their usual pursuits. The mechanic was dressed in his coveralls again, while Mary had gone back to Dublin to resume her nursing duties. The pub itself looked calm and uneventful, an ordinary house once more. Mary Hickey might be in the kitchen right now, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea. My evening there took on the quality of a dream, never to be repeated. There was a time when I thought such evenings would fall my way consistently in Ireland, but I knew better now. As Eugene Kavanagh had said, “They won’t miss us until we’re gone.”

  At home in Ranelagh, I found an E-mail waiting for me. A friend in California had alerted me to the existence of the Flann O’Brien Original Irish Pub in Graz, Austria, so I could add it to my file of literary oddities. There was no end to the business of appropriating writers, apparently. Soon we’d have a Seamus Heaney Original Irish Pub somewhere, the Tara situation be damned. Even the real estate agents were getting into the act. I’d just seen an ad for a new tract in Leitrim, with an arrow indicating “the late John McGahern’s house” on its outskirts. At any rate, Flann O’Brien probably deserved some recognition abroad, since he’d been so neglected in Dublin—no portrait at McDaids, for instance, despite his considerable patronage.

  On a whim, I checked O’Brien’s Web site. (There’s also a Flann O’Brien’s in greater Boston, I discovered.) The copywriters had done a terrific job of articulating the Irish Pub Concept’s formula. It was no surprise that O’Brien’s “like its namesake tries to embody this spirit”—of “Irishness,” one assumes—nor was I shocked to hear that the pub had been “built on the Emerald Isle by the finest craftsmen” and shipped to Austria piece by piece. The next two sentences stopped me cold, though, because they were so wrong-headed. “Although Ireland has become a young, vibrant, energetic country in recent years [true], she is still firmly rooted in her culture and tradition [half true, at best]. In Ireland, the pub is still the focal point of every community every night [totally false].”

  There was no end to the appeal of Fairytale Ireland, either, it seemed. In the pub game, the authentically replicated had trounced the authentic for the moment in spite of Walter Benjamin’s assertions. For every rural pub that died, an IPC-type pub was busy being born in a foreign country, at the identical rate of one a day. The ironies didn’t stop there. If an investor were to stray from the formula and reproduce a pub such as M.D. Hickey, even installing a sweetheart of a grannie to pose as Mary, most people would give it a pass in favor of Nine Fine Irishmen. Worse still, when an ordinary Irish pub revamped to comply with its owner’s conception of the modern, it often resembled Nine Fine Irishmen, too.

  One truth was beyond the scope of irony. The traditional pub, plainly furnished, with no phony bric-a-brac, recorded music, or TV, where a genuine publican ran the show, the barmen (or women) didn’t change by the week, and the locals outnumbered the tourists, was on its last legs. In effect, Ireland’s pubs could be divided into three rough categories—a handful of carefully curated trophies such as James Toner and Doheny & Nesbitt that preserve an element of tradition; neighborhood bars like those in Ringsend and the Liberties, pleasant spots but not worth a special trip; and faceless corporate pubs operated strictly for profit. The trophies would probably be around forever, but the others could join the ranks of the departed at any time.

  For isolated country pubs, the future looked bleaker. Frank O’Brien’s in Athy, situated in a vibrant market town, could be reinvented as a museum piece like Morrissey’s of Abbeyleix if the right person came along, but Mary Hickey was unlikely to turn her front room into an Internet café, nor were the O’Connors about to hire a chef to develop a dinner menu in Ballitore. (An average pub must do about 50 percent of its trade in food if it hopes to survive, says Louis Fitzgerald. Paul Stevenson of VFI, brainstorming again, pressed for innovation, “Orient
al or even organic.”) The elderly publicans were just locked into a routine they’d initiated a half century ago, unwilling or unable to quit. With no successors in line, the fate of their pubs would be dictated by the real estate market and the police who patrol the roads.

  My journey was over at last. I knew I might stumble on another M.D. Hickey in West Cork, say, or the far reaches of Donegal, but it wouldn’t alter the picture. Better to put away the notebook, park the car at the curb, and prepare for the holidays, I advised myself, and that might have worked out if I hadn’t agreed to meet Moriarity, the photographer, for a pre-Christmas drink, with the proviso that there’d be no swapping of rounds. He’d moved to a small town some months ago to cut his overhead, and his visit to Dublin was a yuletide ritual that many of the Irish indulge in, off to the big city to see the lights and the decorations on Grafton and O’Connell streets. The women do some shopping, while the men refresh themselves as necessary and calculate the damage.

  I got to Birchall’s first. When I entered, I felt exposed rather than sheltered now, because of the new mirrors everywhere. I hadn’t yet adjusted to the makeover. It was more dramatic and extensive than I had anticipated. The pub looked more spacious, and just as handsome as McSorley’s—streamlined and cleared of the random junk on Jack’s shelves. It looked designed, too, and all of a piece. It flowed, as the architects say, and the bar blended seamlessly with the lounge. Gone was the pub’s cobbled-together aspect. Gone were the dated upholstery, the letter from Guide Dogs for the Blind, and the painting of swans on the Grand Canal. Instead, some pristine copper tankards hung from pegs, and there were framed rugby crests, two giant photo blowups of famous GAA teams, and three flat-screen TVs.

  As hurried as ever, Frank Smyth still bounced between pubs with his speedy stutter-step, supervising Andy and Big Andy, another Chinese recruit twice the size of the original. When I asked Frank to describe the new look once, he replied, “Traditional.” Jack approved of it, he said, and came by for coffee when he wasn’t playing golf or traveling. The comments from the regulars had been mostly positive, according to Frank, but I took that with a grain of salt, since only a natural disaster could budge them. The staff was gearing up for the holiday crunch, two weeks of blitzkrieg partying that would fill the cash register and exhaust the dispensers of good cheer. To recuperate, Frank was taking his family to Spain in January, where he’d steer clear of the “Irish” bars and stick to tapas.