Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (5 page)

“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”

“You got it.”

And there we were. Two depressed teenagers far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, with no presents, no tree, no stockings, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.

Flick. On the next channel:
The Sound of Music
. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria—not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a von Trapp—comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things.
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles!
And I thought of Ma back in New York and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather's little library, listening to the original cast recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. And I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was certain that in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips and pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy's case—but suddenly, damn it if we
didn't
feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn't singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp strumming his guitar. And that feeling of freedom returned, that sense that even if I didn't know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, was right. We both cried; it was good. In my case, the tears flowed free and fast. Billy was more restrained, but a few droplets stained his cheeks, even though he was trying to fight them.

“Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me another beer.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Merry Christmas, man.”

He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Yeah, Merry Christmas.”

•   •   •

A
week later, the boys and I drove up to Oakland for the big New Year's show, where Vancouver Ben pressed a miracle ticket into my ready and grateful palm, where I spun around the broad corridors of the Coliseum with people I loved, where the night shifted itself down into dawn, into a new decade, into the 1990s. Then back to Santa Cruz, where Danny and Billy and I, joined later by Marie, found a place to live up in the hills, in a century-old log house on stilts right on top of a fault line in a forest of scrub oak and redwoods, Pacific madrones and ancient ferns and pillowy green moss.

•   •   •

I
'm not a Deadhead anymore, and haven't been one in years. And there are some people who seem to regard that part of my life as a lapse in taste, a failure of discernment. That's okay by me; I don't regret it a bit. And I can't think about this without starting to cry a little, like I did in that motel room that Christmas night, because I look back at my sixteen-, seventeen-year-old self, in some carnival of a parking lot somewhere in America, with no class to go to, no job to worry about, no parents on my case, with the certainty that somehow, through luck and providence and the kindness of strangers, there would be food enough when I was hungry, a place to crash when night came, someone to drink with or to hold fast to when I was lonely, and I get this pain, this pang, this awful, hopeless, close to desperate longing. I think I'd do anything if I could just go back there for one day, just one day. That's all I'd need. I don't think I'd want more. Nostalgia really is a bitch, and getting older is hard.

I grew up. And on the whole, I guess I'm glad I did. I left Santa Cruz. I got a GED. I went to college. Went to work. Got married. Moved on. Found other communities where I fit in, with other people I loved.

But I know that part of me will always long for that time, with its many joys and excesses and occasional terrors. I learned what it meant to go too far, to drink too much. And I had acquired something that would serve me immeasurably later on, when I fell in love with bars: I had become wide open to people, more capable of accepting them, and of enjoying them, and of loving them, for all their goodness, and badness, and general
mishegoss
. I grew bolder: I would talk to anyone, anytime. It almost always paid off; if not in friendship, at least in stories. I look back and what I see first are not tie-dyes and discarded nitrous oxide cartridges and ticket stubs and spiny green pot plants in lividly illuminated crawl spaces; what I see first are golden-white quivering aspens in autumn on the road from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon. Sunset at Natural Bridges. I see a campfire in a backyard in suburban Rochester, where a very nice man named John Milton—for real—whose address had been given to us mysteriously by a bunch of bikers he didn't know, let a host of hippies unroll our sleeping bags in his living room, built a campfire for us in his backyard, and made us eggs and home fries and toast the next morning. Mostly, I see those people, and I hear the songs we sang together. I never felt freer in my life than I did in one of those parking lots, or around one of those campfires with those sweet unwashed people, and I'm telling you, brothers and sisters, I never will feel that free again.

3.

AN AMERICAN DRINKER IN DUBLIN

Grogan's Castle Lounge, Dublin

I
t is hard to say exactly when I became Irish. It's not like it happened all of a sudden. It was gradual, incremental. And the Irishness I was interested in had nothing to do with the Kennedys, the Catholic Church, the Clancy Brothers, the green-beer-and-kiss-me-I'm-Irish swag of Saint Patrick's Day in America. What I was after was an equally bogus and utterly ahistorical idea of an ancient Irishness that reflected, and galvanized, my vague, young, softheaded notions about poetry, revolution, and identity, and the romantic allure of islands, the way they are set apart from the rest of the world, isolated, troubled, special. My instinctive attraction to tribalism in many forms—from the fraternity of drinkers on the Metro-North bar car to the family of lost children I'd joined on the Grateful Dead tour—had found in the ancient Celts and their contemporary descendants yet another expression. Here was another tribe to which I wanted to belong.

For a Jewish girl from New York it was a questionable choice—why on earth would I trade my inherent identification with one historically oppressed people for another?—and a peculiar feat of self-reinvention. Yeats's poems had a lot to do with it. The Pogues had something to do with it. And fairy tales, and myths, and legends. I was stirred by the stories of Hibernian badasses, from Cuchulainn to Brendan Behan. I was a total sucker for the stolid somber pulse—like heavy steady raindrops—of the bodhran, the big, round, moonlike frame drum that is the dark heart beating within spooky old ballads in which maidens were drowned in rivers by jealous sisters, or babies were abducted by malevolent elves, or plans were hatched to lead bloody midnight insurrections against colonial oppressors.

I had a sense that I would very much like the smell of burning peat in a small parlor on a damp evening, and like even better long leisurely afternoons in a pub on some Dublin backstreet, where gray northern light asserted itself through mist-streaked, half-curtained windows, where I might settle in with a pint of Guinness and a notebook, tinkering with my poems and maybe recording bits of overheard conversations, while regulars argued politics and poetry and talked and drank, talked and drank, talked and drank, until at last a white-haired barman with rolled-up shirtsleeves finally threw his arms up and shouted an exasperated “Last call.” I was sure not only that I'd fit in just fine, but that I could keep up with them all—if not drink them right under the table.

This is a landscape mined with cultural stereotypes, flattering ones and ugly ones, stereotypes all the same, and it is dangerous territory. Perhaps you have heard that we Jews love money and school. You may have also heard that we Jews don't drink. “No one has ever seen a Jewish drunk,” my mother used to tell me.

Right.

You may have also heard that the Irish
do
drink, and prodigiously. So, for this and other reasons, by the time I entered college I had become Irish. And though I didn't stay Irish for long, I was pretty good at it. Second semester, I took an Irish literature survey class. I paced around campus reciting “The Stolen Child” and “The Second Coming” to anyone who would listen. James Connolly, the courageous and unabashed Socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising, had joined Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci in my little pantheon of radical gods. I learned a smattering of Irish Gaelic. I bought a bodhran.

It was hard to explain myself, though, and I was frequently interrogated. My heart was definitely in it; I loved, and knew, Irish folktales, and traditional music, and poetry. But why was I so into this? I didn't really know. Was it because my upbringing had been so secular, so open, so fertile for self-expression? Maybe, but I hardly thought about it that way. Really, I couldn't come up with an explanation better than “because it's interesting.” It was true—Irish history and literature
are
interesting, but wasn't that also true of Turkish or Russian or Japanese or—heaven help me—English history and literature? I was deeply unsatisfied by my lame answer to an honest question, maybe even exasperated. I had dyed my hair red. I could easily pass. I was asked so many times if I was Irish that after a point I decided to say that, yes, yes I was, sort of.

•   •   •

M
y mother had often told me colorful stories about her paternal grandmother, Anna. She had lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in a mixed neighborhood of aspirational middle-class Eastern European Jews and Irish Catholics whose children fought one another viciously as soon as the parochial and public schools sprang them at the end of every weekday afternoon. Anna sang and played piano, was famously foulmouthed, had left her Hungarian-Jewish husband, my great-grandfather—by all accounts a decent and mild-mannered stationer—and, after the divorce, bore a second child, out of wedlock. She said “burl” for
boil
and “earl” for
oil
. She was tough. She had cred. “You'd have thought she was Irish,” my mother, herself a great fan of the whole green-beer-and-kiss-me-I'm-Irish Saint Patrick's Day thing, said approvingly. And so it was that my great-grandmother Anna, whom I had never met, who was, conveniently, long dead, became Irish. Once I'd decided that, when people asked, “Are you Irish?” I would sheepishly answer, “Oh,
not really
. Just one great-grandmother.” It was a total crock, and I felt slightly sick to my stomach whenever I repeated it. But I did it anyway, because it made me feel just a little less like some kind of poseur Irish manqué. Which of course was exactly what I was.

In a hallway near the English department office at my school, I saw a poster for a summer course in Irish studies at Trinity College in Dublin. For months before I left that June, it was all I could think about and talk about. I just couldn't wait to get to Dublin, where I would read good books, find the best pub in the world, and, I had it in my head, maybe meet a real live Irish poet, who would have a lovely soft accent and recite poems to me, and with whom, I hoped, I might have a brief but memorable affair.

The kids in the summer program were told to meet at a designated spot at Kennedy Airport, near the Aer Lingus check-in area. I spotted them right away. They were clean-cut and preppy in their khaki shorts and polos and fleece pullovers, well-adjusted and healthy-looking. I was not, in my black leggings and Converse high-tops and nose ring, a pack of Camel Lights distending the top left pocket of my denim jacket, the dark rings under my eyes evidence of the hangover that had resulted from my send-off at a bar in the East Village the night before. They gathered together in an excited little circle. I did not join them. Instead, I sat by myself in one of those contoured bench seats in a corner of the terminal, drinking coffee and reading a translation of the ancient Irish epic the
Táin
. And then I saw a guy walk in wearing a leather jacket, its blackness brightened by an ACT UP button: a pink triangle on a black field,
Silence = Death
. Rad. We gave each other a look. I felt a little better.

•   •   •

O
n the flight I sat next to an Irish couple returning from a New York vacation. “First trip to Ireland?” the missus asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “I'm going to study there for the summer.”

“Oh, and where's that?”

“Dublin. Trinity College,” I said.

“Top school,” the mister said.

“Grand,” the missus agreed.

They were done talking to me.

•   •   •

T
he in-flight movie was
The Field
. In it, the great Richard Harris (a film—and drinking—hero of mine, second only to Peter O'Toole) plays a pathologically bitter Irish tenant farmer who fears, not without justification, that he will be forced off his precious green field—which, the viewer is frequently reminded, he had nurtured and coaxed and agonized over and transformed by the sweat of his brow from a patch of hard rock into a lush and fertile pasture—by a rich Irish-American outsider. This does not go well. It ends with the deranged farmer driving his herd of cows off a cliff, into the roiling Atlantic, and unintentionally killing his dim-witted, sometimes violent son along with them.

It is not a film that makes Ireland look good. It depicts the Irish as insular, provincial, suspicious, incapable of adjusting to a changing world, and frankly insane.
This
was where I was dying to go to study?
These
were the people in whose history and culture I had so deeply immersed myself? I took a long look at the couple seated next to me. Maybe I'd made a serious mistake.

•   •   •

W
e arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and were shepherded to our dorm at Trinity. I'd be sharing a two-bedroom suite with a pretty, blond, sweet-natured California girl whom I strongly suspected was still a virgin. She wore long white nightgowns and a retainer. She seemed scared of me. Like I might hit her, or hit on her.

After a quick nap I walked back through the college gates to check out the city. Dull, familiar chain stores flanked both sides of Grafton Street. I was upset by the spectacle of dozens of children—young children, under ten—begging on the pavement, mostly in boy-girl pairs, members of the Travelers community, I was told later that summer. One little girl in one such pair looked up at me with cold blue eyes. “Spare some change, miss?”

I didn't have any change yet. I offered to buy them something to eat; they didn't take me up on it. I was planning to minor in anthropology; I figured I should try to engage these unfortunates. “I promise I'll come back when I have change,” I said, crouching to meet them at eye level. “What are your names?”

“Mary and John,” the girl answered glumly.

I soon learned that, at least in the summer of 1991, all the beggar children of Dublin said their names were Mary and John.

So far, Dublin kind of sucked. Disappointed, I headed back to the dorm. A group of American girls was chattering in the stairwell, looking over the orientation program and class schedule. They were not enthusiastic about having to read poetry. Then what were they doing here? I wondered. But I kept my mouth shut.

Later in the evening I noticed the
Silence = Death
guy heading out of the suite next to mine. I tagged along. “I was so relieved when I saw you at the airport,” I told him.

“I thought you looked nuts,” he said.

His name was Ryan. He knew Dublin a little. His father was from Sligo, in the northwest of the Republic, and he had visited Ireland before with his family. He was a junior at the University of Chicago, studying music. We went to a packed nightclub not far from campus. I would've preferred a pub, but this would do. Ryan drifted away toward a cute boy. Another one drifted toward me, a little older, late twenties, and edged in next to me at the bar. “I'm Larry,” he said, introducing himself. That didn't seem right. He seemed too young to be a Larry, and he worked in business in some vague way. But he was friendly and funny enough, and he paid for my pints and gave me pointers about his native city. He didn't seem particularly interested in poetry or politics or cultural identity, in anything that had drawn me to Ireland. It was hardly a conversation for the ages, but it improved with every emptied pint glass. By the end of the night I had drained at least five. Never mind the Book of Kells, Kilmainham Gaol, the GPO, Sandymount Strand: “What you really need to do here in Dublin,” Larry opined, “is go to a rugby match.” I was drunk enough to agree.

By then, Ryan had disappeared. Larry offered to walk me back to Trinity. At the college gate, he kissed me undramatically and said he'd pick me up there the following Saturday afternoon. Well, why not? Romantically, my freshman year back in Vermont had been a bust. I was game.

I soon learned that a rumor was rampant in Dublin: American girls were easy.

Larry showed up as scheduled on Saturday, and we walked and talked and eventually wound up at the Stag's Head, a venerable old pub with a long marble bar and lots of weathered wood. The Guinness was good. We were having a fine time. And then—and I can't for the life of me remember what precipitated this—he announced that he didn't like Jews.

“Oh really?”

“Really,” he confirmed, adding decisively, “I just don't like 'em.”

I knew that Dublin's Jewish population had dwindled down to next to nothing by the end of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, many Irish Jews emigrated to America and Israel. I knew about Robert and Ben Briscoe, the Jewish father and son who had both served as Lord High Mayors of Dublin. I knew about Portobello, the small Southside district once known as Little Jerusalem, where long ago James Connolly savvily distributed election pamphlets translated into Yiddish. I knew about the synagogue there, and about the small old bakery that sold something resembling a bagel; both still stood but were relics of former times. Larry could not have had significant opportunities to find himself in the company of Jewish people.

“Have you ever met one?” I asked, knowing by then that Larry hadn't traveled much out of Ireland.

“No, I can't say that I have.” He gestured to the barman for another round.

“Well, now you have.” That was the last thing I said to Larry. I left behind a full pint of Guinness. I had managed to assimilate so easily in Dublin that it was assumed I was Irish-American. But never had I felt more like a Jew, or more thrilled to be one.

•   •   •

B
ack at the dorm I ran into Ryan and told him what had happened. “Asshole,” he agreed. “Forget about it. Anyway, I found a pub I
know
you'll like.”

•   •   •

R
yan led me to South William Street, not far from Grafton. From the outside, Grogan's Castle Lounge wasn't especially promising or picturesque. But as soon as we entered, I knew I had found the bar that I had dreamed about in the months before my arrival in Dublin, and possibly my spiritual home. Aesthetically, it wasn't much: the carpets were tatty, the walls were covered with questionably competent paintings by local artists, the upholstery on the banquettes and barstools was a little dingy. But it was smoky and cozy and welcoming, and buoyant with conversation. In the '70s, a former barman from McDaid's—a well-known literary haunt—started working at Grogan's, and many of his writerly regulars followed him there.