Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (6 page)

I took a seat while Ryan went up to the bar to order our pints, and I pulled out a notebook and pen. A man two tables away called out to me, “Are you a writer, then?”

This is the first question they ask you at Grogan's. I was twenty. Was I a writer? How was I supposed to know?

“Yes,” I answered.

“That's good,” he said. “We're all writers here at Grogan's.”

And that turned out to be pretty close to the truth. That night we met Peter, a handsome rake with jet-black hair and high cheekbones. In his bright yellow corduroys and pointy black leather shoes, he looked like a Mod filtered through David Lynch movies. Peter didn't hesitate before taking out a crumpled sheaf of poems for me to peruse right there on the spot. With him was his sharp-tongued girlfriend, Kate—a student at Trinity—and their friend Michael, funny, awkward, self-deprecating, sweet, on the dole, in baggy sweatpants, a too-big T-shirt, and running shoes. He wrote, too, of course, but exactly what he wrote was anyone's guess. It was probably good, though. I sensed that he was the smartest of the bunch.

The lot of us shared a table, and for the first of many nights that summer I tossed my duty-free Camels and they their Marlboros and Silk Cuts on the table for all to share, and we bought round after round in turn, and laughed, and talked feverishly about the books we loved. Peter seemed to find my interest in his country's canon quaint and misguided.

“Whatever you do, for God's sake, just don't sing in here,” Michael warned me in a grave whisper. He nodded in the direction of the genial, avuncular publican who looked like an Irish Santa Claus. “He once killed a man for singing in a pub.” I believed him. I didn't find out until weeks later—when I repeated the story to someone else—that Michael had just been bullshitting me, taking the piss, as they say. Good one.

That first intoxicating night at Grogan's yielded three major developments. First, I was indoctrinated into the great Irish cultural tradition known as
craíc
(pronounced
crack
—which disturbed me the first time I heard people talking about it, since New York was at the time in the thick of its devastating crack epidemic).
Craíc
, alongside Guinness, is major currency in a Dublin pub. It is discourse, conversation, chatter. It can be light or heavy, funny or serious. It can be about absolutely
anything
,
but it must flow freely, it must have rhythm, and it must not be dominated by a single participant. There is good
craíc
and there is bad
craíc
. Grogan's was always good
craíc.

Second, with alarming speed I acquired a taste for Irish whiskey, preferably Jameson. After my early romance with Jack Daniel's had come to its ugly end in California, I could no longer stomach even the smell of American whiskey, its redolent, deceptive sweetness. But Irish whiskey was a different thing altogether. Gentler, milder, less aggressively sugary. I still liked a pint of stout, but in Jameson I knew I had found my one true love. (I still defend Irish whiskey against frequent allegations that it is inferior to its Scottish counterparts, particularly to status-symbol single malts, and refer to spirits authority David Embury, who wrote, “If you really like the peat-smoke taste of Scotch, you may prefer it to Irish, just as you may prefer smoked ham to fresh ham. From every other point of view, however, I believe that Irish is infinitely superior to Scotch.”)

Third, I discovered that the word
cunt
—totally forbidden where I came from, the worst of the worst, unholiest of unholies—could, if delivered with the right inflection, be light, affectionate, friendly, practically a term of endearment. This took some getting used to, but by summer's end, I could unhesitatingly call my Irish friends complete fucking cunts and mean it in the nicest possible way.

•   •   •

A
nother night at Grogan's, not long after the first, a middle-aged man turned up at our usual table. All the regulars knew him and behaved differently in his midst. They sat up a little straighter and seemed to measure their words more carefully. Peter whispered his name in my ear. “Good poet,” he said. “Published. A few books.”

“So, you're a poet?” I asked him. By then, I knew how to start a conversation in Grogan's.

“I am,” he said. And with that, we got to talking. And we kept talking. The Poet grew up in a small town, but had lived in Dublin since his twenties. He wore an unmistakable cloak of personal tragedy, which I found extremely appealing. He was exactly twice my age. And he was kind and attentive and laughed at my jokes and made meaningful eye contact. He had a beautiful, soft voice. He would read poems to me, I was sure, if I asked. Maybe I wouldn't even have to ask.

It was getting close to last call. “Michael and I are going to go to the workshop at the Oak this week,” Peter told me. “You should come. Wednesday night.”

“I'll be there,” I promised.

“Bring a poem,” he said.

On Wednesday evening I made my way to the basement of the Oak Bar on Dame Street. There must've been at least twenty poets there, sitting on folding chairs in a circle. They were young and old, talented and not, male and female—but mostly male. There were Angry Young Men and misty-eyed septuagenarians. Down-and-outers and chicly outfitted women of a certain age. I took a seat next to Peter and Michael. Michael nudged my shoulder and said, almost conspiratorially, “Look who's here.” Across the room, I saw The Poet.

“Do you know why he came?” Peter asked.

“To read a poem, I would guess.”

Peter arched a dark eyebrow. “He doesn't need
this
. He's here because he knew you'd be here.”

I rolled my eyes and pretended I didn't care.

We went around the circle, and each participant read his or her poem aloud twice—or passed on reading that night and opted just to listen. Then, after each piece had been read, we went around the circle once more and everyone offered a brief critique, or passed. (At a meeting later in the summer, I saw a brawl break out in the workshop after an exceptionally stinging critique—something unknown to me from polite American poetry classrooms, and thrilling. And I'd heard about the time a courtly old codger, about to deliver his assessment of a piece by a self-styled tough guy, steeled himself to say, “Oh, it's a lovely poem, a lovely poem.” He collected himself and looked away. “But mightn't it be better without the line
She could sit on my face any day
?” It had pained him to utter such words).

It was my turn. I don't remember what I read, likely something a little formal and stiff, faintly political and painfully earnest. The critiques were bland and nonabrasive. I could tell they were cutting the newcomer, the foreigner, some slack. Across the room, The Poet nodded his approval. I felt good. I'd survived my first round at the workshop.

Drinks upstairs followed. I sat with The Poet. He was a great talker, a vivid storyteller. He told me about his boyhood, about his years drifting around Europe teaching English. He had traveled. He had met Jews; he had no problem with that; he had even lived briefly in Israel, which was more than I could say for myself. Peter and Michael whispered to each other, smirking.
Fuck them,
I thought. We talked until last call, and The Poet walked me to Trinity.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked at the gate.

It was much better than my last kiss, with Larry the Jew-hater. We said good night. The college gate was locked. I knocked loudly and the guards let me in. They liked to trap tipsy students in conversations from which it was diabolically difficult to extract oneself. Full-service security guards, one even insisted that I try
poitín
—coarse, fiery potato moonshine—while I was in Ireland. The other tried to teach me a few tin whistle tunes, but I was hopeless.

•   •   •

W
ithin a week or so I had practically moved in with The Poet. He had a small house on the north side of the River Liffey, across the pedestrian Ha'penny Bridge. There was much that I found impressively self-sufficient about him, about his domesticity, this grown-up man in his little row house, who rose early every morning to bake bread and make a pot of strong black tea. And together we'd have our tea and toast before I headed out to Trinity for class, before he settled into his study for a full workday of writing. I admired his discipline.

By effectively moving out of the dorm—I still dropped by between classes, to grab a change of clothes, to take a nap or a shower, the odd night here and there—and in with an older man I had only just met, I had, Ryan told me, become a bit of a scandal. I received this news with great satisfaction. But in truth, nothing felt scandalous about my life with The Poet. More than anything else, we talked.

And we drank. Many evenings, after my classes had ended and he was satisfied with a day's writing, we'd meet at Grogan's. At the pub, he often drank shandies—concoctions of lager and 7UP far more popular among women than men. I'd usually stick to Guinness, holding off on whiskey until later, when we got home and would continue drinking and talking before dragging ourselves upstairs to bed. We were comfortable together. I felt secure. The Poet was affectionate and generous. He introduced me to old friends, to other writers. But we were not inseparable. I took nights off from The Poet—and even from Grogan's—to hang out with another group of friends I'd made at a rally, young radicals from the Socialist Workers Party, at
their
pub near the Bank of Ireland Plaza. The restrooms were tagged with scathing anti-English and anti-American graffiti. No one there asked if you were a writer. They didn't care, and—though they themselves were mostly students—they would have been much more impressed if you were a dockworker. No matter. If you knew the words to “The International,” could hold your own in a discussion of Gramscian ideology (for a start, use the word
hegemony
as much as possible),
and
hold your liquor, you were in.

Trinity College had dropped down to the bottom of my list of Dublin priorities. I went to my classes. I took my exams. I stared at the clock until I could bolt out of the lecture hall and over to Grogan's. Most—though not all—of the teachers operated under the assumption that Americans were idiots, and accordingly dumbed everything down for us. To be fair, many of the Americans in Dublin, traveling in packs and vomiting in the streets, did little to disabuse anyone of this notion, and were outdone only by the Australians. One instructor, an ingratiating poet of some renown, told us that he thought Jim Morrison was a great poet. I knew this to be untrue and found it patronizing.

But I did get an education. At Grogan's. At the young socialists' bar. From Ryan (who introduced me to my favorite pub
and
to Baudelaire's
Paris Spleen
) and from The Poet. I had made smart, interesting friends. I had found my pub. I was intimately involved with a real poet. I hated thinking that I'd have to leave, and soon.

“Just stay,” Michael pleaded. “We'll find a way to get you on the dole.” It was tempting. I was very happy in dear dirty Dublin.

•   •   •

A
nother night, later in the summer. Another long, raucous shift at Grogan's, with Ryan and his boyfriend Eamonn, Peter and Kate, Michael, The Poet, and me. The
craíc
was more cracking than usual. But when the barman shouted “last call,” we drank up and then went our separate ways—Ryan and Eamonn to an after-hours gay club, Peter and Kate to their place, Michael, God knows where. The Poet and I walked home past the packs of Americans and Australians still stumbling around Dame Street and Temple Bar, past several pairs of begging John-and-Marys, along the Southside quays, across the Ha'penny Bridge. Once in a while we'd stop and kiss against a lamppost. We said little.

Back home he set a half-full bottle of Paddy on the table. We finished it off and went upstairs. He held me and kissed my back. And then he said, “There's something I have to tell you.”

I turned to face him.

“I love you,” he continued. “But there's someone else I'll always love more.”

You've got to be fucking kidding me,
I thought, as if he had said something singularly audacious and impertinent—and hurtful. I thought that I was in charge of this relationship, if only by virtue of my youth. I was mistaken.

The Poet went on, told me more. I quietly fumed and said nothing. I pulled on some clothes and collected the stuff I'd been keeping at his place—underwear and T-shirts and socks and a toothbrush, a few books—and crammed it into my backpack. I'd go back to the dorm. Immediately. I had started to cry. I announced that I was leaving.

“You don't have to do that,” he said.

By then it was raining. I had no umbrella. I stomped unafraid past the drunken toughs who congregated at the next corner. I was seething, and still crying. With every block, the rain fell harder. By the time I reached the bridge, my clothes were soaked through and water had collected in my backpack. I was sorry to see that a few John-and-Marys were still out, so late, in the pouring rain. Even they seemed to take pity on me. “Ah, you'll be all right, miss,” one boy said. “Spare some change?”

I dug some coins out of a pocket and pressed them into his small, cold palm. And I stood there, smack in the middle of the Ha'penny Bridge, listening to the rain hit the river, looking at this dirty old city I'd grown, in so little time, to love so fiercely, to feel at home in. I suddenly felt like this wasn't real, like I had suddenly become aware of how absurd this situation was, how absurd
I
was.

By then, in my imagination—for The Poet had told me no such thing—I'd decided that his one true love must have been some tough, sunburnt Israeli girl he'd met on that kibbutz twenty years ago, that he was an Irishman with a thing for Jewish women—and here I was, a Jewish girl from New York who'd so effectively pretended to be Irish.