Jaywalking with the Irish (21 page)

One eye-opening statistic would be a tally of the number of stupid and abusive rants that occur in pubs after heavy swilling – the scary second Janus face of the Irish drinker. Experts at this sport develop invisible, hydraulically activated gauges in their heads that keep them upright when those of other nationalities would topple over hours earlier.

A couple of decades ago, these gauges came imprinted with the get-even word “British.” Whisper the B-word in the evening’s
declining hours and you would immediately witness gears turning in slack faces and vacant eyes burning with fresh life – chugga-chugga bang went the internal hydraulics and out came a tirade about the last eight hundred years. It was hard to argue with some of the underlying notions; but then again, no refinement or elaboration was ever sought to temper these outpourings, whose main point was to demonstrate the super-human flush of brilliance and virtue that had suddenly erupted in the speech gearbox of the elocutionist.

Float the word “Nigerian” to the wrong person some night in an Irish pub, and you will see a similar display of astonishing nonstop vitriol, so passionately do a few misbegotten souls despise this particular group of impoverished immigrants, a small minority of whom, it must be said, are not always model citizens. The Irish have had so little prior exposure to people of color on their shores that one can almost fathom the mental flailings the subject induces – until receiving the same treatment.

Irish-Americans have long thought of themselves as being blood brothers with their forebears across the seas, like Jews come home to Israel. Unfortunately, many visitors will soon confront the unpleasant surprise that, in contrast to Burkie, certain ornery swillers with those hydraulic gauges in their heads no longer like Americans much at all.

“Are you American, is it?” begins a typical conversation.

“Why, yes,” responds the visitor proudly, not suspecting in the least that he is walking into a trap.

“What part?”

“The northeast.”

“Aye, it’s a big country ye hail from.” Bleary eyes is buying time now, sizing up his target, rehearsing his rant, honing his verbal razors, assuring himself of his supreme cleverness.

“Ever been there?”

From this type, you will not be getting a disquisition about his six successful butcher, baker and lawyer cousins and an uncle working “the high steel,” as the Irish sometimes call construction jobs on skyscrapers, on foreign shores. Instead you might be asked: “Tell me, what do ye think of Cambodia?”

The wise would do well at this point to race for the door.

“I don’t really ponder the place frequently.”

“Oh no?” Behold now a bemused but dangerous smile. “Well, what about Vietnam then?”

Responses like “Fortunately, I never served,” will not save you; nothing will.

“Nicaragua?”

“Granada?”

“Guatemala?”

“Panama?”

“Palestine?”

“Chile?”

Your swiller has the whole world in his pocket and wants nothing more than to drop all of it, every shard of his superior, lord-of-history knowledge at your feet. And fool that you are, you could try to say something mollifying back. Don’t.

“I’m telling ye now, ye come from a nation of bullies. Ye have bullied the entire world but ye will never bully us, because we are a proud and independent people and we do not need you. Ye bullied the blacks and the Indians and the Mexicans, and ye even put your flag on the moon.”

Don’t dare mention that “ye” are being bullied now – although you will pay for the silent tactic as well.

“Why, you’re very smug, drinking your pint on our soil, and saying nothing like you’re very clever indeed. Ye are a very arrogant people.”

This class of booze-hound by now will be convinced that he has boxed you into a masterful corner. But he’s not done.

“Would you like another pint?”

That is when you leave.

Having been through this two dozen times before, I was not nearly so offended as the man wished. Ten to one, he’d be grinning at me on the street the next morning, Janus head rearranged as if we were best of friends. I wasn’t thrilled with a lot of my homeland’s recent gunboat diplomacy myself, and of course had no vision of how far it would eventually head. By the time the Iraq war started, I might have had a rant or two to offer myself. But still.

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In America, our lives had been overwhelmingly focused upon raising the children. But changing adult tangents and diversions had taken hold in Ireland, and sometimes it felt as if the kids were getting short shrift. In Connecticut, we would rise at dawn from October to April to ferry all three to Saturday morning ice-hockey games where every participant’s progress was closely admired by their parents, despite the fact that excursions to practice also ate up two evenings each week. After-school skiing and family sledding on our snowy driveway in the woods further enriched the children’s life. The spring brought baseball and tennis; the summer, swimming competitions, fishing, and canoeing at the lake two minutes from our door. But Ireland had no ice, no snow, no baseball, and waters so cold bathers jumped out of them screaming “fecking hell!”

Jamie and I had more than enough to occupy ourselves – the start of my magazine venture lay as close as locating one believing benefactor with a pot of gold, and Ulster Television’s John McCann still seemed close to biting. Jamie, meanwhile, was enamored with the bright challenge of introducing sometimes deprived kids to the magic of live theater. But we had occasional misgivings about our kids’ unrelieved city living, where the boys, at least, spent so much of their free time booting balls about the hard pavement of our treeless street. The only sport Christian Brothers offered was rugby, and Harris and Owen were still coming to terms with these Saturday morning contests, which few parents bothered attending, perhaps because they were often drowned in epochal torrents of rain. The contrast between the wholesome, if often over-organized, pastimes that our kids had been offered in the U.S. and the more fend-for-oneself Irish way of rearing sometimes seemed stark.

Obviously, Irish children – and our own street-living offspring
– seemed basically as well adjusted as kids anywhere. Laura, having faraway school friends, waxed a bit lonely some weekends but was always happy when roping in a classmate for a crisps- and cookie-strewn sleepover. But there were scarcely any nearby fields for the boys to play in, save those owned by the local GAA clubs with their offerings of hurling, rugby, and Gaelic football. The problem was that the ones near us seemed a tad rough.

One Saturday the Christian Brothers rugby teams had their games scheduled at a “gah” club about four miles from our house. Upon arrival, the boys were exhorted to scurry off to the club’s locker room.

“The what?” Owen asked in confusion.

“In there,” his coach said, pointing at what looked like a steel container fallen off the stern of an ocean-going freighter.

Meanwhile, a prodigious deluge commenced.

“I don’t want to change in there, Dad,” Owen remonstrated.

“Go on, you’re a rugby player,” I urged.

“It looks like somebody’s chopped the place up with an axe. And the rain is pouring through the roof.”

Well, Owen was right. The “changing room” appeared to have been attacked by a pike-wielding maniac, with holes in the gaping roof and long gashes in the walls baring jagged twists of rusted, tetanus-breeding shrapnel. Empty Scrumpy Jack cans glowered from beneath the graffiti-scarred benches.

The congenitally muddy playing fields outside oozed like a pig wallow. Then somebody blew a whistle and the kids set to throwing each other head first into the muck. I tried chatting with another father, but neither of us could see the other through the rain streaming down our wiper-less eyeglasses.

Gradually it became clear that Irish parents compensate for some of the weaknesses of organized kids’ activities in their culture through a variety of inventive alternatives, some of these involving their on-again, off-again affection for the Catholic Church. Young Owen’s upcoming First Holy Communion, for which Christian Brothers had been prepping its little angels for months, provided an object lesson there. Little did we know what a national rite of passage awaited. The occasion is at heart a festival of hope. But the
rub is that First Communion must duly be preceded by the cleansing of First Confession, in which parents, even very sinful ones, are expected to lift their duffs off the pews and step forward as proper models of penitence. The prospect was petrifying.

The church nonetheless resonated with song and pageantry on the First Penance day. Owen looked to be in deep conversation with the Lord as he and his classmates stepped up to the altar and expressed their sanctified contrition, as did little girls from neighboring schools. A forty-something priest stood at the lectern, beaming at the assemblage of innocence. A much older one stared out from stage left. The first looked kind, the second stern, and it felt as if they had worked out some kind of spiritual balancing act. Father Kind gently invited the parents to come forward to vouchsafe their stature as proper role models. “I realize many of you will not be regular confessants, but it would be helpful for you to demonstrate the power of your own redemptive faith to your children. All you have to say is, “I am sorry for my sins” – nothing more.”

“This is a good deal,” I thought. As a boy I had regularly cringed in murky confessionals before opaque screens behind which invisible beings threatened eternal damnation. If no sins could be remembered, you made them up in order to be done fast with whatever string of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” were demanded. When the voice cracked with puberty, it got worse.

So this new confession-lite sounded nifty. The only problem was that Father Stern did not look happy.

The liturgy proceeded, and the seven- and eight-year-olds advanced to whisper their offences against their families, teachers, and the Lord. Touching it was to behold.

Now it was the adults’ turn. A mass inertia seized the congregation, as if this were Lourdes in reverse – instead of the lame miraculously walking, parents in the prime of life seemed to undergo a collective paralysis. Father Kind smiled patiently, but Father Stern scowled. After a lengthy pause, a few adults inched forward. Muttering soon broke out in the next pew.

“Don’t go to the older priest. He’s changed the terms,” an attractive brunette whispered to her husband. “I said ‘I’m sorry for my
sins,’ but that wasn’t good enough for him. ‘You’ll have to tell me something more specific,” he insisted.

Forewarned, I veered toward Father Kind and got off easy.

The real First Communion followed a couple of weeks later. The children were enthralled, the boys sporting rosettes on their pressed blazers, the elaborately coiffed girls wearing immaculate white dresses and veils, like little brides of the Lord. Four priests in brocaded vestments presided, and the dolled-up mothers betrayed moist, doting gazes. Goodness shined. Jamie’s mother and wheelchair-bound sister, freshly arrived from the States, cooed.

We certainly felt some reverence ourselves. Children need faith; we all do – at least in something more elevated than our own selfishness. Our little boy had been beaming for weeks, clasping his uplifted hands in prayer at every church service, announcing that on Tuesdays, for some reason, he was making an effort to be especially good. I asked Owen about what private prayers he had offered before receiving his First Holy Communion. “That Aunt Martha will be able to walk again,” he whispered.

And what could be wrong with that? In America, the pendulum of individual entitlement had swung so harshly that mentioning the very notion of God in school was a cardinal sin, and in fact a potential firing offence for teachers. American schools have lost so much common purpose that they breed another kind of anarchy, a spiritual one, perhaps more disruptive than the unraveling apparent on Ireland’s streets. Self-direction is the rule in dress, behavior, and belief. One of Laura’s third-grade classmates announced that he recognized no obligation to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag – a thirty-second reflective pause employed to settle American kids down for the beginning of the school day. Then again, the father’s benediction to his boy’s teachers was to announce – “My son will show you respect when you have earned it.”

So we were happy to see Owen enjoying his moment of untarnished devotion. His neat little uniform helped set a tone of order to his school day, and that was fine, too. American teachers were struggling to control classrooms with fifteen ten-year-olds inside – half the size of many pin-drop quiet Irish ones. Never once in Ireland did we see any of the widespread “public order” offences
in the classroom. It wasn’t screaming or corporal punishment that achieved the workable peace – the banshee in the boys’ school had been sacked in a few weeks, after all – it was parentally supported respect for the educational process. So the reverie with which the First Communicants embraced their sacrament seemed uplifting, an expression of able stewardship and loving concern.

How long this young piety would endure was another question. Henry Sidney, a sixteenth-century lord deputy of Ireland and father of the poet Philip Sidney, dismissed Irish Catholicism as but a veneer with which the natives dressed up their essential evilness.

“Thei regarde no other, thei blaspheme, thei murder, commit whoredome, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience,” he reported home. “You would rather think them atheists or infidels.”

His contemporary Barnaby Rich chipped in with the comment that the Irish lived “like beastes, voide of all lawe and all good order” and were “more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous and more brutish in their customs and demeanures, than in any other part of the world that is known.”

The legacy of oppression that resulted from such bigotry was enough to make me sign my kids up for Catholicism on political grounds alone. But the inherent contradictions of Irish life always have their twists. Once our little Owen’s sacrament of First Communion was done, the “wantone,” if still loving, secular aspects of this day became manifest. In Ireland, the Catholic rites of childhood – both First Communion and Confirmation – produce a stupendous outpouring of beneficence, which is spelled C-A-S-H. The kids lift their hands to God with fervor, then keep them outstretched afterward.

No sooner did Owen unite with God than the money envelopes started fluttering into his palms from kindly neighbors and friends. Within two hours, the boy had over £400 in his pocket. Burkie chuckled at this haul as being pitiful, however. “Is that all? One of my friend’s kids picked up £1500.”

The first twenty guests at our celebration party said their goodbyes by seven o’clock. Very civilized. But then the next dozen hit
the doorbell and Shaun Higgins sang his “Maggie,” and we shoved some heretofore well-behaved neighbors out the door sometime after 3 a.m.

“Getting to be one of us, for better or worse,” the ever-watchful Shaun chortled devilishly the next afternoon.

We had the threads of something wonderful in our fingers. We were having the time of our lives whenever we paused to think about it. Every day had patterns of easy belonging, serendipity, and surprise that our over-earnest friends in the U.S. would pay thousands of dollars for on a summer holiday and talk about for the rest of their years.
Craic
, as the natives call great fun, was so readily available that one had to hide from it during the week, lest one’s whole life become a burst of laughter. People at every turn said that they were starting to forget that we didn’t actually hail from Cork. Frightening was that notion. We had executed the most dangerous of midlife casts and caught something live and quicksilver.

But . . . the guilt was always nipping. We kept picking at the slightest knots in our routines and worrying the skeins, trying to re-create the happy routines our children enjoyed back at home. We would fret about them and our distant families so much that we occasionally lost sight of the fact that this Irish safari had made us all larger than we’d been just a year earlier. The seasons had turned and it was time to make plans.

“It sounds like you’re having a great life there, no matter what hardships you’ve weathered. I’d dwell upon that if I were you, because you both were complaining before you left. If you as parents aren’t happy together, your children will pay a price that is heavier than whatever geographic dislocation they are suffering,” a friend from the States sagely wrote.

Hmmh. And our kids scarcely looked like they were hurting, what with the boys dragging four friends into the house or garden every day, and Laura consorting every other weekend with the daughters of yacht designers and horse breeders, of sherry-soaked Brit ambassadors and New Zealand and American romantics and executives who had all ended up in Cork for one reason – they were fishing for dreams themselves.

Our lives were full. So what was there to lament? I went fishing for trout when I could and kept writing, while Jamie threw herself into her expanding responsibilities.

In mid-May, I went to Dublin to present my magazine proposal to the courtly John McCann of Ulster Television. A few years previously, that outfit wouldn’t have had a prayer of flexing its muscles in the Republic, where any enterprise doing business with the Brits was despised. But these were new days. John McCann decided to run the proposal by UTV’s new Cork office with all its resident Corkonians – an idea akin to sending a bee back into an incestuously gossiping hive.

The feet kept moving to the sunny side of the street. A couple of weeks later, the manager of UTV’s Cork operations called to say that he admired the proposal, but was not in a position to back the magazine. Ouch.

The consultants organized another meeting, then called a second to cap the first one off, and set up a third for the hell of it – as tick, tick went their hourly meter. After a few days, they arranged a presentation before the managing director of one of the biggest newspaper conglomerates in Ireland, the Cork-based Thomas Crosbie Holdings. Once again, the headman there expressed keen interest, though he used few words and held a poker face. He would get back to us on Monday – though which Monday was not immediately clear.

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