The Road to McCarthy (18 page)

My pornographic frog reverie is interrupted by a gruff old Chinese lady who pushes past me to get at the old guy who’s drinking tea. She sits down
and starts shouting at him just like the old lady outside Café Central in Tangier, except that, unlike the old Moroccan boy, the Chinese man starts shouting back. They go at it hammer and tongs for about five minutes, then break into loud laughter and move to a table for two that has just come free. As I finish my noodles, the guy in the leather jacket finishes his call. He looks pleased, as if the killing is back on for tonight. His meal arrives, a vivid and elaborate stew of the kind of unspeakable inner organs you wouldn’t usually find outside a textbook or postmortem. Looking round I can see that most of the other diners have also gone for variations on this lung and bile-duct special, their bowls brimming with shades of gray and brown rarely encountered in nature, or Safeway. I may fancy myself as a cosmopolitan diner, but my noodles with recognizable mainstream animal are about as adventurous here as egg and chips. As I stump up my $3.95 at the counter in the corner, I remember the most intimidating menu I ever saw, in Guangzhou, China. I still have it at home. Camel’s Hump in Wonderful Taste. Boil Badger in Earthenware Pot. But a special place in my heart will always be saved for Corfu. “Spleen Stuff,” it said, “with salad of wild green things.” I believe we had the moussaka.

I’m walking to the Canal Street subway, past traders selling gloves, pak choi, hats, durian, watches, luggage and giant crabs, when I spot a poster for Corona Beer in the window of a Chinese grocery store. The unique attraction of Mexican beer, as I’ve always understood it, is that you drink it from a bottle that has a slice of lime or lemon stuck in the neck, a concept about as attractive to the serious beer drinker as a pint of Guinness with a banana in it. But here in the middle of Chinatown I’ve discovered a previously unimagined selling point for fruity Latin American lager. The face of a stereotypical Mexican bandit, swarthy and unshaven, framed by sombrero and poncho, leers out. Hanging from the somberro are dozens of tiny shamrocks. “Kiss me,” the bandit is saying, “I’m Irish.”

I’m on the platform waiting for a downtown train when two seedy-looking men with gray complexions come through the barrier and start walking towards me. One pauses to look at a subway map, as if he’s pretending to read it while keeping lookout, while the other walks towards me
with an ominous sense of purpose but no visible weapons. He’s in his twenties, wearing a leather jacket that’s too thin for the climate. By the time he reaches me and makes eye contact I’ve decided that he’s some kind of low-level foot soldier from one of the ex-Soviet mafias, one of the ruthless thugs I’ve been reading about in the paper who are infiltrating the New York underworld. Cruel and very unscrupulous, by all accounts. I should be careful. The lookout is still by the map, cleverly blocking my way if I try to make a run for it. Stay calm. Don’t do anything rash. Wait for help if you have to.

“Excuse me, how ya doin’?”

He’s a tourist from Ireland. What the hell does he think he’s doing going about the place pretending to be a Ukrainian pimp and scaring the shit out of everyone?

“Cold, isn’t it? Look, we’re trying to get to the Brooklyn Bridge but we can’t work out which train to get. Do you know if this is the right platform?”

I tell him I’m a stranger myself.

“These maps’d do yer brain in, wouldn’t they? Confusing, aren’t they? Not like getting the tube.”

So we get talking and I ask if he’s on holiday, and he says he’s working here for a few weeks, and I wonder what kind of work, and he says he’s in a play, him and his mate, but his mate sleeps all day so he’s not here. So what play’s that then?

“It’s called
Howie the Rookie.”

“What? The seventy-five-minute dramatic torpedo?”

“That’s the fella.”

Now what are the odds, I’m wondering, against trying to book for a play, just the one play out of the dozens in New York, and it being sold out because it’s such a hot ticket, and then one of the cast—half of the cast, for God’s sake—walking up to me, out of all the people in the city, and asking me the way? I have to say I’m impressed. It’s almost enough to make you believe that our choices really are guided by some higher intelligence, and crop circles aren’t made in the middle of the night by nutters with balls of string who are off their faces on scrumpy. I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff. I’ve always wanted to do some research on the meaning of coincidence, but
I suppose deep down I’ve been waiting for a chance meeting with someone who could tell me all about it. Right now I’m about to have a chance meeting with the lookout, who’s walked up to join us.

“This is Mark. He wrote the play. My name’s Aidan, by the way.”

“Mark O’Rowe? Of the distinctive voice and the profane unsentimental prose?”

“The very man.”

I get off the train with a ticket for Sunday night’s show.

Howie the Rookie
is spellbinding. Two interlocking monologues describe a night of mayhem and violence in searing Dublin slang. Aidan is terrific, and so is Karl who sleeps all day. The audience of middle-aged Manhattan theatergoers who’ve been lured to the down-at-heel performance space by the rave reviews seem awestruck rather than involved, like anthropologists examining specimens from a distant civilization. At one point a cell phone goes off in the audience. Karl, quick as a flash and emphatically in character, snarls, “Turn that fucking thing off,” and the phonee finds himself on the wrong end of a brilliantly improvised stream of abuse that makes Karl’s character more terrifying than he already is. Four Dubliners in the audience are laughing like drains at all the bits that are completely impenetrable to anyone who isn’t from Dublin. As I leave after the show I hear one of them saying, “That Pakistani doctor he was slaggin’. He’s my feckin’ doctor! The same guy! I can’t believe he didn’t even change his name.”

Actors and author join me in the Patron Saint of Lunatics Bar. The waiter is still decanting HP, but there’s no sign of the kissing couple. We talk about the play, which they’re taking to San Francisco next, and about Mark’s kidney stones, and then the three of them come with me in a cab to Rocky’s, where I’ve arranged to meet Chris from Seanchai.

There’s a handful of Sunday-night customers, but no sign of Chris, so we take our pints and sit under the window that’s like a screen. Mark’s on fruit juice because of the kidney stones.

Aidan tells me about his friend from Dublin who’s landed himself a job in New York as an art deliverer.

A what?

“He just takes really expensive paintings back and to for this super-rich collector. He went round the other day with a Van Gogh, and the guy told him to put it in the closet with the others. He hires ’em out at twenty grand a pop for dinner parties, so the lazy feckers have something to talk about.”

Karl and Mark have discovered the jukebox. I’ve told them about Seanchai and Karl keeps on playing their CDs. He seems very taken with Rachel’s singing, and keeps saying, “Jesus, but this girl’s got a great voice, hasn’t she?” So we carry on for an hour or two the way people who tour for a living always do, nattering away like best mates though this may be the only time in our lives we ever meet. By midnight it’s clear that Chris isn’t going to show, and it seems time to call it a night. Karl puts Seanchai on for one last time—“will ya listen to her voice!”—and Aidan and I are discussing how bizarre it was that he should ask me for directions like that, and wondering whether coincidence is a genuine power in our lives, when the door opens and Chris and Rachel walk down the stairs.

“Karl?” says Rachel.

“Rachel?” shouts Karl.

They went to primary school together in Dublin, and have known each other since they were about eight years old. He’s been playing her records all night without having a clue it was her. He didn’t even know she was in New York. She didn’t know he was the hottest ticket in town. When it’s late at night and cold outside and you’re a long way from home, it’s comforting to experience the kind of coincidence that suggests that life has meaning after all. The situation clearly merits a quiet drink by way of celebration.

When you sit up
all night talking, a spell is created whose magic is dissipated the moment you walk through the door and back into real time. There’s a very particular feeling, half elation and half self-loathing, when you’re going home after a night out and everyone else is going to work. I’m
reminded of these things as I hit the street, hoarse, euphoric and already forgetting the stuff we’ve spent the last six hours gabbling about. I do recall that Karl and Aidan are marrying a pair of sisters, and I think one of the weddings might be happening in Mexico. And Rachel’s parents nearly called her Vivien, “which would have been a feckin’ disaster,” but changed their minds and called her Rachel instead. Rachel Vivien. And Mark of the profane prose and the kidney stones went back on the beer at about three in the morning; and isn’t Chris suing a British TV station for millions of dollars for using his music without his permission in a film about terrorists? Something like that. The details are receding into the mental fog as I get into a taxi that’s just dropped a security guard outside an office building. God, I feel rough. For years I’ve been telling myself I ought to go to the theater more often, but perhaps it’s not a good idea. It ought to carry a health warning.

Fifteen minutes later the driver wakes me outside the apartment building. I’m hoping to slip in incognito, but the guy in the top hat and greatcoat makes a big fuss of opening the car door for me. I manage to get out without falling into the gutter, and make it to the elevator without walking into a plate-glass door, though the bright lights are very distressing. I don’t want to wake anyone before the alarm goes off at seven, which is in half an hour’s time, so I take my shoes off and carry them into the apartment. Phil and his entire family are in the living room, about to phone homicide to report me missing.

“Nobody goes out to the theater at six o’clock on Sunday night and doesn’t come home till seven on Monday morning. Especially in a place where they don’t know anyone. What the hell happened?”

I tell him it was just a coincidence.

This morning
I discovered that it’s actually possible to be nervous while you’re still asleep. I woke up filled with dread, my stomach churning even though for a moment I couldn’t remember why. I must have been like that all night. No wonder I felt exhausted. And then the realization came
flooding in. Tonight’s the night! With any luck this is as near as I’ll ever get to waking in the condemned cell and hearing the key turn in the lock.

As I dressed I found myself thinking back many years to the first performance our newly formed theater company ever gave outside the safety of our home enclave of Brighton. To the terror of some of the cast we had been booked by the Merseyside Arts Association to do a short tour of pubs in Liverpool, in an evangelical and potentially life-threatening initiative to take theater to venues that had never experienced it before, and inflict the arts on people who didn’t bloody well want them.

After a slow and depressing trip up the M6—during which our most gifted performer, who was due to appear in women’s clothing, tried to escape through a window at the rest area—we arrived in Halewood and started looking for the first night’s venue. After ten minutes driving round bleak-looking high-rise apartment buildings in a mood of escalating panic, we pulled over at a bus shelter to ask directions. It wasn’t until we stopped that we discovered the only person in the shelter was a Hell’s Angel, a massive man in biker’s leathers with terrifying tattoos all over his hands. A whimper of fear came from the back of the Transit as I rolled down the window.

“‘Scuse me, mate,” I said. “Do you know the way to a pub called the Heavy Bottle?”

“Er, yeah,” said the Angel. “Do a U-ee back up the road, second left, first right, you’re there.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“No problem.”

We were just about to pull away when he spoke again.

“I wouldn’t go there if I was you though. It’s really fuckin’ rough.”

When we arrived the landlady told us that there’d been a murder in the public bar on Saturday night. “Don’t worry about that though, love. You’re on in the lounge.”

And do you know what? They loved us. I’ve been trying to remind myself of that all day.

I had lunch with Phil in a hundred-year-old restaurant formerly called
Bill’s Gay Nineties; they recently acknowledged contemporary reality and changed the name to Bill’s Nineties. While we ate he regaled me with more glamorous tales of life as a musician—like the time the out-of-control blues singer threw up on stage, a grotesque torrent of foaming red because she’d been drinking home-made wine that was still fermenting.

“I remember mopping it up with a towel on my foot while I was trying to persuade the promoter to book us again, and hoping he wouldn’t notice.”

At the end of lunch he gave me a pep talk. “Look ’em in the eye, never step backwards and turn up late like a punk rocker.”

I’ve already ignored
his advice by turning up on time. As I came round the corner past Curry in a Hurry, I heard the noise for the first time: a raucous Glaswegian rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” that I knew wasn’t coming from any of the vegetarian Indian restaurants. I’m standing in the doorway surveying the carnage, wondering whether to take the three steps down into the heart of the Fenian carnival or turn on my heel and flee. I can’t even see the picture of Cagney on account of all the Scotsmen draped in green, white and orange Irish flags jumping up and down and waving half-pints of whiskey in the air. They’re dancing now, or at least some of them are, not kids but men in their thirties and forties, jigging on the spot and propping each other up with their heads like the poles of a drunken teepee. The TV is showing the video of the Celtic match they watched this afternoon, are watching again now, and will surely watch for a third time before the night is out, comas permitting.