Jaywalking with the Irish (6 page)

Earlier explorers of distant lands often returned with spectacular tales of having to hack their way through dense jungles, climb hoary mountains, or traverse wild seas in order to reach their El Dorados. Our family’s first tasks, after arriving in Cork City, kept leaning toward the tedious. Arrangements for a new phone line were attempted with at least eleven different help lines at Eircom, the privatized national phone monopoly that seduced 400,000 Irish people, most of whom had never purchased a sheaf of stock in their lives, to buy shares that became worthless overnight. And no wonder, because none of the cheerful operators at Eircom had the slightest ability to connect with their colleagues at the next desk.

“We have a comprehensive basic service for thirty-two punts per month, or in your area you might wish to consider installation of a special ISDN Internet-access line.”

“How much will that cost?”

Silence. Crackle. Dead phone.

Twenty more calls and still nobody has the answer.

“Do you want a split line?”

“I’m not sure . . . Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.”

Crackle. Gone.

Cork’s Department of Motor Vehicle Taxation recently came up with the perfect bureaucratic solution – announcing that, due to unmanageable volumes of calls seeking personal assistance, they were henceforth suspending all answers to that line.

Nevertheless, we solved each tedious logistical challenge in its turn, and even landed a checking account from a bank manager who evidently bet his vault’s holdings on dark horses. Meanwhile, our boys kept recruiting one friend after another, while rapidly maturing Laura steeped herself in books about Ireland, and
gingerly tested the waters with a couple of slightly younger neighborhood girls. Jamie, attempting to stake her claim in an unfamiliar world, nested with a vengeance. Armed with a block of “Fairy” soap, she organized every corner of the house, from drawer to shining drawer, and began to make sense of mysterious Irish household entities such as the hob and “hot press,” the linen closet that also houses the hot-water tank, invariably controlled by mysterious electrical timers. In fact, everything in this house seemed to be controlled by a network of these things, which turned washing machines, dryers, and furnaces on and off at their whim.

One afternoon, I found Jamie muttering in the laundry cubicle, which we had been told housed “the most advanced American appliances.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, seeing her scowl.

Thereupon, she produced in either hand a formerly adult shirt, now shrunk by the most advanced imported American appliances to miniature elfin sizes. Until very recently, the Irish used to believe that the missing sock problem was explained by fairy mischief, which suddenly seemed plausible to me.

“Just right for a leprechaun who fancies Marks and Spencer,” she growled.

Women of course possess a knack for establishing networks that could cement kingdoms over problems just like this. So hassles small and large became fodder for constant visits with the neighbors. For a while, it seemed that every time I turned around, gregarious spirits like Breda Higgins, on the day shift, or the hilarious Belfast-born Mary Lynch, who preferred to stop in after 10 p.m., appeared in our kitchen to transform conversations about their favorite “cling film” or the mysteries of Gas Mark 6 on the cooker into weightier discussions, often ending in peals of laughter, about Ireland and America, restaurants, shops, movies, novels, and the like, before digressing into the more personal stuff of passions, memories, and dreams. Thus was our web of new connectedness woven, with Jamie dispensing tea or wine as was called for, and mixing as freely as if she had been in Ireland all her life. The idea had been that we’d just settle in for a sabbatical of renewal for one year or maybe two. But watching my wife and kids embrace their changed lives, forever seemed possible too.

Me, I manfully procured four wheels by buying a small “estate” car, or station wagon, that had a sign in its front window two hundred feet from our house. Something’s not clicking? Take your clicker out of your pocket and click it, said the avant-garde composer John Cage. The kindly Welsh owner, whose name sounded something like Brynbrrryn, handed over the keys three days before being paid, which was very trusting indeed for a locksmith. Click. A celebration seemed in order, and I instinctively thought of that curious upstairs pub I had espied on our first walk about town, the Hi-B.

“Wigs for Hire,” a wiggy sign said on the floor just above it, but never mind. In no time at all, I climbed those dingy stairs to the linoleum landing, and then opened a black door to an aria blast such as emitted by Mahler in one of his more bellicose moods. Behind a crescent-shaped bar, a man with flying wisps of white hair stood waving an imaginary baton beside shelves thick with whiskey, his pupils rapturously dilated. He was singing something that went – dee, Dee, DEE! It definitely was not B.

Before the maestro, a number of curious-looking individuals hunkered over cylindrical columns of black stout. One had an unruly beard whose tendrils looked as if they might store months of famine-resistant nutrition. Another with a goatee expelled the heavyweight word “procrustean,” albeit garbled in the Urdu-like thickness of West Cork speech. Beaming at him was a dark-haired woman with a puppy at that moment raising a hind leg as if contemplating releasing a benediction on the floor.

I found a free stool and gazed about in wonder. The proprietor, who I quickly learned was named Brian O’Donnell, offered some fleeting curiosity my way as he fussed with his Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.

“That’s a sad light tonight,” he pronounced about an element not much of which looked to have ever touched his milky white skin.

“Drive a man to seek refuge,” I tried, not realizing that our interchange could have long-term consequences.

“I take it you are from America. Americans are not often intimate with the word ‘refuge.’ Nothing personal, but I am just
thinking, isn’t vocabulary diminishing everywhere?” Brian said and turned away. His voice was peculiarly shrill and his attention span short. He lost himself for a while in fishing through a stack of papers with a manner not unlike that of an eccentric collector of antiquarian books. My kind of man, I thought, while mentioning that I was from Connecticut.

“Ah, the Constitution State, I believe,” Brian countered with that astonishingly pinpoint knowledge that the Irish often manifest about places halfway around the globe.

“That’s amazing! Most Americans don’t even know that’s what it’s called.”

Here, my interlocutor produced a self-pleased smile. “Ah, ah now, I do know a thing or two about the world. And I had a particular friend from a period when I was in medical school who ventured that way, a certain Michael Buckley from my, ah, shall we say, salad days.”

Gasp. “You’ve got to be kidding. He’s a friend of my parents!” Serendipity being my guiding Irish star, it soon developed that Brian had spent some of his riotous youth with the self-same Cork-born doctor I knew in Connecticut, a retired friend of my parents.

“My, I’m just saying now, isn’t it a small world?” said Brian, amiably squinting through his nearly opaque glasses.

Seizing on the connection, I dealt forth a quirky story which involved my posing, in 1974, as a young American psychiatrist beside a real Irish one – a friend of Bun’s named James O’Brien – in a Dublin schizophrenia ward. At Gaffney’s I had badgered James with questions from my recent readings about the intersection between creativity and madness until he finally invited me to come and see for myself as he made rounds. The first patient on our tour was a diminutive man who called himself Daft Jimmy. DJ promptly held out his hand, demanding, “Cut off these four, Doc, and I’ll be okay.” Jimmy explained that if he had but one finger, he wouldn’t be troubled anymore by thoughts of strangling innocent pals. “If you can do it, Doc,” Daft Jimmy beamed my way, “I’ll invite you to me house for a spot a’ tay.”

Brian drummed his fingers on the bar, wondering where I was
heading. Somehow, I felt compelled to demonstrate that I could spin a tale with the best of them. I hurried on, “So Daft Jimmy is there chuckling when who walked in but the hospital’s chief.”

“Sticky,” Brian said.

I explained that James O’Brien quickly introduced me as “Doc Monagan from the States.”

“Where in the States?” asked the arch-browed chief.

“Connecticut.”

“Connecticut, is it? Where exactly?”

“Why, Waterbury,” I had said.

“Isn’t that remarkable! I worked there myself. In which hospital do you practice?” chortled the major domo.

“St. Mary’s,” I had groaned like a cornered rodent, having been born in that one.

“Then you must know Dr. Buckley? How’s his wife, Hylda?”

“Who?” I had gulped.

“So in other words you were a stuck pig?” laughed Brian, grasping that this tale was all about the serendipity that stalks through Ireland, in this case nearly thirty years ago and now newly repeated between him and me.

“Exactly.” I told how James O’Brien yanked me away by the elbow, thus ending one of my first object lessons in the need to watch one’s every move in the improbably interconnected warp and weave of Irish life.

“Extraordinary,” Brian clucked, making me feel as if I had just passed a challenging entrance examination for acceptance to the Hi-B. “And to think that this is the same Mick Buckley I knew so well. I have great time for that man.”

A rambunctious punch of Wagner muscled forth, and Brian began introducing me to various figures inhabiting neighboring stools.

“Would you mind if I had a cup of coffee?” one asked, a civilized-looking sort with neatly parted brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses such as university lecturers wear.

An inexplicable darkness spread across the Hi-B owner’s face. His voice assumed an oddly mincing quality and his hands began to tremble as if confronting a shocking transgression. “Would ye
know what a public house is for, fella? Well, you ought to after all the time you have warmed that stool. We do not serve buttered scones and coffee, as you well know. Or perhaps ye intended to call into a sandwich shop?”

Men up and down the bar began sniggering into their pints, knowing the Hi-B’s ways intimately. Brian, looking pleased, topped off his already plenteous cognac, as the would-be customer poodled away in a huff. “Summertime, and the living is queasy,” he began singing for no particular reason, and then abruptly stopped to point out a nearby pencil sketch he had drawn of the great Gershwin. There were a dozen similar portraits on the walls, likenesses of famous composers, movie stars, and authors he had sketched with fair talent, back in the days when he cared to pursue that kind of thing.

People came and left, conversation eddied and flowered, then Brian’s face suddenly contorted at the sight of some fresh affront in the back precincts of his small pub.

“It is as distasteful as eating chips in a bar,” he blurted toward whatever was bothering him. The regulars sniffed trouble, knowing (as I later learned) that Brian once took such a visceral disliking to the bright colors of a customer’s tie that he surged forth from the bar with a pair of scissors and severed it at the knot. He then abruptly shoved the shorn ends into the man’s pocket and said, “Now you’ve got a hanky to match.” Another time, a lady in a hat rejected one of his bawdy overtures so indelicately that for the next three months he refused to serve drink to any haberdashery-crowned customer who ventured into the Hi-B.

“Ye would not eat chips in a bar, would ye?” Brian now demanded over my shoulders, his eyes bulging like those of a foraging fish. “That is enough!”

My curiosity was itching. Were the marauders behind us smoking grass? Drooling? Picking their noses?

“I think ye had better leave! And don’t come back too soon!” Brian suddenly yelled as a young woman and her tall male friend sheepishly exited in confusion.

“Would you mind my asking what they were doing?” I asked.

Brian moved closer. “
Osculating
,” he cackled.

“How horrible,’ I said, knowing this peculiar Latinate word for kissing.

Someone with a red beard saw me chuckling. A shopkeeper with a penchant for placing hefty sums on the races (a weakness shared by about every fourth male in Ireland), he warned that Brian’s mood swings were not the only thing to worry about in this vicinity, because when the moon was full and the tidal conditions unfavorable, many lanes in downtown Cork could gorge with rising waters from the Lee.

“It hasn’t been too bad lately, though,” he offered, as I began to wonder if anybody in this place or this town or country talked straight. “And you should have no danger of drowning here, thanks to the protection of the stairs. Plus you appear to be lucky in general,” this penetratingly eyed creature, who turned out to be an immediate neighbor, continued.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the place where you have chosen to reside is the best park in Cork, because you have just found the best bar in Ireland, and because Brian seems to like you, which is not always or even often the case and which could of course change.”

“I like it here,” I said, thinking this was all gorgeous theater, just what had been missing in the careful coordinates of our pre-Irish days.

“You should. Even to have found a stool is like a
pishogue
.”

“A what?”

“That’s a word for a kind of superstition. Like a foxy lady.”

“Who?”

“If a fisherman sees a foxy lady on the pier, he knows he will drown and so he does not on that day go to sea. There are good
pishogues
and bad ones, various classes that we might call
pisheens
. It is a good sign to have found a stool here, because in doing so you have assumed a seat in the senate, the Roman senate. Here we sit and judge the world, while the plebeians sit at our backs.”

Some might say this was madness. But the scene was resplendent to me, and suggested that a life of vibrant color, unpredictable and spontaneous, was ours now for the taking. If only I could collect all these impressions in a jar and get them home safely, I
thought as I sipped, the wife will love me, and our adventure will be blessed with hilarity. Okay, I was already tipsy.