Midlife Irish (23 page)

I also found it comforting to be around so many people who had some of the same religion-induced psychoses that I did. Just
kidding, God.

In Ireland,
everybody
does the things that people thought were so weird about my family. Almost
every
house out in the west has holy water fonts next to the door. Almost
every
house has an Infant of Prague (a statue of the Christ child whose garb you change to fit the liturgical season). I didn’t
keep statistics but, on average, the houses I visited in Ireland had about eight crosses in them. There were signs with prayers
and pictures of Jesus and Mary all over the place. I was in ten houses that had that famous picture of the sacred heart of
Jesus. In Ireland I knew what it was like to be typical. Just another kid in a regular family. Everybody was looking
around for the holy water font when they came into a room. Completely normal behavior.

In Ireland, I tried to walk inside every Catholic church I came across. There were, as you would figure, a lot of Saint Patrick’s,
but I also came across Saint Teresa’s, Saint Peter’s, Saint Joseph’s, and the saint I’m named after, Saint Francis Xavier’s.
If you come across somebody named Francis in Ireland, you don’t need to ask what his middle name is.

It was great to be in a country where my family was normal.

ELEVEN

Alcohol and the?
Irish Person

Phase one of our journey was near completion. We had only a few days of random rambling before phase two set in. In phase
two we would no longer be footloose and fancy-free. We would be bound by an “agenda.” We would have to look into very specific
things, and we would probably be confined to very particular areas.

Our “plans” for phase two didn’t look like plans. They looked like the two-pronged plan that had gotten me through much of
my life until now, namely: 1) Make it up as you go along; 2) When convenient, pretend that you had whatever happened planned
all the time.

So we drove along just north of Dublin without a mood of desperation. We had spent a lot more money that we thought we would
spend, but when your money has James Joyce’s picture on it, it’s difficult to get upset. It’s like Monopoly money.

But on that day in our lovely Punta, we decided to take stock. We would find a little town, find a pub, which is never hard
to do in Ireland (like finding that name “Trump” in New York), and have a “sit-down.” We wound up in a little pub around Dundalk,
a town just north of Dublin on Ireland’s east side. We found a seat, and decided to take stock.

Phase two, the finding of my parents, was still in front of us. It was time to get organized. We didn’t want to leave without
doing what we set out to do. Now that we had to actually act, our attitude changed. We were in a country that was still pretty
foreign to us, and we had very little information. But Paulette was optimistic and I felt “if she is optimistic I am optimistic
too.” I had faith in Paulette and her orderly mind. When anybody loses anything around our house, she finds it. She always
knows the ending of murder mysteries before everybody else does. She loves organizing. She loves lists of “things to do.”
She will have a “list of things to do” at my funeral.

We wrote a little list and evaluated it while we ate a few sausages and sipped another Guinness. (By then I could just walk
in, sit down, hold up two fingers, and point. They always knew.)

There wasn’t much on our list.

• Find out about Frank’s dad
  
• Find out about Frank’s mom.
  

At this point, we had a few regrets. We hadn’t seen the whole country, but we had seen a good bit of it. Ireland is not the
USSR. I’m sure we hadn’t really seen and experienced Ireland, but we got semiclose. We had given it a good shot. We certainly
used a lot of petrol. We had seen enough of it to get a pretty good impression.

But we knew that if we were going to accomplish our goals, we would have to draw a line someplace. We knew that, despite the
vast uncharted Ireland that still lay before us, there were limits. We couldn’t stay here forever, although that seemed, late
at night, a very good idea many times.

We realized that we hadn’t even set foot in Dublin, the city a lot of people think of when they think of Ireland. Dublin was
the city of
Ulysses
, the city of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious novels like
The Commitments
and
The Snapper
, the city of the Easter rebellion and certainly
the
city of Ireland.

I had even thought of going to graduate school there. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I thought that I was an “Irish
writer,” even though I’d never spent a day in Ireland. I would go to Ireland and come home with my Irish degree and all would
be well. I’d be a young man reconnected to his “Irishness.”

It never happened, of course. When I was twenty-one, I already had a wife and a child (and twelve dollars on my nightstand,
my “nest egg”) and could never really afford to go to Ireland and study there. I remember sitting on a couch in Watkinsville,
Georgia, and realizing that no matter what I did, I could never afford to go to Ireland and study.

But Yeats infected me. I said his poems to myself all the time. I thought they were perfect ways to spend the fifteen-minute
tour around the factory that was part of the job.

I remember vividly opening the big gate in the back so they could unload the train at 7:30 in the evening. It was the only
“thing” I had to do on my shift. The rest of the time was spent reading: Otherwise, I just walked around for insurance purposes
“paying attention.” Yeats was amazing. He would make the whole thing somehow elevated.

When I stood on the roof of the factory and turned the lights on, I thought about those swans. I made $1.75 an hour—pretty
good.

A quarter after seven the sun would start to go down, and I’d open the King Kong–like gate; the train would gasp and belch
its way in. They would unload the massive coils of wire. Forklift drivers would steer their amazing way over to it with startling
quick turns of the little black steering wheel. The train would leave. I would close the door. All the time I would be thinking:

Like a long legged fly

Above the swift stream

His mind moves upon silence.

I had always loved that stuff. In graduate school I loved Yeats, memorized his poems, said them silently as I walked around
my rounds at Anaconda Wire and Cable Company, where I was a security guard. It was my little world there. But as I finished
school, and started yet more school, and had another child, and moved to an opulent trailer in Winterville, Georgia, I still
found no matter what idignity the trailer park had in store for me, I still loved that stuff.

So with Dublin before us and a big stack of American-earned James Joyces in our pockets, we could go after Beckett or Joyce
or Yeats or Shaw or Wilde (or the young, still-living Heaney), or (for the politically minded) the chilling details of the
1921 revolution, but we thought that those were very big fish and we weren’t, after all, Ahab and his wife. (Although Paulette,
at times, reminded me of her.)

We wanted a
theme
, something that you could approach in a more general way—something you could go after without a lab coat, but some great
generality that floated around Ireland, Literary Ireland, if it could be arranged.

We decided on our subject pretty quickly considering the vast panorama of Ireland that presented itself to us. It was a subject
quite vast, yet a subject almost every Irishman had an opinion about.

My dad didn’t drink very much and my mom didn’t drink at all. Even after thinking hard, I had to say that I never saw my dad
in the Irish state of “a drop taken.” Even Saint Patrick’s Day and weddings never moved him to imbibe too much.

I have to admit that I don’t really know many Irish people who drink way too much. When I come to think about it, the “problem”
drinkers I know aren’t even a little Irish. Nevertheless, on the official “Irish Day” (March 17) in America, the standard
thing to do is drink. You can also make jokes on
that day, but a great majority of them involve Irishmen and their fatal love for liquid refreshment. Of course, in America,
people drink at Christmas. But they also open presents and do a lot of other things. On Saint Patrick’s Day, there are no
presents, just booze. Along with New Year’s Eve, the focal point is alcohol.

In old American movies, whenever there is an overtly Irish man, he is often a guy who really likes to drink. He’s often a
funny, garrulous, likable guy, but he’s also a drunk. In American movies “Irishness” is often almost exactly equivalent to
the Irish character’s fondness for booze. It might have nothing to do with reality, but in most American movies of the thirties,
forties, and fifties, the connection is hard to miss. If the character you’re playing is Irish you’re going to be drunk and
happy about it.

It’s not just the movies that have linked alcohol and the Irish. If you wander down Broadway in New York City, it is difficult
to walk a block without encountering a bar with an Irish name on the sign. There may be no real O’Brian who owns O’Brian’s,
but if you are stuck for the name of a bar, try one that starts with a “Mc” or an “O’.” When they market a new alcohol product,
they often name it after an Irish person.

In Ireland,
every
small town has a pub, and the pub owner has a well-defined, respectable role in the community. In the West of Ireland, everyone
knows the pub owner, who is usually a very popular man.

So it wasn’t surprising that my dad, an ambitious but poor Irish guy newly arrived in America, wanted to open a pub. He was,
like so many of his post-World War II Irish-American brethren, doing what came naturally. “Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment
Parlor” was born.

There is, in Ireland, the pub-evaluation term, “good house.” A “good house” is a place where a decent man might sit and have
a glass or two without being bothered by things like fights and, as I heard it called in Ireland, “the general tumult of the
world.” In a good house a man can sit and sip his
frothy beverages amid the company of other frothy beverage fans and be assured that he’s not going to hear “It’s All about
the Benjamins” or something by Billy Idol. He’s not going to encounter young men attempting to “converse with members of the
opposite sex,” unless those members are very, very familiar with those young men. Like they’re married. No one is going to
eat dinner, or fight, or attempt to make money, or, perish the thought, obtain illegal substances. No one is going to do anything
that detracts from the main objective: drinking alcohol-laden beverages while sitting on tall stools.

Gannon’s Irish American Refreshment Parlor, located in Camden, New Jersey, was a good house for twenty years. Then, in 1966,
it became, for my dad, something else. Something less.

In October of that year a man walked into the liquor store area and asked for a six-pack of beer. The young man was overweight,
bearded, and possessed a receding hairline. He was also seventeen years old.

The young man was on a mission. The American Beverage Control Board had sent him to Gannon’s. The American Beverage Control
Board was an organization charged with the unfortunate responsibility of determining whether every bar stayed within the law.
The law in New Jersey at that time (it’s since been changed) was that no one under the age of eighteen was legally allowed
to buy alcoholic beverages. The inordinately old-looking kid was a shill for the American Beverage Control Board. Every year
they hired some seventeen-year-old kid who looked to be much older than he really was. I don’t know where they got these kids
(the circus?). The kid “tested” bars by walking in and attempting to buy beer or liquor or wine. The kid would walk in, and
if the bar sold him booze, he would leave and be followed in the door by the “ABC” men. Then the bar would be fined and shut
down for a week. This was “fair” in Camden, New Jersey, and the gulag.

My dad hated paying the fine and he hated losing a week’s
worth of business, but more than anything else he hated the fact that the ABC would run a notice in the local newspaper informing
citizens that a bar had willfully broken the law. That really sickened him.