Midlife Irish (4 page)

An Irish person is just like a cowboy. I figured this out by watching John Ford movies.

John Ford is widely supposed to have characteristically introduced himself, “I’m John Ford. I make westerns.” He might have
said, “I created what people in America think when they hear the word ‘Irishman.’ ”

Ford specialized in the movie genre “western.” For this he used John Wayne. But he also used Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Ward
Bond, Walter Brennan, and, as they say, “a host of others.”

It seemed to me odd, when I first discovered it, that John
Ford was an Irish guy. When I was a kid, I was surrounded by Irish people, and, because the Walt Whitman Theater was four
blocks from my house, I was also, if you consider fifties American television and movies, pretty close to surrounded by westerns.

When I was a kid I would watch a movie that would be classified as a “western” almost every week. My absolute oldest television
memory is of watching (half watching—I must have been four years old) an anthology series that featured old westerns. My mom
told me that one of the first names I ever spoke was “Johnny Mack Brown.” She would do an impression of me saying it: “Johnny
Mack Bwown! Johnny Mack Bwown!” This would cause me acute embarrassment in high school, but I got over it.

Johnny Mack Brown, certified cowboy movie star, was one of the recurring actors on the particular anthology show that I watched
with my mom and my brother and sister. My mom told me later that, at the end of the show, she would ask me, my sister, and
my brother, “Who is your favorite cowboy?” Mary and Bud had varying answers, but I would always answer “Johnny Mack Bwown!”
I was, she told me later, just about screaming.

Johnny Mack Brown. Those four syllables are all that remains in my memory banks of that particular cowboy. I know that I said,
“Johnny Mack Bwown” when asked the cowboy question. I have absolutely no idea who he is or what he looks like. I could not
pick him out of a lineup.

Years later, I was going to look up “Johnny Mack Brown” and attach a face to the syllables, but I didn’t. It seemed purer
to leave him as the only person I “know” only as a sound.

So, although I could have bumped into Johnny Mack Brown at an airport and not known it, he is real, to me, only as a sound.
I do know that Johnny Mack Brown rode a horse and had a six-gun and wore one style of those hats. That’s about it.

Like “Johnny Mack Brown,” the concepts “Irish” and “western” were never quite clear in my young mind.

Even now, described in a certain manner,
The Quiet Man
sounds just like one of Ford’s westerns. There is an outsider who is a nice guy but, when aroused, capable of violence, something
he’s really good at. There is a beautiful untamed landscape with a breathtaking, beautiful heroine, and there is, of course,
the bad guy. The bad guy is also violent, but not as good at violence as the good guy is.

This good guy is a man of few words. He’s tall, and he is John Wayne, aka Marion Morrison. The first time we see him, he’s
getting off a train. The voice we hear is the voice of his dead Irish mother:

Don’t you remember it, Seannie, and how it was? The road led up past the chapel and it wound and it wound. And there is the
field where Dan Tobin’s bullock chased you. It was a lovely house, Seannie, and the roses, well your father used to tease
me about them, but he was that fond of them too
.

Wayne’s name is Sean Thornton. Ford had relatives named Thornton, and he liked to say that he was born “Sean.” The movie has
a family feel to it. Ford’s brother Francis and his son-in-law Ken Curtis were in the cast, which is packed with Ford’s “regulars.”
They were doing what they usually did for John Ford—making a western.

If you watch
My Darling Clementine
and follow it with
The Quiet Man,
there is no mistaking it. Those cowboys were really Micks with bigger hats.

THREE

Green Simians Within

In writing this book, I read a lot about the Irish coming to America. American history isn’t the prettiest story in the world,
but Ireland’s role in American history is, at the beginning, a particularly ugly chapter. The theme is basically “Who gets
to oppress whom this year?” Irish immigrants start out oppressed, then swiftly become the oppressor.

The eighteenth century was the first Irish immigration to America. The first wave was Protestant. They settled in the South.
Like most immigrant groups, they were stereotyped (period drawings show the newly arrived Irish largely as a form of drunken
monkey-men with porkpie hats and pipes in their mouths).

The next wave, the famine immigrants, was much larger. Period representations, drawings for newspapers, still emphasized the
hats, the pipes, and the booze, but the monkeys seem to have gotten much more violent. These monkeys aren’t comic. They’re
still funny looking, but they’re threatening, especially when they are drunk, and they are drunk all the time. America seems
scared of these monkeys. One of the sons of these Irish people became the baddest man on the planet (circa 1880s), so maybe
the drawings aren’t that fanciful.

This wave was, of course, largely Catholic. The first group of green monkeys (who had now morphed into southern gentleman
planters and a few northern businessmen) actually
tried to suppress the second green-monkey group. They largely failed. By the pre-Civil War era, it’s too late to suppress
that second Irish group anymore. They are by now almost human.

In 2002 America you still find that little green monkeyman once in a while, but he’s usually confined to cereal boxes and
Hallmark “humorous” Saint Patrick’s Day greeting cards, and he’s comic, not threatening. The truth is we’re just not that
scary anymore. Even his kids are not threatened by Gerry Cooney.

It is very possible to be a first-generation Irish-American in 2002 America and be almost completely divorced from Ireland,
a country that, until recently, made divorce against the law. I am a walking example. I can go (except for brief flashes near
the middle of March) an entire year without having a single “Irish moment.” Nevertheless, the fatal Irish identity was still
buried somewhere in my subconscious mind. One summer day a few years ago, it bobbed to the surface.

My “trigger” was rather unexpected, but, as my mom would say, there you go.

I was looking at a car with a mouth when I first decided to go to Ireland. It was a moment of, for me, deep meditation.

I was alone. I had just mowed the lawn. Whenever I mow the lawn I have “distant thoughts” because I don’t like to think about
mowing the lawn. I went inside and took a shower. The television, the great meditative tool, was on. It was a show (I think
it was PBS) about “low riders,” cars that are adapted to ride very slow, “bounce,” and look cool. The show features many of
these cars and their owners. One car had Pez dispensers, filled with Pez, glued all over. Maybe two hundred Pez dispensers.
This got my attention.

The owner of the car told the interviewer that this car “made him look friendly. Especially to girls.”

There was a low rider whose headlights had been turned into eyes. There were eyelashes and everything. There was a
big nose on the hood. The best part, though, was the tongue. When the driver popped the hood latch, a big red tongue came
out. “It made people laugh,” said the owner. The car was painted a deep metallic green.

When the owner popped the hood, the unseen narrator said, “They see this as a part of their native culture.”

That was my Jungian synchronicity Irish moment.

A green car with eyes and a mouth and a purple car with Pez dispensers. Native culture.

I began to think about my native culture. I grew up in New Jersey, so my native culture, to some, isn’t that great a culture.
Bruce Springsteen is probably the first thing you think of when you say “New Jersey.” In 1984 I remember Ronald Reagan saying
that his administration was deeply committed to that culture. Ronald Reagan said that during his re-election campaign. I remember
thinking at the time that it was the most bullshit thing ever said by a politician.

Springsteen’s songs are about fast cars and Jersey girls and the Jersey shore, and, of course, the always-popular “broken
dreams.” I remember when they almost made “Born to Run” the official state poem. A state senator objected to “Baby this town
rips the bones from your back, it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap” as bad for tourism.

Native culture. I have eight Bruce Springsteen albums, but for me the Paragon of New Jerseyism is Frank Sinatra. His songs
are about women and broken dreams, but there are no cars (except the elegiac honking limousine horn in “September of My Years”).

If you want to tell something about a person’s culture, it is usually informative to examine his living area. In
Do the Right Thing
Danny Aiello’s pizza parlor “Wall of Fame” was given its proper cultural significance. The fact that there was not a single
African-American on the wall was a telling anthropological pointer.

In my office, New Jersey is well represented. There is a framed letter I received from Frank Sinatra in a prominent
position on my personal wall of fame. Sinatra sent me it thanking me for ridiculing Kitty Kelley (an apparent Irish woman)
in a magazine article. I also have a framed copy of the Philadelphia Phillies 1964 roster and a Phillies button from 1980,
the only year they were ever champions.

But the only Irish thing is an old sign that says “Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply.” Every Irish-American has the same sign.
It’s required.

In my albums it’s the same story: forty-five Sinatras, eight Springsteens, two Chieftains, and that terrible “the Irish Tenors”
CD.

I began to feel more inadequate than I normally feel. Every year of my youth, when my family went to the Hibernian Saint Patrick’s
Day Party I had heard one Irish guy ask another Irish guy this question. This was always followed by obscenities, so even
then I knew it was not a good thing to be asked.

“What kind of Irishman are you?”

What kind of Irishman was I? I could hear a voice: “You wouldn’t put a patch on an Irishman’s ass!” I knew what kind of Irishman
I was. I wear green on Saint Patrick’s Day, that’s what kind of Irishman I am.

This started to bother me. I was two-thirds through my life and I hadn’t even been to Ireland once. I had never even kept
up with my Irish relatives. I barely kept up with my Irish relatives in America. The idea of dying before I even bothered
to see where I was from was a sad, sad thing.

So I watched the green car with the eyes and the mouth and I thought about Ireland. I wouldn’t put a patch on an Irishman’s
ass. I didn’t know what that meant, but it bothered me.

It is an often-made observation that there are more Irish people in America than in Ireland. Because of this, there are a
lot of people like me, Irish people whose idea of Ireland is based on something that has no basis in reality. The authentic
reality is the result of many sad circumstances—the potato famine, the English, the Irish economy, the English, and so on.
But this situation has created a huge market for stuff that is directed at the “Irish Diaspora,” Irish people who know nothing
about Ireland, but feel a little guilty about it once in a while.

I feel a little sympathy toward these people because I’m one of them. It’s very strange to consider: all these Irish people
with a substitute country. But as with most things in the modern world, there is no “solution.” Ireland is a tiny island,
which is relatively sparse in population. If the population of the “Irish Diaspora” were all sent to Ireland, the entire island
would be as tightly packed as New Jersey. If there were enough guys like me, it might turn into Jersey. Then what would we
do?

All these people need their absent Ireland, and they get infusions of it on a regular basis. The highbrow Diaspora gets a
never-ending stream of books that connect Ireland with everything in America. Ireland and Walt Whitman. Ireland and Thoreau.
Ireland and Joseph Campbell. The mythic area here is a particularly rich lode, and the racks of Barnes and Noble are filled
with examinations of Oisin’s wanderings and Queen Maeve’s thoughts. Plus wind chimes.