The Road to McCarthy (15 page)

It’s not long before we’re rattling past the long-term car park, which means we must only be about twenty miles from the airport. It’s a smooth
check-in, and in no time I’m walking through Business Class to my seat in Economy. The aisle is blocked by a flight attendant who is trying to ply a business passenger with free champagne.

“No, thank you.”

He fixes her with the forced half-smile and morally superior glare of a jet-lag Nazi.

“Just water for me.”

Well, give it to
me
then, you self-righteous sod. How dare you turn your nose up at something any normal person would be gagging for? Why are you paying extra for stuff you don’t want? I’m still reeling at the injustice of it all when the woman across the aisle, who looks like the CEO of a company that tests cosmetics on animals and is proud of it, makes her order in an unsmiling monotone.

“No. No alcohol. Just still water. And no meals.”

“None?”

“That’s what I said.”

No chance for the crew to spit in them then. As the flight attendant moves to let me pass through I catch her eye and say, “I’ll have their champagne if you like.”

I’m trying to sound like I’m joking, but we both know I mean it. So she fixes me with the pond-life glare she’s just been on the receiving end of from the Cosmetics Bitch.

Get down the back with the rest of the ballast, you desperate loser
, she says, taking care to phrase it, “I’m sorry, sir.” My spirit broken, I trudge past the dividing curtain into the terrifying netherworld of psychotic children, Antipodean backpackers and competition winners from the tabloid newspapers with whom I will spend the next seven hours jostling for elbow space with my knees touching my chin. It’ll be the best part of an hour before the first sniff of a drink, and it won’t be Veuve bloody Cliquot. They should make an example of those two ingrates. The captain should come out and point: “Oi! You! And you! Off! Go on, off!” Economy would echo to the sound of proletarian laughter as we guzzled their booze and divvied up their bags of freebies like looters after the revolution.

The in-flight magazine compounds the damage with a preachy article warning not to drink alcohol for at least twenty-four hours before flying—let alone on the plane itself—because of the health risks. This puritanical guff makes me even more tense than I already am at the prospect of takeoff, and therefore more in need of the drink or two that most of us require in order to relax and block out the mental reruns of every air disaster we’ve ever seen. A tipsy plane is a happy plane, it seems to me, merrily oblivious of the terrifying fact that we are seven miles above the unforgiving glaciers of Greenland with no visible means of support. What health risks, anyway? Flying is dangerous, sober or drunk. So why not run whiney articles telling people they’d be much safer if they got off and stayed at home instead? Mind you, that can be dangerous as well. A friend of mine was at home knitting when the ceiling fell in on her—plaster in her hair, rubble down the cleavage, the lot. The insurance bastards refused to pay, of course, because they said it was an old house, so it was fair wear and tear. She wasn’t even drinking at the time, which goes to show you can’t blame alcohol for everything.

The plane’s only half full, so, unlike Jet-lag Nazi and the Cosmetics Bitch, I’ve got a row of three seats to myself. No champagne, but three seats, and a pile of newspapers. Time spent in the United States offers many delights, but I think it’s fair to say that news from other countries isn’t one of them. A booster dose of British journalism will help me cope when Europe hasn’t been mentioned in any news media for more than two weeks and I’m beginning to question the reality of my existence.

As we take off, I’m reading that someone has stolen forty-six bloodhounds from a kennel in Kent, and a fifteen-year-old girl has been given breast implants as a birthday present by her mum and dad, who sound like smashing people. And a police sergeant has been found guilty of indecently exposing himself to a ninety-three-year-old woman in the old people’s home where he’d been visiting his father. Unfortunately for him he was recorded in the act by a security camera; yet he still pleaded not guilty, saying that his zipper had broken and his undercarriage had spontaneously popped out of its own accord—wait, it gets better—but he hadn’t noticed
because he’s 300 pounds and hasn’t been able to see past his stomach for some time. You can see his predicament. All manner of stuff could have been going on down there for years and he’d never have had a clue.

We’ve crossed the Scottish coast before the trolley appears at the far end of the aisle. I’m just deciding what to order for my two colleagues in the empty seats next to me who’ve gone to stretch their legs, when there’s a tremendous crash and a yelp of pain. The flight attendant, who was walking backwards down the aisle pulling the booze cart in her wake, has stumbled and fallen, banging against a Jewish gentleman in the aisle seat, and bringing the trolley and its contents tumbling down on top of her like an amorous drunk. Perhaps she got lumbered with the three-wheeled trolley off the train. Anyway, now she’s lying on her back, her uniform covered in miniatures of gin and brandy, like Father Jack’s wildest fantasy. The elderly American lady across from me catches my eye and explains what happened.

“The cart overturned, and then she went down on the man in the yarmulke.”

Well, why not? You can see her point. “Heck, I’m down here already, and I’ve always wondered what it would be like. May as well give it a go.” Eventually she gets up, dusts herself down, and brings us drinks, and more drinks, which we all knock back with no apparent ill effects. I do develop a chest pain which in the course of the flight relocates itself to my shoulder blades, but in a way this is a plus, as it induces dark thoughts of the probability of cancer, which takes my mind off the likelihood of crashing.

A short sleep, and we’re heading down the New England coast towards New York. I take a final look at the papers before entering international news quarantine, and find a gripping account of an English murder trial in which the evidence has been compromised by the police, who refused to attend the scene of the crime for an hour after the 999 call “in case the murderer was still there.” Yes, you can see how awkward that could have been. Much safer to sit outside in the squad car eating Kentucky Fried Chicken for an hour. If anyone in New York tries to suggest that Britain is going down the gurgler, as they sometimes do, I will tell them this tale of heroic British bobbies and watch them squirm.

We come in to land under a steely gray sky, the last traces of snow still visible in the outer suburbs. Perhaps I should have gone to the West Indies after all. There’d have been no snow there. Montserrat almost got the vote. I was tempted by the prospect of spending St. Patrick’s Day, which I’ve always associated with the dim light and bare trees of England, Ireland and Budapest, on a sunny tropical island, especially one where the saint’s day is said to be celebrated with particular fervor. Some linguists believe that the local patois, like that of Barbados, is descended from the Irish brogue, a theory that has been hotly disputed by rival linguists and academics, who have been prepared to travel long distances to debate their case at seminars and conferences on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. The prospect of Paddy’s Day festivities on a sun-drenched Caribbean island was most attractive. Fat joints would be rolled, made entirely of shamrock, and we would dance on the beach to the heavy reggae sounds of “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” Another time, perhaps.

For years I’ve been hearing stories of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, still the biggest in the world. It’s either a glorious celebration of Celtic pride and the achievements of Irish America, or a shame-making Disneyfication of stomach-turning paddywackery and drunken sentimentality, depending on whom you believe. I figured it was time to find out for myself. The trip to Cobh gave me the final nudge I needed. I decided to come and see the parade, and maybe even march in it, if that’s possible without being a member of a religious order, Irish band or paramilitary fundraising organization. Perhaps if I packed a dog collar, dark glasses and a beret I could lurk in a side street and tag along when Gerry Adams or the Corrs walked past.

I was also keen to know how an English accent would go down. A friend of mine narrowly escaped a vicious beating for being English in a New York Irish bar on Paddy’s Day a few years ago. He was able to see the funny side of it because he was Irish, while his American would-be assailants had never even set foot in the country, though they had seen
The Quiet Man
and
Michael Collins
. My mixed Anglo-Irish Catholic-Protestant parentage might not count for much if I find myself cornered by guys like this and try
to persuade them that history perhaps isn’t so black and white as it’s sometimes painted. I have an ace up my sleeve, though, a fact of which few people seem aware.

The New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade was founded by the British army.

I’ve decided I’ll only mention this as a last resort, as there’s a good chance it will only make matters worse.

The first person I see
whenever I arrive in America is always that big pear-shaped woman in blue polyester trousers and white uniform shirt with epaulettes, patrolling the no-man’s-land before you get to Immigration. It’s unclear what her function is, as she never speaks; she’s just walkin’ tough, walkin’ strong, like a Wild West sheriff, or a steroid freak from the gym. You must have seen her. She’s in San Francisco and Boston, Miami and LA. “Welcome to America,” says her gun and her prodigious transatlantic bottom. “This is how we do things over here. You got a problem with that?” No, ma’am, I surely don’t. This time, though, she’s walking up to me. Hundreds of people converging on the twenty-five immigration queues, and she’s picked me. What have I done?

“Purpose of your visit?”

I always feel guilty entering the United States, on account of having worked for two days as a chef without a permit, and without any of the skills normally associated with being a chef, in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the 1970s. I explained my accent by saying I was from Massachusetts, and it seemed to do the trick. The busboy had never been farther than Tucson and wanted to know if the cowboys in Boston dressed the same as in Arizona. His world crumbled when I told him there were no cowboys in Boston. Years later I saw some people dressed as cowboys on their way to a Wild West club in Boston, England, which just goes to show you should never generalize. Perhaps she’s keeping me talking so they can drop a net on me and drag me off to a back room where FBI agents who look like Henry Kissinger and Jack Ruby will be waiting to shoot my buttocks full of truth serum.

“Vacation.”

Holiday!
I should have said
holiday
. She’ll know I’m only trying to talk like them to ingratiate myself, which is a sure sign of guilt. I’m going to get locked up and gang-raped for cooking burgers and spaghetti in Arizona twenty years ago, and for making the Chef’s Salad. It was the restaurant’s recipe, but it should have been an arrestable offense. Strips of Kraft processed cheese with shredded white cabbage and canned corn in Thousand Island dressing? It was crime against humanity.

“Okay. Wait in line twenty-one.”

Two minutes, and I’m through. For the benefit of American government officials, I’d just like to point out that the stuff about Flagstaff was a joke and didn’t really happen, and anyway it’d be hard to find that dishwasher even if he existed, which he doesn’t. If anyone tries to tell you I worked in a junk shop as well, it’s a lie.

I take the airport bus to Grand Central Station, then a cab to the Upper East Side, where I’m staying in my friend’s spare room. An awning covers the street outside the entrance, and a uniformed doorman in cap and greatcoat lets you in, which is very stylish, and also costs you $1,000 in tips at Christmas. There’s nobody home and it’d be tempting to lie down and sleep for a couple of hours if I didn’t know that the key to avoiding jet lag—apart from not drinking for a year before getting on the plane and consuming only double-distilled mineral water and Royal Jelly while you’re in the air—is to stay up until the local bedtime. This can be a tough order when you arrive in Australia at five o’clock in the morning, but at four o’clock in the afternoon in Manhattan it’s a breeze, provided you embrace that goobly out-of-body sensation as a positive. Jet lag frequently creates the feeling that you are observing rather than participating in life, an experience that is intensified by being in New York, where every square inch is familiar from countless films and TV shows. The only difference between the Manhattan you know from the movies and cop shows and the one that’s there when you get off the plane is the fact that you’re in it, and you’ve never seen that in a film.

As I meander downtown from 72
^nd
Street, it strikes me that in a peculiar way Manhattan looks less modern and more traditional—less what Europeans think of as “Americanized”—than does Britain these days. There are
small grocers, delis, bars, florists and cleaners, all bearing the name of a family or an individual instead of an international chain or brand, so that the city still retains much of its early-twentieth-century charm. Though it reaches for the sky, at street level it’s surprisingly intimate, and just how you want it to be, like going to a concert and being relieved when the band plays all their hits rather than experimental new stuff that everybody hates. Taxis are yellow, steam rises from the subway vents and you feel like applauding as if Bob Dylan had just launched into “Positively Fourth Street,” only with a recognizable tune.

After walking aimlessly for an hour and a half, I’ve reached the corner of Second Avenue and 20
^th
Street. Jet lag is starting to assert itself, and I feel as if my veins are filled with lead. I need somewhere to sit down, and right across the street is McCarthy’s Bar and Grill. It would be perverse not to go in.

A barmaid with a fierce Dublin accent, her face illuminated by eight TVs, is leaning on the counter and moaning about Christmas in New York to the only other person in the bar, a sales rep from a drinks company. He’s from Dublin too.