St. Patrick's Day: another day in Dublin (Notre Dame Review Book Prize) [1 ed.] 0268035385, 9780268035389

Citation preview

NOTRE DAME REVIEW BOOK PRIZE “This is first-rate prose. From the evidence of both this book and his previously published novel The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov, we realize we are in the presence of a great novelist in Thomas McGonigle. He puts a certain period of Dublin literary history before our eyes with freshness and honesty. Not only that but by his skillful use of modernist techniques he gives the ‘Irish Novel’ a long outstanding and much deserved kick up the arse into the twenty-first century. I praise the work mightily.”

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

—JULIÁN RÍOS, author of Larva and The House of Ulysses “Thomas McGonigle is a second-story man called Lamont Cranston. He is the shadow figure who winkles out the secrets that lie in the dark hearts of men. And what better ground to work than the dark city of Dublin, and what better meretricious myth and all the crap that goes with it than the myth of St. Patrick’s Holy Ireland. Never in the history of the Western world has there been such a bogus ‘state.’ Heinrich Böll famously declared, ‘Out on the Atlantic verge lies the beating heart of Europe.’ What he forgot to say was that heart is worn, tattered, and badly in need of a triple bypass, one for each of the leaves on that shamrock, the symbol of this land of benighted hypocrisy.”

THOMAS MCGONIGLE

was born in 1944 in Brooklyn. His previous novels, reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Voice Literary Supplement, include The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov and Going to Patchogue. He lives in New York City.

NOT R E DA M E

Cover Design: Faceout Studio Cover images: Background art: “Pub Crawl Down Memory Lane,” David Sandlin © 1995. Courtesy of the artist. Black & White images are courtesy of the author

M C GONIGLE

—JAMES MCCOURT, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Queer Street, and Time Remaining

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

“A retrospective portrait of a young Irish American in Dublin, St. Patrick’s Day combines the acute vision of the best fictional memoirs from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It has both Edward Dahlberg’s acid lucidity and the caustic tone of A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. I make mention of these two uncommon American writers because Thomas McGonigle ranges with the lone rangers, the unique writers.”

A NOVEL

—NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, former Ireland Professor of Poetry

another day in Dublin

Thomas McGonigle

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

The Notre Dame Review Book Prize 2013

Love beneath the Napalm, James D. Redwood

2016

St. Patrick’s Day: another day in Dublin, Thomas McGonigle

2015

Times Beach, John Shoptaw

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

another day in Dublin

THOMA S McGON I GL E University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2016 by Thomas McGonigle

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGonigle, Thomas, author. Title: St. Patrick's Day : another day in Dublin / Thomas McGonigle. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, [2016] | Series: Notre Dame Review Prize Identifiers: LCCN 2016025045 (print) | LCCN 2016025130 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268035389 (softcover) | ISBN 0268035385 (softcover) | ISBN 9780268101053 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268087036 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Irish Americans—Fiction. | Americans—Ireland— Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Saint Patrick's Day— Fiction. | Dublin (Ireland)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / General. | FICTION / Literary. Classification: LCC PS3563.C3644 S7 2016 (print) | LCC PS3563.C3644 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025045 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Armastusega Anna’le

It is not easy to think of myself as a man who is thought of as dead. I might as easily think of myself as dead. And perhaps some writers do before they begin to write. They think of themselves as dead. Or they think of themselves as thought of as dead.

—Gerald Murnane

4 November 1977 9.30 am. The capsules have been taken with some whiskey . . . It’s a bright sunny morning. Full of life. Such a morning as many people have died on . . . I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened. No big bang or cut wrists. 65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure I did some [At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop].

—Keith Vaughan, Journals, 1939–1977

L’artiste qui joue son être est de nulle part. —Samuel Beckett, on Jack B. Yeats

To lavish love on objects unworthy of it is infinitely better than living a cold, ordered life in a study, in an office, or even a garden tending flowers . . . it has not been the sinners, the degraded, the drunkards, the gamblers, the crooks, the harlots who have made me shudder, but the dead, the respectable dead; cut off like a branch from the tree.

—Francis Stuart, Things to Live For

ST. PATRICK’S DAY

Come, hear something, read some things, I was saying.

That spring I was staying at the Russell Hotel in the cheapest or, as I have been taught to say, the most reasonable available room. I have sat before the fire in the lobby, cold glass of Carlsberg in hand, realizing: traveling out the patrimony, a gift in my case, from all the years of my father’s fear of doing anything which would endanger his retirement. After forty-nine years of work at the American Can Company he survived two years of doing, as he put it: nothing. Died, he did, alone in a parking lot with strangers looking on at his performance. Upstairs, built into the cabinet next to the bed was a radio which received only Radio Eireann—stories always seemed to begin: In 193 . . . In 189 . . . They, He, She, and . . . the words flowed into never remembering a fact except the pause before the announcer saying a birthday greeting to someone’s Granny of County . . . who wanted to hear “Apples and Oranges” as performed by the Metropole Dance Band and then the female announcer would say three or four words in Irish, allowing me to remember this announcer, Ruth Buchanan, who had taught English to foreign students in the same school where I would work in Baggot Street when I had lived in this city with the Bulgarian, this Ruth who could also still be seen in cinema adverts plucking a little shampoo bottle growing in the center of flowers then blooming down there in Stephen’s Green; this Ruth who was now saying three or four words in Irish every hour, reminding people there are two languages in this country—and for me, one of those languages drowned in the ocean across which my grandfather at the age of twelve was shipped from Donegal to New York where that Bulgarian lived BUT let’s not go into all of that just yet. ————

1

A fence of rocks piled one on top of the other, cement forced between, about an asphalt paved front yard. Will you come in? The house set back from the drive. Will you come in?

Down there in the street, troops of high school bullies have been formed up to strut and twirl and shake their behinds for all they’re worth: St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, imported from New York and points west— them showing them how it’s done; bands and marching units in between flatbed trucks on which shivering girls stand throwing sample packets of dried peas and frozen fish fingers. Looking down from my window I couldn’t tell whether this was the end or the beginning of the parade. His watch on my wrist had stopped. H. A. M C G O N I G LE 1924-1969 45 YRS CANCO S ERV I C E In the corner a red plush straight-backed chair on which I had been stacking the books bought in an effort to catch up for the years since in Dublin. I put the books on the floor next to my suitcases. I thought to sit, watch them down there. The window sill is too high for my feet or the chair too low and either way I couldn’t see with ease what was happening in the street. I couldn’t remember whether the pubs would be open so I called down for a couple of Carlsbergs to be sent up: three bottles and a glass. Waiting in thirst I again twisted the problem, what was I doing in Dublin, when as before coming in from the airport there was the same identical sinking feeling of why in whatever it is, had I come back, again, because I always had that feeling, back here again, never remembered of course until after the rush to find the bus for Busárus, find the change, find a seat, get all the luggage into the bus because I wouldn’t trust them to put it into the luggage compartment. St. Patrick’s Day

————

A SE RV I CE ANNO UNCE ME NT

To ensure a comfortable journey through this day an ITINERARY is provided: Starting (obviously) in the Russell Hotel Walking to Grogan’s by way of Stephen’s Green and Neary’s Pub In Grogan’s Out on the Street to the Memorial by the Grand Canal and Baggot Street Bridge To Rathmines and Rathgar Starting Out Again Taken Apart McDaids En Route Again, Grogan’s To the Party The Corn Exchange

Back here again riding in the bus across land being packaged up into housing estates and petrol stations, looking out at the old woman washing down her step into the pub and the same people still sitting in all the same places, maybe a little worse for wear, but who isn’t in this day and age (von Webern music) but knowing too, at least, they did have a place and after all I had spent years here which had been more alive than all the years spent in other places or was that another lie among others which had brought me back here to Dublin, as before? A knock at the door. The kid was here with the beer on a silver tray. He was twelve, fourteen, or fifteen years old, how should I know? I signed the check and gave him 20p tip. He thanked me and backed out of the room. I skipped the glass. The beer wasn’t really cold. Back then, I would never complain about something like this, because Americans were always complaining about warm beer, cold rooms, and people who didn’t bathe. The Americans came dressed in white socks and London Fog raincoats. I lost my white socks and kept the J. C. Penney raincoat which was soiled down the right front side with dried red paint after brushing against wet posters in the anarchist office in Glasgow where I had visited: Americans never wore soiled clothing being afraid of getting run over by a truck . . . ————

3

Alone in this room, standing at the window, drapes pulled back, looking down at the rainy street now deserted. Over there, at an angle across from the hotel: backroom of a chip shop where after the fashion I danced to Beatles records in 1964 with a shop girl who wouldn’t tell me her name because you’re just here looking for a good time of it and you ain’t never gonna come back here again, I know, so what do you want to go and know my name for, just for a dance, anyway, is that okay, you know, if not I’ll go back to my friends who’ll never talk to me ever again if I talk too long with you, just here for the joke of it, you are . . . A certain deep breath, look to the ceiling, hope people don’t notice but—in all of this: living at the Russell and thinking of going off to a chip shop. I wouldn’t have anyone in this room unless they . . . not to dare beyond the beginning of thought—the fingers are long and tremble—never dare to say, though hearing all too clearly, as before: chopped your balls off, right, even if you say you never get mixed up in a sort of conversation of nounless feeling. Beyond The Pale . . . a place never gone to because pints don’t grow on trees and a man could die of thirst in the middle of all that damp green scenery. Never wanted any part of the army who went tramping about Ireland looking for cemeteries in which their relatives had been dumped. Childhood was ancestry enough together with the years previously spent in Dublin, history of sufficient complexity I didn’t have to go seeking more muck to pile up in a closet with the dirty underwear. The girl who took me across into sex reminded me rain heavy leaves when storm ended sun out slight wind gusting rain falls again on sidewalk standing close to the trunk of the tree avoiding the momentary wet smelling sweet mold coming as she did from Kinsale her father pensioned out from the British Army retired complaining, she, Barbara silhouetted by the light of the exposed tubes in the gramophone, said nothing, I said nothing grateful the silence her fingers

Laughter in the hall. A thud against the door. I am not in. During the day no pissing in the sink. The bathroom was across the hall. Never really sure which word to use: toilet, bathroom, men’s room, the shit house. Vance Packard was to blame for it because of The Status Seekers. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Words give away class. In the whatever, a bathtub the size of an Irish coffin, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, and next to it a chrome heated towel rack. Another day when the hint of snow on the ground, now just a reminder of exactly how long the winter holds on to Dublin, I had gotten off the bus in Rathmines and was walking up the road toward the Stella Cinema when seen stopped in the traffic a hearse carrying a polished tan coffin. Six o’clock on a dark late afternoon, early night, a time rushing from/to, turned away from the hearse and, if I could have . . . to make the impact stronger: thrown into a pub and ordered a whiskey. Had a second and a bottle of Harp; finished, back on the street and just another night to get through. The sides of the coffin squeezing his shoulders— the large hands of the uncle just back from Korea grabbing my arms: he’s getting to be a big boy all right, yes, he is that. Will you come in? Be done with it. This is all so dumb. The past is fucking with the past in the grave and can only drag you down. Sounds in the kitchen. Would you like a cuppa tea? She is out of her shoes. She must be cold. Yes, no milk. The dishes rattle. Has the fire come on good? Yes. It’s warm. Over the fireplace is a picture of a girl standing on a flat slab of stone wearing a wide floppy hat. To the right in the corner, a bookcase of tattered school texts, magazines from Denmark— Barbara’s brother was engaged to a girl from Denmark—and England, books by Hemingway, orange Penguins, and Françoise Sagan; across the room a sofa with a broken-down armrest, across it a shiny black raincoat with blue denim collar.

Just like my father, or your Uncle Jimmy, my mother would say and I’ve forgotten what it was I had done to get her to say it. Those activities of men which women are always putting up with. You okay in there? Sure. Can you hurry up, I’ve got to go. ————

5

That’s what I’m doing. Footsteps go away, come back. Please. The person is small and wide. He doesn’t say thanks. Not expecting or doing so myself, back in the room greeted now by sun. That’s all I need. Barbara brings in the tea tray: two cups, a kettle with repaired handle, a sugar bowl, two tea spoons, a small cup of milk. Sip at the tea. She sorts through the records. Dusts one off with the sweater she is wearing. I’m tired of just hanging around I’m going to get married and settle down And this sporting life is going to be the death of me. He whines so, I say. He doesn’t. He’s a good friend of my brother. That’s what you like about him? No. She changes the record. The Rolling Stones. “Under the Boardwalk.”

The third bottle of beer is warm and glowing blonde in the sun. Next to the typewriter is To Leave Before Dawn by Julian Green. I had started to write a letter to Green on the blank back page of the book, sitting last night in a corner seat in the Bailey, gone there to get away from the crowd in Grogan’s. Maybe I should write it out quickly, go over to Paris and hand it to him. Now, with back to the Green, yes, I know the pun, looking at the scrawled writing: I told you, I’d only write when I had something important to say. Importance has ambushed me in Dublin. You are an old man and I am a young man. We talked only one hour—the distortions and eccentricities of hurried conversation. I write to you only because maybe you can detect in my ignorance a certain innocence in hope, a desire to be happy. I write to you, now to ask . . . I met Green in Paris in January . . . we talked for one hour. How had he come to write The Dark Journey, a book I could only read a chapter at a sitting. Malcolm Lowry took it with him on his last journey to MexSt. Patrick’s Day

————

ico. I do not have to read my books, Green said. Had he met Joyce in Paris? I was twenty-seven. My first book had just been published. It was before the war, the last war, a friend invited me to a party. James Joyce was there. He was what in French is called Le Grand Seigneur. He had perfect manners and seemed from a different century. He told me his children had fallen upon my book. Sadly I have not read it, he said. My days for reading are over. On Grafton Street, that Spring, I turned and walked away

In the mountains of northern Bulgaria, I told Green, I met my wife’s grandmother, she is a large ball of black wool out of which dance two blue eyes about a single tooth. Her son said she is only eighty-six. Julian Green said she must be happy. She had seen much. It was good to have seen much, happiness is a mystery like God. Green is a convert to Catholicism so I told him I had been an altar boy when I was young. How I envy you, Green said, I did not have the chance, I converted too late. He asks me to write out my name so he will not misspell it as he inscribed The Other One. I had been reading it in Virginia, I tell him, knowing part of his family came from Virginia, reading it when I received the call that my father had died in Saugerties, in a parking lot. We are never prepared, Green says, never prepared but we try to be and we try to be, forgive me for repeating that I was at the university in Virginia after the war, mathematics defeated me so I came back to France, one never knows. I took her hand and felt the veins against the bone. Felt the dry chill. Barbara says nothing. She takes my cup and carries it to the kitchen. I heard the sounds of it being washed. Met her in the hall. The kitchen light was off. A black figure against the gray. Her lips high. She bent and met me on the tips of my toes, kissed. Walked back to the room. Sat on the floor. Her head lay in the crook of my arm. Traced the outline of her face.

So, I have left the room, my room, and walking down the flights of stairs as the ceiling gets higher and the plasterwork more elaborate while the staircase gets wider, carpet thicker and the brass rods holding it in place, brightly polished. ————

7

It looks to be clearing, the girl said, taking the key at the front desk. It does. A pity about the parade, she said. Did anything happen? Thank God, no, wasn’t it awful. Yes. But you were saying. The weather. All that planning and all those people coming all that way. That’s the way it goes. I suppose, but at least no one was killed, like a bit ago. Embraced her with all the passion of the word embrace. Hands on her breasts. Against the boy chest—I think—for the length of her body; against the pelvis, along the legs under the denim skirt. She wouldn’t open her eyes. She grasped at me. The sticky warm flesh and then her face like a painting in a . . .

Walked toward Newman House but before getting there crossed the street and entered the Green. Antonioni had painted the trees of a park in London to get the exact shade of brown and green he wanted for Blow-Up. In the kitchen of Newman House, a dozen large fish had been lying on the floor waiting to be hacked up for Friday lunch. The cooks and the helpers moved about the room dressed in soiled white uniforms. Blue-jacketed waiters rushed in and out. The Green was filling up with people walking up a thirst. The head of Mangan on its pillar. Crossed over the bridge Ruth used in her search for that flower containing the bottle of shampoo. Back and forth in front of the pond walked the duck counters. A swan was out in the middle of the pond with an arrow in its neck. Kids must have done it. It was just a ratty-looking swan in the middle of the pond with an arrow through its neck. Cupid had missed a couple fucking in the bushes. Leaving the Green by way of the South African gate. a drafty corridor. In time I lead her out to the hall; am led to the other room. I push off my shoes. I watch as she rolls down her stockings. Let me help you. Undress her in the time she undresses me.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

On the bed: chest to chest. Under the blanket, goosebumped. Her long fingers guide me away from her belly button. Guide me. Assertion ends in passage. Eyes shut closed. Joined lips. Pull away drooling on her leg. Her fingers across my back. I am shaking. She guides me again. Retracted. Shaking. My hands cold. My hand over the stiff curls of hair, there. My hands feel waxy. Rub her breasts. Jelly on the bone

Walked up Grafton Street . . . or down . . . or up. No matter, going in the direction of Trinity but made a quick turn at the first lane, into Neary’s by the back door. Holding on in life is a matter of habit, sitting the wall to back, a bottle of cider at the table in front, the boy having poured before the chance to tell him, I’d pour it myself. They always dumped the cider into the bottle (a couple of cubes of ice, please) destroying the carbonation— but said to release the flavor though cider was drunk in the morning for the bubbles. A satisfying burp and the day was off to a good start. So! The lads were polishing the large brass lamps at either end of the bar. Neary’s is a theatrical pub. Behan’s parents were in there years before drinking up the money that came to them as gift from . . . Susan had liked Neary’s and when the downstairs got crowded we would go upstairs and order Bloody Marys. This is cheaper than going to New York, Dickie would say. The only way I’ll ever go, Susan would reply. Pessimistic as usual. No, for a change I’m being reasonable which is worse, I know. Dickie was in love with Susan and Susan was never in love with men who were in love with her. I went to the Trinity Ball with Susan and Dickie went with a woman who was in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was in love with her and she was not in love with Dickie so when she went back to England, Dickie was in love with Susan. I was never in love with Susan, not even for a moment because that would ruin, as I thought, a more interesting, what I called, a relationship, to be consciously ironic. ————

9

Reading the salmon-colored pages of the Financial Times was a way of being elsewhere. Susan and Dickie were said to be back in England. No goodbyes. Since it was a holiday, a second bottle of cider. At the Trinity Ball, Ian Whitcomb sang “Nervous” in a tent erected next to the library reading room, years before, he had gone to Trinity and sang in the beat clubs down by the river. A French writer is said to have written with different colored pencils to mark the shifts of time, but the cost of such reproduction, and even knowing it. Bring on the violins for the poor but honest, said the bartender back in Wisconsin when he found out I had heard Ian Whitcomb—the bartender with the green hair for St. Patrick’s Day—and breaking out the Jamison instead of the peppermint schnapps but here I am in the routine of a cider in Neary’s and soon enough over to Grogan’s for a bottle of Carlsberg followed by a pint of stout. A cold one for Mr. T., Tommy said, and as he will say, sitting that first week in Dublin . . . all of that comes later, though all of that, THAT year in Dublin . . . An Englishman is ordering a whiskey, Scotch please. He has a large white moustache, yellowed at the corners. His eyes are blue and watery. He looks in my direction and I disappear. I look back at him. He does not turn away. He takes a sip of his whiskey, puts the glass back on top of the table in the exact spot where it had been placed. He picks up the Daily Mail. He takes another sip of whiskey. He does not look in my direction again. She lived in Rathgar. We left and walked along the rain night sharpening streets. Her hand was cold. The fingers long and bony under the skin; her blue-green eyes were set in the narrow face between two curls of dark hair. Along through the side streets to Rathmines Road. Modern faces gashed into Georgian forms. The chips were too hot. Teeth stinging hot mush inside. We shared a bottle of Coke. Walked as if toward the mountains

And the photographs in the Irish Times of Anglo-Irish couples marrying to carry on the fair skin, frail bodies, and ignorant as shit, man, Joe (for Stalin) was telling me in McDaids. They are that. As stupid as

St. Patrick’s Day

————

your political leaders in America who get described as simple but honest and straightforward. They always know who to put the knife in. I’m not having any of your American romanticism about a class of shit-smelling lumps who only know the difference between one end of the horse and the other because they got stuck on one before they were born. Joe could be right. But he was sitting in McDaids or in Grogan’s; had been to America and come back. There must have been something wrong with him. Or me? This morning in Neary’s. Parents dead. Wife in New York. Sister in New York. Money in my pocket. Not a care in the world. I have to be getting out of here. Nothing wrong with Neary’s, but the morning was over and it was time for the serious business of the day, not like all the others: St. Patrick’s Day in Grogan’s. Are you cold? No really. I pushed her collar up against the back of her head. Squeezed her hand as if to extract the cold. She smiled. Said nothing. You are very shy, I said. Yes. One shouldn’t be. Why? You prove the worth of the wrong people, the loud ones. I can’t help it. It’s my way. Some things I can’t alter. Do you believe in ghosts? No. I do. Why? Because they exist. She pointed to the shadows between the houses.

Out of Neary’s, across the street into Balfe Street, knowing Balfe was the middle name of Donleavy’s Sebastian Dangerfield, some sort of composer, now just a length of street and cutting across a car park to enter by the front door Grogan’s The Castle Lounge, or The Castle. Closer to the meaning of, “To the Castle, get your Alien’s Book, registered up with the police, photographed and established that you got to be out of the country by 31 August.”

————

11

In Grogan’s

F

ront room stuffed with the people who don’t mind the couple of extra pennies laid on the cost of the drink for the privilege of being in a carpeted room. Briefly sunlight comes in through the smokestained windows, and the bright effect is too much for those of us heading back there beyond the swinging door to be among people who . . . Tommy’s behind the bar and placing bottle and glass on the bar. A cold one for Mr. T., he’s supposed to say, resting his hand palm up on the bar top. That’s what I need. Right you are. Tommy counts out the change for the ten pound note very slowly. Giving the lads a chance to see: how can they get a taste of it. Liam’s got himself sitting snugly into the corner seat where I want to sit. The seat down from him is empty. Ah, the American delegation arrives. He does. And in what mood? Not talking. Liam sips expertly at the pint bought with his own money. A tailor without a shop. I turn to the foreign exchange table in the paper. Liam looks around the pub. His fingers are yellow. He was interned with the boys, you know, the boys, during the war and learned Russian through Irish. I don’t keep up the language because there just isn’t the interest in things Russian, but with the Russians in Rathgar I expect I’ll get out the language and give it a run for the money. I’ve gained a penny on the pound and go up to the bar and order a pint. St. Patrick’s Day

————

You going to the commemoration? Liam asks. What one? For Kavanagh. He’s been dead for years. True, right you are there. But every year his friends get together and read some of his poems and remember him around the bench by the canal. He didn’t like me. You’re an American. I even bought his collected poems. And you wonder why? Americans are thick . . . not you in particular, just thick. That’s what Kavanagh knew. . . . you are the brother of Barbara. Now many years ago I was friends with Barbara and lost track of her. I saw her from the distance, I think in 1968 when I came back there from Sofia, and I might have seen her in London in 1978 getting off a bus in Notting Hill. Back then she lived just off the Rathgar Road, worked for an insurance company and had a sister who was going back/forth to England. If I remember correctly your father lived in Kinsale and had been in the British Army. Can I ask you to forward this letter? I remember she said you had gone to Trinity but she had not gone to university and I believe she eventually married a night student who was going to UCD

In the corner Mr. J. sits for easy access to the end of the bar, and against the wall a padded bench broken by shoulder-high partitions and five round tables with stools scattered about. Liam and I are sitting near the swinging door so we get first sight of anyone coming in from the front room or coming in by the back door. Not to be caught unawares. Mr. J. is talking to himself. His hand is a claw about the glass of vodka and one ice cube. Should we say all the sad woe of his life and all the busted potential down the drain? Jocelyn has arrived with a half pint of Harp and is sitting between Liam and myself. Liam has nothing to say to her. As before, I see, Jocelyn says, reading the paper. I am. ————

15

Didn’t I explain to you when you are in a pub you’re here to talk and carry it all on. You did. I just didn’t feel like it. That’s just it. None of us really feel like it as you so quaintly put it. If any of us felt like it none of us would be here in the first place but we can’t stand the fucking walls we got ourselves stuck between at home. Get it! I do but some days. Then you should stay at home with the sheets up about your head. The parade woke me up. We all have excuses. I have three kids and I don’t know where the next meal is coming from. It’s a public place. Then act like you’re in public. Liam here knows what I’m talking about, don’t you? Liam drains his pint and is up the bar. My American friend, you’ll never learn. What? You’ll never learn. It’s too early in the morning. Afternoon. It was afternoon when I hit the street. Afternoon, still, I think . . . That’s them Americans, Liam says turning from the bar. Always thinking, they are. Liam is saying, I know a lot about the States and the cousins there come over to visit with their long complaints about the life here. But what do they know: at least we don’t kill our president and his brother and then kill the only hope of the Black people, now do we? And the way you were slaughtering the yellow people in Vietnam, not that I’m a communist but even saying what I’ve said would get me put in jail in your great free country, wouldn’t it? I do remember you, though not very well. It would be nice to hear from you about yourself. In 1966 I married Pat Farrell (who you met) and we lived and worked in London (Notting Hill) for five years (exciting times, exciting place). There we had a daughter Fiona. Then we split up and Fiona and I came to live in Dublin. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Jocelyn’s upper lip has begun to wrinkle and was covered by a fine tracing of gray hair: where she was from, who was the father, what was she doing in Ireland, someday could I read what she was writing since she said she sometimes wrote poetry, what had she done in America where she had hitched back and forth across the country two years ago— where had the kids been?—questions you asked a friend of the friend. What are you doing here, man? Jocelyn asked for the third time. Visiting again. I lived here for three years at two other times back in the ’60s. That’s complicated. Not really. I went to Bulgaria, got married, lived in Rathmines until the job ran out. I was teaching English on Baggot Street in the school Jan Kaminski owned, do you know him? Does he own a club, Liam asked. It was a late night place. Lilia used to be the cook and I taught in the school. Jan had a place down near the docks. The quays you mean, Liam said. Yeah, the quays near the Four Courts. People said things about it but I was never there. On Baggot Street he had his restaurant and the school. Now I’ve seen him in a travel agency on Baggot Street. Last year my mother and father died and here I am. So? Jocelyn said. So, nothing, you asked what I was doing here. You haven’t said what you are doing here, just how you got here. I’m here. I don’t think that’s enough. It’ll have to be for now and now I need another pint. Can you get me half a pint. Okay. I don’t like to. I know what you mean but today is different. It always is. I’ll take care of you next week. It doesn’t matter. It does. I’ll write it down on my list. I don’t go to city centre pubs much anymore. Sometimes we go to the theatre. The opera is in the Olympia at the moment— “the gods” has been reopened (did you ever go?) especially, ————

17

which is a wonderful place to see opera from, the sound rises up and fills the ceiling and you are right up there

Jocelyn wrote The American and 1 pint after it. This way I know pub debts and I’ll have to go out to pay it back and I always pay my debts. I make sure to get out. It’s the only way to get along when everything else is going bust. I don’t know about that, I said. Well then, you haven’t learned much. Yesterday, didn’t you say one should never be personal when talking in a pub? That was yesterday. Today is today. Today is today, Liam said. It is, I said. Feast day of the Irish. Put to boil the new potatoes. I think you’re being . . . What, Jocelyn? I am Irish so I . . . You are the American, Liam said. We must keep these things straight. I am American born, to quote Julian Green. Talk to Mr. J., Liam said, about these foreign people. He’s busy. I point to Mr. J. who was taking a nap with his eyes open in the corner. He had been stunned by some terrible memory dragged to the front of his mind by the vodka. And I am not American made, to complete the quote. When you are young you have so many friends and you are so careless. I lost touch with some dear ones and now I am sorry. I sound like an old crone, I’m only a year older than you

A half of pint for the lady, Tommy says as he puts it on the bar, and a pint for Mr. T. I give him a pound, take the drinks to the table, return for the change. Have you seen Liddy today? The fair or dark one? The fair one. He was here last night and he’s expected I’m sure, not expecting. The pub has filled while this has been going on: this chat with the barman, this chat with Jocelyn, this chat with Liam, this chat, this chat and the smoke, and the swallowing and the spitting and the coughing St. Patrick’s Day

————

and the close observation of newspapers for the afternoon racing about which I know nothing except I once won a pound and lost it in the next race when I was out to Punchestown where Audrey’s father was racing, where we stood in the owner’s circle as they walked the horses about before the race, and before we were into the Kildare Street Club tent for a quick taste. I didn’t hurt your feelings did I? Jocelyn asked. I’ve learned a little, mark you, not understood or liked this whole business of gotta run catch the bus, you know, you string out your tale of woe and when your listener doesn’t even reply, just up and out, gotta run, which I remember reading in Flann O’Brien, to make sure no one thinks I’m stealing without giving fair warning. Flann O’Brien, you say, Liam says. Yes . . . Is he being read in America now? I’ve read him and I guess others. A pity, then. They’ll be having tours and what not, like they do in June for Joyce. Without the Americans Joyce would have been forgotten. You’re wrong there. Joyce has always been read in Ireland and known for what he is, a clever lad who made his man a Jew. How’s that? Killed, as Paddy said, with one of them PHD’s to the heart. I guess . . . No guessing about it. Dead, Joyce is, and now they’ll be killing O’Brien. You can’t kill a book. They have in this country, Liam said and up to the bar. Leave ’em with no possible reply. Through the village of Rathmines, past the Stella Cinema, Slattery’s pub, the petrol station. PUT A TIGER IN YOUR TANK. The pump man dressed in a Tony the Tiger suit: what do you get after buying five gallons of petrol? ANSWER: T.S.R. What is that? Tiger shit remover. Somehow our cheeks touched and our legs brushed for a second. Her bones peer forth from her face and ribs ridged the feel of her coat. She was a little taller than I.

————

19

A fence of stones piled one on top of the other with cement forced between, about the asphalt paved front lawn. Will you come in? The house set back from the drive. Will you come in?

There are spots of shine on Liam’s suit jacket: impressions of coins. Jocelyn is wearing a patched Irish knit sweater. I am wearing my father’s brown lumber jacket and jeans blacked at the knees from the sweat of my hands and not washing them. The drink isn’t doing its job. Do you think Liddy will be in this morning, I asked Liam. It’s possible. There’s the what do you call it out by the canal for Kavanagh. The reading, you mean? That’s it, a sort of memorial, I was along to it last year and the year before. I read about it. Near the bench, right? Yes, that’s it. Liddy will be in, I should guess, and Mrs. Kavanagh. I don’t like her, I said. The feelings are probably returned if she knew you, though she probably doesn’t. I am glad for that. He married late. You know our funny country. Liam did not smile when he said it. Jocelyn, are you going along to the canal for Kavanagh? I don’t think so. I should get back to my kids. I don’t leave them alone for too many hours. It’s just to get out for a little, not to escape them. They are my children. Yes, my children and I wouldn’t let their father within the same city with them. Do you want another glass of lager? I can’t afford it. No matter and Liam, a pint? No, I’m fine but why not, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Should live up to the stories they tell about us, drunk to our knees but in there at church every Sunday morning where you’d think they were brewing up the stuff in the basement to tell by the amount of gas in the place. So, a pint? That would do nicely. Liddy hasn’t come in, Tommy said. I’ll let him know, if he’s up front with the gentlemen, that you’re back here. His mouth closed with an ex-

St. Patrick’s Day

————

aggerated chomp. I put the pints on the table and not forgetting the lager, back to the bar for it, and then to the men’s to . . . not about to go into all the usual business about turning Guinness into water and gas and if only you could recombine them at that end you’d have the whole problem licked in one fell swoop into a big house and servants polishing your toe nails. Barbara pulled down the sweater that had crept up her back. She glanced at the pile of unopened letters lying on the table. He had not noticed them. My sister would be home by this evening telling me how nice it was in Manchester and the club they had been to and the band they had seen and the pamphlets she had read and the boys she had winked at and her boy, her man who led her about on the ring from room to room. Maybe she would bring home a new pin this week. I feel so stuck in my routine in Dublin. My hands felt cold along her neck. She looked at my head leaning over hers and she closed her eyes saying, is it supposed to rain?

Mr. J. noticed my return from the men’s with a jerk of his head; mouth opened but forgetting what he wanted to say. It would come to him eventually. I knew more of the people in the pub looking and walking. Ben the painter and friend of Ralph Cusack now in the South of France whose book I found in the Strand when I had been back to New York: Cadenza. Hoeing an obscure row, if asked, Leland was in with her American boyfriend. She had the basement flat on Leeson Street with the kids living in the back rooms to either side of a long spine of a corridor leading to the back room where people slept in combinations not seen since the Kokavia Club of Athens before the Colonels. And this in Ireland, in Dublin, the largest village in Ireland as your man Denis at UCD was once heard to say. Leland wrote poems, plays, and novels and once entertained the taxi driver, Fintan, who won’t be around until this evening because he simply does not like the daylight when things seen in night as reasonable are cut up by the light of day—I was going to say eviscerated in the clear light of day, but no, Fintan ain’t coming in until evening when he has ————

21

out on offer checkbooks and if only you will loan him a pound, a fiver will be coming back your way with the promise of a good time to be had by all. The poets’ doctor is in with watered gin in front of him and the night’s watch behind him at the hospital. Wouldn’t let him open a can of sardines for me. Joe was in on a break from McDaids. Named after Stalin by his father and a Spanish St. Joseph by his mother. His house was divided, and unlike all those other families heard about growing up where the husband and wife hadn’t talked to each other in twenty years here was a mother and father who hadn’t talked to each other as a matter of religious and political principle. The argument had been about the Pope’s armies or lack of them, according to Joe, who told me this one night and was embarrassed the next morning, didn’t talk to me for a month because never do you talk about something THAT personal. They had pads of paper all over the house, and it was Joe’s job to keep the messages up to date by throwing out the last exchange. Things had to be kept current, otherwise they would end up having to compose a Swiftian sort of book in which all the notes began to refer to other notes and they would be living just to keep the notes about the notes up to the minute. I turned and walked away or she turned and walked away that year on Grafton Street

We were wondering what had happened to you, Jocelyn said. The pint is still here. As well it should be, Liam said. I was thinking, I said. Always a dangerous business, Jocelyn said. You are getting close, Liam said. Close to what? You’ll know when you’ve gone past it. Liam drifted away from us. Jocelyn and I were talking. People did not join couples: male/female—something about invading privacy or the possibility of triangles. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Will you be around tonight? I have to go to the shops later but I will be in for sure tonight. What time would be good for you? Anytime you wish. Around nine then?

Your man Liddy is in the other room, Tommy told me when I was to the bar for another round. I wondered why he had not come to the back. Jocelyn saluted with a tip of the glass, it’s the same all over the world. Thems that have, have and hold on to it and shit upon the rest that ain’t got a hole to dig in . . . You’re right. In America there’s the illusion things get better. Ah, the famous American Dream. Don’t I know it. The disease of optimism given with the birth certificate. Excuse me. Jocelyn stood. Don’t break anything. Very funny. I’ve read the paper too.

WOMAN WHO USED BROKEN TOILET AWARDED £68 FOR DAMAGES A 49-YEAR-OLD mother of a large family, who was stated to have received “a nasty injury” when using a toilet in a licensed premises just before closing time, was awarded £68.31 damages and costs in the High Court, Dublin, yesterday, although the judge had found that she was 80% negligent.

On the brown round table stood my pint nearly drained, Jocelyn’s glass empty, the ashtray full, a beer coaster in the middle of the table as if surrounded by the glasses. There were numbers on the coaster in blue ink. A gully of silence suddenly in the room and the talking begins again, louder than before. I . . . with nothing to say. Here in Dublin. When, where, and I’m not going to ask, Why? Liddy is a wide person with a ruddy face and blondish hair. Evelyn Waugh comes to mind if you can subtract Waugh’s Englishness, his snobbishness, and remember only the drunken parties at Oxford and the moment when Waugh is trying to kill himself by swimming out into the sea and at the moment when exhaustion sets in and relief is at hand and about to do the job he gets stung by a jellyfish; the hurt is too ————

23

much, and Waugh to be posed with ear horn when in the vicinity of visiting Americans. Liddy had been the editor of ARENA and had actually paid contributors out of the money from the death of his father who had made his money in America and come back to Ireland to live out his life in the style he knew he deserved. Liddy went to America and taught in Ohio, San Francisco, New Orleans, and installed himself in Milwaukee where there were no more socialists; just bars and angel boys. Liddy was in love. He was always in love. I do not know all the details. Gossip sucks dry the heart. Ah, go on, tell us. There had been one of those parties, beginning in the pub, McDaids probably it was that year, to closing time when stocking up with sixes and sixes and sixes of Guinness in paper sacks, people left for the party in Hatch Lane. There’s a radio playing: Radio Luxembourg with Dateline Dating at 23 Abingdon Road, London . . . Liddy was in the corner working on a pint of whiskey because he was watching his weight and someone had been kind enough to give it to him as a gift for his return. Liddy wasn’t feeling the ache of having to be out of Ireland nine out of twelve months. His friend wasn’t around when he looked for him but his wife was, though no one was talking to her, for some reason, Liddy noted, and then remembers waking in the morning. There was an inch of whiskey in the bottle which he drained to avoid waste and his friend’s wife was crying. Paddy had hanged himself some time during the night in a closet upstairs after finding his wife on the bed . . . we hadn’t been doing what you think, never thinking that, but the story was they had been doing it and been seen so by the friend in the closet which seemed much too symbolic to note and you could never write of him hanging himself in a closet because he had never gotten out of the closet because Ireland is a closet . . . that night on Grafton Street . . . we had met earlier in the New Amsterdam Café in South Anne Street I seem to think it was raining or had been raining, and on Grafton Street—turned or Barbara turned

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I went into the front room, after collecting my pint and over to where Liddy was sitting with four young men, one of them an American who lived down in the country. I am here. That is to reiterate the obvious, he said. Let’s make room. I sat next to this guy who was sitting next to this other guy on the bench against the wall. The fit was tight but it was better than being out on a stool in the middle of the floor. Liddy introduced the four guys, and I caught a Liam and Conor but couldn’t put face to name. And how is the Russell treating you? Liddy asked. It’s ok. There were murmurs of approval, envy, and what the fuck are you doing in a pub like this. You know they’re tearing it down like all the good things of Dublin, Liddy is saying, not that my parents approved of the Russell, being newly rich they liked the Shelbourne. I thought that was for Protestant bishops? And the newer rich. The Gresham is for Americans who don’t know where O’Connell Street is and the Hibernia is for our English visitors. Liddy, I rushed down to the Hibernia when I saw the picture of Ezra Pound in the Irish Times, when he came to Dublin after going to the service for T. S. Eliot in London. I missed him by a day. Would he have seen you? I didn’t care.

EZRA POUND IN DUBLIN.

He was visiting with Mrs. Yeats, whom I saw in that theatre behind Trinity where the Abbey was before it moved to the new place. Are you giving a lecture? You need a new pint? I can’t get into round buying. You’re staying at the Russell. It’s much cheaper than you think. Reasonable, is the word, is it not . . . Yeah, but I always forget. I really wanted to see Pound. Now he’s dead. Like all the very best. That sounds like Mr. J. ————

25

His influence does travel. But Dahlberg used to say the same thing. I finally did meet Dahlberg in New York and had an argument with him. Dahlberg was here in Dublin, wasn’t he? Yeah, he lived out in Ballsbridge, I think. Like your man Berryman. Him too, Liddy said, but I didn’t hear him, only about him and the man we honor today. Kavanagh, I said. Are you going out to this ceremony they’re having for him? Yes. Can I come along? It’s open to the public. I’m going out in somebody’s car. I know where it is. Is anything going on afterwards? Yes. Here’s the pints. One of the young men, with dark scars on his jaw, where a beard should be, set the pints down. To Kavanagh. Glasses raised and drank. Were you at the Kavanagh and Berryman thing? No. Liddy said. It was in the University Club off Baggot Street. I was there. Americans, it has been said, Liddy says, are good at picking over the garbage of sensations, and gobbling like carrion birds. Your friend’s American, I asked Liddy. I met him in San Francisco, we were both pilgrims to the shrine of Jack Spicer, may he rest where he no longer wants. I’ve not read Spicer but I know he was a poet. A poet? A poet. Liddy stood. A poet you say. I have to . . . Liddy went toward the back room to the little room. We both got to San Francisco too late, the narrow man said. Spicer had been dead for years but you could still feel his presence. Liddy learned everything he knows about America from Spicer. The liver dissolving into hospital sheets. Are you Conor? No, Liam. I know who you are, the American Liddy published in ARENA who almost met Allen Ginsberg. That’s how I like to keep it.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I know what you mean, Liam said. Kerouac is the key. Ginsberg is a corpse fucker if ever there was one. He’d probably take it as a compliment—the worst thing you could do with Ginsberg is ignore him. I have to get myself a pint and look back in at Jocelyn. She’s back there? Yeah. A good place for her. You don’t like her? There is so much you can take and the record gets turned over and it’s the same as you’ve been listening to. I didn’t hear side two. You did if you heard side one. Walking to the bar, stuffed with so much rubbish knowing rubbish is part of it. Tommy, you’d better make it two pints. We’re not locking in anybody today. The holiday. The fresh air is demanding your lungs. An awful fate. Far worse has been demanded of our poets. While Tommy was drawing the pints I went into the back room. Jocelyn was getting ready to leave. You’re off? You’d deserted me. I had not. I was talking to Liddy and got distracted. Good, I’ll come and join you. Sure, we’re sitting over against the wall. Liddy was coming from the bog and the expression, as the men’s magazines would have it, on his face said he wasn’t glad to see me talking with Jocelyn and himself now in the same room. Jocelyn, you know Liddy, don’t you? Of course. The same. Your friend Teresa is over there. He pointed back toward where Mr. J. was and yes, Teresa was standing at the bar. She had not seen me and it would matter little because she probably wouldn’t remember me.

————

27

She’s married now, you know, to someone I don’t really know, Liddy said. She wasn’t married when I knew her. She just had the child and was always going back and forth to London. That’s Teresa. Now she lives in Blackrock or some such place. I’ll be going, Jocelyn said. Liddy pushed on into the front room and I went over to Teresa who is taller than I remembered, but then I only remembered her sitting in the Bailey or lying on the floor of the room off Dame Street. Or sitting on the toilet. Teresa, I said. She turned in the direction of my voice. Annoyed. Excuse me, I knew you . . . Ah yes . . . you were going off to someplace. Yugoslavia . . . I asked you to come along. You did. I remember. It was nice of you. Are you living here? No, I just came over. And the child? He’s fine. Let me pay for this. Teresa turned to the barman who was at the same time called to by Tommy to come and collect two pints for the Yank. I’ll take them down there. I’m not running away. Just a minute. It was nice seeing you Teresa . . . do you come in often? Occasionally. I’m married and when I can or when we can . . . Teresa took her glass and moved toward the door where a group of men and women were standing. I didn’t recognize anyone. I didn’t know who her husband was. I could never have been her husband. She was thought to be the most beautiful woman in Ireland. One night and never a chance for another. She must have been drunk. Or just lazy or too tired to get herself home. Kavanagh had been there that night and Hobsbaum, the English critic. Teresa stayed after Kavanagh finished the bottle and was helped out by Hobsbaum who was looking for one last sentence of insight from Kavanagh before going back to the exile in Glasgow where on Robbie Burns’s birthday he read a selection of Wordsworth’s poetry. There’s some believe a pint grows stale if you don’t have at it within two minutes of it being pulled . . . And there are those who believe in five, I said. Like yourself, yes, sir, like yourself. Right you are. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Liam and Liddy were talking as I sat down. They stopped talking. So strange to see Teresa after all these years. She’s in here frequently. Liddy said. Not my type of female. There’s a streak in her. I thought she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in Ireland. Some say it and have painted her in those colors, Liddy said. And written poems to her, Liam said. Awful poetry of bodies flinging themselves at each other. Trifles without being witty, Liddy said. Our Irish boys and girls have just discovered their organs and are run amok. They don’t have time for guilt anymore. I liked Teresa very much. You were supposed to. I did of my own free will. It was that summer before I went to Venice and Yugoslavia. You’ve been to Venice? Liam asked. Three times. I would like to go, Liddy said. I have slept the Proustian cities of France and am saving Venice for my old age. I had gotten that last bit of money from the government and was going to go as far as I could. Instead, I got off the train in Sofia. I had wanted to take Teresa with me and I even said I’d take the child. That was good of you, Liam said. I was just being practical. Teresa was . . . Tears, tears, Liddy said. I am tired of tears masquerading as poetry. I cried no tears for Teresa. Then it was not love, Liddy said. Tears and love go together like moon and June. This is awful, Liam said. But at least you’re not talking psychology. That is the American malady, Liddy said. Not all Americans are so affected. You were brought up Catholic? I was and am now a practicing bad Catholic. Thus a believing Catholic? A practicing bad Catholic, though practicing for who knows what? ————

29

Clever, Catholicism has saved you from psychology. That’s why I published your poem. Poets are always the first to know, in this country anyway. You can’t say that for America. There it’s just another business. A growing business, I said. Kavanagh knew it, Liddy said, Who killed James Joyce? I did with a PHD from Yale. I always remember the line as being Harvard, I said. Did Kavanagh have it in for Yale? I just think he needed a name and it was the first one to pop into his head. I worry about you, Liddy said, when he was sure Liam was up at the bar. You are eating yourself alive and it is an awful diet. How do you mean? You talk too much of the past and your part in it. That’s all I got. That’s all any of us have, Liddy said. But we try to get away from it for a little while. I’ve heard that somewhere? Maybe. But it doesn’t matter. There are only so many clichés, and we are always using them. Liam must be up there massaging the tit for all we know. Liddy looked about the room emptying. I went up to the bar to get another pint just as Tommy was opening his mouth: Time Gentlemen, Please. It’s time, Gentlemen, please. One last one. For today yourself, Mr. USA. Don’t you wish you were in New York on a day like today? They say it’s a fine old time. I should want to see it someday. Here you are. Tommy put the pint up on the bar top and I paid with a pound note. after the night lying together walked “home” and felt something for which I only had the word loss but knowing it was the wrong word or something like that, confused you could say

Liddy, are you going to the reading out by the canal? It’s not a reading. People stand around and say what comes into their minds. We try to remember. Paddy would have hated anything formal, inflated, or official. St. Patrick’s Day

————

I think I’ll go along to this Kavanagh thing. Kavanagh didn’t like me. He was the poet, Liddy said. It’s as simple as that. Don’t you people ever get tired, Liam said. The dead are supposed to wrestle with the dead. The living get stains on their hands. And stains are becoming the cliché of this minute, I said, proud for a second of finding just the right phrase. Liddy nodded his head. He laughed out loud. People turned thinking someone had begun to die, argue . . . The New World, Bless them! All my sweet pink children. Bless them. Liddy stiffened his back and drank with delight a long swallow of stout, burped and eased himself back into the chair. There was noise in the back of the pub. A loud screeching female voice demanding a whiskey for me friends. It was that woman. I knew her and she did not know me and hated me anyway. She was the widow of the Poet Liddy was up and into the back room saying he’d see me out by the canal, later, you know? I’ll see you there. There might be something afterwards. That would be good. I’m so tired of pubs and the hotel. A party would be good, I’ll see if they’ve changed. That woman, the Wife of the Poet, would follow a coffin hoping it would spring a leak and she could lie under it with mouth open ready to sup on the fluids to nourish her through the rest of her miserable life of hanging out, having waited for him to finish up the drink for the night so she could get him home so he could vomit in the privacy of her scorn for him. Pick ’em out just before they’re good for nothing but dying would be the slogan. Liddy is laughing. There was a pause and he was laughing again. Liam was still sitting next to me in the room now nearly empty except for a couple of old newspaper sellers over by the door bent over their pints. Liam was asking me where I was from back in the States . . . I was born in Brooklyn but my parents moved out to Patchogue which is about sixty miles out on Long Island. It was country back then. There was no one around. My father wanted to get away from his family. His parents had come from Ireland. ————

31

Have you looked any of them up? No. My father didn’t know any names but his parents had gone over to America as twelve-year-old kids and worked as servants in rich people’s homes . . . they probably forgot all about where they came from. My parents are from here, Liam said. They’ve never been back. There’s nothing could get them to come back. They’re as happy as . . . whatever it is that makes you happy in Los Angeles. There’s nothing there to remind them of this. After they got rid of the Latin my parents didn’t go as regular as they used to, I said. The biggest mistake the church ever made, Liam said. There was something about the church being permanent and just there. Now it’s almost like going to a Protestant service—that’s the next step, they’ll start talking about “going to services.” Liddy can’t stand any of it. He goes? I asked. He’s Irish. How did we end up talking about things like this. Ireland was the last place in the world where it was still possible to talk about such things without irony or that terrible Protestant idea of being saved. What it is, I said, if you’re born Catholic and are brought up Catholic you have memories that are somehow very poetic: the liturgy, the priests and nuns in black robes, a Christ figure, all love and lambs, blonde Virgin Marys—saints who have done fantastic acts of bravery and were sure of what they were doing. Fantastic stories! Shit on toast, Liam said. There was a nun in the school who made you kneel down around the toilet bowl. I’ve heard those stories, I really have. I was a teacher out in Wisconsin in a Catholic school and the kids told me the nun in the fourth grade made them kneel down by the toilet bowl and there was a kid she kept locked in the closet just because she got tired of him . . . but that sort of stuff didn’t happen to me. I was a good kid and the nuns liked me. I hated kids like you. I knew they had it in for me. And it wasn’t the school because most of the kids were Irish backgrounded, if you know what I mean. The Mexicans had their own schools, but I guess what got to me is my parents didn’t give a shit. Are you going along to the Kavanagh thing? I asked. I suppose so. Liddy likes it, but THAT Kavanagh and the wife of his. St. Patrick’s Day

————

I think the same thing. I’m sure it’s unfair. Life is unfair, to echo those clichés. my room was in 5 Orwell Park, Rathgar. On the wall a large painting of an open-chested Christ with blood dripping from His Sacred Heart

The room is closing in. Emptied of people the words are too clearly heard. Liam is waiting for Liddy to call him to get a move on otherwise you’ll have to walk on your own legs. You better get going, I said. You’re right. You going along? I’ll come along by myself. Yeah, you know where to go? Baggot Street at the canal. The time has been called, Tommy said. Thump of glass against table top. You’ll be missing your friends. LEAD ON WITH LEMASS

AND PUCK OFF WITH LYNCH.

————

33

Puck off.

Out on the Street to the Memorial

There is a wobble in the step.

Out in the street without an empty whiskey bottle to take along to the Carmelite Church to fill with Holy Water. They do use a lot of that stuff in this country and it’s a damp place so you can’t be chalking it up to evaporation. Sons slinking down the stairs in the early morning hour to get a cup of the stuff to take back to the bathroom and let it run over the hand. Which misses the point wonderfully but not tripping on the low curb so passed the closed McDaids ARENA lived without regard for exactness of fact and typography, which angered people for whom a magazine was judged only by its regularity and correctness in both. However, ARENA lived with flair. Its editors and contributors cavorted, were reputed to run the periodical from McDaids, refused to take life seriously.

to Grafton Street and stand for a moment at the corner empty of: the man with the fiddle, the man with the open scarred palm, the women with the two baby carriages filled with cut flowers, on Grafton Street I . . .

the group of men in donkey jackets discussing the true north or the true south or might not west be best, the man saying, suddenly finding himself laughed at for being too much of a reminder of where they were forced to live for too many years, London, chained to dormitory beds in rooms rented by the shift—when I was over to visit Helen living near Highgate, I had to stay a night in a Camden room in a bed, with shoes on, all my clothes on and my arm as a pillow, so always one ear open to the guy all night in the bed next to me saying the rosary in Irish because St. Patrick’s Day

————

I could see his fingers moving over a knotted piece of string fastened to his shirt sleeve and what was I doing there lying in that bed thirsty and knowing I would tell people about spending a night in such a place and they would nod their heads and turn away or say something but god wasn’t it awful. Standing on the corner of Grafton Street. Up the street going toward Trinity, on the corner of Wicklow Street, Desmond O’Grady had the woman with the harp standing, in a poem, waiting to go down to the country—she’s long gone but I used to always walk down that street, back when it, when I lived in the St. Andrew’s Hotel on Exchequer Street. That’s gone, as you of course know or should . . . The Magic Mountain wasn’t put together on the run. Afterwards, the meetings were short to the point where I had unbuttoned my pants before ringing the bell; neither of us knowing those sentences that lead to

The New Amsterdam Café is not there anymore on South Anne Street, replaced by a sandwich shop stocked with foreign-looking stuff in honor of Ireland’s membership in the Common Market . . . yes, yes. Lilia’s remark from her hospital bed in Baggot Street Hospital: they give you so much tea you’d think they think you’re sitting on a pot, it runs right through you like rain on a day when you went to the beach expecting a sunny time. Once upon a time . . . Justin died in September. Found “neglected” in his room. I met him several times in the summer and when I asked him down to the Gorey Festival he said he couldn’t risk losing his busking spot in Stephen’s Green. (Liddy in a letter)

Fifteen years it took him . . . having come home from work there was a letter, saved until back on the street to read walking along: Found “neglected,” in other words died last September in his room in Dublin. A shudder never felt before. Why for him? The second friend to die. My getting old. Another birthday. If I was to call Lilia and tell her I just got a letter about how Justin died, you remember him? But she wouldn’t and would say as she had of another friend, Charles, he did what he wanted to do; but she wouldn’t remember Justin because the year she ————

37

was in Dublin she wasn’t speaking English that well and wasn’t drinking, and those were the only occasions for meeting Justin, then just back from Rumania after something happened—he wasn’t saying and was, as he was having it, trying to get on as best he could for his clothes were still good and French people were just beginning to come to Dublin in large numbers and Justin knew where all the parties were where only men went and that’s what the French men were looking for, and how interested they all were in him, then, trying and sure, just maybe things would . . . and I allowed my American optimism to forget Ireland was a small country: you get one shot at IT, not like in the United States with all the moving on: grandmothers in their seventies going back to a university for master’s degrees. Justin had his shot and something happened. He’d come into the New Amsterdam Café on South Anne Street and sat with the French or Spanish au pair girls, and I remember I was friendly with Marie-Jose Maydell LeGras from Réunion who talked in French with Justin who had read all three volumes of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom, then banned in Ireland (I read them that Easter in London) and she liked Justin for his manners, so unlike all the Irish, he smoked French cigarettes and had just passed the test for the tourist board . . . a couple of years later when I was married to the Bulgarian he told me he had been in Rumania on some sort of tourist board business but it hadn’t been pleasant and Lilia wasn’t having him over to the bedsit on Grosvenor Square because he looked like the sort who . . . not drinking she didn’t like . . . which he later told me was his only pleasure after working the penny whistle to get the money for the stuff, and someone said Justin goes with boys to the Green Cinema. I thought, at least that— for only twice was I ever invited into someone’s home in Ireland because there is a terrible privacy in the land, so where ever, like damp logs rubbing against each other . . . one afternoon I had walked by him not recognizing him and then him shouting and I turned, Justin! just after the pubs had opened in the afternoon, starting toward Toner’s but he wasn’t allowed in (he hadn’t been able to wait to get to the toilet so went in the corner; happens to the best of us) so we went around the corner where he was allowed during the early evening before all the people came in and he’d have to be going. He bought me a pint, insisted on it and then I bought him one and how’s it going? not so well where are you living? I have a room, my father won’t see me. I won’t see him. He doesn’t St. Patrick’s Day

————

want anything to do with me. Justin didn’t have any front teeth. He was dirty. His clothes were soiled and ripped. I couldn’t look into his mouth. There was brownish gook caked on his lips. His fingers were nicotined yellow . . . He asked about the large American woman, Mary. I hadn’t seen her in six or seven years. He asked about the East German Dietrich with the three passports who’d disappeared. We talked about Art who taught history in America. We talked about Stanley who smashed a man’s head through a door at Gertrude’s and Alice’s for making fun of his accent. We had a couple of more pints and it was time to be going because it was time to be going with nothing more to talk about as the future was not in our vocabulary and I knew something terrible was going wrong and had gone wrong and now when I look back, something was awful with my own life but Justin was going to the dogs on the express and I was still on the local . . . Someone said Justin’s father was either in insurance or was a judge but either way he wasn’t welcome at home: something snaps and you know it ain’t never gonna come back or it’s never gonna arrive though somewhere in my mind I would like to remember Justin was once going on about Villon and the company of traveling poets though how to imagine a poet in a suit jacket was beyond him and that was the only sort then about, and I linger . . . for Justin was of a moment when you could live by your wits, song, and poetry because in the Common Market Ireland where without an automobile you’re thought half human, where the center of Dublin is empty after a certain hour with all the people tucked into the suburbs stuffing themselves on the American dream, finally, without having to go all that way across the ocean and after all the years of having to put up with all the stories of those come home on holidays or just over for a visit, finally . . . Justin didn’t get on with it . . . I cut down the alley next to the sandwich shop and take a long anxious pee against the back of it. To be getting on with it. To be getting along to Baggot Street to the stretch of canal bank on the other side of the canal from the bench erected for Kavanagh and there stand with a proper amount of respect. No tease as in life there is no tease. I will have fled those little rooms in Ely Place, missing the last month’s rent. ————

39

The summer of 1974. Nixon was doing his part in the play and he should be rehearsed as it was essential, I guess, for that summer. I’m trying to keep track of the time. Should have something to eat but there is no time for it and I ain’t interested in food and don’t feel like walking back to Grafton Street for a hamburger at The Great American Disaster where Anglo-Irish gentlemen hold court because it’s so cute and it makes talking to you, pointing at me, so much more interesting. The Anglo-Irish are a whole other kettle of fish as are all the English people I knew in Dublin and the Jewish people and the Norwegians, not to mention all the Africans and a couple of people from the North which is a foreign place—I won’t push very hard on that point because of the long political argument taking us back to Grogan’s for a quick shot (snap) of those large boyos with Northern accents, down in Dublin on holiday, you’re not to ask why or how’s it going: they will or won’t and probably don’t have anything to say: for completion’s sake there was the Bulgarian and the daughter of the head of the Macedonian Communist Party. Baggot Street’s been gobbled up by offices and the flats for quick servicing of genitals. A fine rain begins to fall. end of weather report from Dublin.

Collar turned up of the wool lumber jacket, come into my possession with the death of my father. I am always expecting to find particles of tobacco in the breast pocket. In the pocket a gold Cross pen bought in Combridges in Grafton Street because a writer needs a good pen. I might not have the great house with windows open to the river, but I do have a pen. I should be telling all about this guy met in the Copenhagen Coffee Bar out on Rathmines Road. He was living in Grosvenor Square—where I would end up with Lilia—not in the same house. The guy has long gone into story and not a trace . . . I’m down by the canal, standing in a light rain, enough to be wet but not enough to get you wet with the difficulty of presenting a group of people always wondering when I was reading about what B and C are talking about, what is A up to while at the same time when my reading

St. Patrick’s Day

————

switches to D and F what happened to B and C and of course A is off by him/herself, forgotten as it were possible. Standing in the light rain—weather inserting itself—seeing Liddy first, because I have known him the longest among all the rest and probably he is the one who will say if asked why I’m there, he’s my friend, he’s OK even though he is a Yank, in too many ways, he ain’t like all the rest of them, known him since back before all the rest of them got here and turned this place into a continuation of what-have-you and then there’s the poet’s widow, and she’s the one who doesn’t want my type here because what the fuck did my type ever do for Paddy when he was living except sneer at his rough manner and invite him to their country and fill him up with the drink and ideas he didn’t need anyway and they wouldn’t know a poet if he crawled up their arseholes reciting poetry in the morning, all the poetry they read is on them cereal boxes in the morning. Mr. J. is the center of attention unfolding a crumpled and folded piece of paper on which he had written his portion of the day and the order at which the proceedings were to roll forth. The Broadsheet man is there. He will give me a chance later to tell you about how I fell in love with a chorus girl in Sofia because you will want to read my poem the Broadsheet man published and paid me a pint for it, he did, and a copy of the BROADSHEET, the best magazine after ARENA to be published in Dublin during those years, and Liddy’s friend is there standing next to Leland of the flat in Leeson Street into which I went only once and that was to collect Liddy before or after drinking in O’Dwyer’s which was the pub of record in 1964–65. Only an opening of pores and orifices, jamming of flesh to flesh as a substitute for . . . until finally one day Barbara and I met in front of The New Amsterdam Café on South Anne Street. I can’t see you anymore, Barbara. Why? It’s obvious. We can’t talk. We have nothing to say to each other. All we do is . . .

We haven’t forgotten Leland. Her American, Buckley, is with her, who did actually get up the courage to go out to the American embassy and hand in his passport and go up to the Castle for his rightful citizenship . . .

————

41

Fintan is in his shadow which has to be imagined since there is no sun—an advantage over moviemaking—you’ll grant me that. That woman is there who taught at Trinity straddled on the back by her name written out in Irish complete with the first award of the poetry prize formed up from the slime of PK’s memory and Teresa is there as are Susan, Marianne, Dermot, Stanley, Art, Barbara, and others and others, more than I’d be able to remember at the moment of memory—all of them there in this morning later in New York hearing a woman being introduced as having been in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and I went up to her and said I had been planning to go in the Peace Corps to Turkey but lived in Ireland where I was living or had been living when I applied to go off with my Bulgarian friend—never said the word wife—to teach in a Catholic school in Sierra Leone which I thought must be an interesting country because I knew this jazz piano player, Wordie Jones, whose sister was in Bergman’s comedy—I know a lot of people in Sierra Leone have the first name Wordsworth which is a popular name for some reason I hope this isn’t complicated just because I overheard you saying you have been in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and this guy had said I didn’t know the Peace Corps was still going, don’t worry I knew that—Wordie, by the way, had this friend Jesse who was from Tanzania who was studying law and lived with a lot of other African students in a house off Rathmines Road—near where that auto assembly plant was—where Wordie lived and there was also Immanuel from Uganda who must be long dead or so set up in London that he had never been heard from again though I still see him arriving at that house in his Austin Mini into which he has stuffed two scrubbers as he had the real knack when it came to such, the pulling of the girls out of the dance hall on the promise of a better party to be had: it must have been his being so ugly and them thinking they were perfectly safe with him and anyway what could they lose—there was nothing they were giving out without a marriage before a priest Immanuel had the downstairs room and Jesse’s room was upstairs The piece of paper in Mr. J.’s hand was unlined, for adults don’t use lined paper anymore, putting off the things of childhood, if ever there is a childhood in Ireland. His mouth was moving but nothing was heard. in the back and that’s where I met Barbara

St. Patrick’s Day

————

There was a pathetic number of people standing about in the light rain. Expecting more was stupid: where was the shaded theme development for this standing about a bench by the canal though complete with mood: a dead dog floating belly up in the canal but no used rubbers midst the papery rubbish that floated at the edge of the canal and seemed to accent the deep green of the tall grass that grew down to the water. Liddy nodded to me and ran his finger around his collar about which a large red tie had been fastened and now loosened. At least no one was in a freshly pressed suit. I wanted to get over to Liddy and find out what was the real story, who had it in for whom and where were they going after to celebrate what they had done today.

SIMBA

SIMBA

SIMBA

Mr. J. began again to lift the page to a reading position. His eyes were not focusing. He needed a glass of vodka and none was at hand. Don’t get the idea I am making fun of the gathering. We were there in memory of a poet. We were there in our ability to remember a poet which is remarkable given the state . . . Words have been lost on the way from wherever to Mr. J.’s mouth. He is not crying. Somewhere I had thought Mr. J. looks like one of those skinny European construction cranes. His head nods furiously in the now slight breeze. He pushes back the hair that has fallen over his eyes. His arm holding the piece of paper falls to his side. People shuffle. I must have missed something. Did I get there late? Too bad Wordie wasn’t here. He could whip out along his jazz piano and fling some music against the death of seven years before. They wouldn’t have him. People, even these people, are not that . . . Wordie went scared for years in Dublin after a couple of Irish troops got killed in the Congo. Simba. Simba. Simba. The chant of the kids and then an Indian guy had gone off his head and chopped up his girlfriend and stored her parts in a suitcase until the stink . . . how could they tell, was the sentence given the stench of Indian cooking . . . but the kids couldn’t find an equivalent SIMBA

————

43

SIMBA

SIMBA

Mr. J. gave up the struggle, said something . . . this wasn’t the time or place and he couldn’t say it any better: it must be said within the four walls for he had never known Kavanagh to be a man of the spaces beyond four walls, contrary to the image of him being a man of the earth. O, he came from the country and the country never left him, he, Mr. J. was sure Kavanagh was not your man to whistle—though this bench was his favorite spot I have heard it said . . . but for himself, give him four walls here and below ground . . . Mr. J. dragged a cigarette from pocket and put it in his mouth, not lighting it. His mouth shifted it to the corner, and so speaking: Damn it all and apologies to the women of virtue present for I am sure they do have a memory of the state if no longer were within the grasp of the angel. The poet is dead seven years and Dublin has been dead for seven years and we are walking through a graveyard not knowing when we ourselves shall be translated to out true home. Long live the patriots! I am done with it. Up the Patriots! A short man, known as the Doctor to the Poets, patted Mr. J. gently on the back saying, yes, yes . . . Mr. J. turned sharply: None of that American allusion making. He too is dead and buried within the sound of lions, caged lions. I’m sorry, the Doctor to the Poets said. It is well known, a compliment is a very nasty bit of business. There will be none coming from me toward yourself, Mr. J. said. I was asking for none but was thinking I may offer what I have to say, having known Paddy during the last years of his life. Paddy was the last . . . allow for a pause in which people as they move closer to hear what the Doctor to the Poets has to say at the same time they move away so that there are increased chances for gossip and argument in the retelling of exactly what he did say and who he did not mention as indeed happened, no one remembers what he said . . . the Doctor to the Poets did not consider me a poet as I would not give him a handwritten poem for his collection. He judged poets based on their handwriting. Anybody could have a book of poetry published, he was known to say, but give me the handwritten poem passed from hand to hand in the smoke-filled back rooms of pubs, stained in passage by the stout soaked fingers of young men.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Leland began clapping and Buckley joined her. The Doctor had been caught taking a breath. Mr. J. raised his head from chin to breastbone and motioned with his hand: applause was not something done at a memorial service—savages, next you’ll be wanting the rocking roll. O’Flaherty was right, Mr. J. is saying, the Irish don’t know how to behave and the English do these things better. Always have and always will. Practice is what it takes, until you have some you should cultivate a spud under a rock. Liam O’Flaherty of The Informer fame was still to be seen in the back room of Grogan’s drinking gin because the English never let you down, no matter what their leaders might do. Gin is a better drink than whiskey, he had learned this truth in the trenches in World War One.

Leland had begun speaking but I missed most of it, though not to worry you’ll get a chance to hear it in the pub later though she was saying, he will be missed and not only by myself and the walls of my flat and walls of the pubs he lived in and the streets he walked along, alone, for who could stand being with him and do not take offense at what I am saying . . . Leland stopped speaking, the arm of Buckley about her. Liddy was clearing the spot on which he stood, like a dog brushing away the present moment. In the middle of the love, he was saying, in the middle of that muscle which when it breaks is like the pillow we bite at the moment we realize we are no longer loved—a mouth full of feathers or chopped up bits of foam rubber—Kavanagh walked through Dublin known and greeting all those who knew him with the scorn of a man for whom love was the no I with the scorn of a man broken on the wheel of fortune saying: it always comes too late. With such a tawdry wheel but then this world deserves no more—however I do not complain of this world for it gives us the material for hymns—no—no—kill the liturgical and give us the song Bright white bird Come Claim me

————

45

For black paradise. (at least Liddy stole from a good person)

But who was Kavanagh? Dare we ask who he was because we surely fear we will find he is nowhere within our own souls and thus we stand, empty bags by the side of the road, beggars in a world filled only with beggars, and it is no joke that God, Our Lord, said the meek shall inherit the earth . . . for each of us standing here has his own story to tell and only puts up with the other’s telling so we can tell our own little share of this man’s passage through our lives. You all know and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, though I am going to do so because I’m sure your brains and memories are in no better shape than my own: I have talked of Mr. Joyce and now I talk of Mr. Kavanagh and I am not going to compare the two except to say one comes after the other in the dream we call time to borrow from that other mountain sitting amid the mountains, eyes dancing among the butterflies and dirty fingernails of motel-bound nympheta—launching a whole series of other -ettes—from millionaire to model to punk to fuck a bit of an item to be used in a high school parking lot in that country where I now live out my own exile and knowing just because I do live in exile there is no country calling out to me: COME HOME COME HOME AND BE THE BARD. Ah, Patrick, those bog hands of yours that brought glass to lips: whiskey after large whiskey in the oldest fast shuffle known to man or beast—I am rambling and know you would approve as you do approve of Mr. J.’s crumpled piece of paper upon which are carved words that mean more than . . . all the stone tablets raised for the gunmen in this country’s history. Long may the gunman live in stone and song: I do not mean anything political in that, just polite poetic babble. We, the poets, must always remain ineffectual . . . Our disasters must be wracked out upon our own flesh—how puny are our demands: to be allowed to flay our own flesh, to swell livers to the size of basketballs squashed out from under rib cages, measured by rulers and the little ballpoint pen markings on skin where the doctor has inched out for our own eyes the years of abuse. O, the fun, the joy of it all! I have no way to end my words for Kavanagh. He has overcome mortality and though we will all surely die, his book is on the shelf for how St. Patrick’s Day

————

long we cannot tell. As each year passes there is less and less need of these poetic constructions. I speak sacrilege against myself. But when was the last time you heard of a person who was reading a poem as opposed to writing a poem? They are all out there with pen, pencil, electric typewriter, or hand filling up the air with their teased-out words. 10p SUGAR THEFT COSTS MOTHER 25 POUNDS

We are all dead or in the process of dying—some more actively than others but it is our only consolation—no one will truly outlive us. Yeah, they get a couple of more years but then too, finally, finally, finally . . . Cut . . . The rain and thirst are doing the job of work for me and of the two the thirst is of the more pressing nature because it is better to be drunk and wet then just wet. I stop. And so on the proper down note—I was going to talk about the final low keys of a piano being pounded in an empty house but that is for our gothic American friends . . . There is silence. There is silence. There is silence. And the movement to the cars parked on the street. I began to walk after Liddy but he turned and seeing me walking with them. I don’t think there’s room for you. I’m sorry. When Liddy had finished speaking for the last time there was a moment of silence because people didn’t know for sure if he was done, but he was and then they began to walk toward the cars. Talk is not necessary. There is too much talk in this country. But I need to talk now. I’ll listen. No, You must be able to talk. Leave me alone. It is better. I’m not that one person. I should never have . . .

I knew they were going someplace for a little party and I wanted to go with them. I started to walk along. I knew almost everyone present either by name by face or by conversation through the years and in recent times. As the cars were filling up Liddy came over to me, I don’t think there’s room for you, I’m sorry. or ————

47

The talking was done with and I heard some say they were going along to the place of that woman who taught at Trinity. I never felt comfortable with her but what the hell this wasn’t California and a lot of people who didn’t like each other were always being thrown together. I just assumed that having come along to the memorial I would be going along to whatever was going on afterwards. The cars fill up and drive away. The last two were filling and Liddy stepped back and spoke. I don’t think there’s room for you. I’m sorry. or There had been more Guinness consumed than I would admit to and I missed something when Liddy came over to me as the last car was filling. There’s no room in the car for you, I’m sorry. or Did Liddy come over at all? I’m sure of it. Really? Yes. And what did he say? There’s no room in the car. I’m sorry. Why didn’t you ask for the address? I didn’t have time. Why? There was no time. Everything was in a rush. I thought I was going along with them. I just didn’t think. I didn’t expect they would be . . . or With the rain they all just wanted to get away from the canal and inside somewhere where it would be warm and they could get something to warm a body against the cold and damp. It wasn’t that cold or that damp. or Liddy was tired and there comes a moment when you just don’t want to understand anymore with . . . or You weren’t wanted along because you weren’t part of it all and you had been making fun of them for all of these years and now you want to be part of the ritual but you haven’t paid the dues. The last car drove away. For a moment I thought it would back up and come back for me. We’ll squeeze together and get you in. The condemned man thinking they aren’t really gonna pull the triggers, all of them, all together—one will hold out and convince the others that this is all wrong. She did not reply. Turned, walked to Grafton Street. I knew it was a mistake. Walked after her, but had nothing to say. She did not look back. I saw her NOT looking back.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

To Rathmines and Rathgar

Walking along the Grand Canal with collar turned up against the sud-

den chill. I walked toward Leeson Street either to go back to the hotel or out to Rathmines in time for the pubs to open again or just walking because I think they said they were going to someplace out that way, maybe in Ranelagh, and I would run into them. No characters lurked by the trees, no lovers sank under wetting newspaper in the high grass. Cars went by. The faces turned and looked at me walking and were gone along in the gray light. Of course this is in the direction of where Barbara had lived . . . I thought I should go back to New York because at least Lilia and my sister were there. It wasn’t a good feeling but one which had occurred before: getting off the train in Sofia and wanting to get right back on and continue to Istanbul where Anne was living but then getting to Istanbul two months later and finding she had been thrown out of the country. I was in Dublin because I had been talking about Dublin since 1968, October 25th to be precise, and to echo the people on the street when Lilia and I flew out of Dublin for New York F I C TI ON

but I knew I had to go and people would say don’t you miss Dublin and how lucky you are to have lived there for three years. At Leeson Street bridge I saw the apartment complex which was new back then and where Americans had lived, the sort of American who would never have talked to me when I was in New York, but after all we are all Americans, would invite me around that first year when they too were either first-year students at UCD or there like me for the third year. But when I was here with Lilia I never saw them, by marrying St. Patrick’s Day

————

someone other than an American. They didn’t miss me with their tennis games with the grandchildren of the president of Ireland and the stories about rugby club dances where you carried a vomit bag along and competed with each other to see how much vomit and how many different sorts you could collect in the course of the night. I continued along the canal. Because of the fog, or mist or sudden grayness the sodium lights had been turned on giving everything a yellowish tinge. Beckett was on my mind which was at least still capable of supporting a writer or two. The TB spit–stained waters were just ahead and when I crossed over the bridge the car assembly plant would be to my right. F I C TI ONS Barbara said she lived in Rathgar. We left and walked along the rain night sharpened streets. Her hand was cold. The fingers long and bony under the skin; her blue-green eyes were set in a pale face between two curls of dark hair.

But in the present tense I could be unfaithful to Barbara and I had hoped to do it with Mary Conan who lived in Palmerston Road and who I will be seeing all this coming summer having met her in a day or two in the Bailey, where I went one night to get away from Grogan’s, where she was sitting with some tall men, later learning one of them was a lover, the others, brothers and cousins or just friends—she had a friend who was studying medicine, who would be going to London to work in a hospital and needed someone to take care of the flat in Ely Place: I still owe her twenty-five pounds. Mary was tall and large and had reddish blonde hair, with blonde eyelashes and brows like Liddy, so I thought they belonged to the same tribe of the Irish in the way Hilary Rosenblatt said you can tell certain Jews belong or must belong to the same tribe by the shape of the nose, size of lips, curl of hair, or occupation . . . she had heard this from an uncle in Belfast before he went to Israel . . . Mary’s house was close to the road and her upstairs window was open and at five in the morning or whenever it is that things start to go from dark to light, that summer I was standing on the sidewalk listening to the record player and since I’ve forgotten what was being played: let’s say, John Cale’s “Paris, 1919.” ————

51

So, walk along Rathmines Road. The large barn of a church to the left where I can say I finally knew it was all over. It had something to do with the size of the congregation and how far away the priest seemed and the boozy smell of Sunday morning. What was this that was over? I should get myself into a pub—a cathedral of the spirits, Dermot was saying—and fill up a couple of hours with idle conversation before facing the night again and all which that brings to mind. Walk myself up to Rathgar and get myself some chips and taking a chance the chip shop would be open because usually it wasn’t open in the afternoon. At the library he can take himself to the right and find Grosvenor Square, which again, was a good address but the wrong city where I had lived with Lilia. Inside, the library was a very public building in the English style gone to shabbiness in only the way that English buildings can go shabby. Books so gray at the edges they were slick to the touch from use. The list of censored books wasn’t available. An August Sunday afternoon in the north side of Dublin. Epitome of all that is hot, arid, and empty. Tall brick houses, browbeating each other in gloomy respectability across the white streets; broad pavements, promenaded mainly by the nomadic cat

And though I was only twice to the country in all the years of living in Dublin, I was to the north side of Dublin on occasions not that many more times. To be really there, I was never—that is, to visit someone’s home. I went there for the movies, for a walk, and you don’t include going to Howth as going to the north side of Dublin. Though I walk past the closed Rathmines library, but before doing so, look up the block and see that the Copenhagen Coffee Bar is still in business as is the Stella Cinema and the pub next door and maybe eyes swivel around to the redtowered building across the street from the library which sits as a tall gibbet on which a criminal of a special order would be able to swing like a well-lubricated socialite at the end of a formal dance . . . anything to distract me from the how, why, of ending up in Sofia then back here in Grosvenor Square which when you live there is entered by a lane between two rows of houses and next to a high iron fence topped with barbed wire of the army barracks and by then the other side of the lane is a long garage into which people have forced themselves and a small grocery shop where the milk and vegetables are laid out for inspection St. Patrick’s Day

————

on the cement in front of wooden counters made of nailed-together cartons. The money is kept in glass jars one for each denomination of coin and the bills are . . . I’ve never seen where they keep the bills. Lilia wouldn’t go into this shop or the other hole in the wall in the alley on the other side of the square. She thought they wouldn’t understand her English. In the center of Grosvenor Square is a tennis club for those people. Not being a Protestant gentleman I was not one of those people. I would see the women arrive with their fair hair tied back, carrying wooden racquets, T-pressed and covered with plaid jackets. They would not wave to the men who were standing by the clubhouse waiting for them. They never waved. Maybe they had been to Greece at an early age and had confused the ban on waving at a person with fingers extended and palm toward the person with the freedom we did enjoy, I guess, still here, to wave at a friend appearing from a distance without having to worry about whether he or she has been to Greece where that person would have learned that such a wave is actually a curse and not something to be shrugged off but rather stored up for a rainy day. Grosvenor Square is a bracelet of nineteenth-century red brick into which Lilia and I moved after a couple of nights of staying with Helen and Nina in their place in the top floor of a building on Baggot Street. In some books a certain face provokes a song or a song calls to mind a woman or man. Nina and Helen bring up the English rock band Small Faces and one or both talking about what a sexy so-and-so one of the Small Faces was/is—or do I confuse Susan with them? Being out in Rathmines which is next to Rathgar where I lived before, Barbara, I said nothing, grateful, the silence, then, her fingers back then, Susan lived on Rathgar Road when she was reading The Mandarins and waiting for the landlady to hurry up the men who were painting her flat, because she was going crazy not to get at least one out of seven nights a bit of sleep in her own bed—sharing was fun, but you did have to put some of your life in order and Susan knew hers was slipping, slipping, in the same way that mine could be said to be as I walked along the east side of the square toward the house where Lilia and I lived in the front first-floor bedsit with bath and toilet up one flight and the landlady living in the basement with her idiot or retarded or slow or strange or snotdrooling brother collecting the rent from us week to week and having ————

53

to sign for me so I could get those library tickets since only rates-payers are thought honorable enough to have the right to use the public library. We paid four pounds a week rent and some of the money came from my father who said later: I gave at work when I put a ten in an envelope, skipped lunch two days a week so you could pay the rent and eat at the same time. Our first home. The house is still there but I have no desire to walk up the steps and see who has the room connected to the first bell. That’s the beginning of another . . . in front of the house, the gate of the fence still open and broken, three milk bottles cloudy and empty near the door leading to the landlady’s flat on the ground floor. No one was coming from around the corner of the square shouting my name and turning my head and then me running, slowing down to a walk and with hand out to shake hands with someone who wanted to see me and what have you been doing all these years and how things do change, though the more they change, as they are always saying, the more they stay . . . Walking all the way around the square, past the house where Finbar lived in the attic with his writing of the movie script about Deirdre in Irish, but long gone as is Dan Boylan who was last seen in Madison, Wisconsin working in the theatre . . . all these people last seen and yet not seen since they have not been carved upon your brain the way a knife carved Melinda’s name into the tree high up now and I am too old to climb and look for it in front of the house in Patchogue, so not knowing if it is there or whatever can happen to such things in the freedom of nature though IT IS there because I have always kept it in imagination: I did carve Melinda’s name in the tree and knowing as I carved it I would one day remember I carved your name in the tree and saying to myself I knew, I know, I must have been in love with Melinda because I carved your name in the tree in front of my parents’ house in Patchogue because the tree will last longer than . . . that tree looked like it would last forever: the problem of being an American, not trusting to stone for my memorial, a sentimental person at heart, if you ask me: holding out my heart: BREAK IT, PLEASE. THE SOONER THE BETTER BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE TIME TO STAND AROUND AND JUST WAIT FOR YOU TO GET AROUND TO BREAKING MY HEART.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Get out of Grosvenor Square, and because I don’t have a map of Dublin suburbs thanks to the Irish Tourist Board which has decided no one in their right hard-currency-spending mind would want to visit a Dublin suburb, I can only say I walked around the ass end of Rathmines and Rathgar and ended up in Brighton Square which ain’t a square but a sort of triangle and over there in a low sort of building Mr. Joyce got himself born in a front bedroom. A college from New Jersey put up the plaque to commemorate the event because no one would expect the Irish to think of such thing but why should they. In September I had left the train at five o’clock in the afternoon, in Sofia . . .

Rare it is that there is someone who is stuck with the conjunction of such countries as Ireland and Bulgaria in the what of the life. Out of Brighton Square to Rathgar Road, there is no reason to walk up Orwell Road and look for Orwell Place where I lived for the first year of my life in Dublin with the Swiss family that ran Jury’s when it was down in Dame Street: gave me a large back upstairs room that toward the end of the stay got much smaller when I was moved to a small front room used by the au pair girl who left. The front room was small. The front room was after Barbara. There was a large painting of the Sacred Heart on the wall and again packing, the other half of unpacking, is what I remember best about that room. Taking strips of cardboard, wrapping them around five or six books, tying them up and then lugging them two or three at a time down to the post office on Rathgar Road to be sent book rate back to Patchogue. That June I was going back to Patchogue. Going back to Patchogue and I would finally talk with and “go out” with Melinda. There was the offer of a job in the south of France as a driver, companion to a crippled doctor, which I had found from a front-page ad in the Times. I wanted to go home to Patchogue. The year was over. I walked around Dublin taking photographs of Rathmines Road, the Four Courts, just random street pictures, and then out to Dublin airport knowing, now, when I was on the bus, it was a mistake. But what was there for me in Dublin . . . I wasn’t Irish born, I had come over for the year and was now going back with the year over. Some of

————

55

the other Americans were staying on. Melinda was in Patchogue. I had a year of college. I had all the excuses and none of the courage. “Life is endless disillusion,” wrote admired Vietnamese scholar Nguypn Kyen. “Success,failure,gain,loss are not worth a jug of wine”

So, standing on the corner somewhere out there. From the newspapers I know the Russian embassy is out this way, now, but then and then long ago, it was not, and Ireland did not recognize any communist country because even if the Pope could truck with the Communists, Ireland would remember its function from as long ago as the Dark Ages. Drag in Whittaker Chambers and the flowerpot in a letter to Bill Buckley: We are heading for a new dark age when we will be burying our items of culture and intelligence in flower pots for the barbarians will be all around us, if they are not so at the moment.

The pub has just opened. In and under the dead eye of the television orders up a pint. There are two old guys in the corner, pints on the table in front of them, not speaking, not speaking even after at the bar for five minutes so they didn’t stop talking with the walking in. No one in Ireland can resist talking for more than two minutes. They’ve done studies on this matter. One of the fellows has a large open sore on his cheek and is sucking on a dead pipe. The other is working down a Carrolls. I know the brand. His fingers are yellowish brown. I turn hearing their heads knock together in mumbled conversation. I did not know the two men in the pub from the proverbial man in the moon and had a closer relationship with the man in the moon. Slip in a word like relationship to keep up my American citizenship. I should go over and ask them if they live nearby. Do they remember the Americans who had the small house down the road a bit, across from the fish and chips place just behind the billboard. O, those noisy Americans, what a crazy bunch of people, not at all like I would expect, but on the other hand, tie some feathers to their heads and put a rifle in their hand and they would do a good job of impersonating your red Indian in the cowboy pictures.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

The Americans had this small house and were always throwing parties and always the Garda were showing up and being told they would turn down the music and get the people to quiet down and on the third visit all but close friends were sitting in the damp living room in the back, wondering why people had all left so suddenly, the reason quickly made evident when someone walked back from the kitchen saying: there’s nothing left to drink. All these Americans will be in the Corn Exchange later so it does little good to get into parties that happened now so many years ago when he knew Marie-Jose Maydell LeGras from Réunion and the . . . at mention of her name and Barbara . . . The guy with the sore on his cheek stands and shuffles to the bar while the barman pulls himself down from the end of the bar where he has been drying glasses. The man hands him the empty pint and the barman puts it on the shelf next to the sink to be washed and gets him a fresh glass for a fresh pint. Good weather, we’re having, I say. It is that, he replies. A fine holiday, I say. It is, he says. I turn back to my pint. He stands there waiting. Somewhere there should be a couple more words. Why doesn’t one of these fuckers say a fucking thing more. Can’t the creep see I want to talk and be talked to and talking gets through the next hour or so, just to get through, not live at the high table. The pint is drawn and your man pays and takes it back to the table. He places the pint in the midst of the spill from the previous pint; a tan swirl runs through the black liquid now squashed by the fresh pint. Your man sits and gives the pint a minute to settle from the disturbance it suffered being drawn out of the lung in the cellar. BAR-RED!! Mrs. Dorothy Peterson, a 10-year veteran officer with the Reno, Nevada, police department who has become a specialist at handling drunken driving cases, is now on suspension—for arriving at work drunk.

Sitting and drinking. Too many times and again more times than could be counted sitting and drinking and wanting to be someplace else

————

57

but there was no someplace else so was riding as a consequence for seconds on the train in Germany back when . . . forcing him to be back when . . . leaning against an Iranian girl for warmth and she was doing the same: laughing and drawing faces in the condensation on the window. In the middle of the night the train stopped in Cologne and we rushed off to find something to eat or drink. The bar was open and got two bottles of Afri Kola waiting for a suburban train with the help of Les Rendez-vous D’Anna which made visible train stations at night and like Chantal Akerman to be obsessed with the feeling for the past and how standing close to the curb and being missed only by inches by a truck and having no feeling one way or the other about having just escaped being killed. So on up the road, past the little post office, into the chip shop, have a plate of chips served on heavy white dish, a glass of Coke served in a bulky cloudy glass. Five of these glasses are on the wooden shelf above the sink toward the rear of the shop. The owners are Italian. They all come from the same town in Italy and are all related. It isn’t Venice though there is always a gondola somewhere in the shop: a plastic model or in a wall rug or drawn upon the wall in fading red and blue paint. The jukebox is on but no one has put any money in. Looking for “Oh Pretty Woman” or “Town Without Pity.” Those songs, the inaccessible places. There are plenty of chip shops. The place has the feeling of just having awakened. The lights haven’t all been turned on. The table wobbles a little each time a chip is stuck with the fork. The teeth stinging

Rather think about Marielle, the girl from Holland, dancing with her in another African flat to “Oh Pretty Woman.” That was the Nigerian’s place. His father owned a bank and a share in the Nigerian embassy. Borre was at the party with his Greek girlfriend. He went to such parties with her because there were never good-looking women at them. She would feel comfortable in such places. Borre wouldn’t be angry with himself for missing a chance. He had to take her out once in a while. They couldn’t always just meet at her place. She was human, after all, and so am I, he’d say. Marielle went home to Holland after being an au pair girl for a year in Dublin with a family out near Howth. She’s been to the Corn Exchange. She didn’t say much when we were around other people because hotness of the chips eaten with Barbara walking that night from Jesse’s.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

she felt only I could understand what she was saying and she had a lot of difficulty understanding what Americans said. It had taken her most of the year to figure out, vaguely, what the Irish family she was living with were going on about, and then there was a little disappointment when she actually could take part in the family conversations and found out they were exactly like the ones at home in Holland. This made her in a strange way homesick because it reminded her of how much she wanted to get married and have a place of her own and be on her own without her mother telling her that nail polish was something girls who wanted to live in the Zaydyke wore all through their childhoods. Marielle had blondish hair which in summer after a month of sun would turn bright blonde-red. I don’t know the word in English, this other Dutch girl was saying. Lizbeth was the girlfriend of Brian who worked for a car hire company or was it a travel company? Both probably at different times, but he went to live in Holland and was lost. She will reappear on the arm of Brian, on his arm in the Corn Exchange. Had sat with Marielle in the chip shop off O’Connell Street just up from the quays on the north side having a quick something before putting her on the bus going out to Sutton. I’ll see you on Thursday night? and she’d say you must call and calling she’d say she would come in on the bus that was closest to around seven but she’d have to be home by eleven because she didn’t like to get the last bus which was always full of drunken men who failed at getting drunk and they’d always be bothering her just when she wanted to sit by herself and watch the night go by with the moon partially hidden out over Dublin Bay. Enough times we’d be seeing the back end of the bus going around the corner and walk a block to the dark street and there stand in the shadow, kissing to hold against the couple of days it would take so we could meet and do this again: her panties would be soaked through and I’d have to find the dark corner again after she left and shove handkerchief down into underpants and drying off. All that wetness and no place to go because I lived with the Opperman family and she—why didn’t you just go to a hotel? You must be kidding? We were not French and this was in Dublin . . . and held on to each other. This is so good . . . and then she would say, this is so good, you are a good boy. And move my hands from in front of her to her backside and I would slide them around and for a couple of minutes and then again: you are a good boy. Her lips ————

59

were very large so before the forgetfulness of kissing they felt like two puffy bandaids . . . Yeah, I know the road is out there and at least then it is easier to follow the footsteps—sidewalk, road, sidewalk and carefully I train myself to look to the right first and then to the left because I don’t want to be found out as a spy the way the German agents were found out in London: always looking to the left before crossing the street. Fyodor Sologub says, Children lie, adults make mistakes.

I’m a little tired of being young, someone is saying, as I linger over the last bits of chips and save one swallow of Coke to finish off the meal. Waving goodbye to the people wearing dark blue smocks. They are not young and they are not adult. They are male and female and Italian and behind the counter and speak enough English to deal with customers ordering fish and chips. On the street to cross the road so as to walk past the house the American owned or rented and where all those parties got held. The guy was from Indiana and went back there, I think. He was going to get drafted and probably did with the feeling, what can one person do against such a hand shaking, head shaking, all of the body shaking, dilemma, Who can you turn to? What time is it? The American is a blur. Marie-Jose is a photograph and a reason to see Mississippi Mermaid because it takes place on Réunion. Unclear if anyone was living in there. The sentimental scene: I was just nosing about the old homestead: did some good fucking here; my grandmother coughed up her lungs in the back room, a cousin chopped off his fingers one by one all night long in the front room upstairs, I hope you understand . . . Down the road going toward Rathmines is a lane to the right as I walk. A fence of stone piled one on top of the other with cement forced The lane is dark because of the tall trees and the thick shrubs to either side. Rain has no chance to dry. I walked down the lane, turned to the right. There is a building on the other side of a graveled space in which bits of weed and grass grow and are pushed down by the coming and going of cars to be parked. It is a sort of apartment house building with between and about an asphalt paved front lawn. Will you come in?

St. Patrick’s Day

————

three or maybe four apartments. One car is parked off toward the line of trees to the left. An old Morris. No indication anyone is around. Barbara pulled the drapes because she thought someone was looking in.

I walk myself back out of the lane and then on down Rathgar Road . . . The big houses are being chopped up into investment opportunities. Montague has the story about the country people moving up to Dublin and becoming instant city people shoving everything to the side of the road. Pass the petrol station—because this is Ireland and not gas station— no tiger-suited gentleman manning the pumps. The road curves into an intersection with a pub on the inside curve in front of which he always waited for the bus when he lived in the big house off to left back over there when he was first in Dublin. The lounge bar was damp. A bottle of Carlsberg. Not the export stuff. The favorite drink of medical students. The padded bench against the wall. Regular Carlsberg is a bitter-tasting lager while the Carlsberg Export is sweet and twice as strong. No need for the strength today. Smoke still lingers in the room from lunch or the night before. Gray light through the cloudy window high up on the wall. The carpet is worn and stained, the design long gone. Hurting: teeth, elbow and asshole, bleeding gums. A sight for sour eyes, his own in the mirror in the morning even though I for one didn’t have to look in the mirror in the morning to make sure I am all still there on the spot. The body didn’t lie, was conscious of it all, every ache informing: yes, still, alive. The woman at the Quakers said she had an extra room I could rent for the couple of weeks before I was to live with the Oppermans. She gave me exact instructions and I found it at the end of the street, behind a stone fence with rusted gate and overgrown garden up a flight of high stone steps, some cracked and one not there but replaced by a gray board, to knock at the large brass-encrusted door and the same woman from the Quakers appeared. I had thought I was going to a friend of hers . . . We say the silliest things, she said. She showed me to my room in the back on the main floor. She hoped the room would be warm enough because she knew Americans felt the cold more than we Irish do. During ————

61

the day I could come into the front sitting room. The sun was in there for most of the day chasing shadow beasts across the faded wallpaper. An electric fire stood in the middle of the fireplace in both rooms. My bed was climbed into and sunk down in. A hot water bottle was discovered the first night. The bathroom was upstairs and the exposed brick of the walls pulling away from the facing material. The house isn’t long for the world because there’s just not the money to put into it for one old lady and people who need a place like yourself for a night or a couple of nights. The house was pulled down. An apartment block is there now. Gone ahead still having a sit in the pub and get myself up to the bar and another bottle of Carlsberg. The ceiling high up, three times at least my height. When I told the woman I was trying to write she found a small table and set it in the middle of the room under the light which hung from a cord from what was or must have been a fine fixture. It was got rid of years ago when there was no one to sleep in the room. A bedside lamp is the most someone needs just staying for the night. The papers, from trying to describe the ocean over at Fire Island as seen by myself and Melinda when they would finally meet after all these years and go over there and stand by the edge of the water, maybe where Thoreau had stood looking out at the ocean and wondering where the bones of Margaret Fuller were . . . The second bottle of lager is not very cold. Had asked for a chilled bottle of Carlsberg. Learned to avoid saying, a cold bottle of lager because of refrigeration or lack of it as a method by which to sum up American society. Not being a journalist out for five hundred words on the fascinating Irish. DEATH AND DYING, PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES. DEATH AND DYING, AN INTRODUCTION. CAUSES OF DEATH. LIFE TABLES OF NATIONAL POPULATIONS. SOCIOLOGY OF DEATH. DENIAL OF DEATH. THE NUDE MOUSE. THE FINAL MONTHS. Heaping up the collections against the breakdown. In the room on Ely Place the destruction of Nixon had been followed since years before in high school anyone was better than Kennedy. Nixon was extreme in Patchogue. This is all hard to believe and if you want, think of it as what Carlsberg does to a brain. St. Patrick’s Day

————

That ain’t a subtle insult against the Danes. A fine people. I know them well for all of two days in December 1964 when I flew up there looking for the blonde love of my life and found, strangely, that on 23/24/25 December people aren’t in a mood to fall in love and live happily ever after. I was ready and willing and for my trouble was staying at a youth hostel in Kolding after going out to the market and getting a liter of Coca-Cola and some jam and what I thought was peanut butter but which, get this, turned out to be mustard . . . it did seem strange they would have case after case of peanut butter but then the Danes celebrate the Fourth of July. One more beer because the first one got pissed away after the third bottle of lager was brought back to the reddish brown wood table, and a third will get me to the hotel or maybe by a roundabout way hit O’Dwyer’s as I had wanted to go to the pub where I had met Liddy and all the rest when he was first a student at UCD and a few years later saw Barbara in the pub a couple of doors down next to the stationers’ shop and it seems to be winter remembering seeing her and she was with the man who I had introduced her to and I knew—somehow—knew he had had been visiting her after I had introduced Barbara to him; this is the strange thing I think the guy either was going or eventually did go to UCD, but I knew who he was and thought that at least Barbara wouldn’t be alone—I really did—and when I met them in that pub Barbara was wearing the bright blue raincoat, with black corduroy collar, but I was talking with the man who now was knowing Barbara—whatever was talked about— I didn’t say a word to Barbara, not a word since the turning on Grafton Street and now I am talking to the man and I don’t have a single sentence in the crowded room to say with Barbara and did I say bye, or did she say bye . . . I went along to O’Dwyer’s and sat and thought about it all, in that peculiar way of thinking about things and went back to the pub and it was empty, really empty as if something had happened

You never know what will be good for you, so I am ordering a pint for the road, the long road—give us a break—settle the stomach for the long night ahead. The round-faced man draws the pint and in the ————

63

waiting: Barbara said nothing and I said nothing, then. I didn’t want to drink the pint but am not ready to face opening the door to leave and money spent, my father’s death money. The pint’s taking a long time to arrive. Do I ask if the barman is reading the telephone directory and I am having myself walking already back to the hotel . . . by way of the Stella Cinema . . . Lilia and I saw Once You Kiss a Stranger with Carol Lynley . . . explaining America to her by way of this movie . . . for another time as I am unrolling the wad of cash, the brown and green notes, from the death tree shaken, play money as a result of the death rattle, heard by no one . . . WOMAN WHO USES BROKEN TOILET AWARDED £68 FOR INJURIES

Dublin drifts from mind even as I sit in the pub . . . but suddenly it is crowded with men in soft hats and women in curlers under scarves drinking stout and smoking away . . . their fingers are short and designed to give a kid a good bashing if he deserves one, as they all do more times than you can shake a stick at, the stout being drank and these women looking something fierce, as is said, one can feel them putting the boot into the side, the accident of the death mirroring the accident of the birth, and in spite leans in the direction of one of them, do you know what time it is? You got the time right there on your wrist? You trying to be funny or something? I was just asking a question. Trying to be funny if you ask me. I am not. Be off with you . . . go on with you . . . I take pint and retreat . . . and am gone with half-empty glass left on shelf by the door. The Stella Cinema is as it should be, Once You Kiss a Stranger is still playing there . . . the twenty-fifth year of an exclusive engagement. Slattery’s is next door and had been upstairs with Lilia after the movie—should I be saying film—she would drink the foam of the stout. We didn’t have a lot of money, young people in training to be old people.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

So, how to go from the Stella Cinema in Rathmines all the way back to the Russell without liquid refreshment, without curiosity being pricked by the possibility that in this pub the answer doth lie? How did I get myself back to the room? Why did I go back to the room? Was anything in the room when upon the bed, one arm across eyes and the other hooked into the belt just above his fly, below a tongue of diseased meat. I am not trying to be cute as I could have stopped in on Kevin in Harcourt Street if I had so wished. Kevin was in the antique business or that part of it which can be operated from your bedsit. Luckily, he had high ceilings and the paintings covered every inch from floor to ceiling. He slept on a pallet covered with heaped-up pillows, all fringed with gold thread and silver where there was no gold. His lamps were dusty and many in number, color, and intensity. Kevin reclined in the splendor one room allowed and in his own ability to do what he wanted to do, assuming he wanted to do anything and I never knew Kevin to do anything. There was only sadness about Kevin who had been to London and come back, in the same way you meet people in New York who have gone out to California—usually they have gone to San Francisco, never Los Angeles because they have good taste in their own words and have been to Europe—and now they have come back to talk about San Francisco, how interesting it is, just like going to Europe . . . The rosary beads have been wrapped around his hands and his knees are growing calluses . . . With darkening, the Television Club was lit up but the lines hadn’t formed for the evening dancing. Kevin is standing at the far end of his room telling us to sit, be careful of your head when you lean back, get it there between those pictures, if you lean against the picture you’ll split the canvas, it isn’t a great painting as people are starting to want ancestors to fill up the walls of those houses they’re buying and they’re buying walls bigger than any family they might remember and know that most of them still got the bog on their heels and back a while they wouldn’t have even been fit objects to spit upon by the side of the road. But who am I to complain; they give me a living and I give them some fine faces they can call their own even if the features don’t match ————

65

up but who looks that carefully these days and who would even know what to look for. Kevin never offered anything to drink but then people in Ireland never offered anything to drink. But he did get out the tea and made us or rather made up cups for Lilia and myself. I always passed on the matter of tea. Kevin didn’t want to be sitting with us. It wasn’t that he disliked us but we reminded him, in being a man and a woman, that he didn’t like to sit with women. He preferred his own company or going over to Bartley Dunnes with the pink lights and the low ceilings and the drink from China and the Philippines with a quick side track to Chile and maybe even there was stuff from Turkey that reminded Kevin of the time when . . .

This is before the Flaming Faggot of Dublin rode a pink bicycle about in Dublin Before you turn into Harcourt Street there is a group of shops in the midst of which was a milk bar where you could sitting at a counter get a cold glass of milk, an unusual drink in Dublin as milk was served usually at room temperature. I had been reading the Herald Tribune. He was an older man with gray moustache. Any news of the dying in Alaska, he asked. Not that I’ve seen. Don’t bother yourself to look. It wasn’t on the front page and I’ve read it pretty carefully . . . We always read our papers carefully when we travel. Are you just passing through Dublin? No, I’m at UCD. Studying what? English literature, medieval history, and ethics. There is that long pause. You have family in Alaska? No, I worry about the dying in Alaska. I didn’t know people died there in a strange way They don’t. I like the sound of the word. America has such beautiful sounding places. Minnesota. Montana. Arizona. Mississippi.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Have you ever been to the United States? No, and I must be one of the few people in this country with no relatives there. His hands: on each finger a thin gold ring with a tiny black stone set in a setting of white metal. Don’t worry you haven’t dropped into some sort of occult novel. Just noticed the guy’s fingers and rings. Got to give you some details. Can’t have you thinking that here was a moustache and some fingers, sitting in a milk bar going on about the dying in Alaska and that is all. There is a long pause One night tired wandering around Dublin after the pubs had closed, been drinking no more than usual, a taxi slowed. Waved him down to give myself a treat. Where to? Eustace Street. It’s only a couple of blocks but I’m . . . Why don’t you sit up here then? The driver opened the front door. Late? The driver said. Yes, I’m tired. You American? I am. I meant nothing by it. My sister lives in New York. You here long? A year or so. Don’t meet many Americans who’ve been here for a long time. You lonely? Sometimes. Tonight? I don’t know. The taxi went along Dame Street, passed Eustace Street, You passed the street. Don’t worry. The driver turned off the meter. Do you mind a little ride? It’s very lonely driving around at night . . . It must be, I can see that. You can? I was a newspaper boy when I was a kid. You’re by yourself a lot. I hate it so much, the driver said. It’s so lonely. All the time. You do know what I mean? The driver reached across and patted the leg. You do? ————

67

I do, but be careful driving. I am. The driver’s hand again on the leg. You really know? I do. The hand felt warm, which was an illusion because of the heavy cord trousers. You’ve got a big one. You do, a big one. Can I suck you? I don’t know. Where can we go? The police. I know a place. The hand was moving. The streets, the buildings were watched but it was just the night out there into Phoenix Park. It’s safe? It is. If the Garda come, I’ll just say we’re sleeping it off, but they never do, they don’t care. The car stopped. The fly being opened and the driver taking the penis out of pants, very gently afraid to rip it on the zipper, You’re wet. I know. I just . . . A sprig of palm pinned to the visor above the driver’s head and the driver lean over and taking his teeth out placed them on the seat between them and the lips were felt and then the tongue sucking and finally . . . it tastes so good, so nice, so very nice and I did look down while the driver was talking and the teeth smiled and not wanting to think of the man without his teeth and what if . . . but nothing . . . warm and wanted. The driver drove the cab back into Dublin. He stopped on Dame Street. Could I again? But here? The head was bobbing for apples and it was okay, like that. The taxi disappeared. Pause over. Was Dublin being good to you, the man asked me as we sat drinking milk. It’s okay. Then why do you have the long face? I don’t have a long face. It looks to me like you do. Must be because it’s late and I’ve been . . . doesn’t matter. Have you made many friends? I don’t make friends easily.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I know what you mean. People can be so very cruel. I think you’re exaggerating the case. I am not. I know how cruel people can be. You must remember I live here. A native born Dubliner; if anything, I should know the cruelty of the place. Why don’t you leave? It’s my home. No one said the home was to be a loving sort of place. You as an American probably can’t understand such things. I do. Then you are the rare exception. Possibly we could be friends. Can I offer you another glass of milk or maybe you would like to come back to my place, it’s close by and have a glass of milk there with me. One’s enough. I was only drinking it because it was cold. This is the only place where they serve the milk cold. You Americans with your cold this’s and your cold that’s and your hot rooms. Maybe some other time. I doubt there will be another time Maybe you’re right. I know I am. I told you this is a cold place where people sleep with cold stones to keep them warm and they wonder why they wake up in a bad temper. You said you were a student? I am at UCD for the year. I thought Americans went to Trinity. They do but I wanted to be where the Irish students went. Trinity has a quota on the number of Americans. They make it very difficult and you have to know someone. All that usual stuff. But I do find Dublin very strange. A people famous for talk but nothing ever happens. What’s supposed to happen? I don’t know. That, my American student, is the secret. If I knew there was something more to this guy than a moustache, ten, no, eight rings on fingers and I’ll add a heavy tweed jacket with a gold fianna pin which did not come into play since I didn’t speak Irish— also how about a couple of burst blood vessels on the side of the nose? Too obvious, you say? I should have given him a book to hold so

————

69

we could fix him literarily, at any rate. Bring in a little fog, outside beyond the door, out of which a friend of his walks, enters the shop, sits next to him, squeezes his hand resting on the countertop. Your man’s hand disappearing under the stranger’s hand much the way my own would have if Paddy Kavanagh had the decency ever to shake it. So with Kevin sitting midst his lamps and three rugs on the floor one on top of the other; on the little carved table at the head of the sleeping pallet was the collection of little inlaid boxes containing absolutely NOTHING and myself, should I be in the Russell? Barbara poured herself a cup of the tea and stirred in a spoonful of sugar and then having forgot, she poured in a trace of milk. Her long fingers circled about the cup and her mouth blew cool air across the steaming liquid . . . What time would you want me to stop by? Anytime you wish. After nine then? Fine. I’ll see you then. He pulled on his coat from the pile and walked with her to the door. He lifted himself up on his toes and kissed her lips. He walked down the path and closed the gate behind himself. Looking back she waved once and then again. He walked on and looked back. She still stood at the door and was still there when he looked back when he could not clearly see the outline of the door. He walked “home” and felt loss.

Kevin was saying lamps would be the next big rage. Rugs were passé. He was sad as there was little romance in selling rugs complete with the long cups of tea and the indirection of the sales pitch because it was wrong to go out and sell a rug in the way you would a painting or a fireplace screen. Kevin knew, unlike the general run of the population, Erich Maria Remarque had been a rug collector, flying his favorite rugs back and forth between homes in Switzerland and New York. Remarque who lingers in the obscurity of his famous All Quiet on the Western Front in the same way Nabokov reclines in the shadow of his little girl. ReSt. Patrick’s Day

————

marque’s novels always end in death and no matter how he arranged it there was always the truth in that understanding. Might as well underline it: life ends in death and ain’t nothing can be done about it. The sadness of the books, Kevin would say, is what interested him. Something had gone wrong for all of the people in the books. They never knew beyond an inkling and then it was an excuse as large as a headline in a newspaper on the front page. To sleep back in the Russell but remember it’s just in for a nap.

INTERMISSION

Barbara, is there a day when I have not thought of you? Of course there are but not that I consciously would wish for as they were incomplete. You and I < > together in 1965. Of course, I remember you. You were the first woman I < >. The first woman I < >. The first woman who < > me . . . the first woman . . . and of course I am being true to all those clichés about remembering the first and would you remember me if I was not the first . . . and I was not your first boyfriend, your first . . . you were the older woman. I held on to that idea for nineteen years until you wrote to me. I do remember you though not very well

And I had thought you even back then as older, so much older, a woman of the world, so unlike . . . so far away from me, I did not know what to do or say . . . . that night on Grafton Street after we met in the New Amsterdam Café . . . I keep thinking it was raining. I could be mistaken. It probably doesn’t matter. Or does it change anything? I do not have a picture of you from that time. You sent me a picture of yourself from this last September after your first visit to the United States. A picture of you, the husband, and your daughter and brother-inlaw. The picture of yourself reminded me of you, but it was not of the you from back then. I sound like an old crone. I’m only a year older than you

————

71

In a badly kept diary I found your name under the date 8/April / 1965 . . . the April is crossed out and May inserted in a different ink. It couldn’t have been April as I was then traveling based on my stamped passport . . . stamped with symbols of the DDR as interesting in their way as an old man’s Bulgarian passport I saw in Sofia which he showed me to describe his travels to Chicago in the 1930s by way of the swastika stamp for the German transit visa . . . I was mixed up with Barbara on her floor last night—third time since and including that first night when I was very scared—birds chirping

To turn in the seat midst these faces, Nuala came late and Marianne, and Audrey, David, Anne . . . Mrs. Gaffney whose brother she buried the other year . . . Look to the floor: the muck, the spilt drink, the spit, the stamped-out cigarettes, canceled out by Barbara, a brisk spring afternoon and her in blue smock coming from the insurance company: look at the rag they give us to wear to protect our clothing from the dust, you could imagine the dust in the office . . . but better to keep us in our places, the bosses stride about in their suits, we look so neat and subservient. In the pub I am asking, do you think of dying much . . . That is a popular question of the moment, but no, I don’t . . . You have evenings at the theatre with women you first worked with twenty-five years before who are still married to the men they stepped out with so long ago. The children have all gone to London, to America, and rarely come home anymore. You have a cold edge about yourself, there is a coldness about you, some might say, just as they say they have a sneaking regard . . . . . . turned away from Barbara on Grafton Street in April, 1965.

I turned away, turned away, turned away, turned away over and over again for all the years and walked back down South Anne Street toward the New Amsterdam Café where it had happened, I think, and saw myself turning away from Barbara in Grafton Street, over and over again, so that I did not really see myself walking back to Grafton Street and St. Patrick’s Day

————

Barbara no longer there and even as I walked by the display windows of Switzer’s, seeing myself walking by those windows of Switzer’s with the discreetly posed manikins, and did not see her. and I would be turning away from Barbara on Grafton Street for the rest of my life and walking toward South Anne Street and again turning back and walking a little way and not finding her there on Grafton Street. • and finally Barbara came into Grogan’s after the long pause when Tommy was away leaving me suddenly to myself as he was in deep conversation with a fellow in a cap in the way they do in Ireland: heads bent close together over the little round table, in a pronounced whisper, about something: a dead baby or arranging a bashing. Barbara’s word is brilliant as in that’s brilliant. I know one could make fun of it but I will not. We just missed MacDara Woods, Tommy told me, I tell her. He’s married to that woman in Trinity, Barbara says. I think I heard of him from before. We had a sudden bit of work. I would have been earlier. You work up in Dublin Castle? It’s not as glamorous as it sounds but it is a nice walk in the morning. Should we go over to that new area you are always writing to me about eating out with the girls from work? Brilliant, Barbara says. Dublin has become like New York in some ways: they keep tearing it down to make way for something or other. Jury’s got torn down—it was the first—I think—and a whole lot of slum buildings down to the Liffey in what has gotten called the Temple Bar area. Rock and roll is a good export earner and there are restaurant and gift shops catering to the tourist market that follows the sightings of such creatures who have long ago moved themselves to fortified settlements on the outskirts of Dublin with the right to shoot anyone caught climbing over the walls. They are national treasures, I kid you not, and bringing in much needed foreign exchange, or is that another old-fashioned idea: remember the BUY IRISH GOODS campaign. Barbara is telling me she wants to see the exhibit of an American photographer. Do you know her, Eve Arnold? She has read about it in the paper and there was show on the television the other night. She enjoys, she says, going to exhibits when she can. ————

73

We do not talk about having seen each other last year. We do not talk about having seen each in the early summer in New York City, when she came down from Boston, where she was visiting, along with her husband. At Exchequer Street we pass what was once the St. Andrew’s Hotel. I lived in there when you weren’t in Dublin anymore. Across the street was the Trinity pub, The Old Stand. English people used to go there and Irish people who imitated English people. Roc Brynner liked it . . . We go down to Dame Street and I am not about to walk all the way to Eustace Street to see where I lived in a top floor flat once upon a time and anyway they’ve torn it all down. Let’s look to the present, Barbara says. We are both alive now. I was thinking of Roy Orbison and going to his concert with this Dutch girl. She was an au pair who got appendicitis and went back to Holland. Your boyish memories, Barbara says, and I remember being with Marielle and seeing Barbara and not knowing what to say I guess we won’t be going to Howth this weekend? If you want to . . . I’d like to. In the letters back and forth I had mentioned wanting to go with Barbara to Howth and remembering being there with Marielle, each of us in heavy coats against the damp and chill. Barbara and I walked through the Eve Arnold show:

Barbara thinks the show brilliant, as good as the television program made it out to be. The woman has had an interesting life, she made something of herself in spite of what the world was telling her. How things have changed in Dublin. Everything is so much more interesting these days with places like this, with such interesting things for people to see and to do. Gift shops, poster shops, restaurants, clothing shops with one or two bits of clothing artfully arranged in the window along with the vase of yellow tulips. It used to be like this in front of the Pompidou Center in Paris . . . now everything is looking like everywhere else, even walking down the Portobello Market. We are delighted to present this one-woman exhibition by leading Magnum photographer

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I remember how much I enjoyed doing that in London, Barbara says. We have a late lunch in a large themed pub which is the Irish idea of what American bars are like. Barbara will have the fish and I have the chicken. From the “carvery.” The Fitzsimmons Bar and Restaurant. Next to the cigarette machine is a machine selling disposable cameras. That’s not so unusual. Parties of Irish and English women come to Dublin for the weekend. Hen parties, they call them, themselves. They need something to immortalize their drunkenness. Show the pictures around in shop or office the next Monday. To remember the good time they all had. It’s a new phenomenon. Men have always done such things. They are so proud when they show the pictures about. It’s a little embarrassing, the drunken faces, but they are happy. You can’t deny that. There’s the evidence. Who is to say? Women going out with other women and having a good time, without the men, and if one ends up with a man for the night all the better. It’s before they get married and even if they get married it is said to strengthen the marriage. I’m surprised you’ve not heard about it. You have everything in the States. We Irish have come a long way, trying to catch up with the English until . . . or leading the way for the American women, who is to say. Walking and invited to see a display devoted to the Berlin Wall. That spring, in 1965, I walked through the wall at Checkpoint Charlie, that spring of meeting Barbara . . . What does it matter, she asks. What does anything, then, matter, really. I’ve told you about it many times, I still remember walking with a UCD student in Stephen’s Green and we had just passed the Three Fates is that what they call it near the entrance for the Green over near where O’Dwyer’s was and she was telling me there is never any reason to write, now, everything was written by Cervantes because she was reading him in Spanish and if you think about it just go back to the Greeks or Romans—why write?—she was so adamant and I think now in some way she might be right. And she likely never gave another thought to it after she said it, I reckon, and it’s too bad you can’t remember her name. Her father was a wholesale greengrocer and she had red hair. ————

75

Did you ever meet back then any student whose father was just a plain greengrocer? But I was telling you of going through the real Berlin Wall and now it is only a exhibition. (I didn’t miss Barbara when I got back to Dublin from what I liked to say the DDR. She was seeing someone else when I returned) • as walking along Nassau Street with Barbara to the National Gallery. We had been there with Nuala last year so can skip the tour until a later moment. Then we walked along Westland Row past the church where Bloom thinks to have a woman and by the shop where he buys the lemon soap and I collect my luggage and out on the DART to Killiney.

SEATS ARE NOT FOR FEET

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Starting Out Again

E

yes sting when opening. Closes them tight. Black smeared with red and then just black. Again, slowly opening eyes and at the same time pulling the legs off the floor and swinging them onto the bed with feet hanging off the end of the bed . . . as confused as the language. Stretching, yawn. Was gonna have myself call down to the front desk, asking, what time is it? And the woman saying eight fifteen, pausing, wondering: morning or night? Of course it’s the night and I’ve only been out of it for a little while, not enough time to top up the batteries but still enough to whet the tongue for the stuff to kill the thirst, and they should all be in the pubs and though I don’t expect there are any parties, like long ago or even more recently, maybe there’ll be one and I can get myself inside among walls and find _________________________ _________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Sterne wasn’t just dragged in. Unbuckles, drops pants, drops undershorts, takes himself in hand, hops over to sink and pisses. Shadows walk quickly near to the high fence of the Green. Two tall businessmen cross the street and seem to be going for the hotel. A bent woman is pushing a baby carriage piled high with newspapers. What will the night bring? The dead always know more than the living. A grim way of living. Have to be getting on with it. What happens if you wake up some morning and you got no complaint? The sweater comes off: cigarette smoke embedded in the wool. Put the sweater on after smelling the armpits. Sometimes they smell sweet and other times the smell of the deathbed and the relatives crowding about, waving roses under their noses. More likely under a street lamp, just off the Bowery, shoes stolen, pockets slit. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Fingers through hair, rain of dandruff on sweater brushed off. No clumps of hair this time. Down there to the street and out to the pubs again, as the night is as young as it ever is in Dublin, middle of the week, if memory serves. I see the pile of papers I can’t get rid of. They have gone from Beloit to California to Dublin to Sofia to Helsinki to Beograd, to Amsterdam to London and on; and to Paris to see Julian Green that second time, such a botch after meeting that woman in the Rodin Museum. Dear Mr. Green. . . . Dear Julian Green (this was gone into pages, pages ago; don’t need a clumsy bit of recurrence to show us that you have read about all of this some pages ago). Hand into the pocket to feel the still comfortable wad of paper money. Down in front of the fire in the lobby, cold Carlsberg at hand, the eyes on the well-polished brass instruments in their brass pot to the side of the fire, the squares of turf in their brass pot and ears open to the deals being made on either side. The gentleman on the right has two buttons on his lapels saying PUSH. The man he is talking to takes a chance and pushes the right button, that is, the button on his right lapel. A little flag pops up: DUMMY! PUSH THE OTHER BUTTON. Your man does so. DUMMY! PUSH THE OTHER BUTTON. These are serious men. They drink neat gin on the rocks with a bit of lime. Should be getting my show on the road. The Russell is a good home. People leave you alone. People are always asking, how is the Russell? How only those people who most want to be around people are always praising a place for letting you be alone with yourself. Chin to collarbone but no falling asleep. Not fat enough to get away with being a picturesque drunk asleep before fire, a study of an Englishman fallen upon bad times. The eyes close for a moment, open, close. Suddenly turn and look to the door. What if Barbara walked in right at this moment. What would I say, or maybe Susan? She’ll be living in the suburbs during the summer, but to never hear from her again even though she and I and Dickie planned to meet . . . what year was it? In Istanbul at the Blue Mosque and talk about all the years . . . those things only happen in books. Tonight, walk the body to the Castle Lounge, to O’Dwyer’s, to Toner’s, to the Bailey, to Davy Byrne’s: the moral pub but the woman ————

79

squatting for a pee in the alley to the side is yelling, ain’t you never seen your Momma take a pee—wanna whiff? The receptionist at the desk has a dusty sort of smile. When she turns away to put it in the mail slot the smile vanishes and I know she’d turn and wish my ass into a ring of purgatory for pissing your life away. Should turn around tell her I have no choice and this ain’t one of those nice English novels I like to read at the moment where each chapter takes us to another scene, another group of people doing something interesting, and none of this concentrating on one poor bloke lost in his sadness, his loss, and only to get on . . . Have a pleasant evening, sir. She smiles again. I’ll be trying. Out into the fresh air, a going forth into this St. Patrick’s night, walking along the dark side of the Green, past by some sort of Protestant church and then some buildings given over to offices, past the university church out of which pour weddings for the front page of Sunday newspapers and on Grafton Street we stand in front of the newspaper office windows looking at the pictures wondering if she had done it before the wedding or maybe it’s a difficult night for both of them. Newman House is closed up for the night or the holiday. When first in Dublin, the weekday supper there some nights to save going out to Rathgar and just having to come back in later in the evening. A bit of fish, a fried tomato, mash with gravy of some sort and I’ll pass on the milky tea and yes, a couple of slices of white bread and you can smear some butter on them for me, thanks. Ta. It was the ta that went right to the spine. How to be part of these people? Even New York’s, yeah and doncha . . . Sitting at the cold table. It had just been wiped and the chilly air in the place made it cold to the touch while feeling overdressed because of no heavy wool overcoat into which to bury the hands, collar high up against the back of neck, the long front of the coat banging against the front of the walking legs . . . A long wool coat will keep you through many a time when a friend will let you down and you’ll have to face the weather by yourself. I must have been reading Catch-22, bought in Glasgow, because I hadn’t read it before. The book is banned in Ireland, the man sitting St. Patrick’s Day

————

across from me was saying but them that wants it gets it but I don’t see any need for all them sort of books. There are plenty of other books in the library and that’s the great evil of our censorship board, they draw attention to books that would merit only silence if left to shift their own strength into the mouth of the world. Why would you be reading it? It’s very popular and I didn’t want to read it in America. Do you know the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte? No. That’s why you are reading the book you are. And why it’s said to be popular though I have my doubts. What did this guy write? You, Americans, Malaparte wrote The Skin and his best book Kaputt. Get them. You’ll see what I mean if you have an open mind. An open mind is an empty mind. Right, the man said, a very poor choice of words. Just read The Skin and you’ll never look at a flag in the same way. Catch-22, that’s the book you’re reading, the book of a child and I don’t have your American love of children. And don’t eat the sweet. The man who runs this place is bent on killing off the population through the consumption of his sweet . . . Newman House is a bog, a drafty pile of rooms that run into each other. Joyce or Stephen had his run-in with a priest inside . . . I don’t remember the face of the man who was talking at me about Catch-22. The large front door is closed and black in the night. Memories of college are always: how did I end up as I did. Filled with the dross of what is going on instead of knowing what is going on: the same damn thing as before, during the last three thousand years. I put on a play upstairs in Newman House and was told I should give it all up and I had helped some of them work on Luther. Student dramatics! The waiting on the steps of the residence a couple of doors down from Newman House for some woman. Back to those steps and a wave of the arm as a good, good night gesture. Waiting for Sonya in Restaurant Moscow, Sofia I would say a hundred sentences to you each would begin with maybe

for I know the sad truth of this city

————

81

where the shove is more important than the kiss

where the heart is an inefficient reasoning machine when compared to the party register held by crooked fingers

in a building resembling a penis.

Every passing tree draws my eye I am satisfied only by silence

and then I wish for a vast party casting me into the morning

when the bottle caps chew my teeth and I kiss, again, the pillow. Of course I am passionate

in the manner of grass rippling under the wind

near the great house spilling its wealth into the river where I have swum with heiresses of boredom. My watch ticks away the minutes you will not come

fear is the faithful shadow

and our mouths are very poor in language finally the waitress arrives with beer and I shall go to look for you

finding again the empty street

and what to do for a couple of hours

until sleep slams dreams into my brain. Sonya was fourteen minutes late.

However, in Dublin, and our man has just left the Russell is walking along Stephen’s Green toward Leeson Street with a thirst in the mouth and thinking maybe Barbara will be coming out of the old pub just down from O’Dwyer’s but not much hope, why should it really be beyond the usual old desire to get hurt one more time and who else to hurt other than one’s self. At the corner, some sort of new building that gave rise to: tear down all of old Dublin and pave it over. Out with the old and pave it over. Say the words slowly. OUT WITH THE OLD. PAVE IT OVER. You can’t be meaning what you say? I do. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Go on with you. I will not. Down with the old. Pave it over. That’s so destructive. Haven’t you heard the urge to destroy is a creative urge? Bakuninist rubbish. Marx knew what to do with him. Marx was wrong. I will not argue you the First International. We must preserve the past so future generations will know . . . Are you going to provide pillows? PAVE IT OVER, I say. You’ve been in these pubs too long. Down to my right is the front of UCD: large stone pillars holding in the elephants of ignorance. Won’t do. Try again. UCD is a train station: too many tracks leading nowhere, lots of flatcars for sleeping, terrible drafts for the shoulders. Stanley naturally appeared. He had been to see his professor about the thesis he was working on. With Stan we have a lurch forward in the plot of the evening, remember being back in those pages about Justin? mention was made of Stan and his American accent. They will both show up when we get to the Corn Exchange. Stan is a large guy with heavy beard and black wavy hair, the sort who could pound a bar top with his fist and they would jump to attention and not to laughter. O, Justin. At the Irish bookstore, on sale, Art Mitchell’s Labour in Irish Politics, 1890–1930. In the acknowledgments a word for Justin and Stan. Their names in a long string of names. The book is a reworked doctoral thesis. Wonder if Art had another in him. Art is somewhere in or near Boston with his dark Irish wife from down in the country as back then she was the girlfriend who would stick. I have myself on the corner of the Green getting ready to cross over and into O’Dwyer’s for a quick pint. For the long months before I went to Copenhagen for Christmas to find the blonde of my life I did not drink and was known as the man: bitter lemon with a couple of pieces of ice, please. It wasn’t much of a problem as long as I was sitting with other people who ordered lashings of drink. It was the walking into the place by myself and ordering the bitter lemon with a couple of pieces of ice, please. This guy Dan was there. He was American, had himself some sort of Rotary ————

83

Club scholarship to look up his relatives and how they fit into where he wanted to go with the rest of his life. He was going out with this English girl who was living with this Irish girl and all of them were living where Marianne lived, just down from where Shaw was born in Hatch Street. And there was this English guy Jim who directed plays and went somewhere. Jim Richardson. He directed Endgame. Had wild hair and a way with . . . Liddy was there—how can I not mention him—quick up front with Cronin and Higgins, and Brian Lynch who doesn’t answer his mail. The evening is getting on. The place is filling up. It’s not as crowded as it once was when most of UCD was in Earlsford Terrace. I could pretend to knowing a couple of the barmen. We could have you going through the litany of what have you been doing since . . . right up to the, you haven’t gotten any new chairs, the same cloth-covered ones with wooden arms, you sink down into them, and them that be sitting on the banquette get the chance to be on a higher plane . . . The English woman that Dan was seeing—or was she at one time Jim’s girlfriend and he passed her along to Dan because he liked the way Dan did the lighting for Endgame?—had a narrow face and long dark brown hair. She had been in convent school in England. Her name escapes me. Like most women back then, she did not do anything. She was just around. The men did what had to be done. There was one woman who did things. She helped run DramSoc. She was an exception and noted by all as such. Dan and I were the only Americans sitting in O’Dwyer’s until Johnny Green showed up one day from Washington, DC, with the intention of staying as long as he could. He stayed for a lot of years and never lost his Southern accent. He played hurling. The pint is good. I used to come here when I was a student at UCD, I hear my voice saying to the barman. He’s a bit younger than the other two or is it three of them . . . there were more people around then. There were, he says. When they moved out to Belfield, a ghost town was left behind. It can’t be that bad. It isn’t. When do you say you were a student at UCD? It seems like a long time ago. That is a long time the way things are going now. St. Patrick’s Day

————

The barman is off to another customer. The bathrooms are in the back, behind this little sort of corner where we used to sit hunched over: Where are we going tonight? What’s on, have you heard and who with? I am sitting on the stool. I’m afraid someone is going to pour a pint down my back. I am still new to the country not really knowing no one loses a pint if he can help it and they don’t refill pints lost in the combat of the room. It takes getting used to this sitting on a stool out here in the Siberia of the room with no wall to back me up. There are some that like being out in the room. I’m a corner man, a cave man, a man who likes his nose buried between the lips of hair and the smell of urine and sweat and waiting and hearing and hurry up and get up here so I can kiss you on the lips after you’ve nearly kissed the lips off of me. The barman goes from that customer to the next and then he stays away from me. I can’t blame him. Who wants to talk about something other than the horses or the match? I had wanted to ask the guy if the professor who got up on the top of the bar and peed on New Year’s Eve or was it Christmas Eve was still barred. Back then in the pub it was all about Vietnam this and Vietnam that and not one of them knowing what it’s like to get stuck in a country, what it’s like to get born without asking to get born but then there comes a moment just after they go on about all the poor people starving to death in America, going to sleep hungry and the Marines setting babies on fire and bashing women’s brains in, that I turn and tell them that it’s all to the best that there are Americans in Vietnam bashing in babies’ brains. It gives you all something to talk about, what would you do without the Americans in Vietnam. It was so much better when they were in France. There’s Americans up outside Derry. Enough is enough. I’ll be finishing up my pint and we’ll get ourselves along smartly because we have a lot of ground and time to cover. How different from this was the other offering of the night, the world premiere of “A Beautiful and Wholesome Girl” by American student Thomas McGonigle, presently in U.C.D. It goes like this. Old man seduces young man. They kiss (On stage!)—relationship of soul. Young man meets “B. G. W. Girl’’. Fall in love. They kiss—relationship of death. She enslaves him, leads him off on all fours with a rope about his neck. Curtain. Applause. The moral of the story is, if ever you meet an old man on a freight car, somewhere, don’t, on your soul, kiss him. At least try not . . . etc, etc.

————

85

The play was an atrocious and embarrassing farce throughout. Of course we should encourage young College talent. I was curious to see the play, and I viewed it sympathetically, but could see nothing in it, nor indeed in the loose, unskilled production and the overacting, that deserved praise. Lighting was as bad as in the earlier “Osborne” production. Why is it that creative dramatic production in College is so inferior to the production in the other literary fields.

Even before the night has begun there is much confusion in it. If this were a thriller you should have a ground from which to survey the wreckage of the plot. I stand by the bar next to a man sitting on a stool hunched over his cigarette and pint rising up in front of his low eyes. His ears are overgrown and a yellow substance is caked on the gray hair. His fingertips are orange. His eyes are blue. If they had been brown I could have dragged in my old man and sat him on his chair in the living room of the house up there on 9W at Saugerties, his eyes looking to the mountains, waiting he was . . . The man smokes his cigarette, drinks his pint. His eyes continue to look straight ahead. He is well trained. I see a face I could jump to sudden reminiscence yet look away. There is nothing familiar about anybody in the pub other than: they are of the same tribe as myself. I sip at the pint, wipe my lips with the back of my hand. My tongue goes over the silver valleys of my teeth and I am separated from the fellows bent to their pints. A heavy woman is standing next to me with an empty pint glass and a gin and tonic glass. The barman is over to her request. She does not smile at me who does not smile at her because I am sure her man, because she left a table at which another woman with a man is sitting, is watching her every move, just waiting to prove his love by placing me midst the bottles on the shelf behind the bar. The woman takes her drinks back to the table. The barman continues his patrol of the bar, walks past me since I make no motion and the pint is only half gone. I look around the pub. People are still arriving; the flow hasn’t begun to change. Waiting for someone to shout out, hey, what are you looking for, who do you think you are, why are you treating us like animals in a zoo; ain’t it bad enough you got all of them poets writing poems about animals in the zoo and over there you got them with pencils and charcoal working away at taking out the souls of the little animals. St. Patrick’s Day

————

. . . it is amazing that people would be satisfied to write novels that take place in the kind of miniature landscape of the neurotic head

The Guinness provides a burp. Ah, the finest sound in the world, the man hunched near his glass says without looking up. You can say that again. I won’t for both our sakes. You needn’t the Guinness has done it for both of us. It has indeed. Just to get away for a minute. But no I am at my job of work in this pub in this city waiting for the end of the holiday, which is not really a holiday. You American? the man next to me asks. I am. More of you people are around here these days. Glad to hear it, I say, never knowing what to say and hoping your man is long gone into his monologue and I have only got the tip of the iceberg, though I hope I’m not the Titanic steaming full speed ahead with a couple thousand Irish steerage passengers locked down. Adds to the charm of the whole fucking place, the man is saying. Adds to the charm I was saying to my friend just the other day. Adds to the charm and we don’t have to be going to the pictures any more, there are so many of them walking around in Dublin with their raincoats and sunglasses against what sun, I ask you, what sun have you ever seen in this place? Go on tell me that, what sun have you ever seen in this place? There was no sun today. I think my answer helpful but that sometimes is the worst track to place my locomotive on. I should take a piss but the man behind the bar might scoop up my emptying glass and I’d be obliged to go through some sort of song, dance with poetry optional to get him to bring it back . . . I saw sun. I beg to differ with you, I saw no sun today and I was watching for it because they always talk about God smiling on the Irish walking down green-striped Fifth Avenue in New York. That’s New York for you, the man says. Have a God up there smiling on a street with a green stripe on it. Down the middle. ————

87

Down the middle no less. And a God up there able to smile—the sin of it all and they probably rake in the dollars don’t they? They do. Green beer . . . Green beer. I’ve heard of it. I have a brother in Chicago. He’s drank green beer. Gave him a green hangover just like in the comic books my kids read at me in the morning when I have the belief there is not another day left in my life. Are you having a pleasant visit? I am. Another satisfied customer. The Tourist Board will be pleased to hear it. Have you ever been to Chicago? No. Has your brother been home? He was here for a week. Every day got worse for him and for us. From the plumbing to the little cars on the street that were trying to knock him down; he couldn’t wait to get back to his home in the States. I am telling him, I knew this woman in New York who is from somewhere in the country in Ireland who has brothers who still got their farms and how they envy her being off in America, and she was telling me, they don’t know how much freedom they have over there on their farms with no boss over their heads. What does a person have in New York? I’ll tell you: the subway and a job. Is that a life, I ask you, is that a life? The subway and a job. I have the thought: still staying in this damn pub and the hour is getting late and should be getting along to Toner’s with at least a look in the door at O’Donoghue’s, then a quick back peddle over to Davy Byrne’s how can that be missed then into the Bailey and finally back to Grogan’s to pick up what will happen later in the evening with the desperate large sacks of bottles of stout and tins of lager and surely someone should remember to bring along a bottle of something stronger because we want to get through the dark to the light of early morning when again—wax on you, my son, poetic with the gray light of early morning and wondering when the fuck she’s gonna wake up so she can start again sucking on your sore cock and you can clasp mouth to her pussy and lick it dry because: a long way away and you got to find words now for the finding of yourself again in that bed in that room in the Russell by yourself. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Would you want a drink, a pint? I have to be going. Half a pint then. Sure, I won’t be getting you back. Some other time. I’m sure you’ll be here another time. Jimmy, when you’re ready: a pint and a half a pint for the Yank. A half a pint for the Yank and one for yourself. Jimmy repeats the order as if obvious. The clock is ticking. Justin is sitting in the alley next to Toner’s working on a liter of cider. Cider was for the morning. I used it for the bubbles to get the gas up. If you drink too much cider, a guy was going on in my ear, you get rickets and skin conditions. I have to be going, putting down the empty glass, while he is still working on his pint. See you about, he says wiping his lips with the back of his hand. I don’t have to push my way across the room. It would have been better if I had to push my way across the room. Sorry, sorry, sorry trying to get through, no bother, sorry. No, just out of the pub, on the street under the bright sodium lights. The air of desperation is seeping into the streets. Closing hour is coming on and I have, if not miles to go, at least a bunch of places to get on to. My fist is opening and closing. I stop the action and wonder if I have been doing it all night. Maybe I was scaring people off and it was my guardian angel keeping away the one person who might have been looking for someone with a fist opening and closing. I open my fist and spray out the fingers like the crown of thorns on the head of the Statue of Liberty in Bulgarian cartoons. I should have a starving brown baby to place under my foot and slow grinding heel into its shrunken chest. The night should roll over and play dead and allow me to get on with this passing of the time. They’re ripping down many of the buildings surrounding the Green. Make it safe from those of us who want to lurk in the shadows. Do the serious thinking there. I should nip past the building where I will live out this coming summer, up there on the top floor. I am not drunk enough. There is still some hope in me. You never know what will be in the remaining pubs. From eight to eleven. The life can change. ————

89

Another of our geniuses, Patrick Kavanagh, was a dreadful bore, mean, too: he had a way with critics; he punched one, a woman, in the face in Merrion Row, knocking her off her bicycle. Ordinary people really ought to be grateful we have few geniuses of their calibre. A Behan Memorial Library? Perhaps a public convenience will meet the public need.

If Paris is worth a Mass surely I can get a couple of minutes out of this walk down the side of the Green and turning right take myself into Baggot Street but not into O’Donoghue’s, a singing pub filled with rucksacks, Germans, French, and throats forever thirsty for pints that have to keep coming if the music is to be ground out of the fiddles and the clicking spoons. The darkness of the lived moment —Martin Heidegger

Said goodbye to Silya who was on her way back to Iceland to abort. Not my kid. She wouldn’t have anything like that to do with me. Large cow-like teeth she had and the sort of blue eyes rhyming dictionaries are made for. A NOTE

Today I was down at one of the two Irish bookstores in New York City and came upon your book about Belfast. From the bio details of your age and going to Trinity I believe you are the brother of Barbara . . . Almost twenty years ago I was friends with Barbara but over the years I have lost track of her . . .

from Barbara: Your letter reached me too late to contact you before your trip to Vienna in February. I do remember you though not very well. It would be nice to hear from you about yourself. In the meantime I shall tell you what I have been doing since I saw you. You could say an intrusion An eruption of freedom within this moment

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Going to the pictures, remember how we said that? And I don’t expect you want me along with you and your Barbara, Nuala was saying. You have your fantasy weekend to work or walk through. Denis Donoghue and I walked along Dawson Street to Waterstones where he was looking for a cheap edition of Yeats poems and doesn’t find it and so walks to the garage off Molesworth Street where we say goodbye. In Molesworth Lane, I had my first conversation alone with Barbara in a café upstairs presided over by a fat Egyptian—are any others let out of that country, I said or she said. A fat Egyptian and Barbara and I talked and by then we had missed the last bus and I walked her home to Rathgar. Now, at 10:30 Barbara and I were out of the house and doing the shopping and then stopping by to see her mother in Blackrock, down the twisting roads of an older estate where the shrubs have all matured and where her father died at age 96 and where her mother now lives alone with visits from Barbara and her brother and her sister . . . we take turns looking in but most of it falls on me because Jonathan lives up in the North and it’s hard for him to get down here and there is the longdrawn-out situation of his marriage coming apart . . . an old woman meets us and it’s hard to look at her because she is being thrown back and forth by her body in rebellion under the weight of the Parkinson’s, something I had never seen . . . all this sort of stuff is hidden away. Barbara’s mother still gets out of the house and even drives the car over to the country club where because she has been a member for so long they have waived the annual fee. She must be the oldest member and plays bridge and has for so many years and I say I remember you from before, Barbara is it now thirty-two years ago. Do people still listen to Radio Luxembourg? I am saying that is how your mother and father met . . . at the bridge club which seems a century ago and it almost is as if it was that long ago, as they are talking about probating my father’s will and his shares from the bank, and I am looking at a figure of Native Girl in costume . . . as if they had come back from years in the colonies to an old age in Ireland . . . but they never in old days left Ireland for holidays— being thrown back and forth by the Parkinson’s until the medicine slows down the body . . . she serves us 7-Up and Christmas cake. ————

91

I take the cup and dish to the kitchen out back. There is the smell of old people and decay and the rain is doing in the back wall: rotting wood and stuff dropped and not really cleaned up, and everything is coated with a thin layer of dust mixed with cooking smells . . . In the car: my father was so angry those last months, only Fiona could sit with him. For some reason she was calm and he was calmed by being with her. He was so angry and feeling betrayed by his body. It was just too painful to watch Daddy in that situation. It was so hard to love a man so filled up with hatefulness for everything about him; hate for the very life that wouldn’t leave his body soon enough. It was the drool he hated the most. He couldn’t stop the drool from coming out of his mouth, he had always been a fastidious man. Barbara is waiting for us in the National Gallery and how bright is her gray hair—she has it in a sort of splash across her forehead, a sort of helmet, a smear of paint. Nuala is hungry so we eat in the cafeteria before going about the rooms. Now, who pays . . . again, I can’t remember what I ate. I want to see the painting that was used on the cover of Nuala’s book: The Temptation of St. Anthony. So the mad dashing about the obsession and the masking of the jealousy and how friendly I become and how I . . . Barbara likes a painting by Willam Orpen. The Putting on of Stockings, she says, it should be called since that is what is going on and Orpen has a good idea for what women are like or he has looked at women for the way they are. The actual title is Sunlight. One feels pedantic for noting this when matched up with her eye. She wants me to look at the hands of the woman in The Wash House. Usually, she is saying, I am interested in the faces of women but here something is different. There is no face, only the hands. That is what a woman is: hands. They stand in for the mouth . . . what more do you need to know about this woman? I think of her hands, the long bony fingers guiding my penis into her vagina . . . her hands, those fingers . . . We look at the Jack B. Yeats pictures. The white light that Nuala pointed out to me from Killiney Hill. And Barbara says that is one of my favorite walks, along the beach and you feel you are alone in the world. Barbara mentions again she liked women in paintings. How they are more decorative and pretty to look at. Men do not belong in paintings St. Patrick’s Day

————

or they seem uncomfortable, though so many paintings are cluttered with men. It was an exhilarating moment to be walking with these two women through the gallery. To feel the camera, the recording of wit, words coming to mean something else, the dropped hints, the eyes caught looking, the hesitations, the venturing of opinions, but never any glancing touches. Later, Barbara and I are in the Sorrento Lounge. There is a match on the television and we sit away from it all. Feeling all grown up and the warmth. I talk about the going back and forth and how all the people I really care about live in Ireland, England, France, and Italy. I worry about them dying. Like Eugene. His death put a hole in my London. And all your women. It’s not really like that. A funeral procession underway as we drive out of the lot. People are walking behind a casket being carried into a church. Getting ready for the funeral. The removal, they call it. Life slows down. The pacing. In the dark. To string it along. The reminder of what can happen. Fragility. In the dark. Do you want to come to the house? It is a recent estate. Barbara says hello to the guys lurking about. I always say hello to them and Kieran always finds little jobs for them to do. Before she opens the door she turns off the alarm system for the house. There are a lot of break-ins and if you pay these guys to do things maybe they’ll skip your house. Barbara enjoys looking at herself in the mirror. She likes the ritual of fire making. She lights the candles. On the stage. When I was sitting in the front room of Barbara’s house there was a long moment when she went upstairs and was moving about in the front of the house. The bathroom was at the back of the house. I was wondering what she was doing. Was I supposed to follow her? I did not know what to do. I did not go up there and meet her in the dark. I thought I should. I remember meeting you in the passageway of the flat in the house off of Rathgar Road . . . Did I say that? Allow me to have said it. I really am Irish, I’ll have you know, Barbara says. We are not of Huguenot descent as I once told you, as I hoped. Jonathan found all the ————

93

papers. Traced it all back to some time when they converted or we were simply then Protestant. We were not “soupers.” You Americans are so gullible. You are a real American like the new husband of my sister-inlaw. He’s a real American. The first husband was a Scottish Jew who was used to being taken care of. He didn’t like sharing his wife with the children. A strange man. And you were saying about Kieran at the newspaper? Why are you mentioning him. I didn’t mention him. I understand she was not to be reminded of her husband. I got that. I really got it though I usually don’t hear such things. She did not want to talk about her husband. She and I were from a different time. The subject of children had been moved on to. It is good for a father to be that close to his children. Jonathan is finally going through with his divorce and he has a new girlfriend and she is very good for him. I feel very close to my brother. He was so miserable for so long. That is why he was able to write a 700-page history of Northern Ireland. It gave himself something to focus on. He didn’t have to think of the woman he was married to. I don’t mind being on my own, Barbara says. I like my own company. Some nights when he is at the paper I am almost angry or maybe disappointed is a better word when he comes home. We live very much our own lives. I like it here by myself reading. The candles are lit and it is reassuring. And I am just here by myself. It’s not that I dislike people. I have many friends at work and I see them and go out with them; go to the theatre and have a good time but I just like being here, by myself—do you know the story in Dubliners, “A Painful Case”? It is my favorite story. I guess it says a lot about me or about what I know about my family’s life The night goes on. She is talking about having a real job, finally, and a real job is and was working in the government services, like back when your friend Donoghue had one. They even give you time off for exams at the university, if you decide to go to university. A real job and they had a moment a few years ago when they took in older women. Once you couldn’t have a government position if you were a married women. It would be seen as taking a job away from a man who really needed it to support a family.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

She is saying her bottle of wine for dinner is very important on Sunday. Will you come over here with Nuala for dinner, I’d like to cook. It won’t be a bother. I’m sure it will be okay. I just have to ask Nuala. Barbara went to National School and then Wesley College. She remembers as a little child holding on to the pram and it’s in the rain and then climbing into the pram where her baby sister was. Her mother walked them about but drove her out of the pram. She felt awful being pushed out of the pram. Her mother had raincoats for all of them. Her mother thought it was good for them all to go walking in the rain. A story and it is getting late. When Barbara’s father was in his early thirties and an assistant bank manager—I think that is why I have always liked “A Painful Case”—his mother asked him if he didn’t think it was time to be getting married. Of course he was still living at home, that goes without saying. What about the bridge club? For many years he had been going to a bridge club on Tuesday evenings. He had noticed someone there and he right away wrote to this woman and asked her if she would marry him. She wrote back that she would need time to think about it. A month later—mind you in the meantime they had seen each other at the weekly bridge club meetings—he wrote again asking if she would marry him. At the next bridge club meeting, she said, I suppose. They stepped out together for a year and were married. In time Jonathan was born and when I was born the pregnancy and delivery were very difficult. They decided they would get a girl from down in the country to help out. They put an ad in the paper down there and they hired Mary. They thought she was fourteen. You must remember this was back before people had their au pairs sitting at the dinner table with the family. My mother and father ate their dinner in the dining room and Mary would eat her dinner in the kitchen by herself. Two years later someone told my father that he should get some sort of insurance for Mary since she was now sixteen. That’s when they found out that she was now only fourteen. So they had hired her when she was twelve and that is why I don’t find it strange that you say your grandparents were sent off to America when they were twelve. That was back then when there was no such thing as a teenager. My mother did decide to

————

95

call in at the St. Vincent de Paul Society because she thought Mary should have some sort of social life and you know my parents being Protestant didn’t want to interfere since obviously Mary was Catholic. The St. Vincent de Paul Society only had activities for boys or for girls alone. Anyway, as things turned out Mary did meet another girl in circumstances similar to her own who lived in a house down the street. They started to go out on their day off and Mary met a soldier from the Rathmines Barracks and she found herself pregnant. My father went to the barracks and a marriage was arranged at the Church of the Three Patrons, the church on Rathgar Road you asked about. On the day of the wedding the soldier didn’t turn up and Mary was left at the altar. My father went back to the barracks and explained the situation. The commandant had the soldier called in and had him escorted by a detachment of soldiers to the church and you could say that he was married at the point of many rifles. The last of Mary, I heard only that she was living down in the country and had two or three children. I don’t know anything more about her. Driving me home. It’s not that far to Nuala’s house. Along the Military Road and suddenly realize how late it. Nuala is asleep so no one to talk with. THE LARGEST PINT IN THE WORLD

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Taken Apart

As a Hungarian once remarked, all novels since Ulysses take place on June 16th.

So into Toner’s. Justin not in the passageway to the side or I could have

gone into the Republican pub but didn’t want to: hunched into a corner, shoulders to my shoulders while humming along with the “Helicopter Song” and then a quick run of “The Men Behind the Wire.” If they worked on their aim with the same skill as the songs, there wouldn’t be a Brit left on the soil. Toner’s hasn’t been worked over with the formica and vinyl, still divided up into compartments to give a person a bit of the privacy for a quick commune with the pint in front of him. The old gents have been cleared off by this hour and you got all these wild-haired students who know what they are about. I was hoping Susan would be sitting on a stool in the back: dirty blonde hair dyed black with her fingers yellow from the cigarettes she had to smoke against the doubt closing in and choking the very life out of her body. I was living in a room on the top floor of a commercial building in Eustace Street just up from the Liffey on the south side of Dublin. To the west of me Swift went mad and his man servant, Patrick, charged a penny each so the mob could come in and watch The Dean in the midst of his convulsions. To the east, of me, Trinity College sits as a stopper to the bottle made of Dame Street. Sad-eyed English girls sit in The Buttery eating yogurt, sliced apples, and cheese. They speak softly, and it is said, on a whim, will come to your room for no other reason than the whim and that is the worst of all for if it were more than a whim it would be bearable and the line is: would you have breakfast with me?

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Which seems, if you don’t mind me saying it, to counterpoint the screams I imagine in the night coming from Dublin Castle where books with the lists of informers going back three hundred years are still under seal as a fear remains on the land; not far away they tore Robert Emmet apart and fed his heart to the dogs. When I walked home from the pubs I would see a couple leaning in the doorways. They rubbed against each other like large damp logs. I knew a lot about history that year for there was no person to be with and with whom I wished to live the future. I walked and read and drank and was able to say hello to a number of people in the pubs: Nigerians with the promise of a Mercedes when they went home to Lagos, an East German who did something with diamonds and physics, Marina to whom I taught English, a Norwegian business student who was in love with a Greek girl who sat at home mostly and watched in a mirror the acne on her face, an English girl who came to my room on the whim and lay awake all night as she had not been able to sleep well since as a child and living in Malta with her parents, where her father was an officer in the British navy, she had seen her twin sister killed by lightning during a storm in the middle of summer. Susan. Susan with her black hair dyed away from its original dirty blonde color and I remember that she carried a copy of de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins and put herself into St. Patrick’s for a month with the nerves and when she came out her hair had begun to thin but not enough to prevent her from working as an extra with the rest of us from the pubs during the making of the film Darling Lili. We sat in the Gaiety Theatre and watched Julie Andrews sing to the heart of Rock Hudson (and between takes she passed a bottle and it seemed that as the day wore on we clapped louder and were not asked back a second day). Susan. I saw her only one night alone and that had been because she needed a place to be while the landlady had her room painted in the house out in Rathgar. We have talked many times since. Then one day I was told she had gone back to her parent’s home in Plymouth. She sat in a large room reading Paris Match waiting for a child to be born of a father not named.

————

99

Eustace Street is noisy in the day but when I walked home at night only my footsteps walked with me and even the couples sometimes seem to have vanished. Susan. The remains were buried. Under no stone. You think of going to Holland. The lightning over Malta is not something to be thought pretty and walked home one afternoon in the sunlight past the horse-drawn carts and the men tearing up the street. A large aluminum kettle is upon the coals for the tea and in a pub at the corner in a back room I drank stout and thought of Susan who was then history; not far from me The Messiah was first performed. I have seen my place on earth, possibly under a jar of Guinness, and sure there awaited the fate of flying to Copenhagen for Christmas for didn’t Danes all have blonde hair like Melinda’s? The youth hostel in Copenhagen was closed and people were about their duty of being happy. On the 23rd of December I set out hitchhiking to Germany. Made it to Kolding on Jutland. In the supermarket I bought what I thought was a jar of peanut butter. It was mustard. Another boy was in the dorm. We talked of the cold and the gray sky that cloaked everything, even the blonde faces were like newspaper. On the road for the Eve of Christmas. Very few rides. Walked across the border to Flensburg. Stayed at the youth hostel; myself the only guest in a place for five hundred. I felt like those in the Catholic Worker who rent a place in the municipal shelter to do penance for being alive. I had a couple of oranges from the machine, two bottles of Coke. I stayed awake all night reading Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. A chained dog outside my window howled at the wind.

A pint and sat against the dark wood wall middle section of the pub. Dusty empty whiskey bottles and luckily could not see my own face on the whiskey mirror. Of course Susan didn’t come in that night. She lived in a basement flat and had the child because an abortion was too much of a hassle. Finally something had taken root in her body. She was willing to meet Dickie and me at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. I thought it was Hagia Sophia, I was saying to test her and she was saying, there, you see, we would have all gone to and waited for each other in the wrong place.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Dr. Dugdale given 9 Years Solicitor withdraws in Beit art case.

I held the pint in my right hand. I balanced myself first on my right foot and then on my left. To sink into the luxurious warmth of self-pity, and the pillow holds the impression of a sweat-soiled face: should have been the spit-encrusted face. I should be getting myself out of Toner’s but the memory of Justin— the man’s still alive, still—you can’t kill him off just yet. There is still time, the freedom to change. You agree with that, I am sure, but Susan isn’t coming in and I should be going. When in doubt up to the bar and instead of a pint just get a Harp for the road. I clank the coins down on the worn wooden bar top. Going back to the corner I nodded at a guy who nodded back. Long hair with bangs. Dermot Healy. Last seen in an English lecture hall: what can you say to someone with whom the only thing you had in common was you both fell asleep during the same lecture? How’s it going? I asked. Okay. Back here all along? A little bit but I never really left. You went to the States didn’t you? Yeah, California and around. Was America as you expected? More or less. Probably less. Acid is illegal in California, now. You should have gone before 1966. That was the time to go to California. That’s what these old guys with elbows sticking out of the tops of their skulls were saying. Brigid Rose Dugdale was released from Limerick Prison last Saturday. She had made it clear there were two things she wanted to do. One was a speedy reunion with her five-year-old son Ruairi, and the second, helping to publicise the H-Block and Armagh Prison campaigns.

————

101

Healy gives his girlfriend a stroke up and down her back. She smiles at me. She is saying she is putting up with this guy temporarily until the moment when . . . her hair is long, dark, and full. She smiles and teeth wobble a waltz in her mouth of the next morning. Do you know Brigit? he asks. I forget your name. So do I . . . Can I get you a drink? No, I’m just about to leave I have to get over to Grogan’s and then some other places. Dermot goes up to the bar to get himself and the woman . . . I see he is only carrying one glass. Brigit notices. We share the glass. When we were in Dublin we did the same thing. We were living out in Rathmines, Grosvenor Square. I know where it is, we’re on Leinster Road. No, he’s on Leinster Road. I’m still at home with my parents. We lived for almost a year in Grosvenor Square. We would live on a shilling’s worth of minced meat for flavor in the moussaka. It was awful. Liver was the weekly treat, cut off a huge cow liver in the shop, hung there quivering, next to the Stella Cinema. I know which one you mean. Ground rat droppings and all. He came back from the bar with a pint in his hand. She sipped at the foam. Leaves the body for the man, she does, he says. I’m over here, traveling on the death of my father. If my father died there wouldn’t be enough to get a good drunk out of it, Healy says. He worked for forty-nine years for one company so I could be over here. For a moment I think I see Susan down at the end of the bar. So standing again with Brigit and Dermot not knowing what to say: was that ever a problem? Healy gives the glass to the woman and goes off . . . Were you at UCD with Dermot? We were in a manner of speaking. I knew him by face and he knew me in the same way. He said you read filthy poetry in a class over there. Got up and read I don’t know what. The nuns blushed and someone complained.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I didn’t know that. All I did was read some of “Howl” the poem by Allen Ginsberg. I’d never do it now. Everybody knows who Ginsberg is and I should have known back then that everybody was going to know who he was going to be. A person can’t live his life like that—but you’re American and are reading all those newspapers and what do they call them? opinion polls, right? as if opinions matter one bit. Like a stain in the sky the next morning. That’s beautiful. You’re joking me. It’s beautiful. Say it to me when Dermot is here. You’re just having me on. Dermot comes back. Tell him what you told me, she says What she said was beautiful. What did you say? I said it was like a stain in the sky the next morning. You’re making fun of me now, she says. You wanted Dermot to make fun of me. Brigit sips from the glass and gives it to Dermot who tips it in my direction and I do the same with my glass. A close call. The edge of the broken bottle against my wrist and sawing for all its worth, making sure the blood is going to flow . . . OUR SWEET TIMES HAVE TURNED SOUR

Out of there. See you around back and forth. I didn’t poke my head in O’Donoghue’s to run smack into the backs of Germans shoehorned into the pub for a whiff of the music. Back then Arthur would have been in the back, his black-haired country woman with the crooked teeth and relatives down in the country with the house to which they went when the kitchen was empty in Dublin. A second in front of the Shelbourne and deciding not to go in. At another time the hotel bar is on the orbit. An expensive landing spot at which to hunch into the collar of a long overcoat and look out at the wall of American businessmen, muscle tone in good repair, teeth dancing

————

103

toothpaste smiles, and hands: not a cliché in hand, if you get the drift. Them going on, not a decent steak to be found in Dublin. It used to be the fashion to meet in the Shelbourne grill and over hamburgers and french fries, the hamburgers eaten native style with knife and fork and the french fries just like the ones at home, thin and dipped into the puddle of ketchup, and talk about the spring in Virginia or ice-skating in Rockefeller Center. Too much time spent on things not happening. The newspaper peddler has gone from stacking his coins on the wall in front of the hotel, counting them against the unsold papers piled next to the rolled-up bit of canvas, not now needed. I stand for a second, seconds, hesitating, knowing I can’t go into the hotel, so turn the corner and slip along Kildare Street, by the Kildare Street Club which Audrey’s father belonged to and even if I had the money, no possibility . . . the used book store, so I have myself walking down Kildare Street and into the shadows for a quick piss, cold cock in the breeze and smaller in the chill and with a spot of dust in my eye I have wanted to take knife and plunge it into my eye to end the irritation and complete the job with a fast whip of the knife smoothing of the upside down U between my legs, to be like a girl and have nothing dangling, but couldn’t be pissing in the shadows if I were a girl, so standing in front of the National Library but just for a second, not knowing how he could have walked this long block without a thought in his head to stand and wonder why in all that is holy, what do you call it, he should be standing thus waiting for Stephen to appear over there in the shadows with that conscious bit of bitterness he is supposed to carry in a compartment of his brain for the priest-flirting girl who done him wrong, if you can believe anybody walking around, a grown man no less, with a fictional character as the guide, and this is as good a place as any to reckon with his own idea that all the people in Ulysses are one and the same guy and that Mr. JJ was just a better maskchanger than the old fart Yeats who, as we all know, was beyond help by the young Mr. JJ. Stone never softens Except under motion of wave Relentless So, relentless (pathos supplied needlessly)

St. Patrick’s Day

————

But backtracking along Kildare Street: people appear at the oddest time as I found a letter from Marie-Jose Maydell LeGras I hope you will excuse this odd paper. I’m sorry I have not anything else at the moment. I have tried to see you sometimes at the “New Am” but the girl told me you were going to a trip all around the continent. I hope you did enjoy it. I am going back myself on Saturday the 1st of May. So I do not think I will see you again. Anyway thank you very much for your book. I did not like it as much as the other one. But still . . . Good bye. I hope I will meet you somewhere one of these days. Bye, bye and thanks for everything

But in a moment to be looking in the windows of the liquor store next to Smyth’s of the Green. Chartreuse looks like a way into the morning. Now’s the time for a sort of razor scraping of the tongue and inside of the mouth. Nothing ever seems cold enough in Dublin. Just to get rid of the sticky taste of all day, of all night and the next morning and again the day. A WINE MERCHANT actually when looking down and seeing the sign in the highly polished brass. I stand corrected. I stand corrected in more ways than one. I stand in front of Smyth’s with my back to the shop front watching the passing parade. Up above me the neon lights selling even in the daylight, FLIGHTS TO NEW YORK AND LA PAZ . A taxi driver smiles from his cab across the way and I was a one night gulp and swallow, if I am remembering correctly. The night crowd is running for the last couple of hours in the pubs before having to face the night and the dreams and the nightmares the very language makes it a challenge to come up with something that actually does happen with the same force . . . Am I at the top or the bottom of Grafton Street. On Grafton Street I turned away from Barbara. How these problems keep recurring. I am not about to plunge into a great cyclical history of the universe. No begging-bowl Hindu wise man is about to appear though wouldn’t it be a kick in the head to see the man with the violin back at his post in front of that clothing shop, sawing out “Silent Night, Holy Night,” the only song he knows and how it lifts the spirit. Better to know only one song and play it all the time. ————

105

It was over a shop in Baggot Street. A couple of small rooms, lit by candles. Someone had just bought a portrait of Teresa. That wasn’t the reason for the party, 1967. People were sitting on the floor. Your man with the violin was in the corner sitting on a backless chair. Sitting with straight back, proud as a court musician or John Cage if the violin was his instrument. Don’t get me wrong. It was a party I remember, out of the hundreds I have not. And your man with the violin. Each time he played “Silent Night” it was as if he had discovered a new meaning. It was the horror at the center of the song. All that silence and loneliness, running around a virgin. You can hear the cows shuffling in the background and every once in a while a load of shit comes sliding out to crackle upon the dried straw going up in a puff . . . Still at the bottom or top of Grafton Street and to the left is Rice’s: who are the Norwegians who drink in there and had been in there asking if they knew a Borre, one of them did remember hearing about him but didn’t know what happened to him. Stick with the young people, Malcolm has said. Old people are only how long the ladder has to be in order to get themselves down into the grave without breaking a leg. Standing in Rice’s. Designed like a waiting room to a funeral parlor. Just the place to put your hand on her or his knee and work up the morning’s promise. A chilled Harp, please. The Harp isn’t chilled. Carlsberg or Carling? I’ll have a Dane. The barman smiles. He’s heard it before. Would never wish to be accused of originality. Do the Norwegians still come in? They do, but only on Saturday nights. They work very hard at their books. I’m sorry to hear it. Well, it’s only a rumor and wouldn’t matter to me one way or another. A cold lot of fellows if you follow me. I do. Cold as their eyes. And they got the coldest I’ve ever seen. I was never comfortable in Rice’s and Borre didn’t like the place except when he went there to find out how much he hated Norwegians, St. Patrick’s Day

————

but still was saying, Do you know what England is good for? Flying over. And the day is now almost gone and the night with only three hours to run and under the weather as the people in the pub have drifted into shadow. Like a kid being questioned: What was it like? It was just like, you know? I don’t know. You do, you’re only having me on. You want me to talk about the man over there with the scar for a smile and the woman without a hand who wipes her lips with the stump of an arm. Patriots down from the North on holiday but not putting my nose where it ain’t wanted and where I don’t want to go. Just a couple of months ago they blew apart a bunch of people a couple of blocks from here and didn’t people go over and see if there were any blood stains to be seen. Nearly to the end of the Dane and in need of another. Drinking alone is the true sign of a man who loves his own company. Regretted asking the barman what was going on in Dublin on a night like this. Should have known what he was thinking, as the answer was I wasn’t going to the dances or one of those new late night places where you got to be careful of your money. Are the dances still the same? You know, men on one side and the girls on the other. Things don’t change that much, the barman says going toward the other end of the bar. But not getting on with the night. I am. I got that woman over there without an arm. Didn’t I give you that a moment ago? Should she walk by me on the way to the ladies and pardoning herself ask me if I had the time? For what? The time, the time on your wrist, man. Just after nine, if my watch isn’t broken. Sounds right. Check your head. Thanks for the dance. Work quickly on the beer in front of him. The woman will be coming back and only maybe two or three minutes during which time she will be telling her 250-pound near retarded son, your man over there said a rude thing to your mother and need I ask what are you going to do about it. ————

107

Just glad to be out on the street and the over-coated sea sliding past, mingled with the dark suit-jacketed men and the women: alone. WOMEN TO JOIN HUNGER STRIKE To walk down Grafton Street—an end to this business of whether I am going up or down Grafton Street—hand in hand with my love. We say nice things to each other and plan to braid our gray hair. Puke into our cupped hands and offer it up. I do not walk quickly, now, this night. I know where I am going. Place the hero in front of where Tyson’s used to be and remember meeting Brian Moore down in Virginia and noticing his raincoat and scarf both came from Tyson’s and having no chance to do his shopping in Tyson’s as a gentleman should have: What will the ragpickers think when they go through clothes upon death? Standing where Tyson’s used to be . . . Not going into Neary’s. Instead yes, by the back door like the actors do, escaping from the Gaiety, across the alleyway. The place is packed so does the Beep Beep Beep Beep, recognizes a Micheal who has his name now into Irish Micheál and is on the radio. But born an asshole, always an asshole. Should have stopped and talked with Micheál and made a point of using the English pronunciation just to . . . knew you from before you had an excuse. Now he is claiming his mind had turned into mashed potatoes because of the demands of the mass media and O, how they didn’t recognize genius and it’s all because of you Americans with your cheap television for export. Micheál says, You’ve been away? Years. It’s been that long? Yes. On holiday? Sort of. Got to be getting over to Grogan’s. Looking at watch. I go there sometimes, but not too often, Micheál says. What are you doing these days? Writing. I do some work for the radio and television when the chance comes along. And yourself? St. Patrick’s Day

————

My father died. That can be full-time job of work. Can I get you a drink? Another time. I do have to get over to Grogan’s. Then a small one. Whiskey, I reply. Irish? No, American, since you’re buying and are in the business. There is something unfair in getting Micheál with an expensive drink but I am not here to win and influence friends. Fuck him and all his kind. Where is this anger coming from. I’m talking to it. A tall skinny sort of guy with a rat’s rash of moustache across his upper lip and a thin leather case for carrying his poetry and inner-office memos about getting out and making a story from the clouds drifting over the mountains and how they have a peculiar Irish cast to them, that only an Irish poet is capable of finding. Have you kept up with many of the people from the old days, from the New Amsterdam, but I am sure that is long ago. That place has been closed for some time. A lot of things have changed in Dublin. You can say that again and again. But we are now part of the Common Market and life is more interesting. Where are you staying? The Russell. A nice place. They’re getting ready to pull it down, you know. I’ve heard, but I always wanted to stay there from when I was a student and walking by the place on the way to UCD from the bus. Have you tried the restaurant yet? No. Excellent. A couple of stars from the Guide Michelin, if I’m not mistaken. Food doesn’t interest me. Get an expense account and it will. Micheál pays for the drinks and I raise my glass to take a sip and then: All the best, Micheál. The same to you. There is a moment of waiting for the talk to begin again. I do not feel the whole room waiting to see what we are about to say now. ————

109

Have you been to America, yet? No. I’ve been quite busy here. I go over to London more times than I care to remember. I’ve never been tempted by the States. I’ll be right back. Watch my drink. It’s under observation, as the forces of law and order put it. I push my way through the crowd to the men’s at the back of the bar, out the door and into the men’s off the little area between the outside door and inside. I’LL EAT YOUR SAUSAGE LEAVE NUMBER DO YOU REQUIRE MUSTARD? GERMAN OR SWEDISH? DO IT THE DUTCH WAY ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE AND PALM AND HER FOUR SISTERS THIEF!!!!!!!!!!!

What have you been doing with your life? Micheál asks. I was living in New York and then in Virginia—no, I was in Wisconsin and then in Virginia and then in New York. I was over to Europe last year while my father was still alive and then we went together to Newfoundland and Mexico. Sounds like a lorry driver’s life to me. Not as well paid. Conversations belong on the stage. We’re in a bar and I am having a conversation. It wasn’t planned this way. I would have preferred to have myself walk through this whole mess, silent and gazing. I knocked back the rest of the whiskey and took a couple of sips of water. I have to be getting on my rounds; ministering, I am, to the memory of my years in this place. Is the patient in critical condition? At the moment it’s a toss-up. You got to let the matter fall where it may and keep your umbrella at the ready. Out the door. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Chatham and Balfe Street perpendicularing itself into it reminding me of Sebastian’s middle name in The Ginger Man. I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls. I could go across the street and sit in the broken-down pub, known as a hideout, but I would only be hiding out from myself and myself is not on the run.

————

111

McDaids

The inside of the bar-restaurant begins to feel like a uterus. —Nicole Brossard

I

go along Balfe Street and into the side of McDaids. The guards are in the snug working their way through a troop of pints. They look up: white faces and red noses stop-lighted dead center.

John Lennon is shot to death

I nod to the soldiers of the cross-burning party. They do not nod back and return to their pints looking for . . . I will not compromise them. I look to the edge of my jacket sleeve. It is unraveling to fringe. My nose itches. I itch it, am putting one foot in front of the other. The name of the dance tune is obscure. I have a place at the end of the bar with my back to the snugly corner. I look down the length of the bar. Yellow fingers point and mouths open in belches. Not too many people sitting along the walls. It is a quiet night. Someone said the people had moved on from McDaids. It was a rough crowd they got in most nights. Drugs!!! were known to be talked about on the premises though no attempt was being made to run a disorderly place of business Halfway down the bar an American stood straight as an arrow with pint within reach. He had a waxed moustache and an antique business. Only when he was very drunk would he talk to me. Sober, he needed no reminders of where he came from. He had a shop in Dawson Street, just down from where I always remembered an American woman had a dress factory, she called it—more like a sweat shop without the undocumented Spanish surnamed workers. She had been friends with Silya, the Icelandic woman I met as the first foreign person I exchanged words with on my first journey abroad, in Reykjavik, where she was working as a receptionist in a student hotel where I had gone for lunch. St. Patrick’s Day

————

I talked about her. She would be on the porch of the National Library. Going home to Iceland to have a baby or an abortion. She thought to keep the child. Your American man was pulling in his gut. Not much of one to do it with if you ask me, who when I stood to pee had trouble finding it down there, shrinking it was back up into my own body. And glad of that. Am I close to understanding why Hemingway cut the balls off his guy in The Sun Also Rises? It’ll be a pint, I say, and the barman goes to work. A moment of nakedness, waiting to be made a complete man standing in McDaids. We had been sitting in here, Tim and me, a month or so before I went back to America, another year it was. Tim had a crooked back and was a serious student of the literature. He had more money and was even then thinking about devoting his life to the study of Wallace Stevens. I was drinking gin and bitter lemon while Tim was working on his pint, sitting in the late Saturday afternoon gloom. Cancel the gloom. The man next to us on the bench leans away from us and spews out an afternoon’s worth of stout. He stands carefully avoiding the stomach spill. It is a moment until the smell reaches our noses. Half-digested Guinness, perfume of the night when mingled with urine pissed up against shop doorways in Rathmines Road. At least he’d been drinking on an empty stomach. The man goes downstairs to freshen up, wiping lips and chin of the spill on the sleeve of his gray suit jacket. Carefully explained to me about the necessity of tweed in this country of frequent rain and showers: all different sorts of showers. Your man comes back upstairs holding onto the rail for dear life saying something about having visited a marbled hell and it was very wet, a wet hell. The priests were lying to us, do you hear me. The barman is mopping up the spill and is telling the man he is listening to his theological disquisition but finding it hard to follow in the ebb and flow of this more basic argument on the floor. If only you could have made it to the hell you speak of . . . A pint, your man is shouting at the barman. A pint it is. A pint it was, the man behind the bar says. And a pint it will be. Will be, he replies. Redundancy will get you nowhere. The man fell back on the bench and as Tim turned his back to him the man was turning his back to Tim. ————

115

The pint was delivered. There had been no violence. The mop was given some use. Helps when tax time comes along to provide evidence of depreciation of the premises. Wallace Stevens, you say, Tim? I remember asking him. I like the use of stone in his work. In our knowing that in the final end of us all we end up finally with a stone, tantalizingly placed six feet away from us. I prefer blondes here and now. Trust stone, Tim said. And the pint tonight is as good as gone. Dining out/or/in. The members of the dinner party. Barbara, her husband, Jonathan (Barbara’s brother), the girl friend of Jonathan whom he has known for some time. She has four children, mostly still at home—a fact collected from somewhere, as is: Jonathan left behind a house, a wife, and his children who still will not talk to their father, but he finally seems to be happy though not that happy because of the situation he left behind. Not unhappy to have left that situation, according to his sister, and Nuala is there as am I who am noting the difficulties in all of this and I don’t know if Jonathan and wife are divorced and whether the girlfriend is divorced because in Ireland either in the North or in the Republic, even with divorce now allowed, there are many arrangements made: some a hangover from the past and some just continuing and why all the bother of going back to the courts or even going to court because nothing ever good came from the courts. The complexity of the dinner. Framed. it has to be. by what I no longer remember because as I was saying you must record this even though it seems like those dinners in books nowadays when literate people engage in thinking about something other than brand-name comparison shopping. You must write it down. I must write it down. Get beyond the six adults in conversation but somehow find a way to indicate the accents, the tone of voices, the pauses, the closing of the eyes, the goings away from the table, the eating, the menu: what was on the menu, at what hour did we all sit at table and begin the meal, when did the thinking begin of what had happened during the dinner, did Barbara turn away during

St. Patrick’s Day

————

the dinner or had she turned away a long time before that, back in New York City when I refused or did not. How to look? How to decide? Even as we were at table I would look across to Barbara eating with intensity, tasting each mouthful, wanting to talk about the texture of the food, the tastes, the balance between the various dishes, and here she was stuck with people who were launched into the North, launched into what was happening, what had happened what might happen and what had happened years before and how easily it was all gone into, even the personal stuff, now. Melville had been naïve not to know of how dangerous it was for any thoughtful man to write about the early loss of his beloved father and the loss of a fine home and education in fine schools. Easily written, Redburn was now exacting its psychic price in forcing Melville to confront soberly what he had seized upon merely as handy materials for a quickly written narrative.

The conversation revolved around Jonathan. He was the oldest and a historian. He had written histories of Ulster and Belfast. He taught in a college of higher education—he had never been offered a chair at a university. He had never wanted that, so he said, and people just didn’t make up lists of people to offer chairs to. You had to put yourself forward and some people had the knack for doing it and others, well, they got what they got and he had gone to the North because he was in love. Is there any other reason to do something? I told them of starting to write as a way to say hello to Melinda. Well, Jonathan says, I went to the North after Trinity and as these stories often do, it didn’t work out and I was now living in the North and didn’t want to go anywhere else. I know it sounds strange but that is just the way it worked out. Your bread upon the waters, I turned to Nuala. She did not recite the poem she is famous for but reminded us it was not herself upon the waters but the words in the Irish language that were then changed into English and they went out and she had no control over where they might take her and she was taken to Japan, to Turkey, to Italy, to Estonia, to Finland, to America so many occasions and all the time meeting people who wanted something from her. It was a frightening experience to be

————

117

met by people who wanted something from you, who wanted something by just being in the room with you and she not knowing what exactly it was they were looking for and she was sure they probably didn’t know what they were looking for but all of that longing . . . I am not providing dialogue to be made into a play or words to be set to pictures. Never in the course of the evening did the conversation turn to cinema or to the television except for a brief mention of Father Ted because I brought it up and they all agreed, everything that could be said had been said and now it was the rest of the world’s turn to catch on and how boring it would all be and now there is nothing more dated than a funny television series that had taken its course and is now being sold around the world. Possibly the only thing funnier is the figure of the former prime minster of a Balkan country—like Philip or as he so described himself, I am saying, but they do not want to go down the Balkan road as it is all too close to the world in the North and we are blessed with our own problems and don’t have to go looking into the world for something to read about. How people hunger for these insoluble situations, Jonathan says, the news articles cobbled together from the old files, the television programs, the memoirs, and finally the films of two people caught up in the storms of hate and passion and how to keep ducking and fucking, you could say is the implication, while providing a bittersweet ending of having survived again to reappear in another troubled spot and aghast that I didn’t see the potential for that . . . you are a writer and you are supposed to be able to spot the ripe sources of entertainment . . . is that now what our poets are for: lightning rods for making a euro or a . . . ? But I am not interested, I say, in that . . . I only care for the present moment and what has gone on in the past that allows us all here to be sitting having a dinner. It comes down to my meeting Barbara how many years ago and her saying goodbye, no, my saying goodbye and almost immediately knowing I had made a mistake and how my whole life has been lived in that mistake, everything has been a mistake. That’s why his wife is divorcing him, Nuala says. You heard it from his own mouth. Imagine having to listen to such stuff and the two beautiful children and him saying it was all a mistake. St. Patrick’s Day

————

It is all just literature, Jonathan’s girlfriend says. Many a man feels like that . . . I have felt like that. It is the most ordinary of feelings. A feeling any parent must have some time if they are honest in themselves though most people dare not ever to say it and you can imagine in a country like this . . . the way you know the truth of what I am saying is by looking at how people actually treat their children and live with them. A country like this, Nuala says. Don’t I know what this country is capable of. Didn’t my own parents get an order of protection against the man who would be my husband. I had to wait until I was eighteen and they hoped I would wait until hell froze over. But it just made me stronger in determination and sent me faster away. And they are talking about complicated relationships, arrangements, and not only arrangements in the Irish sense of where to put the body once the life had gone out of it, but arrangements for the living and how to dispose of the children and the lovers that accumulate with the years and the thoughts of those people and how they seem to sometimes set up shop but most are just a pretense of unspoken possibility, never to fall into bed or against a wall in Dalkey, quickly now, get it over with and then can you control yourself, please, please, control yourself and a man at your age and a woman at your age . . . Don’t get old you’ll regret it, the husband says. He is an assiduous glass filler. He keeps them topped up with an assortment of red and white wines and was there any beer?—I think not. Wine has become the drink of choice. This is the modern moment in Ireland. Vintages, countries, names, the whole rigmarole of sipping is put in place and moves the conversation right along. The backs of many bottles are to be broken this night, he says. The accident of a meeting, I say. I wonder if there is way to talk about it? Probably not. An historian is always pretending there are no accidents, Jonathan says. The historian is always trying to fit everything into his narrative. Over the years in my classes, I have had the boys from all the armies in the North. History lessons don’t seem for a moment to have changed a single one of them. They either learned only what they wanted to learn or I did something wrong or was I too good of a historian so you could take whatever you wanted to make whatever case you wanted. I don’t know if this answers what you have just said. ————

119

My family is all scattered, I am saying, not like here in Ireland where everyone is either directly keeping in touch or turning your back, right there, when you run into someone from the family on Grafton Street, say. I went many years ago now to a “family reunion” in a park near Levittown on Long Island. Uncle Bill said he remembered when you came by with a girl with long blonde hair. Deirdre and I stood around and waited for it to be over, the Family Reunion. We didn’t have anything to say to any of the cousins or their children. We had known all of them every few weeks of driving to Levittown and giving out our toys as they were outgrown. Kevin was not there. He was the oldest and closest in age to Deirdre and me. Later, we were told he was living somewhere in the City and was a junkie after getting out of the Marines. He just could not get his life together and he had not even been to Vietnam. Uncle Bill died young, as they say . . . Aunt Emily his wife fell down the stairs into the basement and was dead. Just a family story. Where do they fit in? People drink from their glasses . . . A PERSON HAS ONLY SO MUCH APOLOGY WITHIN.

I once knew a woman, I began again, I was the guest from abroad, as someone said, in New York and not in that way known, since the evening moves along and thoughts are turning to such matters though don’t worry they didn’t get much further than this thought: this woman said she saw a woman at the Center for Inter-American Relations on Park Avenue and knew she had to buy a dress just like the one the woman was wearing because in the next week she would be in Mexico and she was going to meet a man who was going to change her life and who she would be in love with and who would change her life forever. And so the next week she was in Mexico City visiting with Luisa Valenzuela and she said as they were walking to this little gathering she said to Luisa that she was going to meet someone at this gathering and her life was going to change and when she walked into the room a man was sitting playing a guitar and she sat down in front of him and when he stopped playing she said, I am here. The man looked at her and that was that. It was the most inconvenient moment and the woman: he could imagine. He had just left Argentina, and here I was and he also knew . . .

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Do you know if I read this I wouldn’t believe it and I guess I should not believe it just because she told me but it was in answer to my telling her of getting off the train at five o’clock in the afternoon in Sofia and meeting Lilia and I guess it is the same as meeting Barbara in Jessie’s rooms in Trinity . . . do you remember when there were all those African students in Dublin. Simba. Simba. Simba, Jonathan says, and I smile as no one else remembers that was what little kids said as the Africans walked by because that was the tribe which killed an Irish soldier in the Congo or was that after some African chopped up his girlfriend and stored the part in his luggage and the kids were mixing the two stories together? The guy with the luggage was an Indian . . . wasn’t it above the Green Lantern in Harcourt Street? Jonathan asks. All that seems long ago. How do you remember, Barbara says, all of it. I just know I have so many things to remember at work and here in the house and I have all those books to read for my course and not to speak of the papers to write and when did I ever get the time to do any thinking: remembering is beyond me. Sometimes I think I am jealous of all your free time to remember and to think. But surely you are remembering all the time . . . No, why should you think that? It just seems. You’re a typical American, more than you think you are, always knowing what is best for other people and never looking at the mess in your own country, though it was very nice to be in America last year . . . though maybe Canada was even nicer and Nuala, we had just come back from a wedding and again how nice it was but how busy everything is. It is beyond me how people find the energy to do everything they do. He is busy, Nuala says. So busy, busy and the life there is not so easy . . . I don’t recognize my actual life in this. from Pickup on South Street: security isn’t interested in confusion.

You’re not conscious, Nuala says. That’s what his wife Katherine says all the time. He is not conscious and expects other people to watch

————

121

out for him and the mess he doesn’t realize he leaves behind. Actually I don’t know if that is fair because I don’t know really what has gone on: I hear both sides of the story and I am no tale carrier, just as I am surprised by how busy everyone is . . . But Jonathan, Barbara suddenly says, you CAN’T move to Donegal. It is so far away . . . (in her voice, emotion, piercing) I’ve driven the road and worked it on the map it is not, you must believe me. It is. It is much farther away and it is not getting easier with my mother and your mother, our mother, I might say. It is just so unfair and mother thinks you are very far away and when she talks about you it is as if you were on the other side of the earth. That is how old people think geography . . . a little like children. If you are not right in front of them every moment of the day you are not part of their lives. It is not that. I need to know you are around. I am tired of being the only responsible one. You know your sister is not around . . . She lives even closer to our mother than you do. But you know she is not really there. The place in Donegal is not that far away and you just have to remember it, believe me . . . if you had a map, I’d show you. When I hear the word Donegal—it was the only thing I remember my father having said about his father: he came from Donegal. My cousin found the place, Malin Head but I have never been there. My grandfather was long dead before I was born . . . The husband decides it is time for the cognac. He got the bottle the last time he was on union business, abroad. Everyone likes to drink a bargain, he says. Malin Head is very beautiful, Jonathan says. But until recently there was no way to eat on beauty in Ireland. People had to leave. Now they are said to be coming back. Unlike say England or France the Irish story is not complete unless you include the story of those who went away. But it is hard to write history of what it is like for a people’s story to be made up of a large numbers of people who have gone away and both groups of people don’t like talking about the subject. In America, not that I have been there, so you might know better, but I do believe the Irish Americans don’t like to think about what Ireland St. Patrick’s Day

————

is really like and the Irish here don’t like to include those people overseas as part of their own story: they just see them as a source of money, an easy touch, and that easy touch makes people contemptuous—but it is a delusion for sure . . . I say, as I have said before, I feel when I have come to Ireland I have that feeling: why am I back here again? We have heard that before, Nuala says. And the reason for your feeling is you are coming to visit a place that doesn’t exist anymore—even if it did once exist and I doubt it ever did exist . . . you are just walking a lot of disappointment. No one cares about you walking about in the city. No one cares, and that is the root of why you are unhappy about Dublin, not to speak of Ireland, a place you know nothing about. Truth cuts either deeply or is but a superficial aside inside the dream. A man was screaming on Thompson Street: you ain’t shit, you ain’t even born, you’re an embryo, you ain’t even born, I live on the block, I own the block, you ain’t even born.

No Yeats or eventually Kavanagh, please. None of those poets. None of this right to live, none of this right to choose stuff. I would give you journalism but that is even a greater delusion. The newspaper comes out six days a week—at least the Irish Times does. And dreams on the seventh? If one knew what they did on the seventh . . . There is a pushing back from the table but people do not get up and go into the sitting room or the kitchen. They stay in the dining room and sit. The table has been cleared and Barbara has out the jar of chocolates I picked up in the duty free in London and people are unwrapping the little pieces of darkness. The action of people opening little packages of chocolates seems to be part of the way people live in Europe. The constant going and coming on business and then holidays that always included the duty free or was the holiday just an excuse to go to the duty free much in the way that going to a museum was a reason to go to the museum shop . . . in New York they now have museum shops all over the city so you don’t have to go to the actual museum . . . saves people the bother of pretending. I wish there was more real pretending today. Anything to avoid hypocrisy. ————

123

I am never aware people are telling me stories. I always take what people say as the truth. Another bottle of something is placed on the table and the conversation repeats itself. Jonathan, you must not move so far away. I just won’t hear of it. You can’t move that far away. But what about that woman in New York, Jonathan asks. Did the meeting with the man change her life? She lived with him as a common-law wife and they were very much together and yet they grew apart as the years took them away from that meeting in Mexico City and they went their ways. He died and she was telling me this story about how the meeting had changed her life. It didn’t work out but the meeting did work out. As we are leaving Barbara suddenly says, we didn’t appreciate the wonderful flowers you brought. I’ll be thinking of you as long as the flowers last. I should have brought plastic flowers. Yours will last long enough. No, they won’t Nuala says. Every step is a step closer to death. Call me at work. You have the number. Let it ring. I go to lunch from 1 to 2:30. Only twice was Nuala on the wrong side of the road going back to her house. She goes directly to bed. We’ll have time to talk in the morning. You don’t mind me leaving you out to the airport a little early as I have to pick up the child from school. As long as we have time to go to the bookshops and Barbara said she could meet us for lunch. I’m to call her and we can go to Grogan’s. She works in Dublin Castle. From one castle to another castle. Fine with me. It’s been said. Everything has been said before in Ireland. It’s your weekend, your coming to Ireland, again. You shouldn’t let your imagination run away with you. Men. It was a nice evening. Barbara is not interested in that. Sunday in Dublin Barbara has fallen behind. She has to get a start on the day, has to get down to doing all the work she has left undone, with you coming on your visit to Dublin. I have all these books to read for the course. I have so much work to do. I can’t go to Howth. I know you St. Patrick’s Day

————

asked about going to Howth but I am not on holiday. During the week I have a very demanding job. I enjoy it, as I told you, but it leaves me no time during the week. You don’t know about things like this. You have friends in Dublin you can ask. Why don’t you just call your friend Nuala. Maybe she will want to go to Howth with you. I don’t feel like it. I can’t go. I knew what was not being said. Barbara and I should have done something in New York and now there was no way to talk about it. Not mentioned. Something we do not talk about. Just like that: married for many years and something we do not talk about. Having arranged, eventually, for Nuala to come by, I was called down to meet Fiona, Barbara’s daughter by the man in London, and she is talking about living on her own and how she could not imagine, for one second, what it must be like to have to share your home, your space with another person, how cramped it must be, always tiptoeing around, not wanting to make a noise and him or her doing the same. Now she can come and go as she wants and not have to be beholden to anyone, not have to announce what she is doing or wanted to do. I mentioned Jonathan saying last night that Nuala’s first language was Irish and how she came into the world by way of the Irish language, while for everyone else in the room the world was described by English, and while it seemed like there was something to be learned in all of the sudden silence there is only a dreary frustrated silence produced because none of us sitting at table could take the conversation to a place from where more sentences could be produced as I asked Fiona if she could read Irish as I assumed she had it at school. Fiona had Irish at school, Barbara said. We all had it, Irish at school, but it never meant anything. It was just one of those things you had to do like maths and it was never explained in a way anyone could see it as being part of their lives. I suspect Nuala was just an exception, one of those exceptions and I suppose . . . Nuala came by with her younger daughter and we drove into the city. The daughter would sit in the back seat of the car unwrapping pieces of candy. Barbara did not ask when I would be back but she did say she had so much to read so please, I hope you understand and next year I have the final exams . . . ————

125

The brass-handled doors of the Natural History Museum opened and we walked through taken immediately by the Irish elk, the Irish eagle. T.H. Parke stood outside on his chunk of stone having marched across Africa

Fish, birds, animals, and all the stuff about the natural world. All that world beyond the human central nervous system. Collected by so and so down in the country. Lives filled up with picking up stuff, stocking the emptiness of lives— I’ll not be coming back to Dublin, I tell Nuala. Suit yourelf. Nuala finds words in these exhibits. She was sent back to Ireland from England where her parents were city doctors, to spend her childhood summers with a grandmother in the country. I never go to the country, I say. You are missing . . . Don’t tell me. I know. I am sure. I am missing. I think of the country as a place where you get wet and are alone. You can be alone if you want to be. I don’t want to be. I would rather have strangers crowding up about me than all the prettiest hills and coast line and all that stuff. Why are we so sour, all of a sudden. You were never Mr. Cheerful. Never have I heard you ask a question. Nuala leaves me back to Barbara’s house. It is later than we realized. I am sleepy. The child was asleep in the back seat. Barbara is reading in her chair. In the front room. The husband is at the paper. She has to study. She is sorry. Maybe we can talk in the morning. I wish I could talk but I just have so much reading to do. Was it okay in the city? That museum is interesting. I used to go there at lunch. It was comforting to see all the stuffed animals. The order of it all. Good night, now

TO HAVE BEEN Happiness the contemptible life goal of illiterates —Elias Canetti

Monday morning and into Dublin. Even after the rush hours the cars still back up because they all have to fit into the usual bottleneck. The St. Patrick’s Day

————

horror of living in distant parts. At the post office containers are lined up collecting for the missions: SHALOM SMA PLEASE HELP THE MISSIONS HOLY ROSE HILL MISSIONS PADRE PIO CAPUCHIN FOREIGN MISSIONS

You can’t walk out from Nuala’s house and you could find yourself stuck here without a car and the meaning of no money, of being poor. Everything is relative, Nuala says, and of course to what? She puts the car into a car park. The elevator is broken so we have to go down the stairs. Across the malled Grafton Street, when back then, the buses came hurtling down the street they kept you on your toes. Over to Hodges Figgis and Nuala says to buy a book of Yeats’s paintings, you can’t go wrong with that, a souvenir of your visit, the variety of books on Ireland, the self-absorption of a small country, the standing army of Irish poets is lined up and at the ready. We do not go into the Carmelite church as we cut through the alley over to Grogan’s. The only place they understood you. You could go there and get absolution for anything, not like the parish priests. A warm place in the city. Into Grogan’s by the front door. A formal visit you could say. The owner is on duty. Monday morning and all that. Shows a respect for his employees. Tommy buys us a lunch of sandwiches, coffee, and a cold Coke for Mr. T., he is saying in a low voice that Jim Fitzgerald is not dead and in an even lower voice, he is in hospital with the Alzheimer’s. Liam Brady still comes in and his year in prison for the IRA has now reached twenty years . . . and before he is dead he will have been in prison for more years than he has been alive. Dickie Riordan doesn’t come in but it is known he is in McCarthy’s on Rathmines Road from 7 to 7:30 every evening. Fintan is behind the key. He was out of his head. One day down on O’Connell Street, something happened. He could have been behind bars. He had his routine you could say. He had a brother who was in business and Fintan would have the check by his way and was on his way to cash it but he just needed a little cash . . . Tommy Smyth made the delicate gesture with his fingers in the way Fintan had ————

127

with the going into someone’s wallet looking for the cash or cards. As if he was carefully removing a girl’s knickers or brushing his mother’s hair, he is saying. Mr. J. died in Wales, you know that, a sausage roll while lying in bed and not getting up ever again. The journalists and the television keep calling us up to make sure we haven’t changed the place. Of course they’re disappointed with no story but they still have this need to know we haven’t changed the place and I’ll not be changing the place. Some things should stay the way they are. I was in America, in Massachusetts, the other year, where I have some relatives and the changing that goes on over there. But you people are used to it and we are getting used to it not like the boys across the sea in England . . . In the midst of this and so passing quickly through the litany of the missing in action, Barbara shows up. Slipping in the door and right into the bench next to Nuala. Tommy has a cup of coffee and bowl of soup brought over to her because she doesn’t want a sandwich. I’m always impressed by the sandwiches, I say. As little meat as possible and still calling them sandwiches. They don’t want to expose you to mad pig disease, Barbara says. I was delayed a bit and just got away. Usually there is no problem but you know the answered phone call . . . Barbara agrees it is nice to be in a place that isn’t all fixed up but then it is nice to go to a place that is fixed up. It makes for a bit of difference after all the years when nothing changed. Nuala says this was the first place she came to when she came up to Dublin from Cork and Tommy was the first person she met in Dublin and he would cash her a check now and then and so Tommy has always been a friend, a port of call, a place of safety. It’s nice you saying that but I wouldn’t go that far. Is this an example of the plámás you were accusing me of last night? I wasn’t accusing you of anything on Saturday night, Barbara says, but you are just such a desperate flatterer, sometimes. The word is popular, Tommy says. It is, Nuala says. Lets people know you know a couple of words in the Irish. It’s a good sign. Gives us a bit of distinction. We are not all that easy to figure out. Times spent figuring and sorting out. The Irish figure out and the English sort. St. Patrick’s Day

————

We have to be going because Nuala has to collect her child and drop me before to the airport and Barbara has to get back to her real job. Barbara and I embrace but do not kiss and I have no sense of her body and it is as if . . . just the rush away and knowing something special happened, even if it was only remembering Tommy buying us all lunch and that is not something much heard of in Dublin: a pub owner giving away food and drink, even if it was only a Coke, coffees, and some sandwiches along with the news of Michael Hartnett coming into the pub and announcing he had just been in St. Pat’s for two months. The poet he was talking to replied he had been in for three months and Sydney Bernard Smith who was of course listening in said he’d been in for six months and another one piped up saying he had been in for a year and finally from a distant corner someone said he’s been in for two years . . . Tommy was saying he realized he was the only one who hadn’t been in the looney bin so he must be the external keeper of the flame. To the airport by car. Nuala drives me up O’Connell Street, past the GPO, the missing Nelson’s Pillar, the joke of the scrubbers shouting after the men who are going on about the empty fork or empty fuck or whatever it might be and—what you got wouldn’t fill it. The chrome Italian chip shops with the country girls working as waitresses for the first place to stay in Dublin and the Gresham where the well-off uncle (he has a good pension if he says so himself) would stay, back then on that twenty-one-day tour of the old country and to escape it all back then in the cinemas on Saturday afternoon while the memory clogs up. On the radio a man is talking about Leonard Cohen. Music to slit your wrists to, the commentator reports. I get a couple tins of Coke at a little shop on the Swords Road and do not win the Evening Herald Christmas Cash Match. The Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succor is gone by and it was a good time over at Barbara’s house and I don’t know why her husband seems to talk in a such a low quiet panting voice? I didn’t notice that. He was very nice. Considerate. He listened very carefully to what you had to say. But he speaks in that low whisper, as if he is confiding in you about something but all he is talking about is the weather or his plane flight back from London. There is something a bit too ingratiating for my taste. ————

129

He is married to Barbara that is what you are saying. It is beyond that. He’s always been nice. He even gave me a picture biography of Flann O’Brien he got at work, on the last visit. But that voice. He’s a nice man. He’s just married to Barbara and she seems very happy. Nuala leaves me at the departure entrance. She will be in New York in three months. I hope you have laid some of your ghosts. I wouldn’t put it that way, the laying business. You have been back and I hope you will be able to come back again. To see Dublin as it is not just as you remember it. Is there any other way? No one is asking me back. Go on with you. Have a good flight. I’ll see you in New York. Beckett’s face on the posters in the departure lounge. A quote about Dublin and he being one of the four Nobel Prize winners who have celebrated Dublin in their work and by the accident of their birth. I bought a cassette of the group Anuna, “Deep Dead Blue.” As far from the green green hills of those Irish Irish eyes of Kevin Barry who . . . Again, why had I come back. A wonderful time was had by all. I had not been one of the four tourists robbed at knifepoint or even one of the two who had been robbed by people holding blood-filled syringes . . . Do I love my old love of it? (ah the sentimental) Leaving Dublin for the very last time January visit: if this was a Romanian film even the sub-titles would need sub-titles Barbara was in the kitchen bundled, it appeared, against the chill though she said it looked like a nice morning. You have the luck with you, you do get used to the chill. It wakes you up. And a good thing as she had to be rushing since she had to be on time and it was just one of those mornings. She wished she could linger but today is one of those days. I’m sorry the visit has been so rushed for you but then you were just dropping in, as it were, and you have so many friends, maybe next time it would be better if you stayed with one of them who had more time for themselves and you’re on holiday and would have to understand . . . could I be getting you anything for breakfast though I think

St. Patrick’s Day

————

you said you didn’t really bother to have anything in the morning. There is no yogurt; I should have got it last night or you should have gotten it last night when you were out with your friends if you knew what you had wanted, Jonathan is back up this morning to the North and I am just so rushed. She passes me the Irish Times: worry and stress spill over quickly into depression and there is the bubble of anger and frustration that their voices are not being heard. How sad we are, surely, as we hear of the experiences of these women who dread the milestones that usually provide joy for parents: Christmas, First Communion, Confirmation—so many stones of stress with the raw expense, the debts . . . A frosty morning and no time really to talk as it would be so good, really, but she is saying she uses the train ride to think into her day coming on . . . the train is new, the suddenness of the sea wipes away the grime of the city . . . school kids on their way to school. Backpacks stuffed with books. How much we expect of them, she is saying . . . It didn’t happen. What was supposed to happen? If I knew I did not turn away on Grafton Street. We are adults now. At Tara Street Station some sort of construction. This is where the baths had been, behind Trinity. Barbara is off along the quays to her job up in the Castle and I am to cross the bridge, the sea out there to my right, to Busárus. Sadness, now of not coming back to Dublin without the comforting visions of exile or the sad going away because of circumstances or the going home, finally. stepped into the deepest unhappiness —Howard Devoto

Too many whatever you want to call it. Just a going away but not really as I am going back to England and then down to the countryside where the words: you’re such a snob: going down to the countryside. ————

131

Bye to Barbara. Bye to Dublin never the freedom of just going to Ireland for the hell of it. How intimate one becomes when among the Irish! And then five minutes later: who are you? Bits and pieces of feeling. When I was in England after the visit with Barbara, Helen took me dinner after we saw Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds where we met up with a friend of hers. This friend’s husband had, in her own words, gone somewhere. He went somewhere, Helen says. He was Japanese and he had three children with Helen’s friend. One had been a dancer with a ballet company in Copenhagen and had danced in all the Scandinavian countries. She was thought to be promising when it happened. They had been very proud of her. There was then a sort of divorce, the friend said. The children had gone to live with their father in Japan. They didn’t want to live in England with her. The friend had been to see the children and they seemed happy. Maybe things would work out, she had thought. Nothing had really been settled as you Americans like to settle things. But you are American, Helen said. Only legally the friend replied. Something happened in Japan. The husband had been a ship’s captain and was now on land. He became disgusted with the shape of his children’s eyes. He knew what he had to do. One day he cut with a knife the eyes out of the heads of the children while they slept. Two of them died immediately from the shock and loss of blood. The third child survived and lived with one eye. The father is now in a hospital. He will not talk about what happened. The Japanese are very sensitive about such matters. The daughter who survived is in a sanatorium in Switzerland. The Japanese government pays for her care. They did not know what to do with her in Japan. Helen said she didn’t like Beyond the Clouds. She didn’t like to think while watching a movie or even after seeing one. It is nice to feel a movie while you are watching it. That is what going to the movies is all about.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

En Route

It is imagination that loses battles. —Joseph de Maistre

The door shuts behind me. I am standing on the sidewalk. The noise is

in there and I am out here and wishing I was in there though I now have the job of walking along Grafton Street remembering earlier walks—

on Grafton Street I turned away or she turned away or we both turned away—along the street . . .

A sad time of it was had by all. A momentary lull as I think to cross Grafton Street again, not knowing still which end is top or bottom: I want to be heading toward Duke Street but only get a few steps from McDaids and this guy with a worn black leather jacket is standing in a doorway and saying he had been listening to me go on this afternoon with that tub of wind Liddy. Tub of guts you mean? Tub of wind. He ain’t here enough to be a tub of guts, just a tub of wind without any stink, that’s your man. Nothing to respect in or about him, bragging his first boyfriend at Glenstal is chief defense counsel for the IRA . . . Liddy published a good magazine and his poetry is okay. I don’t read that muck. What does he care about the working people. I have yet to meet them in Dublin. I am one of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked for a living. Not very hard, I’ll warrant you or bet you or any other affirmation you wish. I have. Good for you. I’ve been out working since I was twelve. I had a newspaper route, I said, when I was twelve. And a nice Mommy and Daddy at home, he said, smiling, how you Americans are always smiling. Don’t get me wrong. I like the American people, it’s just the pictures we see of them and what their politicians do in their name. It’s the same in this country—probably worse because fewer people have got a cut of the pie. St. Patrick’s Day

————

A piece of the pie? That’s the phrase, but I don’t like using phrases like that, the ears just slide over them and people don’t hear them but they must one of these days hear them. What are you doing? I work out at Fiat. Putting together them fucking cars and trying to build some sort of union mentality. Most people have about as much mentality as picking your nose. But I don’t blame ’em, I’m just the same except I read books when I get the chance and am not vulnerable to the depression Have you lurched into a socialist novel?

What’s your name? Pat of all names. But I wear it as a badge now after four years in London. Nothing like English life to make you really Irish. As if one ever doubts these things, if one is thinking. A lot of ifs. Yes, your man Pat was the guy named Joe, Joseph, met earlier— something like that: what’s in a name?

I know, it’s the ifs paralyzing one’s will. So back into the pub, a pint then? How should I know how to overcome it—you people with your fancy education and all the time in the world that have to give us some hope, some reason for going on: because when we stop the whole show stops. I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. Worse, worse, mark my words. Every man jack of them is for sale. He just hasn’t found a buyer yet. You Americans have a slogan: there’s a sucker born every minute. That terrible American optimism. More like every second, if you ask me. You said you were organizing. 2 fans kill selves over Lennon death

I am not for a moment gonna suggest I didn’t know this conversation was on the horizon. It was there all along. When am I gonna

————

135

say something about what Pat looks like. The wrinkles on Pat’s eyelids say he is much older than I would have at first guessed.

I should have stayed in America, Pat is saying. I was living in Los Angeles, are you from California by chance? No, I’m from Patchogue, it’s a village about sixty miles from New York City. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Los Angeles, as you Americans like to put it. I loved it but I had to get back here. It wasn’t my country. And a man only has one country and it doesn’t matter how much he tries to flee it he always carries it upon his back like that fuckin turtle with his shell. I stepped back. The hour is near on ten and I have places still to go and people to see. I like the Russians, Pat is saying, they’re like the Irish . . . I thought the Poles were like the Irish? I never heard that one. I read it once somewhere. Maybe V. S. Pritchett, he had written a book about the Irish and when he was doing one on the Poles he realized he was writing pretty much about the same sort of people. That’s an Englishman for you . . . they don’t even get the cart before the horse the way you Americans do, they line them up side by side and see which one they can be seen with, without giving offense. Well, as you know today in New York, there are only two kinds of people, Irish and those that wish they were. Heaven forbid, people hunger to be beaten. It’s often a wonder to myself and I’ve been taking a couple of the pints today and thank you . . . as he is draining the pint.

Alienation among adults still At high tide

I have to be going over to Grogan’s. Pat’s face got an expression on it. Needless to say I ordered two pints. Come with me when I go over to Grogan’s. Nah, I think I want to end up in Bartley Dunn’s. Dartley’s bums. You know our city!

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I do but not really. Back when I was here the last time I knew all these African guys and they liked going to Bartley Dunn’s to chase the women. Most don’t go there for that reason . . . So I’ve been told . . . but anyway they liked the place and they liked me because I was a foreigner and that’s what we had in common, we were foreigners and the Irish really don’t like foreigners. Go on with you. The pints arrive. We’ll always drink to our foreign visitors. If the foreigner is paying. Once he’s off to the bog you’re pinning him to the side of the shit house. Part of the sport of life; have to keep ourselves amused in this primitive country where the television goes off at 11:30 not like California where they try to fit a couple of extra hours into the 24, if they could . . . Some do, I’m sure, through the miracle of chemistry. Never tried the stuff . . . there was a lot around. We stand drinking our pints, as well as we are able. The language of the typing does not indicate that my brain as I am sure Pat’s brain was beginning to show the effects of our adding to the profits of Arthur Guinness. A token of cuteness demanded by a wanting to come up with a turn of phrase for the fact that we were launched, we were launching ourselves! . . . out into a dark and forbidding sea and are not to be held responsible for the consequences and if I knew how Pat was saying, We have black babies in Ireland. You know: they tell our Irish girls, you too can have for your own, your very own little African nigger baby, save it for Christ Jesus, just like your uncle is doing in Africa: just lie down and enjoy all three hundred pounds of African HEman. I think that’s why I went to California. Los Angeles is as far away from Ireland as one can get and still be speaking the English language. And you don’t need a religious or medical reason for going there. The ceiling of McDaids is high and vaulted: a former Pentecostal church so that there would be room, for the voices singing unto God before taking leave of the room; a sort of mixing bowl in which many disparate elements are added and subtracted on the way to reassuring God of his favor upon this island of talkers and liars forgive the poverty of

————

137

the play on the usual: I am not an English journalist wired with three or four Martells. Up there on the ceiling as if painted on with the yellow nicotine . . . YULE IN DENMARK Christmas is Denmark’s greatest annual family fling! December 24th Christmas Eve is the Danish Christmas. At 5 pm traditional Christmas services are held in churches. Back from church, the family sit down to Christmas dinner—a long ritual, often consisting of roast goose or duck stuffed with apples and prunes, and served with red cabbage and potatoes. After dinner, the family assembles round the tree, which is now lit by little candles. It’s the Danish custom at this point to all take one another by the hand and dance round the tree singing carols. This done, gifts are exchanged round the tree. Although Denmark has a “Yule man”, who looks very much like Santa Claus, Santa Claus hasn’t the same significance here as in the Anglo-Saxon world. Here a little sprite or Christmas hobgoblin, called a nisse, plays the dominant role in the Christmas fun and games. Remember, Glaedelig Jul is the Danish for “Merry Christmas”!

My hand was not shaking. I was unaware of my eyes changing color or any lack of clarity visible to the naked eye. My nose was done for the night. Pat lapsed into a silence. My mouth was moving but no words were articulated into sound. Could it be said that moments of reflection were on tap together with the pint of stout and a small whiskey for Pat since when I touched my left pocket I discovered a wad of paper there and it was all the brown and orange of five-pound denominations, not something to be sneered at. Waiting for someone to scrape the shit off the fan and begin the long poem again.

Irish 7 call off 52-day jail fast

Pat heads for the room telling me to watch out for his drink and I have a moment truly to myself before I have to deal with the crowds St. Patrick’s Day

————

pushing to the bar, demanding service from the now tired barmen. I have to be getting out of this place.

Jail warning for attacks on girls

He comes up from the room, shaking his body like a cat after it has been squeezed. I tell him to keep an eye on my pint. I descend to the room. The steps are slimy with tracked-up urine and water. You pee against a tiled wall and try to angle it so that it doesn’t splash back on your legs and hope the flush doesn’t go off because it floods the floor; the trough being stopped up with vomit and cigarette butts. Alone in front of the marble wailing wall. Pat, I should be going off to Grogan’s. It’s getting late and I want to put in my penny’s worth. It is a time of inflation. A couple of shillings, more likely. That’s what I am thinking and I am just in Dublin for a short time. Wish I could say the same for myself. I tip my head back with pint to lips and drain off a burping mouthful. The taste buds are back in shape. Glad to hear it. Don’t you think you need one for the road? Are you being a toucher? I am. Well so be it. I am touched and get your man over here The little barman with the hearing aid is brought over and given the order for a couple of pints. There should be some sort of exchange between the hard of hearing and the rattling tongues that should betray some sort of truth in the muddle in the middle. The pints are delivered. Money is spent and the pints begin their departure into another substance. Fear not, in a minute or so to get myself out of McDaids up to the corner of Grafton Street and decide to walk toward Trinity avoiding the question if he is going up or down Grafton Street by saying that he is heading toward College Green, a place that is not green by any stretch of the imagination: rather something like radio so having labeled it green we see green when we walk into College Green or possibly looked at the map and he is heading toward the green . . . but he hasn’t, YOU KNOW, he is still standing in McDaids with Pat and it is still minutes ————

139

before he will take himself to the corner of Grafton Street and decide that a quick visit to the Bailey would not be without interest. Pat, why don’t you come along to Grogan’s. I’m fine here, can’t you see that, MAN. I want to hit the Bailey too . . . There is no way on this planet of green apples will I go into that place. It’s okay, Pat. Really. Only an American can say that and get away with it. The Bailey is not for the likes of myself. They don’t have a man at the door or anything like that . . . I have him in here. Pat points to his head. At least he’s not at the door. Even for an American you’re really being thick. Years ago maybe I would have gone in there. I was in there back before the renovation before the one they did recently . . . Who wants to keep up with such stuff. Two sets of eyes looked about McDaids. Nicotined ceiling; Guinness being good for you: thin lips pulled back into toothless mouths: mutter mutter into the night so that . . . in, I am in for a couple of pints after a day’s work and had to get out of the house screaming all around me. Did I tell you the one about my friend who was over in London the other year when he found out that he was suddenly a rich man and couldn’t believe it, so went and asked at the pub he always went to, it was an Irish one but not one that you’d recognize because most of them standing around were West Indian . . . and it doesn’t matter that you don’t hear the rest of the story tonight because it will be ready there tomorrow when another one of these Americans come in looking for: what is it that you Americans come looking for? I have to go to the Bailey. It’ll round out the evening. There are a lot of ways of rounding off an evening and the Bailey is one of the more desperate. I’m only gonna look in and then scoot over to Grogan’s and then down to the Corn Exchange. Some Americans are having a party there. St. Patrick’s Day

————

More Americans! Would you want to come along. You know where the Corn Exchange is? On Poolbeg Street. Right. Sure I couldn’t drag you along to the Bailey. Not with a team of oxen and a horde of Chinese peasants. Racism from yourself? No, more like choosing sides in the Chinese-Russian argument. Not knowing much about the Chinese other than those awful restaurants I’ll stick with the Russians. The Russians were the first to recognize the so-called Irish Republic. Ireland did not return the recognition . . . But they are getting around to it. They now do admit that the Soviet Union exists. Once, after the court cut her off when she brought up the names of Mao and Chou, she reportedly said in protest: “Since you won’t let me speak, you can put a clay Buddha in my seat and put it on trial instead of me.”

I am on my way. The green plants get on one’s eyeballs and knowing we can’t keep ourselves there for it’s more than a quick Carlsberg, not the Special Export, just lean up against the bar in the Bailey which for some reason ain’t filled. Sort of people in there who missed the last private car home so they could have a cocktail before dinner and try to act out the new way of living based on Stamford, Connecticut or Short Hills, New Jersey: a couple of vodka martinis before dinner and then dinner cooked out of this season’s cookbook served with the wine of the month. I ain’t good at satire. I should take the beer over and sit at one of the marble-topped tables . . . Jane had been met in this bar. She was a friend of a friend and you know the story. I’ve told it to you and don’t have the time to go into it right now. Who the fuck wants to know this kind of junk anyway? There has been a distinct absence of fashion reporting: no descriptions toe to crown of head as what people are wearing as they wait out the less than an hour before closing time. In suits they are. Showing the ————

141

day’s wear. Their chins are darkening. Out of the twenty some, counting and losing count but trying to avoid marking off the numbers on fingers, linking finger with face, broken nose, pink shirt, blonde hair, concealing the counting as remembering not to move lips when reading out of fear of getting Nabokov to come out of Ultima Thule or St. Petersburg or as is more likely the Swiss bank account of his son, tsk tsk tsk: you there, counting on your fingers in the same way the words of the book are rolled over your moving lips like the fingers of a blind person over a braille book: the braille edition of Playboy, counting, I was, twenty, now thirty or so men and five women, in skirts and one in American jeans, but she is maybe German here with a man who likes foreign women but doesn’t have the courage of the Guinness heir who likes ’em slanteyed—so won’t go further south than Austria or at any rate wherever it is that blonde people stop being a reality and become a dream of what you get as a holiday bonus if you are short dark brown-eyed and are just so natural; the German woman wondering how she got sold on the bill of goods of coming to Ireland to get close to nature ending up in, is this a pub—yes, it is dear, we no longer have the pig in to sleep in the kitchen as Ireland is in the Common Market and that was the first item of modernization: pig moves out. The Bailey used to be packed on the weekends and Mr. Kavanagh would be moved off his bench at the front and have to wander the crowds looking for a sympathetic ear. I was in Sofia the year of his death in Newsweek and Time. There had been the traditional mixture of sadness and thank god it was him and not me and since he was an old man wasn’t it appropriate what else do old men have to look forward to other than death—and did he snarl, yes, the comic book word, SNARL at me when I asked him to autograph his collected poems bought from the Eblana on Grafton Street with hard-saved money. STILL I harp (while drinking a Carlsberg) on this event that passed without no one else remarking on it or I was just another one of those Americans who . . . would I have been remembering if Kavanagh had been as smooth as leather-clad Foucault demurring from signing the book after a lecture . . . YOU KNOW damn it Stan isn’t gonna have the refrigerator working and the shower will be still filled up with a year’s supply of the Irish Times, when I finally with all the rest get to the rooms in the Corn Exchange—but maybe I knew: the passage of the poet from the St. Patrick’s Day

————

keeper of the language into a minor supporting role in the celebrity business . . . Kavanagh being alone on weekend nights because the place was packed by those who awake on Friday night and return to sleep Sunday morning and Kavanagh is not the face to appear on the dreamvision so he moves unnoticed through those weekend hours—not a celebrity and celebrities don’t sit hunched on a stool, whiskey in a hand twice or three times the size of my own hand and I remember how awful to intrude as I was doing into his oblivion and my own memory and why the fuck not, in this pub, now more bar with a triple-A tourist rating because they got the door of number 7 Eccles Street and either a life or death mask of Kavanagh, the poet, in a glass case . . . just dead dead dead my fist squeezing the glass. I would rather have been drinking the beer from a bottle, ’cause I don’t like the loss of bubbles. Yeah fuck’em, the voice cries out: Heilige Kreuze sind die Verse. Poems are poets’ holy crosses

quickly link it up with my own: I am tired of tears masquerading as poems. Kavanagh is dead. I am alive. The world goes on. Dran die Dichter stumm verbluten Where they, silent, bleed to death

Only the dead draw dampness from the dead. We, the living, do not have the language to talk with them. There is an acid taste in the back of my throat. I take a long sip of beer. I allow it to get to its destination. I burp with caution. Head bowed into shirt collar peeking over sweater edge. I am not going to sleep. Just a moment with myself. Nothing going on there. So head up, eyes open as if back from a long journey and it always is when taking vacant possession of the moment behind closed eyeballs. Not going to say I did not miss talking with someone in the Bailey . . . missed, missed, longed for, and was found wanting so by the back of the neck and get him standing in the foyer, hesitate for a moment to go up the couple of steps and make a contribution to Irish culture: against the enamel.

————

143

Maze prisoners threaten new hunger-strike

Pisses. Zippers up and locks zipper as it wouldn’t do to go forth with fly undone. In the mirror the skull is creeping down my forehead so rearrange the hair, wash some water through mouth, finger across front teeth. The water is not cold. No pain in teeth and no streaks of blood in it. A groan in a far cubicle. There is a thump of body against metal door. Mutterings of the name of Jesus and his son Joseph. The man is confused. Tempted by Davy Bryne’s across the street. Only tempted since I don’t have an African or Tim to take along. Tim was an American guy who came from Racine and spent a couple of years in Dublin hunching his way through the city. He lived with the family of the man who did the wine buying for Davy Byrne’s. The testing lab was in the kitchen with hours of say 11:30 in the evening until the job of analysis was done. It was a tough and ticklish business. Distractions were of the human kind. The man’s wife did not appreciate the scientific nature of their work. To the corner of Duke Street and Grafton. The mind is running away. I am sure it will return in good form. Tim is dead. I’ll get to that in a moment. Africans used to get into the little cocktail room off the main room in Davy Byrne’s and sit in a row ordering up the drinks from their manual of how to be in polite society. The Bloody Mary was always a cause for laughter. There is some question as to the name of the room where they would be sitting. I would like to think, either the Molly Bloom Room or the Leopold Bloom Room: there is some sort of cut-glass decoration up behind the bar and I don’t think it’s called the Ulysses Room Stephen D Room. It is really a small thing and a small bar more like a small bar in a small airport in a small city of some small place: vinylcovered banquette, round tables, uncomfortable chairs, a small bar at which people stand having a conversation about the weather or the teledream they are looking forward to. Do not think that I am going to backtrack and end up there. I have my foot on the curb and am looking toward the Green to be sure no bus

St. Patrick’s Day

————

is gonna come hurtling down the road seeking me out for a quick test of the priest before the end—nine First Fridays of the month, guarantee given in Patchogue—knowing the first sin after stating that this is a confession is the one of presumption because like its brother, cousin, whatever relative you care to use, despair has to be gotten out of the way quick or you get damned even before the rest of the show can begin when you divide up the rest of life’s possible events that might not pass muster when viewed from on high. Aranmore correspondent of the Donegal Democrat tells us of the dilemma of a man from a remote island. According to the correspondent’s informant, Mickey Boyle, the man went to confession on the mainland. It had been a long time since his previous confession, so the priest reproached him. “I have a long sea voyage to get here,” the island man explained. “If it’s a venial sin, it’s not worth it. If it’s a mortal sin, it’s too dangerous.” Isn’t it almost time that Ireland was catapulted-out of the Middle Ages into, say, the 14th century?

Sitting around with a bunch of guys from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, all of whom were going home to the promise of a Mercedes when they got off the plane and the lesser among them would have to wait for six months while the paperwork was moved from pocket to pocket. And there was Jesse, Immanuel, Alaba, and Wordie. Immanuel we believe dead since he came from Uganda. Jesse was from Tanzania and probably has ulcers. Alaba was from Nigeria and had a father who had a bank. He is probably still well alive as bankers don’t die in wars and none of us can remember if he was from whatever tribe it was that wanted Biafra to be a free country. Wordie is probably still around somewhere. Wordie is hanging out. None of these guys are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Though it is possible to imagine: In a whitewashed room somewhere, very hot and moist one of them sitting down with a couple of bottles of Guinness and remembering their time in Dublin when they lived in the slums in Rathmines because the Irish were so thoughtful: they provided them their own homeland within the Irish estate—let it not be said that the Irish were not as fully up to hating a person because of his skin color as the next guy . . .

————

145

Hate isn’t an exact word. Just that no landlord would rent to a person with a skin darker than a suntan acquired in Spain and for the suntan they required a peeling nose to attest to the fact of it being a real suntan from Spain. And it had something to do with the Irish army being in the Congo and a couple of them getting killed and you would hear kids shouting after you, if you were African, SIMBA SIMBA SIMBA— You know they all look alike. There was also a guy from Mauritius— he lived in a couple of rooms in the back above shops on Wexford Street. The smell of paraffin heaters and I remember—tra la-la tra la-la a pile of heaped-up coats on a table in front of the door and this English medical student lying passed out on top of this woman who was nearly passed out—nearly because her tiny fists were still tap tap-tapping the back of this guy: but there was an optimistic beat to the fists: maybe he’ll love me in the morning even though I’m Irish and he is English so English and going home to Bury to practice and watch football. Kadar Musa! That’s the guy’s name. The one from Mauritius. He wrote me a letter later, asking if I would help him come to the United States but I didn’t have a job and he was in Mauritius not going anywhere with whatever it was that was supposed to set him up in life. He was Indian, I think. They had a wife ready for him. Kadar’s room on Wexford Street was always cold. Cold even by Irish standards. It was a party I was remembering. The front room was packed. You couldn’t squeeze into the mass of dancing bodies that danced close to each other under the single light bulb covered with a green or was it a yellow scarf. In the back room, there were only two, divided by that little hallway where the English medical student is memorizing amino acids in his sleep upon a heap of coats. In the back room, a group of Irish guys up from the street drinking bottles of Guinness out of a big brown sack, looking around the room for any unattended bottles to add to their little store because it was a long night ahead of them and an even longer walk in the night. I am still standing on the curb of Grafton Street. A lot of buses passing at this time of the night, hurrying to finish up before the last buses of the night. And Alaba is talking with this tall American woman, Mary, who is from Connecticut and after she went to the New School and moved to St. Patrick’s Day

————

California, married and as the story goes, I don’t know what happened to her: swallowed by the maw of unremembering. Mary was tall. Alaba had to look up at her. She had short hair and was looking for a way to get away from talking with Alaba. It wasn’t she disliked him just that he was so boring. In the way that businessmen are boring if you are interested in talking about the latest play at the Abbey and Alaba saying did she go to the films a lot, he liked films a lot though he couldn’t go as much as he liked. The music is either early Beatles or early Rolling Stones probably with a good bit of The Animals and Gary and the Pacemakers. No music quotes because I don’t believe them and there is something disfiguring to the copyright page of the book with all those references to rights assigned from to ending up with a lot of movie companies . . . an obscure complaint. This rage for authenticity. Only thing you really want to know. It’s gone, gone and I am not going to do the sleight of hand that passes for realism and try to show you what was going on. All you need to know is the rooms were cold and by now they are warm with body heat, with smells from Woolworths long before Jane Forth came up with the idea of buying all her makeup from Woolworth’s and flaunting it across the pages of Vogue. All re-creations of the past are cute. There is no commerce between the past and the present. Have you noticed that usually they give you a cat and the one thing about cats—they don’t have a memory and they don’t pass along memories . . . Got across Grafton Street and now to find that narrow passageway to South William Street . . . Kadar is saying Immanuel just went down to the dance hall to see if he could get some more girls. Aren’t there enough, I say. There are never enough girls. Have you seen Marie-Jose? She went back to Reunion. She was a nice woman. She was that: a woman, not a girl. All for the best, Kadar is saying. Soon enough, don’t be sad, we’ll be with women and want to be with girls. The party went on. The Englishman awoke. The woman was now asleep. Clive was his name. He walked through the back room looking for something to drink ————

147

New attempt next week to end ‘blanket’ protest

I don’t have time for English medical students and the jokes they bring in their baggage though I did spend many a Sunday afternoon in Clive’s rooms in Trinity sitting by the fire reading the English Sunday papers hearing about his plans to . . . violate the Sixth Commandment with the certain relish only an Englishman can bring to the task, when stuck here in this Irish setting where the girls have anklets of filth, he was saying. Leaving us with that Johnsonian insight to nip into the kitchen area and fry something for dinner or was it tea or supper. Fry it when in doubt. Clive had a roommate, also English with dark hair from London who was always going off to Norway to visit and then it was always off to Sweden and almost got himself married but it was all too easy and his English blood required some variety of dreary ordinariness and not the sharp-edged silver against dark blue setting of Sweden . . . he liked to wear shirts with filthy collars and this was not allowed in the town where he would be expected to live with his true Swedish love . . . I am finding the alleyway that leads to South William Street. His name must have been William, never Bill. Eventually he got himself an English girlfriend but I want to think she was actually from the North so I could tell you my one long North story . . . but no, she was English and had been fitted with a hat made out of dried flowers and two children of which one did not seem to be all there so came complete with two social workers and a third who looked in on the other two and the mother herself. Immanuel meanwhile is down outside the dance hall saying he knows about this fantastic party where there is good dancing and lots of fun. He has his shoehorn along and the girls arrived a bit worse for the: where is the toilet, I need the toilet, where is the toilet . . . and four of them push into the compartment Kadar has decorated with a view of Port Louis above a three-by-three mirror, army field mirror. Immanuel is proud of himself and is shifting his bulk from foot to foot waiting for the four girls to get themselves out of Kadar’s bathroom but they are in there for the rest of the evening. Low coughs are heard on the stairway outside followed by the flow of liquid matter. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Step carefully, goes along the cry. The man on Grafton Street with the newspapers spread out at his feet is not on duty, obviously, some might say. Immanuel has his large hand around the neck of a bottle of sweet wine from Spain. He knows what the girls like. He himself is drinking Guinness by the bottle from a bag he has set down clicking on the table in the center of the back room. Your Irish men in the corner are eyeing the sack. They are thirsty. They are hoping the girls will get themselves out of the bathroom so Immanuel will have to get on with his seduction and they will get themselves over to his sack of Guinness. William was in the front room with someone who reminded him of the girl he left behind in Sweden. Clive has returned to rest. Kadar is standing by the door. He should have sold tickets. I had told him about how artists used to throw rent parties in New York during the Depression. I am passing the Carmelite church, in there with the round-the-clock confessions—a line of women at one in the afternoon in for a quick confession with lunch and penance up front of mumbled prayers and then out to the shop down the alley to get an apple, a yogurt, and a container of some sort of juice because in the Woman’s Own they have been talking about health and how diet affects your . . . LIFE No, they take apple and yogurt and plastic spoon and sit in the sun where they can find the sun and eat to pass the hour . . . It would be good to see the other line of women, this time old and bent and out of some play of the realistic twenties or thirties, complete with shawls and long black skirts, lining up they are, with empty whiskey bottles in front of the Holy Water font, the one for bulk deliveries. The party on Wexford Street went on into the early morning when it was still dark and I was walking home alone, unlike I am sure all the other people at the party who had met the true love of their lives and only I was condemned to walk out my days and nights alone on the streets of Dublin, urine and vomit streamed . . . What about the Holy Water . . . you put it in the little font at home near the door . . . you don’t bathe in it like some Protestants think— another one of those misconceptions people have about Catholics, who are indeed a funny group of people, but there are fewer and fewer of these old women, and now, so to mention, there are very thin ones who ————

149

come bearing not whiskey bottles but brown sherry bottles and they are your tinker people who are seen on the streets begging either with baby in arm or rolled-up blanket in arm passing as baby, begging they are to put together a bottle for the family to be drunk sitting underneath the billboards of the parking lot opposite Grogan’s. What do you do with the Holy Water in the house? You bless yourself entering and leaving the house. I am sure about the leaving the house, but why not also when you are entering, it adds the so necessary bit of formality about any visit. Your Englishmen are tucked into their room in Trinity, locked in against molestation, by the doorman at the front gate. Walking the alleyway, alone, a spy in a black/white B movie from the Rialto in Patchogue. No cat crosses my path because this is by one of the class directors who’ll get discovered by the French and who will be found living in a rundown hotel in San Diego sustained by sweet wine and the once-yearly visit of a distant cousin who is hoping to be left the old man’s last thirty-five dollars because that is the least . . . and more CASH than the cousin can lay her hands on at the moment and call her own. High-contrast shadows and my profile with bloated belly and fevered brow. Know that they are within steps of getting me. I will not make it to the end of the movie. Get out the picture books and pick a death pose. (to be inserted as you might anywhere in the previous section) Teresa

Teresa.

One night drinking with Patrick Kavanagh who had a lung carved

out of his chest and the tall myopic critic Hobsbaum from Glasgow

(an English ex-pat who on Robert Burns’s birthday gave his yearly lec-

ture on Wordsworth and his warning to beware of drinking in Scottish pubs: everything on the table is a weapon; the matchbox useful for

gouging out eyeballs) and Teresa whose black hair framed a thin blue-eyed face.

Whiskey upon whiskey until the silence of five minutes to eleven-

thirty. Time Gentlemen Please. Time Gentlemen Please.

Eliot said it better, Philip said. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Come along to my place, I said.

Goddam fuckin’ Americans I wouldn’t touch your piss with cold

enamel, the poet said. Nothing but cods to stick up the arse of Europe. Patrick’s lung drew in a noisy breath and his fist scattered the

glasses.

Yank, you ain’t fit to lick the shit from between the toes of the low-

est scrubber in Dublin.

Ah, stop the noise Paddy, Teresa said. She squeezed my arm. Long

bony fingers, rubber hands wrapped about muscle.

I had seen Teresa in the pubs. At lunch she would bring along her

child of whom it was said, was dying of a blood disease. She hadn’t

loved the father. There had been no way to talk to her until this evening when she was already sitting with Philip who had come to Dublin to study the manners of the poet.

Philip knew Teresa from the year before in London. They were

lovers for a few days and now were friends. I sat next to her. She drank drink for drink and when she stood occasionally she would announce her intention of going for a pee.

I imagined myself in love with her from the moment I sat and she

and I and the child were at a hotel on the Adriatic. We would sip goldcolored drinks, eat fried octopus and sweet peppers. She would be-

come tanned; her blue eyes would draw color from the sea; the child would be erased into the earth and we would live happily ever after.

Progress in the evening. The poet passed out. A cab called. Philip

drank half a bottle of whiskey. When I turned from Teresa to ask him

the name of his book he was no longer there. Teresa said something and she was not there and I went looking for her to ask, or say, or when I could . . . she was piddling in the hall toilet. The door opens. The light on. Her panties had been turned into a slingshot. Have a good time? Of course.

Will you stay? Why not.

We lay on the rug in front of the bed. The bed was too dirty. Her

mouth swallowed mine—you could say—and she said if I wanted to make love with her she’d take off her tights. I don’t want you to stretch them. ————

151

In the morning I asked if I might see her again. Maybe.

The week passed. She didn’t come into the pubs. I knew her tele-

phone but could never call. Someone said she had gone off to London with the baby for a blood transfusion. Teresa was thirty, I was twenty-

three. Her breasts were small and large-nippled. There was a long black hair on the right breast. The color turned red when I looked at

it after looking down from the electric fire switched on when she said she was cold.

I was sitting in the Bailey. Down front. Pulled up a pew to chew the

glass rail. Paddy was not in tonight. Finally and hopefully choked on

his own spit. It was a slow Saturday. I went to the bog. Teresa was in the pub when I came back. She was sitting with a short bald man.

This is Eamonn. He’s an architect about to emigrate. This is the

American I was telling you about.

Good to meet you. What are you drinking? Got the pounds out of

the old lady.

I sat next to Teresa. She sat between us. How do you like it in fair Ireland? I like it a lot.

But you said you were going to Yugoslavia, Teresa said. I’ll be coming back.

What a crock of shit.

He had a lot of shit in him, Teresa said. But he’s nice for being an

American.

Then a drink to him.

Eamonn was talking to the people at the other table. Have you thought about Yugoslavia, Teresa? Yes.

And?

You know the child. He could come.

I can’t ask that of you. I’d like to.

It’s not fair. You can’t know. I do.

Know what, you can’t know, Eamonn asked. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Nothing, I think you’d better be going. Have I offended you?

No, you’d better be going, I’ll tell you some other time. If you change your mind I’ll be in McDaids tomorrow. If I change my mind . . .

The night was now gray behind the dark edges of the buildings. A

church bell tolled and was answered by another. She was right. The bed was a mess. I slept on the floor. The floor was hard. It must have hurt Teresa.

————

153

Again, Grogan’s

What was a man’s life in this wilderness whose vapor was laden with the stench of thousands upon thousands of decaying bodies —Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

IRA is deeply divided

Standing in front of Grogan’s . . . and then I open the front door, look inside, too crowded so around the corner and use the side entrance. Remember, we went through the whole question of the front and the rear parts of the pub when here in the middle of the day. Now into Grogan’ s with the additional question: should we be going into the Castle Lounge. The Castle. The legend: only room enough going around the walls of the chapel for the exact number of lord lieutenants or governors OR WHOever the fuck it was the English had here running from the Castle the show in Ireland—their coat of arms—that’s what was going up on the wall of the chapel . . . I am not sure when it comes right down to it if Grogan’s got its Castle Lounge name from conscious thought of the Castle, down there at the other end of Dame Street. I had to go up to the Castle to get my alien’s book. I became a file in the state’s belly. Either I would pass out of the anus with all the other shit or the shit would come down falling upon my head and no Martha’s Vineyard rock family would be singing backup lyrics getting ready to sign me into an institution for the cure of what ails the doctor. DO THEY SMEAR THE WALLS OF MECCA WITH YOUR SHIT?

A plump man is standing at the corner. He is not waiting for cars to pass. There is little traffic on the street at this time of the night. He is rocking back and forth. He is not drunk. Having no beard on his chin St. Patrick’s Day

————

there is no way to drag in Jack Kerouac; the long-lost ghost of one of those rivers of America you cross heading out West. Muddle must be his middle name. I pass behind the man on the corner. He does not turn. I have never seen the man before with his pale face, thick glasses. Maybe, Stephen grown old and without beard. Nora dumped him when a better offer came along. The accident didn’t happen. He had to come back to Dublin like everybody knew he would, in the end. People are very, very loyal until someone makes them a better offer.

The night air cleared my head. My lungs are filled with the deep green of the fields. My eyes glow with the blue of the sky. My lips are kissed by the edge of the surf. I am not protesting too much. I stand on the curb back to the street looking at the entrance way of Grogan’s. You go up a step. There’s an entrance then turn to your left and open the door to the sudden turn of faces sitting on the bench against the wall nearest the door. But their full faces are obscured by the standing bodies of the people packing the place for the last minutes before they have to face what are they going to do with the rest of the evening and is there going to be someone who will be able to provide a quick rest of the head and genitals and maybe if it’s not sinning against the sin of hope, a something to put in the stomach but this ain’t America and the bottles are to be kept under tight hand though the warmed-up air is free to drink and there is a lot of that always being offered by those who cannot sleep and those who will not sleep out of fear of what the night brings down upon them: what if they have no nightmares—of what will they compose the poems being demanded by the climate of creativity swimming over even one such as I, waiting at this rear entrance of Grogan’s for the conjunction of spheres, is it—so be it—I am inside the pub and am still standing outside—I have pushed my way to the bar and have ordered two pints and they’ll be along in a second, just wash up some of these glasses, can’t offer you a clean pair of hands, ha ha, and Tommy is pulling the pints against the thirsts and while he’s at it to see if he has a cold Carlsberg back there on the shelf and he does for you Americans always know you’ll be in for that one long quick cold one and will there be anything else? Put six of them in a sack and you can ————

157

put another six in another sack and is it a party you’re going to and it is, we’ll be expecting a full report of the damages in the morning, bright and early. You’ll be getting that, I am sure, from more than one person. They always say it; after this night, as if there was any way to end all of the after this nights because there will always be something after this night . . . I am not in from outside yet. The body is not as fast as the mind and though I do not like to listen to the strange language of the body, much preferring the mind and the language of the heart: dum-de-dumdum . . . Three lads come walking down the block. The tall one wishes me a pleasant evening. It is that. They go into the pub. The short one (if there is a tall one there has got to be a short one and another more or less like himself, the short one, and both of them look up at the tall one) turns and says have a good time and offers his face, more scar than expression across the eyes where he must have not ducked in time or else the guy was fighting dirty or was smaller than he and when he ducked . . . I should have given myself a sidekick. Would have made it easier for everyone concerned. Pause.

Start again. I am standing at the back entrance of Grogan’s. I have been to the bar and done all the ordering for the night. I am proud of this accomplishment. I am tired of going up to that altar, pulling out the wadded-up slue of one pound notes, leaving behind the coins because I still don’t know how much each of the drinks is or is supposed to be: there are two prices of everything in this country: one for the natives and one for the likes of myself.

Irish activist Bernadette is shot in her home

You got me standing in the pub while there is the chance I haven’t gotten myself into the place and am still waiting on the sidewalk for the final burst of energy to send me again into the fray when who should St. Patrick’s Day

————

show up but Liddy with a friend, not the same one from this afternoon, but someone I have known from before—a woman with kids that are known of but never seen, who sits in the basement on Leeson Street. But beggars aren’t really that choosey. Teresa, you know our American friend, Liddy is saying as he pulls open the door for Maude and I follow in behind them. She knows you, Liddy continues turning his head back to me, asking if I’d like a drink for the night but I tell him I’m on my own, and Liddy says that cannot be, tonight you are a guest of the nation . . . HO, Ha and yes, I’ll be coming along to the party down at the Corn Exchange, with all the rest of the people and don’t feel bad about this afternoon, that’s just the way things are and even if you feel awful turn it into poetry; but I don’t write poetry dipped out of that sort of spring I say and Liddy says so what, write it anyway and after the fact you can always stick to it any body of water you please as the source of the inspiration, you follow me, I’m sure I don’t, but it doesn’t matter though I think I’d rather be outside on the street and how did you find out about the party tonight? Everybody knows. How? You are too old to be asking such questions. I’m sure you remember sending me those pages you made a copy of, about the transvestites wearing sanitary napkins. They know and you know so why make a big to-do about it? I see too many people all of a sudden in the pub at a late moment. I should take minutes to stop and say . . . Stop and Say. Sounds like a drive-in tape recording studio, if you ask me, just the sort of thing a rising young man should be getting himself into, with the literacy rate falling and people not having the ability to write a simple postcard, they can stop in at the Stop and Say Shop, pay their money, say what they want to say, give the address and automatically a mechanical gadget will tape the message, type out an address label, tape up the package, and dispatch it into prison-stitched mailbags for immediate posting to the love object. Science fiction, you say! No. Late night Dublin carry-on in order to stay above ground. Teresa is sipping at a lager in one of those glasses which when held in the middle look as if the person is squeezing them up into a reminder ————

159

of pimples popped in childhood; Teresa is the one person I know who I am sure didn’t have pimples when she was a young girl getting ready to be the heartthrob of half of Dublin’s men and the enemy of a quarter of Dublin’s women who have yet to learn to take pleasure in the fact that one of their kind has been able to extract the heart still pumping from the chests of . . . The pint is good, tonight. It is, Liddy replies, without challenge. He wants to make sure I’ll be there to guide him through the Corn Exchange. Teresa has seen me looking her way and has turned her back so I know she has turned her back on me . . . How sad. Cry of the violins in the smoke-filled air. The gossip flies like mud at the end of a stick being paraded around a school yard hoping the teacher will think I have dug up a prehistoric monster . . . A hard row you have to hoe, I am saying to myself when who is it but Mr. J. arising from the corner, pointing a long finger at Tommy asking for and Tommy completes the sentence, the usual. There is a wet spot where Mr. J. has been sitting and goes unnoticed except by the likes of you, he is pointing at me, except the likes of you who come to this place to eat, no, gnaw at the bones of we the living, not even allowing us a couple of years of peace before the bones get sacked up and carted off for examination by gross hands . . . pause . . . gross hands The Irish Sea Is no longer A problem

On that rush into the morning, I can feel it in the bottoms of my feet that have grown inches thicker and I move with a certain slowness of step, a certain dignity of holding back because I will not want to allow any to think I have been on my own all this day. Liddy, is your friend Liam around? He’ll be in later, he was parking the car and had to get straight about a number of things. An awful day and the night doesn’t look much better while the promise is in a dim language not known by the inhabitants of this now besotted commoner market—how appropriate the common market for a common people who . . . Liddy’s voice drifts off into the crowd and I watch Teresa and I see Susan look in from the other room. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Just her head pokes into the room and of course I am not sure it was Susan . . . her hair still dyed away from its dirty blonde color. I begin to ease my way across the packed room but the bodies don’t give and I don’t want to knock anyone’s drink out of hand and am not about to allow some joker to stuff his cigarette into my coat pocket. . . Talking to yourself, Man, Jocelyn’s voice is heard. Only company I can stand at the moment. Ain’t it the truth, MAN. Ain’t it the truth. Put it on one of those skateboards and you could make a million of your American dollars to go and live in California, where no one gets old or gray pubic hair. Jocelyn is sitting with two men who are resting up. One has his head thrown back and his mouth open and the other has his head thrown, of course, forward, mouth closed and possibly chewing the fly the other guy is still waiting to pass on. You’ve tired out your friends. They were done before I arrived. I think you said you don’t venture out at night. The walls were trying to eat me. I see you have your friend Liddy in tow? If you say so . . . What were we talking about this afternoon? How should I know or care. That was long ago and is now a typescript some historian in the future will have the time of his life analyzing. You’ve become an optimist. Packed room, the light filtered through the haze of smoke. Eyes clawed at. It’s cock and cunt talking time. Will you be coming along? Where? A St. Patrick’s Day party at the Corn Exchange. You must be kidding . . . and if you’re not, does it make a difference; don’t you get enough of all of that in the pub? Irish people don’t like parties; they don’t know how to behave. I know how to behave. You would have no need to say so if you did. Jocelyn jerks her head in such a fashion as if she had just backspaced the typewriter and proceeded to underline what she had wished to say, The Irish produce short stories like they produce babies and sheep. ————

161

I pushed my way back to the rear of the room. It had been a risk taken and not thought about before, but what the hell, late at night and that’s when one gets careless, always a bad policy. The pint was still on the bar top and its lonely companion a half-empty Carlsberg. I beat the Carlsberg into emptiness and took pint in hand. I would step back from the scene and wallow for a couple of moments. Pat has his fist around a pint and is doing very well thank you for himself. He has met a young thing and they look like they will have a good time of it for another couple of minutes. Liddy is over to my side and telling me tonight should be some good fun. Like the old days. Nostalgia is a great stimulant to the thirst, I reply. I agree, Liddy says. To our great reactionary country, looking for a reason to live in the graveyards of its martyrs . . . all the sad dead wormeaten boys. Do you know Pat over there? I have seen him. Do you know him? Is there more that I should know? Probably not. It’s tough saying something good about a person in this country. People think you’re having them on. And you are, is what they’ll tell you from experience. Praise is just a clever way of stealing some of your personal treasure. No one can believe a compliment. That doesn’t make any sense. Sense is something we can leave to the theologians. They got the tough job in this scientific age of telescopes and black holes. You’re a hard man, Liddy. Not hard enough and not always, sadly, with age. It happens to the young always the first time out, hard for seconds and then a short intermission. O, sex talk, sex talk is so boring . . . It is late at night. Now is the time to talk about occasions of sin so we’ll have guilt to talk about in the morning, and to experience a little guilt is to begin to write a good poem. That’s what’s wrong with all of those New York poets. How can you feel guilty about: table carrot spoon. St. Patrick’s Day

————

When are we gonna be saved by the bell? It never tolls when it should, Liddy says. Turned away. An old woman or man suddenly faced with: the futility, the tiredness as a premonition of it being all over, it being all over and still no one had gotten around to figuring out what IT was . . .

Wake up. Jocelyn was pushing her face into mine, Wake up! I am. And I’m the Queen of Araby. Aren’t you? Yes, I am. Are you awake, now? I had been asleep on my feet. Waking up and still the same place as when going to sleep. The voices, the faces, mouths moving, the cigar in arcs of incense boats in a medieval ceremony—the clothed sacks of guts. My eyes hold these three old men sitting at the bar. They are hunched forward and are not talking. They look straight ahead, are admiring the wood of the counter behind the bar. Are they trying to figure out how old the wood is? You’re muttering to yourself, Jocelyn says. Beware of the mutterer, I turn talking to Jocelyn. Beware because he is armed and dangerous to all. Joke, joke. You like repetition, I say. Only because you dislike it in yourself. There is little I like in myself, I’ll have you know. Not too loud, you’ll wake up Mr. J. and you’ll have to go through your recital of book titles. We haven’t done that today. Something to look forward to. Do you know Susan? Who? Susan, she’s in the other room. English with dark hair. Who is she? I knew her when I was here the last time. She had gone to Trinity and was reading French, she had a lot of friends. I went with her to the Trinity Ball. ————

163

YOU went to the Trinity Ball! Yes, don’t all gentlemen go to the Trinity Ball if they get the chance? You could knock me over with a flower and spit on my grave . . . Is this some complicated Serbian curse beginning, at this late hour when I shout to Tommy to get me one last pint and Jocelyn what will you have? Gin and tonic. And a gin and tonic for the lady. Tommy measured out a shot, took a small bottle of tonic from the shelf and deposited glass and clicking bottle on bar top, went and came back with pint. Collected his money and brought back the change. No prices because in this day and age of inflation it would matter little. Cheers for the rest of the evening. Jocelyn raised her toniced gin and tapped the edge of the pint. It was all so formal. A violin into the heart vein. The last pint. I am in Dublin. I am in Grogan’s. I have a room in the Russell. It is late at night. Eleven, going on eleven is late. The day is over. My father is dead. I am in Dublin. My mother is dead but her death mattered little or am I only saying it . . . I am not going TO SINK THIS NOBLE SHIP OF STATE WITH . . . a pint at hand. I am fighting against the night. I am talking with Jocelyn. I have talked with. I have talked at.

IRA’S revenge for Devlin.

I am alone. I am alone. Yes, I am and I protest too much because you have seen me all day carrying on these brilliant conversations. You are tuning out, Jocelyn says into the ear. Can you watch the pint? I have to take a quick peek at immortality. Simplify your life. Watch the pint. That’s better. In pissing. In the little room. The floor is a sea of urine and islands of vomit. No New World on the other side of this sea. The earth is a blood sponge. Returning to the pint, a barman is saying, time gentlemen, please, time gentlemen, please . . .

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Mr. J. has erected himself and is waving arm calling for the eye of the barman who is not looking his way until Mr. J. musters all the force of voice of the man born a couple of streets away from the slum where Edmund Burke first saw light of day, and Mr. J.’s continued education in either Oxford or Cambridge, whichever one it was, mightily unsuited him for this place, that bench, from which he has arisen, damp stain where he was sitting is the evidence of how much he had been thinking during the day and . . . what were his words . . . we are waiting . . . and so is Mr. J. for the words to come from wherever they go, deep in the innards of a man . . . I AM A LAPSED HERETIC GET ME A WHISKEY AND MAKE IT A DOUBLE Mr. J.’s body wobbles under the gray cloud of smoke and the loudness of the people is all in our ears, it is no laughing matter, or smiling matter, but what can we expect as if we ever expected anything from these citizens of the New World, a bastard civilization gone to earth in only a hundred or so years, a cursed civilization. A WHISKEY A WHISKEY and you have infected the good workmen of Dublin with your slovenly habits, all of them carry in their pockets the promise of a job in the sewer bars of your New York, where no one is ever known to smile or have a kind word for the poet or man of the words. Calm down. I will not. This is my city and you are the visitor. You will have respect for your elders, as I had for my own in my youth when one could talk about having a youth and not an experience. Do not tire yourself. Do you want me to get you a drink? And well you should. Whiskey? A whiskey it is and be snappy about it. I push to the bar and order up two whiskeys for the road. And your Mr. J.? That’s including himself. I’ve had enough. A dangerous admission, one that could endanger my license if said too loudly. We are not in the business of getting people drunk. We are here to sell drink and the consequences are your own business. Are you sitting or standing? I ask Mr. J.

————

165

Do you question my ability to stand? I would not think to do so, but it might be easier on all concerned. Damn your all. I will drink standing to be on the lookout for my enemies who lurk to take advantage of poor John . . . Better to hide, I say as he is sipping at the whiskey, clearing the tongue for future combat. That’s the Dien Bien Phu myth. The French learned the hard way— have to say that for you Americans, they went out and engaged the enemy . . . a terrible waste, always, to engage the enemies. Nothing they like more. But I shall stand and see them coming. The voices were growing louder and the shuffling of bodies, waiting to see which hand was going to be dealt out this evening of the national saint. Poor John, as if the creases on his face had begun to drink and his lips were moving preparing themselves to argue in an argument that would never, again, be coming his way.

Healed by faith says tennis star

I am not struggling for aphoristic truth. I leave that to others. I, THE OTHER Mr. J., I run myself into the little room and take notes on what is being said. I will not trust truth to imagination. Liddy would get himself back over here away from whoever it is he is arranging his heart with. An obvious bit of knowing comes when I see Teresa standing there, next to the man with the beard in the suit, with the cold pen out now writing a check. She wasn’t dumb about it all. Made sure he had a bank account and not one of those savings accounts paying interest after one shilling has been accumulated. Teresa is wearing a brown suede coat with high collar. Her black hair is still black. Her blue eyes are still blue and sad as all the years . . . See what whiskey will do to a good man. Reduce him to a bucket of spent tears for what could never be. I nod to Teresa when she turns at the sound of breaking glass for it seems Mr. J. had waved his arm about, forgetting a glass in hand, empty!!!!!! and come in contact with the wall and thus, Teresa’s head turning, her eyes pass along my own face lookSt. Patrick’s Day

————

ing in her direction. There is a slight movement near the lips. I can take it either way. It is too early in the evening to be sure Since there was no second night

Well, as they say in the newspaper: his head was so far up his ass his tongue was licking the back of his breastbone. Teresa, my voice is saying as I make my way through the crowd, do you remember I offered to go away with you to Yugoslavia and if only you had said yes I would not have met Lilia in Sofia. Why isn’t she with you in Dublin? She doesn’t like the Irish. Tonight, Teresa whispers in my ear, is the night you do not say things like that, I only came in so Williams could cash a check O, just to be within the distance of her warm breath. Mr. J. has returned to his bench. He is looking at the empty glass. I don’t know if his eyes are seeing anything. They are still open, but that doesn’t tell me what I want to know. Time Gentlemen . . . Gentlemen!!!!!!!!! Are you gonna be killing the pint? Jocelyn is tapping the rim of the not so nearly destroyed pint. You credit me with some strength after all is said and done. It is late in the evening and I have to have some place to go . . . Opportunist. Is my middle name. I work at the pint. Williams is handing the check to Tommy who says, pleased to be able to help you in any way possible seeing you come in with such handy heady references, pointing to Teresa. Mr. J. has turned his face to the wall and is quiet. He is listening to a lecture. I cannot make out whether the discourse is on philosophy or medieval painting. John’s eyes are closed and alas, Poor John still has hours to go as his friend who works on the buses is leaning over and trying to get some response by talking into his ear. John is not having any personal relations at the moment. He is improving the irritation in the brain. The friend is insistent. John’s shoulder shrinks from the touch of the man and then shakes itself back at the young man still in the uniform of his calling into a life of collecting fares and giving change and no abuse back to the abuse received from the irate Dubliners, so free ————

167

with it, these days . . . not realizing they are contributing to The Making of a Saint and within the years of their lives they would see in all the bookshops of the Republic a journey of this man’s soul from the number 14 to the number 15 bus and here he is now talking to Alas, Poor John, who has turned his head and looks up with uncomprehending eyes at the object of his infection—yes, he has said: this infection called affection. Yes, it is touching, Liddy is saying to Jocelyn, to see how love makes its way through this cluttered earth on which you have to share the road with so many slugs who don’t realize their calling is under a stone. Slugs, all of them and on the road all trying to be poets and failing they’re off to the advertising jungle to hustle any organ of delight that might have some value on the bed of the marketplace and a bed not available any doorway, please, will do. Large damp logs rubbing together, if I may quote myself, I say. You may be less scabrous if I can make a request, Liddy says. Give us more nature and less of the human . . . They are one and the same, I say, while Liddy is turning away not interested in hearing what I have to say, because it is not part of the bargain. John’s bus conductor is squeezed in next to him and they are holding hands. They are both afraid. It is days before payday and John’s money is at an end and he wants to get at an end as Mr. J. just wanted to get to an end, and any sort of end would do. And get ourselves accused of being pessimists in a world gone mad for those balloon-carrying optimists, who have worked out a means of armor-plating those damn balloons against the slings and arrows of bad news every morning in the paper and why it is, said Mr. J., Joyce never got himself out of bed until noon. The hospital plans to demolish all of the buildings on its own side of the street to make way for a major extension of its facilities. Included in the plan are the ruins of No. 7 Eccles Street, which readers of Ulysses will remember as the home of Leopold Bloom. It is to be part of the site of a new car park

I do not understand all the effort, Liddy says. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Effort at finding happiness, I jerk head in direction of Mr. J. and wish there was some way of directing the indication at myself, at ourselves standing here at this moment, while the pub is getting ready to close, Tommy washing furiously the pint glasses as they get piled up on the bar top, collected by the boy who moves among the tables, careful, ever so careful because to knock over a man’s drink at the end of the evening is to invite down all the bulls of hell and purgatory on the rites of departing: clouds not being one of the items of the night’s progress a man likes to carry with him when he ventures to find a doorway to take a quick piss against the bursting his bladder. To hell with decorum, Liddy is saying. We are a natural and healthy people as long as we carry the boot on which the mud has been placed. Where to carry the boot? Implanted in the brain where they all got kicked before they knew what was happening to them, at birth it was. No stage Paddy for me, Liddy, I want the straight story. We do not suffer the straight story at all in this land. I did not mean to suggest straightness in anything I said. I know it was there, a failure of the imagination, what comes of talking with an American. I am American born, I say, sure that Liddy will . . . You give homage to your fellow countryman, Julian Green. I do. No matter. The night is still young and I am a tolerant old fool. You men just drivel on. We do and that is what all you ladies are seeking if the papers are correct: an equal chance at driveling on with the lads. I do not read the papers. Bravo for you, girl, Liddy is being much more rude than I have ever seen him. It is the problem of the love struck or the love scorned. Nadezhda Mandelstam, 81, Russian Poet’s Widow Dies

Teresa and Williams walk by us standing at the end of the bar. Williams says hello to Liddy and Teresa gives no indication of my being alive. My bones give indication enough of worms queuing up for a chew. Whiskey for the saints in training, Mr. J. is standing again and Tommy is over next to him asking if he needs a taxi. ————

169

I need a whiskey. Do you need a taxi. I’ll call one for you. Call us a whiskey and be snappy about it. Tommy walks back behind the bar. Mr. J. collapses back to his place of rest. His friend has extended his arm and is consoling him against the rude rejection that has been dealt out by the powers that be. TIME TIME PLEASE and since the glasses aren’t being refilled islands of clear space begin to appear on the tops of the little tables. The boys are clearing their way through the final battle of the night. Liddy is drumming a tune on his belly. Jocelyn fidgets. I have the confidence of a man stood against the wall waiting for the order:

FIRE

Always waiting to be rescued. Take me back to the arms of my mother, leaking I am, from both ends, all of a sudden. THEM, that had the fuck had me and all these years paying for whatever it was they felt in the morning after they had done what they knew to be, trying to replace the dead son, and me to be both: the years have worn down this belief. They are dead. Dead, hear me. Dead. DEAD. DEAD. You were saying about Mr. J.? I was and have forgotten the train of my thought with the evening coming to a close and Liddy muttering on and I’m standing with Jocelyn who smells like an historical dumping ground Terrorists bomb Paris courthouse

Mr. J. is said never to sleep, in a bed, that is. He catches a couple of winks here on the bench where his love life is being played out in the hands of his bus conductor. He would be too easy a target for the idiots who roam the Dublin streets bad poetry on lips coated with even a worse sort of breath—all bitterness and anger at being born in such a place. EXTREMELY RELUCTANT

THE IRA executed a former Volunteer for ‘informing’, earlier this week. Twenty-four-year-old Maurice Gilvarry, formerly a Volunteer with the

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Belfast Brigade, was shot dead, and his body left on the South Armagh border near Forkhill on Monday evening, January 19th. The IRA stated, on Tuesday: “He was arrested by us and admitted giving information to the RUC about IRA operations, the movement of weapons, and the use of certain safe houses. Every IRA Volunteer knows the penalty for passing on information to the enemy which endangers the lives or freedom of other Volunteers and republican supporters. We are extremely reluctant to execute Volunteers, realizing the methods and duress, the physical and psychological pressures used by the RUC to solicit information. But this was no simple case of a Volunteer being arrested and breaking and then reporting this to his unit. Maurice Gilvarry admitted before a court-martial composed of his peers that he passed on Information on an ongoing basis for a period of years. For endangering the Irish Republican Army and undermining the struggle he was executed.” This statement was issued through the Irish Republican Publicity Bureau in Dublin and was signed by P. O’Neill

Down the hatch. Liddy, do we need a little one for the road? I will see to our man behind the bar. Liddy goes down to the far end, leans over and says something to the other barman. The man at first nods his head, yes, and then no and then yes again and Liddy is walking back with that smile of expectation. Said it was for your dead parents who were killed on this day in the United States and you over here drinking up the sorrow. Had I begun, even then, to write the poem: 1980 there was no one last poet here is no longer any poetry,

That’s an awful thing to have told him. A lull. The motion of history trying to catch up or overtake us, ready to clobber us into powerlessness, sitting here on the edge of Europe: trapped in Denver knowing if we go on to California this is what we have to come back to. All of us are failed from the moment of birth.

————

171

The drinks are presented on a small tray, placed on the table behind which Mr. J. is catching a couple of zeds. What is to become of us? I ask of no one in particular as I take my glass from the tray and Liddy is handing Jocelyn a drink. It is not like him, but then it is the end of the evening. A large question and we only have small drinks in our hands. Isn’t that always the case, Jocelyn says, with you men of Ireland . . . always an excuse if it isn’t the weather or the next man or a disturbance in the atmosphere over Bolivia . . . Do not include me in that men of Ireland routine. I was born in Brooklyn, behind the bishop’s residence, the part of the house where he kept his garbage. Brooklyn, you say, Liddy says, like our famous world poet Mr. Montague, lying now as it were between the legs of France when he needs to and that is . . . De Valera was also born in Brooklyn. That is no recommendation for the place, Liddy says. Montague I can accept, at least in some part of his body, he is a poet. De Valera, a constipated mathematician with a family about him bloated like leeches upon the body of a poor peasant from Clare . . . And no one has left the front room for the back, out of whose face I can weave more of the funeral rags for my heart set to take the deep— what is the number?, down into the ocean and there midst the used condoms, jock straps weighted down with broken bits of bricks from the fireplace into which I have had to jerk off in memory of you and poor Paddy. No, Kavanagh has been dead all these years and his wife wasn’t in this evening. Next day Oscar’s elder boy, fated to be killed in 1914, “possibly the most beautiful child I have ever seen,” came down to visit his father. Oscar at breakfast consumed an enormous quantity of sausages, then he took his son and guest out for a row. At lunch Wratislaw found himself in trouble. He made “some slighting remark” about Home Rule. The small boy flushed with anger and violently demanded whether I was not a Home Ruler? Oscar made peace by saying, “My own idea is that Ireland should rule England.”

St. Patrick’s Day

————

TIME

the voice is now softer and more formal. Going through the motions You have no beer and are mumbling, Jocelyn says, bringing me back to this place I have not left from. Important? Jocelyn asks. Yes, important. I was thinking about Kavanagh and how I would not be giving him a tinker’s piss if he had signed that fucking book of his— just as I wouldn’t have the burden of Melinda on my back if we had consummated our love in carnal combat in Patchogue, instead of fumbling around the premises of wanting to be honest with each other. Spare us the detail, Liddy is saying. We have all heard them too many times before and they are always the same. Give us the left-out bits and they will firm themselves up as a better tale. Here and here, Jocelyn raises her glass and is now done in for the rest of this part of the night. Dreams are the kiss of night, Liddy says. Allow me some bad poetry. Not my own. Given me by this American with a crooked walk, years ago. Dead, you say he is? Yes, like all my best friends. I say this sentence loud. I want to provoke a certain reaction from Mr. J. who takes the challenge even though he is probably still asleep. Thievery in the boozer. I hear thievery in the boozer! You have indeed, I say, sad: Steal when you get the chance. Mr. J. drops back to sleep again. Coogan’s Public House on South William Street was pretty crowded for a Tuesday evening but Barry Murphy muscled himself onto the seat beside Gerry Jordan. The two men had been at school together in the Dublin slums. Murphy had always been big and a bit slow, but alongside Gerry Jordan he had developed into a fierce street fighter. Jordan had been born with the killer instinct, but his slight frame and lack of weight had been a big handicap until he had teamed up with the bigger boy.

The lights should flicker on and off—no, off and on, off and on. Get the troops moving on to other campaigns Jocelyn as I said has finished her piece for the night. ————

173

Mr. J. is pretty much done in by the events of the day and is preparing for the night. A mood for a line of poetry heard in a movie where a snake crawls across a man’s face. Ken Russell’s film about Rossetti: it seemed that youth would never go.

Why haven’t you done your Easter duty? Liddy asks. I did. You did not. You have not been to Mass and confession and communion since when? I did my duty that April it must have been or maybe it was May and I would be walking along Rathgar Road knowing I was the loneliest person in the world on a Sunday morning and I couldn’t call Barbara It was only at night I could see her.

Who cares, Liddy says. The boy is walking around emptying the ashtrays into a large cookie tin. Should say biscuit tin, Jacobs, it is—right back to Rathgar and Sunday mornings waking with Lilia and out to get those chocolate-covered biscuits, cookies, as they say in the United States and Canada, if we go there. Should we be getting out of here? In a minute or so. A minute or so . . . I’ll be right back. I make my way to the enamel wall. A breath of sour air to clear the mind and get it back on the high road of adventure. Dress sword was left home, was left back in the hotel. I did not think we would be encountering any rough element on the street. And I am not a gentleman who needs to carry his sword. I do not want my pint from the hands of the Provost of Trinity as provided for in the rules . . .

Sure they’ll call it O’Disneyland Time to go and get on the road. Hit the road, Jack, or some such thing. Time to be moving on and all I require is a little simple will power but we don’t have to rush. We have been left behind by the rush. I am no expert on such matters, Liddy says, though I am not listening. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Lurking, who does that, in the corner of my mind—there have been a lot of corners if you have been keeping track: on St. Patrick’s Day, the night of said day. It is 1974 and we have a party to go to at the Corn Exchange.

Catching Dublin’s Essence

With a party to go to you would think there would be more eagerness afoot, on display, than we are seeing: a sportscaster seems to have made a moment’s appearance—quick wipe and we are back with what you have been used to. Snow in St Stephen’s Green.

Let us say Liddy has been waiting for his friend to join him. Can’t say he must have been held up in travel. In travel? Yes, yes, in traffic, is what you meant to say. The traffic is getting worse year by year. Time to fill in the canals and turn them into five- or six-lane superhighways to ring Dublin with footbridges on which lovers can stand and kids can stand in the boredom of their youth, holding cement blocks waiting for a likely car to pass . . . teeth of a skull heaved up by winter, spring, fall, summer, all that nature stuff from which there is no escape: I watch Liddy. Hours seem to be passing though it is only minutes. The watch on my wrist has stopped. I’ll have to take it in to get it repaired. My father’s watch, given to me by his death. I had been waiting for his death, been waiting longer than I have ever talked about. It is the one genuine suspenseful drama we are given in this life: waiting to see if and when they are dead. They’re dead and the dead are excellent companions for the dead and we the living . . . The man has dark slicked-back hair and he’s sitting opposite me holding one of those liter bottles of beer, using it as a pointer: the dead fuck the dead and we have nothing to learn from them except, stay alive and don’t fuck dead girls. It is not a very nice thing to do and ain’t, as you Americans would say, much fun. Where did this guy come from? ————

175

REMEMBER a while ago Teresa had been in and left with Williams. REMEMBER I had offered to take her and child off to Yugoslavia. REMEMBER, I am sure you do, finally. Well, Teresa didn’t like Yugoslavia and took the next train, as they say, back to London. I told her I was staying a little while longer as I had to make up my mind if I was . . . So, we’ve done the remembering and still can’t figure out where this guy with the beer bottle in hand has come from. Liddy, is Liam coming along? He should have been here. If not I expect we’ll see him over at the party. No, Liam, as you know is American. Suffers from too much organization like all Americans. Has even organized his conscience. How does one do that? That, my son, is a secret of the heart which one day . . . I don’t give a flying proverbial fuck, Liddy. A rare offer I am sure our taxi drivers would look forward to. They live closer to the ground. They do. It is not to their credit, but they do live close to the ground. Leland’s friend, the taxi driver, was no longer an object of talk. Fintan lived further and further out on the famous fringe of society. I hadn’t seen him and that was a dangerous sign. He would be about—lurking, was the word people used about him and he would appear at the exact moment when I was down and wanted a final little hammer tap to the top of the skull to feel really rotten with his report of some party that had broken the wallet of a Chilean millionaire and sheets so bloody . . . Fintan’s hair had been shocked from black into gray. He was no longer a young man about town with a bunch of kids living in rooms out back in the basement flat on Lesson Street. The flat had been turned into a late-night restaurant where you had to watch the bottle of wine you were required to buy in order to sit in the place, because someone might steal it when head turned . . . Fintan was pushed out and a restaurant erected to his memory: a chancer was the other word people used about Fintan. Checkbooks fell into his hands and there was always a sort of gap between the act and the fear of getting caught with misplaced checks. Thank God, for the chilly climate of Ireland. A gold chain by all rights should be draped about his neck and a gulch of hair should be visible midst the open white shirt. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Fintan frequented black corduroy jackets. The cloth was dusty, Things are not so good, he would be saying through puckered lips. Things are not so good, these days, when the number of Americans has fallen and we are left to our own resources, seems I keep seeing the same wallets, I mean, faces, circulating. When you were first here it was much better. Then it was a time of growth and poetry and people were alive and out having as good a time as possible: now they go out to be seen and do not have a good time if they can help it. Nothing is being spread about; now is the time the gardeners talk about as raking close to the curb. However, from thinking Fintan was not about he was suddenly there with a car, an auto on loan if there is a place to go. Liddy did not like Fintan but was friends with him. Another one of the helpful distinctions it takes years to understand and still you can come up with the one hand dripping with chilled air. Liddy would not gossip behind Fintan’s back. It was that sort of friendship. Didn’t take him seriously enough to keep track of his life. O, that’s Fintan, was the extent of the friendship. I on the other hand was an object of Fintan’s attention. I was the American, another one of them from the land of dollar bills, that were never counted and were always falling from the table to be scooped up by the industrious. Fintan was shifting weight from one foot to the other. He was waiting to be asked the extent of his thirst. The beer bottle had disappeared. I was thinking this as an American. Liddy would never give a thought to it as he would assume like all men created on this . . . Fintan had a thirst, only the grain of soil . . . I had written of as clogging the vein, would end. And if you can’t quote yourself, who can you quote? The anticipatory dance step put me on edge. I think they’re not serving anymore. They are, just ask them. They got to keep up appearances for the tourist trade and the balance of payments—you are American. I try not to let it show. It does so you might as well put it to some use. Liddy looked at me. I had been had. Fintan could smell an unspent penny a mile away and always knew his own cause was a worthy one. Fintan had himself over to a man in authority who was then seen pouring whiskey into glasses and putting the glasses on a tray and carrying the tray toward ourselves with sadness and regret at the death of your parents and on this a day of national shame at what goes on in the city of ————

177

New York on St. Pat’s Day with the Catholic bullies in from The Island or over from Jersey. Ah, the whiskey of sorrows, a far more interesting concept than old Deirdre— Now, I was saying, you don’t take my sister’s name in vain I didn’t know you had a sister, Liddy said. I do. And a brother before me who was dead before he was a year. I trust he was baptized, Liddy asked. Of course. Good then. You got another one putting his back to the oar of pulling you in the right direction. The whiskey is . . . Fintan did not continue. He had been taught to put an end to religious discussions as they tended eventually to get around to conscience. I think the man needs to be paid, Fintan said to me. He would never have said this to Liddy. I was caught and was paying for my nationality. May the worms shit on the face of John F. Kennedy before they get down to gnaw on his shrunken testicles. It wouldn’t do any good. There was nothing I could curse. I was had and as an American I got out the money careful to take only a fiver out because of the unhooded eyes of Fintan, would have his hand into my pocket before I had a chance to nail a lock to the front door. The whiskey had a bitter edge to it. Memory is a moth-eaten blanket and now the year is turning chilly. Blanket men take note. We should be getting ourselves out of here, I say to no one in particular. What’s the rush, Fintan says. The party will be over before we get there. Have no fear. Fintan is here. That is the fear, Jocelyn says. Unfounded, I can assure you, Fintan says, hand to breast, his own— thought you caught me on an ambiguity there! O.K. O.K. O.K. we are all getting into the car Fintan has outside. Once, Burgess said, the most difficult thing in writing is getting people from one place to the next or to the other or into and out of a room. Once you got the movement question under control you got everything else within striking distance, to mix metaphors. So. St. Patrick’s Day

————

TO THE PARTY

No matter what we do, we are going, sometimes in spite of ourselves, toward a happiness of which our mind can form no idea. What good is it to regret the shadows of this earth. We must think of death with hope and firmness of the great shining country that lives beyond the black gate. —Julian Green, 8 December 1937

I am in a car being driven by Fintan. We are on our way to the party

down on Poolbeg Street. Stan and Arthur have the place and will always have the place. They are locked into it. I could drag in a whole bunch of other situations of how people are always attached to certain places. There is music on the car stereo. Somewhere I have a record plugged into my brain. I am sitting in the back with Jocelyn and Liam who did show up after all. Liddy, because of age and all the rest of it, got the front seat. The death seat, I tell him, and he says he is not afraid to meet his Maker but would prefer to delay the accounting. A lot of interference from CB radios, Radio Luxembourg with the hot dates from Abingdon Road with the most modern method of meeting the one true and only love of your life after so many botched attempts— Through streets of Dublin. Downtown, further downtown. I had forgotten to say we had each picked up our sacks of clicking bottles. Because I was the American my bags did not click as mightily as some because I had filled them with as many bottles as I thirst—as I thought my thirst would demand and of how many hours I thought to be still alive until the morning hit me over the head with the idea: I was still in Dublin. This is called building of tension, this has been St. Patrick’s Day and of all the usual thoughts Ireland, and Dublin, and being born in Brooklyn, stamped on the face with the map of Ireland, as some said, thinking instead they stamped some ghetto from east of Warsaw on my nose: or this could be just a New York City thought, the most Jewish of all cities . . . Toll Rises to 49 Dead, 129 Injured In Blaze at Dance Hall in Dublin

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Do you know the people at the party, Liddy asks. They’re Americans, been here for years. Art is doing a graduate degree at Trinity and Stan is doing something. I’ve never understood what kept him going. More Americans, yes, Liddy says. Yes, Fintan says with all the melodrama his yes is supposed to echo for all who have been with us so far. I need a cup of coffee, Jocelyn says. I am sure they have it, Liddy says. Americans keep a pot of coffee on the stove with the same faith that our dear old peasants of yore kept the pot stirring center stage in the Abbey of memory. I saw Mrs. Yeats once in the Abbey, I said, back when the Abbey was in that theatre behind Trinity. It made all of Dublin seem a very small place. Did you ever think otherwise? In the beginning you always think a city is larger than it is and then there comes a moment when you think it’s a pretty small place. Small potatoes, Jocelyn interjected. That’s right: small potatoes. I hope you’re not taking the national symbol in vain, Liam said. I am not. I thought it was the shamrock. Only for export and then only on greeting cards or the tails of jet planes . . . Potatoes, always keep them close to the heart, Liddy is saying. Like that Russian saint who kept a jar of apples rotting in his drawer— You got the wrong saint and the wrong country, I say. I don’t know who the guy was but he wasn’t a Russian and he wasn’t a saint, the one with the rotting apples . . . the Russian you’re thinking about, if it is a Russian, kept jars of his spent ejaculate and baptized each one of them. But it can only be baptized if it is a person and cum ain’t fertilized, Jocelyn says. Back to the potato—it is a decent—what is it?—fruit or vegetable? Well it is a tuber or tumor—whatever it is, it is a decent something that saw the Irish people through many a storm. Only a couple of million bit the dust in the famine. Whatever you put your faith in has the right to betray you—it is one of the features of any object of trust. Only in the United States are you ————

181

surprised when the statue has feet of clay and a skeleton of frayed wiring. Let them eat dust and at least their souls will be saved. Dust is not for eating but for marking out the faithful on Ash Wednesday. A&P Catholics. Ashes and Palm takers, only going to church when they are giving stuff away. And after the tale of woe on the radio and in a car was there any music? There was indeed and I’ll be getting to that as soon as I can: No Future, Fear, Janitor of Lunacy, Model Worker, I Hate Mondays, a cut by Von Webern that no one caught but they were sure to remember it if they heard it again, something by Chopin since the mind rarely travels far from Poland when the subject of music comes up and the night is fast upon us and we are all alone, Shift the Blame, Satisfaction, Coming Down, Barbara Ann, Manimal, No One Driving, Underpass, Metal Music, Heart and, Soul, A Means to an End, Isolation. My Mind, Shot by Both Sides, and other carefully selected songs to tear us . . . Fintan, you got the directions? Yes, of course. I know my way about these streets. We should have Mr. J. along, he’s a Dublin man. I do not have a rubber sheet to put under him. His mother sends him out in the morning with a rubber sheet. And I know for a fact Mr. J. doesn’t come equipped with a rubber sheet and there is a literary reason for my knowledge. Mr. J. is anti-Joyce and would have nothing on him to be seen as homage to Stephen’s early years: rubber sheet indeed! How can anyone forget all those English classes where you have to talk about the rubber sheet and Stephen’s developing sensitivity as an artist, with nose pinned to rubber sheet trying to find words for the smell. I need a cup of coffee. That is an allusion to Dean Swift. The American has something there, Fintan says. This is the city of writers and their ghosts haunt the streets . . . you too can walk the streets Swift and his lady loves walked— Fintan is reading the tourist board literature. St. Patrick’s Day

————

It is required before you get a license as a taxi driver. You must be able to prove you can discourse on three major writers and always have one obscure clod of earth to throw at gullible professors from the middle part of your country. No way to squirm my ring of keys out of pocket so as to use one of them to cap off a bottle and ease the passage from pub to party. It’s just a bit along there. Then to find a parking space. Becoming more and more difficult with each passing year. We are a modern city after all. Have to have up-to-date idle conversation. The weather is too old-fashioned. Traffic jams and parking. Never produced decent poetry. Poetry is long dead . . . On the day of his death, when in the evening we were gathered on Gendrikovy Lane where the museum is now, but where then there was only the Briks’ apartment we suddenly heard loud noises coming from Mayakovski’s room—very loud noises, unceremoniously loud, as if wood was being chopped. This was Mayakovski’s skull being cracked open to remove his brain. We listened in the horror-filled silence. Then a man in a white gown and boots emerged from the room—either an attendant or a medical assistant, but someone unknown to us—and in his hands that soldier carried a basin covered with a white cloth raised in the center like a pyramid, just as if he had been carrying a cheese pudding. In the basin was Mayakovski’s brain.

On Poolbeg Street just up from Mulligan’s and not to tell you all about being in Mulligan’s, how many different times and O, go on, why not talk about Mulligan’s. They have to get themselves out of the car. Get the sacks of bottles out of the car. They have to make sure they aren’t leaving anything behind in the car. They know Fintan has a contract with a dealer down by the quays for anything found in the cab, lost in the cab; you say you left something in my cab? They know they don’t want to have to go out to the car once they are in the party. They know they don’t want to have to wait until Fintan is ready to go down to the cab and get what they left in the cab. And you say you don’t have time to go into what was going on in Mulligan’s. Nothing really. It was just another pub to go to. It was the last Joyce pub easy to go to and seemed to be much as when Joyce might ————

183

have known it. Down there near the Irish Press building. Just showing you I know what I am talking about. They stuck this ugly building across the street from it. Your man in his blue watchman’s uniform with his aluminum container full of milky tea looking out from the glass box . . . where’s the verb? Lost that sucker in hatred for that glass building across from Mulligan’s. The last time I remember I REMEMBER again? I thought you were getting rid of I REMEMBER. People are getting the idea. As I was saying, I remember, the last time I was in Mulligan’s it must have been with Helen and Mike. They had come down from the North and were on their way back to London. We were standing around talking with, was it Liddy, that time, but anyway John was there with his lipstick, chapstick, and I was asking after Antonia and you know the business about this woman buggering sheep and the man with John saying she was his wife, not that she buggers sheep but she is his wife and is the woman who had a grandmother who knew Henry James in London because she was American of very old stock and she would never have given up her American citizenship even if the hordes of both Germany and every nig nation in the world were to come marching right up Piccadilly, as the Brits had burned out her grandsomething’s house in the War of 1812; living in London was only a convenience. The man whose wife was stated as having a desire to fuck sheep was so polite. Never showed his true colors. Never share any memory of Mulligan’s with people. They were nice enough, all of them. Be in the back room and watch the man arm-wrestle the young one and lose. And to know the whole story of it. The man going home and beating up the kid saying his prayers. Giving the kid a lesson he’d never forget. God never does listen when you need his help. Those people are pretty much out of the car and here I am in Mulligan’s doing a lesson based on Dubliners. St Patrick ‘hijacked,’ says Orange leader

Mike was to the bar and getting another round and saying, what a mouth you got I thought you’d be counting your teeth, and him, the woman’s St. Patrick’s Day

————

husband. He couldn’t very well hit me because it would have been admitting he didn’t have the language, maybe that’s the difference between peoples. Here it still is a matter of the tongue being stronger than the fist in the long run, though there has been an increasing number of incidents of people resorting to the muscle side of the brain . . . and years later Mike was still saying that day you were so drunk and you saying to that man who was so polite in that formal Anglo-Irish way, is she still strapping on the dildo and buggering the sheep, you asked, and the man didn’t miss a beat, replied that no, she was married to him and he had been sent out to fetch a cake and would you like to be going back to the house and the balls of you, you accepted, and Helen and I just sank into the woodwork of Mulligan’s and I was thinking, I would sit in the back room with Susan and she would . . . in the gray fading light her blue eyes in pale face, surrounded by a mad woman’s black hair: each and every one of them a bastard, just a bastard, from her father to that one last week, couldn’t they see, it is not in the nature of a man to see but being unable to get anybody to ask after Susan as I knew only people who drank and Susan wasn’t drinking much then and the few friends she had from Trinity lived deep in the country and deeper in the country of drugs—DRUGS, how exotic that sounds in an Irish context but some of the best damn drugs flow, float through the streets and lanes of fair Dublin since the Garda have other things on their minds. Though I don’t remember what was the cause of Susan’s distress . . . PISS ON THE BILLIONAIRES’ PRESS

They got the sacks of beer in their arms and are walking away from Mulligan’s and are almost to the steps leading up to the gray of the Corn Exchange. I’ve been told the Scotch House on Burgh Quay went, but that was never really on my path of drinking the streets of Dublin. A place to go into when the pubs had opened Saturday afternoon after the afternoon films down on O’Connell Street, sitting up in the balcony with those English medical students. Army officers on leave, sitting midst the occupied folk and their quaint habits: Irish kids like to spit and drool from the balcony on those in the stalls . . . ————

185

Sorry, I did have a reason to get the picture shifted to Dubliners when I was living in Eustace Street which Joyce mentions as being the address of the man who will end up arm-wrestling back here in this room of Mulligan’s, the address of where the guy is working and getting the reason for going out and pawning his watch to get the stuff . . . in Eustace Street in a room on the top floor Susan was there and Dickie: we sat and the three of us held hands promising to meet at 12 noon on and on and on . . . I have forgotten the day and the year but I remember it as being a noon and the place Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and there we promised each other we would do nothing. Paisley slates Banana republic

Is the front door gonna be open? Liddy asks. They walk up the broken steps of the building. There is a fresh puddle of vomit to be avoided. Food is being served. We all need a breath before the next round of drinking begins. a stepping aside.

Why can’t people puke where other people aren’t gonna step in it? Almost out of a fine-tuned sense of pass it along if you can—knowing just where to open mouth and let go. So we’re still in front of the Corn Exchange. I yelled out STANLEY. There was no reaction from on high. Stanley! Arthur! Window opens far up. The door’s open. It’s locked. It was open a minute ago. It’s locked now. I’ll be down. Don’t go away. Stay where you are. You don’t want to miss the show. An earnest sort of voice, Liddy said. A pleasant surprise, Jocelyn said. After all of this evening. We stand around stamping our feet. It is not that cold. It gives us something to do. It is easier than talking. We have all been to the movies. Not as many of those movies as once upon a time. Before the big battle St. Patrick’s Day

————

the Indians always work up a war dance. NO NO there will be no lurching into a Western under present circumstances. Flann O’Brien gave out an example and even a sort of encouragement for having a Western down here by the docks. A little war dance is all I can afford. I don’t want to have to dress people up in ten-gallon hats—they might look good in them but we can leave that all for the times which will come after this moment in Dublin when those damn ten-gallon hats will appear on the heads of the disco-dancing teens of Dublin. Never on the way with Susan. That summer after the Trinity Ball she was in a couple of films and was under the supervision of a couple of lovers and ended up in St. Patrick’s: it was so sad. I thought my hair was gonna fall out. I would never be able to go out into the sun with a bald head. It was so sad. It was so sad. Yes it was, I would agree if I was cold of heart. I met Susan around one o’clock in the middle of the week on Nassau Street. If there had been a wall handy she would be banging her head against it. She couldn’t go home to Plymouth. My fucking old man kicked me out of the house when he heard . . . what did he hear, it was nothing, that’s what my fucking old man heard, was fucking nothing and it drove him up the wall, I wouldn’t tell him what’s the matter so he kicked me out of his house saying I was never to come home again—just like in the song of Ian Whitcomb: poor but honest and they don’t want to see you if you’re either of those two and me with both of them on my back . . . The Disco Show Must Go On

They must be building the stairs to get down to the front door, Liam says. To answer him an empty glass falls from on high and shatters in the street. If we were in New York that would be an excuse for the police to open fire. A bit louder here in Dublin and we would be taking cover and then looking up to see what we have to scrape from the brickwork. Getting ready for the warpath. The blood is heating up. There is sweat on our wrists. Anyway, get the bottle open and fool that I am give Jocelyn the first slug and Liddy has his hand on the bottle before I get my own out, am left with two swallows. He must be going by way of China or at least Bolivia, I said to no one in particular. ————

187

They can come by way of Tibet and hump a yak on the way for all I care, Fintan says. Is that the short or the long way, Liam asks. How should I know? I’ve not been farther than London. Eventually, as should be made plain, the front door opened and it was Arthur doing the opening and we followed him upstairs and were in the converted offices that served as their flat, apartment, since they were two Americans from Boston, living in Dublin, engaged in academic pursuits and NOW you can simply say this was an act of nostalgia. These two guys were students and why have you made them students when you could just as easily have made them two guys living in Dublin on money from the proceeds of their fathers’ deaths, like your own reason for being in Dublin. I have no nostalgia. I turn and instead of seeing the wall of nudes, blonde nudes, I look into the kitchen of Arthur and Stanley’s office and see Stanley standing near the sink, a bottle of gin in his right hand and a blue and white striped Woolworth’s coffee mug in his left hand, saying why the fuck am I wasting all this energy pouring gin from bottle to mug when I could just as easily pour the gin straight to the mouth of the mug and so, lifted bottle of gin to lips and took a long swallow of what I noticed was Beefeater Gin—rare indeed in this land of C.D.G., Cork Dry Gin—Christ’s Dried GUTS. Stanley was a tall broad fellow. You could put Stan’s face in the middle of a map of the United States and his hands out there banging into shape the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines and it would not be out of place. He had a big smile and knew a smile was the best face to put forward when going through someone’s pockets. Arthur was a much smaller person. The guy who actually did the work. Thin with a moustache looking like it required plant food to grow. He was talking to us with his back to us, make ourselves comfortable and you could see his hand moving with a sort of be cool and don’t make waves and don’t break the furniture, there ain’t that much of it to begin with and no one is to try and make a play for the woman I am married to though God, it would be interesting to see if anyone would make a play for the wife who stands in the corner with a small glass of something in hand, thinking that this can’t go on for much longer though it will and Stan turns when he sees us and screams, long time no see. St. Patrick’s Day

————

WELCOME

But before we get upstairs I have set the empty bottle down on the top step and have stood for that long second while I listen to someone fiddle with the lock on the other side of the door. We’re in, I say, and Liddy, Liam, Jocelyn, and Fintan are up at the door to see the peering face of Arthur in the gray backlit gloom of the Corn Exchange. It’s the Grogan delegation, I tell Arthur. Good to see you, how’s it going? Too bad about Justin. Shame. Indicate as obviously as possible a moment of silence for Justin who will not be with us tonight as Justin was known by Stan and Arthur. He was on that boat to Spain. That is not my story. Stan will have to fill you in on that. FOUR IN SEA DRAMA OFF IRISH COAST

So, up the stairs. A candle, a group of candles on top of cartons at each floor. Our shadows danced. We climbed higher and then through a long corridor off to left. . . . Soon I understood that by emphasizing his aristocratic origins (his biographers exaggerate this, but he himself was the instigator), he was looking for a way of separating himself from the “temps de laideur ricanante.” He guarded his solitude and did not recognize many of the values generally accepted in his epoch.

No Beatrice, no Laura . . . to finish up this day . . . to be set in the moment of the car door opening and just before the first touch of shoe to pavement: the old is skeleton death, her body on the boat of Charon poling on to Hades, mouth stuffed with a coin. How can Barbara go on about being happy, about how the colleagues will be so jealous and are so jealous of me going off on my own, of going off without my husband to New York City. Does Barbara talk about what did not happen in New York City?

————

189

And went walking along 11th Street with Barbara down to the river, passed the White Horse and able to say in there Dylan Thomas drank his last before dying at St. Vincent’s. The day is papercut clear and the men are out sunning their backsides and a crazed black man walks from tourist to tourist asking for money and a blessing: bless me mother, bless me father, bless me child. Give me. A German in moustache, short pants, and roving eye was asked to take a picture of Barbara and me against the fence. I have a foot up against the cement lower part of the fence and am reaching with left hand up to the fence behind Barbara’s back. She leans against me and had the palm of her hand on the front of her right leg. She smiles and is wearing sunglasses, head cocked a little to me. She is wearing black jeans and a sleeveless red patterned blouse . . . in the background another pier and in the far distance the World Trade Center. I am sending her away. On her way. I bought the Official Guide to Dublin, published in the 1950s in Dublin. Her voice is sad and wistful, I think, as if expecting to be told . . . The passage of thirty-two years. All I have done, all that she has done. “Having finally given up betting, drink, and the rest I came here to Berlin and was plunged into a kind of whirlpool.” And he “de-

liberately wanted to expose himself to humiliation.” “I could not

be a writer in the bosom of society.” Being in Germany is one thing, lecturing at Berlin was bad enough, but going over to the

other side of the street, slinking down the street was something

a writer could not do in peace time. (Hitler’s Airwaves about Francis Stuart in Berlin during World War Two)

Gray pussy hair, I imagine gray hair. I know so little about her life: a stew with thought. Her marriage, her divorce, her remarriage, her two children. Is something the matter, Barbara says. I don’t know. Is something the matter with you? No, maybe we should stop for a coffee. At the corner of 9th and Second Avenue there is a Starbucks. On South Anne Street in Dublin in 1965 there was the New Amsterdam Café and out on the Rathmines Road there was the Copenhagen Coffee St. Patrick’s Day

————

Bar . . . and I thought I had pledged myself not to talk of these places, again, but I had sat in the New Amsterdam with Barbara . . . and it was after or before going to that place that night after which we no longer saw each other . . . on Grafton Street I turned . . . We sit at a round table toward the back of the Starbucks. The woodwork, I am saying, in the ceiling, the curved dropped-down ceiling for the recessed lighting always reminds me of cafés in Sofia, when I was first there in the ’60s and the Bulgarians were copying the latest designs for such places from the West . . . I like the lighting fixtures hanging from the ceiling, pieces of parchment wrapped about the lights . . . back then they would have been made of some sort of yellow or orange plastic. Are you unhappy that I am here, Barbara says. I have the impression you are. You are avoiding me. I thought from the letters and maybe from what you wrote and maybe I said something . . . you don’t seem to want me to . . . I thought we would have . . . You’re a married woman. And if something happened what would that do to your marriage . . . Nothing. What would you tell him. He wouldn’t ask. Surely he would be curious about that weekend. He’ll ask what I saw, what we talked about, what I did but that is all. Maybe not even that. We do not have that sort of marriage. We each have our own lives. But not like you seem to think. We sleep in the same bed but we don’t . . . we haven’t had relations for ten, twelve years . . . We don’t talk about it. We just don’t. We get along very well. We just don’t have a sexual relationship. He and I get on very well. We have so many things to do. Everybody says we get on very well. We have so many family obligations . . . we just get on very well. He has his work and I have mine and I like my work very much, as I’ve told you. I am happy. We never touch each other. You just don’t notice it after a while. Twelve years ago he had an affair. It was awful. The talk, the tears, the sitting on the couch, talking and crying. It was awful. We cried and talked for two months. Ten years ago I had an affair. It went on for three or four weeks. It was just lust and then it was over. I never told him. Why go through the talking and the crying. No. It was over. I lost ————

191

interest. He lost interest. For three weeks it was crazy. It was just too much. There was another time but it went on for three days and I . . . with the solicitor who I worked for then for two years. He had a real blowtorch personality. We had the affair, if you can call it that, and then it was over and it never came up again; not once in the two years I worked for him. Most people’s lives are like this, I expect. Why would you think otherwise? We’re happy. We suit each other. What would be the point? Maybe the pleasure. What would be the point? Maybe all of that is so overrated. Why throw away something that seems to work. I’m happy and I think, but I don’t know, I guess, he is happy. It never comes up. Even when you have the example of your brother. That’s different. He was being smothered by his wife. She wanted to be all over him. That’s why he wrote those books and even then she wanted to be helping him. It was a way for her to involve herself in his life. But he knew from near the beginning that his marriage was wrong. But he went along with it. You were asking once, Barbara says, about that poet Montague: didn’t he furnish a life of processed self-pity. Men are so sick in their supposed tenderness . . . My husband thought his tears meant something. I walk holding hands with Barbara, along Second Avenue. Going walking with her that first time out along the Rathgar Road from the upstairs coffeehouse in Dublin. Not to think of what I both know and do not know. In the room on First Street, Kiss me. I don’t think anything should happen. You’re not free. You’re married and that’s just the way it is. You are not free and I . . . Official Guide to Dublin . . . this seems closer to the Dublin I remember when I was there than to the one I have walked through. Barbara reads from the section on Killiney, delightfully situated and boasting a fine beach which affords capital bathing. The language seems so dated . . . capital bathing. I remember my father saying: they would be stopping at a place as opposed to saying he was staying at a place . . . She seems so thin. Seeing my own age in the lines on her face and the naked desperate begging need mirroring my own life and it has unsuited me for pleasure and I am thinking of the ribs . . . St. Patrick’s Day

————

I remember meeting you, now in Trinity, in that room of Jesse, the boy from Tanzania, was it . . . I remember more than I told you. Whenever I am walking on that street I think of you . . . When we were walking from that café . . . what was the name of the street? Molesworth Street and the lane off it, the café, I think of the time I was there with you . . . Is it still there? Molesworth was perpendicular to the Hibernia that is gone, I know . . . what I found very peculiar is after we went back and had done it and were in bed you wanted to get up and walk. This was back then when I expected we would stay in bed but you wanted to go for a walk. I didn’t know what was the matter. I was scared, it was the first time . . . but I thought, I really did, that babies came out of the belly button. I didn’t know anything. I knew more than that. And we lay there in our stunned sort of . . . just held . . . close to me and she held me and we are there again years ago . . . it seems like such a long time ago.

HERE IS THE WHOLE BOOK IN A FEW SENTENCES HERE THE READER AS WELL AS THE WRITER SHOULD TRULY KNOW THE ACCIDENT OF

I’m so glad we talked and I came back and we talked and you told me. I thought you didn’t like me and were disappointed in some way. You know you wrote to me from America after you went back there that year and I had meant to write and I didn’t and I was looking for your letter but I couldn’t find it. I kept it, I am sure I did . . . I couldn’t find it . . . You didn’t reply that is all I knew . . . I was at home in Patchogue, I saw Melinda . . . I wonder what I would have done if you had replied. (another one of those BUT stories) I’ll just be going. You know this is the most assertive thing I have ever done. My mother was saying, so you’re off to New York to see your boyfriend. I laughed and everyone else laughed. I don’t know where she got the idea. The girls at work think I am very daring. They’re all jealous. To get away from their husbands and go to New York all by themselves and to meet a man in New York City. That’s what they all dream of. I

————

193

work in the state solicitor’s office. You know about solicitors? We get all the police reports of crimes and have to decide whether to prosecute. I really like my work. Yes, I am really happy. I have a job I love to go to and I have friends at the job and people I see and I have never known what I wanted to do. I am really happy. I don’t worry about my health like you Americans. I used to but then I stopped and it doesn’t seem to matter. This is just the way I am. I’m never sick and neither is my husband. I can’t tell you. We’re just never sick. Maybe ten years ago I was sick with a cold or something but it went away. Of course we had to see the doctor when Sally was born but that was the only time. I guess it must be all the walking. How did you marry him? I don’t know, but I do know. I had met Paddy here in Dublin and it seemed that . . . I was what, twenty-two or twenty-three, and he wanted to and it seemed like the thing to do and I hadn’t thought of anything else to do and then suddenly went off to London and I had Fiona and Paddy was always trying to find a better situation and we were always moving and we were never really suited for each other . . . and I was introduced to him and Paddy had moved us up to Bury St. Edmunds and then he was up and down commuting to London because whatever it was that he had found didn’t work out and didn’t think it would lead to something he wanted—that was the way it was in those days—and eventually he would only be coming back on the weekends to see us and don’t get me wrong he was very attached to Fiona and still is, and I met him and he was a journalist. He just swept me off my feet, as they say, I was mad in love with him. As it happened, he had planned, he was moving back to Dublin and I went along, not right away but very shortly after but it seemed that I . . . it wasn’t as stressful as many breakups and then I just went back to Dublin and we started living together. I got a divorce and for a while Paddy was devastated. He didn’t want it and he quickly found someone else and seems to be happy, I reckon. As you know there’s been no sexual relationship with him for years . . . You were my first girlfriend in that sense, I say, like I told you and I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know much more than you because just before I had met you I had been going out with Ed Mitchell. I guess I was his first too because St. Patrick’s Day

————

he was my first. He was a nice Protestant boy from down in the country. There’s not very many of them. He must have been very isolated. He lived with his mother and father, an only son. It was awful. He took me home to his parents and introduced me as the girl he was going to marry. I felt very trapped. I wanted to live more. I was what—twenty, single, a girl working in Dublin. I felt awful because I had met this other fellow who I had my heart set on and now Ed started writing me these letters that if anything happened he would kill himself and if I was not at the Palace Bar at nine o’clock on this Saturday night he was going to kill himself, throw himself in the Liffey or something. I didn’t know what to do and this friend was visiting my brother and I told him about the fellow who would be waiting for me in the pub and he went along to the Palace Bar and I guess they both got drunk and there was no more talk of suicide or anything. I don’t know what was said and I guess I don’t want to really know, I was so glad it was done with but I guess I didn’t think much about things in those days but . . . and then I went out with this fellow I had my heart on . . . his father was a judge in Fiji . . . he was at Trinity and he was a real product of the English public schools but nicer, if you know what I mean, and he spent his holidays in all these exotic places where his father was a judge. There was someplace else, maybe Malaya and all of that and maybe he was the fellow I mentioned to you or, I don’t remember . . . I was . . . but then that just ended and I met Paddy and it seemed like the right thing, to get married and you know the rest of the story. Barbara, you seemed so exotic to me. A Protestant girl and me coming from Patchogue where we didn’t go into the YMCA because we didn’t do such things back then, as those places were supposed to trap Catholic kids. I have always meant to ask you, what sort of accent do you have? It’s a south Dublin accent for sure and I guess you can say it is Booterstown to be exact. I can hear it when in Dublin but I couldn’t tell you what makes it such. The talking just stopped bang there. Right at that moment. We held each other for, as they say, the longest time, and then there were no more questions, no more storying. I wrote a letter to Karolin about Barbara coming to New York but before sending it I called George: [A MEMORIAL STONE NEEDS TO BE PLACED AFTER THE MENTION OF George: he reappears in the ————

195

book Nothing Doing and was in a deleted scene from the movie Julien Donkey-Boy, and the album Sound of Silver from LCD Soundsystem is dedicated to George Kamen (1942–2006)] . . .You shouldn’t send it. You don’t have to confuse life and fiction. You don’t have to be unhappy. Enjoy your friend being in New York. What does that have to do with Karolin? She is real and the Irish girl is a fiction, really, though a living fiction if you want.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

The Corn Exchange

The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing. —Augusto Roa Bastos

The Corn Exchange was no castle unless you can fall for the idea that

certain businesses are the new empires of our day and their offices, castles on the Rhine—follow me, please, don’t want you to get lost and fall hundreds of feet into an insurance claim against company and state. Looking for a free lunch ain’t the way to be in this day in which every person gets his chance to bounce on the trampoline. So through the gloom, the better parts of ourselves dancing on the gray walls and dark offices, closed for the night and for all eternity. The Corn Exchange was closed down awaiting demolition. Arthur had a friend working on the Irish Times who heard about a couple of the offices in the place which had been fixed up by this guy as a Parisian retreat from his damp marriage. More creative than most of them. Instead of turning to the bottle he found a girlfriend. A real live girlfriend who wanted to have an affair with a married man. It didn’t last and this guy told Arthur about the place and he knew Stan from Boston. How long have they lived in the Corn Exchange? Glad you asked the question. If you noticed when you came into the kitchen, which was the room you entered when you entered the offices, the flat, you noticed, to emphasis the point, a shower stall in the far corner. It is full of newspapers. The shower stall once worked but something happened and what the fuck, there are the public baths in Trinity. Some might think that a sufficient comment on an Irish state of affairs. Filled up the shower stall two times and were now on the third goaround. So, how long? Okay, you get a bundle like this . . . hands thrust out as if to indicate a woman has large breasts, now move the hands still cupped out a way and you have about three months of accumulated papers from my own experience of when I lived in Ely Place, never having taken them down to the street. St. Patrick’s Day

————

A lot of reading going on in the shower was the joke. We don’t want to be downbeat. Stanley says to put the coats in the other room and get ourselves into still another room and have a good time so a good time can be said to have been had by all and everyone is to have a good time with prawns on the way if what’s his name gets his ass in gear and I don’t mean a hayburner or whatever it is that they eat and gets himself in from Howth with a bucket of prawns which he promised me without fail, he said to me, without fail I’ll have you a bucket of prawns for St. Pat’s, without fail, even if it kills me. Those candles, surely they’re a fire hazard? You are right. But not tonight. There will be no tragedy to use the wrong word. Other details from the street to the offices? There was lettering on the office door. I didn’t catch it going in so I’ll catch it going out. This ain’t a ship of fools or even the Lusitania. Still in the kitchen or the room called the kitchen because it is where there is a sink, a hot plate, shower, table now loaded down with empty beer bottles, booze. At least I wasn’t shaking. Another one of those last times I was with Stanley up in Revere Beach we had been to see the original or second original Howard Johnson’s, drinking Michelob on warm empty stomachs and then for a look in at the trailer display sponsored by the Massachusetts Crime Commission: you get a chance to sit in the electric chair . . . but the shaking came later when Stan took me over to visit this Russian woman who he said would fuck me for free as a favor. I stood shaking and she wouldn’t have me so Stan told me to go down to the car because you can’t keep a woman waiting who is primed and ready. The empty bottles were filling up the kitchen table. Arthur’s wife moved through the rooms picking up empty bottles when she wasn’t standing against the wall. She didn’t want a proliferation of weapons. I was told by a guy that parties are a thing of the past in Dublin, I was saying to Arthur with an open bottle of beer in hand having stuck the sack of bottles under a pile of coats in the other room knowing I would have to get them soon because eventually a couple would end up on top of the coats going through not here can’t you wait? I have heard so but don’t believe it. A whole tribe of liars has grown up, in this new Ireland. ————

199

I walked away—a far grander gesture in language than in reality because with three steps I was nearly out the door and had met few of the people I knew or wanted to be there this night. A dull yellowish light in the kitchen; probably brighter than memory would have it. In fact it was damn bright for an Irish kitchen but then this wasn’t an Irish kitchen with the block of grease that got warmed up infrequently to heat up the water for the tea to go with the bread and butter supper. But who to begin with: if I tell you Brian arrived with his Dutch girlfriend then I would have to tell you again about Marielle, but Mr. J. is at the door and a space is being found for him in the other room, far to the other side of the other room, with a couple of days of Irish Independents as seat coverings. Mr J. extracts a bottle of vodka from inside coat pocket, takes a short pull from it. His friend is late in arriving. You can’t let the young out of sight for a moment before they’re jumping into bed with the first offer arriving on hoof or claw. Not that I blame him, a young lad and all while I, an old fart with no smell left in his wind. Sure the Spanish must have a phrase for it but the language has flown out of my head and the thoughts of dead Gainor Christ—I mist-speak . . . MISTSPEAK his name, Crist. Smells like the same old bunch of farts are showing up again. God in heaven I hope it ain’t true. Mr. J. is okay but not the same drear hum of voices sounding like the end of the horse race and all a horde of losers of what might have been and if only they had trusted the knee banged against the door ENGLAND GET OUT OF IRELAND MASSIVE ANTI-THATCHER DEMONSTRATION

Anyway Mr. J. is in the other room while Brian is at the door and the Dutch woman who went to work for the Line of the Flying Virgins as they say and might as well go along with it by repeating the other joke this Dutch woman brought into the conversation between Brian and myself: Cunnilingus, The Irish Airlines, Aer Lingus, and, some have added, the Anal Lingus is the freight service. St. Patrick’s Day

————

Brian had been on the Queen’s Flight back when the Irish were thought to be loyal and a good sort even if a bit backward. Now, if I told you what he was always telling us about serving in the Royal Air Force, there would be a whole slew of crack . . . each piece of toilet paper stamped on her majesty’s service . . . He was a member of an ExServicemen’s Club which had a couple of rooms in Dublin. It was a way out of the slums. Mr. J. could tell you about it. Mr. J. had a brain and it got him out while Brian had a brain though it didn’t hop down an immediate academic lane. Into the Air Force and because the Queen liked them tall and good-looking he was on her flight. Brian was drinking from a ceramic jug of Dutch gin his friend had brought back from Holland. Marielle’s father had been a dentist and kept a bottle of Bols next to his easy chair in the sitting room. It was so tall it was used to measure the grandchildren that came attached to Marielle’s older brothers and sisters and which she was due in good order to bring with her. Stand the kids against the Bols. Are you still writing to Marielle, Brian asked. No. The letters stopped. I remember Marielle, your friend, Brian’s Dutch woman friend says. You were remembering. Yes, her hair was the special sort of blonde with a reddish tinge to it that flames out in summer, but I hope she doesn’t freckle. Usually goes with that sort of hair. Those kind of girls never grow up. As if you cared. Make good mothers. They produce good future citizens. They are decent people. O, how I hate them. Not Marielle. She isn’t— it is unfair. But her type. They are monsters of normality. All you can say: I want to hurt them. They take it with good cheer and think it the way of the world. They glue on a smile and the world smiles too; isn’t that the expression. She pokes Brian who almost chokes on a gin swallow. Yes, that’s the expression. Monsters of normality. I puke on them. The woman was quiet for a second and I remembered her name, Lizbeth, and she had a friend in the south of Holland who had a magazine called Maniefest and somewhere along the time of the line she told me if I had a poem she would send it along to her friend who could maybe publish it because he liked to publish English language poems along with the Dutch . . . ————

201

Where to find that damn poem. I have it somewhere in my papers. I have accumulated papers: a man of paper if not of letters

There are no plants in the office. There was nothing much living there. The Irish kitchen: all you need is the top of the stove to boil or fry, preferably both, and glasses of water are placed next to the dish upon which there should always be meat, potatoes, veg. Place a plate of white bread in the middle of the table. The stick of butter should have begun to melt into a shapeless mess on a small teacup saucer. Stan’s place didn’t yet include a refrigerator, but they had been lined up awaiting Ireland’s joining the Common Market. Whole dockloads of them fucking ghostly perpendicular coffins . . . but not yet . . . I am standing in the kitchen with Lizbeth who says she and Brian hope to move to Amsterdam as soon as she gets some money ahead from the job and Brian will be learning Dutch so he can go to university because he missed his chance in this country and in Ireland you only get one chance and then it is all over ALL OVER with no appeal to a higher authority. I did not know about that. Lucas in the pub would be going on about getting himself thrown out of the bar, the legal bar, not the boozer, almost had you, and how he was going to be getting himself back in because they had done the disbarment in only one of the two official languages of this country. At the moment Lucas resisted taking the final steps in his climb of the paper mountain as he was making too much money giving out advice, free advice, mark you, because he was afraid someone would come along and clamp noose tongue to iron and he’d be hanging by the short hairs of his nostrils . . . or was it of the ears . . . no reason under God’s sweet heaven why a man couldn’t make a living off of free advice. Who do they think they are interfering with a man’s God-given right to make a way for himself on this earth. What’ll Brian be studying? Philosophy. There are two universities in Dublin and one down in Cork and another in Galway. You have answered your own question. He wants to study German philosophy. He has his fill of this country.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Poem of a Moment

The death of a friend brings life to the point of a heart-puncturing knife used to kill the animal man When will the trees return their leaves that lay upon the floor with footprints of trampling people who cannot see the death about them. A boy and girl walking in love their lungs are filling with the juice of death their hearts will burn out and a grail of soil shall fill the vein.

Brian put his arm on my shoulder, would you come to visit us in Amsterdam when we get the houseboat? We can go down to the train station and watch the demonstrators scatter marbles under the police horses when they come charging down the avenue at us for wanting . . . We want, Lizbeth said. We want. To begin to want is to begin . . . I know what you mean, in France the guy is taking off the girl’s pants and discovers tattooed on her belly: open at the other side. Brian had been good friends with Justin and had met in the New Amsterdam and they knew the man who married Barbara . . . but I am distracted by Mr. J. across the room sitting on his pile of newspapers. And here sits the most brilliant man in Ireland, Nina says. Pathos beyond reckoning, Better to be sitting on newspapers soaked with your own urine than walking the streets of Soho with a whip sticking out of your arse in the way of English intellectuals. You’re just jealous of their accents, their education, their villas in Italy, their shelf of books. If you think so . . . I do. Well, then I must agree with you, as well I should. ————

203

Ireland is drunk: the whole country. They’re all 10th and 12th generation alcoholics. It was general knowledge that I had sold my body to the morgue for 33 bucks

The conversation had not gone the way I had planned. I had no crush on Nina as her mind was bound by dark hair. She was, as they said, short and intense: clichés, to be sure. I was not about to quote Shakespeare: I cannot heave my heart into my throat . . . and Denis is lecturing again at UCD, he never stops lecturing from his six-foot-six height. Shakespeare the driest fuck imaginable, Nina says. Even English people have stopped reading the rubbish. Arthur has found a couple of strings of Christmas lights to drape into the corners to discourage people from inhabiting those places of refuge. Once a guy was sitting into a corner . . . Three strings of lights in each corner. He should have been an interior decorator. His sex preference didn’t go with that job. Is everything getting sorted out? A crowd wanders from room to room. Alone, I walk from room to room. Where are the poets tonight? Kavanagh is dead. As is Clarke, while Liddy is in the other room where the subject of his conversation is the beatification of Nicolai Bukharin, a process he has promised his fortune to upon his own death. The legacy will be turned over to a religious order in Limerick—careful to protect it from the pink shirt of the former secretary of Ezra Pound who has found himself falling out of windows in Rome . . . do you find this of interest, Liddy finds himself asking Brian and Lizbeth. No, I am not sorry to say, she says. Irish poetry does not exist for me as I am Dutch . . . So into another room I go, and again Mr. J. is presiding: we are trying to have a good time on this the dregs of St. Paddy’s Day. Give me a whiskey! Heads not fully swollen yet for the early morning hour when the milkman now makes his rounds on his electric cart . . . all the newspapers ran the article on the last run of the horse-drawn cart and replacing the ritual of the bedding-down of the horse with the plugging-in of the cart: ah, the tears . . . the milkman now has to be wide awake in the morning bereft of the guiding genius of the nag on the route.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

POLICE CHECK WALK ON WATER SECT

Not able to insert myself into a corner thanks to Art’s decorating skill I find myself sitting on the floor, back to the wall, observing a forest of legs and the fat ankles discovered by the poet Berryman, who long ago cashed in his chips and now is pissing down on us from a great height. With eyes moving ever so slightly up one sees Helen and Nina sharing their adventures in the New World . . . where they worked as barmaids in New York City to fund an expedition to Mexico City . . . had seen them off at Westland Row Station before it had been transformed into Pearse Station, on a cold wet morning, and they returned with their holiday packaged: we had a super time. VITOSHA (the mountain park overlooking Sofia, Bulgaria) Orange splashed in a distant sky never overhead never marking these steps always out there. To the left, tracks, recent animals— underneath packed snow dirty from walkers. And then naturally the dark fear comes from the unknown, says the pedant I say, it comes from waiting for what has happened to happen again.

Another empty bottle to be placed with the forest in the kitchen where Jocelyn is saying she should be getting home to her babies and don’t be asking me how old they are, old enough to make me depressed they are and it sometimes happens: I get out into a night like this to find myself ending up on a shore: Americans having a good time on St. Patrick’s Day.

————

205

St. Patrick’s Day is an American invention, Liddy says. Not the saint, we have three of them, but the parades invented by the Brits to keep up the morale of the Irish in the British army during your revolution . . . let them out to parade about with an extra ration of rum . . . only thing the Irish American kept was the drink and now they shove it down our willing throats . . . and I would cite you chapter and verse but in the immortal words of Karl Marx: give us a drunk. Liddy has been a student of Mr. J.’s so Liam passes him the bottle of whiskey and he is quiet for a moment. A cold though warming bottle of Carlsberg for my pleasure checking that my sack is still disguised under the coats. The legion of empties . . . skeletons in the forests of Germania, Liam says. STAY IN TUNE

Sure to be a grinding down of hope as one hears a bunch of drunks staggering up the stairs and others shushing away while stumbling, the falling, the yelling, the sound of glass . . . American sailors hot off a ship in the harbor and Stanley is saying, who the fuck invited you? We are guests of the nation Fuck off this ain’t a short story. Stanley slams the door in the face. The glass of the door does not shatter. The sailors go on the offensive by singing: no one can make out the words and Stan is at the door telling them to get their asses down the stairs before he sics his Doberman on them. They sit down. They have watched television. This aint the dean’s office so get the fuck out of here Power

Power

Pow

I’ll be turning it off. Stan is out in the hall pushing and kicking. He gets them to the stairs and pushes. The film breaks at this moment. No one knows what happened next. An Irishman’s Diary Public clocks are becoming harder and harder to find. The Nelson fob-watch is long gone. The Westmoreland Street clocks have vanished, the chimes of the ancient churches are barely heard. Admittedly the public clock on Boland’s Bakery on Grand Canal Street is

St. Patrick’s Day

————

a reassuring reversal to old times, but it is a single swallow and the wind is still from the east

I have other fish to fry. Art had pasted clippings from the press: rural rapes and their consequences. Stan understood the ritual of Irish courtship: if the woman screams rape, something happened and if she complained, nothing happened. I am sitting on a wobbly chair near the forest of bottles with a hand around the neck of a bottle. My arm brings bottle to lips. I drink. I listen. I watch. I am doing my job. I have a job. With so many people about it would be out of place to lean over and lay head upon knees and finding myself on the plane to Helsinki or Bolivia though Bolivia was replaced with the change of thinking: distance is not the reason to go away: ain’t got a worry in the world and just waiting to see what is the garb of the man with the shovel: O, seasons pass over me. DON’T TAKE ACID TAKE IT PASS/FAIL

All drug stories are alike, as are drunk stories, love stories, cowboy stories, crime stories, creature stories, animal stories, fuck stories—only the body parts change . . . The enrollment of a loved one in the Sacred Heart League’s Easter Novena seems to me a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate our hope in the ultimate good and happiness that Our Lord gained for us all. The infinite graces and blessings available through the Novena can brighten the lives of all and especially help to shore up faltering hope by refreshing the spirit of those with particular problems

I get out another bottle of beer. That is something I can actually do and no one can deny I am making do with what’s at hand. Back to the village of the racial memory and waiting for the leaf to fall but only so much of this back to nature: I have always lived where the grass don’t grow.

TV AWAKENS THE COMMON MAN

————

207

Nature calls me to the little room down the hall . . . floor awash with piss, vomit, blood from noses and female orifices . . . the brimming bowl so fall of the necessary waste of life . . . A NIGHT OF SHEER MAGIC . Wet shoeprints back to the office and if this had been a different walk in a different time would have bumped into Susan or Teresa, or Barbara but am hearing the just over for the racing season and we’ll be seeing, I am sure out at Celbridge with those women who have the house for the season with the books rented by the running yard as one must have books in the library even in a rented place, don’t want people to think we are savages even if American and once you get on a horse you never ever have to read a book, thank God . . . this was a friend of Audrey’s who liked Audrey and who was even in turn liked by her. Audrey had the flat on Pembroke Lane which Dickie and Eugene had been using and which was across from another building of flats where Americans lived and where Roc Brynner lived and out at Celbridge, Audrey had me along as she had never been to a barbecue and that was just arriving in Ireland: now stomach cancer is said to be on the rise, another form of American cultural imperialism . . . could be heard in the pubs. Those wet shoeprints have stopped: is thought being given to feeling or keeling over? Audrey found it all so charming the way this American took a stick and stuck a marshmallow on the end of it and putting it to the fire, slowly spinning the outer part turning brown then crackling black . . . blow quickly to cool and then plunge into the mouth She liked the procedure. The result leaves me . . . It left me long ago. HUNGER STRIKE TO RESUME THIS SUNDAY

Those footprints had better get moving and they do but are very faint and back in the office where Art and Stan are yelling at each other. Not an argument, just shouting. There’s nothing fucking left to drink, Stan says. Calm down. There is plenty to drink and with them shrimp showing up from Howth or what have you, if what’s his name ever gets here . . . You can’t pacify the natives with food. St. Patrick’s Day

————

A bottle of Guinness is produced and Stan is quiet. In the other room Radio Luxembourg has Leslie Gore going through her routine of it being her party and she’s gonna cry all over the cake and Leslie is replaced by “Downtown in Europe.” Setting sun of broken glass years left behind with just you you to keep me quiet

Many people now about and have seen them in the pubs . . . not yet ripe enough for the grave. She has chewed-down fingernails and the remains are painted black. Speaking French to the man who is looking away, want to get her out of there but she is the one with the money and she is a foreigner and they like to fuck and do things to you, not like the run-of-the-mill Irish, but tonight not enough to go round and the guy is thinking to get her alone and cut off those tits on her and make them into change purses, having scooped out the guts inside like that fisherman down in Galway, or just have my finger up her arse and watch her squeal, just got to get the drink into them. STOP.

The crazy guy got to go. A false step to be sure. The remains of the shattered fingernails belonged to a dark-haired short French-speaking woman in black turtleneck whose fingers are drumming against the top of the table. She had come to Dublin looking for something . . . Many held in Belfast raids

My lips are not moving. I wish she had seen Paris nous appartient and was asking if one can walk on the rooftops of Dublin. I am thinking. Have I said this before? My memory is going with the night. I say it again. I am thinking. I am not saying yes to the airplane in the morning as it . . . you have been warned. The possibility of blood flowing not to be avoided. Jocelyn appears. I have been watching the trousered legs of our orderly audience: cheap wool blends against the long delayed summer.

————

209

The Irish like to stick to a once-found uniform and wear it until it begins to fall into rags . . . I am getting ready to leave, she says. We’re entertaining each other. There is precious little money and . . . Piss poor show on all grounds. I am repeating what you said this afternoon. I am not responsible for anything I said. It was said in the passing moment to keep away the meat axes. We need more meat axes . . . You Americans as if Vietnam wasn’t bad enough, always thinking a little blood is called for . . . I’ll be off and I’ll be hearing no funny remarks. Be seeing you in the pubs. However, I might be dead before I reach the flat in Pearse Street. Some kids might push a rubbish bin from the roof and I might be passing along on the sidewalk. Be seeing you Jocelyn. I should have stood. Into your life and out again like that guy in Trieste who gave me a copy of Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur. The guy was going on to Lebanon to see the cedar trees which he had heard about back in Seattle where he worked part-time for Boeing. That is all I knew of the guy and the book The Voyeur, on the cover of which a blonde girl is kneeling on a bed, dressed in plaid skirt and her hands are at the waist of the skirt so when she pushes she will be naked . . . the picture still jogs the memory: blonde, Melinda, loneliness, blonde and back then I was on my way to Sofia where as they say I did not know that my life was about to change and it seems from the photo credit CHAZ who was a guy who owned a bar WATT’s Happen Inn in Manhattan and Lilia went off to bed with him and left in the middle of the act as she couldn’t stand his old flesh touching her . . . a few drinks and she was ready but when he took off his shirt the sagging chest flesh . . . just the sight of it, like my mother, she said, and here I was at the head of the Adriatic in Dublin walking through the office looking for action, on the prowl for if only that guy from Trieste would show up and . . . or Jocelyn stops and turns and comes back and says, cheer up you’re too young to be measuring a hole in the ground for your remains.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

On Radio Luxembourg Roy Orbison is singing about the pretty woman getting herself along the street and Charles is telling me about how hard it is to be asking for one thin dime, one thin dime and you know you got to ask nine more people and hope each one of them gives you one thin dime as your buddy is on the other side of the street also asking ten people one by for one for one thin dime and the two of you are going to put together that two dollars and get yourself a bottle but you are hoping there is a back door in the liquor store so you can go in to buy the bottle and stiff the guy waiting outside for his share, that’s what life is like I can tell you and you got yourself full up with your misery but you got two eyes not like me with only one and an ugly old face and a checkerboard hat and a job driving a truck that I have to kick back for the privilege of doing . . . one thin dime, remember that asking one after another ten people for one thin dime and they look at you, look through you, but you can’t . . . Charlie’s dead . . . he started to bleed out of his asshole and there was blood all over his room across from Jerry Foley’s Village Paddock bar— he had tried shoving newspapers between his legs to stop the bleeding and he got himself across the street and asked Jerry to call an ambulance as he was bleeding and Jerry could see the blood filling up Charlie’s trousers and set him a chair outside the bar because if he died in the bar they would shut it down for days and days and Jerry couldn’t afford that and Charlie just had to understand and they took Charlie to St Vincent’s but he was dead because they couldn’t stop the bleeding. My problem: I still got hope and it’s a dry fuck. The Christmas lights send one under the tree. Yeah, a pleasant memory . . . in the dark no one is dancing, the low hiss of words against the possibility of what’s in the cards. Articulate, aren’t they, Liddy is saying. After the second grunt they are thrown back upon using the first one and then they get confused. What are you talking about? The state of this room, the state of the state, the state of emergency . . . I am tired of tears masquerading as poetry, I say. We often can’t live up to our own poetry, he says. I say a poem:

————

211

My Moving Picture (Dublin) The gas burning behind the yellow glass and then up from the bed the face in the mirror seen the night before going down to bed. One room television grinding next door from the window the fog as hair for the faceless street lamps The body returning to the chair head bent into the collar of the shirt to keep warm.

This is a sort of throwback, Liddy is saying, to another time when parties went on and on and no one cared what was to happen in the morning, if it was even to arrive, rent was a thing you read about in the papers and language was in the hands of the poets. But the hammer . . . I am sure you remember a party at some architect friend of Teresa’s out in Ranelagh, you were there and we were all sitting in the back room and suddenly someone threw a bottle of something at Mr. J. and Mr. J. didn’t duck and there was a sort of stunned silence and everybody turned to Mr. J. and waited for him to say something. We waited and the seconds ticked off. Mr. J. looked at the man who threw the bottle . . . I think it was empty as no one ever threw a full bottle. I don’t know how long we watched and then the party broke up. Something had really gone wrong. Mr. J. had not replied. No one as far as I know has ever mentioned this party in any of the writings from that time. Mr. J. simply sat there and looked at the man who had thrown a bottle at him. I don’t want to tell you the year as that is too easy. I don’t think I was there, Liddy says. You were there, I am sure of it. You came with Leland and Mrs. K. who was being nice to the guy who gave up on English in favor of Irish, St. Patrick’s Day

————

you know who I mean, he was writing grant proposals in Irish, Michael Hartnett, a nasty bit of business as Fintan would say. Have you seen Fintan tonight? He’s somewhere about, he always is, but you’re sure I was at the party . . . Yes, because Mr. J. signed one of his little books for me and recited all the titles of the Julian Green novels he had read And you say a bottle was thrown and everyone just sat . . . It was as if a bottle of ashes had been thrown and there had been no fire to remind us of any warmth It’s always possible, there were so many parties . . . and you say Teresa was there? Yes, the same one I thought I was friends with. You have all the right people. I am sure I am right. Pearse Hutchinson was there and Montague and Justin and Justin was talking to Montague about Paris and horsemeat. I have no interest in what Justin said. He is dead and all we would be doing is gratifying our own sense of being alive in comparison to his so obvious death. Liddy clicks a bottle against my own. Clappers at Mass instead of bells: says it all. He is going into exile in America to join the internal exiles in that country who are all dead: Jack Spicer in particular. 1st Hunger Striker Named:

Bobby Sands In a statement smuggled out of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, the first Irish political prisoner to begin the hunger strike . . .

Don’t worry the party continues on . . . it is well into the night and every place is closed against the perils of the night, as the Protestants pray, he would say . . . we are now listening to late night radio from across the sea and foreign lands: “Wunderbar” by a guy named Riechmann, German electronic music: Muzak for intellectuals you mean, Tim sneers and his sneer will not be taken up at the moment and Liddy is saying, I don’t know what you see in this whole affair with Mr. J. By ————

213

that time in the night he was carrying on a discussion with himself as to whether Robert de Montesquiou deserved the title The Commander of the Delicate Odors. You are probably right but I also heard a joke that night and I do not refuse to tell it: a woman comes back from the doctor and says he says I have either TB or VD but she didn’t remember what he said as she was just so nervous. So the guy calls up the doctor and says my wife says she has either VD or TB, so what is it? and the doctor says chase her around the table and if she coughs fuck her. Something lost in the telling. Mr. J. just sat there midst the provocation of such a dreary joke. The time of words had been seen off and the moneybags were being swung . . . Leaning against the counter or something or other. Stan is saying the prawns would be along shortly and we can feast against the gloom filling the wrinkles on your brows. This is my last visit to Ireland, never again. Fist pounded, empty bottles jump and dance. He wants to ram his fist into the wall. He’s probably right. A 16-year-old youth told the Dublin Circuit Court yesterday that a man sells heroin in St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, all day, every day, at 20£ a fix. Judge John Gleeson commented: “There is a killer loose in Stephen’s Green and he should be caught.”

In Ireland there are no second chances while in the U.S. every second of life is a reminder, always a possibility if you just hang in there, kid. Stan had been drinking with us in the Bailey. He had come back from London after selling something and making a great deal of money and was now on his way to the south of France. Ireland was a sentimental jog back into: wasn’t it interesting when we tried to get drunk on three shillings and by God we did have a good time of it and all those girls and all those nights we never got to sleep and how interesting the conversation always was and thus the party . . . Stan had lived here with Arthur but in the Bailey, back before one of the renovations or just a few hours ago—who’s counting?—Eugene was there and J. P. Donleavy had come in and he had written his name across The Saddest Summer of Samuel S for me but wasn’t drinking and Stan told him to go back to the Bronx, you short skinny fuck, who do you think you’re kidding with that slum you got down in the country? St. Patrick’s Day

————

Stan was buying drinks for everybody, really, as he always wanted to be the guy coming into a bar and buying drinks for everybody and having plenty of money in spite of no maudlin lesson to be learned, but it is a dangerous bit of business to show this side of yourself in Dublin, as no one likes to see a man’s guts on the outside of their flesh case. Stan’s only comment: fuck ’em I had told Stan there was a party in one of those little lanes down near the canal, walking from Stephen’s Green you walk along and just before the canal turn to your left and look for the pink painted wall, Gertrude’s and Alice’s place, so you can imagine a blonde guy who had made a habit of playing drunken aristocratic louts in American movies shot in Ireland telling Stan to stick his uncivilized tongue back in his mouth and Stan was now banging this man’s head against the wall and finally the wall gave in and the man was not resisting and Stan was being told to leave and he was agreeing it was time to go as there was no more to drink and Gert it had to be said did not mind any of this, since it reminded her of New York and she had been happy in New York. In New York no one cared about anything and Stan was being so New York she said and he said not New York Boston, please, and Gert said are you having a good time of it in Ireland, a small place of it after New York and he was saying, I was until that guy said something about me and she said not to mind him as he was the new Ireland and he hadn’t figured out how to make money off of it and was very bitter and you have to come down to Alice’s place in the country as I am selling off all the crap her grandfather left her in this castle and would you like some acid? I like my pain and pleasure in a bottle, he said. Today’s alarming story

We are still in the Corn Exchange. Do not get confused. Stan’s fist is still in contact with the piece of wood holding the wall together at the back of the counter on which are piled empties, dead soldiers of the IRA, notebooks, squeezed-out toothpaste containers. And you’re asking what happened to Stan after meeting with Gert and not until later in O’Neill’s he was saying, I don’t know what’s happened to Ireland, to Dublin, I mean everything is different ————

215

You’re telling me I thought it would never change. Now in O’Neill’s which is like a morgue with the iced trays removed but it was a morgue I woke up as Stan was saying and I swore I saw my face on Gert’s face and I thought I had been fucking myself or something like that . . . so in no way am I ever coming back to this godforsaken country. I never want to wake up looking at my own face and not in a mirror and she was saying wasn’t it a charming evening? There is metal banging against glass and Stan makes his way through the crowd to find a man standing with a large metal something-or-other held to chest. The prawns have arrived. Just call him Harry or John, a walk-on and Stan is yelling at Just call him Harry, the prawns ain’t cooked. Sands claims fast accord was broken They’re fresh from the sea. I scooped them out of the boat myself, what do you want a gold plate and a dozen serving wenches on their back with legs spread or a couple of lads? Enough talking filth, Stan says. Art, is there a pot for cooking? You used it to boil your underwear. Not in mixed company, you’ll have everybody scratching themselves. Pulling your wires he is, Just call him Harry says. I always play with myself, better company than most of the Irish, Stan says. Come out to Dalkey for a good time. No way, Just call him Harry gets the pot from Art and fills it up with some water. We have a hungry crowd and we don’t want them going off to the Manhattan for beans and chips. Sounds good to me, I say. Feverish activity on the homemaking front. Stan fills up the battered pot with water, throws in some salt, puts cover on pot. Lights stove. Don’t worry there is no oven. This is an Irish stove. They do not come with ovens or broilers. Fry it or boil it and preferably both: a little repetition or insistence . . . St. Patrick’s Day

————

On the weekends you’ll want to explore the Ireland of James Joyce, Sean O’Casey and Seamus Heaney. You can visit the beautiful villages, the rolling farmlands and the historic castles or relax in the warmth and openness of a traditional Irish pub

Brian and Lizbeth look in from the other room. Isn’t it wonderful how domestic things have gotten at the late hour. Brian volunteers to peel the prawns when they have boiled. No need, Stan says. People can do it themselves. Give each a newspaper. We have no niggermaids in the closet. Stan crosses himself. I promise to read James Baldwin as my penance for one hour every morning. EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN NOBODY WANTS TO DIE

But why are you so taken by Mr. J.’s silence, Liddy asks as a way of getting from the stove being lit to Stan shouting: FOOD’S ON. If I could answer that question . . . You are the one stuck with the name wanting to push his fist onto the side of Jesus and his fingers into the holes on hands and feet . . . Maybe it doesn’t mean a speck of pig shit. Or you have grown up or Mr. J. has grown young. I am aware of Liddy following my sitting myself on the broken-down bed and reaching under it for a reserve supply of . . . on the lower east side of New York they used to say a bang for a bed. Next to the bed no silver-framed picture of Stan’s true love, rather an ashtray with the moldy ends of sodden cigarette ends, lipstick-stained, a collection of pub and hotel glasses, an invitation from the American ambassador to come over and watch the election of 1964 (of Goldwater’s postponed triumph in thought if not in deed), and in the gloom Stan’s Boston University class ring gleamed and it had been the cause of the initial argument at Gert’s place We do not have much longer to go. Steam escaping, day waning . . . where is the broom handle to end the show. At least getting near to some sex, just near to, ain’t inside as the old saw has it. At the doorway my arms are stretched out and if only someone came along and nailed my feet to the floor: religious symbolism . . . ————

217

When Does It Begin

Shouts, accents, a shout in the sleep for some, but a revelation in full dress uniform—well, not really, the Marines met in the Bailey but not reported on—back when—they were drinking scotch and water and vodka and tonic and complaining why does everything close so early even on St. Patrick’s Day in godforsaken Dublin for God’s sake . . . so I had invited them along to the last party in Dublin. The Marines looked so healthy, like Swedes. OUR ONLY MISTAKE WAS NOT WINNING

Stan is heard welcoming the Marines, Glad you are here, earlier we had some trouble with the navy. Show us the way, they say as one voice. They left hours ago. Don’t run away. Food will be ready in a few . . . Chow time. Chow Time. CHOW Time, CHOW TIMES. Prawns, I say. They turn and look at me. We’re having prawns, not pussy. You’ve been to TJ? Yeah, I say. He’s been to TJ, the Marine says, knows about CHOW TIME in the Blue Fox . . . But pussy don’t got no snap in Ireland, Stan says. Like driving your Mack truck into god knows what. Ain’t no Viets to suck your dick, either one Marine voice says . . . though I like Thai mouth myself. Brian has his hand across Lizbeth’s mouth. Prudent. My people are expressing their international outlook and I relish the meeting of minds . . . How long does it take to become a Marine, someone is asking. Marines are born and then remade . . . into the best killing machines on this earth and no matter the faggots can’t make up their minds if Marine jockstraps are government issue. What the fuck are these men doing here, Judith asks. Stan asked them along he wanted some Marine protection. Expecting sex in the water, she says. St. Patrick’s Day

————

They guard the embassy. Big hunks. They are that. Their faces are so clear and open. An open mind is an empty mind. Better to fuck then. Judith. She was a friend of Susan’s. A complicated family with relatives in Israel, South Africa, New York, and has tried to go to Goa but only as far as Istanbul where she fell in love and stayed for a year: fair kinky hair, large breasts, blue eyes, small arse, short of stature, could speak four or five languages, was thought to be brilliant but there was no place for her . . . the big breasts do not foretell she is going to get fucked tonight while she is drinking her own Yugoslavian wine . . . People show up like that, just like that. Finding them sitting next to you and not a thought about them for years . . . Patrick’s Day is coming and with a great chance to write about Leprechauns, Clurjcauns, Beansidhe, Shamrocks, the Wee Folks and the IRA

Stan is back in the kitchen bellowing about the prawns almost being ready and why can’t anybody be getting off their arses . . . CHOW TIME CHOW TIME CHOW TIME

The Marines are thinking about the woman out there in the middle of the Blue Fox and as the music heats up a bit she goes from upturned to upturned face of the Marines about the stage and squats, open cunt descending . . . Judith, don’t you have some kids? My mother is taking care of them. In Dublin? No, down in the country. I don’t live in Dublin, you remember that? I kept running into the same way of running into things. In the country there are different things . . .

————

219

I’ll drink to that, I say and she replies by clicking wine bottle against beer bottle . . . I remember—there it goes again: Judith had said: I am not wishing for anything anymore. I put one foot in front of the other and forget what I am doing because if you . . .

At which point the rug on the floor calls, can that be said, demanding attention. It’s dirty with the pattern in an office in a building scheduled to be torn down, lodged in memory of a few people and when it is demolished, a photograph, maybe, and I am saying to Judith, you are right. My agreement awakened Mr. J. who was shouting at me, Leviathan. To Leave before Dark . . . The Dark Journey, I replied and Mr. J. was saying, they had you running in and out of the pub on a yo-yo you were, with them saying they saw your man Julian Green with what’s his name, with John Broderick, in the front room and then on the street. That’s true. Of course it’s true, why should it be otherwise, I don’t have time for lies or truth compromised by the American desire to please everyone and slaughtering the yellow races not to mention the red men of your wide open spaces. End of communication, sir. And it was. Julian Green, Judith says. A writer, the only American in the French Academy. I saw him in Paris and I could speak to him because he speaks English and he says he is American born not made. You must know that in Under the Volcano the British consul is reading The Dark Journey or . . . I have it confused with another Lowry book . . . I don’t want to drown like Lowry in his own vomit. St. Patrick’s Day

————

I would hope not. I stand suddenly in the second of the adverb. Judith says, sit down, who are you kidding . . . I want to see if the prawns are done . . . The water was boiling. Stan, Art, Brian, Liddy, Harry, Liam, Lizbeth, Fintan (supervising since he is good at that), and a cast of hundreds . . . they were whistling while they worked at watching the water boil and Stan dumping in the prawns saying, am I the new savior and this the imitation fishes. The beer was no longer chilled and Lizbeth was wiping her hands on Brian’s Donegal tweed jacket, invented for the habits of the Irish. You look so sad, she says. I was thinking of Marielle but just for a second. She was very young. She was and is now back in Holland for so many years . . . And longing for mountains . . . the secret of Dutch life . . . You knew Marielle when she was the nicest, now you would not want to know her except to fuck her . . . The prawns are run under cold water and the shelling begins as I am thinking Harry brought them in from Howth and I had been out to Howth with Marielle . . . walked along on the cliffs . . . the sea there via James Joyce, of course. But more to the point,

The watch on my wrist says so. A guy is asking Judith if she has seen Doctor Zhivago which played for two years in Dublin and before that Lawrence of Arabia was responsible for many people dying of imaginative thirsts . . . a desert almost spread in Dublin but luckily they pulled the film, now the rage was for fur coats . . . Dad is dead.

A guy I didn’t know was reading from the newspaper: A pre-credits sequence shows the sluttishly beautiful Susan Sarandon slicing lemons while Burt Lancaster mournfully irons an old red tie in the next apartment . . . a line from Robert Johnson: “Squeeze my lemons till the juice runs down my leg.” That’s not the Doctor Zhivago I saw, Fintan says, but maybe I missed something. Dad is dead.

Dad is dead.

————

221

Your Dad

this afternoon in the parking lot heart attack. on the way to the hospital I’m sorry sorry I’m sorry if I can . . .

The guy didn’t get anywhere with Judith and I was asking her if she had any plans. At this hour, you must be kidding. Just asking. I am here for the duration. I only have a hotel room to go to. I thought you were living in Dublin. I’m at the Russell. Pretty classy. I have the cheapest room. Is there still acid in Dublin? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t done acid since I was pregnant. Liddy kneels beside me and is saying, food’s almost ready. What have you been talking about? Nothing. A subject close to my mother’s heart and to the heart of every poet. Out of nothing come the words, right, so surely the poet has to give some thought to this place . . . let’s eat prawns. Boiling prawns, boiled prawns smell like sex in a close room . . . you need air about when you . . . The prawns taste good. Harry is saying he can’t take credit for them. Stan is your man, he says and Stan is saying you learn strange things in Revere Beach and if only there was something fresh to drink. Art pulls two bottles of Bombay gin from a hidden place. This is suicide, Liddy says. Ginocide, Liam says. Pour the gin, Fintan says. Where’s the glasses? St. Patrick’s Day

————

Art’s wife appears with a bar selection: the Bailey, Old Stand, Davy Byrnes . . . Those glasses are not going to be sanitary, a Marine says. Art is washing glasses . . . Stan sips from the bottle, a Marine sips from the bottle, Liddy sips from the bottle, I have a pull and there is no need for glasses after another turn among the guests. Some St. Patrick’s Day, Marie says. It is, Art says. In Milwaukee, Liddy says, St. Patrick’s day begins on February 15th. This one will end in Dublin in a week as we have been modernized . . . In the haze of drink the story was told or wasn’t told and I have it all in memory since it has to be told as the second bottle of gin was making its way about the room because it was Anthony Burgess right around the corner in Trinity telling us the story by James Joyce when speaking on the topic of the sexuality of Ulysses inside the walls of the surly fronted . . . since Eugene had met Burgess in the York Minster when he would be standing there with his two empty suitcases, having disposed of his review copies, waiting to take the train back to the first wife who was dissolving her liver with gin and Burgess liked to tell James Joyce’s favorite story . . . Where’s the story, Stan says. Yes, where’s the story, Liddy says. Judith nods her head and I begin by saying, there was this man in prison. Nice beginning. and he wanted to get out Naturally. so he started to bang his hands against the wall Had he been gang-raped yet? I don’t know, this wasn’t a French prison as only in France do they write great gang rape poems, something about the French asshole, or arsehole. the guy is banging his hands against the wall, the palms of his hands develop saws So, you can see if you were reading the story it doesn’t work as well as if you were hearing it for the first time as Burgess was telling it to Eugene. ————

223

and with the saws he cut his way through the bars of the window You have a whole theory of architecture, Art said, might be interesting to discuss what sort of room your man is in by the evidence that he could cut his way through the bars along with the idea of how would his body then fit through the window, must have been very thin . . . These prawns are good . . . these prawns are good . . . these prawns are good . . . Art, Stan, Brian, Lizbeth, myself, Judith, the Marine, another Marine, Susan, Teresa, Liddy, Liam, Fintan, Leland, and others even if not mentioned by name were heard from . . . so the guy has cut his way through the bars and has had the foresight to knot together the sheets, which for some reason he has been able to accumulate A certain flaw in the story, as I should have started back from when he was accumulating the sheets, however . . . he’s knotted the sheets together and tucked one sheet under his arm Or, hold on for a second, he’s knotted the sheets together and gotten himself down to the ground—you are holding . . . he could have untied the last sheet and used it or used the one under his arm. Judith, could you pour me a neat gin as my whistle needs wetting. and your man now has a sheet in his hand and proceeds to rip it in half and what do you make with your man now holding two halves and through that he got himself through the wall of the prison . . . I know the answer, Fintan says, what’s the doughnut built around? Right. and your man is out on the moor because all prisons are built on moors, damp windswept places, and your man is cold and wet and in fear of catching pneumonia My own father almost died of it as I heard since childhood: what a killer disease it is and on top of this I don’t want to lose my hair which happened to my father. from the fog he took a blanket

St. Patrick’s Day

————

A pause for a sip, you see what Burgess was getting at? Vaguely, Liddy says. Not so loud as you’ll waken Mr. J., Liam says. Vagueness is his favorite color . . . so your man makes his way to the convenient tool shed on the edge of the moor but hears the posse on his trail and suddenly at all four sides and this ain’t no Lone Ranger–Tonto story—he looks around in desperation and his eye passes over the hammers, the axes, the screwdrivers (whenever one tells this story there is always a hesitation if a girl is present when mentioning screwdrivers so it might be better to mention chisels . . .) the men attached to the dogs are closing in and your man at last sees the plane and so farewell to his pursuers . . . he is off like a shot, I sometimes add, if I can use a cliché, a must for keeping my hand in the business and your man is walking in Paris, France The French have more practice in providing background for people on the run and escaping this and that, a little Rilke, Hemingway, highcontrast photographs of blonde hair on the back of the neck of a naked blonde woman turned away . . . forget it. your man is one day walking along the rue Vaneau Where—you don’t really need this detail of the street name or the fact—Julian Green lives there. when he discovers he is being followed. They are on to him When does the story end? An objection to the length has been noted. so, he walks faster and they walk faster and faster they walk the faster he walks and eventually he finds himself in a cul-de-sac And no, there is not going to be a play upon the word cul even though I did introduce that blonde lemon of Genet. and just as those pursuing feet reach the other end of the cul-de-sac from where he is standing . . .

————

225

no escaping, but our hero sees a door and suddenly a woman appears—he noted the door had closed behind her and there is no key to be found, and those footsteps are approaching almost to the whites of their eyes when out of the blue he noticed a ladder on the stocking of the lady and he climbs up the ladder and has not been heard from since. There is silence in the room. The pin falls off the counter And then, Stan asks Yes, and then Liam says Same for me Liddy says I want to know what happened when he got back into the womb, Judith says, probably complaining about the furniture. Where’s the imagination, Susan asks. How did Susan get into this room? In the theft, my dear, Liddy says. Don’t you dear me . . . Theft is a way of life, for any artist, that is why I loathe them, Susan says. Morality, Mr. J. quotes having awaked at Susan’s English accent, is furnished to the world by the Anglo-Saxons with their bathtubs and washbasins, a people who have only one original spiritual activity: to wash themselves. That is uncalled for, I say to Mr. J. even if it is true. Please you are all guests of the nation, Fintan says helpfully. Everybody is a reader today, Art says. And none of them have actually read from what they quote. The story is okay, Teresa says and that is the last to be heard from her. Her husband led her from the party. The Marine had heard it before in Saigon. Just stimulus-response if you ask me, Stan says. Are there any millionaires coming from the ranks of the Marines in Vietnam? Do not step into the drug business, the second Marine says. They didn’t split with you. You must be crazy I do not believe in mental illness. St. Patrick’s Day

————

You’ll believe in this fist if you don’t take it back . . . sitting here in Dublin on your ass, sucking yourself off. I am not a yoga adept. Fuck you. Boys, Judith says . . . Guys, time to leave, Art says. The combination of Judith and Art removed the Marines who left with dignity intact, for some reason or no reason, just be gone. A silence descends upon the room, a silence that comes along from time to time in the best of books. I find myself next to Marie and she is saying, I’ll be glad when the holiday is done with. It was a foolish idea coming over to Ireland to relive the past, when all grown people know the past is only in books. Will you be going home? I have no home. My parents are dead. So, let me get you a beer . . . there are a few left somewhere beyond. No, I have to steer the captain through the streets of Dublin. I’ll see you before and I am into the other rooms looking for Liddy. He’s in there resting with Mr. J., Liam says. He is overcome by the fumes. Looking for inspiration, he is, but not in dreams, not much there behind the closed eyelids unless in Mangan: The House of Quiet, for strong and weak, And Poor and Rich, I have still to seek— That House is narrow, and dark, and small— But the only Peaceful House of all!

Speaking of little rooms, do I need a key for the little room It was open when I used it What am I asking you for, you don’t live here, Liam says. And I am soon gone of this place, I can tell you. I’ll join you in the little room and we were standing each in front of the wall. Two signs. TOO LITTLE

TOO LATE

Back to the office and to be out of here sooner rather than later. Nothing will change or I would grow old, the world grows younger. ————

227

Sit here, Marie says. Seems like hours since I saw you. Sit for a bit, I have to get Art into gear for the departure. You said that hours ago or minutes, I forget. Will you be staying much longer in Dublin, she asks. They are tearing down the Russell and I have a place in Ely Place but they’ll be tearing that down soon enough. All good things come down. We are all being torn down, Marie said and then went somewhere. Art sat down. She’s on the rag or something. You don’t know? You know these things; you’ve been married. Is there any more beer? There must be some, Stan has it hidden somewhere. He’s never unprepared.

These beautiful lace bras with sheer tops not only look terrific, but work to minimize bust size without squeezing, flattening or distorting. You’ll love the way these Minimizers make all the difference! In white, beige or black. Fintan comes by and asks if there’s any more . . . Ask Stan. He always knows. He said to ask you. Ask Liddy, I am sure he knows what to do. I haven’t seen him in ages. Liam says he was in with Mr. J. O, in the sleeping compartment. If that’s what its turning into. Got to kip somewhere. Too late to be moving out into the streets. Fintan, you must be joking. Are there any more prawns? Get off your . . . they’re right behind you. Smell of sex . . . They were expensive. You didn’t pay for them. They were still expensive. People need to know. Money is always the matter. I know or knew. Indeed, I knew and recited the headline

St. Patrick’s Day

————

FOUR IN SEA DRAMA OFF IRISH COAST

A fine time. But Harry says nothing. He and Stan and Art and Justin got themselves a boat and decided to sail to Spain. I once had the newspaper clipping. The Irish navy had to rescue them. A twenty-foot boat seemed big enough and it was made of wood, that was the thing about it. Harry was a druid. He had made a study of it, as he was fond of saying. You told me of the druids in the Copenhagen Coffee Bar. You remember? How many people do you meet talking about people living in round houses and crying for the trees coming down as they can feel the pain of the axes . . . I wasn’t saying rubbish like that. And you were telling me about some school in Mexico City that enrolls only kids who have the sixth or the seventh sense, I forget which one you were talking about. You mean extrasensory perception. That’s it. There is a school like that. I want my children to go to it. You have children. I hope to and my children will have this sense. They know that evolution continues and that is the next step for humans . . . are the prawns good? They are. You’re working on a fishing boat? I do some cooking. I am waiting. Who knows where Harry ended up or Stan or Art. They are here right now. With Justin, it is as you know another story, as if the dirt under his fingernails rose up and buried him under a six-foot avalanche. FOUR IN SEA DRAMA OFF IRISH COAST

Harry was moving on, holes for people like me are being plugged up in Dublin. No one invites anyone anywhere, he was saying as he walked away, unless they are sure it will lead to some financial reward. Everyone is working twenty-four hours a day . . .

————

229

Over on D’Olier Street the Irish Times presses are cranking out what happened today, well now yesterday. Mr. J. is preparing to be annoyed by them getting his recitation wrong. Liddy will have been mentioned but more as an afterthought. Stan will say the night ended like all the other nights. People were saying. They have had . . . What have they been saying . . . Vanity, Judith says to Stan who doesn’t hear her. Art tells him, Marie and I must be going . . . still a lot to do before . . . How long have you known Art, I am asking Stan . . . A long time. We weren’t childhood friends, but adult friends . . . am I sad to see him go: who knows. I’ll not be coming back. He has to because Marie has family . . . the living and the soon to be dying . . . no one can envy that future . . . mark my words, just confusion and that is even worse. We’re becoming old men before our own eyes. St. Patrick’s Day sunshine brings crowds to parades

A worthy response, Stan says. And did you see this scrap of newspaper confessing my collecting references to Stan and no, I am not interested in African adventures . . . Boston, Dublin . . . And they returned to sit in silence the night he died, the night of December 27 when we waited by him for the coroner, that long night when Stanley hopped onto his bed, curled up on his pink blanket and took a final nap beside Ed Brown

Judith could have been talking with Susan and even Barbara might be allowed to appear and she said to me, I have to stay here, my child is here. That is not what I asked you. I know. I could wake up tomorrow and stick my head in the oven. The birth of a poet, Stan says . . . I have never written a poem. There are many of that class of being in Ireland. Now is the time for the reserves to be called in.

St. Patrick’s Day

————

I am thirsty, Judith says. I hope for life? Within the absence of a reply Stan is away and back with some clicking bottles of Guinness: the national drink, brown bottles and darker within. And Marie-Jose—remember her, met in name on Rathgar Road in the flat of the American . . . she was reading the novels of Sartre, The Road to Freedom, sitting on my lap one time and I am telling Judith and Stan in that emptying room . . . where had the people gone . . . MarieJose knew two friends who worked for rich Americans in Paris, so rich they never ate French food. Everything was shipped over from America in tin cans—is that the idiom she had asked me—they were to be only in Paris for a year and they were not going to allow the experience to poison them. I don’t believe her or you, Stan says. Look around, Judith says. St. Patrick’s Day is an American holiday . . . Texas cheerleaders were marching today in Dublin . . . and look around here . . . Brian’s head was asleep on the lap of Lizbeth who was sleeping. Halfway to Holland, could be said and Judith is saying again, think how lucky you all are to be in Dublin . . . I know, Stan says. And either more and more or fewer and fewer will be doing it in the future and we will still be alive in our tiny shells jerking off against the ceiling. Do I hear that word, ceiling, Mr. J. is suddenly shouting, the ceiling is an excellent place for composing one’s thought upon. The English bully and Catholic propagandist beat me to the idea. Our Irish poets write too much about clouds, on ceilings is better. None of us wishes to see the triumph of nature, Liddy says. But you write about stones, and hills, and all the rest of the soggy fraud, I say. So what of it. I trust the human heart. Sucking dried shit if you ask me, Stan says. Tonight was a delight, not a single whiff of the unpaved countryside. I am afraid of places that have not been paved. Fear controls you, Mr. J. says. You should see a priest as to what controls you.

————

231

I am not Catholic, Stan says, Thank God. Thank whomever you wish, it is not my affair. Give us a drink. You are the host and I am the guest and we shall keep these distinctions clear. We shall. Stan returns with a bottle of stout that Mr. J. swings to the corner of his mouth. Stan sat at the feet of Mr. J. and Mr. J. was not talking anymore. I sat next to Judith. Where was Fintan? Liam was somewhere about. Brian’s head was unmoved. Stan had forgotten the violin player from Grafton Street as he should have been here for one more performance of “Silent Night.” The woman with the harp was no longer at the corner of Wexford Street. Fintan was probably going through the temporarily discarded coats. He was coming up with little money. Is this becoming a wake, Judith asks. Not if any of us can help it, Stan says. We are not contract craftsmen for the tourist board. And no whiskey to be wasted on accidental spillings, Mr. J. suddenly says . . . that’s all we need: a resurrection? Let us be done with erections in Irish fiction, a vain vain wish as they are becoming too common. Mr. J. has returned to sleep. All of them to become dead soon enough. Stan is asking Judith if she would like a tour of the offices? Do you want to get rid of me, she says. If you care to phrase it that way. Slap a little flesh against flesh and we’ll be having love songs soon enough: razor blades buried inside oranges . . . so Stan is off with Judith . . . and I am in the bog staring at the wall as I pee and read: WE’RE ALL HAS-BEENS SAID ONE DEAD HERO TO THE NEXT IN FLANDERS FIELD

Back to the scene: Mr. J. is sleeping. Another character, Dermot, appears but he says nothing to Liddy . . . Fintan has found a checkbook and is out the door before you can . . . Lizbeth is saying, Brian has had a hard day today: As a Dublin resident who much appreciates the beautifully maintained grounds of St. Stephen’s Green, I am greatly

St. Patrick’s Day

————

concerned at the senseless slaughter which has taken place recently of the baby ducks by the seagulls. A keeper has told me that in one day seventeen (17) of those lovely little creatures were killed or eaten alive by seagulls. I myself have witnessed a killing . . .

I am sure of it, or not, Liam seemed to be talking with Barbara or Teresa . . . Done with it, at the moment as when I went up to Saugerties to attend to my father’s death I found a note on the dining room table: I gave you your first job at Canco through Mr. Loughlin and you returned? Ronni Marion’s Father gave Clem his (First) 1st Job in the job building the 6th Avenue Subway and Mr. Whitney had to look for Clem to hide him when the Union man sent around to check. So you can see Why? What happened to all the bonds in the bank and? I know for a fact that someone drew it out since I commuted with the AVP of the bank on Myrtle and Clinton Ave . He was in the main office,. What happened to my COIN COLLECTION. That was I trunk. When I get an answer to this I will try to forgive you all. Alice and Betty were not in on it since they had all they wanted and good husbands

I am rubbing the bottle cap against my wrist and then parallel as one is supposed to do. I am asking Liddy if he’s gonna be in Grogan’s later today for the Holy Hour? Probably, though I should be going down to the country to see my mother and be getting ready to go back to the States. I hope you’ll be in Grogan’s. Don’t count on it. Can I have one of your beers? There’s none left, the pubs by the river should be open soon . . . Right. Take myself down to O’Connell Street afterward for the tour, Café Roma, Café Milan, and into Café Italia to be served by a girl with red ————

233

blotches on her knees, arms, and face with chipped nail polish and blue eyes as frail as those in the head of a doll in Switzer’s window, just off Grafton street, when I, just like her, far from that village on Long Island came to Dublin . . . as likely as the headline:

F RO M DU BL IN TO BULGARIA

But instead down to the quays and into a pub for the morning wakeme-up, discover in my pocket a crumbled check—

must have forgotten Mahon had been along, when was it . . . who knows . . . Lilia won’t mind . . . take care of some debts as we hadn’t needed the money back then . . . a poet’s credit is always good . . . when he dropped it in her lap to cheer her up after having the appendix out and was recovering in the charity ward of Baggot Street Hospital . . . a couple of weeks before we were to go to the US of A . . . but save it for a rainy day . . . so, to the Russell to see if anything came in the post, as I should say, then a little while later out to . . .

Dublin-Sofia-New York 1972–2015

St. Patrick’s Day

————

Thomas M c G o n i g l e

was born in 1944 in Brooklyn. His previous novels,

reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Voice Literary Supplement, include The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov and Going to Patchogue. He lives in New York City.