My Love Letter to a Pile of Rocks Part One: A Chance Meeting and Subsequent Unfounded Obsession
The Aran Islands are, always have been, and will continue to be my friends. Three small, rocky, yet unique and beautiful islands off the western coast of Ireland, marked the imaginary boundary between the calming Galway Bay and the wild and unrelenting Atlantic Ocean. The first time I met that pile of rocks I was merely a tourist lost amidst a plethora of people on the hydrofoil heading to Innishmore for the day. I didn’t know anything about Aran, except that I had to take a boat to get there; boats and water had never been friends of mine. I was much more comfortable staying on dry land with my feet planted firmly on concrete.
As my green mind and body had a little war about whether my will to not embarrass myself would win out over my incredibly nauseous stomach, I thought about how I had gotten here, to Ireland, in the first place. Six months before I was three months into my freshman year of college. I was an 18 year old Gap clad kid in the middle of collegiate hell in the cornfields of Fargo, coming to terms with being gay in a silent soliloquy with myself while all around me Lutherans from the prairie towns of the Dakotas and Montana prided themselves on coming to the Big City and Communion Nazis chased me down the hall, yelling at me because I wouldn’t accept the Blood of Christ during the required weekly chapels. I knew I wasn’t going to be at that school more than a year and had already put in a transfer application to Kalamazoo College. So I just threw myself at my English classes because I thought I had big, important things to contribute to literary studies, ideas that always proved too big for my brain or that Harold Bloom had already thought about.
In one particular class, I wrote a paper about the absence of spirituality in the U.S. in response to an Egyptian short story, and my professor told me to come to France with her. She promised me that once I got to Mont-St-Michel I would find spirituality and realize what that whole belief thing was really all about. I said okay, and found myself preparing to go on a month long literature seminar in May with thirteen other students, all of whom were seniors who were graduating or people entering their senior year. We were going to spend ten days in Ireland, a couple in Wales, five in England, and the remainder in France. To me, those first three weeks were just filler until we got to Mont-St-Michel. And, really, the only thing on my mind that morning on that hydrofoil to the distant pile of rocks was not puking all over these people I’d just met.
Someone told me that I’d be better off to go up on the deck to breathe the fresh air, so I did, and out in the distance I watched that pile of rocks come into view. Immediately, a funny feeling started growing in my stomach that began to override my seasickness. My eyes had found a focal point in Innishmore, and I couldn’t tear them away. When we docked I was excited not only to get on dry land, but also begin exploring the island. We boarded a mini-bus, nixing the expense of the horse and buggy, nixing the work of the bicycles. Our bus began driving down the one road of the island, showing off her best features—Seven Churches’ Graveyard, the Beehive Monastic hut and, best of all, Dun Aonghasa, the prehistoric ring fort on top of the cliffs. The bus waited along with all the other busses while we ate lunch, bought sweaters, and climbed to the top of Dun Aonghasa. The climb started easily, but got increasingly steeper. I kept going, stopping intermittently to catch my breath. Once I reached the top, the starkness of it all hit me. The ancient crumbling stone walls surrounded a horseshoe shaped area no longer than half a football field, which was banded on its straight edge by nothing—just air, and an over three hundred foot drop into the ocean below. I was warned not to go to the edge. At least four tourists a year were blown off, meeting their death somewhere between the sharp rocks and the unforgiving water.
I listened. I stayed a comfortable twenty feet away, sitting against a single boulder while my fellow students climbed all over the area, some hanging over the edge to get pictures of the rocks below. We took our time climbing back down to the bus. After that it was only a short bus ride back to the boat docks, and once again we boarded the hydrofoil and danced in the waves back to the mainland.
I was on that pile of rocks that day for five hours. But for some reasons I just couldn’t get Aran out of my head. The rest of Ireland, Wales, England, and France came and went, and the image of those cliffs just stayed in my head.
The island and I had become friends, a friendship which continued for months afterwards. It’s hard to be friends with a pile of rocks 5,000 miles away, but I have a feeling I was more of an island than she was. Aran was alive through her own power, and by the people who cherished what she gave them. And I was jealous that I wasn’t there. When it came time to choose my location for junior year study abroad, there was no choice other than Dublin in my mind. Not for the school, not for the theatre, not for the beer—although I admit the latter did factor into my decision—I knew that I’d be only three hours by bus and a fuckin’ boat ride away from my pile of rocks.
What the Rental Companies Forgot to Tell You
I hate flying. It didn’t used to be that way—I’d fly everywhere without any hesitation, without any question. But about six years ago I went from professional commercial jet passenger, transcended white-knuckle flyer and went straight to the rigid “albino-body” stage. My doctor prescribes Xanax for me now, but it doesn’t even help. Instead of having these full-on panic attacks I have silent still ones, my limbs at rest while tears stream down my face and I calmly and rationally say nonsense like, “I can’t get on this plane. If I do, it will fall out of the sky and we’ll all die.”
When I was little I would have dreams about my death, and it was always one of two ways—plane crash, or falling off the sidewalk and getting my head smushed like a warm M&M. I solved the latter by always walking closest to the buildings, but there’s no way to avoid flying, especially since my new dream is to be a contestant on The Amazing Race.
The flight that planted the seed of paranoia was a British Airways flight between Dublin and London in December of 1999. It was an early morning flight and, like most winter mornings in the British Isles, was full of dreary, dense fog. I knew the flight had been a bit bumpy and we’d been turning some, and at one point I looked out the window and lost all sense of where I was. I couldn’t tell if we were right side up or upside down, on our right, on our left—I had no idea. I have recently learned this is what pilots call “The Leans”, and when it happens they have no choice but to rely on their instruments in the cockpit and the disembodied voices of the air traffic controllers. But I had no instruments, no numbers or readings that could tell me everything was fine, no disembodied voices—at least the ones outside of my head. And that’s when I realized that flying is just an exercise in relinquishing control, and that’s just not something I’m good at.
9/11 helped push my paranoia through its gestation period into a fully-grown phobia. But the plane being hijacked or blown up aren’t my only worries. I worry that the pilot has been bitten by an Amsterdam and doesn’t know about the bite until he faints during take off. I worry that an innocent smoker has inadvertently left a ninety-nine cent plastic lighter in their checked luggage which will ignite in the unpressurized cargo hold. And I worry each time the plane turns because, while I understand enough about the physics of flight to know that the plane floats on the fast moving current of air beneath it, I don’t understand how that current can hold the plane when it’s just the wingtip pointed at the ground.
Despite all of this, there’s one time when I love flying, and it’s when I’m flying into Dublin. There’s this point where, if you’re looking out the window, the endless grey of the Atlantic Ocean gives way to the green of the Emerald Isle. As the plane begins its descent, you can start to make out small hamlets of towns, stone fences criss-crossing the countryside and, once the plane does a 180 above the Martello towers of Howth, the rapidly growing metropolis of Dublin itself. I like these moments because, for me, flying into Dublin is like coming home. And, any mode of transportation is better than trying to drive there.
Ireland’s already famous for its sheep, rocks, and beer, but people should know it for its god-awful roads. It’s not that they’re bad—it’s just that they’re terrible, horrible, no good and very bad.
First of all, there are no directions. There is all of one street sign in downtown Dublin, posted at the intersection of Dame and O’Connell streets, the largest intersection in town. The sign reads, “To the North, To the South, and To the West”. Out in the country, don’t even think about trying to find your way. The few signs that do exist read things like, “Corofin, 8 km” followed seven and a half kilometers later with another sign that reads, “Corofin, 13 km”. Luckily, these signs are written in both English and Irish, giving the traveler the unique experience of getting lost bilingually.
Every single person I know who has attempted to drive in Ireland has lost at least one hubcap, but usually two or three. This includes the most perfect driver I know, my mother, who swears to this day that the hubcap that fell off our car was actually stolen somewhere along that tenuous twenty mile stretch we drove in NORTHERN Ireland. I’m not sure what happened to it, but if it was stolen I’m positive it was by some other tourist who was afraid to return their car without the complete set. The rental companies have gotten smart, however, and now they string one of those little zip ties between the hubcap and the wheel so if you knock one off it doesn’t just fall off and roll away but rather flaps in the breeze as you drive along looking like you’ve got albatrosses stuck underneath your car. But not only does this look stupid, you’re also liable to nick a leprechaun.
This is the hubcap that fell off our rental car somewhere between Glendalough and Kilkenny. We got a lot of suspicious looks from the security guards after all four of us were “randomly” pulled, one by one, for the mega airport security check. I thought for a minute we were going to get detained and wouldn’t be able to fly home which, frankly, I was okay with. I don’t know what most people do when they lose their hubcap, but we decided to stop outside the gates of Kilkenny castle and play Hubcap Frisbee. And then we got back in the car and took out a side blinker and mirror on a hay trailer. So, my advice to you? Buy the fucking insurance.
Once you do find your way around, and if your car’s still driveable, you’ve got a choice of roads. There are M road, the motorways, which have no speed limits and are about as wide as your normal two lane highway. Then there are the N roads, the National Roads, which are about as wide as a residential street and are the main roadways in most parts of the country. Finally, you’ve got the R roads, the regional routes, where there isn’t enough room for two bicyclers side by side, let alone a Nissan Micra and a big-ass German tour bus. And they’re really fun when you’re driving along with a fence on one side and a hedge on the other and you round a corner to find your car staring down a farmer and his herd of bulls, or you come across a flock of lambs looking like the Ice Capades on crack and one of them spins into your car. And again, not my mother’s fault. The sheep? Hit US.
To keep up with both EU standards and the demands of the “Celtic Tiger”, the lamest name for an economic boom ever—the roads have slowly been getting better. But one road, the National road between Limerick and Galway, is not getting widened as planned. And it’s all because of a man named Eddie.
Eddie Lenihan is a high school English teacher at Limerick Secondary school and, like all high school English teachers, is bat-shit crazy. He’s very tall and round with a big bushy beard and hair that covers his whole face with owl-like glasses that perch on the bridge of his nose. And he’s convinced that he can communicate with fairies—the flitty, flying kind. I got to be friends with one of his former students, and she said sometimes he’d be in the middle of a lecture and stop, look around all possessed like, and start talking in low murmurs to some invisible being.
But one day the fairies brought Eddie a different message. “What? What are yet saying? Save the bush? What bush? Stop the—what? Stop the road? An, don’t leave yet, I don’t understand!” But the fairies had gone, and the voice’s message lingered, haunting the fields of his dreams. He knew he’d been charged with a quest, but he wasn’t sure for what. He began to pull out all the maps he had of the area around Limerick—both fairy maps and construction maps. His classes were ignored, his wife was ignored, and he convinced his two year old son that it was always night so he should always be asleep so Eddie wouldn’t have to take time to play with him. See? Bat-shit crazy. But it was all worth it, because Eddie found the bush. Outside the village of Latoon was a giant hawthorn bush, and it was marked for destruction because the roads were to be widened two feet on either side. Eddie knew the bush had to be saved because it was a meeting point for the Kerry and Dingle fairies when they went into battle against the likes of Donegal and Clare, and without that bush there was no way the Kerry and Dingle fairies would survive on their own.
Eddie knew his mission. He made all of his students wear “I heart the Bush!” buttons, and went around town with a petition and collected over 5,000 signatures. He then went to Dublin to present the case of “Eddie Lenihan on behalf of the Kerry and Dingle fairies vs. the Irish Transportation Counsel.” The case was headline news in papers all over the country, and not long after the court presented its ruling. The road from Limerick to Galway would not be widened two feet on either side as planned. Instead, it would be widened four feet on one side.
Ireland is truly the only country I know that would stop progress in the name of magic.
This story does have a sad ending. On his website, Eddie Lenihan wrote the following:
“Of late, the Latoon fairy bush once again featured in practically all the Irish national daily newspapers, this time for wholly the wrong reason. Some person on the weekend of August 9, 2002, took a chainsaw to it, and very deliberately cut off every single branch, but left the trunk standing bare. What obscure point this coward (the act was done under the cover of darkness, naturally) was trying to make is hard to fathom. But an old man of that locality, one with a deep knowledge of such things, as soon as I phoned him with the bad news replied, ‘Is he still alive?’. I have no way of knowledge that. What I do know is that the Good People do not suffer destruction of their property without response. The misguided person who did this may have let himself in for more than her bargained for…”
Eddie Lenihan is only one of many Irish who cherish The Good People. When Ireland was rallying itself for the fight for independence around 1900, a group of writers and intellects including W.B. Yeats saw the importance in writing down the fairy lore, and they sent young writers off to collect and record these stories. One of these writers was John Millington Synge. He traveled around the west talking to many people. One woman told him a doozy of a story, something about a cow falling off a cliff into the ocean and a single fairy shepherding the cow to safety. Synge just put down his pen, stared at the woman, “Come now. You don’t actually believe in the fairies, do you?”
The woman gave him a searching look and said, “Believe in them? Of course not! But they’re real.”
Now, that particular fairy with a penchant for bovine was supposedly from the Aran Islands, and I will believe anything from that pile of rocks.
My Love Letter to a Pile of Rocks Part Two: Is This For Real?
Three weeks after moving to Dublin, I felt the pull to go west. I dragged two new friends along, not ready to face the islands or the boat ride alone. And this time, I would not be a day tourist. We traveled to Galway on a Friday, planning to spend the night before catching the early morning boat. The other two went back to the hostel after just three pubs while I took a walk along the pier. It was a clear night, and I could smell the sea spray coming off the bay, feel the rocks of the city wall against my back, and I thought I could make out the lights of Innishmore on the dark horizon. But that was impossible.
The sea was calm when we set out the next morning, and the boat was emptier than it had been a year and a half before—Ireland isn’t the most popular travel spot the third week in October. Drizzle fell from the gray skies when we docked. We nixed the horse and buggy because of expense. We nixed the mini-bus for the same reason. Instead we rented bikes, grabbed maps, and looked forward to spending the day cruising the island. I had been sick for a long time, and my body was not as strong as my friends’. While they rode ahead, Aran and I had many talks about how I needed those roads to be easy ones—no hills, no bumps, or I would be took weak to climb Dun Aonghasa that afternoon. The rain fell harder. My hair was drenched and my glasses began to fog. We reached Dun Aonghasa and slowly—very slowly—made the climb. The precipice was encased in fog, hiding the nothingness I knew was beyond. My friends were on a lower plateau, the mini-busses had already moved on to their next stop. I was alone, and sat on my boulder trying to be content. I couldn’t sit still, and wanted to go closer to the edge. My legs propelled me forward until my shoe stubbed a rock and I fell to my knees twelve inches from the edge, clutching the earth as a sudden gust waged overhead, the rushing fog forming our private chamber as, trembling, I found my sense of bearing and solace on the edge of infinity. The pile of rocks was my savior that day, a role they would reprise a few months later.
I heard my friends calling my name and I got up, smoothing the wrinkles from my wet clothes and praying that they had called my name before seeing me prostrate on the ground. We biked back to the small village by the boat docks, returned the bike, and found dinner before going back to the hostel. I left them there while I wandered the streets of the village with a sheepish grin on my face. This island just felt like mine, a pile of rocks I could call my own, my home. I heard music from a pub up the street—somewhat ironically named “The American Bar”—and went in to order a pint. The villagers were all here—and I realized I couldn’t join in their conversation without certain concessions on their part.
Innishmore is a Gaeltacht, a community dedicated to speaking Irish as their first language. My glee slid off my face as realization and Guinness dribbled down me. What was I doing? Who was I, an American, to call Aran mine? I was my worst enemy, the colonizing outsider, who, in order to fit in, would have to change those around me. As quickly as my giddiness had come earlier, reality slammed itself against my drunken brain. I would be leaving in less than a year. My obligations were in Dublin, a three hour bus and a fuckin’ boat ride away—a distance which a few months ago seemed a lot smaller than it actually was. I couldn’t spend the time here that justified my claims.
When we left the next morning, I tried not to look back. But I did in spite of myself, searching for the pile of rocks which had so long ago controlled my seasick stomach.
Who’s Your Partner?
I love the warning signs on the smoke packages in Ireland: “SMOKING KILLS”. “SMOKERS DIE YOUNGER”. It’s a wonder that I started smoking there but I figured I had five strikes against me. I was in Europe. I’m a writer. I was studying theatre. I’m a jazz musician. And, I’m gay. There’s a very small cross-section of people that fit all five of those that are non-smokers. It didn’t take too long to pick the habit up. When Ireland first passed the smoking ban in March 2004, there was an uproar not only in the country but also from Irish immigrants worldwide. Smoking and drinking was an integral part of the Irish Culture! Without smoking, would the lyrics of the drinking songs have to be changed? What would the wives have to complain about when their husbands came home from the pub?
The BBC did a survey in Ireland about three months after the ban went into effect, and there was one overwhelming complaint. Now that the pub interiors no longer reeked of secondhand smoke, you could smell everyone’s farts from drinking Guinness all day. I can just hear a bunch of peat farmers in a pub in County Mayo, sitting around going, “Ah Jaysus Mary and Joseph! Seamus let one rip!”
You know what they call these? Fags. It always made me pause, because these are the straightest things I’ve seen in Dublin clubs.
I was nervous about living in a country that was 98% Roman Catholic, where divorce had been legal less than ten years and most contraceptives were still very much a no-no. Even though I wasn’t out to my family yet, my freshman year of collegiate hell had been followed by a year of liberal bliss at the “Gay K”, Kalamazoo College. I’d been dumped only a couple months before and was ready to start dating again. In high school, one of the games we played in the airport on band trips was “Gay, or European?” At least, that was the male version. For women it was usually, “Gay, or Midwestern Farmer’s Wife?” But how do you tell who is Gay AND European? My gaydar was totally off in Dublin and I didn’t know the local customs for recognizing other members of the team. Did you still give the back nod of recognition? Everyone just looked so chic, a label which has never been ascribed to my fashion sense.
Around the time when I realized I was going to run out of money and grow out of my pants if I didn’t stop eating every meal in the pub and should probably look for a grocery store other than the convenience store in the train station next to my apartment, I began seeing these two men everywhere around town. I didn’t know their names or anything about them except I thought they were students at my college. I never talked to them but I would watch them, because everywhere they went they held hands. This in itself was nothing spectacular in my mind, but what I also noticed is hardly anyone gave them a second gland. And that’s when I knew everything was going to be okay.
Shortly after that I was walking home from my newly found grocery store, my bright red Eagle Creek backpack stuffed with food for the week, and I heard this American voice say, “Oh my God, it’s Hugh Grant!” I turned around because I LOVE Hugh Grant, and was shocked to see an American tourist, complete with fanny pack and white tennis shoes, pointing at me. And that’s when I knew I was going to be okay, and it was time to once again embrace my inner gay man and get out to the clubs.
I met Gavin, a nursing student at my college, my first night out at the George, a big purple building with neon pink lettering. We became inseparable, and it got to the point where we just assumed any man and woman we saw on the street or in restaurants were just like us, two single gays in the city looking for others to hang out with. We’d stand in line to get into the George three or four nights a week, being serenaded by the homeless man who cruised the line holding a plastic bucket and singing Louis Armstrong tunes in hopes to garner enough change for a pint or some fags.
I found out quickly that I had three things going for me. One, I was a foreigner, someone new on the scene. Two, I had lived in Fargo, and yes, it was exactly like the movie. Three, I had just converted to Catholicism. Living in a cornfield and becoming a member of the most homophobic sect of the Christian faith were not the two things I thought would impress people the most, but I guess it was all right because my looks and my dancing skills were never going to get me anywhere.
I dated two women in Dublin, and with both tried to hold their hand on the street, daring the people around us not to swivel their heads, maybe silently communicating to some other lonely soul I would never meet that everything was going to be okay. Neither scenario worked. The first time I reached for Clare’s hand, she pulled away and said, “You better not. I have forty-two cousins who live in this section of town,” proving to me that condoms really are a good things for Catholics, and that the potato famine had no lasting effect on Irish population growth. The first time I reached for Kathryn’s hand, she didn’t pull back but we rounded the corner and looked into the face of the Louis Armstrong bum. He did a double take, looked at me and said, “I knew you were that way,” and then turned to Kathryn and continued, “but I didn’t know but you!”
When I returned to the States, it was with a bruised heart. But when I came back to Dublin it was with my girlfriend and our two fabulous gay boys. After the first few days in Dublin we headed west. Our first stop was Kinsale, a town I knew well as it was Kathryn’s hometown. Karen had been driving since Jonathan hit the hay trailer, and decided to turn in early. The boys and I headed to a pub down the road, The Mad Monk. It was music night at the place, and we were entertained with traditional songs about Superloos and Viagra, the unstoppable Pfizer Riser. The place was packed with locals, and when they heard our accents we were surround by a gaggle of men in their late twenties / early thirties, their occupations apparent by their varied degree of professional attire. After I told them I’d lived in Fargo and yes, it was exactly like the movie, the free pints started appearing on our table, each man pressing forward to impress the lot of us with his vocal talents. The exasperated bar owner started yelling at everyone around 1 AM that it was time to go home and around 2.30, we actually started to listen. As we made our way to the door an excitable young fellow in a suit, with his tie loosened and hanging limply came up to me and said, “I’ll kiss you, as you’re a lass,” as he kissed my cheek. Then he turned to Eric and said, “but I shan’t kiss you, as you’re a bloke. But you have lovely earrings!”
Eric was highly disappointed.
A few days later we found ourselves in Cliffden on the northern edge of the Connemara. We had decided months ago that we’d treat ourselves to one night in a bed and breakfast instead of the hostels. I had picked the Waterloo Guest House not only because of its location or its names with Napoleonic overtones, but also for the outdoor HOT TUB, which I knew would be amazing at night this late in February in one of the most remote parts of the country. I emailed the proprietor, P.K., to see if they had any vacancies, and received an email back written in very short, monosyllabic sentences. At the bottom was a note that said, “Allegra Lingo, if you are French or Italian you can view our site in your own language by clicking HERE”. This was a bad sign. We’d confused the fuck out of this poor man already and we hadn’t even arrived yet.
I’m not exactly sure what P.K. was expecting, but it wasn’t four young gay Americans on his doorstep that evening. Within ten seconds, he thought he had us figured out. “Allegra and Jonathan, your room is through here. Karen and Eric, you are over here.” We nodded and went to our rooms, waiting until we heard his footsteps retreat upstairs before switching the luggage and ourselves. The boys took a walk into town while Karen and I caught up on some TV and made do with leftover food from the car. When the boys returned, they and Karen decided it was time to hot tub.
Karen found P.K. in the hall, and the conversation went something like this:
“Hi, P.K., I think we’re going to use the hot tub, so I need a robe.”
“Okay, but I already gave Eric your robe.”
“Yes, he said he got two, but three of us are going. So I need one.”
“Yes, but I already gave Eric your robe.”
“I know. But Jonathan’s going, too.”
“Yes, but—wait, who’s your partner?”
I heard a very long pause while I stifled giggles into my pillow, playing out Karen’s thought process in my head. Finally she answered, “The boys are sleeping in that room, and the girls are sleeping in this room.”
Now it was time for a pregnant pause from P.K. “Oh Jaysus, Mary and Joseph! I thought you were partners! I should have given you two beds!”
As we drove away the next day, we had a good laugh. We’re not sure P.K. ever figured it out. Instead, we went from being enigmatic French Italians to heathen Americans living in sin to very pious, good Christians, separating the sexes.
I read this book on quantum physics that talks about the human brain’s perception of reality. It told the story about how when Christopher Columbus was approaching the New World, the indigenous people could not see the ships coming because it was such an unknown object, kind of like when my father doesn’t see any of the spills in the kitchen and my mom gets mad because he’s house blind. It wasn’t until one of the tribe’s elders stood on the beach and said, “Something is there” could the rest of the tribe see the ships, and by that time they were close enough to see the designs on the flag. My Xanaxed brain thought about that a lot as we flew home. We had left on that trip on February 15th, 2004 when San Francisco started giving out marriage licenses to gay couples, the final strike of the match igniting the hot button issue of gay marriage politics we’re currently in. I’m not sure what’s better—staying strong as a vocal community while the hatred and backlash towards an integral part of my being grows daily around me, or finding myself in a country and situation where that fiber of my being is so alien no one sees it. For me, and I realize it’s not a popular choice, I choose the latter. But on whatever soil I find myself I will always reach for Karen’s hand. Except for at monster truck rallies. There, we decided it’s safer not to.
Today’s Programming is Brought to You By the Letter H
I took a class on Samuel Beckett taught by one of the world’s leading Beckett scholars at Trinity, during the year that the BBC was working on the “Beckett Project”, a mini-series where they brought in some of the world’s most famous directors and actors to put all of Samuel Beckett’s works on film. Anthony Minghella, Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and others were all familiar faces around campus while they filmed. But the most useful thing I learned in that class was that my classmate, Bart’s, father’s cousin’s sister-in-law owned a dog that was from the same litter of the dog who was from the same litter as the dog that was owned by the next door neighbor of Samuel Beckett’s brother. I learned nothing new about Beckett that I didn’t already know from a class I took during my freshman year of collegiate hell until February 2004, when I went back to Dublin and stumbled drunk out of a gay bar at one in the morning and hailed a cab to take Karen and I back to the hotel.
As we passed the walls of Trinity College, our driver started playing tour guide as he did with all American tourists. I managed to interrupt him long enough to tell him I already knew all about Trinity because I’d been a student there four years before. He asked what I had studied, and I told him theatre and literature We talked about Beckett, Yeats, Shaw, Doyle, and Joyce all the way to our door in a suburb ten miles away.
I’ve had enlightening conversations about Shakespeare with strangers in the Dublin Burger King. Talks about Wilde in other cabs. On the pedestrian streets, amongst the Louis Armstrong singing bum and the immigrants selling Dublin Today, there is always an eight or nine year old standing next to a lamp post with a laminated 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper taped to it, listing all the poems they can recite for you. I could never resist paying a pound to hear a child recite Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping form the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Ireland has always been supportive of its writers. It’s not a surprise to learn that four Irish writers have won the Nobel Prize for literature after you learn that if you claim “writer” or “artist” as an occupation you pay no taxes. And I’m still looking for an Irish gay boy to get married to so I can get Irish citizenship, in case anyone knows one?
But it’s not just the nine-hundred page novels about a man walking around a city or the carefully crafted poem that gets attention. This is a country that has poetry on the fabric of their airline’s seats, a “writer’s corner” with excerpts from famous works in their train cars. But it goes even further. It’s not sentences, or even words. For the Irish, the power of language comes in a single letter. My T.A. at Trinity, Mark, was a Catholic who grew up in Belfast. When he was a small child, about the age of the Innisfree reciters, kids would come up to one another and ask each other to pronounce the eighth letter of the alphabet. It’s “H”, by the way. If you say, “hay-ch”, it meant you grew up on the Protestant side of town. If you said “hitch”, it meant you were Catholic. You could never be sure of who was asking the question, or the way you were supposed to answer. If you answered incorrectly, you were in for a beating.
I sometimes wonder how a country that is divided not just by a borderline, not just by politics and religion, but by the pronunciation of a single letter will ever find its way back to its true self, its cohesive identity. I want the division to go away so the next time my mother drives that treacherous twenty-mile stretch of NORTHERN Ireland, it’s not scary but rather a continuation of beautiful gorgeousness.
I heard Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, speak on the steps of the Dublin General Post Office on April 24th, 2000, the first time Easter Monday fell on April 24th since 1916, the day of the fated Easter Uprising when intellectuals, patriots, and students alike barricaded themselves all Les Misarables style in that same building and shot at the British soldiers. The siege was over nearly as soon as it started, and those who hadn’t been killed were imprisoned at a jail not far away, most of the leaders of the uprising executed in the prison yard. I cannot walk by that building without noticing the bullet holes, the remnants of a cause that will never be finished until the six remaining Northern Irish counties join the other 32—forming a single, unifed, Ireland.
I drank regularly—shocking—at a pub that was a front for the IRA. While we belted tunes at the tops of our lungs, arms trades took place in the back.
The first time I was in Ireland, it was on the eve of the May 1998 peace treaty, and the town were plastered in bright green posters that said that one magic word, those five important letters (none of which were H)—PEACE.
The peace initiative passed and things were quiet, until the school bombings in Armagh, the steady rise in disappearances beginning again.
When I drink too much, I start extolling the virtues of the IRA. And I calmly and rationally say nonsense like, “No one here understands. They sing these songs and they think they know but fuck—I’ve met the men who used to go out in ski masks and I don’t fucking get it.” That’s when it’s time to hand over my car keys and pay my tab.
I have a confession to make. I’m not Irish. I have no blood ties to the country I cherish, the unending fight I whole-heartedly support. My family is Welsh, not the French or Italian P.K. thought I was. As much as I wish my last name was originally “Lingo”, or “language” in Latin, the perfect name for a writer, it is actually “Llyngoch”, or “of the red lake”. It was changed to something more “American”, more “normal”, when my ancestors immigrated to this country.
There is a town in Wales named Clan-vire - / puck-gwin-gil - / go-gare-ych - / win-drawb-ire - / clan-t-silly-o -/ go-go-goch. Fifty seven letters long, one of the longest single word town names in the entire world. In English it means “The Church of Mary in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near a Rapid Whilrpool and the Church of Tysilo by the Red Cave.” Twenty four words, or 91 letters and twenty three spaces to say the same thing. A Welsh kid may have a hard time learning to write small enough to fit Clan-vire - / puck-gwin-gil - / go-gare-ych - / win-drawb-ire - / clan-t-silly-o -/ go-go-goch on an envelope, but it’s easier than English.
And sometimes I get mad at my distant Welsh relatives because they have all but become English. Each time there has been a vote on home rule, or moving a Welsh government back to Wales, they have voted against it, willingly staying part of Great Britian.
I spent a couple days in a town called Aberystwyth—that’s sure as hell easier to pronounce—on the western coast of Wales. My first night there, I made my way down to the seashore to take pictures. I sat on the pier putting seagulls and clouds into focus, hearing the rhythm of the Welsh language spoken by the fishermen pulling in their nets in front of me, the din of the English vacationers from their seaside balconies behind me. And there I was in the middle, watching the sunset on the British Empire.
My Love Letter to a Pile of Rocks Part Three: Intimacy is Some Feckin’ Scary Shit
The bus for the port left at nine AM. I was once again in Galway on my way to the Aran Islands, this time my only baggage a small backpack with two changes of clothes, my journal, my pen, and my cell phone. I was alone, on what would turn out to be my final solo trip. When I reached the front of the ticket line my brain thought, “round trip to Innishmore” but my words betrayed me and I said, “round trip to Innisoirr”. Innishoirr, the mama bear of the three islands, home to two hundred people, two hostels, a bed and breakfast, castle ruin, and a shipwreck. It was not a tourist place, garnering less than 1% of the day traffic of Innishmore. We reached the port and I saw the hydrofoil where big-ass bus loads of people were chatting away getting ready to go, and then looked past and saw my boat—the small, twenty foot water vessel riding low and already rocking from side to side. There were only eight other people on the boat besides the two man crew—three young Germans, two Scottish college students and their American friend, an 82 year old woman who had grown up on Innishoirr who was coming home for her mother’s 105th birthday, and a Dublin man who was competing with me for Aran’s attention. I looked out onto the water as the boat pulled away from the dock, eyeing the white caps topping the waves in the bay.
There were never white caps before in the bay. I was going on a small, small boat headed for a small, small island. And I’d forgotten my Dramamine.
As soon as we pulled away from the dock I began regretting taking advantage of the free Irish breakfast that morning, complete with two fried eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, potatoes, and black pudding. My nauseous stomach won out over my desire to not embarrass myself, and the moment I stood up to make my way to the back deck I fucking lost it, spewing my breakfast all over the aisle. Finally I made it outside, a trail of puke marking the path behind me and tried to get out to the edge of the boat, but the Dublin man pulled me back by the collar of my shirt, telling me the waves were too big, and I could be knocked into the sea. Two of the Germans felt the same way I did, and they were standing in the middle of the deck, hanging onto a metal pipe that ran underneath the deck of the upper level. I followed suit, and the three of us stood there, heads hanging down, puking onto the deck and our shoes. It didn’t matter that our vomit was all over the place—the boat was rocking not only up and down but side to side, the waves spilling over the side and drenching everything in cold seawater. My hands were not quite big enough to comfortably grab the pipe, and at every jostle of the boat I thought I would lose my grip, sliding into the side of the boat and over the edge.
It was the first time in my life I honestly thought I was going to die.
And I was okay with that.
All I wanted to do that weekend was see a different part of Aran, one that hardly anyone else knew except the people who lived there, but damn if she wasn’t making that difficult. What should have been a fairly pleasant thirty-five minute crossing had turned into an hour and a half of pure hell. When we docked, the captain apologized for having sailed. I wobbled to a vacant hostel, collapsed on the couch, and called me mom to tell her that if she ever wanted to see me again she was going to have to come there, because I was never, ever, ever, getting on another boat.
When my body stopped shaking and the room stopped spinning, I decided it was time to explore. The owner of the hostel stopped me and asked where I was going.
“Just around the island. I heard there was a shipwreck.”
“’ave you ever driven a harse before?”
“No, sir. But I’ve ridden one.”
“I’ve got a harse outback that’s tamer than the bay. You want to take ‘im out?”
I went around back with the man and he showed me his old horse, hooked up to a rickety wooden cart. He shoed me how to hold the reins, what to say to make the hose go. He said it was no harder than riding a ride at Disneyworld—the ol’ horse knew his way around the island, and was used to tourists riding him.
“But I’m not a tourist!” I exclaimed. “At least, I don’t feel like one.”
“I know yer not,” said the man. “That’s why I’m not making you pay,” he finished with a wink.
I drove the horse through the village, passing small houses gathered around the pubs, smoke from the peat fires rising from the chimneys. Out past the last houses the stone fences started, marking small plots of old farmland, now depleted of resources and as empty as haunted battlefields. We turned the corner towards the back, remote part of the island, and there it was—the shipwreck. I tied the cart to a rotting pole, not too concerned the horse would go anywhere, and started exploring. It was a newer wreck from the beginning of the twentieth century, a big rusting metal ship that had been uprooted from its resting place during a violent sea storm and had come to rest on the deserted beach of Innishoirr. That was all I knew of its history. There was no placard, no tourist information to tell me more. But, at the price of upfront knowledge came my privilege to climb all over it, exploring every nook and cranny. As the sun turned its corner from midday and began its descent into darkness, I untied the cart and headed back.
After returning the horse, I walked up to a small pub in the village for dinner. I packed away the pints with the locals, who were nice enough to switch to English long enough to explain what was going on in the Rugby match they were all watching on TV. The bar cleared out when the match was over. When I stepped outside and looked up, the night was completely clear, blanketed with stars, and a full moon hung low in the sky, silhouetting the castle ruins on top of the hill.
I ducked back in the pub and bought one of the cigars I’d been eyeing all night and a full pack of smokes and headed up to the ruins. I found a place on the wall to sit, and let a smoke. I realized something right there—even though Aran’s secret island was made up of a shipwreck and ruins of a once upstanding castle, marks of violence and upheaval, there was a part of that pile of rocks that was totally serene, totally beautiful and, for that moment, totally mine. I continued to smoke and sit, relaxing in the sanctuary I was finding in Aran.
And that’s when I heard the banshee. The mourning, keening, cry of death. One of the most dreaded figures in all of Irish folklore. The banshee is always a woman. If you hear her, you know that death is nearby. If you see her, you know death is coming for you. And here I was, on a totally clear night, all alone, on the highest point of the island. I jumped from my perch, hit the ground, nestled my face into the soil, clenched my eyes shut, and pressed my hands over my ears. She wailed, and I clung to Aran. After a long while, the wailing stopped. I slowly opened my eyes and ears, raised my face, and say that everything was still as it had been. I brushed the dirt off my face and clothes, and lit my cigar. I had survived the banshee. And it was only because of Aran.
When the cigar finally went out, I stumbled back to the hostel. I listened to the waves crashing against the rocky shoreline outside. I realized how hard it was to love the place—in one day I had nearly been killed by both a sea storm and a creature that up until that moment I had thought was just a myth. But I loved Aran just the same, even more. She tried to be distant, tried to push me away, and that made me want to be closer. Was I confusing me need for sanctuary with love? Did I care? Were they that different in the long run, anyways?
As I drifted off to sleep that night, I made a pact with the pile of rocks that if she told me her secrets, I would tell her mine. And even if she wouldn’t, I would always tell our stories.
Toe-er do un rudd kear-nah marr ah-ta ig un arr air un urr-lar
(Give me the same as the man on the floor, a drunken tale that eventually gets around to mentioning St. Patrick’s Day)
All good stories start out with a few friends. All even better stories start out with friends going to a bar. But what makes a great story is when said friends go to a bar, proceed to get drunk and do something incredibly insane, crazy, and stupid.
This is one of those great stories.
On the cold, wet, dreary February night when our story begins, I was sitting in Mahaffey’s pub in Dublin with two of my American friends; Lyndsey, a Japanese American republican theatre major who you can now catch in such roles as “staffer” and “student number five” in select episodes of The West Wing and Boston Public; and Chris, short for Christianna, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, freckled bandita of an English major who has gone on to become the general manager of a shopping mall the in greater Los Angeles area. Over achievers all of us, I tell you.
We had just come from our weekly film night for our Post Classical Hollywood Cinema class, where we’d finally gotten fed up with our Irish classmates trying to intellectually discuss “The Goonies”. Over many, many pints we took turns doing impressions of our classmates discussing, with a straight face, the directorial choice of Chunk choosing Baby Ruth over Mounds Bars and whether the deletion of the Octopus Scene was made in an attempt to downplay the Oedipal thematic structure of the film. We fantasized about how much we could get away with in our final papers, wondering if we could base a thirty page paper on the deconstruction of the nicknames in “Top Gun”.
Our impending finals were quickly shunted to the back of our brains to discuss our upcoming three week Spring Break. Trinity College was nice enough to inform us that all of our rooms in college would be closed for cleaning. So what were three American lasses to do? My memory grows hazy around this point, and coherently picks up with the three of us waking up in my flat, a stack of three plane tickets to Athens, GREECE, sitting on my desk. One way tickets to Greece.
Somebody should have thought better than to put a 24-hour student travel agency within stumbling distance of a pub, or at least administer breathalyzer tests before the credit cards can be charged, preventing unsuspecting students from committing the grievous error of drinking and buying. Or maybe it was their plan all along, feckin’ capitalist pigs.
We went back to the travel agency and, with the agent’s help, pieced together our memories of the night before, how it had been my idea that Athens was where we needed to go, about our agonizing over Air France (where there were duty-free Galuoise cigarettes) or Czech Air (where there was cheap beer), and how we had gotten one way tickets because, in Europe, everything is priced in one way so the round trip was twice the price, and way out of our budget.
So this is how on March 12th we found ourselves boarding an early morning flight to Paris, with nothing but a backpack and a three-week Eurail pass each that our mothers had been so gracious to buy us, and absolutely no fucking plan about how we were going to get back to Dublin.
Now, I’ve done a lot of travel, but I have never felt so foreign as I did that first night in Athens. Part of it I’m sure was because I’d been living for the past six months in Ireland, where technically I was a foreigner but didn’t feel like one. Part of it was probably because, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by signs that I couldn’t even recognize the letters, let alone read. Totally Greek to me. But it might have also been because, as we walked into Plaka, the labyrinth of streets that make up the center of ancient Athens, the first thing that happened was a group of young men chased us down the street, pelting us with pink plastic squeaky clubs and silly string.
We took refuge in the nearest taverna with outdoor seating, watching the rumble scene from West Side Story play out before our eyes. One group of people would gather at one end of the street, another group at the other. They would crouch down, beating their squeaky clubs on the cobblestones, letting the noise reach a cacophonous din and then, on some inaudible cue, would yell and run at each other, swinging at anything and anyone.
I ordered my dinner by pointing to a grouping of letters that looked familiar, probably from the sign outside a frat house. When the waiter brought back my rack of lamb—thank God I’d chosen wisely—I tried really hard to find out what the fuck was going on. There’s a sterotype that American tourists, when desperately trying to communicate in a foreign country, just get really loud and talk slow. I, on the other hand, tend to gesticulate wildly and just mouth words, so I was all [pointing] “what’s going on?”
Trying to string together any English words he knew would make sense, our waiter answered, “the day, before the day, we eat no meat.”
I mulled this over, finally clutching at the cross around my neck and showing him.
“Ash Wednesday day after today?”
He nodded.
This confused me even more, because I was sure as hell that Lent had started the week before, when the barkeeps at our pub ripped our half-finished pints from our hands at midnight and said, “Yeh gotta go—it’s Ash Wednesday and yeh can’t drink ‘til yeh’ve been smudged”, and I’d also proclaimed I was giving up men for forty days.
“Ortho-dox”, said the waiter.
We had, unwittingly, landed in Athens on the Greek Orthodox mardi gras. We ate quickly, bought squeaky clubs of our own, and spent the next few hours gleefully joining in the rumble.
We spent the next day poking around Athens, going to the Acropolis, entertaining Japanese tourists by running races in the Old Olympic stadium, and then took off island hopping in the Agean Sea for a few days in search for the elusive blue dome, but instead getting lost on Mykonos, where all the buildings are painted the same white and there are no street signs, a tradition upheld since the hey-day of piracy in an attempt to protect its women and wealth; and to Delos, the birthplace of the god Apollo that was deemed so holy by the ancient Greeks they decreed no one could be born or die on the island, so they all just packed up and left one day.
When we came back from the islands on the 17th, we were now a group of six. Lil and Gil, an elderly lesbian couple who were both Cuban immigrants, met working at the social security office in Miami, and now spent three weeks a year traveling to a new country, and Carlos Arturo Perrenge Tessman, a dude our age whose father was the head of guerilla warfare operations in Chiapas outside Mexico City, had joined us. We were planning on meeting some of Carlos’ friends for dinner, and were introduced to a girl from New Zealand who told us to call her Kiwi since everyone else did, three writers for Let’s Go who we would continue to run into all over Europe in train stations for the next few weeks, and Darren, a Californian whose parents had given him enough money to travel for one year to figure out what the hell he was going to do with his life.
“I heard you ladies are down from Dublin,” Darren asked me. “Where’s your shamrocks today?”
I looked at Lyndsey and Chris in horror. We were living in Dublin for one year, and because of one drunken night, were spending St. Patrick’s day in Greece.
We found a restaurant that served Guinness and the eleven of us sat down, toasting each other over our olives and feta cheese, which somehow just didn’t feel right. I looked around at this crazy group, giving each other advice on what towns just really sucked, drawing maps on napkins to the best places to get pot in Thessaloniki. I sent my St. Patrick’s Day prayers up to God, thanking him for allowing me to get drunk that night in February. I raised my glass to drink, noticing the fading bruises from the squeaky club escapades, and thought to myself two things.
One: I was so going to write about this someday.
Two: Being a writer? Really prevents you from enjoying the moment.
Ef-khes ya ti yorti a-yiuh patrikiuh!