Dublin

January 1, 2008

I set out like a panther in a new forest last night. I stopped at pubs along what I supposed from signs I saw on the bridge to be Tara Street. Began at Kennedy’s, where the barman reeked of urine, which was a shame, as he was a tall, strapping man. Went from bar to bar feeling drunk and free and happy, but my steps were winding, whether I willed it or not, toward Camden Street and familiar territory. There too I went from pub to pub, choosing those which didn’t seem stuffed yet with revelers. I was hungry and very drunk, so I stopped at Bo Bo’s, a place advertizing “gourmet Irish hamburgers,” hamburgers with different toppings named after places in Ireland. I could even get one wrapped in lettuce rather than a bun. The place was fronted by a graceful Argentine named Sebastian. Sebastian’s brother guarded the door, and a Chinese kid with the most perfect manners did the cooking. Sebastian covered me with a variety of Argentine blessings for the new year, and accepted my drunken benedictions in return. Worked my way through the Grafton area. Grafton Street is hung with faux light curtains and chandeliers of lights, as though it were a great ballroom. Finally found myself in the Temple Bar, thronged and merry. The night was mild enough that boys were rampaging in T-shirts and the girls were out in low-cut and high-hemmed sparkly dresses. Hare Krishnas came dancing into one side of the square, while American frat boys bellowed out cowboy songs in another. Found myself pressed against a boy from Belfast who was–I gather– a professional golfer who had played in Atlanta and lived for a while, unhappily, in Pennsylvania. He looked like a very young Bob Hope, which, so much time having passed, he is likely never to have been told. Clocks strike midnight at different times in Dublin, but I think it struck first in Temple Square. Everybody was kissing everybody, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, the big boys traveling together on a lark. Nobody was kissing me, and I was too embarrassed to solicit it, even for luck. How much luck is a coerced kiss? In an analytical sense, it was the saddest moment of my life, an old man with nobody to kiss him at the stroke of midnight, surrounded by those whose most careless gesture won for them what a lifetime of exertion had failed to win for him. But, except in the moment it took to perceive and say all that, I was not sad. I was in fact quite merry, quite genuinely happy. I was in my way happier than they, for while they had their separate and particular nourishment, I was sampling from a table that offered thousands. I was like one of those aliens in the space movies which feed upon human emotions, and the emotion which fed me was joy, and all my gluttony didn’t seem to diminish the supply. If a movie director had set up a scene to exemplify mirth and goofy goodwill among the many-colored and many-tongued variety, he could not have done as well as New Years night in Dublin did by chance.

Garda were arresting and giving lectures along O’Connell Street. Drunken Irish men (and women) were arguing bitterly with them, but I thought if they had an American cop to compare to theirs, they would bless the night and the stars.

New Year’s Morning. Misty first-dawn now. I am ready for it. Wandered through the rainy morning, which never seemed to include actual rain. Found Grogan’s open near Grafton Street. It’s a remarkable pub, its walls covered with art in a wide variety of styles, and a wide spectrum of quality. It’s the sort of pub I might run if I ran one. The most impressive objects are two works in lighted glass, one a striking mass of portraits, the other a rendition of the interior of the pub itself. Beautiful. But what knocked this fine experience askew was the behavior of the bartender, an object-tossing oaf of a man who clearly woke New Year’s morning with a grudge or a hangover or both. He threw four lovely girls out of the pub because he suspected they had been out all night. They almost certainly had been, by the look of them, but I wondered why it was his issue, what justified his display of self-righteousness, why he thought denying them morning coffee struck a blow for morality. I’ll come to Grogan’s again, just to see if the beauty of the art balances, finally, the ugliness of the proprietor.

Went to the National Museum on Kildare Street, and ogled the bog men in their miraculous state of preservation. One had his nipples cut off. Among the ancient Gael, sucking the nipples of the king was a sign of submission; so, no nipples, no hope of kingship. You’d think being dead and in a bog would curtail that ambition just as well.