Dublin 4

July 9, 2009

I described to Stuart how I spend my evenings on holiday and he said “people collecting.” That is exactly right: people collecting. I wondered if Stuart considered that he had been collected. Will need a bigger drawer for him.

Anyway, set out in the evening after one of my heroic hotel room naps, and lit upon Pravda, down by the river, a place I had often passed but never entered. It’s an enormous interior, full of interesting elevations. I sat down beside Gareth, a skinny kid whose mass of hair looks like it is about to break his neck. Full-on, though, his beauty was wild and startling, like the face of a faun glimpsed suddenly in the forest. He was reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa and making notes in a fine, creamy handmade diary. He fronts a band where they play music while he reads the prose pieces he writes in the lovely notebook. His conversation with the bartender had been about a girl, and girls were one of his top concerns. Around him were bags filled with the printed versions of his friend Julia Morrisey’s roman a clef, Clean Young Mess, which he had copied for her in advance of distribution at some music/ arts/ literary event. He gave me one, and it is quite horrible, and when Julie came in with her mates to collect them, her perky prettiness made a dissonance with the tragic myopic in the story. Gareth, despite encouraging bad writing in his friends, was a brilliant young man, well-read, easy to talk to, without the didacticism and defensiveness of the usual Intellectual-Irishman-in-a-bar. I felt eloquent and open with him, as though he were conveying me into the vacant air as he had done his friend Julie. I didn’t quiz him about his education, but there had evidently been a lot of it, and I admired the fact that alongside the intellectual dwelt the most unabashed hound-dog, watching for girls, speaking of girls, planning a move to Vancouver in pursuit of a girl.

Short visit to S at his workplace. He told me two jokes his patrons had told, snickering and chortling through the telling so that I never actually heard them, but laughed my head off at the end anyway.

Cruise through Temple Bar, listening to a band that I thought was Romanian or something until one handsome kid opened his mouth and out came the purest, roughest Chicago you’d ever want to hear, Arrived at the Ha’penny Bridge in time for comedy night. It was really pretty good, funny and inventive. I was the one American in the room, and so became the butt of many of the jokes. There is an Irish–maybe a worldwide– assumption that Americans are stupid, enthusiastic, confident, brash. I don’t contest any of it but the first, and then not in every case. One of the comics asked me if it wasn’t true that one went to South Carolina only to be stabbed, and I allowed as how it was. One tried to pick on a beautiful Hungarian couple before turning to me, but realized pretty quickly that being Hungarian is not particularly funny. The Australians were good fodder, too: the Americans and the Australians. The subject of rape came up surprisingly often. It was pretty good, and I hadn’t expected it to be.

I must remember not to tell anyone I’m a playwright, for it turns out to be an excruciating thing to explain.

Had forgotten what time I’d agreed to meet S, so I set out well before bar closing. At the edge of Temple Square I was attacked. The truth is, I didn’t actually realize it was happening until it was over. I guess it was my Obama T-shirt (or maybe not), but this sort of burly drunk followed me a few paces, asked me how I was, and when I said, “Fine thanks, and you?” he punched me in the chest. Twice, maybe more. I don’t think he was punching very hard, for I didn’t interpret it as an attack until his friends shouted “Oh my God!” and pulled him off of me. My pulse didn’t raise even by a fraction, so far as I could tell.

Gareth warned me that the Bulmer’s pear I was guzzling is a laxative. This turns out to be correct.

Took my laundry to the New York cleaners (where it was received by a tow-headed Latvian girl), sat in a café in the Temple Bat and wrote, then hiked on to the Chester Beatty Museum, which I remember as a highlight of my last Dublin sojourn. The man at the desk said, “We have a special exhibition of Joseph Haydn, the composer, you know. This is his bicentennial; we have been enjoying his compositions for four hundred years.” The Zen contemplation garden on the roof is so chocked with distractions it’s my guess that not one moment of contemplation has ever been accomplished there.

I thought I was moving aimlessly thereafter, but my feet took me to the International Bar at exactly the moment a play was set to begin upstairs. It was Insomnia Productions’ “European Premiere” of Sticks and Stones by American playwrights Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan. The room would have seated maybe fifty, upstairs of the bar, with the windows blocked by floor mats and the stage lights created by nailing goose-neck desk lamps to a beam and pointing them back toward the stage. The play knocked on the door of boldness and vision, but never went in. Yet it was a solid effort, well acted, and the whole set-up was my dream theater world, a vibrant little play in every storeroom and attic in a vibrant city.