The Celtic South: High Above Their Shining Weapons Flew Their Own Beloved Green
Ireland, a love letter in two parts.
Ireland, a love letter in two parts.
Another beautiful article from A Memoir of the Occupation. Well done, sir! - DD
This morning on the harbor when I said goodbye to you
I remembered how I swore that I’d come back to you one day
And as the sunset came to greet the evening on the hill
I told you I always loved you, I always did, I always will
Shane MacGowan, "The Body of an American"
There was once a bar in New York City. No, not a bar. A pub, maybe? But no, that’s not the proper word either. A boozer, a doggery, a shebeen. There is a Molly’s Shebeen in the collapsing luxury-good nightmare of Gotham, stubbornly holding an eroding beachhead on 2nd Avenue. But it’s not Molly’s, a great little boozer though it be. And founded by actual Irishmen: not the latest silly “concept” from a PE-backed purveyor of slop.
The place I have in mind is different. I could not even tell you how to get there. It was decades ago, before 9/11 even, that I raised my last glass and staggered forth -- “drunk to hell I left the place,” if I may quote the great Shane MacGowan, the patron saint of what some future biographer may call “the Gotham Years.”
But I could find it with the right prompt. Proust had his madeleines; for me, it’s a pint of Harp and a shot of bourbon – usually Wild Turkey; Jameson’s, in a pinch. Then a second pint and a second shot. Put those away, and if it’s the right sort of bar in New York City – one of the old Irish ones that served longshoremen, hard hats and cops – the third pint and shot are on the house. So six measures of intoxicant for the price of four, which at the time was the time was around $10, plus tip, per round. That meant a man could become quite merry for twenty bucks and drunk to hell for forty.
But armed with six measures I could find it. Drop me anywhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn and as the whiskey distributes itself through my frame, some long-forgotten inner helmsman will awake and pilot me there. It was on a north/south avenue, I remember that. Maybe Second or Third Avenues in the mid-Eighties in Manhattan? Or the mid-Eighties on…