Kerrigan in Copenhagen (22 page)

In the 1940s and '50s, this bar was a favorite haunt of Gainor Stephen Crist, American GI Bill expatriate from Ohio studying law at Trinity, to be driven to glory as the model of Sebastian Dangerfield in
The Ginger Man
, Donleavy's classic comic novel, although said Crist, broken by drink, would later wind up bad-mouthing the same Donleavy.

Brendan Behan, after his release from Borstal, drank and sang and roared here, as did Patrick Kavanagh, a segment of whose diary was featured in each issue of the 1950s Dublin literary journal
Envoy
, edited over the tables of McDaid's.

Could any of this explain his presence here? Yet there had already been other signs that he felt might decipher the reason. First of all, a postcard handed to him for no ostensible reason by a young woman with a stud on either side of her nose and black-painted lips. Printed on the back of the card was:

Fierce talk

Loose liquor

Hard girls

The Pre-HAM Social Transgressive Cabaret

GRISTLE

Entry £5

On the obverse, however, the card said HOMO ACTION MOVIES for butch queers, filling him in, so to speak, on the meaning of the acronym HAM, so he discarded, so to speak, the card.

Perhaps the meaning then is that the world takes you, in fact, for a
homosexual butch queer transgressive in disguise, he thought, but rather took comfort in his memory of the statement in some book by Norman Mailer,
The Prisoner of Sex
perhaps, that any man who proceeds to the fullness of adulthood with nary a homosexual interlude has earned the right without hesitation to describe himself as heterosexual.

“Bollocks!” shouts a lad speeding past along Harry Street on a tough-looking, stripped-down, high-riser handlebarred bicycle.

There were signs at Trinity College as well—one outside the main entrance said, CYCLISTS DISMOUNT. And one in the shower, which Kerrigan had refrained from using, said, AFTER SHOWERING KINDLY REMOVE HAIRS FROM THE PLUMBING OUTLETS. And somewhere on Grafton Street, he has seen another sign: BEWARE OF THE MOVING BOLLARDS.

In the name of God's sacred teeth, Kerrigan thinks, did she or did she not utter those words, and if so, how could two women have said the same thing to him? He had figured out, in retrospect, what Licia meant by it, but it was important for him to know whether his Associate said it, too, and if so, what she meant by it.

Another sign in Trinity on the lead-netted window of the at-that-hour-inaccessible doors of the Buttery breakfast room: NOTICE: VIDEO MONITORING IS IN OPERATION IN THIS AREA. PILFERERS WILL BE SEVERELY DEALT WITH.

A smiling waitress steps out of the doorway of McDaid's and asks if he would be wishing another pint of the black stuff or any such other thing.

“Do you think I ought?” he asks.

“Sure, a bird never flew on one wing,” she tells him.

“Another then,” he says, and thinks, And yet another as a propeller on my tail, as he examines the ten-pound note with which he will pay. On its front is a green-toned portrait of James Joyce (1882–1941), jovial as C. G. Jung (1875–1961), whom in theory Kerrigan might have met until he was eighteen years old, who published a psychological analysis of
Ulysses
, by whom Joyce's wealthy American patroness Edith Rockefeller McCormick tried unsuccessfully to pay Joyce to be psychoanalyzed, and who unsuccessfully attempted to psychoanalyze Joyce's mentally ill
daughter, Lucia (1907–1982)—whose name, he notes not for the first time, bears an unfortunate similarity to the wife who abandoned Kerrigan, though Lucia means “light,” while Licia sounds, in retrospect, sinister, with two letters of the word
blind
as well as three letters of the words
malicious
and
malice
, though it also contains four letters of the word
delicious
.

Alongside Joyce's green portrait is a mountainous peninsula that, turned sideways, bears a striking resemblance to an erect phallus and powerful scrotum (“What did Molly have on her mind?” an Irish friend once asked, pointing this out to Kerrigan). On the obverse of the bill is a map of Dublin showing the Liffy and the face of Anna Livia and the first sentence of Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Copyright Central Bank of Ireland 1993
.

Kerrigan wonders if the Central Bank of Ireland has claimed copyright on Joyce even while he admires the irony of the fact that Irish money depicts this great writer who was so hated here for so many years and did not set foot in Ireland for nearly the last four decades of his life.

As he sits musing over the Joyce money, Kerrigan is saddened to think that in just over two years' time, in accordance with international treaties, it will have become a collector's item, replaced along with the national currency of at least twelve other Member States of the European Union by the nondescript euro, whose notes would bear no writerly portraits.

The waitress brings Kerrigan's stout and takes away his portrait of Joyce with its quote from
Finnegans Wake
which once again he realizes he is not succeeding in reading and no doubt never will, not least perhaps because there are so many made-up words and obscure puns right from the first word, “riverrun,” which play on the French
reverons
(let us dream) and
riverain
(one who lives by a river), as well as their surface meaning, facts he would likely never have discovered without a gloss.

Consider this, Kerrigan: You will no doubt die never having read
Finnegans Wake
. But at least you have, after carrying the two volumes
around with you from residence to residence for over thirty-five years, read the first volume of
War and Peace
, which of course was brilliant and thrilling and entertaining. But what about volume two?

He sips his stout, thinks of all the things he will never be able to fit inside his head before it begins its process of decay and desication, a skullful of dust. Skull-alone in a dark place.

Kerrigan's slow feet walk him down Harry Street to Grafton, where yellow and white and red flowers fill the passage and a woman sits on a case awaiting customers. He steps over crunching matter on the pavement—the rubble of history? Of
his
history?—left past Bewley's Oriental Café, whose continued existence is under threat, to
Duke
, right to the familiar wood-and-glass facade at number 21. Always changing color, it is currently painted gold, a licensed premise for two hundred years, under its present name since 1889,
Davy Byrne's Bar & Restaurant
.

Here, for the first time in the 1940s, J. P. (Mike) Donleavy met Brendan Behan, and because the American did not like what Behan called him, a narrowback (i.e., one who has not worked with his body, living easy in the new world, although Kerrigan has also heard it defined as a reference to how narrow immigrants had to be if they were to be crammed into the ships that carried them across the ocean), Donleavy offered either to thrash him in the bar or to do so outside on Duke Street. Duking it out on Duke Street, so to speak.

But outside, Behan—perhaps shrewdly recognizing that Donleavy was a skilled pugilist who had trained with a professional boxing coach—offered his hand in friendship instead: “Ah, now why should the intelligent likes of us belt each other and fight just to please the bunch of them eegits back inside the pub who wouldn't have the guts to do it themselves.”

Kerrigan spent a few hours with Donleavy once, at his house in Mullingar, outside Dublin, a mansion that features in Joyce's
Stephen Hero
.

Donleavy was a gracious host, served a tray of bread and scones and cheeses and tea while feeding great hunks of peat into the pungent fire. The walls of the mansion were filled with Donleavy's art, the shelves of
his library were filled with various editions of his books, the music rack of the grand piano displayed the sheet music for one of his own compositions. And Donleavy himself drove Kerrigan in a vintage automobile to the station to catch the last train back to Dublin and stood there to wave him off as the train pulled away.

Kerrigan does not like to think of the sadness that descended upon him in the train, for Donleavy was the great American literary hero of his early twenties, after he had come through Joyce and Camus and Dostoyevsky, and seeing Donleavy in the last year before his seventh de cade, Kerrigan himself in the last year of his fifth—the year he married Licia—he felt that one of the great moments he had always dreamed about had been fulfilled, but none of the promise that had always seemed imminent in his life ever would be, and in fact the great shock of his adult life would happen in but four years—a college education later.

As unlike as he was to this legendary writer, he felt an intense kinship to him. But it did sadden him that Donleavy took such evident relish in singing tales of fisticuffs and broken jaws, jolly barroom brawls, never mentioning the cracking of skull bones that occasionally results in partial, sometimes permanent, even total paralysis, partial edentulousness, reduced vision or hearing. Kerrigan tended to blame this attitude on John Wayne. Ironic, it has always seemed to him, that the homosexual serial killer of many young American men in the state of Illinois was named John Wayne Gacy, while another man, castrated by his wife for allegedly raping and abusing her, was John Wayne Bobbitt, who after his penis was located and reattached, founded a band called the Severed Parts and appeared in two adult films,
John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut
and
Frankenpenis
, in an attempt to pay his medical bills.

Donleavy did, however, express sorrow at the inadvertent punching out of the teeth of a woman in a brawl on the Isle of Man, an event later translated into an anecdote in
A Fairy Tale of New York
in which the main character, Cornelius Christian, accidentally punches an eyeball out of the head of a woman in an East Side New York barroom brawl.

Kerrigan's own father, a man of song and lyric, admired those who were “good with their dukes,” but Kerrigan has never understood why men should wish to punch each other's faces. He had tried it a time or two himself, was moderately good at it as a lad, did enjoy the power that befell a boy unafraid to throw his clenched fist into the face of another boy, but when he was fourteen, after a particularly vicious fight one day with another boy named Theodore in which the two of them rolled over desks, tore each other's hair, punched each other's lips and teeth and jaws and skulls and eyes, Kerrigan no longer wished to. He did not lose the fight, but he knew enough later to understand that no one wins a fight like that and, further,
Theodore
means “the love of God,” and even if the will of God had embodied tooth and claw and the need for every living creature to ingest the tissue of other living creatures, animal or plant, he thought it was a bum rap, and he did not wish to cooperate unnecessarily with this system.

He wonders, for not the first time in his life, despite poetic wisdom and advice that he should “to this due degree of blindness, submit,” how this system of life feeding off life could have been devised. Whose imagination could have devised it? William Blake asked as much, and so did T. S. Eliot: “Who then devised the torment …?” Providing teeth to tear open the throats of others in order to procure fresh, unresisting meat upon which to sup? The only exception is the sweet miracle of the breast, which can only nourish, not be used as weapons.

Then he recalls the pie-size, sculpted medallion he saw of Sheela-nagig in the window of a shop on South Great George's Street earlier. It depicted the mysterious Celtic exhibitionist goddess whose image is found hidden away in nooks and corners of certain Christian churches in Ireland and England. The stylized image of a woman holding apart her labia, her eyes and mouth bemused, almost moronic.

Within your stony nook you lurk

In acrobatic pose.

You leer, you stare, and open jerk

The petals of your rose.

Come in, you breathe, come into me.

My cunt is what you crave.

The little death is yours for free,

As is the cold, cold grave.

At the bar he orders a pint of the black stuffto keep his consciousness from pinching. On a shelf behind the bar stands a bottle of Irish vodka—Boru—named for the first king of a United Ireland, Brian Boru, who routed the Vikings in the eleventh century, whose son was Kennedy, and who was stabbed in the back by a Dane while praying on Holy Thursday, a sanctified death to which Hamlet refused to deliver his uncle, slayer of his father.

Beside him now at the bar a leather-jacketed man with a flowered necktie, squat-nosed, sits scowling over a pint of lager. A white-haired man at the drum table by the wall, ruddy-faced, burgundy sweatered, lifts an empty pint glass silently above his head and jerks it toward the bar.
More!
Ignored.
More!

Three middle-aged women in flowered dresses, seated on an upholstered benchat a table, eat plates of ham and mustard. Kerrigan orders half a dozen rock oysters, and the barman says, “Ah, I wouldn't eat the rock oysters.”

“They're usually brilliant,” says Kerrigan.

“They are that, yes, usually.”

“The salmon then.”

“Now I'm your honest barman. You wouldn't want the salmon at this hour.”

“The cheese platter?”

“The cheese platter would be agreeable,” he says, and when he has served it, “Enjoy it now, there's a good Stilton,” and, “Thank you very much indeed.”

Kerrigan thinks it good that he eat cheese, which is provided from the sweet miracle of mammary glands. Further, he wonders if this
red-haired barman would ever seek to punch his face should he be angered by him for some reason. He himself would never dream of punching that honest barman's freckled puss.