It was the year I was eighteen and my brother had begun his love affair with all things Irish. He was making good money and his then wife brought a second stream of revenue into the house which left him with more money than he seemed to know what to do with. After the big screen tv and the full drum sets he set his sights on a trip across the pond to the emerald isle of his daydreams. Seeing as he couldn’t stand said wife, for which no one could blame him, he looked elsewhere for companionship for the trip. So one day I got a call asking me if I could cash in my measily minimum wage vaction time and go with him to old erin’s isle.
I barely survived the plane ride over. I get car sick at the drop of a hat, if I’m not driving, and being sealed into an air lingus tube for nine hours with nothing to breathe but the accumulated exhalations of every passenger before me and gazing out the window longingly for the cool fresh air that was so painfully, close madness was a real option. So relieved were we to touch down on solid ground and breathe in not only fresh but excitingly foreign air that our attemtps to tour Bunratty castle ended in both of us sleeping for twelve straight hours.
It was exhilirating. It was not only the first time I had left the country but the first time I had been on a plane or seen the ocean. That’s a great deal for this simple country boy. We saw achingly green fields against which all future green would be judged, crumbling ruins of an ancient monastery hidden away behind a copse in the middle of a field, and that strange feeling when you look into the shops and homes to see that everything is the same as home except completely different. And there was one experience in particular that I find myself drawn back to during my not infrequent reveries.
Back home in the states I could, on a good night, order a beer and not be hassled. Of course occasionally the bartender or waitress might ask for ID and I would put on a fine charade of reaching into my pocket and, upon producing nothing but lint, lament that I had left it at home and order a coke instead. Or better yet my brother would walk up to the bar with full beard and more than the required number of years to back it up and order two beers, bringing the second to me. It was, technically, a crime but after a few drinks one began to think of themselves as some sort of soused activist resisting an unjust law. A drunken Ghandi. An intoxicated King. At the very least a soused Seeger.
While in Ireland not only was I of the legal drinking age but no one seemed to care. Thus we made our way inexorably to the grandest pub we could find where I was introduced to my liver’s arch-nemesis, Strongbow cider. Not only that but along the way we popped into a narrow shop off the main drag that was filled floor to ceiling with fine smokables in elegant furnishings. And from it we selected two of the most average priced cuban cigars we could find. It was to be a fine occasion.
That day we walked, seemingly forever, along the maze of streets and alleys of Dublin. I’m sure we covered little of the city but none the less it was more than what our flabby selves could handle. We marched over cobblestone alleys. Pushed our way through great throngs of british ears, african eyes, subcontinental noses, german chins, and irish hair. Sauntered along sidewalks that lay in the shadows of history. Pick our way through parks populated by ghosts and o’er the ganges of the literary world. And it was here, passing to and fro across the Liffey, that one found those poor unfortunate souls with their hands out. I was no world traveller but I’d seen men reduced to alms before. Maybe it was the shock to my adolescent system of discovering that Ireland wasn’t a theme park for americans but an actual place with actual people. Maybe it was their choice of locale, right there on the bridges that cut the city in half. They forced themselves on the conscience.
After this tour through sites historical and spots adorable we came at last to the public house and to our cigars. My brother had Carlsburg and I had Strongbow and neither of us should ever again order any different if given the choice. We were about to enjoy a second round when, for a reason I simply am incapable of recalling, I was sent out to get change. My brother handed me a foreign bill and told me to go down to the little store on the other end of the alley and bring back some coins.
The alley was lit up by the street lights at either end, wide and empty, save for a solitary busker. She seemed to me no older than I was and american from what I could hear, long brown hair spilling over her shoulders, dressed warmly against the crisp night air. I found her, upon exiting the pub, already in the midst of performing aloud to no one in particular. With just a hat on the ground in front of her she sang, with a voice that felt too old for her form as if it had been aged by hard living, the single most stirring rendition of Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher that I’ve ever heard. At the start of every stanza she was a true big band leader full of throaty confidence and commanding, the star of some grand invisible celebration in her honor. At the end of each stanza her voice came down so low and unsteadied it sounded like she had lost all hope the world would ever be warm or bright again. I stood transfixed. There was no on in the alley or on the streets and no one in the pub could hear past the general din of it’s patrons. We were all alone there but she sung up at the moon as if serenading it or perhaps imagining some great eager throng hanging on her every note. Each hi and de and ho was crystal clear and echoed off the brick walls. They sounded like a lament for a life that had left her jaded or some lost innocence now only to be remembered in dark jest lest she loose all composure. Poor Minn, poor minn, poor minn.
I ducked into the shop and got the change and wanted to go give it all to her, to ask her name, to hear her story, to go back and get more money for her — a million dollars worth of knickles and dimes. But I stepped out of the shop just in time to see her turn the corner and walk off, her hat on her head. I went back into the pub and told my brother that there was a woman outside that sang Minnie the Moocher acapella. He grinned for a second and let out a little cough of a laugh and turned his attention back to the irish folk tune over which I had shouted. I smoked the cuban cigar and growing dizzy from it you might think that my mind would turn itself to the Cuban embargo or the reel that played on around me but all I could think of was that girl. I begin to imagine how she came by such an aged and woeful voice. I constructed an elaborate story of how she came to Ireland as a college student and fell in love with a man who introduced her to drugs (a bloke named smokey perhaps) and threw all caution to the wind to try her hand at being an artist. Finding no commercial success at this, I imagined, she took to living in a run down house with other young artistic types who found little better success. I saw her in my mind’s eye going home with nothing to show for her night’s performance and comforting herself by looking out her third story window at the city stretched out before her as an old jazz song played on her stereo that didn’t quite drown out the sounds of the angry couple that lived below.
Even today I find myself desperately wanting to know her name. I think back and wonder what she might be doing now. Sometimes I go back and imagine a different story for her or for those people on the bridge. I wonder how they got there and where they ended up. I wonder if she knew how beautiful and strange and ultimately haunting her performance was. Most of all I can never hear that song again without being taken right back to that time and that place. Back to the tall brick walls and rung with the sound or how the slow melodic tone sounded clearer when that chilly breeze blew in or that feeling that I had stumbled upon something… unearthly.
But then, maybe I’m just being sentimental.
