Gregory McGillivary
Reading Irish
Tonight, I will be with seventy-five people, few of whom are my friends but nearly all of whom are acquaintances. I anticipate this evening with the same enthusiasm that a man with a limp looks forward to the running of the bulls.
As I drive home, I wonder whether I will make the right impressions on the right people (though usually no impression is best) and resolve to have just one drink to ensure the evening is without incident, at least an incident caused by me. My car crunches onto our sandy beige gravel driveway, my thoughts calmed by its border of ancient-paired cherry blossom trees and a lawn of tulip-shaped blue-green blades of Kentucky Blue Grass. I park the car and close the door with a tight, satisfying swoof.
On my walk to our stone house, my pastoral landscape is abruptly interrupted by a platoon of catering trucks whose posterns shriek “Tammy’s” in neon hot pink. Workers dressed in white shirts, black pants, and black shoes scurry back and forth from truck to house like ants delivering food to a queen’s nest. St. Patrick’s Day decorations adorn the doors, stairs, and windows of the house, creating an amber-green glow. Inside, the furniture has been pulled from the “Great Room,” valuables removed and safely hidden, and I see my wife, Terri, in a heated discussion next to a makeshift bar nestled in a corner near the foyer.
“One bar? One bartender? Seriously? For seventy-five guests? Do you think people should clamor for drinks like, like beggars outside a Moroccan souk? No —”
“Ma’am, Stevos can pitch in. He drinks. A lot.”
“An amateur . . . and a drunk? No.”
Terri put her index finger to her chin, looked down at the caterer’s nametag, and conspiratorially tilted her head. “You know, Raymond, sorry to disappoint, but this isn’t a ‘call to arms.’ ‘Volunteer bartenders needed!’ No. We need someone who knows … who knows a Gibson from a Gimlet.”
She patted his shoulder. “I’ll call Tammy.”
As she called, I interjected, “Terri, shall I make the signs?”
I make signs at literary events like this to discourage the literary types, known as “LTs” to Terri and me, from entering our wine cellar, our bedrooms, and at the far end of the house, my study. “Do Not Enter Under Penalty of Writer’s Block.”
“Excuse me, Tammy. Grayson, no signs. Too tacky. Event too important.”
“But the study door doesn’t lock, the basement lock is broken, and ...”
“No signs.”
Many of the LTs who frequent events for the Endowment for American Literature, the literary charity whose Board Terri chairs, pride themselves on living a misfit code along the lines of “ordinary conventions of civilized society needn’t apply to me.” Their visits to the suburbs engendered a particularly fierce adherence to their code.
As I added a few more folding chairs to the Great Room, some LTs arrived, well before the event’s official start time. Like a school of barracudas attacking chum, they cleaned out the first round of hors d’oeuvres in minutes.
At tonight’s “Irish Night,” the Endowment presented two authors who write in the Irish milieu. PMc, a diminutive woman whose half-smiles and gentle manner radiate a motherly kindness, writes brilliantly of Irish Catholic immigrants in suburban New York - their Catholic guilt, their Catholic moments of feeble resistance to the Church, their Catholic inability to escape large families, and their Catholic need to drink, heavily.
MK is a far more popular author. A tall, thin man, with white hair and, in keeping with his well-documented, by him, reputation for temerarious antics, a red, splotchy face with a perpetual look of mischief. His first book about his pitiful childhood in Dublin was a bestseller, made into a movie, and is now a serialized television show. He’d followed that book with four others, all written in a half-fiction/half-memoir style, all best sellers. He’d ditched his first wife of 30 years, and as I finished my folding chair assignment, I felt a tug on my suit jacket. I looked up to see an attractive woman of about thirty, with dark black hair in a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, big blue eyes, appareled in a mint green dress with dark green mousquetaire gloves—pure Camelot.
“Do you work here?” she asked.
“Yes, and they’re nice enough to let me live here too.” I smiled awkwardly to ensure she knew I was joking.
“Well, then you’re, like, you’re like the host?”
“Yes, but the least in charge among the hosts.”
“But I bet you’re in charge of liquor?”
She was partly right. I selected the alcohol, but “in charge” was a stretch as I had no other role concerning alcohol or anything else other than to follow Terri’s instructions. Yet, my chivalrous instincts inflamed, I answered, “Yes, you could say that.”
“You’re the one I need to talk to. M. is not allowed alcohol. Period. We’ve been married two years, and he hasn’t touched it. Got it?”
“Sure. I will instruct the bartenders that he’s our first guest to be cut off, effective immediately.”
I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. “Grayson.”
She looked at my hand, frowned, and abruptly marched off, her heels clicking on the hardwoods.
Happy to meet an alluring youngish woman, my mood improved, but then I worried about my new role as alcohol sheriff. Should I alert Terri? The other Board members? Should I make an official announcement, “Welcome, M. is not to drink alcohol, so please tell him no, slap him, break his wrist if necessary, anything to stop this desperate Irishman.” I decided the best course was the coward’s way. Don’t worry anyone about it.
I went to the Great Room bar, tended by Tammy herself, and, as the bar farthest from the entrance, always empty early in the evening. I spoke to Tammy about M. and waved to Lilly, also hip to the Great Room bar move and the Endowment member responsible for fundraising. I strolled up and gave her a good-natured hug. “Lilly, how are you, darling? Who are the targets tonight?”
“A big night. A hedge fund, two AOLs, and a Carlyle Group.” Lilly sounded tense.
“Impressive. Do any read?”
“Carlyle only reads ‘true books.’ I suppose he meant nonfiction, but I’m guessing he doesn’t read at all and he’s here for some reason other than literature; Hedge Fund is well read, he’s my highest hope; and the AOLs, I don’t know much about except I got the ‘nonfiction only’ response. Nonetheless, they are here, and God knows the AOLs have had plenty of time to read.”
I chuckled at that since we’d all grown weary of the AOLs continuing to milk their status as “new rich” in the charity circuit, even though it’d been twenty years since they’d received their windfalls from the ill-fated Time-Warner/AOL merger.
“I have a suggestion. We celebrate MK as a sort of nonfiction writer, as many of these rich guys write books that are essentially memoirs or self-help books, explaining how they became rich through hard work and genius. Luck simply had nothing to do with it. AOL Leonsis himself wrote one of those.”
“Really, hmmm, that’s a good idea, Grayson.” She seemed surprised. With a smile, she said, “But I think it’s best if you stay away from them and behave.”
I mingled through the crowd, had a few drinks, and noticed MK’s wife, whose name I learned was Carolyn, holding court and beaming sultriness at a bevy of admiring men, including Carlyle Group. I grew a bit tired as one does once one stops drinking, even if only as a break, so I was pleased to see author PMc arranging herself in our large, bright yellow, wing-backed chair in the Great Room as if she were Mother Goose readying herself to read to her children.
Terri introduced PMc, who read from her latest book and took questions. The past five years, I’d attended a minimum of thirty of these sorts of readings as Terri and I hosted a book club several times a year in which the authors of books we read came to our house for cocktails and, secondarily, to read from their most recent book. I knew what questions PMc would be asked, or really any author, and I knew the answers PMc, or any other author, would provide.
I’d learned the two attributes every author possesses. First, nearly all literary authors teach, and nearly all of them teach creative writing. It doesn’t matter how famous. Perhaps authors need an outside structure imposed, or health insurance, or additional income, or some form of human interaction, since writing is a lonely endeavor. I don’t know why exactly, but they all teach. Second, these creative writing teachers tell anyone who shows the slightest interest in writing fiction themselves that doing so is an impossible task, requiring artistic ingenuity befitting Michelangelo or Shakespeare, decades of practice, and such perseverance in the face of rejection that if a “resolute” writer doesn’t commit suicide first, they die of alcohol poisoning, and if this doesn’t seem discouraging enough, they’ll add, for the few such as themselves who survive, there’s really no money in it.
Once at a reading, a woman asked famous author RF how he wrote so convincingly from different voices, as a child’s and a grandfather’s, in the same novel. She foolishly added that she was writing a book herself.
RF asked her what she did for a living.
“I’m a lawyer.”
He asked her how many hours a week she spent writing.
“Six to eight, though sometimes the entire weekend.”
“Well, that’s commendable, given your other job.” He looked directly at the woman, pointed, and said, “Guess how many hours a week I spend writing?”
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t think so. I spend forty to fifty hours a week writing. Writing is all I do. I write because,” and he shrugged self-deprecatingly, “unlike the rest of you, I can’t do anything else.” He shook his head. “Since that’s all I do, if I couldn’t write from more than one perspective, I’d have to be pretty dumb, wouldn’t I?”
Tonight’s Irish event featured two authors whose ability to write best-selling and critically acclaimed books occurred while one, PMc, was the primary caregiver for four children and taught creative writing at a university. The other, MK, didn’t publish his first book until he was sixty and wrote his magnum opus while working as a high school English teacher and tending bar in the summers, all the while partying like a college kid perpetually on spring break. I know because I read MK’s second memoir. In it, he mentioned writing once, and only then to explain why “regrettably” he missed what turned out to be a banger of a party.
I refocused and listened as PMc explained why she wrote about the suburban Catholic milieu – she lived it, duh, I thought. Terri caught my eye, pointed to her watch, and mouthed, “Find MK. He’s missing.”
I knew from experience that I had fewer than ten minutes before Terri would cut off questions. I searched the wine cellar, the upstairs library, the screened-in porch, until I heard muffled laughter behind the closed monastery door of my study. I opened the door and, damn it, MK and two Lilliputian authors in their seventies sat on my light green leather couch, clinking glasses filled with whiskey.
MK stopped his conversation, turned, and welcomed me in a friendly Irish brogue. “Well, who do we have here. Join us for a nice drink. Now, would you be the owner of this fine whiskey?”
My heart raced, as my study housed an extensive and well-catalogued rare Scottish single malt collection. I’m sure my face broadcast extreme annoyance, maybe even anger, because MK said, “Now, now, boy, we just treated ourselves to a nice Irish whiskey. What do you have it for if not to share?”
I broke into a grin since Irish whiskey, to me, was expendable.
The three smiled back and waited for me to do something. I said, “M., it’s showtime.”
“Oh damn, they expect me to speak? I’ve nothing to say.”
“C’mon, M. They don’t care what you say. The audience just wants to hear you say anything.” Boy, was I wrong.
MK got up with the help of one of his new friends and turned to me. “Can I hold your arm on the walk to wherever we’re going?”
We slowly made it to the Great Room. MK saw the chair, shook his head, and said, “Help me up the stairs, lad.”
The stairs he pointed to climbed up the side of the room and looked out into it. As we slowly trudged up, MK held my arm, stumbled on the third stair, continued, and stopped at the midpoint. Despite the financial success of his books, MK’s outfit seemed carelessly put together unless, of course, MK intended it to discourage aspirants from joining the writing profession. He wore an old-fashioned corduroy three-piece, dark green suit, with the vest partially unbuttoned and a wrinkled, tattered, white shirt with gold stripes that gave off a well-worn shine. The shirt was partially untucked.
As he gathered himself, I realized he had no book. I whispered, “Do you need a book ?”
“Hell no,” he hissed in my ear.
Terri nodded for me to give the introduction. A hush came over most of the crowd, and as was the way with LTs, a few loudly hissed at others in the audience who hadn’t quieted down sufficiently, including Carlyle Group snuggled in a far corner with Carolyn of Camelot.
“This author needs no introduction. The author of four incredible novels, including The Phoenix Doesn’t Always Rise High, and an authentic voice of the Irish immigrant experience in America, please welcome MK.”
MK’s head hung down. His skin was the pallor of light reddish grey, and his eyes were closed. I put my arm around him as if we were brothers and nudged him with the back of my hand. With that, MK seemed invigorated and sprang to life.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen. A fine good evening to you. I want to thank the McKenzieninies for hosting us and the Endowed Literate People urh the Literate Americans’ Fund, no the Endowed . . . oh, whatever it is for inviting me here tonight.”
Some laughter followed, MK paused to let it pass, and pointed his finger out toward the crowd. “Now, I want to discuss something serious. Something far more serious than books and stories. Here’s the thing. When I was a wee lad in Dublin, and then County Cork, it doesn’t matter where, I would go to church nearly every day, and nearly every day, the priests would tell us weeuns, ‘Save your pennies lads. Save your pennies colleens. There are priests in Africa, a huge place, and they are bringing the word of God to the African people. But the priests are starving, and they need your weeuns’ pennies to continue.’”
He cleared his voice, paused again, and then let loose, raising his voice with each sentence as he spoke. “But what on earth do we find out now? Pedophiles jumping boys in the jungles. Pedophiles stalking boys in the Sahara. Pedophiles bagging boys on the beaches. Pedophiles carrying on in the Congo.”
MK stopped and pulled out a handkerchief, mopped his brow, and cleared his throat again. I warily turned toward the audience. Some looked disgusted, but most were perplexed as MK’s pronunciation of pedophile had come out as Peedio-fill. I saw Lilly shaking her head and looking at the ground. Terri looked like a Statue of the Modern Blonde, fully extending her 5’10” frame, ramrod straight, on display, an unwavering plastic smile plastered on her face.
MK took in the crowd, and got a knowing look on his face, a joyous knowing expression, half smile, half smirk. “Well, I have the answer. It’s my understanding that many nations in Africa are plagued by chaos, misery, sickness, and devastating natural disasters. What they need is money. Here’s the thing, they can get it. They should sue the Catholic Church, with its untold riches, for the pedophilia that happened on its watch. I want the pennies that I sent as a wee lad and that my friends sent to those God damn pedophile priests to go to the Africans.”
I was still holding M. by one arm, and noticed Terri, now animated, gesturing for me to cut him off.
“Okay, you’ve heard it hear from MK. Lawyers, please contact M. to get the ball rolling,” I said quickly, followed by a nervous, guttural, half-laugh.
I pretended to look out over the crowd. “No questions tonight, great, and that concludes our Irish evening.”
“Wait, wait,” yelled an LT. “He needs to answer our questions. We paid money for this.”
I ignored the LT, but another yelled even louder, riling up the crowd, “What was that crap? He’s to answer questions.”
“Look,” I said, “MK’s tired, and his voice is failing.”
“We demand time.” I recognized the LT shouting this as she invariably asked nearly the same questions at each event.
“Okay, tell you what. As I said, M.’s voice is failing, so we’ll take a few questions. I’ll relay them to him and provide the answers. You go first, Ms. …”
“Mabel McCloud,” she proudly shouted. “When did MK first know he wanted to be a writer?”
I answered all the questions without having to whisper to MK to ask for the answer. Only one question concerned pedophilia, though it was a doozy. Had MK been the victim of pedophilia?” I answered no, and, to cut off this line of discussion, asked, “Were you?”
I wish that I could report that an hour later, the LTs had left, the folding chairs were piled up, and that I’d spied Lilly and Terri merrily chatting about the fundraising.
But no. After MK and I reached the bottom of the stairs, a man, who I later learned was an AOL, immediately confronted MK. Flush with anger, he cried out, “How dare you joke about pedophilia. My cousin’s a victim; it ruined his life. Now, mister, I’m going to kick your ass.”
This AOL was reasonably fit, probably played tennis or squash or some such middling exercise, but it appeared he also probably drank a fair amount, and as I quickly discovered, he’d never learned to box. I pushed MK behind me and, to avoid questions of liability, allowed AOL to take a swing at me, a swing I easily dodged. I popped him in the nose, a bit harder than I intended, as it caused him to crumple toward the floor, but a nice LT broke his fall, so he suffered only a damaged, bloody nose.
Adrenaline coursing through me, I shouted, “Someone help this man. And, hey it’s time for you all to leave.”
But then I noticed a tan, fit man in his thirties moving swiftly toward me. My senses heightened, I observed he wore light tan Gucci loafers, a Brioni cashmere checked jacket, and a Patek Philippe watch with a custom, pale green face. Hedge fund! I tensed up as he approached.
He said, “What a fun night! Can I join you for a drink?”
As I shook his hand, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and a voice whispered in my ear, “Well, well, boyo. What could be more perfect than Irish night ending with a fight? I’d been drinking that Irish swill, but now’s time for you to loosen up and for us to try those single malts you’re so jumpy about.”
As the three of us marched on to my study, I brushed past Lilly. “Join us?”
“Yes, but no more punching.”
