It’s the same story every time. The evening looks all secular and respectable. A white tablecloth affair at Dublin’s premier speakeasy. Expensive cocktails, a gin and juice drink called a “Tommy Gun”. Bad, watery spaghetti. Someone’s birthday, it’s hard to say whose, is celebrated and then forgotten soon as the candles blow out, a ripple of blue smoke suffering to hang in limp rings over the table.

It’s then that Mark reappears from his trip to the bathroom with a bottle of Maker’s Mark wedged, angular as a face, down his chinos, compliments of the unattended side-bar. Sitting at our places, watching as we watch, we note the hitched, groinal gait of a man struggling to reach his table with valor, clandestine airs, and think: he’s trying it again. That big dick walk.  

Sure enough we all shell out at dinner, bemoaning the devastating loss of thirty euros a plate. Ours are the only young faces amid the circus of suits and Dublish mammies suckling at treacley rosés. We curse the posh tapas. We’re foreign, lightly criminal college kids and faking broke oft as not. But when Mark stops us five paces outside the restaurant and unbuttons his fly, producing that shining head of unmistakable kitch: the lurid red wax of the bottle neck; we still wolf at him like parents whose beloved bairn has soiled himself in the wavepool at Disneyland.

Nevertheless we follow him down Temple Bar way, that exhausted tow path of tourists and rollie-choked cobblestones. Here, an amoebic splatter of vomit, and there, a street performer clutching a tatty mandolin with a Punisher sticker, torturing the U2 catalogue. Always a few men dressed as leprechauns, felty costumes peeling at the elbows and feet, swinging their pails of lash cash.

It’s midsummer and things look gauzy, uneventful. Drunk noise and trad music engorge and recede from doorways. In the external window ledge of the McDonalds, boys in trackies and Air Max recline, tossing fries. The usual chain smoke veils their eyes and between them there is the suspicious motion of a new stem being rolled close to the belly. Under the bills of their hats, they regard the chromosomal contents of the street. In the gutters lie glints of unleavened metallic butts from discarded whippets. All of this and it’s the pun we hold onto: it’s Wednesday night and we’re meeting Mark’s Maker.

Dublin’s an utter fantasy precisely because humble old Wednesday could be your best night. Thursday, Friday, the clubs are full as cattle pens and the Americans stick out bad. We’re the only men in boat shoes and crew cuts, the only women without stilettos and nodes of fake tan brindling our knuckles. The Irish don’t even need to hear an accent. They have a glance, their gaze sticks, and then they ask The Question:   

“So, are yehs from California?”

It’s exhausting to always disappoint them.

The truth is we’ve been in Dublin long enough to cultivate dangerous ideas about our tourist status. We slough it off week by week and eat the skin. City center and we know all the shortcuts, performer’s faces in St. George’s Arcade, the bus routes, where to get a facsimile of a banana milkshake at three a.m., which of the emaciated rickshaws sell coke, how to ask for it as “patsy”, the dens of iniquity, coffee shops with an obvious bathroom code, the numbered buttons worn down in sequence. We know about the brunch spots of the intelligentsia and the hedge funders, the rotations of the two beastly swans in St. Stephen’s Green, why to avoid a youngfella in grey trackies who’s on the pace, the bouncer at Dicey’s who likes to tell homely girls their horoscopes, how to scan the morning streets for recyclable DART tickets.

We know never to comment on an Irishman’s choice to wear garments made by the American fashion house known as Hollister, the comings and goings of the lone chicken cart on Harcourt and its stooped midnight provisioner, how to rattle up a pair of operational headphones at the silent disco on Camden, cheapest pint across the river, the broken barrel at Workman’s that topples if you lend it your weight. We know where to find a hollow, a deserted nook or alley in which to imbibe, away from the crowds.

“God’s truth is we’ve been in Dublin long enough to harbor dangerous ideas about our tourist status. We slough it off week by week and eat the skin.”

We skirt the sprawl that dribbles out from Temple Bar and Quay’s onto the thoroughfare. Holding the whisky bottle aloft like a despot’s cane, Mark hooks a right by a gift-shop. The smell of fried fish and rotted vegetables pursues. Up comes the close, narrow as throat, and we enter one by one, cutting between the bricked-up backs of bars.

Shuffling, we edge single file, drenched in red light. Mark is stocky like a human corgi but paces ahead, howling at the hangnail moon, the Maker’s hoisted high in his ham fist like a mute virgin sacrifice. In the red light, the cap’s wax ignites like the clotty output of a slathering heart.

We howl too but soon wish Mark would shut up. Our feet slip over the slick cobblestones. Screams of an electric fiddle stripe the air. We let our silence speak. Sensing mutiny, Mark changes tack and begins to sing a bastardization of the Fields of Athenry, a ballad to which he knows bare branches of lyrics.

“MICHAEL, THEY HAVE BLOWN YOU AWAY,” goes the wail. “OUR LOVE WAS LIKE A CHICKEN WING!”

We stuff ourselves sideways, scraping two sets of cheeks on the building sides.

“LOW LIE.”
“THE FIELDS.”
“OF ANTHENRY”

A scuffing thud, then a crisp skittering is detected. Something has happened at the front of the procession. With a slow and building thunder, as the last word leaves his gob, Mark’s yowl is judiciously eclipsed by a gulag roar of purpling rage.

“RYYYYYYYYYYY!”

We stop up short, flattened between the walls. It’s hard to see all jammed up in the vampiric light, but swiftly it becomes obvious that Mark has galloped into the carefully constructed den of a sleeping man, and with accidental but total efficiency, demolished it. Layer upon layer of newspaper the man had built up around himself, packing it into corners, a soft-edged cocoon, blasted apart and gamboling down the alley like bales of wet tumbleweed.

The man rises from the slink of a blue sleeping bag to run his hands through jags of phantasmagorical yellow-white hair, looking incredibly like a spring dandelion. When he screams again, the tone of it changes in the middle like a doorbell.

“ACH, AN WHAT’VE YE DONE? AW, JAYSUS!” He catches the collar of Mark’s polo.

Actions become predictable. There’s the light thump of the whiskey bottle falling slack against Mark’s leg, an unctuous reversal, a universal backing up. Mark, a minstrel moments ago, cannot answer for this unintended cruelty. His collar, soon identified as a useless companion to his body, is dropped. The man paces, surveying the crime. As the evening’s revelry turns to ash, we can almost see the wheel of solutions spinning in the inner-sanctum of Mark’s brain, pegs of nauseous color flailing to a climax, blinkering into a cerebral event. The answer? Full Samaritan.

The apologies are torrential but manly. An accident it was! Mark stoops to collect, one-armed, a harvest of the nesting papers, sweeping them appeasingly in the direction of the man’s sleeping bag. All the while the whiskey is pressed tight to his chest as if to dash the chances it might, as penance, ascend rapturously into the night sky.

These efforts are farcial. The man lunges. Mark’s hand is swatted away with bobcat ferocity, the newest rash of paper is seized and rocketed to the ground, an empty bouquet that drifts off petal by petal; classifieds and sport page; to the wet stone where a footballer’s elated face melts away on the hump of a cobble. The man says with heartfelt ichor:

“FACK OFF YOU DEVILS.”

This is all it takes. Mark strikes off down the last bit of alley. Mystical, this shame metastasized into a sudden coldness. We follow.

As we pass, our shoulders rasping against the brick, each of us murmurs a solemn apology to the man as if reciting responses for the reception of holy communion. A drop of forgiveness on our tongues, O Father. He looks but says nothing, and when we’re done and past, wanders down the opposite way with the soft rattle of his sleeping bag dragging behind him.

In a hunched half-circle at the edge of the Liffey, the seven of us swap the bottle hand to hand, swigging, each depositing a swab of warm spit around the mouth. Strengthening our immune systems with nothing and no one but the cold strokes of river light to look on.

We’re solemn at first because something bad has happened. We’ve rubbed the slick veneer off of the night and must nurse the resulting splinter. The bannister’s in our arse. Nurse it we do. Pass and swallow. Pass (no, don’t hesitate), swallow. Damage done, we begin to think maybe the crime itself wasn’t so bad nor the incident in the alley. Happens! Ha Ha. What can you do? A bit of nothingness. We tried. Honestly. No guilt. That’s life.

The moon loses its edges. Devolved fang of bar soap. We climb the river railings Titanic-style, laugh about Mark, the whiskey in his pants, the back of the restaurant and the papers, the newspapers barreling like fat cabbages down the alley.

We drink most of the Maker’s and must decide on the succeeding pleasure. We’ve done the silent disco, the upscale Dingle Whiskey Bar, bleached ourselves in the neon wash of the Pygmalion marquee. Always that shark-like smelling, sensing out blurs of heat and blood in the corners of the night. What O what bodily joys lie ahead?        

Everyone needs the toilet. We know we can loiter at the old bar on St. Mary’s Street, the one with the excellent facilities. We waltz down Grafton.

The girls split off with the whiskey bottle in someone’s purse, and when we tackle each other into the black and white tiled bathroom, we sing and careen and swing from the croaking stall doors like so many Gene Kelleys, spanking our asses, I LOVE YOU BAY-BAY. Alone, alone, blissfully alone until the door flips open and admits a patron. She’s got a tight black chignon, a frilly ironed blouse, pinstriped trousers.

A blazer.  

A blazer! Oh, it’s a bad business. A tattler, good Sir, it’s plain to see. A bare-faced tattler. It’s unfortunate, but when she takes a good look at us in the mirror, posing, sweating, she doesn’t like us either, and it’s all one can do not to urge on the inevitable tattling that will follow.

A beauty mark lives in the dead center of her chin, an eyebrow puckers while she’s applying lipstick; two steepling arches of politico magenta. On our end, there’s some gobbling at the neck of the Maker’s, a bit of choking. Epileptic laughter. A mild vomit in the sink. These things can’t be helped.  

By the time she crimps her wallet shut with a little nose-breaking snap, we know there will be a beeline made towards the bartender, a rolling back of the shoulders, a speech.

Animals in the bathroom! Thieves!

How do we tell her, before she tosses one last knife from her discerning eye, before it sinks into the soft banks of our chests, before she slips out through the door, before she speaks, that we are so much less than these things?

We set the empty Maker’s in one of the sinks, a swish of brown still moaning in one of the corners, and leave before the lights come on.