Almost an Irish story

With good weather, comes spring cleaning. With spring cleaning, comes looking for reasons to stop cleaning. . . I’m in luck.

I found the yellowing pages of a short story I started in 1991. Just back from a trip to Ireland with a buddy, I started a mock travelogue of the trip, à la Hunter S. Thompson. Admittedly, my 1991 verbiage wouldn’t win any awards from today's PC police, but I found it a fun read. I’ll share this as either a one-time retrospect or as the first chapter of a serial. Let’s see where this leads.

The Doctor screams through Ireland, a travel story (1991)

Since you’ve asked, the real beginning was somewhere during a horrible zydeco arrangement of BB’s Gambler’s Blues. The Doctor was describing the problems with 15th century nuclear fission or some other thing. I was drinking dangerous bourbon, thinking about her.

“Let’s go to Ireland!” somehow screamed above the zydeco.

This was an important moment in our relationship. The Doctor was a politically correct Eastern European often mistaken for French; I had the only Irish blood between us. We met 29 days prior at a co-fundraiser for Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown when the Doctor and I shared an ambulance shortly into the evening.

The Doctor recovered much more quickly than me, but he had more scars. I was surprised that he would even suggest Ireland after my remarks about the wart, his mistress, and the sandals. In retrospect, I suppose he was used to the wart, tired of his mistress, and unaware of his sandals.

It was agreed, we’d go to Ireland.

He was always one for themes and immediately stopped ordering rum and demanded Jameson’s. He then instructed me to feed the jukebox and play anything by Sinead O’Conner.

We knew it was important that the Doctor make the travel arrangements since I had bartered my American Express card for two passports in Caracas and was in-between credit ratings. “I have a friend at the Pentagon who will fix that,” the Doctor assured.

Maybe it was the bourbon, the music, or the prospect of foreign travel again, but I remember it was exactly then that he stopped looking so French.

That moment could have lasted forever had Oakley, the bouncer, not recognized me. When I ducked the bottle, it crashed on the Doctor’s forehead. The explosion of glass was of the best I’d seen; the Doctor simply interrupted his travel plans to praise, once again, the East German medical system’s tradition of implanting steel plates. We left.

“You drive,” instructed the Doctor. “Head to O’Hare.” He tossed me the keys to his minibus and soon we were miles out of Ann Arbor screaming toward Chicago. “Don’t drive over 90,” growled the Doctor. “The computer screen gets fuzzy.”

The minibus was equipped with over $90,000 worth of computer and recording equipment (“Aren’t government grants the best!” he always cheered) and was armor plated. It was the Doctor’s theory that when the skinheads came looking for him, he wasn’t going to be a sitting target.

After about an hour, the Doctor triumphantly emerged from the back of the minibus and handed me a first class ticket to London, a BritRail pass, roundtrip steamer tickets out of Wales, and a rental car confirmation. “God, I love technology!” he began. “Did you know that the medievals had the same awe and wonderment over astrology that we feel for critical mass reactions. . . .”

He started again. Whenever the Doctor came close to sobriety, he began to lecture on meaningfulness and technology. It really was quite odd. When he started drinking, his entire focus was on younger women. By the third drink, he was convinced that older women were the keys to personal salvation. When completely smashed, the Doctor’s lecture turned to inner feelings of esteem and its effect on feelings of inner helplessness -  or wrestling. Meaningfulness crept into the conversation only with sobriety.

I was as guilty, except that I never thought much about wrestling. I had, however, read plenty of John Irving.
. . .

I started into the O’Hare parking ramp just after 3 am. The sudden change of speed (or was it the squeal of the failing brake linings?  “I refuse to get new brakes until I hit something,” he explained earlier in the trip) woke the Doctor.

“STOP! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” demanded the Doctor. “THIS IS WHERE THE SKINHEADS HIDE AT NIGHT! DON’T YOU WATCH GERALDO?”

I confessed to missing the last few shows, but, regardless, I was open to suggestions. “Head downtown. The Mystic Blue Pumpkins should be finishing their last set at Kingston Mines – I used to back them up – they’ll let us use the safe house.”

If you overlook the whole thing with the St. Bernard, it was an uneventful drive overall. It is really good to be with someone more paranoid than you.

Image from public-domain-zorger.com