The details and names in the following story have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. Any approximation to real events is purely coincidental.
Setting the Stage
Paddy and Brendan wanted me to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with them but I was just not up to it.
I had just broken up with Patricia that past week. I didn’t want to but I had to. Part of me wanted to hang on to that which never really existed but it was time to let go. Isn’t that the toughest part? The kisses, the poems, the lovemaking — wouldn’t it be easier to pretend things were ok just to hang on to the familiar and resist reality? I will always remember Patricia as a beautiful, articulate and sweet partner (well in the good moments at least).
In true dramatic break up fashion, I listened to Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” over and over. In yoga class, I broke down. I sobbed in child’s pose, the tears ran down my mat. In the boxing gym, my jabs fell short of the punching bag, the wind was knocked out of me before I took any shots.
Despite the pain there was an immense sense of relief. The old me would have hung on for months instead of putting a dead-end, co-dependent relationship out of its misery. I bid farewell with affection and with genuine hopes that Patricia could find healing and continue to grow. I knew we had to cut off all communication. This meant no more texting and talking on the phone so that it would really feel over and the healing could begin. I thought I had drawn a clear line in the sand but over the next three days she wrote me and sent me songs via WhatsApp, G mail chat, Facebook and Instagram. I had to keep redrawing the lines a few times after they got blurred. Taking space is never easy in the electronic age.
Reframing St. Patrick’s Day
The break up was fresh and St. Patrick’s Day was around the corner. I have never been a drinker and resent the narrow conception most Irish Americans and Americans in general have of this day. The Irish blood that runs through me is the blood of Irish rebels, political prisoners, hunger strikers and fierce guerrillas who refused to be assigned a second-class position before 800 years of British domination of their homeland. Stripped of its hallowed traditions, St. Patrick’s Day has been converted into the day jackasses have a pretext to perform their tomfoolery.
It is important to remember the Irish were never white until well after they came to America. Back home the Irish were regarded as sub-human by the colonizer because they had a different native religion, customs, communal land ownership and language. Seeing the general pattern of behavior of Irish Americans today we see a text-book case of assimilation. The defiant, conscious Paddies are few and far between. The rank and file of police departments up and down the East Coast are notorious for being thoroughly Irish American and thoroughly racist. This sea-change of identity marked a people’s metamorphosis from being an oppressed colonized nation to being part of the arrogant, manifest-destiny, status-quo. This is the chauvinism we seek to challenge.
One evening I was approaching an Irish pub for an after-work function with a colleague who was an African-American poet and performer from Kentucky. When we were a block away from the pub she said: “Uh oh. I don’t have a good feeling when I see that flag. Too many insults.”
Wow that hurt! The underdog of yesteryear had ascended on the social totem pole and assumed their role as oppressor a jump across the pond. It pained me to hear of her experiences which I had witnessed too many times myself. The Irish flag at turned into its opposite in the U.S.
Who are we? Who have we become?
We are more than this.
Lest we forget that the blood of great Irish rebels flows through us.
A Test of Wills
On that bitter cold Sunday in March, Paddy and Brendan were persistent. They knew they couldn’t lure me in with beer and cheer but then they mentioned that they were going to a Republican bar. Republican in Ireland has nothing to do with Donald Trump or John McCain. An Irish Republican is someone who believes in one united Ireland, not in the partitioned Ireland that has existed for 400 years. An Irish Republican then is a believer and defender of one indivisible Irish Republic free of foreign control.
Our band of brothers were both Irish-American veterans of Desert Storm and shared some of my Irish nationalist, anti-imperialist sentiments. They definitely had their reactionary side but I saw them as two potential movement contacts and mentees. They urged me to shake off the memories of Patricia and have a night out with the lads. I promised to make a brief appearance that Sunday night but I was in no position to socialize and enjoy myself. That is the worst thing about break ups and obsessions. You get so mired down in the quagmire that everything else in life temporarily loses its beauty. Besides I had to teach the next morning at NYU (New York University).
I arose that day in cleansing and healing mode. I awoke to a run, meditation and reading. I studied before I went to the 4:30 p.m. 145th St. Bikram Yoga donation class. The other classes are $25 per class but there are two classes per week where you can crumple up a few single dollars, place them in a glass jar and be part of the privileged 104 degree lot for 90 minutes. After a long shower at Bikram, I went to visit a yoga instructor friend in Astoria, Queens. I was on Day 5 of a fourteen day cleanse and she had homemade kombucha and fresh-pressed juices. We talked, cleansed and stretched. It was now nine p.m. I felt better. I felt light and high-off-of-life after the fresh-squeezed juices of apples, cucumber, lemon and ginger.
Break Ups are Tough. No one is invincible.
I headed to Maspeth, a neighborhood that is in on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. I entered The Gin Mill pub with the intention of making an appearance and then returning to my mind’s obsession, the break up.
My buddy Paddy was already inside, a few “drinks to the wind.” He knew I was struggling. He began to lecture me about “playing the field” and never getting attached. I laughed at his twenty-eight-year-old-ness. Those who were afraid to be touched would never completely open up and give of themselves. Those who live with fear only get to feel a fraction of the life and love that is before them. I promised him his day would come. When he least expected it he too would run the gauntlet of love, pain and break-ups.
And sure enough a few years later that was precisely what happened. He had met his match and found himself equally distracted, demoralized and depressed. What are break ups but growing pains, rites of passage and an essential part of being vulnerable and being human? They are difficult as you go through them but they will strengthen you for the rest of your life. There is no way out of it but through it. He pressed some drinks on me but I still was not tempted. He knew I was a vegan — or what in Ireland some of the lads called a berry-picker — so I wanted to keep my reputation intact.
The Volunteer
It was just after 10:30 p.m. when Mooch and his family came into the Gin Mill. Mooch was the nickname of a legendary IRA man who participated in an urban guerrilla war in Belfast in the 1980’s. The natives who signed up for the IRA — sacrificing their lives for the cause — were called volunteers. For a decade, Mooch lived on the run sleeping in different safe houses, evading British paramilitary outfits and prosecuting the just war. War-weary and hardened, he knocked back drinks like there was no tomorrow. He was playing the guitar and singing rebel songs in a circle formed with his wife, daughters, family members and friends.
I was honored when his family invited me to take part in the singing. When there was a pause in the melodies of Irish unity and rebellion, I shook some hands and learned from Mooch and another veteran of “the Troubles,” the name given to the past 30 years of war in the occupied six counties in the north of Ireland. They told me about the different factions that emerged out of the IRA once Gerry Adams had struck a deal with the Unionists and the British government. They cursed out the Sein Fein leaders and everyone who had compromised what they had fought and sacrificed so much for. When I posed a question about “Northern Ireland,” he grabbed me behind my neck and told me he had not done 11 years in Long Kesh prison for anyone to refer to the north of one united country as a separate entity. In an avuncular, mentor-like but brusque way, he impressed upon me that “There is only one Ireland son divided for so long by those who never cared about us who have been there generation after generation.” He then gave me a few hard approving slaps on the shoulder and offered me a pint.
He pretend spat in his hand and extended it to me. We hugged each other lost in the revelry. Here was a titan who had given his freedom and life blood to the cause of national liberation. What could be more special than making a toast with a man who had been a confidante of Bobby Sands, Brendan Hughes and Maireed Farrell?
Beer was the last thing on my mind but I was not going to reject it from an IRA man. The first beer tasted like pure ecstasy. Remember I didn’t have even a trace of a starch or a grain in me. Before the glass was empty I was elevated to another world. That is the advantage of drinking while cleansing. I was the quickest to feel the effects of the alcohol. Little did I know, the first beer was a tipping point. I was about to embark upon a journey from which there was no turning back.
