Bad News
When it rains, it pours — enduring a North Sea journey to face storms of a different nature
I had received difficult news before, but never in so great a volume as I was to encounter the evening after surviving a twenty-two-hour ferry from France to Ireland in the spring of 1991. The North Sea has notoriously rough waters, and after a relatively calm start to the journey, by evening my friend Pete and I found ourselves in a storm of biblical proportions. Our boat, the Sealink, an enormous vessel carrying hundreds of people (and their cars) had been relentlessly tossed about like a cork in a toddler’s bathtub.
Once we mercifully arrived to shore, the journey home began with a scramble up the docks and missing the only bus back to Cork City by minutes. I was yearning to see my girlfriend, Eleanor, and loathed the prospect of spending the night in the seaside village of Rosslare. We decided to take our chances hitchhiking, just as it began to rain.
Pete and I found our way to the primary road and stuck out our thumbs. Bumming a ride in Ireland was still fairly common. There was less fear of being picked up by a murderer than ending up in the back seat of a drunk driver.
“Yes!” I cheered, as we trundled up to the brake lights of an old station wagon.
“About time!”
I looked in the driver’s side window and gave the guy a once over, but in fairness, anything short of a machete on the dashboard and we were getting in. The driver looked sane enough, with a seaman’s cap and gray beard and rosacea nose. He asked where we were headed.
“Cork!” I answered.
“Well, get yer arse in out of the rain,” he said. “I’m headed south. I’ll get you halfway there now, boys.”
I got in the front and Pete got in the back and we were off. We cornered the first couple of turns a bit hastily but that was normal for Irish drivers. On the fourth and fifth bends, however, as the wagon used most of the oncoming lane to navigate a tight turn at over seventy kilometers an hour, I saw we were in trouble. I turned around to Pete, who nodded toward the driver with his eyes wide.
“Don’t mind us,” I offered up loudly. “We’re not in any hurry to get back to Cork. Just glad to be off that boat.”
“Ah, bloody Sealink,” he answered, accelerating into the next turn, two fingers on the wheel. “Better off buying a postcard and staying home.”
I had hoped chatting would distract him from driving so fast, but it only made things worse. He continued to drive like a drunken maniac (which he was) but now took his eyes off the road completely for a chat. I was incredulous that I had survived a harrowing storm-blown sea voyage only to tempt death in a station wagon at the hands of a drunk.
“I’m very sorry sir, but I’m feeling sick,” I lied. “Could you please pull over and let us out.”
“Is it the driving, like?” he asked without irony, squinting through the rain and whipping through another turn. “Bit of a free for all, isn’t it!”
“Not at all,” I lied again. “I think I’m just wobbly from the boat. Could you pull over?”
Our overserved chauffeur pulled over on the outskirts of the next town, and I leapt from the car. Pete got out with our packs and convinced him to let us walk, while I feigned illness amidst the roadside gorse. He waved goodbye and we watched his single taillight fade into the fog.
Luckily, it was not long before another driver — this time sober — picked us up and carried us the rest of the way south to Cork.
Back in town, Pete and I separated for the first time in a month. He had a fair walk to his apartment and headed home.
Eager to reunite with my Irish better half, I decided to forgo dropping off my pack and walked directly to Fagan’s Pub. Our band had a practice space on the second floor, and this is where I hoped to find my girlfriend Eleanor.
It was lashing rain and my clothes were soaked when I entered the pub and stood dripping by the fireplace. It was a Tuesday evening, so the place was virtually empty. My old-timer pal, Deccy, was nursing a pint at one end of the bar and Caroline, the owner’s daughter, was tending.
Caroline was lovely and it was nice to see a familiar face, but the last time we had hung out, we closed down the bar and fell asleep upstairs in the old-folks cognac lounge. I woke the following morning in a booth with a splitting headache and staring into a fake ficus, so in my current weakened state, I was wary of a repeat.
“How are things, Deccy?” I asked, taking a seat at the bar.
“Well,” he replied, thinking it over. “I was eating Crunchies until four, then I switched to Mars bars.”
His talk of candy woke my stomach and I realized I hadn’t eaten since the ferry. I fished through my backpack and found three packs of peanut butter cups — not the ideal companion to a pint of Guinness — but it would have to do. I sat eating my peanut-butter cups and asked Caroline if she had seen Eleanor.
“Took off to County Clare,” she said. “A gig with Hank, I reckon.”
“Damn,” I whined.
“Well, you’ve got me and Deccy to keep you company, love,” Caroline countered, pouring herself a shot.
The three of us sat drinking and talking and before I knew it, I’d consumed five pints of Guinness and six peanut butter cups.
“I’m gonna head off,” I said, feeling queasy as I gathered my bag and slung on my damp raincoat.
On my way to the door, Deccy asked about the band.
“What’s the name of that musical group you’re in, again?”
“The Catalysts,” I returned, self-consciously, never having been confident in the name.
“Biological enzymes,” he reflected.
“What’s that?” I asked, making for the door.
“A catalyst,” he repeated. “A biological enzyme.”
He was right, of course, and for a moment I could picture him in the ’60s as the scientist he once was — performing meticulous lab research over Bunsen burners and chemistry decanters — long before he had ingested his own batch of LSD, chasing that catastrophe with pints of lager for decades. I smiled and said goodbye.
It was the last time I saw Deccy. He died alone in his apartment months later, found after a week’s time by a neighbor.
Across the street from Fagan’s Pub was a granite business that sold tombstones, and next door was a fellow who did the engraving. We used to joke about how Fagan’s was a good place to drink oneself to death, since you could have a headstone picked out and engraved within minutes after expiration.
I left the bar and walked past the tombstone yard and engraving shop and rounded the corner along the river toward home. It was raining hard and I was starting up the hill past Fin Barre’s Cathedral, when my stomach rolled and I suddenly had an irrepressible need for a bathroom. The combination of peanut butter cups and Irish stout had run its course.
Realizing I was nowhere near a pub with a toilet, I dug into my pack for a bunch of travel tissues and hustled to an alley. Feeling slightly ashamed of what I was about to do — but not so much, considering the number of bodily fluids deposited on Cork sidewalks after dark — I leaned back against a wall in the shadows and prepared myself. I loosened my belt and was about to lower my jeans when I heard voices and laughter coming my way.
Ah! This can’t be happening. What are these morons doing? As if wandering around drunk in the rain was a ridiculous prospect in a country where it was a practically a national pastime.
I bent my ear and the gigglers were definitely coming my way. It was all I could do to get myself buttoned up and emerge from the alleyway steps ahead, now having to go more than ever, after having come so near the opportunity.
I shimmied along, putting distance between the revelers and myself — hopeful I could make it to the Rock View Tavern, a few hundred yards ahead — but a shiver of incontinent energy pulsed through my duodenum.
Seeing no alternative and wobbling like a penguin in distress, I opened the gate to the nearest house and snuck behind a hedge. With the rain pounding and ankle-deep in mud, I dropped my pants and relieved myself of the Guinness and peanut butter cups. It was unseemly for sure, but I was grateful in a primal way and instantly felt better.
Squatting to crap in a back yard is not something one practices; it is a spontaneous maneuver driven by necessity. Like killing a wasp with a dish towel, you just try to get it right when you have to. Using the tissues as best I could, I cleaned myself and kicked mud to cover the evidence.
No lights came on in the house so I snuck back out the gate and hurried home, feeling I had just touched down somewhere close to bottom.
Once inside the apartment, I kicked off my boots and undressed in the bathroom. I threw my raincoat in the shower with my clothes and was about to hop in when the phone rang.
Our phone never rang.
An overseas call from the United States was expensive. This was an age preceding cell phones and long before international cell service, so when the phone rang in Cork, the call was usually a family member with important news.
Unprepared, it took several rings for me to gather my wits and pick up.
“Hello.”
“Dude-bub! It’s your brother.”
“Tom!” I asked with genuine curiosity, “What’s going on?”
To this day, my brother never calls. It’s not that he’s innately rude; he just doesn’t have the “staying in touch” gene. He’ll talk for an hour to catch up, but you have to call him first.
“News, brother,” he continued. “I popped the question!”
I must have misheard. My brother was twenty-two.
“Say again?” I asked.
“I’m getting married! Her name’s Marnie.”
I was stunned but tried to keep it together. I knew in this situation one was supposed to offer congratulations, no matter the circumstances, but the words were stuck in my throat. At that point in my life, marriage was inconceivable.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yeah man, I’m here. Congrats,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “Good for you.”
“I need a best man. You up for it?”
“Of course,” I answered, selling it better. “I’d be honored.”
“Awesome! I’ll fill you in on the details when you get back.”
“Sounds great.”
I recounted some of my trip, and he filled me in on the goings-on back home, and I congratulated him again, and we hung up.
In a mild state of shock, I finished undressing and took the longest shower of my life.
The decontamination helped calm my nerves, but I was feeling sorry for myself at having missed Eleanor.
My brother was getting married and here I was alone in a damp apartment in Ireland, literally showering the shit off myself.
I dressed and cracked a beer, ready to drink myself to sleep when the phone rang again. Two calls in one day were unprecedented, but I figured it was my mom or dad calling to discuss my brother’s engagement.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Hi Doug-o, it’s your mother.”
“Hi mom. Just got home. The trip was good but I’m glad to be back.”
“Well, I’m happy you made it home safely, but I have bad news.”
“What’s up?”
“Your grandfather … He died.”
“No.”
I knew he was sick, but I had been looking forward to talking with him again. On our way over to Europe weeks before, the ferry across to France landed us in Normandy, on the northeastern coast of France, where the D-Day invasion had been fought.
My grandfather had served in World War II, and I found myself trying to picture the horrific battles on the beaches as I watched a lone windsurfer zigzag back and forth along the shoreline.
Normandy felt like a sad place, cold and gray and shrouded in the memory of war. Old German bunkers remained, covered in weeds, grim reminders of the worst of humanity. There was a museum in Cherbourg with hundreds of photos of the allied liberation. Pictures of American and Canadian soldiers corralling captured Nazis lined the walls. It unnerved me that in many of the photos, the seized Germans were smiling, which at first I attributed to their inherent evil, but later thought was more likely a relief the war was over.
The soldiers on both sides appeared impossibly young. That I was seeing Normandy and the rest of Europe under far more comfortable circumstances was not lost on me. My mother’s father had been a sailor on the USS Missouri’s deck when Hirohito surrendered, and before we left Cherbourg and boarded a train south, I had mailed him a postcard.
My mother said he read it the day before he died.
“He just got worse very quickly,” she went on. “There was nothing we could do.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Me too.”
“Should I come home?” I asked, knowing she would refuse.
“No. Just finish up over there and have fun. The funeral already happened. We had no way to contact you.”
“Damn.”
“What can you do? It’s the same for all of us,” she said, already making light of the situation. “One day we just wake up … and we’re dead.”
“Don’t be so morbid.”
“Douglas, some events call for morbid.”
We talked a bit more and hung up. I felt bad for my mother, who was now truly on her own for the first time. I thought it must be strange and lonely to have no parents in the world.
I had drunk the first beer without realizing it and cracked a second. I figured if I drank enough, I might unstick the clichés about death wriggling in my mind.
I sat on the couch and turned on the television. If I were lucky, I would catch the “Plus” part of Sky Movies Plus, which entailed repeat screenings of soft porn Emmanuel films from the ‘70s.
Having no luck, and about to exhaust our meager selection of channels, the phone rang for a third time and I jumped.
“Hello?” I hesitated.
“Doug?”
It was my girlfriend back in the States.
“Hey Andrea, what’s up?”
“Well …”
I immediately knew she was breaking up with me — not that I didn’t deserve it. I had been fooling myself into thinking I could somehow straddle the fence between her and Eleanor, in the back of my mind knowing long distances were no excuse for dishonesty.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she continued in a tinny, transatlantic tone. “I kind of met someone.”
“Kind of?” I snapped.
“Well, yeah. He’s really great and you’ve been so distant for the past few months.”
“Distance does that,” I snapped again, close to ripping the phone out of the wall to stave off any more doomsday calls.
“Please don’t be angry. I think we both knew it wasn’t going to last.”
“Well, good luck,” I finished, unable to get into it further.
“It’s funny,” she went on. “We met in the supermarket, of all places.”
Now I was definitely done — picturing awkward smiles over misted rows of broccoli.
“I hope we can stay friends,” she said.
I weakly wished her the same and hung up for the third time.
I was in the midst of surfing amongst our five TV channels when there was a rap on the door.
Knock … Knock … Knock …
It was the signature calling of our toothless drummer, Diarmuid, who resembled a diminutive version of Lurch, from the Addams Family, undoubtedly searching for a Tuesday evening drinking partner.
I peeled myself off the couch and let him in. He wanted to go for a pint, but I was starving so I handed him a beer while I made a snack.
In the fridge were a few leftover slices of Billy Roll — a bologna-type cold cut first produced in Germany, but so popular in Ireland they opened a factory — each slice composed of varying shades of pork and lard that formed a sinister clown face. A roommate had bought it on a lark before we left for Europe, but no one had had the nerve to try it.
The clown meat was the only food left in the fridge, but I didn’t care. Everything in my world seemed similarly spoiled and ridiculous.
I recounted my travels and the phone calls to the drunken drummer while I fried up slices of Billy Roll. As I hovered over the stove, Billy’s cheap, tallow, good-news smile melted and bubbled, and slid across the pan.
