Belfast, Die Young: American Goons Do It Well, Part I.
This is Chapter 1 of a two-part serial on traveling in Ireland the summer of 2016.
There’s something astutely reassuring about an Airbnb. Most likely this is because, instead of posting up in a basement hostel where you’re guaranteed to sleep clutching your belongings and wake before the dawn to the live exorcism of a stranger’s night terrors, you can instead enjoy the privacy, comfort and cleanliness of sleeping in someone’s beloved house. When I and six of my UVa friends set off on a weekend trip to Northern Ireland, we experienced a collective sense of relief that this, our first foray outside of Dublin, would be furnished with the luxury of a two-night stint in someone’s safe, warm and stylishly furnished East Belfast home. Thanks to a few hours of careful research on Airbnb’s site, we had found the perfect place: a white stone town house a mere 10-minute walk from Historic Belfast complete with three queen-sized beds and a fully-stocked fridge. Sold.
At 5 a.m., we left Dublin and took a weekender bus into central Belfast where the brooding industrial skyline was laced with walls and clock towers of rain-drenched red brick. Pigeons rose in and out of the clouds like textbook illustrations of sound waves and the streets were strung with Irish flag and Union Jack bunting. It was strange, new and exciting, like the aerial-view of a cityscape at the beginning of a movie.
At the bus terminal, we exchanged our euros for pounds and caught a cab headed east where our quaint Airbnb was situated between a few family-owned cafes and a local zoo. Exiting the cab, our duffel bags in hand, we noticed a man leaning up against the wrought-iron fence that wrapped around the front garden. As we approached, he flicked his cigarette into the open mouth of an ornamental lion head, ran a hand over his three composition-book lines of oiled comb-over and popped the collar on his black rain coat with vampiric precision. It was an intimidating display, to say the least.
The moment he began to speak, we realized our situation was problematic. In the single week we’d been in Ireland, we’d adjusted well enough to the lyric Dublin accent, but this man’s Northern Irish accent was low, harsh and almost entirely unintelligible. What we gathered, after having him repeat his message eight or twelve times, was that he was the owner of the house and that the bottom two floors were flooded with water and sewage. We would not be able to stay there for the weekend, he informed us, but all was well because he had made…other arrangements.
With a sweep of his cloak-like windbreaker, he ushered us into a car which we all recognized to be a retired, English style black cab. Once inside, the doors locked with an insidious pop and we blinked at one another in silent terror, realizing that we might have politely forfeited our lives at the hands of Irish Dracula. Our fear was compounded when he turned around to face us, cigarette smoke whorling against the cracked Plexiglas pane that separated us from the front of the cab and gargled through the intercom:
“First the lads.”
Alas, instead of Zodiac murdering us, he drove two minutes down the street and turned into the parking lot of a dilapidated motel (all expenses paid, he assured us), leaving us to a fate far worse than a little back-of-the-cab bloodletting.
In the lobby, he lit another cigarette and spoke in hushed tones with the receptionist, a girl outfitted with electric-pink fake nails and wearing enough eyeliner to strike envy in the heart of an early-2000’s Avril Lavigne. She looked at us, a group of hungover, wilting young Americans and said, “Yeh, I might have somethin’ for ye.”
We were taken up a few flights of stairs, our footsteps muffled by the thick, red Miami Vice carpeting and left outside of a room with what appeared to be a pea-soup stain on the door. I was instantly reminded of the omens Viking warlords would leave on their enemies’ huts, a splash of calf’s blood or a pheasant’s gallbladder that meant: leave.
Inside, we found two twin-sized beds without pillows, a radiator the size of a Ford Model T, and a fold-out tray with a few chocolate biscuits that tasted of dead man’s calluses. We sat on the floor and ate them in grim silence.
Already, Belfast was living up to the expectations set in store by our Dublin friends who, when we told them where we would be spending our first weekend away, responded almost unanimously, “Jaysus, why would you ever go there?”
Knowing our host was supposed to meet us downstairs in a few minutes to take us to the “Ladies’” boarding, the boys stuffed their valuables down their pockets and we made our way back to the lobby. Pacing the linoleum parquet floors, we saw that our host was nowhere to be found. Instead, what captured our attention was the growing chorus of screams and groans emanating from behind the closed doors of a conference room to our right. After making sure that the receptionist was engrossed in her smartphone, we slipped one by one through the conference room doors and found ourselves standing before the unimaginable scene of what can only be described as a Skinhead Youth Boxing Tournament.
As the doors closed behind us, there was something formal about the sound of their shutting, the second death-knell of the day. At the noise, a crowd of sixty or more Northern Irish men and women looked up at us in unison. I watched the trajectory of their collective gaze as it skimmed over the boys’ earth-tone Patagonias and khaki shorts, lingering with anger and confusion on the tall Nike socks and the Sperry’s. We, too, stood in frozen silence, taking in the pink-velour track suits, the shaved heads, the men with St. George’s cross tattooed between their eyes. It was like the moment when you realize you’ve had too much to drink. Two gin and tonics before, you were grand, but now you’ve guzzled your way down the rabbit hole and all you can do is live through it.
In order to draw attention from ourselves, we sank down onto our heels and sat between a few rows of fold-out chairs. Satisfied with our attempt at non-presence, the crowd turned away and refocused on the ring where two fresh opponents were squaring up to fight. One of them was a boy who looked twelve, his arms and legs scrappy and chicken-thin. The other boy was enormous, dressed in a Winnie the Pooh-esque crop top which exposed the white expanse of his stomach, voluptuous and studded with a cavernous bellybutton not unlike a hypnotic opal set in a magician’s scepter. There was no way this guy was in the skinny kid’s age group, let alone his weight class. Still, this fact did not seem to faze the crowd nor the little lad himself. We watched in horror as the whistle blew and the two began to circle one another, exchanging tentative blows.
From the edges of the ring, the onlookers screamed profanity and encouragement, egging on their favored boxer with phrases like:
“Stick him a fast ‘un, ye weapon, yew!”
As it was too early in the morning to watch the demise of a child, I focused instead on the sizable calf of the man in front of me, covered in a coarse blanket of brown hair and the blurred insignia of the Third Reich. I could feel the spilled foam from somebody’s lager slipping like a feather-soft trail of warm vomit down my neck. In the swelling tide of this nightmare, I made meaningful eye contact with everyone in the group and, as quietly as we could, we slithered out of the room. My last look at the ring saw the little guy hammering at the gut of the large boy with windmill fists. No Church in the Wild played on in my brain.
Back in the lobby, we saw that our host had returned and was brandishing a large key strung with a velvet tassel.
“Now I’ll take the ladies to their accommodations,” he said, his fortieth cigarette of the morning dangling from between his lips. In an effort to be Smart Travelers™, we strung the boys along for protection and hopped back into the murder cab. A few streets away from the motel, we pulled into the driveway of a modest-looking town home not unlike the Airbnb we had initially booked.
With our luggage in tow we sidled up the front pathway and rang the brass chain of the doorbell, which clanged within the house to the ominous tune of “Yankee Doodle.” From behind the frosted glass of the door, a ghostly figure approached us. We heard the click of countless locks being undone and, finally, the door opened onto an albino teenager in a grey tank top and joggers. Before the poor lad could even ask who we were, our host gave him a sternum-cracking clap on the shoulder and pushed past him into the entryway.
Luckily, a middle-aged woman in an apron and purple clogs was waiting in the foyer to accost him.
“And who the hell are ye, might I ask?” she said, pointing a wooden spoon at his chest. Waving the tasseled key like a proclamation, our host broke into a string of explanations we couldn’t understand a word of. Eventually he and the woman seemed to come to some agreement and she gestured towards us,
“Darragh, would you please lead our guests to their room?”
Darragh, the be-joggered tween, shrugged and started up the stairs. We followed meekly, observing the Victorian-Era portraits that scowled at us from the walls, giving the crooked hallway a potent Children of the Corn vibe.
Rachel and I, the only girls in the group, were shown to a cozy two-bed room outfitted with a sink and a window overlooking the winding suburb. We put our things away in silence as Darragh, like a watchful Marshall Mathers, observed from the doorway.
With our housing situations bizzare but secured, the UVa squad regrouped in front of the motel with the prospect of a whole day in Belfast laid before us. As usual, we hadn’t made any concrete plans, but decided instead to catch a cab into the city proper and go from there. Anything to escape the oddity of the eastern suburbs.
After posting a call to a cab company in the lobby, we waited by the front steps, watching for our ride. While we waited, the last remnants of the boxing tournament trickled out of the motel, the men hauling away parts of the ring and the women fussing over the tracksuits of their young sons. It was then that we noted how truly estranged we were from our surroundings. Unlike Dublin, where the Irish were more than happy to help a group of wayward Americans feel at home, Belfast felt colder, more imposing, a landscape which, like its people, had been hardened by violence, political strife and industry. In Belfast, no one looked our way or gave a friendly wave, no one smiled at our accents and asked if we were from California. We felt, for the first time since we had come to Ireland, unwelcome.
“So what should we do?” someone asked, as we meditated on our predicament.
The responses tossed around included “escape,” “survive,” and “drink heavily.”
Just then, our cab pulled up in front of the motel. Except, it wasn’t really a cab, at least not in the traditional sense. It was a baby-blue van with mismatching hub caps and a guttering engine. An entire panel of the siding was made up of duck-taped plywood. The driver, who was wearing an NYPD-style cap and a Britney Spears headset rolled down his window and asked, “Are ye the Americans?”
We stood, resigned to whatever fate Belfast had in store for us, and said
“Yes, yes we are.”
We rolled back the plywood and got in.
