Belfast, Die Young: American Goons Do It Well, Part II.
The Titanic and Beyond.
To be perfectly honest, when my friends and I walked through the aluminum-silver gates of the Titanic museum in East Belfast, we were expecting an exhibit not unlike a torture museum. You know, the kind of museum that allows you to look at the castration pincers without actually feeling their cold embrace. Manufactured and assembled in Belfast Bay by a task force of 15,000 Northern Irish men, and the harbinger of possibly the most famous shipwreck in history, the Titanic is a big deal in Belfast. With this in mind, we thought that surely the Titanic museum was, above all else, an exhibitionist exploitation of a sea disaster — something that any human being with an operational Thanatos drive would be inherently drawn to.
We were expecting a mandatory (but brief) explanation of the ship’s construction and maybe a bit of historic context followed by a hearty dose of gritty details about the sinking itself. Personally, I was imagining remnants from the wreck, a shrine to Leonardo DiCaprio and, at the very least, a documentary-style reenactment of the crash complete with a large cast of dedicated extras willing to feign drowning for our viewing pleasure. No such delights were to be found. The museum was four floors of semantic hell. We dragged our bodies from room to room as pre-recorded Irish voices told us about the difference between pulled and rolled steel and the exact number of rivets it took to fasten the bilge to the keel. I felt myself losing consciousness at every turn.
When we saw the line for the ‘Titanic Simulator,’ I could hardly be blamed for the flash-fire of elation that ripped through my body. I sensed everyone perking up at the thought of an immersive ride through what could only be the trauma of the shipwreck. A sign posted at the entrance read: unsafe for pregnant women and those with epilepsy. Things were looking good. After paying close to 20 euro to be systematically and cataclysmically bored by a museum that somehow took all the fun out of the Titanic, I was ready to experience a total sensory annihilation at the merciless hands of this simulator.
A grim-faced woman strapped us into the ride three at a time. I chose my compadres wisely, knowing that Mark was plagued by motion sickness and a capricious puker. I watched him in the carousel behind me fiddling nervously with the heavy plastic bars that were lowered over our chests. The ride lurched to a start and, with a light swoop, we were dropped into a tunnel bathed in amniotic red light. A promising mechanical hiss sounded in the distance. The bursting of steam valves, I hoped.
As we idled through the tunnel, I waited for a 3D wraparound screen to dissolve us in a convincing stretch of the Atlantic, for the screams of sailors, for the iceberg to rise before us, peaked and ominous, for the terrible wrenching sound of steel being rent. Instead, we turned a corner and descended smoothly into a room outfitted with the kind of kiln oven you see at artisan pizza places. The simulator shuddered to a halt and, for an uncomfortable moment, we wondered if it had broken down. Our fears were assuaged when, in the next instant, a hologram guttered to life. Slightly blue and dressed in outfits surely plagiarized from the hit Broadway musical Newsies, two Irish men plunged shovels into a holographic pile of coal that could have just as easily been horse dung or any other amalgamation of dark spheres.
“The Titanic employed more than three-hundred and twenty-five Irishmen to work the coal bellows of the ship’s engines,” one of them told us. The audio was out of sync and his mouth was still moving after the soundbite ended.
“G deck had the lowest portholes, just above the waterline,” his partner added. They tipped their hats to us with Dickensian-orphan cheer and we were jerked away through another tunnel and up to another level. By the glow of a second pizza oven, the same hologram materialized to tell us a different set of facts. I could have cried. I’ve read online descriptions of beezing that were more exhilarating than the real-time embodied experience of that simulator.
By the end of the ride, I was utterly disheartened and even insulted on behalf of pregnant and epileptic people. If you couldn’t handle the ‘Titanic Simulator,’ you probably couldn’t handle being swaddled in a knit blanket and being spoon-fed tapioca pudding. We left the museum directly after, our apathy deepened by the simulator’s inadequacies.
After the dim interior of the museum, the harsh white light of the courtyard was blinding. We blinked and shuddered in the slight chill. In the bay before us, fishing boats bobbed and a faded billboard read: WHITE STAR LINE, THE PRIDE OF BELFAST. A flock of seagulls streaked the sky above us, defecating without regard for body or soul. After a quick consultation, we decided there were only two things that could right the wrongs of the day: food and alcohol.
We started on the path that stretched across the bay, walking under several underpasses and into the city proper. At the city’s edge, we passed through a small park where a flock of twenty somethings lounged on the benches, dressed in black and smoking menthols. “No Romanians Here” was spray-painted in red at the base of a fountain. I felt the eastern-European strands of my DNA quiver nervously as we shuffled on.
As the buildings grew taller, the streets became more deserted. Heading towards the city center, we passed a few punks and a single hen party of forty-year-old women tottering in leopard-print bandage skirts and stilettos. In the window of a souvenir shop, a string of T-shirts sagged on a clothesline. One read Belfast, est. 1888. The other, in LMFAO-style block letters, read: “Go Fuck Yourself.”
In accordance with these omens, our search for food and drink became distressingly difficult. We passed long blocks of pawn shops, travel agencies and dry-cleaners without seeing a single restaurant. As the sun set, doubt and hanger set in. Tempers sparked as we argued about which direction would take us towards the sweet balm of sustenance. Our quest quickly dissolved into an episode of Naked and Afraid as, hunched to the ground like Gollum in a Patagonia, Mark pointed to the oily runoff sliding through the gutter as though it were a fresh-water stream and said,
“We’re headed downhill — we must be close to the center!”
Like a band of the dead, we followed the course of the gutter’s pungent current, delirious with hunger and searching for absolution. Eventually, it led us down a side-alley and to the stoop of a club called “The National.” As we undid the latch and stepped into the warmth of the back garden, we stepped also into our deliverance.
The inside of the bar was like an eco-friendly Studio 54. The ceilings were warehouse-high and supported by fashionably distressed industrial pipes. The walls, painted ox-blood red, were lined with velvet booths and avant-garde art installations. One corner couched a wine bar stocked with prosecco and Spanish port. In the other, a live band played a Miles Davis song. For a moment we stood in stunned silence, contemplating the oasis as it unfolded before us. A waiter with a plate full of cheeseburgers swooped by and, as we inhaled the aroma of cheese-smothered beef, we knew we had come home.
Like a flock of pale Quasimodos, we hobbled to the bar. A fiendishly attractive dark-haired waiter handed me a menu and instructed me to ‘cast yer eye on the vegetarian options.’ I felt the beginning of a wail stirring in my throat. Without further ado, we ordered enough food to feed Stalin’s army (pre-WWII) and sat in one of the aforementioned velvet booths, drinking Heineken and gorging ourselves on fries and pita. Before long, we had all but forgotten the trials of the day. In fact, it was almost like being back in Charlottesville. We danced to the band in the back garden, beers in hand, making small talk with the two outdoor bartenders. They inquired where we were staying and when we told them ‘some motel in east Belfast,’ they let out a collective gasp of horror.
“How the hell did ye end up there?” the younger one asked.
Ignorance and strident misfortune were our only excuses. We talked with the bartender for close to two hours and, in recompense for our sob story, he offered to take us on a proper Belfast bar crawl when his shift ended.
The first place he took us was a retired brothel. The lighting was low and the ceilings were strung with clotheslines full of satin bras and panties. As I leaned against the bar, a blue G-string with an oatmeal-grey stain on the crotch dangled inches from my face, a crusty testament to the bar’s dedication to authenticity. After the coma-inducing disgrace of the Titanic simulator, I felt confident that this was what living really felt like.
In an unexpected stroke of luck, our waiter friend essentially became our very own good-humored tour guide. He knew every bartender in the place and told us to order the special, a gin drink which he claimed was the ‘best rated’ in Northern Ireland. The drinks were mixed with elderberry liquor and served with a crystallized piece of pure honeycomb. The gyre of hedonism opened wide before us.
He took us to three or four more bars, each weirder and wilder than the last. By the time we reached our last location, it was close to 2 a.m. The joint was a dark hole-in-the-wall and, at the in-bound bellow of our American accents, the middle-aged female bartender looked more than ready to shuffle off her mortal coil. With obvious relish, she refused to serve any of us alcohol after Mark attempted to order “a pint of sex on the beach.” The night, it seemed, had finally come to an end.
Except it didn’t. In a display of true Irish hospitality, the bartender, who I’ll call Steven, offered to have us over to his house for a nightcap. It was night. We loved caps. We accepted.
In Northern Ireland, the cabs are strict about seat limits. Most fit six people and will not, for the sake of any sad soul, break the law. Thus, we found ourselves split into two groups. One cab had Steven and some of the UVA lads. The other was saddled with me, Nate and another one of the girls, Carrie. I read aloud the address Steven had scrawled on a Carlsberg coaster and we set off through the lamp-lit streets.
My face was flushed and I pressed it against the cold glass of the window. It occurred to me just how full of Tolkien-esque adventure the last twenty-four hours had been. The city, which at first seemed so cold and so foreboding, had opened itself to us. This, I thought, this was the kind of night I would tell my grandkids about when I was decrepit and bereft of all joys and youthful pleasures.
After twenty minutes or so, the cab stopped at the edge of a long residential road, not unlike the ones that run up and down San Francisco. My reverie interrupted, I looked around for the other cab. The street was deserted and the houses dark. We paid the driver and got out. For some reason, the road looked familiar, like I had seen it before in a book or something. I suddenly felt nervous, as though we had come to the wrong place. I knocked on the window of the cab and asked the driver where we were.
“The Falls Road,” he said.
“Could you maybe wait a moment until our friends get here?” I asked. “We’ll pay you for the extra time.”
“Hell no,” he chortled, rolled up the window and drove away.
As his taillights disappeared around the bend, I realized that I actually did know where we were. Before traveling to the Emerald Isle, I had binge-watched every movie about Ireland I could get my hands on. One of them was the war-time drama ’74, which tells the story of Gary Hook, an English soldier who was left behind on the front lines of the Northern Irish conflict. It was a sobering film, one that exposed the casual violence of everyday existence in Troubles-ridden Belfast. Bars were bombed, children shot and neighborhoods plagued by bitter religious and political divisions. It was the kind of movie that doesn’t exactly make you eager to visit Belfast. What’s more, it just so happened that poor Gary Hook was left behind on the very road which divided Belfast’s Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. It just so happened that the road in question was the Falls Road. And, it just so happened, we were drunk, American, totally clueless and standing in the middle of it at three in the morning.
Like any college student who grew up in the ultra-safe swaddling clothes of the ‘burbs, I was struck by an impending sense of mortal peril. We could hear people screaming curses at one another up the road and the sound of glass being shattered. In my mind’s eye I pictured a group of youths checking our privilege by shanking us repeatedly with the end of a Buckfast Tonic Wine bottle. For our stupidity, we would be left like Gary Hook to expire on the unforgiving pavement in a pool of grape 4LOKO and our own blood. Wordlessly, I grabbed Nate and Carrie and pulled them into the first bush I saw.
In a voice that was barely even a whisper, I told them what I knew about the Falls Road. If we thought the skinhead youth boxing tournament was bad, surely we were about to shake hands with Satan himself. To make matters worse, Carrie mentioned that she actually had read something in a periodical about this weekend being a special date for anti-Catholic marches. The screams from outside our bush-fort grew louder and closer.
My hands sweaty and beginning to shake, I fumbled at my phone and flicked on my precious international data. I shot off a few texts to the people in the other cab that read something like “bout 2 die in a ficus on falls road. Where are u?” At the sound of footsteps rounding the corner, I froze. A pack of teenage boys strolled past us, swigging out of cans and screaming an impressive catalogue of profanity. I held my hand over my face to muffle the sound of my breathing. Carrie looked at me like she was about to cry.
When they passed, we all let out a sigh of relief.
“If they had seen us, I would have just told them that my mother is Protestant,” Carrie said.
“What if we’re on the Catholic side of the road?” Nate asked.
I dropped a pin of our location in the Ireland groupchat and Nate looked up the number for local cabs. We listened in silence as he whispered huskily into the phone.
“Hi, yes. I need a cab sent to the, uh, Falls Road. There’s three of us.” He ended the call in the next second.
“She said they don’t send cabs over here after dark.”
I began running through a list of deities in my mind to whom I could sell my soul in exchange for another sunrise. A street over, an impassioned male voice screamed something that sounded suspiciously like “FUCK GEORGE BUSH!” It was beginning to look like it was Faustian bargain or bust.
We waited, freezing and in total silence for what felt like hours. At last, a girl from our group called us.
“YES, HELLO,” I whisper-screamed into the receiver. “PLEASE COME GET US.”
She put Steven on the phone and, cheerful as always, he asked us for the address of the closest house. Popping my head out of the bush like a meerkat, I found a house number and repeated it to him. A few minutes later, he strolled down the street, hands in his pockets and a smile on his face.
“Steven!”
We tripped out of the bush and hurried over to him, looking over our shoulders as though we expected Charles Manson himself to emerge from the shadows dancing a jig in Christmas clogs.
“How the hell did yous end up over here?” he asked.
With mounting hysteria, we explained the cab mix-up and the screams and the broken glass. He laughed and shook his head.
“You could have just told someone my name and asked for directions.”
He was probably right. I felt a bit guilty for projecting my war-movie inspired fears onto a neighborhood that, for him, was home.
As it turned out, Steven only lived a few streets over. Our other friends were already inside, drinking beer and arguing over which Yung Lean song best represented American culture. I noticed that the face of the letter slat was missing from the front door. I later learned that Mark had accidentally snapped it off on his way in and had stashed it under Steven’s kitchen sink. We really were awful Americans that night.
Surprisingly, I actually did get to see the sun rise that morning without pawning off my immortal soul. I watched it from the window of a cab as we drove away, back to our bed and breakfast in east Belfast.
When we arrived on the stoop, Rachel and I eased our tasseled key into the lock and slipped inside. The house was silent except for the pensive meter of a clock. We minced up the stairs and into our room, sliding soundlessly into our matching twin beds without bothering to take off our clothes or makeup. It was five a.m. and the first light was just starting to spread over the wet tiles of the slate roof. We could see the whole labyrinth of the eastern suburbs from our window, the chimneys piping smoke and the pigeons rising in dappled clouds.
It was a relief. To have survived, to have done it all. We had an hour left to sleep before we had to meet the boys and board another bus back to Dublin. I don’t think either of us really did.
To be sure, we were in far worse shape leaving Belfast than when we had arrived. Hungover, broke and slightly traumatized, we watched the city limits slip away and morph into a grey smudge as the weekender bus broke out into the countryside. In hindsight, we should have felt something close to gratitude for the memories Belfast had so graciously bestowed on us with its brutal kind of beauty. To our left, a worn road sign said “Leaving Belfast.” Someone had scrawled over it in lopsided pink paint, THIS IS FOKKING IRELAND, MATE. You had to smile. It was the closest thing to a kiss goodbye.
