“You and me are neither here nor there, young fellah,” the auld lad said to me one night in The Archway. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
He was probably about 50 then and I wasn’t long into my twenties, but he looked years older from the drink and the life in construction.
He always sat on his own when he came to see Turner & Kirwan of Wexford. A rarity, he liked that we played original music – so I occasionally joined him for breaks. Four sets made for a long night.
I could tell he was lonely, and as Christmas grew closer he seemed to shrink back into himself.
Turner and I were particularly lightheaded that night, for Mr. Barry, the immigration lawyer out in Queens, had said our papers would be arriving any day and we’d definitely be going home for our first Christmas in three years.
“We don’t fit over here and come another few years you won’t fit back home either.” The Auld lad persisted.
I would have disagreed with him but that would only set him off.
In the long run, he was right but that first Christmas back home in the 70’s was only brilliant.
The trip with Aer Lingus was magic in itself. A right old party was thrown for us and my brother Jimmy that afternoon in Tomorrow’s Lounge in Bay Ridge.
We were already at least a sheet to the wind by the time we hit the Kennedy Airport bar, already jammed to the ceiling with Paddies equally shellacked. The party transferred en masse to the plane.
Back then, most people smoked and the hostesses delighted in serving Irish beers. The party continued unabated to Shannon, where my father picked us up. We made a couple of stops on the way, as he tried valiantly to keep up with us.
The party continued for the full five weeks as we made up for two lost Christmases. The Wexford girls were sweet, and our old friends delighted in the stories we only half-exaggerated about our exploits in CBGB’s and the Lower East Side and how mighty the craic was in The Bronx.
Occasionally I’d catch my mother glancing at me, worried but unwilling to say anything. Hadn’t we promised her we’d be home for a couple of weeks in the summer!
That rarely happened. There was always some dream to pursue, a record contract to be gained, and later a book to be published or a play to be produced.
Around the seventh year in New York and the third Christmas home in Ireland, I began to understand what the auld lad had been talking about – I was neither here nor there. The previous Christmas, instead of going home, I’d taken a Jack Kerouac On The Road trip across America in a car to be delivered to California.
We crashed in Pennsylvania but, true to our word, we got that smashed-up Audi in one piece to its owner in Sausalito.
I’d lost track of the auld lad by then; Sean, the bartender up in the Archway, thought he’d gone with the great displacement from The Bronx to Pearl River.
I hope he found some consolation in the greenery of Rockland Country, far from the concrete fields of The Bronx.
I thought of him in 2000 when I went home to say goodbye to my mother. Smoking had been banned and the plane felt somewhat civilized, I sat in silence most of the journey and wondered just where had the years gone.
My baggage had been misplaced in Kennedy. I wasted a valuable hour searching for it in Dublin Airport, my mother’s hand was still warm when we got to the hospital.
I’ve returned home many times since then, and somewhere along the line I realized I’d finally disproved what the auld lad said. I’ve gone way beyond “neither here nor there.” My life is firmly set in New York City.
I still visit Wexford, Dublin, Belfast, Donegal, Galway, Dingle, and all the other places I’ve loved in Ireland, but New York is home.
I hope the auld lad found similar solace and meaning up in Pearl River, though I have a feeling his ghost still haunts The Archway along with so many other displaced souls.
