So I went to this pub called 'The Red House', although that isn't quite true. It was a dive of a place called 'The Red House' and my mother said it was rough, that my uncle Abraham used to drink there. I used to drink there when 'The Red House' was still pasted across the peeling wooden sign in bright touched-up-paint. I was fifteen and they didn't seem to mind under-age wannabes boozing Bacardi and coke on a Friday night. As we grew older, the mixers got smaller and the wants changed from time to experience. The Firkin era came after that and the pub once called the 'Red House' became the "Fahrenheit & Firkin" and I liked that. The Firkin Brewery's motto was 'Usque ad mortem bibendum' and I thought that was the best bit of funky Latin ever. It was a good place to drink until my friend died. Well he drank and died. He sat in the pub and drank and then said goodbye and gave away his wallet and watch and then went away to die. We moved away and that banal, slippy, suburban street became a sporadic haunt.
Then the firkin left and it became a plastic paddy pub called O'Neil's but not before that August when a car smash in Paris killed a princess. We stared through the weeping hysteria utterly fascinated and hopelessly drunk. Nobody worked on a Saturday when all the flickering town lights televised images of a princess alive and a lead lined coffin on soldiers' shoulders and young men. Everywhere seemed closed down and the town became an old ghost. Only the pubs opened, the giant screens screening the cortege supplied. I went there alone, walked the phantom streets in my velvet jacket amused by the taste of grief that wasn't mine and still haunted by 'The Red House'. There at the bar drinking Guinness was a young man, dopey and handsome and smiling right at me.
"Joel" I said to my friend and Joel looked up and down at my silly attire and didn't laugh at me because he is a good friend. We exchange small talk about our separate university lives. I tell him I'm just back from Lourdes and he doesn't laugh at me because he is a good friend. We buy each other drinks because we are good friends. Not best friends or close friends but good friends and we watch that giant television screen.
There were flowers all over the hearse; scores of torn, bruised blooms. The car kept up the dignified slowness until the motorway. Still slow, less dignified and flowers were hurled from bridges because people never listen. As the paraphernalia of death passed out of sight, away from the scarred roads, Joel and I drank up and left, Joel with his skateboard shoes and I in my black velvet jacket, to our separate homes where our mothers sit in front of their televisions with plastic tears and VCRs to save it.
Yesterday I wandered back into that town, back into that pub that is now called 'O Neils' , looking for Joel on the day of a funeral, for Lou and my fifteen year old wannabe boozer friends who drank light rum and coke. They're not there. My whole generation has woken up too early, throbbing with love. Those of us not on flouexetine are lost in the droll of commuter-town fondness. The town that was once a ghost is now a graveyard. People shuffle between Sainsbury's and the car. And the only thing still living is the writer, tapping on a keyboard about that ridiculous thing called love, the pain of separation and nostalgia that remembers things perhaps a little better than they really were.
(the above piece was written and posted in 2007)
Postscript added on September 12th 2010
On August 11th 2010 Joel died at the age of 35. Before his funeral, I went into that pub and drank cola (no rum because today I am a sober alcoholic). There was noone there and no spirit of that day in 1997. I caught a cab to St. John's and the town was very beautiful. Joel had become a man who was trying to grasp the christian faith and I had given up.
But I felt that pull on my heartstrings again because I wanted that thing about death, resurrection and forgiveness to be true.
Today I was here alone and went into the chapel and permitted myself to engage in that question. Of course I want it to be true but how much? And I realised that the desire was so overwhelming it crowded out everything else.
