Contradicting the Irish in Me.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself standing on 238th Street in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale looking up 128 steps. At the top of the steps was An Beal Boct Cafe, a great Irish pub that pours a fantastic pint of Guinness (one of the best in NYC in my opinion), and at the bottom of the stairs was me. In between us lay my total lack of fitness and a little motivation that was only driven by the thought of that creamy pint at the top of the concrete beanstalk.

I didn't count the steps but I know it was 128 since at least 3 people that I talked to later in the day took the pains to point out that there are 128 of them and they climb the damn things everyday.

"128 feckers I tell you!".

After about 40 or 50 steps I was starting to get out of breath. It may have been altitude sickness, after all I rarely go north of 14th street, but more likely it was just a condition known as "Fat Bastarditis". I sat down on the steps for a rest and turned around to enjoy the view of the 2 lithe 20-somethings striding up the steps 2 at a time, and who overtook me with a look like I was a dog log that they couldn't be bothered wiping off their shoe.

Slightly offended and therefore freshly motivated, I rose slowly to my feet wheezing like a 90-year old emphysema patient and started mournfully plodding up the stairs again. By this time I was doing a pretty good impersonation of a gasping fish floundering for water and I could see an angelic pint of Guinness beckoning me ever onwards.

Reaching the top I expected a guy to be standing there with a tinfoil blanket and a medal that says "Congratulations you came 9000th in the New York Marathon" but alas there was only more hill. A hundred yards up the road I could see the sign for An Beal Boct and instant alcoholic redemption.

Dragging my bloated corpse in the door I collapsed down at the bar and instantly remembered why I had put myself through this. An Beal Boct is a great bar and probably the closest thing that New York City has to a genuine craic.

Within 10 minutes I was deep in conversation with John the barman and a union carpenter named Tommy who had just finished working a 19 hour day and was having a hard time just focusing on the horizon.

The bar itself is one of those places that feels lived-in. It is only 20 or so years old (which is nothing by proper Irish bar standards) but it smells older. The varnish, Guinness, pre-smoking ban nicotine and ammonia mix together with years of discarded skin cells and blood and guts to make that smell. It is a combination that is unique and I love it. It's also rare, especially in America.

A good craic is always free flowing and can veer off anytwhere. After a bit of yapping about carpentry, obsessive compulsive disorder and the homeless people who live in the Amtrak tunnels of the Westside of Manhattan I bring up the subject of the stairs.

"There's 128 of them" Tommy and John say at the same time.

"When I was a kid I used to ride down them on a beer tray in the winter. Beats any sledding hill in the Bronx" John added.

The conversation moved from there to the Beatles, then to Irish history and Scottish history and the differences between the two. It was a lovely spontaneous bee-bop like flow and I was sorry I had to end it but I had to head back down the stairs to meet a friend.

I said my goodbyes, promising to be back (it's true, despite the stairs I will be back there to see Andy Irvine perform on Oct 13th). My belly now swelled by a quick 5 pints of Guinness, I walked out to the top of the stairs and tried to imagine riding down them on a beer tray but my bum started to hurt at the mere thought so I started my descent on foot.

At the bottom of the stairs I stopped in an old man bar called The Punch Bowl. There was nobody in there except one old Father Jack look-alike at the bar and the barman himself who looked like he hadn't seen the sun in several centuries.

"Arrghhyeedass" said the old guy at the bar.

I'd no idea what he said so I just told him I just came down the stairs from An Beal Boct.

"There's 128 of them" the barman said.

"Thanks, I know".

"Arrrgtyyyrrfuck" said the old man.

"Oh really? What makes you say that?" I said, still having no idea what he was talking about.

"Fuckarrrrgggeiisss". He then started laughing, either that or he was having some kind of fit. He was drooling big lines of spit down his chin and waggling his tongue from side to side.

I made up my mind to quicly finish my beer and hit the road. After An Beal Boct the Guinness in the Punch Bowl was utilitarian at best. At this point I met up with my friend Greg and we headed downtown to a pub called Connolly's in Times Square to see an Irish-American band called Shillelagh Law.

Connolly's is a borderline "Plastic Paddy" joint. Plastic Paddy meaning a celebration of all things stereotypically Irish, shamrocks, Guinness, James Joyce quotes on the wall, etc, etc.

However, I'd say it's borderline since it's kind of been around long enough to actually have some substance, unlike other bars in the neighborhood with names like "Lansdowne Road" and "Kevin St James". It's also home to the band Black 47 who's lead singer wrote a highly enjoyable book called "Green Suede Shoes" and who were known as an activist band during the days of the struggles.

This is where things start to get murky. There are plenty of things I love about Irish culture, and there are actually plenty of things I love about American culture too, but combine the two and it seems to bring out some of the worst people imaginable.

The struggles for me were always left leaning. The Father of the struggles, and indeed the person who the bar is named for, James Connolly said: "The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave".

Pretty fucking forward thinking for Ireland in 1912 I'd say.

So Shillelagh Law come on and they are pretty good, in fact I'd say musically they are excellent. You can tell they are all really great trad players in their own right but at some point The Pogues and East Coast Irish culture invaded their bloodstream to create this new smorgasbord of music.

I'm watching a group of kids down the front who may or may not be underage and they are really getting into it, slam dancing and moshing to these old jigs and reels mixed into a punk ethos and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to see them appreciating tunes which in some cases are hundreds of years old (albeit with new Yankee lyrics).

About halfway through the set the fiddle player dedicates a song to some local trade union and everybody applauds and I'm thinking Connolly again: "Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent".

But then after one song which the band dedicated to a fire fighter who died on 9/11, the young kids started chanting "USA, USA, USA!". I was momentarily dumbfounded, then perplexed as I thought this mindless patriotic bullshit only exists on the right and weren't they just applauding a trade union song 10 minutes ago?

Patriotism is like an alien life form to me, I see it but I don't understand it. I call myself a 90-minute patriot. When the game is over and Scotland have inevitably lost at football, I take off the jersey and rejoin Planet Earth. My country is just as shitty as your country and vice versa. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The firefighter didn't give his life because he was an American, he gave his life because he was a firefighter and he cared about human beings regardless of where they were from.

It soured my night and I left wondering about those young kids. They have a great chance to appreciate something which is old and progressive at the same time. That music Shillelagh Law were playing couldn't have come directly from Ireland. It needed to be blended with the cultures in Boston and New York and the other Irish enclaves of the East Coast. At the same time, the politics have become regressive and Irish-Americans seem to have lost sight of the persecution their forefathers worked to escape from.

I finished my Guinness and we headed home passing the Connolly quote on the wall that reads:

"Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration". - James Connolly.