People I Knew #4: Seamus
Part of an ongoing story (names have been changed to protect the innocent, etc.)
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad
— G.K. Chesterton, an Englishman, in The Ballad of the White Horse
Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene.
— James Joyce, an Irishman, in Finnegans Wake
I’ve never liked drinking,
I think this isn’t atypical for my generation, who generally shun alcohol for weed and pills, but drinking almost always made me intensely nauseous. It didn’t mix well with the cocktail of medications required to make me not jumpy and anxious when engaging in social interactions. The best-case scenario was feeling mildly bloated the next day; worst-case, a hellish one-night stand with Miss Porcelain Goddess. I eventually just quit the shit: not only did it make me sick, it also made me negatively introspective, leaving me wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and why the world sucked. Being Irish-American, it also countered one of the key stereotypes of my kind. Alcohol abuse isn’t an adorable ethnic tic, but a self-destructive horrorshow that I’ve seen consume or nearly consume others around me. The alcoholic Irishman doesn’t just warble cute little drinking songs and crack delightful jokes with his friends; he also comes home and beats his wife and children to a pulp, then weeps and falls before a statue of the Virgin for forgiveness; her silence tells you everything you need to know about what the cosmos thinks of him.
At my university, there were two bars we’d frequent: Sal’s and Costello’s. The university was located in a rather rundown, majority-minority neighborhood, historically disinvested and thus not home to a wide array of businesses catering to an ever-growing student population. Absent any real local businesses, said students had three choices for entertainment: a) get high at home and party till sunrise and then act flabbergasted when their poorer black neighbors just trying to get some shut-eye despised them, b) go to house shows with usually decent music but which definitely weren’t the Barstool crowd’s cup of tea, or c) grab drinks at either Sal’s or Costello’s.
Both Sal’s and Costello’s were terrible, but Sal’s was generally the more tolerable of the two. Costello’s was located off campus on the avenue demarcating the university’s southern border. It was a weird mix of screaming, functionally illiterate frat boys and sorority girls and neighborhood residents out for a big night on the town, and the combo led to an atmosphere of vague tension (especially as the former has gradually crowded out the later). Sal’s was located on campus itself, and this relative safety attracted a slightly “chiller” crowd who were usually the same as the Costello’s crowd but slightly less bombastic and mildly more diverse in their makeup.
Even so, Sal’s still sucked. If you didn’t go to Sal’s with a group, you were fucked. No one went to Sal’s for small talk with the bartender or their patrons, they went there to get trashed with their “friends” after being stamped on the hand by the Stasi-style bouncer, a scowling bro with a hardass attitude towards anyone and everyone (even if they were obviously over twenty-one). The only people who desired small talk were your average bullshitters who are instantly attracted to anywhere where beer flows; they were typically somewhat older, too, since after 1998 or so the social intelligence of any given person dips significantly, ceding the “talking with strangers” sphere to the weird, old, lonely, and entertainingly fraudulent.
Seamus was one of the latter. I met him at Sal’s over Guinnesses during one of my last drinking expeditions last fall. It was one of those clear, warmish days in September or October, when the leaves had not yet turned and summer’s afterglow still hangs in the relatively mild evening air. He had long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and small dark eyes alongside a rough beard; his arms were oddly yellowish and likewise cross-hatched by thick, dark hair. Reared in the Philadelphia suburbs by an Irish-born father and an American mother, he’d made biannual sojourns to his father’s homeland since childhood. He could do a spot-on Irish accent — remarkably similar to Father Ted’s — and complained that the American Guinness recipe was significantly weaker than the Irish one.
Seamus was a business major, and an older student: he’d graduated high school sometime in the mid 2010s and on the precipice of exiting his twenties. He’d never gone to college until recently and had spent several years doing odd jobs whose exact nature I can’t recall. Sometime in his early-to-mid twenties, he’d fallen married and had a son with a Catholic girl who turned out to have severe borderline personality disorder, necessitating a divorce. The son — whose pictures I found adorable — was split between Seamus and his ex-wife. Their respective physical environments were comically different: Seamus had relocated from the ‘burbs to Port Richmond, a heavily Polish-American rowhome neighborhood in North Philadelphia, while his ex dwelled in a typically bland South Jersey suburbs. One can only imagine the severe whiplash that kid must have felt; one month spent in the company of green lawns, Panera Breads, and boxy McMansions, the next in a gritty realm of yardless red-brick terraces and Slavic bakeries. At the very least, keeping their distance and focusing on raising their son had transformed their relationship from cordial rather than angry.
Seamus boasted of his meetings with several famous musicians. He claimed his father was a schoolmate of Bono’s back in Erin, and that he’d been to beach cookouts there with Bono in attendance. Allegedly, the U2 frontman was a totally approachable and down-to-earth fellow who generously strummed his guitar and sang for everyone in attendance. Further, one of his friends was a concert photographer, giving him access to Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Kanye West (there may have been others, but I don’t recall them). He showed me his friend’s Instagram account — his work was uniformly of high quality — and then footage said friend sent him of Beyoncé and Jay-Z dancing in a private booth at a concert; they were smiling jubilantly and yet seemed oddly stiff, not so much a pop music power couple as any pair of middle-aged parents boogying down to the embarrassment of their offspring. Like Bono, he claimed they, too, were totally approachable and down-to-earth. As for Kanye, Seamus had engaged him in a several hours long conversation about art and fashion and the like. Only a couple of months away from Ye’s final bipolar plunge into Hitler worship, Seamus alleged that he was — of course — totally approachable and down-to-earth.
I have no evidence that Seamus was totally full of shit — he could be telling the truth with no exaggeration or phoniness — yet I suspect he’d tapped into the classic Irish reservoir of blarney. He did accents and impressions and spun detailed personal stories out of thin air; he just so happened to share a number of favorite movies and TV shows with me. Yet the celebrity stories had an air of falseness to them, and that undermined the veracity of his other tales: I can’t imagine every famous singer is that nice all of the time, given the scattershot mania of Ye, the moral grandstanding of Bono, and the divaness of Queen Bey. I’m not trying to detract from their worth as musicians; all of them are talented in some way or another (yes, including Bono). But how many celebrities of that caliber keep that sense of humility and graciousness? Bono is among the most famous Irish people alive today, and Seamus’ dad just so happens to be a childhood friend of his? Seamus’ ex-wife is somehow both a) insane and ultra-religious and b) someone he’s on good — or at least agreeable — terms with? The mind reels. Was it all blarney? What is blarney anyway?
Blarney is principally a survival mechanism. Blarney is the vital invention of an island of people who’ve been massacred, shot at, drawn and quartered, and starved to death for eight centuries. Blarney is the common language of those who had their original language beaten out of them. Blarney is how you cope with the proddies burning down your homes every Twelfth of July and every male relative of yours getting molested by priests. Blarney is, ultimately, negative. It’s an older, more sophisticated version of irony poisoning: an awful, pinched way of viewing the world, superficially witty and funny but masking great reservoirs of insecurity and self-loathing. I’d like to think I’m beyond blarney, and I’d like to think that so was Seamus. His dad was actually from that damn country, after all.