Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) by Rosie Schaap

killing his dim-witted, sometimes violent son along with them.
    It is not a film that makes Ireland look good. It depicts the Irish as insular, provincial, suspicious, incapable of adjusting to a changing world, and frankly insane.
This
was where I was dying to go to study?
These
were the people in whose history and culture I had so deeply immersed myself? I took a long look at the couple seated next to me. Maybe I’d made a serious mistake.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    W e arrived in Dublin in the early afternoon and were shepherded to our dorm at Trinity. I’d be sharing a two-bedroom suite with a pretty, blond, sweet-natured California girl whom I strongly suspected was still a virgin. She wore long white nightgowns and a retainer. She seemed scared of me. Like I might hit her, or hit on her.
    After a quick nap I walked back through the college gates to check out the city. Dull, familiar chain stores flanked both sides of Grafton Street. I was upset by the spectacle of dozens of children—young children, under ten—begging on the pavement, mostly in boy-girl pairs, members of the Travelers community, I was told later that summer. One little girl in one such pair looked up at me with cold blue eyes. “Spare some change, miss?”
    I didn’t have any change yet. I offered to buy them something to eat; they didn’t take me up on it. I was planning to minor in anthropology; I figured I should try to engage these unfortunates. “I promise I’ll come back when I have change,” I said, crouching to meet them at eye level. “What are your names?”
    â€œMary and John,” the girl answered glumly.
    I soon learned that, at least in the summer of 1991, all the beggar children of Dublin said their names were Mary and John.
    So far, Dublin kind of sucked. Disappointed, I headed back to the dorm. A group of American girls was chattering in the stairwell, looking over the orientation program and class schedule. They were not enthusiastic about having to read poetry. Then what were they doing here? I wondered. But I kept my mouth shut.
    Later in the evening I noticed the
Silence = Death
guy heading out of the suite next to mine. I tagged along. “I was so relieved when I saw you at the airport,” I told him.
    â€œI thought you looked nuts,” he said.
    His name was Ryan. He knew Dublin a little. His father was from Sligo, in the northwest of the Republic, and he had visited Ireland before with his family. He was a junior at the University of Chicago, studying music. We went to a packed nightclub not far from campus. I would’ve preferred a pub, but this would do. Ryan drifted away toward a cute boy. Another one drifted toward me, a little older, late twenties, and edged in next to me at the bar. “I’m Larry,” he said, introducing himself. That didn’t seem right. He seemed too young to be a Larry, and he worked in business in some vague way. But he was friendly and funny enough, and he paid for my pints and gave me pointers about his native city. He didn’t seem particularly interested in poetry or politics or cultural identity, in anything that had drawn me to Ireland. It was hardly a conversation for the ages, but it improved with every emptied pint glass. By the end of the night I had drained at least five. Never mind the Book of Kells, Kilmainham Gaol, the GPO, Sandymount Strand: “What you really need to do here in Dublin,” Larry opined, “is go to a rugby match.” I was drunk enough to agree.
    By then, Ryan had disappeared. Larry offered to walk me back to Trinity. At the college gate, he kissed me undramatically and said he’d pick me up there the following Saturday afternoon. Well, why not? Romantically, my freshman year back in Vermont had been a bust. I was game.
    I soon learned that a rumor was rampant in Dublin: American girls were easy.
    Larry showed up as scheduled on Saturday, and we walked and