Before I was a hospice nurse, I worked in the software industry. For twenty years. And that is all I am going to say about that. Previous to the decades long software debacle, I was a graduate student, and before that an undergraduate student. And now you pretty much know my whole life story, and can stop reading.
Last Wednesday, a friend from the Deep Past showed up in San Francisco. As we go through life, the past accumulates layers and John is from a layer that now has numerous layers on top of it. We were undergraduates together in Trinity College Dublin in the late 1980s. It was a time of relative hedonism in Ireland. After the 3rd world austerity of the 1950s and 60s (while the Haight-Ashbury was gorging itself on pot and the Jefferson Airplane, Ireland was still economically considered a 3rd world country, and with good reason), the 1980s featured cheap university degrees for many, cheap housing, cheap beer, and just the glimmerings of the tech boom that came to be known as the Celtic Tiger.
But none of this was of any interest to myself or John the other night as we arranged to meet in the foyer of the Zephyr Hotel on Beach Street in San Francisco at 6pm. I drove in directly after my 4-hour weekly hospice team meeting. He was flying in from a meeting in Vegas. I found the Zephyr, and a handy parking spot right outside for a mere $5.75/hr. I sank down in one of their trendy beach-themed bucket seats and tried to let the hospice day drain off me for a few minutes while I waited for my old friend to show.
I had just settled into a mellow sort of post-work now-I’m-in-the-city sort of vibe, when I felt a pair of hands grab my shoulders. Oh Jesus! I cried out, rather over-loudly for a public space, and I turned around to find not just John but several other hotel patrons laughing at me. He had just checked in and he wanted to head up to his room “to put on something slightly less ridiculous” before we set out on the town. Indeed, he was wearing shorts, a clothing item I had never before seen on him. We grew up in Ireland, remember. If you wore shorts, you’d have the legs succumbing to frostbite. But he had just flown in from Vegas. What happens there....
We wandered round Fisherman’s Wharf and settled on some touristy bar with a nice shabby sort of deck where we could have a beer and look out over the water listening to the croupy bark of the seals. As we enjoyed our beers and the start of a catch-up, we watched the giant floating prison of the Princess cruise ship sail with iceberg calm out past the lesser prison of Alcatraz, fossilized on its tiny crop of rock in the San Francisco bay.
John works in finance and he owns his own company. I am a hospice nurse and I do not. I attended his wedding in a castle in Cavan in September 2001. A Thursday, he reminisces, what the fuck were we thinking? He did not attend either of my weddings. Between us, we have three marriages, three kids, two divorces. So it goes.
The great thing about our sporadic meetups over the years is that like many old friends we slip back into what was great about the friendship to begin with. In my opinion, this is primarily humor. John is a storyteller. It was one of the things I first loved about him, his ability to hold a group captive, to make people laugh with the simplest absurdities. In Ireland, humor is currency, and it is one of the things I miss most. Not that life in the US is humorless, but Irish humor is brutal, biting, and dark. When the Ethiopian famine was at its height in the 1980s, the Irish as a nation gave more money and volunteer hours per capita than any nation on earth. But we also had famine jokes. Really tasteless ones. That we laughed at.
Almost everything is fair game for a joke in Ireland. I reckon we are a nation that has been kicked in the head so repeatedly throughout history that we realized early on that the only option was to laugh about it. When I emigrated to America, I quickly learned that I had to tone my humor way way down, so as not to offend. I learned that PC did not just mean personal computer. And I had to stuff my Irish humor into the very back of my humor closet, where it waited impatiently to be set free. I could only take it out and let it rattle its chains when I went back home, or when someone from home came to me.
We dined at the fancy Waterfront restaurant. John, owner of his own company, expensed it. Does that mean we have to talk about your work? Payments and stuff? I said. We just did, he responded, perusing the menu. We made each other laugh for a couple of hours, and took the requisite selfies with the full moon and the lit-up Bay Bridge looking obligingly sparkly behind us. Then we wandered back to the Zephyr and I drove on home to Marin. John headed to the Buena Vista to watch the Chinese barman there line up 400 Irish Coffees.
Next day, he texted me that he was heading to the Haight and the Castro to poke around. I was waiting for my girlfriend to arrive from out of town, and having a preparatory glass of wine. A while later, he texted: Is it just me or has the Castro gone very gay? He took my recommendation to have dinner at the Sausage Factory, where, he reported, his waiter Jonathan was flirting with him. Jonathan just asked ‘Have you been to the restroom yet?’ In what possible scenario is that an appropriate question from a waiter? I have an emergency Uber booked.
I gave him my now lamentably belated advice that on no account should he visit a restroom in the Castro. Seeing how we’re both drinking on our own, he texted, we should just pretend we are out together having a very slow conversation, like drunks do. I texted back that I thought that’s what we had been doing for the past hour.
The next day, he was up at Tahoe. If you crossed Bray with Glendalough, you’d get Tahoe. It’s just a lake, people. Calm down. I was wine tasting in Sonoma with my girlfriend. For the second time in two days, we appeared to be drinking together without actually, as it were, being together. I am aware this contributes to the myth that all the Irish ever do is drink. We also, let it be known, make politically incorrect jokes. I asked him if he had been sexting with Jonathan a lot. Not my type, he wrote back. Turns out he’s gay.
One of the terrible things about emigrating is that the friends you leave behind now live six thousand miles away from you and you only see them once every couple of years. John’s not really one for the letter writing, and we only text around meetups. The odd flurry of email. Still and all, I’m going home next Summer and he has promised to put ‘the crew’ together. Plus he’s in the Bay Area till Sunday, so still the chance to drink together over text a couple of times.
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