as any group New York ever saw, and they might have made a more lasting mark on the place if they hadn't had such an all-consuming thirst. According to Mick, God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world. It had certainly kept the Hell's Kitchen hoodlums from taking over the city.
A few years ago some newspaper reporters started calling the current crop 'the Westies,' and by the time the tag caught on there was hardly anybody left to pin it to. The neighborhood bad guys were mostly gone- dead of drink or violence, doing life sentences somewhere upstate, rotting away in the back wards at Manhattan State Hospital. Or they were married and living somewhere in the Jersey suburbs, getting fat and sluggish, running crooked auto-repair shops, rigging the games in church Las Vegas Night fundraisers, or working all week for their fathers-in-law and drinking themselves sodden on the weekends.
Mick, the son of a woman from County Mayo and a father born in France, not far from Marseilles, was a man who drank whiskey like water, a career criminal, a brutal killer who would costume himself for a night of slaughter in the butcher's apron his father had worn, then wear the same apron to mass at St. Bernard's. There was no reason why we should have become friends, and no way to explain our friendship. Nor could I find an explanation for these long nights of ours, when the stories flowed like water or like whiskey. He would drink for both of us, filling his glass time and time again with the twelve-year-old Jameson. I would keep him company with coffee, with Coca-Cola, with soda water.
Maybe, as Jim Faber has suggested, it was a way for me to have the drink without the hangover, to recapture the sweetness of saloon society without risking a seizure or liver damage. Maybe, as Elaine proposed, the two of us had a long karmic history together, and were just renewing the ties that had bonded us in innumerable past lives. Or perhaps, as had sometimes occurred to me, Mick was at once the brother I never had and the road I'd left untaken.
And maybe we're both just men who like a long night in a quiet room, and a good story or two.
'You recall,' he said, 'when I went to Ireland the year before last.'
His lawyer, Mark Rosenstein, had sent him out of the country to avoid a subpoena. 'I was going to join you,' I reminded him, 'but something came up.'
'Ah, we'd have set the heather blazing, yourself and I. They're a curious people, the Irish. Did I tell you about Paddy Meehan's pub?'
'I don't believe so.'
'Paddy Meehan kept a public house in West Cork,' he said, 'and I believe it was a right hovel, though I never saw it in those days. But your man had an uncle in Boston, and the old fellow died and left a daicent sum, as I heard it called.'
'Left it to Paddy, I suppose.'
'He did, and himself showed a cool head for business for the first time in memory. He invested the whole lot in improvements to his place of business. He had the walls paneled in knotty pine, and he had chandeliers installed and fitted with dimmer switches, and over the door he had a new electric sign hung. A right wonder it was, visible for miles.' He smiled, savoring the memory. 'And he had the wooden floor covered with the finest linoleum, and bought new tables and chairs, and truly spared no expense. But most wonderful of all in this little country pub were the two new doors standing side by side on the back wall, each with a sign on it in the old Ogham script. One door was marked 'FIR,' the Gaelic for Men, and the other 'MNA,' for Women. And there were those silhouettes of a man and a woman, such as you'll find on airport rest rooms, for the benefit of tourists who couldn't read the Gaelic.'
'He put in bathrooms.'
'Ah, you would think so, wouldn't you? Quite the fellow was Paddy Meehan. When you walked through either door, FIR or MNA, you found yourself standing in the same five-acre field.'
He told another story about Ireland, and that reminded me of something that had happened years ago at an Emerald Society dinner. The conversation found its own pace, with stretches of silence interspersed. Outside the rain poured down.
'Did I ever tell you,' he wondered, 'about Dennis and the cat?'
'Not that I remember.'
'You would remember,' he said. 'Even if ye drank you'd not likely forget this one. Oh, he was a lad, Dennis was.'
'I remember Dennis.'
'We were raised decently, you know. I was the only one turned out bad. Francis became a priest. Now he's selling automobiles in Oregon. Makes a change, eh? And John's in White Plains, a pillar of the fucking community.'
'A lawyer, isn't he?'
'Law and real estate, and it spoils his breakfast every time there's a story about myself in his morning paper.' His green eyes sparkled at the thought. 'And Dennis,' he said, 'was what you'd call happy-go-lucky. No harm in him, and no darkness, either. Of course he had a liking for the drink.'
'Of course.'
'He liked his few jars. Fresh out of high school he went to work for Railway Express. Midnight to eight five days a week at their central depot, and he never missed a night's work, and he was never without a drink from the moment he punched in until he walked out into the light of dawn. Every one of them drank like that, and when they weren't drinking they were stealing, and when they weren't doing that they were figuring out what to steal next. The company's out of business now, and it doesn't take a genius to tell you why.'
'I guess not.'
'But the finest thing that ever happened there,' he said, 'was when they had the cat. This woman owned a prizewinning cat, a Persian, I believe it was. One of the longhaired sort, at any rate. She'd had a wooden crate specially built for the cat, and brought it to one of the receiving stations for shipment to California.'
'And they stole the cat?'
'They did not. Why would anyone steal a cat? All they did was drop it, crate and all. The fine crate shattered, and the cat stood in the wreckage and looked around at these drunken idjits, and in a flash it was gone. So what do you think they did?'
'What?'
'They reassembled the crate. They got a hammer and nails and put it back together again, and a fine job they did, to hear them tell of it. But when they were done the cat had not reappeared, and who could blame her? Well, they could hardly send an empty crate to San Diego, and so the whole crew of them stalked through the warehouse, calling 'Here, kitty kitty' and making little mewing noises.'
'That must have been something to see.'
'If the cat saw it,' he said, 'it took care not to be seen in return, for never a hair of the creature did any of them ever take sight of again. But they did find another cat, a nasty old tom blind in one eye and missing an ear, and his dirty old coat matted and scabby with mange. He made his home in the warehouse, don't you know, living on rats. And small children, I shouldn't wonder.'
He smiled richly at the memory. 'And it was Dennis who solved the problem,' he said. ' 'It says Contents: One Cat and that's all it says,' he told them. 'She put a cat in the box, she'll take a cat out of the box. What's her problem?' And so they placed the old tom in the crate and sealed him up, and off he went to California.'
'Oh, no.'
'Ah, Jesus,' he said. 'Can ye picture it, man? The poor woman herself opens the crate and out leaps this wee savage with an evil glint in his good eye.'
' 'Oh, Fluffy,' ' I said, pitching my voice as high as it would go, ' 'what have they done to you?' '
' 'Ach, Fluffy, I hardly knew ye!' '
' 'Was it a hard trip, Fluffy?' '
'Can you see it, man? Oh, you should have heard Dennis tell it. He told it much better than I ever could.' His face darkened, and he took a long drink of whiskey. 'And they called him for Vietnam,' he said, 'and the damned fool went. I'd have got him out of it. I told him I'd get him out of it, there was nothing easier, all I had to do was make a telephone call.'
'He wouldn't let you?'
'I want to go, says he. I want to serve my country, says he. Dennis, says I, let someone else go. Let the fucking niggers serve their fucking country. They've got more to gain and less to lose than yourself. But he
