ode to Father Jack

I used to be a friend of the drunks. A random collection of red-nosed, old and middle-aged men who every day came to prop up the bar at the little Irish hotel where I worked. Some arrived as soon as the bar opened in the morning. They came to chat to each other, to watch a rugby game on the sports channel, to sit alone in a corner brooding, but most of all to drink. A few of them were drunk enough to fall off their bar stool by mid-afternoon but few of them did. Irish men have drinking stamina. Still, many of them had to be carried home when the bar closed.

At first, I carefully avoided them. I had experience of Finnish men who had attained the same state of drunkenness, their tendency to drape themselves over any female in a rather demanding way and whispering things to you that you'd rather not hear. But the Irish alcoholics were different. Their flattering comments to the young, female receptionist were suggestive but with an undertone of genuine admiration and it was difficult to take offense. Equally irresistible was their undisguised joy whenever somebody stopped to exchange a few friendly words with them.

Before long, I had made friends with all of them. On my way through the bar I usually stopped to say hello and ask them how they were. If I came in there on my day off, one or two of them would always buy me a drink and we would chat about anything and everything - if they were still sober enough for coherent speech and thought. My prejudice against the typical drunk disintegrated after a few of these chats and I was astonished at the things I discovered. These alcoholics had nothing in common with each other apart from the fact that they happened to live in the same village, but they all seemed to be poets, musicians, successful businessmen, skilled craftsmen, philosophers - nothing they usually boasted about, just a fact that emerged during the course of our occasional chats. Sometimes I thought that I had discovered a normal, archetypal drunk with a boring job and the usual, boring life details, just to discover that he knew more about the symbolism in Hamlet or some detail in my own country's history than I did. They were always interested in what I had to say, asked about my family, lent a sympathetic ear whenever I had boyfriend trouble.

I forget - they did have one more thing in common. A storm that had crushed them at some point in their life, an impossible obstacle that had stopped them in their tracks. Or just a debilitating feeling of loneliness. Whether it was really a dead end they had encountered or just a minor problem they hadn't dared to face, to me it seemed a terrible tragedy. Such talented people, hiding from life in the smoky darkness of a country pub.

I like my friends sober. But great wisdom and great mysteries have been whispered to me by the people nobody listens to anymore, through a cloud of alcohol fumes.