Shoplifting at Dracula's cont'd.
That first term I lived in a narrow attic room in the Seaview
Hotel in Portrush, Co. Antrim, about ten miles from the university campus, with
a view through a tiny window of red-brick Victorian buttresses, the gray
northern sea and, on clear days, of the long low shank of Inishowen Head in Co.
Donegal. Portrush was then famous throughout Ireland as a slightly rundown
family holiday resort, a smaller, second-rate version of Blackpool, if anything
more second-rate than Blackpool can be imagined. For the nobs there was the Royal Portrush Golf Club, outside
the town. For me there was the
Harbour Bar and the ruins of the McDonnells’ medieval keep, Dunluce Castle, a
mighty Disneyesque fantasy-ruin that juts into the Irish Sea like a jawbone of
decayed teeth. Not far away are the famous basalt organ-pipes of the Giant’s
Causeway, but I found them banal because they’re freaks of nature, not of Man…and
as for freaks of Man, the University of Ulster itself qualified eminently. In
its first years of operation, it was a perfect example of New Brutalism, with
no attention or regard for environs, history or esthetics. It consisted of one
long low steel-and-glass concourse adjoining a skyscraper incongruously
sticking up in a flat windswept heath across which a paved walkway led to the
commuter train stop and the main Portrush-Coleraine road, known to cynical or
realistic natives as “the highway that leads nowhere in both directions.” The
university was modernism at its most minimalist, like an architect’s model of
the headquarters of a provincial insurance company. At least, being set
deliberately outside the town—not that Coleraine is an architectural gem by any
stretch (although there’s a nice wee town square called, like all Ulster town
squares, the Diamond, presided over by a most handsome Georgian bank and an
excellent Queen Anne revival Chinese restaurant)—the advent of the university
had destroyed nothing more than a cow pasture, violating thereby no organic texture save that of Nature. But in its hideousness and soulless functionalism, the whole
place seemed to holler “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!” Hopefully, a good
part of the long low building was taken up by the college bar, an average
boozer’s barn decorated with the odd dart board and tartan wall hanging to
confer authenticity: a failure.
But the
Harbour Bar in Portrush was the real thing. It was of old Ireland, age- and
smoke-stained and plain inside and out, with mirrors and pews and a cast of
locals in stained sweaters and anoraks that included up-and-coming local
writers—real writers, not pretenders
like me. I started going there after a month or so. At the Harbour the drink
was cheap and there was a fiddler every night and even I felt a sense of
belonging, especially one night at closing time when the lights went off, then
on, then off again, signaling Time, Gentlemen, Please, and, instead of throwing
us hard-core boozers out, the publican ushered us into a back room, turned on
the lights, and proceeded to illicitly pump the foaming beer engines dry until
2 or 3 in the morning while three or four local poets just making their ways in
the world, including Derek Mahon, Kieran Nesbit and a certain Seamus Heaney
crept in through a side door and set the darkness echoing with readings of
their verse in return for whiskey and beer. I bought Seamus a double Black Bush
I could ill afford in exchange for what he read, or what I understood of what
he read, but I liked the now-famous lines from “Digging”: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen
rests. / I'll dig with it.” I dug ‘em, and still do, and I likewise dig, or try
to. But in the smoky hush that followed Heaney’s and Mahon’s readings a beefy
fist thundered on the door, causing hurried attempts at pint-concealment. In
came the local rozzer, PC Hanlon or Manion, feigning amazement worthy of
Captain Renaud in Casablanca; he was
shocked, shocked that spirituous
liquors were being served to the public after closing time. He threatened to
close us down and throw the publican in jail unless he was given—not sold,
given—a double Jameson’s instantly. And, instantly, the bribe was granted, and
PC Manion or Hanlon found a seat in the semi-drunken poetry-loving mob and the
reading resumed, with Kieran Nesbit intoning in his smooth baritone voice his
poem “The Bus,” from a work in progress that later became the Arran
Prize-winning collection “Queen Maeve’s Alive and Well and Living on the
Shankill.”
I had a cozy puke in
the alley afterward with Kieran, and although I never saw him again (you out there, Kieran?) we parted firm friends. It was an evening of optimal joy and maximum
Irishness.
