I’m in the front passenger seat of a black Jaguar barreling west on Interstate 20 East in Dallas. 

Next to me in the well between the cream pleather seats is an almost empty bag of weed, a bottle of Chivas Regal – half full or empty, depending on your outlook on what appears to be increasingly tentative life – and a sandwich baggy jammed with cubes of cheese. 

The driver’s stubby fingers fumbling for cheese every few minutes has smudged the sandwich bag’s clean, clear plastic.  The sound of that sandwich baggy rustling is worse than the relentlessness of lightning-bright headlights bearing down on us.

An eighteen-wheeler’s bank of headlights screams towards us, shifts suddenly, the cab shuddering, the headlights vibrating.  The truck changes lanes, horn blaring raucously, the windshield flashing past us in a second is full of the truck driver’s shaking fist, angry face.

“What’s he’s problem?  Aint he got no sense a humor?” snaps our driver, a sixty something-hard-years-old woman, as she slaps the steering wheel impatiently.  

“An’ don’t y’all Eye-Rish boys even think a takin’ none a ma cheese.  I o’ny eats it fer ma dia…beteez.  I could swoon like a damsel in dis…tress if an’ I didn’t have ma cheese.”

From the back seat, there’s the metallic clink of Jimmy Mc struggling to open a bottle of beer using the safety belt buckle.

“Fucking Brits!” he sighs.  “A Caddy’s safety belt opens a beer every time, like it’s a rule!  They probly got some fat fuck with a case of Schlitz in the Cadillac plant testin’ the belt buckles.  Imagine havin’ that job?”

“This is a high…class vehicle,” the driver says.  “Y’all kin on’y drink real liquor in here, none a that pisswater beer you Eurotrash lik… .”

“Hey, we gotta get offa this highway,” Jimmy Mc interrupts, his words coming fast.  “I’m getting’ a bad vibe.  A car just went past us the wrong way – fast!”

I turn my head slowly to see just how fucked up the back seat is: Jimmy Mc’s got a forced grin sprayed across his face; his eyes, dissolved into the grin-stretch, are suspended in drug and alcohol manufactured reality.

“We’ll be awright,” the driver sighs, I hear the baggy rustle again. 

“We’s on’y goin’ one exit.”

Next to Jimmy Mc, Cormac is seated Buddha; his face fully statued; nothing moves but his eyes; they dart around the inside of the car to the baggy full of cheese, the Jag’s cream pleather seats, the back of the driver’s head, my eyes: Anything to avoid looking at the terror that is the windshield.

“Y’all sure aint big on scotch.  I guess it’s t’Eye-Rish in y’all – drinkin’ gallons a that black shit all day.”

Hearing the bottle chaff out of the center console’s pleather, the scotch lapping around inside, I spin back to the oncoming headlights. 

“Down worry,” she snaps, like a child frustrated with their parent.  “I aint gonna drive n’ drink, that shit’s dange…rus.”

I turn my head to stare at her.  All evening this retired English Professor from some Dallas university has moved with an energy that belies her stiff-necked stoop, the lemon-with-legs physique, the heavy limp, the grey-blue bags billowing under her eyes.  Something inside this woman, forty plus years our senior, burns crazy hot to keep her locomoting.

“When y’all is driving, y’all drives; an’ when y’all is drinking, y’all drinks; don’t mix ‘em up.  Thems ma rules.  Martine Johnson, the stoopid bitch, kilt herself breakin’ ma rules.  Cum right outta the liquor store but could she wait?  No she could not!  Opened that vodka right the fuck up, takes a swig, an’ then driv straight through the liquor store winda.  She never could figure out her ‘R’s’ from her ‘D’s!’”

She cackles, her head bobbing.

“Damn near killed the poor Injun ahind the counter, who never shoulda sold a drunk lady a quart a vodka.  Anyhoo, now I aint got no one for Tuesdahs n’ Wednesdahs night.  Selfish bitch.”

She shakes her wrinkly chins and turns to stare back at me.

I shake my twenty-three-year-old head that’s thinking it’s never going to see twenty-four and point forcefully at the highway.

Her face turns back to the oncoming traffic.  

“What is it with people not drinkin’ hard liquor no more?” she asks, like she’s a teaching a class of fifty students and not doing fifty miles an hour in the wrong direction on an Interstate Highway. 

“A coupley a weeks back, I had this tiler dude cum over.  I had ta git the shower wall fixed where all I fell the night a Dolores’ husband’s memorial service. Now that was a night!”

She lifts her right hand off the steering wheel and magically waves the knowledge of Dolores, her dead husband and his sendoff party into our minds. 

“That dude, a little fat Armenian, he wuz kinda cute too, he didn’t want nuthin’ ta drink but C’rona!  No scotch, no bourbon, nuthin’ I had in ma Armageddon survival cab’net.  I had ta git m’ass on down ta Thrace in the liquor store ta git some C’rona. What’s the world a comin’ ta?  Armenians drinking Mexican beer, fixing Eye…talian tiles, n’ chargin’ like they’s Philadelphia lawyers.”

She cackles, her chins jiggling as she slows the Jag and effects a remarkably calm U turn.   

In our irrationally rational manner, we exit up the On Ramp.  Five minutes earlier, we had simply, if erroneously, drove from a city street onto the Off Ramp, the mind-altering substances altering our minds had discounted the multiple red signs screaming WRONG WAY. 

Now exiting off the On Ramp, a silver Toyota Camry rounding the jug handle, sees us coming but, likely caught up with processing the licentiousness of it all, only swerves onto the grass at the last moment to avoid a head on collision. 

Horn blaring, the terror in the driver’s face is fixating, almost thrilling.

“What in hell’s her problem?” our driver snaps.  “Aint she never seen no one git offa a highway the wrong way?”

 “Fucken weirdo,” Jimmy Mc sighs, ambiguously.

At the top of the ramp, our surprising entry onto the four-lane street elicits a symphony of car and truck horns.  Heads shake vigorously; faces sneer; fingers flip. 

Yet for all our Wrong Way navigation, there’s nary a sign of the famed Texas

Rangers, nor even a single obese, donut-stained Dallas cop.  They’re probly all still on that big case from thirty years back, in ‘63: The one where they let the President get shot, then let his supposed shooter get shot.  In fairness, they’re big on shooting in Texas.

Back in the boringly conventional regular flow of traffic, our driver finally succumbs to stress and hands me the bottle of Chivas Regal.

“I’m fine,” I say, deliberately stupidly.

“I don’t give a hot damn what you is,” spit flies from her mouth onto the windshield.  “I need y’all ta open that goddam bottle fer me.”

“Oohhhh,” I delay, my not yet entirely wired brain wondering what could go wrong?  I mean we just did a few miles wrong way on an Interstate Highway in a major urban area, how could a few swigs of scotch on a mere four lane city street make a difference?

“Cops,” I hear my voice lie.

“Where?” Jimmy Mc barks and I sense his head and shoulders spinning as he tenses up in the back seat.

That’s Jimmy Mc.  Still persecuted by a bad beating the cops gave him as a college kid.

“I don’t see no pigs nowhere,” our driver says, fumbling for the cheese bag.  “Anyhoo, we’re almost there.  Y’all are gonna love this ….”

“Youghal is in Cork,” Cormac says from the depths of his brain.

There’s a momentary confused if not embarrassed silence in the Jag. 

“What in the Sam Hill is he a blabbin’ about?” she says, eyeing the scotch still held in my hands.

“Youghal, it’s a little town below in Cork,” Cormac says, edifyingly.  “It’s the last place the Titanic crashed before stoppin’ inta the iceberg.”

I think I see three Irish flags whip past the corner of my eye, but distrusting my thinking and eye corners, instead, I let my mind jump to an imagined scene of the big Cathedral in Youghal and all the people from Lahardane kneeling at the altar, saying a prayer before they head off on the Titanic for a new life.

“Goddammit!” the driver snaps, spit flying onto the windshield.  “I missed the bar.  Y’all confused me, a talkin’ about sunken ships an’ us tin thousand miles from t’ocean.”

I brace myself, figuring that a missed turn for this lady is just a chance to show the world how she deals with turns that miss.

The Jag’s front wheels wallop into the curb! 

Up over the sidewalk we go, head, shoulders, teeth jostling.  The chrome Jaguar hood ornament looks like it is finally getting to launch itself onto some prey – which, perhaps disappointingly for a big-cat carnivore is the green, white, and red storefront of Ileana’s Taqueria.  

With the power of suggestion for a brain under the control of a stomach full of beer, I start to crave carbs.  But there’ll be no stopping for sustenance: Eatin’ is cheatin’ when you’re on an alcohol search and devour mission!

She screeches the Jag around in front of the Taqueria’s few parking spaces, barely missing a big old Caddy, and for consistency’s sake, slams back over the curb before we trundle along slowly a mere half block in the wrong direction before pulling into the lot in front of the TOOMEVARA INN Irish Bar and Restaurant.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  It’s jus’ like the old countree here,” she waves at the three Irish flags, the white sign with crossed hurling sticks at either end of the name. 

“Least n’ what I seen a t’old countree in a bar up in Boston.”

 The front tires thud off a concrete wheel stop, jolting everyone in the Jag forward, but the gods of cars-crashing-into-buildings, whom we know to disapprove of our current actions, are sleeping and the Jag comes to a stop.

“Onliest problem in here is that they mos’ly jus’ drink beer.  How cum everythin’ that’s hard in this world is a left up ta wymen, huh?  Child bearin’ n’ raisin’, cleanin’ up y’all’s mess when y’all spray the mall with machine gun fire, n’ doin’ the real drinkin’,” she cackles again, the bags around her eyes narrowing. 

“God mighta made the world awright, but he didn’t have no gud advice ‘til wymen cum along.  Y’all think that dope Adam n’ his murd’ring, kiss-ass sons woulda tol’ him hows ta git shit done?” she shakes her chins and reaches for the cheese bag.

“Nope, we’d still be ploddin’ round in animal skins if an’ it was up to them dopes. Cum on, I’m a gittin’ thirsty.”

She goes to push open the door, realizes the engine’s still running, turns the key, but leaves it in the ignition, and starts into the elaborate ceremony of extracting herself from the bucket seat.

Jimmy Mc, Cormac and I burst outta the car.  I resist the Popish move of kissing the asphalt paving of the TOOMEVARA INN parking lot. We stand shaken in the green neon halo of the bar’s sign, watching and listening as she lurches and grunts her way out of the car.

 “Shud we give her a hand?” I ask, naively.

 “Not unless y’all want ta wake up beside her tamorrow,” Jimmy Mc grins mischievously.  “Listen, when we git in here, I’m orderin’ a beer, a burger, an’ a cab in twenny minutes at the back door.  Don’t let that Texas grass totally screw yer brain.  Pay attention in here an’ follow me, or youuuuu … may regret it.”

  Still grinning, he raises his bushy eyebrows high, breaks from the huddle and stalks towards our driver.

  “You all right Prof?” he asks warmly.  “Here, here, let me give ya a hand, watch them stoopid concrete trip-over things.  I don’t why they bother with ‘em, it’s not like we think it’s a drive-in bar.  Now that’s a good ….”

Inside, the bar is too bright, forcing me to blink rapidly as I hold my right hand out in front like it’s a magical shield for my over-dilated eyes.  I force my eyes closed and stop moving, imagining myself going face first over a low table.

“… join ya for a bourbon, fer sure I will,” Jimmy Mc’s conspiratorial intonation weaves its way into my consciousness.

Now’d be a good time to slip away, I think.  Ah fuck it, I need a drink to calm me nerves.

“Bourbon, now that’s the honey-colored liquid they make up in Heaven – right?  I think I mighta had some a that before … like two million times!”

Behind Jimmy Mc’s hiss-spitting laugh, I hear the gimped scrape of the Prof’s shoe across the tiled floor.

Nothing stops people like the Prof and Jimmy Mc.  Every day they drink a river of booze and still walk away from the mangled metal that was the car they just launched into a wall.  They don’t fall down steps and break their neck, drown in their own vomit, or step out in front of the onrushing bus.  Somewhere, somehow along the way they’ve made a deal with the fates that trades the often shitty but always real effort of living for the oblivion of terminal soothing.

They shuffle past me to the bar as my vision portals finally resume regular, shitty but real duty.

I look up but don’t believe my eyes are in fact actually working.  After the umpteenth plus one hard rub of the knuckles against the eyeballs, I look up again and the sight is still there: Three big mustached, double-chinned barmen, hands on hips, their ample guts stretching blue and yellow Tipperary hurling jerseys.

Slowly a penny drops: Toomevara … Tipperary … hurling.

“See,” the Prof spins around fast, taunting gravity, her hands flapping at the walls covered with Tipperary jerseys in glass cases, crossed hurls, sliotars, photographs of Tipperary teams, on the myriad shelves is the contents of some Irish shop’s going-out-of-business sale.

“Seeeee, I tol’ y’all this is a real Eye…rish place,” she nods and approaches a bar stool in the manner a wrestler approaches an opponent.

“This fine young lady’ll have a Wild Turkey.  Sit yer tooshie down there princess,” Jimmy Mc taps a bar stool.  

“An’ I’ll have a very laaarge Old Forester.  I am one lucky man.  Lucky to be still a…live.”

He raises his eyebrows, forces his cheeks down, widening his eye sockets, as he nods towards the Prof attempting to wrestle her way into supremacy over the barstool.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask no one and everyone.

“The feller with y’alls?” the youngest barman asks but doesn’t wait for a reply.  “He walked straight through.  I hope he aint puking.  We gots a bathroom fer that.”

“Oooohhhhh,” I answer slowly, again I survey the bar.

My survey catches a dimly lit hallway.

I turn to the barman, who nods before I can ask.

Back at the bar a few minutes later, my biological needs met, my eyes roam over everything, but my tongue is uncharacteristically reluctant for work.

“Y’all is athletes?” the youngest of the three barmen asks Jimmy Mc, knitting his eyebrows together.  “Even the Rangers don’t drink like y’all do, an’ they’s just sittin’ on their fat asses all day watchin’ one millionaire after ‘nother swing a bat.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t be drinkin’ like this if we had a rugby game tomorrow,” Jimmy Mc says.  “No, no, no.  We’d be drinkin’ much harder!”

He throws his head and shoulders back to guffaw and slips off the stool, only to be saved once again by the fates as his left leg magically cuts through the stool and shoots out to stop his fall.

“Where’s Cormac?” I ask again, a tug of team anxiety distracting my distraction.

“He aint out back, I mean, he wen’ out back, but he aint theres no more,” the barman says.  “He didn’t puke nor nuthin, I checked.  Pat don’t like it when people go out back ta puke.  Makes us look bad ta the Mexicalas.”

“Ooohhh,” is all I can muster.

“Here get this gud for nuthin a drink,” Jimmy Mc slaps my arm with the back of his hand.  “What’ll ya have?”

“Bud,” I manage to get out.

“See, I tol’ y’all.  He’s a drinkin’ cat’s piss, when they gots a fiiii…ne callection a whiskey here.  That Pat guy, he knows he’s whiskey, gotta hand that ta him.  How cum y’all got yerself a good bourbon but only got me a Turkey?”

She strikes Jimmy Mc on the shoulder with the back of her hand.

“I possess a delicate pallet madame,” Jimmy Mc flashes his mischievous grin.

The barman places a pint of Budweiser on the counter.

I watch the bubbles stream up from nowhere inside the glass.

“Sit down!” the Prof barks at me.  “Yer a makin’ me nervous.”

“How’d y’all know one another?” an older barman asks, almost suspiciously, pulling at the collar of his Tipperary shirt.

“I met ‘em all in a bar is how I know em, they was playin’ cricket or some faggy Euro sport like that,” the Prof grabs her shot glass.  “How in the hell else’s a soul a supposed to meet any one these days?  Aint like people down at church is gonna go fer a drink with y’all.”

I lean forward, finding it hard to get enough oxygen to think.

Through the golden yellow of the Budweiser, the red EXIT sign at the rear shimmers in the beer’s bubbles.

 “You got a burger back there,” Jimmy Mc asks, spinning his now half full glass of bourbon.

 “No sir, kitchen’s closed.  It closed at midnight, chef took off circa twelve oh one.”

 “Goddammit, give a bag a chips.”

 “You aint eatin’ no chips an’ gittin in ma Jag…war,” the Prof sneers.  “Chips smells like ass.  I don’t want no ass smell in ma car.  What if ma grandkids git in there tamorrow?”

 She kinda-sorta throws both hands up.

 This time the fates, no doubt exhausted, abandon her to gravity and backwards off the stool she starts to slide, her little, crazy head arcing towards the floor.  But Jimmy Mc, still loved by the fates, moves fast and his right arm shoots out and catches her torso.

 “We keep meeting like this princess,” his mischievousness is never more than a scratch away, “an’ we’re gonna have ta get a room.”

“Git yer fucken hands offa me,” she spit-snaps.

In the confusion of their confusion, I turn and walk out the front door.

In Ilheana’s Taqueria I load up on a little chicken wrapped in a lot of carbs.

The lady at the counter is friendly and chatty.  There’s no other customers but she stays open until 2:00AM and gets bored.  After a few minutes talking and waiting while a singing chef makes my meal, she says:

“So you notta like the crazy Eye-reesha guys cum in Sunday nights, one aholdin’ t’other.  Then a punchin’ start.”

She holds up both fists like a prizefighter.

“No, … no,” I say wondering how to react.

I take a deep breath.

“Can you get me a taxi?” I ask.  “‘Cause there is a couple a crazies next door who will prolly end up in here.”

At some point, post taco-devouring, a taxi pulls up out front. 

Two blocks away, I see Cormac lean-slipping against a light pole, his thumb wavering at the oncoming traffic.

“Here, here, stop for that fella.”

“You sure?  He aint gonna git sick all over my cab is he?” the black driver askes threateningly.  In the two blocks he’s already told me he just moved down from New York with his girlfriend, he hates it here cause the only work he can find is “driving this shitass taxi, shippin’ crackers round this shitass town.”

“No, no,” I try to sound convincing.  “He’s just tired is all.  It’s ben a busy day.”

He pulls over. 

“Here ya fucken moron,” I yell out the window. 

“Ye goin’ ta Youghal?” Cormac throws out, his head rising, making him stagger backwards into the light pole.  His shoulder blades grip the concrete pole to steady himself.  

“No it’s Cobh,” I yell back.

His eyes seem to register recognition.

The taxi driver’s head spins from Cormac to me; his face scrunching up anxiously.

Cormac’s head droops forward, his face limp, but his eyes are content.

“It’s Cobh anyways.  That was where the people from Lahardane were praying before getting’ on the Titanic, not Youghal.”

“What sort a shite are you talken?” Cormac manages, stumbling towards the taxi. 

“Ah, ya had me goin’ there for a bit is all.  I was going the wrong way.”