Mick Read online

  But why does he need me? Because I don’t know why, I don’t know, I don’t, but for some reason St. Patrick’s Day makes the people around here, even the not so warm and fuzzy ones like my brother, it makes them all gooey and clannish.

  “Gotta have me boon ’round me,” he said as he swept through the door after work. Which meant he was already drinking, on the job.

  “How sweet,” my mother said, about the boon business. She’d been drinking on the job that day too, cleaning the house. Now she and my old man were headed out to the Knights of Columbus, which is a Catholic club kind of like the Elks, only you drink your eyeballs out under a picture of the Sacred Heart instead of under a picture of the PT-109. They were going to tip back a couple of jars before heading to the night jobs—she the waitress, he the bartender at the O’Asis, which makes the Bloody look like the Ritz Bar. Then they’ll have a couple more during and after work. Get the picture? So Ma finds this brotherly love stuff just lovely, and Dad thinks... well, to be honest, nobody in the world knows what Dad thinks. About anything.

  “Piss off,” Terry spat as they went out.

  “Come home at a reasonable hour,” Ma chirped.

  “I won’t bail you out,” Dad said.

  After Terry sent me to Irish up, I came back out wearing the rugby shirt with the four-inch-wide kelly green-and-white horizontal stripes, deeply wrinkled from life at the bottom of my closet.

  “There ya go,” he said as he jammed the hat low over my brow. Without even rolling my eyes toward it I knew what was up there on my head. It was a knit tam-o’-shanter, bright green like the underbelly of a baby tree frog, small brim with the cloth shamrock stuck on, and a baseball-sized white pompom on top. Supposed to symbolize, can you believe it, pride? I felt like a dink. Terry beamed at me from under an identical cap.

  “Terry, you know, I’m really not much of a hat guy...”

  He didn’t even consider it. Threw his arm around me and squeezed so hard my shoulder blades touched. “Whatsa matter, you don’t wanna look like me?” He laughed like he thought that was such an outrageous idea. “This is beautiful. Ain’t this nice, Mick? You look like goddamn me. We could be goddamn twins, we could. They’re gonna eat us up at the goddamn Bloody, boy.”

  He thinks we look exactly alike, but I don’t quite see it. His hair is orange, and mine is, well, it’s red.

  But he was right, we lit the joint up when we walked in the bar. “Hey, he brought the Mick. Yo, boys, Terry brought the Mick along.”

  “’Course he did. Wouldn’t be no St. Paddy’s without no Micks.”

  They all smelled like cabbage already, Terry’s buddies. The bartender drew a tall one for Terry before he even asked, and one for me too even though I’m exactly fifteen years old and look exactly fifteen years old. Terry tipped back and drank his beer halfway down, slammed the glass on the bar, then slapped me on the forehead because I wasn’t drinking mine yet when for chrissake we’d been in the place for a minute and a half already. I drank, not as much as Terry drank in one gulp, because I don’t have a blowhole in the top of my head, but I did okay. The taste was high and tinny, with a strong bitter finish, so I knew it was Harp.

  The bartender slid two plates of steaming pink food across the bar. Terry growled at it like a ravenous happy dog. I covered my mouth and nose with my hands as the bitter, sulfuric odor of the cabbage climbed over me.

  “Get it away, Terry,” I said through my hands.

  “What are you, crazy? This is some fine shit.”

  “That’s exactly what it is, man. Get it away from me or I’m gonna lunch all over the bar.”

  “You’re embarrassing me,” Terry said. “Tomorrow people’ll be steppin’ on each other’s faces to get this stuff. This is a damn honor, them gettin’ it out for us tonight.”

  “You eat it, then.”

  “I would, but that ain’t the point. You gotta eat it. Damn, this is CB&C, man, you ain’t got no choice but ta love it. This is who you are. You can’t not like it. Not in front of all my friends, anyway. Not tonight.”

  I shook my head, which might not have looked like much but under the circumstances was a pretty ballsy move. I knew how strongly Terry felt about crap like this, and he’d beaten hell out of me for a whole lot less.

  He leaned close. “If I gotta cram it down your throat with a broom handle...”

  I was very much afraid of my brother. Not just at that moment, but in general. However, I was even more afraid of the corned beef and cabbage.

  “Kill me,” I said.

  He went all red, redder, that is, in the face. He looked over his shoulder at all his boys swallowing whole palm-sized slabs of meat. “Then just pick at it, for chrissake. I’ll try to help ya without nobody seein’. Christ...”

  I had truly humiliated him. So I did what I could, spearing the tiny bits of bacon and onion that were cut up in the cabbage, making with the big chew like my mouth was full of a whole lot of bulk, washing down every bite with the Harp. Then I ordered Guinness.

  “That’s the boy,” Terry said, ripping a sharp elbow into my ribs. “That almost redeems ya. Bartender, make it two.”

  The bartender smirked as he stared down into the thick brown head rising under the tap. “Right, Terry, like I was only gonna bring one.”

  No green beers on St. Patrick’s Eve. That was for the dabblers tomorrow. Tonight was for red beers, amber ales, and especially, black beers. Stout. It was a liquid rainbow arcing around us as Terry’s buddies finished their meals and gathered with their pints, always the big pint vases, pints of rusty Bass or Sam Adams, gold Foster’s or Ballantine or, of course, old opaque Guinness. The common thread, of course, was the green shirt of whoever hovering behind each glass. I had drunk my Harp and my stout and had choked down my little bits of onion and bacon polluted by contact with the rest of the foul boiled mess, and I was teetering. Terry, trooper that he was, pounded down the drinks, licked his plate so clean that there was nothing left on it but his ever-sweet breath, and slyly polished off most of my meal without giving away our family shame. And feeling mighty proud of himself through it all.

  “Any balls in the room?” Terry bleated, rubbing his full belly. “Who wants a game?” He pointed toward the tabletop hockey game with the big Plexiglas bubble over it, against the wall under the TV. Terry strutted over to the game, and six guys followed. When he took up his spot at the controls and looked up to see that I was still across the room, glued stupid to my stool, Terry came back and retrieved me, towing me by the shirt.

  Terry played the first game and won, beating the fatter of the big fat Cormac brothers 6-0. That meant Fatter Cormac had to buy him a beer. It also meant, according to Terry’s rules of order, Fatter had to buy me a beer. “No way, that ain’t the rule,” Fatter said. “Really, I don’t need it,” I said. Terry glowered. Fatter bought. I drank.

  Danny stepped up and promptly beat the pants off Terry. “I quit,” said Terry, which I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean, quitting after the game was already over. I guess it meant he was quitting the loser-buys-the-beer part, since he didn’t buy. Instead he slinked over to the little TV, the one with the Nintendo on it.

  “You goin’ to the parade tomorrow?” Augie asked from over Terry’s shoulder.

  Terry hit the pause button on the Nintendo basketball game, making the electronic musical tweedle-dee-ooo noise for pause. Terry turned around and threw Augie a disgusted look. “What kind of a ignorant question is that?” he said, then turned back to his game. Tweedle-dee-ooo.

  It was sort of a dumb question because the thought of a St. Patrick’s Day parade without Terry was like the thought of no parade at all—unthinkable. Augie knew that; he was just looking for fire.

  “You goin?” Augie asked me.

  I shrugged. I shrugged because I hadn’t thought much about whether or not I was going to the parade. I shrugged because I didn’t much go in for any old parade crap anyhow. I shrugged because at that point, four pints full, I woul
d have shrugged if Augie’d asked me what my name was. Anyhow, it wasn’t a true question, with several possible answers. Not in this place it wasn’t.

  “Whatdya mean, ya don’t know? Ya don’t know if you’re goin’ to the parade? Where’s ya goddamn pride, man? Y’know, this is the day, our day, every year when they bring the damn TV cameras down and we get to look into ’em and say yo and we get to see ourselves later on the news sayin’ ya, that’s right, we’re still here, and this is who we are and the rest a ya can just chomp on my inky dinky pink thing. It’s a important muthuh of a day.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what Augie said. Augie, with his thick curly hair like black scrambled eggs falling over his low forehead, his acne-torn face, and his medication that kept him under control and that sometimes he didn’t take, Augie was kind of frightening even though he was no bigger than me. So I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what he was saying, it was just that, well, I didn’t care about what he was saying.

  “You guess so?” he snapped. “You guess? You know, you young dudes just don’t know, do you? Youse guys got no idea what’s important. You got no sense a nothin’ and that’s what’s goin’ wrong wit’ this no-balls chickenshit town.”

  I was so unhappy to be where I was, doing what I was doing. Everybody else seemed to be having such a great time. Terry was beating the video basketball game and talking trash to it. Fatter and Danny were pumping coins into the hockey game and saying the filthiest things to each other they could think of. One of Terry’s other boys, the second round and ruddy blond Cormac brother, sat on a stool directly below the TV mounted high on the wall, staring straight up at the Neighborhood Network News.

  But I couldn’t find a comfort zone. I was feeling too nasty to have any fun, but I wasn’t quite gone enough to float above Augie’s talking. Beers kept coming at me from I don’t know where, and even though I already knew what a mistake it was, I kept accepting delivery.

  “No sense a who you are,” Augie said. “That’s what you punks don’t got today, Mick. Am I right, Terry?”

  “Punk,” Terry said robotically. “Punk. No sense a who he is.”

  “Who are you?” Augie demanded, very serious, taking Terry’s support as a mandate to root me out.

  I thought about the question, but I didn’t think about it much.

  “I don’t know, Augie,” I said. “Who are you?”

  Was this all just a setup? Was he waiting for somebody to ask him and that’s why he talked the way he talked? He lunged at me, tearing open his shirt, the pearly green buttons popping off and flying all over the place. “This is who I am, boy,” he said, tapping himself on the chest. There, under the pointing finger, covering nearly his entire left pectoral muscle, was a tattoo. It looked just like the circular stamp of the Department of Agriculture, faded blue block letters okaying food. It read USDA CERTIFIED PRIME 100% WHITE MEAT.

  Augie leered at me. Nobody else reacted, having undoubtedly seen this all before.

  “That’s nice, Augie,” I said. “In case you’re in a car accident and they need to know what color you are.”

  “Ay,” he said.

  “Ay,” I said.

  “C’mere, check this out,” Terry called, all excited.

  Augie and I parked on either side of my brother’s shoulders so that he could show us something he’d just discovered about Nintendo basketball after playing it a thousand times. “Watch what happens here,” he said, pointing at a tiny black player in a green uniform. “See, when I press this button here what’s supposed to happen is, the guy closest to the ball becomes the player with the brain, y’know, the one I control. But watch this.” Terry pressed the button and as soon as the power switched to that player, to the one closest to the ball, the one with the black face, black arms and black legs, he turned white.

  “Whoo-hee,” Terry laughed as he and Augie rejoiced with high fives. “See that. Just when ya think everything’s blowin’ all to hell, somethin’ comes along to restore your faith. See, even the slants at Nintendo understand that the black boys can play some ball, but it’s the white guys that gotta make the decisions for ’em.”

  Terry was thrilled, like he’d discovered a great truth, a cure for something, found some key to the secrets of creation inside Nintendo’s Double Dribble. He played harder, pressing his face almost against the screen, firing up three pointers, running up the score. Augie got all caught up in it too, rooting him on as rabidly as they all usually did for real sports events, which was quite rabidly. Augie bought three shots of Paddy. Terry clinked glasses with Augie and threw back his shot. Augie clinked glasses with me, even though my glass was just sitting there in the flat of my open palm as I stared blankly at it. “Gimme that,” Terry said, and snatched the glass out of my hand, swallowing the contents down all in one motion. “You can’t have that, you’re just a kid.”

  “Here it is, here it is, here it is,” Fatt Cormac called, bringing everybody to the news on TV. It was a feature on tomorrow’s parade, but the screen was showing scenes from other parades, in San Francisco, in New York’s Chinatown, from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and from rights marches in D.C.

  “What the hell is this?” Danny shouted, only to be shushed down.

  The reporter on TV came on to interview first a member of the Cambodian Merchants Association, then the Gay Community News editor, and each discussed his group’s excitement at marching in the parade.

  “I thought they wasn’t comin’!” Terry screamed.

  Peanuts pinged off the television screen from every direction. The room filled with boos. A hot dog sailed like a missile, leaving a slash of mustard and ketchup on the glass. Someone threw a bottle that missed and lodged in the tight space between the TV and the ceiling.

  “Cut the shit,” Brendan the bartender yelled twice, first at the bottle thrower, then at the newswoman who came on to detail the court decision that had been passed down opening up the St. Patrick’s Day parade to any group interested in participating.

  Terry went berserk, standing on a bar stool and going nose to nose with the TV image. “Who the hell do you think you are, bitch, bustin’ our time? This is our parade, muthuh. Who invited you all? Why don’t you just go and have your own pissy little yellow faggot-ass parades and leave us alone!”

  The place erupted with bottles, glasses, fists, and a few hard foreheads being banged on tables, chants of “Ter-ry, Ter-ry,” and “Hell no, we won’t go!”

  “Oh, yes we will!” Terry yelled, turning to address the crowd from up on his perch. “Betchur Irish ass we’re gonna be there, right, boys?”

  My ears were ringing before all this started. They were screaming now, as everybody made as much noise as possible, including, I was surprised to realize, myself. I didn’t know what anyone else was yelling, I didn’t remember one single image from the news report that had just concluded, but my heart pumped and I watched my brother’s power rising up there in the thick cigarette smoke near the ceiling.

  Suddenly I was listening to myself whoo-whoo-whooping as loud as I could, as loud as anyone, yelling like cavemen must’ve yelled when they didn’t know any words but needed to make noise just because everyone else was making noise.

  Motherballs

  THINGS TEND TO HAPPEN to me.

  “What happened to you?” Sully was standing at the foot of my bed, wearing his navy pea coat and a Bruins cap. He was sipping a Coke.

  “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for that,” I said.

  He handed me the Coke. “Doesn’t smell too good in here, Mick.”

  “Doesn’t feel too good in here, either.” I pointed at the spot between my eyeballs.

  “Out playing with the big boys last night, were ya? Not good for your health, man.”

  “Tell me about it.” I sat up slowly and drank the Coke. “And why are you dressed that way?” He had high black rubber boots on, the buckles all jangling loose.

  “What d’ya
mean? It’s for the snow, fool. You don’t know it snowed all night?”

  “Sully, when I say ‘Tell me about it,’ I mean tell me about it. Last night? What’s last night? I remember being slung over Terry’s shoulder like a sack of damn potatoes and all the way home looking at nothing but Terry’s butt. I had a nightmare about it that lasted all night, so, thanks for waking me up.”

  Sully smiled and saluted.

  “Well, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “The parade, of course. Ain’t we goin’ to the parade?”

  I finished the Coke, making the loudest possible gurgling noises as I tried desperately to get more fluid out of the bottom of the cup. Then I collapsed back on the bed. “Maybe we’ll just skip the parade this year. What’re we gonna miss, a few pink-faced vets and fifty fools running for mayor?”

  “Uh-uh, not this time. I hear there’s some big stuff goin’ on this year.”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “What planet do you live on, anyway, Mick? I was just listenin’ over at the Li’l Peach and everybody’s talkin’ about what you guys were stirrin’ up last night at the Bloody. You were there, remember?”

  I tried, to remember. I remembered excitement, enthusiasm. I remembered a lot of rah-rah stuff and people slapping each other’s hands and hugging and pumping fists and I remembered Terry as some sort of charismatic leader and me getting a little bit of overflow glory from that, people buying me drinks, shaking my hand, me shaking back and hooting about it, the whole thing weaving together and blurring like a great barfly version love-in. What I did not remember was content. I hadn’t a clue what anybody actually said, even though I seconded everything. Content, it seemed, wasn’t the point anyway. It was the fire, was the thing.