He Did It for a Friend. Happy Opposite Day From Mexico

Well, Happy Santo Patricio Dia to one and all from Merida, Yucatan. If the headline confuzzles you, I’ll explain. The old bastid Oirish holiday was referred to as “Opposite Day” because it was the one day out of the year when mom was drunk and dad was crying.

I used to be a working musician, and three out of the four of us had names that would make Michael Collins mention us in dispatches, but we referred to the holiday as “Amateur Hour.” It’s when the alcoholics stay home, and everyone else attempts the lifestyle without the proper portfolio. I never really participated in the holiday back in the US. Merida, Mexico isn’t about to turn over the town to green beer and boiled dinner, so I’m pretty safe here. Almost.

My father was so Irish he left shamrocks in the septic system. He didn’t care for the holiday much that I can remember. He was Bostonian. That was about the most Irish place the US has ever seen. An Irishman once ran for mayor of Boston from his cell in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. He won, too. He had taken a civil service exam for another guy, so the guy could get a job he wouldn’t have otherwise. His campaign slogan, IIRC, was “He did it for a friend.”

My father did many things for a friend. He died penniless, but universally beloved in the city of his birth. His funeral cortege was fronted by a large cavalcade of various policemen on motorcycles. They rode out onto the Northeast Expressway, which was once the most heavily trafficked patch of pavement in the world. They stopped the traffic dead to let my father pass by on the way to his well-deserved rest in the military cemetery down near Cape Cod. I was informed later that many of them got into trouble for it. They didn’t care. They did it for a friend.

My mother wasn’t Irish, and hated the whole enchilada, to mix my metaphors. We had to visit our grandma’s triple-decker (sorta, it was brick) in the rundown inner city to get boiled dinner. I still remember the recipe:

1. Put the kettle on
2. Drink seven cups of tea using the same teabag, with four tablespoons of sugar in each.
3. Assemble your ingredients. God knows what they were
4. Boil everything in a big pot until it’s gray
5. Chase it around the plate until everyone else is finished
6. Eat Entenmann’s Cinnamon Coffee Cake for dessert and enjoy each other’s company
7. The teabag could take a couple more drownings, surely
8. Dad points out what a fine, Irish name Entenmann is

I was mostly confused by the whole affair at the time, but I assure you I’d kill ten innocent men to go back there and do it again just once. Luckily for everyone, I’ve never met ten innocent men, and in my milieu, I’m not likely to.

Irishmen are not thick on the ground here in Merida. I’ve never met another while I’m here, but I’m thick enough to cover for the whole race. Mexico has been pestered by most every kind of foreigner over the years, but shamrocks don’t grow in jungles. But fear not. Two Irishmen, at least, have long since made their way to Merida, and they run the Yucatan’s version of Sloppy Joe’s Bar: Hennessey’s Irish Bar on the Paseo de Montejo.

I have been in Hennessey’s. That tortured grammar sounds like the sort of admission you’d make to a cranky spouse. Luckily I brought my spouse with me, so I don’t have to explain why I know Shane the bartender, and why he calls me by name, and why I was once embraced like a brother on the street by Diego, the other bartender. It’s a fun place, desolated with the usual bric-a-brac like Quiet Man posters and funhouse maps:

But look! They have a separate room labeled Irish Writer’s Room.

This seems wise. If you know anything about Irish writers, you’d segregate them from the general population as quickly as possible, and send out for more booze. If a Welshman sneaks in, they’ll be roaring drunk and fighting in no time. As G.K. Chesterton wrote [Thanks to Gerry in the comments for correcting this attribution]:

“For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.”

So, I might not exactly qualify as an Irish writer, but I’m as close as Merida is going to see, so I went in there. The walls were vandalized with the usual Irish writer’s mafia. Here’s a taste.

I saw Bill “The Butler” Yeats, and Oscar “The Painter” Wilde. Samuel “Godot’s not Here, Coppers” Beckett of course, and James “Cyclops” Joyce. This is a familiar grouping, I’ll bet, but I’ll also wager it’s the first time they’ve ever been displayed right next to a hammock hook. I scanned the crowd in the room. They were all Mexican, and watching Africans and South Americans play metric football nowhere near Ireland, or South America or Africa, now that I think of it. I retreated.

So we will not be alone on Opposite Day. We will wander up the Paseo Montejo to Hennessey’s, and meet a dozen or two people who have befriended us already, and maybe leave with a few dozen more in our back pocket. The one where Whatsapp lives. And I will tell a bad Irish joke or two, or the same one twice, as is customary. And I’ll raise a Black and Tan to the memory of my father.

I never realized until it was too late to tell him that he was the best friend I ever had. He never even hinted that idea to me, but I found it somewhere along the way. Instead of amusing himself, he put his life on the shelf, like fathers do, and raised me up — holding onto the seat of my bicycle while I pedaled furiously and thought I was doing it by myself, picking me up off the ice at the rink, over and over, knocking out my baby teeth playing catch, taking me to the graves on Veteran’s day, letting me steer the car while I sat in his lap, instructing me on how to swear correctly at the Red Sox, sotto voce so mom can’t hear and get us into Dutch, and occasionally sneaking me a sip of his beer. But it’s obvious to me now.

He did it for a friend.