PADDY MAC

In my adolescent years my best friend was a tall, rangy kid named Patrick MacIntyre. He was a year younger, wore cloudy thick glasses and stood a good five inches taller than me, so people always assumed that we were in the same grade. But there were other differences too. Paddy Mac said ‘ain’t’ and ‘don’t’ instead of the longer versions that had been drilled into me, along with other terms that were part of folklore I didn’t fully understand. We knew each other through our fathers; Big Mac was a cop, while my own father was often busy exploring the other side of the law. But they had come up together in Irishtown, and on the rare occasions when my old man appeared in my life to take my brother and me for the weekend, we sometimes went to their house.
Pat and I were fast friends, as he had an affable way about him that appealed to me, and his humorous simplicity was a nice break from the chess match of my own mind. Simply put he was easy to get along with. His own mother had died of cancer a few years before, and I also identified with his sense of life being less than fair.
Spending time at his house, which I did more and more of as the years went by before High School, was like a vacation. Whereas my house was tainted by privations like powdered milk, government cheese and food stamps, the MacIntyre house was solidly middle class, and we would get things like scrambled eggs and bacon sandwiches for breakfast, and Tropicana orange juice. In my house we drank Tang, which was just another powdered drink, whether the astronauts drank it or not.
It was an Irish American home, and all the kids went to Catholic School, something I didn’t really understand, but which felt exotic. It was palpably different from the vaguely Presbyterian upbringing I had known, and my mother’s Scottish kilts and hymns. If I spent the night at Pat’s on a Friday we would usually be allowed to ‘sneak’ a beer or two from his old man’s well stocked refrigerator, something unimaginable in my house. So we would sip our golden Michelobs (‘the good stuff’) and talk about sports and girls while Big Mac silently drank his vodka in front of the flickering TV – even at that young age I could see he would never get over the loss of his young wife.
Another plus was his older brother Robbie and his gang, who were a constant source of new and provocative information. It was Robbie Mac who told me about a couple of St. Paul’s girls in my grade who were ‘easy’ and ‘gave it up’. If I could only meet them! I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but I was more than ready to find out, and the name Lizzie Myers had me in an almost yearlong trance. If they were there having a party down in the basement Pat and I were sure to be allowed a few beers, and one night I drank some Jack Daniels and got drunk, dancing to Kool and the Gang’s ‘Funky Stuff’ and J. Giels Band’s ‘You Got to Give it to Me’ with the older girls at the party. I had too much and threw up into the bushes off the front porch, and when I tried to get to sleep the bed was heaving and rolling and to this day my gut quakes at the smell of bourbon.
Pat and I used to peep through a small hole he’d carved in the bathroom door when his older sister Jody would take a long bath on Sunday. She was seventeen and in High School; her long, lissome body seemed invariably sun-kissed, her breasts like perfect upturned champagne glasses. Her anointment of lotions and sprays was the focus of much of my early masturbatory experimenting. She would sometimes give me special attention, calling me a ‘fox’ or ‘heartbreaker’, and it felt like heaven. I was warmly accepted by that clan, and it meant a lot to me – a hybrid from both sides of the tracks who didn’t know who to identify with yet in life.
My own house paled in comparison; small, untidy, cluttered with shelves full of dusty novels and well-worn furniture from my grandmother’s home - all miss matched. Even our old cotton sheets and pink wool blankets were from another era, and I often longed for a matching set of anything. My brother and I were forced to wear blue blazers and grey flannel slacks if we went to a family function, and eating with your mouth open, or with elbows on the table was cause to be sent to your room hungry.
On weekends my mother used to play opera records and sing along with them in her piping soprano. If Pat or any other friends were over I would die of shame, and eventually she only did it while vacuuming the house, so we wouldn’t hear (but I always could). She also had me reading novels by the time I was ten, and this was something I could never share with Pat. By the time I was thirteen I was living in the ether-world of fiction, and bubbling over with wonder and discovery one day I tried to explain that The Old Man and the Sea wasn’t only about a man and a fish to my bemused friends. Since nobody had read the book anyway it ended up devolving into a discussion about fishing, something we all loved anyway. I was writing poetry too, and when the teacher in sixth grade asked all the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up, and all the astronauts, doctors, housewives and future presidents finished and it was my turn, I said ‘writer’.

***

The last summer before High School we all hung out in the park daily, playing stickball, softball, caroms and horseshoes. We drank sodas by day, and sometimes beer by night under the tall pine trees; riding around on our bikes, spitting, cursing and anguishing over girls or the Mets. This was a time of great anticipation. It was clear that High School was going to change us, but we had no idea how. A lot of the Catholic school kids would be going to the High School, and this worried me because they freely used terms like ‘nigger’ and had in fact called me a ‘nigger lover’ on more than one occasion because I had black friends and loved the Jackson 5. This baffled me, and I couldn’t make peace with it. Were these the same friends who danced to Ohio Players and loved Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones?
As I prepared to take my annual vacation to my grandmother’s summer place in Maine, I began to sense how the social lines would be drawn, and why. Pat said ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ because his old man said ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ (so did mine for that matter). But I still had a stinging memory of the only time my mother ever washed my mouth out with soap, as a result of me innocently calling my brother a nigger when I was six years old. It was a lesson that stuck. I had friends who read books, and friends who didn’t; friends who thought about civil rights and world events, and friends who thought about cars and getting part time jobs (to pay for gas). Of course we all bonded over girls, the Mets or the Yankees and music, but I could see the sides being drawn up as easily as if we were starting a pick-up game.

***

In the winter of my Junior year I had just gotten my own first car, a canary yellow Plymouth Barracuda that had one blue door on the passenger side. Some of the brothers from Brown Town I got high with dubbed it the ‘Proper Bomb’. And it was a bomb. My mother had bought for me as a birthday present, from a graduate student at the University for two hundred bucks. I was unwisely driving it with a learner’s permit, from party to party on a Saturday night when I eventually found myself outside the house of an Italian kid named Moochie Mangone, who was a Senior and part of a crew that took classes that were inscrutable to me, like metal shop and mechanics. I was with my oldest friend Jake, who was part of the old gang and who had kept his ties with them, while I had not. He wanted to go inside, but I had my reservations. It looked like a big party though, and we were both feeling ‘nice’, so he convinced me pretty easily.
Just as we were walking up to the front door, who should come sliding out but Paddy Mac, and I was never so happy to see him. We had gone to the same school for three years, and even played sports together, but we rarely spoke much besides a cordial ‘hello’ when we passed in the hallways. But for some reason I was really glad to see him, and not just because I wanted him to ease us into the party. I was suddenly struck with nostalgia, and we ended up sitting down on the front steps and talking over a few cold Shaefer’s. We were both tipsy and feeling expansive, and eventually I proposed taking him for a spin in my new ‘Cuda’. He laughed, guessing how little I knew about cars, but off we went – leaving his girlfriend and Jake inside to negotiate the rest of the night on their own.
We ended up back at my house, where I had a joint saved for some late night headphone communing with The Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’. As we started to smoke, with the music wafting through our conversation, Pat became melancholy and I wondered if he was thinking of our lost friendship. I felt unsure of myself (as I often did when I was stoned) and didn’t dare ask, but mumbled something stupid that died in the air. Then he said, ‘You don’t know what it was like growing up with no mother!’ and his eyes were glassy with tears. I suddenly had a picture of his mom; a funny, vibrant woman standing next to their above ground pool with a drink in her hand, and in my grasping way found the words ‘She was a great lady’. He started to sob in low halting gasps, and it wasn’t pretty. Then I thought about my own mother and her long illness – feelings kept strictly under lock and key. But Pat knew it all, and had seen her have a couple bad seizures before, so there was no reason to act now. Then we both were crying, confidantes after all these years. I put my arm around him and told him I was always jealous of his home, mom or no mom. And then he surprised me and told me he had also been jealous of my ‘cool classy’ mother too – maybe simply because I’d had one. And in that moment I saw how lucky I was.