Giggles

Tonight’s post would have been quite different. I had thought about writing something edgy, or inflammatory, or revelatory, or yaddah-yaddah—I had thought of writing all those ways that you think you should when you’re twenty-one with a head full of ideas. But this week, frankly, I don’t have the heart for it. So I thought instead that some laughs might be due. Overdue, actually. Luckily, I have a few little occurrences to recount, collected during my time here. Until Dublin, I hadn’t thought of myself as having stories people could laugh at. It’s likely that I didn’t get out enough. Or that the Irish are simply more entertaining than the Americans I’ve met so far. I’ll let you be the judge.

On my first Dublin bus ride, I stepped into the bus and approached the driver’s window to pay at the card-reader. Scanning the bus card, I noticed that he was staring at me through the plastic, his lips pursed like I had done something wrong. The card scanner beeped between us. I just stared back at him, as you do when you’ve messed up but need someone to tell you for certain. The bus driver raised one hand up to his temple and wiggled his fingers, pursing his lips to imitate an alien humming sound.

Now that I was being mocked, I had to speak. “Yes?”

“Gotta tell me where you’re going,” he said. He tapped his temple once or twice. “I don’t read minds.” Help has been easier to come by since then, but I won’t forget the driver of that 46A bus into the city. Though he has likely forgotten me; by now he has probably tried and failed to read the minds of a hundred more clueless tourists in front of his partition window. Or, with all the practice, he learned that superpower and still pulls the joke just for the giggles.

A few weeks later, hailing a cab on College Green after a night out, I saw a drunk defacing the entrance of Trinity College. The fabled courtyard of the school was locked up for the night, but this guy was bracing himself on the fence’s black bars to piss on the grass beyond them. Hardly secretive, not ashamed in the slightest, he kept trying to make eye contact with the poor pedestrians hurrying past.

Not that the sight was attractive, but I couldn’t help but stare (again, a running trend) at this indomitable urinator. He was settling the old Catholic score with Protestant Trinity in the most elemental way possible, I guess. Dublin is a tough place, even if some people need to get wasted to continue the ancient fights. I caught that cab, but the soldier was still firing freely as we pulled away.

These two were Dublin vignettes, just one out of a thousand. Public transport into a bustling city center means that everyone has ample time to watch everyone, from the everyday to the oddball. This extends to the rest of Ireland also, for better or worse. My bus ride to Cork had me a few rows behind an affectionate couple for the three-hour drive. They were excessive, even for Europeans, and noisily frequent. A dozen lip-smacking kisses, with lovely nothings whispered in between, and then two dozen more. Irritating? One hundred percent, the whole way there. But then, on the way back that night, I walked past them to the bus’s toilet and saw that they had curled up onto one another to sleep, fitted easily to one another in an idyllic rest. Seeing that made me change my mind a little, so that I wanted to root for them. Almost.

On and on patter these little tidbits of stories. Not even full tales, usually—just instances that I’ll have to shamelessly embellish to fill the gap in some later conversation with strangers, surely. Take the man who drank in Belfast’s Whites Tavern with an infant in his free, non-pint-holding hand. Was the child his? Or was he the boldest and worst babysitter in all Ulster? Was bringing the child to the bar a common thing? Every Saturday night, or only every other Thursday?

Got the lad again, Benny?

Oh of course, of course. Got to get him used to the smell of it all.

Does Patricia mind, or what?

She’s just happy to get me and him out of the house at the same time, you know.

Surely I could add these adornments onto my skeletal experiences and deceive someone who wasn’t there, to make them laugh, or just puff through their nose with a pitying smile. Accordingly, I expect that everyone I meet must have the same impulse to extra-record the things which happen. Jack and I, in the bus through Connemara, shared the ride with an expressive bunch of au pairs from Meath, Italians and Spaniards and one American. The American, when we talked politely, explained that she was from Chicago originally, and that she studied creative writing. Echoes of the literary everywhere. I later thought (still think, actually) that a group of singing, shrieking au pairs exploring a foreign country together would make one hilarious story, and likely five mediocre rom-coms.

But beyond what I thought, I wondered also if she would write my brother and me into her Irish retelling. Naturally, I would have to be remembered as the more handsome of the two, though Jack would want me also to be depicted as shorter. No doubt we would be one thousand times more ruggedly Texan than either of us are, unintelligible with our accents and cigarillos clenched in our teeth. My beard would reach my gleaming belt-buckle. Jack would reach down periodically to spin his sharpened spurs with a ticking whir. When she offered us two cans of beans (not the mere pistachios of the original), I’d say, “Why, thank you kindly.” Jack would promptly exhale his foul smoke through the nose without flinching. We’d go down in her history as the two smouldering Texans who looked lost and ridiculous against the might of the Irish West.

Or, we would be the polite young men who made eye contact with each other every time the girls screamed at the bumps of the Connemara roads. That is, if the American was watching closely enough to take down the bare bones, so that one day we could be repeated among the Meath au pairs as they took a smoke break together in the garden. Not everyone goes to the Internet, I’ve found.