Music Can Save Your Mortal Soul

Jean, Me, Irishman (“Baldie”), and firetruck in background, Dublin

The boys my sisters and I met in Donnybrook decided to take us to a place called Rio’s. Brian was the ringleader. We left the huge pub in Donnybrook en masse, and Jean and I were walking with Brian. I said, “Where’s the accountant?” and Jean said, “Where’s the guy with the little glasses?” and Brian said, to an invisible audience, “Oh, listen to ya’! You’ve got little names for all of us, have ya’?”

We piled into our car that had the bumper taped on with violently red tape, due to a mishap early in our journey. Our car was literally taped together. There were six of us. It became a clown car. I was on Cahul’s lap. Siobhan was BURIED in men in the backseat. Then came the hilarious drive into Dublin with all of us talking at once. Jokes, repartee, laughter, witty comments.

Rio’s: a CHEESE-ball Dublin dance club. It was packed. The pubs close in Dublin at 10, 11 – and after that there are only a couple of places where you can go hang out, so those places are always madhouses. Rio’s was one of those places. There was club music blaring, everything was silvery mirrored surfaces, so the crowd looked three times as large as it actually was. When we arrived, the party had reached its peak.

Jean and I stood in line to check our coats (a mistake!). Our passports and tickets home were in her purse, which she also checked (another mistake).

A small muscled bald man insisted on bonding with Jean while we were in line. He basically fell madly in love with her. Immediately. Wholeheartedly. Later in the night, after the fuse blew (I’ll get to that in a minute), and the entire dance club was out on the sidewalk, holding their pints of Guinness, and Jean and Siobhan and I had bonded with these other guys, suddenly Baldie emerged out of the throng and shouted joyfully at Jean, as though they were dear old friends who hadn’t seen one another in years: “JEAN!!”

Irish men all remember and assimilate your name after hearing it only once. They say it back to you right away. It’s a beautiful thing. Very good manners. “So … tell me, Sheila…” I’ve said it before and I will say it again: The one phrase that you never hear in Ireland is: “So what was your name again?” You don’t realize how nice it is until you are surrounded by people who behave this way automatically.

But back to the club scene: Baldie was all about line dancing. He loved line dancing and he assumed that because we were Americans, we would be able to line-dance. He was dancing with Jean when the power went, twirling her around, and I heard him say something about “the prom”. Ha ha. His vision of America: line dancing and proms.

Cheesy throbbing music, dancing crowds, strobe lights, so much fun. Brian dancing was so adorable. He was dancing for himself, totally unselfconscious about it. Our new friend from Tipperary. Brian had gained our love back at Kiely’s when we were discussing the “ring of Kerry”. We were blithering at him, speaking in a chorus: “We really want to do the ring of Kerry – we went there when we were kids – but we don’t think we’ll have time this trip …” And Brian said, “Well, to be perfectly honest with ya’, it’s more like the trapezoid of Kerry.”

We danced for maybe two or three songs when a fuse blew. The music stopped, abruptly, and the entire place plunged into darkness.

Brian got so embarrassed. He felt responsible. He had been trying to show these three crazy American girls a good time and look what happens! He was sort of laughing and apologetic, “This never happens!!” He kept saying that, assuring us: “This never happens!” My heart cracked! We assured him (through the pitch black) that we were having the best time of our lives. It was an adventure. The whole night was wacked, but once the lights went out, it reached a whole other level of insanity.

Baldie and Jean took to the dance floor in the darkness, despite the fact that there was no music. They line-danced in the dark. People kept drinking. The noise-level was outrageous.

Finally, someone came along and told us all that we had to evacuate the building.

A mild form of Irish pandemonium ensued.

A throng clustered in line to retrieve our coats, in the pitch dark. The poor coat-check girl blundered around in the black. Everyone continued to smoke and drink and whoop it up in total darkness. Jean and I lost track of Siobhan. We also lost track of the crazy group of boys who had taken us to Rio’s. Baldie continued to adore Jean, completely glued to her side, making witty smart-ass comments. He made us cry with laughter. Baldie had his eye on Jean, true, but he made sure that he charmed the crap out of her 2 sisters as well. Very important courtship technique, one that Irish men intuitively understand. Because we will drop you like a hot potato, en masse, if you are not nice to US as a whole. Because we are FAMILY and who are you?? The Irish understand tribal loyalty. They respect it.

We were going nowhere in that line, jammed together in a mad mob. Finally we reached the coat check area, only to be confronted by an Irish fireman in full fireman garb (Lord help us and save us), holding a flashlight, ushering us out a back door.

“But what about our coats?” I said, right in his face. Obnoxious American behavior. He waved me by, unperturbed.

The entire nightclub had poured out onto the street. A fleet of fire trucks lined the block, lights flashing. It was a cold night. No one had their coats. Everyone brought their drinks outside with them. Everyone, that is, except for Jean and me (we still couldn’t find Siobhan). We retained our American dread of “open containers”. The guys we met on the sidewalk were so shocked and bemused that we had left our beers in the club. “They’d have kept you warm, y’know?” We said something about “You allow open containers here?” and they all looked at us like we were crazy.

Pandemonium. Firemen were running around. We were surrounded by Irish firemen? Have I died and gone to heaven? A cop dashed by us and Jean exclaimed, joyfully, “Garda!”

We all got separated. I wandered around looking for my sisters.

Siobhan later described looking for us, and she finally resorted to yelling my name out into the crowd: “SHEILA!” And some random guy she had never seen before offered, “Oh … I think I saw her over there.”

Of course there were probably 5 other Sheilas in the throng … but everyone knew about the Americans among them. It was a strictly Irish crowd.

I found Jean finally. We huddled up against each other shivering, be-moaning the fact that our passports and tickets home were trapped in the doomed night club – which, for all we knew was about to explode into a fiery mesh at any moment. We met up with two or three other amusing Irish men on the sidewalk, and we were all like: “Our passports! Our plane tickets!” And one of them said to us, gently, in an “I’m not judging you, but –” tone: “It’d probably be best to not carry those things around with you.” So gentle!

Siobhan eventually found us.

Jean was so cold that this one guy put his arms around her, hugging her to keep her warm. He hugged her for about twenty minutes, and it somehow managed to be protective rather than creepy. “Ohh, ya look cold now! Here, I’ll keep ya warm.” We asked him to take a picture of the three of us, clustered on the stairs. Jean was blithering at him about how the “night flash” worked. Suffice it to say that Jean was obsessed with the “night flash”.

The guy’s friends were making jokes about “flashing”, every time the words “night flash” came out of Jean’s mouth (which was many many times.) “Oh, don’t say the word ‘flash’ to him!” “Wait for the nightflash–” “Now you’ve done it!” “Oh God, she said it again!”

Jean and I stood in front of one of the fire trucks, surrounded by all our new friends. Baldie reappeared, and continued to follow Jean around, making her laugh. Siobhan took a picture of all of us, and there was something hilarious, too, about Siobhan documenting all of this craziness — her leaning in, aiming her camera, and pressing the night flash.

One of the guys, the guy who had been hugging Jean to keep her warm, said to us ruefully, “My wife just had triplets. She doesn’t want to see my face for a while.”

They finally let people back in to retrieve their coats. Jean was our emissary. She described going back into the darkened night club, she described queuing up yet again for our coats, and once she got our coats and purses she was told to exit through the dance floor. She made her way through the darkened silver-reflected space, and the entire fire department was sitting on bar stools, lounging about, smoking cigarettes, saying to people as they passed by: “Hey, how ya’ doin’?”

Why is that image so damn funny to me?

While Jean was inside, I somehow hooked up with five other guys. It was that kind of night. I started talking to one hottie wearing a fleece hat. He asked my name. I replied, “Sheila.” All of his friends started chanting, in a warm approving chorus, “Sheila! Sheila!” Nodding to one another, like, “Ah, that’s a good name.”

“So … Sheila…” said Fleece Hat Hottie. Immediately saying my name back to me, of course.

Of course he assumed I was Irish, and the second I got out more than three words, he stopped me:”You’re from the States?”

“Yup.”

“Where from?”

“Rhode Island?” (said with a question mark…You just never know. Sometimes people assume you mean “Long Island”, which they’ve heard of … and then there was the one guy who ran the B&B who, when he heard we were from Rhode Island, asked us, “Is that near Houston?” So you just never can assume.)

Fleece-Hat Hottie leapt right in, eager to show his knowledge. “Okay — here’s how it goes, Sheila, right? You have Rhode Island — then Cape Cod — then New York.”

“No. That’s not how it goes. Cape Cod comes first. So it goes, Cape Cod, Rhode Island, New York –”

He took it in intently. “Ah, yes. Of course. That’s how it goes.” He had lived on Cape Cod. He told me his whole life story.

Jean said it was so funny, coming back out of Rio’s, and seeing me surrounded by five men, deep in conversation, as though we had known one another all our lives.

And finally: off we went. My sisters and I, as we pulled away from Rio’s, were still laughing, re-living funny moments, roaring about the night flash.

Jean suddenly called out, when we hit an intersection: “Look! It’s those guys!”

There were our “night flash” friends crossing the street. The new father of triplets, and the others. We beeped, waving at them, manically, as though they were our DEAR friends. They stopped, turned, squinted into our car. When they saw that it was us, the crazy American girls they had been hugging to keep us warm, they got these huge delighted smiles on their faces (oh, my heart … People!… I love people …)…Then, as a joke, they made this big show about how cold they were, how they wanted to get into our car to keep warm, they were hugging themselves AT us, implying: “Please keep us warm, because we kept you warm!”

They then caught a glimpse of our red-taped bumper and made huge faces of mock horror and alarm – like: “No, thanks … we don’t want to get into THAT car because you all obviously CANNOT DRIVE!”

All of this done with body language between the group on the sidewalk and the three of us in our car.

This night would already have been “one for the books” but something happened while the crowd lingered out on the sidewalk, coats trapped inside, that turned the night into something mythic.

A drunken convivial group, all hugging one another to keep warm, began singing “American Pie” together. And — beautifully — it caught on. Until the entire crowd from Rio’s, lining the sidewalk, joined in … and we all … every single one of us … sang along. Everyone knew every single word. We sang as loud as we could. People danced, people had their arms round each other … We worked together as a group, we went soft, we surged back to loud, we all slowed down, as one, during the melancholy last verse.

“I went down to the sacred store
where I’d heard the music years before….”

It is one of my favorite memories of all time: singing American Pie with the large group of Irish revelers, because the fuse had blown and nobody could leave because our coats were inside. We all became one.

Singing this’ll be the day that I die.

Siobhan, Jean, Baldie, me, and another Irishman behind us