The first time I ever put my foot on a New York pavement I was stepping out of a taxi on Bleecker Street in Greenwich village. It was 1987. I went back to the same spot the other week, over 35 years later, just to have a look. Through different eyes. In totally different circumstances.
ack then, I was about to embark on a mad six-week journey around the country with a mate from college. This time I was here with my girlfriend to see a play I wrote, which was being staged at a theatre in Midtown Manhattan, near Central Park.
I have been back to New York on a good few occasions since that first visit in 1987, but this January was a special visit — it was a great family occasion, with Canadian cousins and my brother and his family from Mississippi all making the journey, as well as nieces and another brother from Ireland and a great friend and his daughters who live in Queens.
I am happy to report the play went over fantastically well. Heaven has a cast of two — a married couple in their 50s — delivering alternate monologues to the audience. They tell us things they cannot tell each other. The play details a weekend spent in the wife’s hometown in Co Offaly as they attend her sister’s wedding.
We had a good few of Irish extraction in the audience who got the lingo, but for Americans not familiar with the specifically Irish references we had a glossary explaining some terms — like “ride” means having sex; “the jacks” is the restrooms; “johnny” is a condom; Sacred Heart is a religious picture of Jesus; Tesco is a large supermarket; Tubridy is the host of the Irish TV chat show The Late Late Show; and “up the duff” is pregnant.
The critics were kind, but the feedback from American theatrical folk was really heartening. They like to talk, they like to share their thoughts, and it was really gratifying to hear what they had to say. Not gushing, ah you’re great, blow-smoke-up-your-ass stuff — they really wanted to engage with the show, the underbelly, the shadow world of the characters.
Actors Janet Moran and Andrew Bennett knocked it out of the park and had people standing every night. Not everyone. You have to earn your standing ovation in New York. In recent years in Ireland, people seem to stand at the end of every show. Maybe it is time to rein it in a bit and save the accolade — make it mean something again.
Andrew is the main actor in An Cailín Ciúin, the Oscar-nominated Irish-language film. His beautiful, understated performance in the movie perfectly captures a rural man of that time. It is good to have such stories rooted in actual Irish experience to counterbalance the kind of mythical Irish world of the other Oscar contender, The Banshees of Inisherin.
Martin McDonagh, like John Ford before him, makes no claims to paint an actual realistic portrait of Ireland. It is fantasy and it is a very successful concoction, and more luck to him — but sometimes the world needs reminding of what Irish people actually look and sound like.
Usually after a show in New York, you would go out on the town and trawl the bars and bring back wild drinking stories about one-eyed Vietnam vets or other colourful characters you had met, but this time I was taking it easy. No late nights. No drink.
I have a condition called GERD, which stands for gastroesophageal reflux disease — essentially, it is acid washing up and causing discomfort and inflammation so you cannot drink alcohol or caffeine and you have to watch what you eat.
So, no bacon, maple syrup pancakes, cups of coffee Americana diner experiences for me, and no late-night bars, but that was OK. You adjust. You enjoy the hangover-free days — and we walked for miles and miles.
I am back now and figuring out what to do with the condition. I see a wonderful acupuncturist, and last week I went to a homeopathic practitioner who listened to me for an hour-and-a-half. It was like being in therapy.
I told her about my first experience of the symptoms when I was 12. It was 1979, during the Pope’s visit, and I was in hospital with stomach pains and they did tests and released me and said there was nothing wrong. It was psychosomatic.
I had gone off to boarding school that September and run away — an experience I have written about in this newspaper. So, the stress of that may have caused the pain as anxiety seems to bring it on.
I take the western approach as well and get it checked out in a hospital, but I am told we carry things. We push them down into the body and inflammation is caused as a result. Inflammation is on the rise. Traumas, both minor and major, not expressed and pushed down. We’re a complex web of genetic and ancestral baggage and our body stores up stuff from the stressful periods of our lives.
My next step may be a holistic approach called body talk. This is an idea — supported by quantum physics — that our reality is created by our consciousness and, therefore, by changing consciousness we can change our reality, including our health. By tapping into the innate wisdom of the body, it is possible to determine what needs to balance.
Now, there was a small dice with death in New York that would have left searching for a cure for GERD utterly redundant. We were staying in Midtown for four nights in old-fashioned apartment accommodation — snug little rooms with a galley kitchen. One morning after breakfast, there was suddenly a furious knocking on the apartment door and a man with broken English asking to please open up. I opened the door and a small maintenance man rushed past me in a bit of a panic. “The gas!” he kept repeating. “The gas! Other guests can smell it in the hallway.” He darted to the cooker and switched off the gas ring, which I had obviously neglected to turn off properly after boiling water. I apologised profusely. He then reefed open the windows to let in some air.
As he left, he asked me to be more careful. Suitably scolded, I looked at my girlfriend and we laughed. One lit match and we were history. A tragic death in NYC. So, you never really know the hour or the day.
New York remains a fascinating place, now seen through an older man’s lens without quite the same wide-eyed excitement of all those years ago when I first landed in Bleecker Street.
It’s still a movie set, the bright lights of 42nd Street and Broadway, the steam gushing through the grates, a city of talk… everybody talks… all the time and it still has that energy and excitement.
We visited an apartment overlooking Central Park, which costs $20,000 a month in services, like a Woody Allen location. And then you catch a glimpse of people on the street, huddled in doorways. Late-stage capitalism writ large, the two worlds existing cheek to cheek — the gap ever widening.
