A good friend once told me that the Irish make whiskey in order to punish themselves. Or perhaps I should say that he warned me that the Irish make whiskey in order to punish themselves.
I had laughed when he said it, which was easy to do sitting in a dive bar in Southern California at 10 at night, trying to decide which of the bottles behind the counter looked the least dusty. At 10 in the morning, though, with my head pressed firmly against my desk, not actually pounding the desk but feeling as though it was, I wasn’t laughing. At that moment, I wished my friend was there so that we could debate whether the Irish made whiskey to punish themselves or to punish me.
Then I remembered that he, like the rest of my friends, family and indeed, everything my life had been up until a few months ago, was thousands of miles away and that I was in an office in Drumdondra, Dublin. Slowly it came back to me that, through some turn of events I still didn’t fully understand, I was now trying to manage a football team in the second division of the Irish football leagues. And that I’d just come up short in the one task the board had set for me. Actually I’d fallen short twice. They had wanted me to get the team promoted by winning the league, which I had failed to do. I had also failed in getting promoted through the playoffs, losing on penalties. Sometimes, I reflected, you put your faith in people and they repay you by totally letting you down when you’re really counting on them. The shots my striker and star winger had taken, and missed, replayed in my head.
The phrase “don’t hate the player, hate the game” kept turning over in my head, like some sort of repeating Vogon poetry line.
I tried to push it away, but just found my brain become enmeshed in questions... Who was the player? What was the game?
As I lay flopped on the desk, I wondered whether Ireland had pain relievers sold under the name brand Excedrin or if there was some other brand name that I needed to search out to get rid of this headache. Then I reflected that if any good had come from this strange journey from my home in Southern California, it was that the migraines that had plagued me since adolescence had not followed me. Before this hangover I hadn’t had a headache since arriving.
I thought back to the first time one of those headaches had come to me, when I was about twelve. Although I was always a voracious reader as a kid, just keeping my eyes open hurt. Listening to music on the radio had the potential to bring jarring pain and newstalk radio quickly became repetitive. Podcasts hadn’t been invented yet, let alone FM podcasts.
I had lain in bed all day, head hurting and stomach queasy, barely moving. When he’d gotten home from work, my dad came in to check on me. I’d groaned, likely making things seem even worse than they were, so he’d stayed and read to me. I remembered feeling simultaneously like a little kid and grown up when he said he was going to share a book that he had recently read and liked. That feeling deepened as he read to me the story of two pilots wrestling with the nature of reality. I didn’t understand it, but I understood what my Dad was trying to communicate in sharing with me. Or I thought I did. Or I think I thought I did. In any event, I hadn’t felt that grown-up again in years.
I was brought back to the present with an actual crash, as someone came in and put a stack of papers on my desk. The sound echoed through my head painfully and I quickly lifted it off the desk to see if the pain would stop.
It did not.
Luckily, no further such outbursts occured, so I kept myself upright and tried to focus on the papers that had just been deposited on the desk. After spending what seemed like a long stretch of time trying to resolve what the top sheet said, I realized that there was still someone in the room with me and decided to just ask that person what these papers were.
I looked up from the desk, wincing as more light entered my eyes, to see my personal assistant, who was more like my personal nemesis, looking at me.
“You’re better than this. You are. You have to be,” he told me.
“Eh…” I replied.
“We’ve got to go through the squad and pick out who’s going to stay with the team and who you’re going to cut loose,” he continued.
I tried to shrug to indicate that I knew that, but since I winced again at the movement, I wasn’t sure if my assent came across, so I said “I know that.” It came out very raspy and then I started coughing while he just stood and stared at me.
As I glared at him through my coughs I made the international hand motion for “let’s get on with it,” then remembered that it didn’t matter much, since he wasn’t an actual person, allegedly. Then I remembered that it didn’t matter, that he’d know the hand motion since I did.
“I’m sorry again about the punch,” I started. He waved that off with a hand movement that I recognized as one that I would have used.
“No need to say anything about it, it was a stressful situation, by design,” he told me.
“But still, it was wrong of me to get caught up in the moment and I know that you are…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence.
“... just another version of you?” he prompted.
“No,” I set my jaw and stared at him, “I was going to say ‘responsible for my being here,’” I finished, thinking back to the memo he had written and left for me to find just before the playoff final.
“Sort of,” he agreed, nodding. “Mostly not though. I think you’ll find that ‘this too shall pass,’ to coin a phrase,” he joked.
I thought back again, this time to the moments just after the shootout which had sealed our fate in the lower division for another season. Just after throwing the punch at my personal assistant I had walked over back to the dressing room, having to hear during the entire walk the sounds of the Cabinteely players and fans celebrating their win. It had been so close, but they were moving on and we weren’t.
I also heard the jeers of the handful of Shels supporters who were still in the crowd, some of which were very specific about what they wanted to do to me or certain members of my family. I stared up at the stands for a few long seconds, not really seeing, before I realized my presence was making the jeers worse and headed down the tunnel. I steeled myself and tried to rapidly gather my thoughts for the talk I would need to give the team to try to console them, keep them ready to come back next year and do it all over again. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and prepared to enter the room.
As I reached out my hand for the door handle I heard the shouts of “We are going up, I say we are going up” coming from the other locker room. Shouting, laughing, stomping, cheering. Then I heard a more frantic voice that sounded as though it was right next to me saying “He’s waking up I said he’s waking up!”
I stumbled, reaching for the door. “It’s not time yet,” I heard a voice answer. “Send him deeper.”
Just then Alan Byrne came down the tunnel and stood next to me. He’d been a stalwart presence on the squad throughout the season, though not one of our best players. He must have seen in my eyes that I wasn’t right, although he couldn’t have known the reason why. “It’s not our time yet,” he told me, “But don’t let it send you off the deep end.”
Looking around I saw that we were alone in the tunnel. It must have been the pressure getting to me, that was making me hear voices.
After I’d spoken to the players I lingered in the dressing room a bit, then made my way out.
The next night at the end of season awards I’d sat sullenly speaking enough to fulfill my duties, but mostly just sipping on a drink in the back of the room as the team of the season was announced.
