I was talking with Tim who approached me a few minutes earlier. I was still at Katie Bloom’s, and he saw me there with my "boyfriend," and wanted to know where he went. I told Tim that my "boyfriend" was a blind date. I worked through the question and answer portion that followed that comment, and now we were on to what I do for a living.
“You don’t look like a mortician,” he said. I smiled the smile I smile every time I hear this observation.
Tim follows that up with, "Did you know a sheriff’s dispatcher sounds the same when calling a funeral home about a death call that he does calling a tow truck driver about a flat tire? Not everything is so sacred anymore. Death is a weird career choice.’"
I retort: "Well I wanted to be a trapeze artist, but ended up in a mortuary. And I have no regrets being a mortician; some of my greatest moments are those shared with the dead.’”
Tim tells me he was raised in a funeral home and sometimes he was sent downstairs to the basement to bring supper to dad. That would really freak him out to interrupt his father, hard at work repairing a body. He said that one time he walked in and a head was sitting on the table next to the body. He was still freaked over it.
His first job was helping dress the bodies with his older brother. They were just kids and all they could think about was if they’d hurry up, supper won’t be cold. Why did that room always remind him of supper, he asked me as he pondered over his Ruby Ale?
It was a rainy Saturday evening and I had worked all day at the cemetery, but was able to gather the energy to slip into my date outfit for yet another adventure for a guy reading The DaVinci Code. This guy was a guy’s guy, someone who I guessed had a life-size Colin Farrell poster taped to the inside of his closet.
He was in the bar a full hour before I arrived, he said, because he’d heard that “hot
women” hung out there and got “liquored up.” Loser!
“When Irish Americans take to the streets on St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate their heritage,” he rambled on to all who would listen, “all the newspapers portray them in cartoons as drunk, violent monkeys.
What a bunch of bull crap!”
He’d begun drinking Car Bombs before I arrived. A Car Bomb is half a pint of Guinness with a shot glass of Irish Whiskey or Irish Cream dropped into it; one then chugs the pint. Not really the behavior of someone looking to meet his soul mate, now, is it?
He made it known to all that he was a devout Irish Catholic and heedlessly began to bash the Protestant faith. Begorrah, this guywouldn’t let up! I kept thinking of recent headlines such as “Drunken fool disrupts Boston Marathon,” and “Defrocked Irish priest strikes
again.”
Then he switched to Black and Tans. At least he had good taste in beer.
I kept thinking, If a drunk man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still a jerk?
He was now yelling at some poor guy standing near him.
“Why the hell did that redhead in here leave? I didn’t even get a good look.”
Blah, blah, blah…who cares, you stupid ass? I was out the door as soon as he stumbled off to the can.
Finbar pulled a classic “show and throw up;” the more he drank, the more he spewed. The whole unreal experience reminded me of a joke: a snake slithers into a bar and the bartender says, “I’m sorry, but I can’t serve you.”
“Why not?” asks the snake.
The bartender then says, “Because you can’t hold your liquor.”