The Feast of St. Patrick

Later, the bar top will be awash with stale booze and there won’t be any toilet paper in the bathrooms and NO ONE will notice…

I’m half Irish, I’m an alcoholic, it’s St. Patrick’s Day and I write a sobriety blog. It’s the perfect storm. You would think less of me (let’s face it), if I didn’t tell you a good old fashioned drinking story today.

I have to be honest, St. Paddy’s Day is not my favorite holiday.  I don’t look cute in a stove pipe hat, I don’t drink beer and I never ingest anything laced with green die #32.  I also lived in New York City.  In New York on St. Patrick’s Day, people leave their offices at noon and hit the Irish bars (or call in sick and start drinking earlier).  By three the entire town is plastered.

Call me a party poop, but this does not look like fun to me…

I never drank on the day you get pinched for not wearing party beads to the office.  I would always leave work early and hightail it back to Darien, Connecticut where people would never dream of wearing false beards or vomiting into public storm drains…

I drove an Alfa Romeo in those days – one of the form over function cars that spit tepid heat from a vent the size of a quarter and don’t lock properly.  I was sitting at a light, at the corner of Park and 30-something, heading to the West Side Highway, when a pride of drunken, second generation Micks (I can say that because I’m Irish…) staggered down Park toward the car.

The largest member of the party, wearing crumpled pinstripes and a tiny leprechaun hat, blithely opened my car door and got in.  This was not a car-jacking, or even an attempt at schmoozing a surly blonde in a sports car.  He was just too tired to continue walking and too blitzed to remember it was not cool to get in a stranger’s automobile.

The light turned green, the cars behind me were blowing their horns, so I did the only thing I could do – drove across Park with the round, O’s of his friend’s mouths in the rear view mirror, and parked on the other side on the crosswalk and over a curb.

Have you ever tried to remove 220 pounds of drunken bond-trader from a bucket seat?

The buddies ran across the street like circus monkeys or Keystone Cops and together we yanked, cajoled and pulled at my passenger’s dead weight.  He never said a word.  I eventually put a 4 inch Stuart Weitzman on the chassis for leverage and pulled him by the lapels until he emerged and flopped onto one of his friend’s shoulders.  The friends were apologetic (in the haphazard way drunks are apologetic) and I left them holding my guy like an enormous, well dressed rag doll.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Be careful out there. I’m serious. Be careful – get a designated driver, and lock your car doors…