The man from the Sandeman bottle would stand at the foot of [the fisherman’s] bunk and stare from the gloom
THE CORRECTION WAS already under way when I took a short cab ride in Donegal, on New Year’s Eve. Entire countries had already been declared bankrupt and the fat cat bounce was a spectator sport. Even in this remote town, people were talking about how executives across Europe would be rapped on the knuckles only on the day of reckoning, even though most of the country (including the taxi driver) would prefer to see them getting slapped across the face with a piece of Donegal Catch.
He was a friendly chap, the talking type. He was awaiting the trouble coming down the pike the following year with monastic calm. And he had a theory based on personal experience about how this was all for the best.
Before cabbing, he worked on the boats. Back in the day, he hadn’t ever wanted to stop working at sea, but there were contributing factors to this change of career and of life. First, as he put it, when he was away from home for long stretches, he began to suspect that his wife was having a lot more fun that he was.
Second (as Harry Browne has detailed in his excellent essay in the Dublin Review, “Where will they get the fish?”), the Irish fishing industry had begun to feel the pinch earlier than the rest of us. Five years ago was the beginning of the end of the golden age, apparently.
Though they were still leppin’ out of the sea, punitive quotas and bureaucracy were exacting a toll on the industry. Still, the harbour was full back then, and the town and the country were competitive in what they were allowed to catch, process and sell.
And how was it in the days of wine and roses? White-collar workers talk about the treadmill; the mind-numbing repetition of waking, commuting, working and sleeping, but it was the routine for the driver just as much as for the banker. The boats were hard labour, but regular and well paid.
For weeks they would be out on the water: Irish and Guyanans, Estonians and Greeks, pulling down a fortune, and nowhere to go and spend it. He said the Muslim men would drop their prayer mats and stop packing five times a day for their prayers, but the rest of them kept working.
They didn’t drink either, but for the rest of them, when they got back to port with fat pay packets, the party would begin. He had already bought his house and his car, so he and a few of the Nordic crew would proceed to drink the town dry, ordering vodka and Red Bulls in their 20s to keep them awake while they sank pint after pint, and then when the pubs in the town turfed them out, they would get a taxi driver to spin them down to the early houses. No counting change and no worrying about the future.
Once, they took a cab all the way down to Galway just to keep the session going, and when they got there, their clothes were wringing wet with the perspiration – all that alcohol being expelled from a body in a state of pure revolt. When they arrived in the city, they bought a change of clothes and then rented a cheap hotel room between them so they could take a shower and bin the old clothes before hitting the early houses and doing it all over again.
Over and over the treadmill turned, and here was his theory. Undoubtedly, times are now hard for those of us who are worried about work, and the worry persists that it’s not going to get better for a long time. But it tempers some of the anger to recall that plenty of things were rotten back in the good old days, too – the days when he was able to describe himself, relatively speaking, as a rich man. As he continued, he told us he wasn’t drinking much now, but he wasn’t rich either, and his working life was just as precarious as it ever was (taxi drivers all over are beginning to feel the pinch), but he was much, much happier.
In any kind of hard labour, they say you can grow to love the pain for the pleasure it divides – those ebony keys on a piano, and how they make the ivory look a gleaming white. But you would never catch yourself thinking that during your first few days and nights back on the boats after mammoth sessions of drinking on terra firma.
Readjusting was hell, apparently. One minute he was hammered in a pub and the very next, he was packing fish in the stinking hold under the deck, then tossing and turning in a bunk, visited by the DTs and by one hallucination in particular, in which the man from the Sandeman Port bottle – he with the hat and the cape – would visit in the dark of night, as the boat lurched across the waves and our man fought nausea, shivering cold sweats and existential horror. The man from the Sandeman bottle would stand at the foot of his bunk and stare from the gloom until, terrified, the driver would leap out of bed and stumble over to the lights to find out he’d been hallucinating again.
I have to say, it’s not the perfect story for a drive to the pub on New Year’s Eve, and especially with the return taxi booked for seven hours later. But it helps me overcome my own temptation to cast a fond eye back to the Golden Age; and it helps me to remember that hallucination always has the quality of real perception.