Pat Joyce's Tavern

Cleveland, OH

Growing up, if St Patrick’s Day fell on a weekday, my dad would pull us out of school to go watch the parade. More correctly, he would pull us out of school angrily, since he was forever livid that our Catholic school did not declare it a holiday.

“What do the Irish have to do to get a holiday?” he would ask.

Almost all of my dad’s arguments contradicted themselves but my favorite was his assertion that the Irish still faced intense discrimination despite the fact that (according to him) we had invented almost everything you use on a daily basis:

“The battery? Ever use one of those, hmm? Well the Irish invented that. Amazing when you consider we weren’t allowed to have jobs until ten years ago. How about TV? You guys ever watch TV?”

“I thought the first television was invented in Scotland, dad,” I chimed in. Challenging one of his claims was fun because he always fell back on the same defense:

“Oh yeah? Well, ever heard of theEnglish language? I doubt they could have invented it in Scotland if the Irish hadn’t saved the entire English language in the Middle Ages!”

Both my parents were incredibly proud to be the son and daughter of Irish immigrants. And the stories my grandparents, great uncles and aunts told about immigrating from Ireland were amazing:

“It was 1908 and we had a bad harvest on the farm in Cork, so my pa says: ‘You’re going on a ship to America because we can’t feed you. You’ll land in New York, then you must get on a train to Cleveland where you have an uncle living as a roofer.’”

“’How will I know when I’ve reached Cleveland?’ I asked. And my pa says, ‘The conductor will announce it. Plus, your uncle Timmy says it smells like it’s on fire.’ I was ten years old.”

I used to wonder why old people were so serious, then I learned: Half of them escaped starvation by entering and navigating a foreign country by themselves at age ten. I’m not sure I had used a public restroom by myself at that age.

When I was growing up in Cleveland, it seemed like each person was but a generation or two removed from immigrating to America; and they all believed that

a) Their ancestral country was responsible for most major inventions and works of art.

b) Thank God they didn’t come from whatever country dominated the next neighborhood over because they did everything ‘wrong’ over there.

Better yet, was how closely these complaints matched their own behavior: “Heaven help us, if we lived along 25th Street next to those Germans, Sean! They’re crazy!” my uncles would lament. “All they do is drink beer! All day long!” and then, without irony, my uncles would open their fourth bottle of whiskey for the day. But, having complained about a neighboring race, they would always—perhaps out of fear of appearing racist before their nieces and nephews—follow that criticism with what they thought was a compliment:

“I will say this for those Germans, though: As drunk as they get, I’ve never seen them make a mistake measuring a porch. You need a roof put up, a floor re-planked? You call some Germans! Doesn’t matter how much beer they’ve put-back, they will fix whatever you need fast and it will last a lifetime.”

c) They each believed that the best day of the year was whatever religious holiday they had converted into a drinking party since immigrating to America. The Irish had St. Patrick’s Day, which is known nationally, but in Cleveland each month saw a different party being thrown by a different immigrant group for hilarious, lesser-known holidays.

There was Oktoberfest of course, and The Feast of The Assumption, when Italians celebrated the miracle of Mary, mother of God, being summoned to heaven so her body would not perish on earth. Yes, Catholics believe that Mary was tractor-beamed into the sky like Captain Kirk, right in the middle of lunch. They celebrate that perfectly normal moment by covering Little Italy in beer tents and carnival rides so unsafe they could slingshot the believers into the clouds to meet the Madonna in time for some heavenly tiramisu.

Weirder and more debauched was Dyngus Day, a Polish holiday the Monday after Easter where everyone gets drunk and the boys throw water on girls and spank them with pussy willows. The girls respond by throwing dishes. That was a true holiday in Cleveland, Ohio: a giant wet tee-shirt contest that ends in dueling acts of domestic violence. As though the city wanted to prepare an entire generation to be arrested as a couple on an episode of “COPS.”

But the biggest of these holidays was always St. Patrick’s Day. Each year, we attended mass in the morning, then dropped my sister off at the start of the parade route, as her Irish dancing school always marched in the procession. We would then hurry over to St. John’s Cathedral and watch the festivities from the top of the cathedral steps. The cathedral was next to where the judges sat, so all the participants would do their best routine when they got in front of it. We would cheer loudest for my sister’s Irish dancing company, then as soon as they passed my mom would turn around and say, “OK we have to go pick up your sister before we go to the pub, to Pat Joyce’s,” which is when she would realize: we had lost at least two of my brothers.

I was the oldest of six kids and my impression of the 1980s was that if you entered any event that erected temporary fencing, you were losing half your kids at that event. Have you seen nature documentaries where the mother bobcat knows her kittens are old enough to hunt for themselves and be independent so she roams farther and farther and tries to lose them? That’s how parents in the ‘80s walked with their kids. Parents would walk at top speed, trying to find an open picnic table for lunch and, after spotting one, they would turn to announce that we have to hurry even faster to claim that table before anyone else and, in that instant, realize that were only talking to half their kids.

“Where the hell is Kevin?” my mom asked.

A mom turning to notice a missing kid has a timeless dynamic because she always asks her husband for an insight and, if he’s anything like my dad, he confidently and reassuringly says, “He’s right here,” and points, without looking, to an area behind him that contains nothing but blank, humanless concrete.

“Shit, he’s lost!” my mom yelled after dad predictably gestured to an empty stretch of sidewalk.

“Where did we lose him?” she asked us and we all shrugged. Actually, all except for my other sister—still a toddler—who was able to state the exact place Kevin wandered off.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” my dad asked.

“I did,” she answered. “I said ‘Kevin is leaving us’ and you told me to quit complaining.”

My dad was so inured to his kids asking “Are we there yet?” that he learned to globally ignore us while commuting, to the point where we could say, “Dad, our brother just disappeared into a crowd of strangers”, and he would automatically respond, “I already told you, we will be there in ten minutes!”

Today, you can give a child an electronic device while traveling and, if the battery lasts long enough, you could drive them to Mount Rushmore without hearing a complaint. In fact, you could drive the wrong kids to Mount Rushmore without a complaint.

I often wonder what we would need to pass on the highway, for my kids to stop watching their device and look out the window instead. I know it’s not a mountain or an ocean or even a flying bald eagle. We would have to see something that, if we were filming, would change history. Something like a mountain collapsing or bigfoot running alongside the vehicle.

“He can’t be far,” my dad assured my mom. This is, without exception, the first response by a father after he’s lost a kid and it’s always hilarious because it wholly contradicts every experience you’ve had of that kid. A momentarily unobserved child will bolt like a prisoner who’s just heard the guards are out of ammo. A kid is always further away than you realize; it’s practically a scientific constant, like the speed of light. If you lose focus on a kid for more than four seconds, they will somehow cover more terrain in that time than a wildcat could.

Kids love to run; it’s the only speed they know. My wife and I sleep in the downstairs bedroom, and we are never alerted to the fact the kids are up by a few random pitter-patters in the morning. No, they have a biological need to run everywhere and from the moment they rise it sounds like a field hockey game is being conducted on mahogany mere feet above our heads. You know how kids run when they are trying-on new shoes? Sprinting and zigzagging, asking if you have ever seen someone move so fast? That’s how my kids get a glass of milk.

“You stay here, I’ll go back,” my dad proposed. He took me and my two, non-missing brothers to go look for Kevin. We descended the steps, turned the corner and, within a block or two, realized we were outside of Pat Joyce’s Tavern, which all of us knew to be the second destination.

“He might have gone in there!” my dad suggested and escorted us inside. We walked inside and saw what is, to this day, one of the most arresting visuals I have encountered. Kevin was seated at a table with my dad’s boss. At the time, my dad worked for Catholic Charities and reported directly to His Holiness, The Bishop of Cleveland. So, yes, my brother was at a seat next to a Bishop who was wearing a giant white miter, like Kevin had pulled Excalibur out of a stone near the Cuyahoga River and was now the Child King of Cleveland, assembling his court and Royal Advisors at Pat Joyce’s Tavern.

My dad and the bishop both start guffawing upon seeing each other. This was a pretty standard greeting for my dad. Whenever he ‘found’ friends at a public event, they were usually holding one of his lost kids, laughing hysterically. They would hold up the errant child and say, “Lose something?” and laugh uproariously.

We had lunch at Pat Joyce’s and then drove home. Somewhere well before the midpoint of our thirty minute drive—but far enough into the drive for it to be a hassle— we realized my other brother, Brendan, was not in the car. He was still at Pat Joyce’s Tavern, playing with our cousins.

“Damnit,” my dad cursed, as he turned his blinker on to signal a U-turn. We were returning to Pat Joyce’s to recover the second lost Flannery of the day.

The van was silent, except for the sound of the blinker and my dad muttering, “these kids, these kids” over and over.

“Well, maybe he’ll be sitting next to the pope,” my mom joked as we started back towards downtown.