JUNE 27th, FLORIDA, 1982.
Dad was downstairs in the hotel lobby figuring out the plans for the day with ‘American Joe’, our resort travel guide.
‘American Joe’ had taken us from Miami Airport to the hotel on Collins Avenue a few days earlier for our two-week trip to Florida. The relationship between Joe and dad was becoming increasingly more fractured and less useful. He couldn’t tell you where the ice vending machine was in the hotel, but he sure as hell knew the location of the best casinos, pancake diners, and strip-joints on Collins Avenue. Organisations of day-trips were about shoving brochures in your hand and vaguely pointing out the window and down the road to a far and distant planet. His grasp of English ran to less than a dozen words.
I was upstairs with the TV on and running out to the balcony waiting to see the Space Shuttle Columbia in the sky after take-off. Less than one minute after take-off, there she was, right there in front of me – like in real life, not the movies, soaring high to the heavens. A moment never to forget.
Dad made that trip happen, even when it looked like we would cancel when mam got badly ill a month or two before. Like a baby, I selfishly cried for weeks with our American holiday in the balance. Dad was tired with double-jobbing and I was growing older, more independent-minded, and we weren’t as close as those fondly-remembered evenings when we played together on the floor of the living room with dinky cars and Lego.
‘’No, John. You both need to do this together. We’ll go again together, another year.’’ [We did with mam in 1984]
Man and boy ventured on their own. We learned a lot about each other in that two weeks – how much we were alike, but how much we were also different as two people in this world.
Two clueless clowns, one 14 and the other 42 years-old who knew as much about the USA as watching Kojak and Starsky & Hutch together on a Saturday night! Beyond that, we had my mam’s accounts and photographs of a trip she did to New York in 1973. The farthest dad had ever travelled was to Manchester, England in the early 1960s on his honeymoon with mam. And even then that had to include a football match to see his beloved Manchester United play. Men and their toys and passions!
Columbia safely arrived in orbit for the R&D mission. I’m back glued to the TV from the balcony. Columbia was but a speck in the distance. Dad arrives back from negotiations with ‘American Joe’ in the hotel lobby.
‘’Right, all sorted. We’re doing Water World today.’’
‘’What! I hate being in water!’’
Dad worked in Premier Dairies in Kimmage and all the workers got a family discount on weekends for Crumlin Swimming Baths. He spent countless weekends taking me and my sister there and trying to teach me to swim. I was having none of it and would sit sulking at the side of pool just watching on as the other kids and adults played. We tried buoyancy floaters and blow-up armbands, but I was still having none of it. Me and water didn’t get on together once I was in it!
‘’It’s grand. No swimming. We don’t even need water gear for the slides.’’
‘’I thought we were going to the Kennedy Space Center today?’’
‘’Too busy with the launch. We’ll do that tomorrow.’’ [We did!]
An hour later we are in shorts, man and boy, and waiting at the bus stop vaguely pointed to us by our ‘American Joe’ on Collins Avenue outside the hotel. The bus approaches and we do the Irish thing and put our hands out. Other people look at us oddly. In that moment, dad announces the start of another one of his social experiments for America. It wouldn’t be the first nor the last that trip.
‘’How does the bus driver know how much we’ve paid when the money goes into the machine?’’
We’d long been used to Irish bus conductors and tickets and paying your fare. Dad wanted to test this new-fangled USA system with machines in the bus and no conductors!
I react by getting on the bus first and take my seat. Dad randomly throws a handful of coins in the machine and quickly proceeds to join me.
‘’Hey, bud, you’re short!’’, comes the cry from the driver at the front.
Dad returns to carry out further negotiations, agrees to pay his additional fare in more coins, and then asks the driver to remind us of the stop for Water World. This proved to be a mistake. Never piss off a bus or cab driver, nor an airport baggage or elevator attendant!
‘’But if all this new automation works, with buses and lifts and vending machines – why is there always an attendant there to help and want a tip?’’ Dad would ask.
Dad conducts a 10 minute analytics of how that machine ‘knew’ he was short. We conclude that the machine knows more than the driver, and maybe it’s even driving the bus itself.
It’s one hour later. This is a long trip. Longer than we expected. People get off, new people get on. Within ten minutes after that, we become the only two white clowns on the bus, and the run-down neighbourhood doesn’t really look like a place Water World would be. The bus empties and everything goes somewhat dark as we pull into an underground bus station. Lights go off inside the bus. The driver clamours out of his seat with a sandwich shoved in his mouth, about to depart, and notices two clowns half-way down the bus.
‘’Guys, we’re done. Station stop. What are you doing?’’
Dad pipes up. ‘’Eh… the Water World stop?’’
‘’Man, Water World was a half hour ago!’’
After further negotiations, the driver lets us stay on the bus until the other driver arrives for the return route. But it doesn’t end there.
Things are looking up. We start to recognise landscapes and neighbourhoods. We are buoyed when dad spots a street sign for Water World.
‘’Nearly there, Michael.’’
Boom. At an intersection the bus rear-ends a wine-red 1970s Ford Mustang, and we are surrounded by four raging teenagers flapling their arms in disgust and pointing to a huge dent in their boot. The Shuttle Columbia launch went smoother than this earlier. I’m not really missing Water World right then. We have to remain on the bus for another hour to fill out witness forms for the cops.
‘’We didn’t see anything officer, back here. Can we get off?’’
‘’Just fill out the form, sir.’’
We then wait at the side of the street a half-hour for another bus to arrive and rescue us.
We later decided to abandon our Water World visit attempt. By 6 pm, we arrived back on Collins Avenue. A day wasted. No special trip. Bummer. We did get to the Kennedy Space Center the following day.
‘’Well, I got to see the real Space Shuttle take-off today.’’
‘’You did, not like on TV. We watched it too, downstairs, from the hotel lobby.’’
We ended the day with the best local ribs and Chocolate Sundaes ever. All recommended by ‘American Joe’. He had his uses on that trip!
There were other adventures and ‘Dad’ experiments, all cut loose in America for a memorable fortnight. Including, one morning on a casual boat trip down Miami harbour, when he convinced some real estate agent sitting opposite – who just sparked up a conversation with us – that dad was a wealthy Irish glass bottle manufacturer and we were seriously interested as a family in buying a $1.5 million estate on Florida’s millionaire row.
In that story, he pretended to be a friend of Irish comedian Brendan Grace and then emerging actor Gabriel Byrne, all of whom he somehow got to know because he delivered milk to their family doorsteps in the 1960s!
In reality, dad had never met Brendan Grace, but he did have a brief barfly encounter conversation with Gabriel Byrne in the Submarine Bar in Crumlin, Dublin years earlier.
‘’Jaysus, Ann, you’ll never guess who was in ‘The Sub’ tonight at the bar. Only yer man from the Riordans on RTE!’’
Dad had a way of weaving every encounter and experience in life into an adventure and story to be told.
There are some days and indeed weeks in our lives we can never have again, together. Even years later, decades… I always believed that was the two weeks I got to know my true Dad and his spirit best, uncut. The sparkle in the eye was just a glimpse of what lay beneath.
I miss and love you, Dad, on this first year we are without you.
Comments
Post a Comment