The Night of the Pickles
by Bill Kitcher
Among my closest interlocutors at the pub are several Irish people. Actual Irish people, not our Canadian “Irish” who call themselves Irish although their ancestors haven’t set foot in Ireland since some time in the 18th century. No, actual Irish people, whose accents are so thick you need to pay close attention to them to make out what they’re saying (as I often say to them, “Who wants to do that?”), and if they’re talking among themselves, it’s impossible to determine if they’re speaking English or Gaelic or Bengali.
Their almost-unanimous dislike of the English is so pronounced that I often tell them I was born in England, lived there for many years, and generally liked it. When they get a little drunkenly hostile about that, I tell them I’m also part Scottish, and that seems to calm them down. Neither of those ancestries are true. My family has been Canadian for so long that my illiterate forebears never had a clue where they were from. If you look at my face, you would probably conclude I’m a generic white European type, some kind of Euro-mongrel: pale skin, light brown hair, black beard, and red armpit hairs. Around Jewish holidays, I’m often asked by young Orthodox Jewish men if I’m Jewish, so there’s also that possibility.
But back to the Irish people, who were currently in Canada working either in construction or in bars. I had no idea Canadians couldn’t do either of those jobs to the extent that we had to import people. One of the Irish people, Daniel, doesn’t belong in the aforementioned groups as he’s lived in Canada for fifty years – since the age of eight – and works as an accountant or something else just as meaningless. For some reason, Daniel held onto his accent and, because there were no Irish people in his schools, it morphed into a dialect so odd that neither Canadians nor Irish could understand anything he said. His tendency to mumble and general quietness when speaking didn't help. One day, I was able to decipher that he admired both the IRA and Margaret Thatcher. As they hated each other and had, in fact, tried to kill each other repeatedly, I realized I could safely ignore Daniel and his points of view. Still, being Irish, he and the newcomers warmed up to each other until they got to know each other.
Daniel played a minor part during The Night of the Pickles, which I’ll get to in a minute, but first I want to introduce some of the other characters. (It occurs to me right now that my digressions and long-windedness may indicate that I have some Irish ancestors. I hope not. I fear for my sanity as it is.)
The Irish lads were a mixed bag of bartenders and cement mixers, ranging from funny and intelligent to stupid and sexist. It didn’t take too long to determine who was what. When it was just the lads together, things were pretty jovial and light-hearted, lots of jokes and good-natured insults, and far too much reminiscing about how better things were in the old country even though none of them believed that for a minute. After all, they were here in Canada, making far more money than they ever could back home, so much money, in fact, that sometimes they forgot to stop drinking until they fell down.
When their female compatriots joined them in the pub, they changed. Quiet and respectful they were until the fourth or fifth pint, and then they’d return to their actual selves.
In my opinion, the Irish women were uniformly more intelligent and enlightened than the men. For instance, some of them actually read books without pictures. Their humour was more subtle, they showed more respect for other people, and they spoke more clearly whenever a Canadian said their accents were too thick to be understood, not just more loudly as the men did.
The best and brightest of the women was Siobhan from Kilkenny, who was a crack bartender at our pub and in Canada for a couple of years before going home to do her Master’s degree at Trinity College Dublin in neurobiology or geology or some other ology I didn’t have the first idea about.
I’ve previously mentioned the stupid and sexist lads, and one in particular was a leading performer in The Night of the Pickles: Declan from Cork, who was a plumber. Several of the buildings Declan had worked on had to have their plumbing completely re-done due to Declan’s incompetence. He never received any reprimands due to a particularly prickly union and because, as I was told, when he was asked about his mistakes, he answered in such a thick accent no one could understand what he was talking about. Once, he said, he was asked to repeat his explanation, and he pretended to get furious, accused the building inspectors of anti-Irishness, and that was that.
Declan was a horrible dickhead, and even his friends thought so. One night, a new (non-Irish) server was working her first shift, and her first table was Declan and a couple of his workmates, who were there only because Declan said he’d pay.
When the server said, “What can I do for you?”, Declan replied, “A roll on my lumpy mattress at the end of your shift.” The server told the owner, who told Declan to knock it off. And Declan did. For about a week. Declan tipped well so he was tolerated, but not by the server, who quit the next day.
So, Siobhan, Declan, Daniel, and I were a few of the characters involved in The Night of the Pickles. There was also the Australian.
At the front of the pub, there is a small rectangular area. I was having a drink with Siobhan (no romance there; she was way out of my league, what with her ology and all). At a nearby table, Declan was with three of his work colleagues who could stand him. In the opposite corner was an Australian fellow who at the time was travelling across Canada.
Declan made a crude remark to Siobhan, to which she responded with her venomous wit, something I wish I could remember the exact phrasing of but can’t, something about the comparable sizes of his two most used organs, his tiny brain and the other one, the one he used for thinking. That shut Declan up for a while but, like a mechanical toy that gets wound up, he started again. This time I told him to shut up. As I outsized him by half a foot and fifty pounds, he shut up. Again, not for long.
On my return from using the facilities one time, I saw Declan sitting across from Siobhan, who was looking into her pint, shaking her head. I heard the Australian say to Declan, “I said to leave her alone, mate.”
Declan, who had his back to the Australian, turned his head to the side and said to the Aussie, “Why don’t you go back where you came from and shag some sheep?”
“You’d know all about that,” said the Australian, “except in your country, the sheep shag you."
Declan’s workmates and Siobhan laughed at that, which upset Declan. The best retort Declan could come up with was, “Oh yeah?” but he didn’t move.
The Australian got out of his chair and approached Declan from behind. The Aussie wasn’t tall but he was stocky and obviously quite strong; with one hand, he picked Declan up by his shirt collar, pulled him off the chair, and dragged him out of the rectangle toward the bar. Declan attempted to get up but the Australian would just shake him like a rag doll, kick his feet out from under him, and Declan would be flat on his back again.
Having reached the bar and spotted what he was looking for, the Australian said to Daniel, “You. Open up that jar of pickles and hold it out to me.”
Daniel did as he was told; he was as curious as anyone to see what would happen next. The activity had captured the attention of everyone else in the pub, a sea or possibly a small lake of smiling and laughing faces, a veritable smorgasbord of skin tones and ethnicities, a true United Nations in microcosm unified in their enjoyment of Declan’s treatment.
The Australian stuffed a pickle in Declan’s mouth, then another, and another. As Declan failed in his attempts to either spit them out or chew them, the Australian directed Daniel to hand him the can of whipped cream, which was waiting patiently on the bar for someone to order a fancy coffee, unlikely in this pub.
Daniel handed the can to the Australian, who proceeded to dowse the pickles with whipped cream, being sure to cover Declan’s face as well. Then he opened Declan’s shirt and fired some cream in there, undid Declan’s pants and emptied the can. With a deft flick of his wrist, he flipped Declan over onto his stomach, and pulled his pants and jockeys down to his knees. He reached back to where Daniel was still holding the jar of pickles, and extracted the last pickle, a beauty of a specimen. He raised it over his head and cried, “The revenge of Excalibur!”
Although I now knew where the expression about the proverbial pickle came from, I still felt I had to step in to stop the indignity that was about to happen. Even Declan didn’t deserve this. I thanked the Australian for his service, and basked in the glow of admiration for my wisdom and sense of justice from the assembled throng. I felt proud as a world citizen, a Canadian resolving a dispute between an Australian and an Irishman.
Declan slunk out of the pub, never to be seen again. He was deported back to Ireland as his working visa hadn’t been properly filled out. Future condo owners in the city were thankful for that. The rumour is he passed away in a sheep-shearing accident but no one has ever been able to verify that.
The Australian, whose name also turned out to be Declan – go figure – met and married a Newfoundland doctor (a legitimate marriage, not one of those convenient ones so he could stay in Canada). They live in Moncton, where he works in construction in the summer and tends bar in the winter. I’ll have to do some research to find out if foreigners visiting Canada have any talents other than those two occupations.
Daniel and I still go to the same pub but we don’t talk because I still can’t understand a word he says. But, for the price of a pint from a stranger, he’ll modify his accent to tell the tale of The Night of the Pickles. Daniel is now known as Keeper of the Pickles.
Siobhan returned to Ireland, obtained her Master’s and Ph.D. in Ology, and got a job with the World Ology Institute in Hamburg, Germany. Coincidentally, the Hamburg area is known for its cucumbers and, every year on the anniversary of the Night, Siobhan sends me a jar of pickles.
Their almost-unanimous dislike of the English is so pronounced that I often tell them I was born in England, lived there for many years, and generally liked it. When they get a little drunkenly hostile about that, I tell them I’m also part Scottish, and that seems to calm them down. Neither of those ancestries are true. My family has been Canadian for so long that my illiterate forebears never had a clue where they were from. If you look at my face, you would probably conclude I’m a generic white European type, some kind of Euro-mongrel: pale skin, light brown hair, black beard, and red armpit hairs. Around Jewish holidays, I’m often asked by young Orthodox Jewish men if I’m Jewish, so there’s also that possibility.
But back to the Irish people, who were currently in Canada working either in construction or in bars. I had no idea Canadians couldn’t do either of those jobs to the extent that we had to import people. One of the Irish people, Daniel, doesn’t belong in the aforementioned groups as he’s lived in Canada for fifty years – since the age of eight – and works as an accountant or something else just as meaningless. For some reason, Daniel held onto his accent and, because there were no Irish people in his schools, it morphed into a dialect so odd that neither Canadians nor Irish could understand anything he said. His tendency to mumble and general quietness when speaking didn't help. One day, I was able to decipher that he admired both the IRA and Margaret Thatcher. As they hated each other and had, in fact, tried to kill each other repeatedly, I realized I could safely ignore Daniel and his points of view. Still, being Irish, he and the newcomers warmed up to each other until they got to know each other.
Daniel played a minor part during The Night of the Pickles, which I’ll get to in a minute, but first I want to introduce some of the other characters. (It occurs to me right now that my digressions and long-windedness may indicate that I have some Irish ancestors. I hope not. I fear for my sanity as it is.)
The Irish lads were a mixed bag of bartenders and cement mixers, ranging from funny and intelligent to stupid and sexist. It didn’t take too long to determine who was what. When it was just the lads together, things were pretty jovial and light-hearted, lots of jokes and good-natured insults, and far too much reminiscing about how better things were in the old country even though none of them believed that for a minute. After all, they were here in Canada, making far more money than they ever could back home, so much money, in fact, that sometimes they forgot to stop drinking until they fell down.
When their female compatriots joined them in the pub, they changed. Quiet and respectful they were until the fourth or fifth pint, and then they’d return to their actual selves.
In my opinion, the Irish women were uniformly more intelligent and enlightened than the men. For instance, some of them actually read books without pictures. Their humour was more subtle, they showed more respect for other people, and they spoke more clearly whenever a Canadian said their accents were too thick to be understood, not just more loudly as the men did.
The best and brightest of the women was Siobhan from Kilkenny, who was a crack bartender at our pub and in Canada for a couple of years before going home to do her Master’s degree at Trinity College Dublin in neurobiology or geology or some other ology I didn’t have the first idea about.
I’ve previously mentioned the stupid and sexist lads, and one in particular was a leading performer in The Night of the Pickles: Declan from Cork, who was a plumber. Several of the buildings Declan had worked on had to have their plumbing completely re-done due to Declan’s incompetence. He never received any reprimands due to a particularly prickly union and because, as I was told, when he was asked about his mistakes, he answered in such a thick accent no one could understand what he was talking about. Once, he said, he was asked to repeat his explanation, and he pretended to get furious, accused the building inspectors of anti-Irishness, and that was that.
Declan was a horrible dickhead, and even his friends thought so. One night, a new (non-Irish) server was working her first shift, and her first table was Declan and a couple of his workmates, who were there only because Declan said he’d pay.
When the server said, “What can I do for you?”, Declan replied, “A roll on my lumpy mattress at the end of your shift.” The server told the owner, who told Declan to knock it off. And Declan did. For about a week. Declan tipped well so he was tolerated, but not by the server, who quit the next day.
So, Siobhan, Declan, Daniel, and I were a few of the characters involved in The Night of the Pickles. There was also the Australian.
At the front of the pub, there is a small rectangular area. I was having a drink with Siobhan (no romance there; she was way out of my league, what with her ology and all). At a nearby table, Declan was with three of his work colleagues who could stand him. In the opposite corner was an Australian fellow who at the time was travelling across Canada.
Declan made a crude remark to Siobhan, to which she responded with her venomous wit, something I wish I could remember the exact phrasing of but can’t, something about the comparable sizes of his two most used organs, his tiny brain and the other one, the one he used for thinking. That shut Declan up for a while but, like a mechanical toy that gets wound up, he started again. This time I told him to shut up. As I outsized him by half a foot and fifty pounds, he shut up. Again, not for long.
On my return from using the facilities one time, I saw Declan sitting across from Siobhan, who was looking into her pint, shaking her head. I heard the Australian say to Declan, “I said to leave her alone, mate.”
Declan, who had his back to the Australian, turned his head to the side and said to the Aussie, “Why don’t you go back where you came from and shag some sheep?”
“You’d know all about that,” said the Australian, “except in your country, the sheep shag you."
Declan’s workmates and Siobhan laughed at that, which upset Declan. The best retort Declan could come up with was, “Oh yeah?” but he didn’t move.
The Australian got out of his chair and approached Declan from behind. The Aussie wasn’t tall but he was stocky and obviously quite strong; with one hand, he picked Declan up by his shirt collar, pulled him off the chair, and dragged him out of the rectangle toward the bar. Declan attempted to get up but the Australian would just shake him like a rag doll, kick his feet out from under him, and Declan would be flat on his back again.
Having reached the bar and spotted what he was looking for, the Australian said to Daniel, “You. Open up that jar of pickles and hold it out to me.”
Daniel did as he was told; he was as curious as anyone to see what would happen next. The activity had captured the attention of everyone else in the pub, a sea or possibly a small lake of smiling and laughing faces, a veritable smorgasbord of skin tones and ethnicities, a true United Nations in microcosm unified in their enjoyment of Declan’s treatment.
The Australian stuffed a pickle in Declan’s mouth, then another, and another. As Declan failed in his attempts to either spit them out or chew them, the Australian directed Daniel to hand him the can of whipped cream, which was waiting patiently on the bar for someone to order a fancy coffee, unlikely in this pub.
Daniel handed the can to the Australian, who proceeded to dowse the pickles with whipped cream, being sure to cover Declan’s face as well. Then he opened Declan’s shirt and fired some cream in there, undid Declan’s pants and emptied the can. With a deft flick of his wrist, he flipped Declan over onto his stomach, and pulled his pants and jockeys down to his knees. He reached back to where Daniel was still holding the jar of pickles, and extracted the last pickle, a beauty of a specimen. He raised it over his head and cried, “The revenge of Excalibur!”
Although I now knew where the expression about the proverbial pickle came from, I still felt I had to step in to stop the indignity that was about to happen. Even Declan didn’t deserve this. I thanked the Australian for his service, and basked in the glow of admiration for my wisdom and sense of justice from the assembled throng. I felt proud as a world citizen, a Canadian resolving a dispute between an Australian and an Irishman.
Declan slunk out of the pub, never to be seen again. He was deported back to Ireland as his working visa hadn’t been properly filled out. Future condo owners in the city were thankful for that. The rumour is he passed away in a sheep-shearing accident but no one has ever been able to verify that.
The Australian, whose name also turned out to be Declan – go figure – met and married a Newfoundland doctor (a legitimate marriage, not one of those convenient ones so he could stay in Canada). They live in Moncton, where he works in construction in the summer and tends bar in the winter. I’ll have to do some research to find out if foreigners visiting Canada have any talents other than those two occupations.
Daniel and I still go to the same pub but we don’t talk because I still can’t understand a word he says. But, for the price of a pint from a stranger, he’ll modify his accent to tell the tale of The Night of the Pickles. Daniel is now known as Keeper of the Pickles.
Siobhan returned to Ireland, obtained her Master’s and Ph.D. in Ology, and got a job with the World Ology Institute in Hamburg, Germany. Coincidentally, the Hamburg area is known for its cucumbers and, every year on the anniversary of the Night, Siobhan sends me a jar of pickles.