Socrates the Bear
Jeff W. Bens
Socrates
the Bear
I
met Father O'Griffey outside a church in Castlemilk, Glasgow when he ran out of
the rectory to tell me he'd saved my bicycle from hooligans. "They were going to do you in," he
claimed and when I thanked him he asked me to buy him a drink.
"You
work there?" I asked. O'Griffey was wearing a brown cardigan and
paint-stained slacks.
"I
worked there," O'Griffey
said. "Until they threw me
out."
I
thought he meant the church. He meant
The Church.
O'Griffey
took us around the corner to an empty bar, The Golden Cross, where the TV
soundlessly showed the city of Glasgow barricading itself against the upcoming Old
Firm soccer match. A dumpster was
already on fire.
By
the second pint of lager I learned O'Griffey was a defrocked priest. "They fucking skooged me, mate, skooged
me so hard I nearly turned Protestant."
It couldn’t have been drink -- my Cape Cod family priest began at
sunrise and by noon was a bar room -- so it was either money or sex and looking
at him looking at the barmaid, and looking at him eyeing the coins on the bar,
I guessed it was both. You hear
tales. A syphilitic whiskey priest. We had one in Hyannis. He went to the Cape Cod Irish Isle motel and
swam in the saltwater pool. Back and
forth across the parking lot, from the bar to the pool, bar to the pool, in
just a Speedo, his wrinkly old body getting prunier by the minute until the
owner of the Isle, alerted by the bartender, personally drove up from Orleans
and drove the father home.
I
was happy for the diversion. Allison had
been visiting for five days and already I wished one of us was back in
Massachusetts. Given that we weren't
having sex, I figured she felt the same way.
Plus, she'd had her teeth knocked out.
She hadn't told me. She said she ran drunk into a wall. Where her front teeth should have been were
two black nubs, waiting on the crowns.
In
the quiet of the Golden Cross bar, I sensed O'Griffey leading up to
something. He kept talking-- about his
niece who was wasting her life as a nurse, about a trip he took for a priests'
convention to Spain, "A greater bunch of horndogs you've not seen in your
life. They couldn't keep their hands off
the waitresses or each other,"
about the loneliness of his days now as groundskeeper for "Father Nancy King." But all the while, as he grabbed my knee, as
he slapped my back, as he covered the barwoman's hand in his own, he seemed distracted,
anxious. I'd bought him his third pint,
for some reason I felt an affinity with him.
I liked the way he talked about politics, "Dennis Thatcher should
be locked in a dungeon with the Archbishop of Canterbury and made to consummate
their affair, " and films, fil-ems, "Now your auld Clint Eastwood, he
knows how to act. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the finest Catholic movie ever
made and don't let the critics of your Jew York fecking Times, or God forbid
the London Times which is not even a newspaper but an arm of Nazi propaganda of
the most outrageous kind, tell you otherwise."
And
he liked to talk about women, but in strange ways -- he liked the barmaid's "healthy
ankles" and "sturdy lower back" -- and when we moved into our
fourth pint I asked the Father if he'd ever been with a woman before.
"Only
Mary," O'Griffey answered solemnly.
I didn't know if he meant the mother of, theoretically, his Savior or a
remembered girlfriend so I let it go. And
in that moment of softness between us, O'Griffey unfolded a newspaper and laid
it on the Golden Cross bar.
"You
see there," O'Griffey said sadly, "that is what is wrong with this
whole fecking country." In the
paper was a large photograph of a kilted Sean Connery at a charity golf event.
"Golf?"
O'Griffey
looked at the paper. He flipped it
over. Then he slapped the page with such
a thunderous force that I thought his index finger would snap off and flip into
his glass. "There!" he cried out.
"That Gobshite Bear!"
There
was a photograph of a large black bear, Socrates, waterskiing on all fours
behind a bright red Scottish speedboat.
The caption said the bear would be making his monthly appearance at the
Grey Ghost pub for Sunday supper, "suitable for children."
There
was an article. Socrates, I learned, had
had his bottom teeth and the claws on all but one of his paws pulled out, the remaining
teeth and claws spared so they could be featured in movie shoots and Socrates
did a lot of them, from butter to beer, and it was on beer commercials that Socrates
learned to like his pint. He was a lager
bear, the article said, and if you held the glass to his bear mouth he'd lap it
straight away. Otherwise, they'd pour
the bear's pints into mixing bowls which he could manage to hold himself. Socrates didn't just roam the streets freely,
he had two keepers, a married couple who looked on Socrates like a son, the
husband having bought him from a circus "because of the way he looked me
in the eyes," and seeing Socrates there in an adjacent photo, standing
steadfast in a field of Scottish thistles, it was undeniable that the bear had
a philosophical way about him, a richness -- even depth -- of expression that
made you want to buy him a pint and tell him your weary woes.
Not
Father O'Griffey. There'd been some kind
of fight. O'Griffey did not think it
Catholic to let a bear into a pub period,
let alone on a Sunday when the ex-father went with his male parishioners for a
drink "at the off bars, not the official bars with pictures of JF Fucking
K and the old Pope" but at the places a little further from the church,
where barmen didn't ask questions and there were no phones.
"Come
on," O'Griffey said like the very presenting of the photo had made up his
mind. I called Allison from a phone box
to tell her where I was headed. She
started to say something. I just said
good-bye and hung up, with O'Griffey tugging on my sleeve.
At
the Grey Ghost, Socrates was surrounded at a respectful distance by
well-wishers. He had on a loose collar
and chain, but the chain was just slung over the bar and his owners were there,
in matching Celtic jerseys, in a booth beneath the Irish tri-color flag, near
enough, but not so near that Socrates couldn't have torn some heads off were he
in the mood. He wasn't. Socrates had a look of such thoughtfulness
about him -- of steady appreciation of his lager bowl, of his fish and chips
with mushy peas -- that he would not have looked out of place sitting beside
his Greek namesake. Dads were indeed
bringing children to sit beside him, mums with babies snapping photos, one kid
in a Never Surrender t-shirt pulled the bear's ear and I caught my breath but Socrates
didn't even look up. Watching Socrates
reflected in the bar back mirror, ten stools down from where we were sitting,
beneath the television showing the Old Firm teams warming up on the pitch and a
tree of hanging Celtic effigies strung up by their scarves-- and the bear was
sitting on a stool as well, a special stool his owners must have made for him but
a barstool nevertheless -- it was clear that Socrates wasn't just in some kind
of animal food daze, a bloated ex-bear, but rather he seemed to be truly enjoying
his food, his lager, his participation in this world of men.
"He
knows I'm here," O'Griffey spat. O'Griffey
lit a cigarette, his gaze like a gun sight on the bar mirror. He'd refused a drink. He was glaring at the lapping bear. And Socrates' tongue was a thing to behold,
lapping his beer beneath his one good row of teeth. When the beer bowl was dry, Socrates merely
looked up. If he'd ordered a cordial I
would not have been surprised, but this mere raising of his snout -- and the
bear's head alone must have weighed 80 pounds -- set O'Griffey to his feet.
O'Griffey
barked at the bear in the mirror.
"Are you looking at me, cunt?"
O'Griffey's
rudeness seemed to take the bear aback.
The crowd hushed. "Here,
now," one of the dads said.
"I
am Father John O'Griffey and don't sit there pretending you don't recall me!"
Allison
came in the doorway at just this moment, soaking with Scottish rain. Behind her, I could hear the shouts of
football fans and the breaking of glass on the street.
"Father--"
I said.
O'Griffey
whirled at me, his teeth gnashing. "I'm
a fucking care-taker now, sonny," he hissed, "and you, you-- "
he spun back and pointed at the bear, "are all that's wrong with this
soft-bellied nanny state of former Celtic Kings!"
Socrates'
owners jumped up from their booth. O'Griffey
lunged at the beast. For a flash, I saw Socrates
try to cover what was left of his meal with his paw, and when that didn't work
he caught the lunging priest with his other paw and indeed bear-hugged him. The bear's food scattered across the bar and
smashed to the floor. The crowd
stilled. Socrates looked at the fallen
food, at the skinny, greasy morsel he held in his arms.
And
then he released O'Griffey, just like that.
Looked at him. Looked at him with
eyes filled with compassion, even love. For
a moment, they just stared at each other, O'Griffey shaking with rage, the bear
steady with equanimity and unconditional acceptance. The pub grew quiet. And then O'Griffey stuck his lit cigarette in
Socrates' wide brown eye.
The
bear erupted to his feet. He was
giant. He flung himself onto O'Griffey
who hung on, kicking and clawing, as the men piled in with tables and
chairs. Socrates' chain rang along the
bartop. Glasses smashed up into the air
"My
brother, " Allison was suddenly screaming from inside the wet doorway, the
crowd of men pushing in behind her from the street. "My brother is the one who knocked out my
teeth. It was him. It was him."
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