Irishman

“How’s the crack?”

“No thank you.”

He presented himself by whacking me upside the head with a cardboard sign plastered with a picture of an English terrier sipping on a can of PBR.

“No no no, ye see in Ireland when we ask ‘how’s the crack?’ it’s like asking if ye had a good time. I’m not offering ye any, sis, no.” He continued to nudge against me, not because he was trying to initiate anything, but because he was quite intoxicated and could hardly walk straight. I told him the crack was great, then he grabbed my wrist and gave me a hi-five.

“When I was in Dallas, Texas I got in trouble with the coppers for asking someone about their crack.”

“Wow,” I remarked.

We introduced ourselves, and when I told him my age, hoping that would shoo him away, he continued to walk beside me. “Ye came to the festival by yerself?” He asked. We were walking in a hoard of people through Stanley Park, so I felt safe enough to tell him that I did. He continued to go on about how cool it was that I traveled on my own. I know it is, and I love it, I mused.

“Don’t be takin’ any drugs, they’re not safe here. On my first week in Vancouver I had a cigarette laced with snow, made me sick.” I was well aware of the opioid epidemic here, there were several posters in my hostel warning travelers about how 100% of the street drugs tested had traces of fentanyl which is fatal at very small doses. There were over 1,400 fatal drug overdoses in British Columbia alone in 2017. The short story is; don’t take drugs should you ever travel to Vancouver.

“Ye want to know how I got to Vancouver? Well I was at the pub, I and a couple of me mates had to streak naked across the floor, the bet was the last one to the other side had to buy a first class ticket to a non-European destination. Well I lost, and Vancouver was the cheapest ticket. I haven’t been back to Ireland in five years, I don’t plan on going back. Ye see, good things can happen at the pub.”

“Sadly, bad things happen too…” I told him about how the other night I was out clubbing with two Englishmen I meet at the bar below my hostel. We danced, drank, had a merry little time, but it was after we left and went our separate ways one of the men I had danced with followed me out. What I should have done was wave down a cab or wait for a bus, but instead I proceeded to walk the two kilometers back to my hostel. He came up behind me, I made it clear I wasn’t interested but he lingered, asked if I was alone, I firmly stated, “no, my mother and father are waiting on me.” He lingered a bit longer, began grabbing me at the hip and trying to lock his fingers between mine, “you come to take taxi with me, we go to my home,” he said in his thick middle-eastern accent. I replied with a fat “no thank you” and began to walk down a side street, “this is my turn, have a good night.” It wasn’t until I was just outside my hostel that I decided to look back, and saw that he was just a block behind me.

The Irishman pulled out a cigarette, so I did the same. I was just about to light it when he waved his finger in front of my face, “no no no, a pretty lady doesn’t light her own cigarette.” I let him spark mine and smiled.

“What a gentleman.”

“Yes ye see,” he began to explain, “I am a gentleman. I will open the door for ye, offer my jacket if yer cold, give ye a napkin if yer crying, I’m a gentleman.” How sweet, I thought.

We neared the end of the crowd, he had to turn right on Cordova Street, and I left.

“Ye don’t talk to anyone on yer way, it would be a shame anything to happen to ye, yer too nice a girl.”

“Thank you,” I said.

By Camille Bliss