Irish Whistle

I’ve never felt so old and so young at the same time: Friday night in a bona fide nightclub. It’s an all-ages show, which lessens my esteem for the club, but we seem to be the only high schoolers here, which takes the place back up a notch. Even so, I’m not sold on China Club, which exudes—through its indirect red lighting and “Dragon Room” (off limits to us kids)—a vague colonialism, just the thing Sean tells me the band we’re here to see protests.

As Sean told it on the drive downtown, though, there’s nothing vague about the way the British oppressed the Irish. I was embarrassed by how little I knew of Irish history, despite being of mostly Irish heritage, and how little I knew of Sean’s fervor for it, despite having been in his orbit since fourth grade, when he and I sat at the same table in Mrs. Rossi’s homeroom. I cut myself some slack, guessing he wasn’t reading biographies of Irish revolutionaries back when we were nine. His is new knowledge, but his resultant anger feels long and deep. “The Troubles aren’t over,” he told us, turning briefly from the steering wheel. And I wanted to care about those troubles more than I cared about whether Mike was watching me from the burgundy back seat of the Fitzgerald family minivan.

There’s no chance we’ll blend in here at the club, so I try not to care. Sean doesn’t; he’s too pumped to see his new favorite frontman from Ireland by way of the Bronx. Mike doesn’t seem to care about anything, which I wish wouldn’t make him so attractive. He’s younger than me and already has a smoker’s cough. I know he likes me—Sean told me when he invited me to join them—but you wouldn’t guess it from looking at him, which keeps me looking.

Sean has moved us even closer to the stage, so that when the band barrels onto it we’re so close I flinch. Just as quickly, I fix on the singer who bangs his head to the bass drum beat that signals serious business. He has red hair and glasses, just like it says in the lyrics to their one song that gets radio play, and I try to place him in my family heritage, try to find traits of brother, father, cousins, uncles in him. His flop of copper hair might be like my dad’s was before it settled into auburn age. I don’t know. I can’t find a definitive connection.

Irish whistle joins the drums and it sounds almost silly to me, making me feel again like a horrible excuse for an Irish person. I try to see into a cloudy memory of going to hear a family friend’s band at the Kilkenny Castle Inn, try to attach my parents’ interest and approval then to the music in my ears now.

Now the music turns serious again, as the singer takes over to tell of a long-ago uprising against the British. Sean and all the others packed right against the stage raise their fists in solidarity, leaving them up even when the singer lowers his own, leaving them up so long I feel I’m supposed to join in and feel my right hand begin to clench. Still hesitant, I look behind me where the crowd is not nearly as dense, fists rising above it only here and there, then turn to my right where Mike stands, looking right at me.

He gives a small smile and a short laugh that seems to say, “Just what I was thinking,” then lifts his hand. But instead of closing his fingers and turning to the stage, he reaches his open hand past me, places its palm on the back of my neck, and pulls me into a kiss. This culture I speak.

We kiss for the rest of the song and all of the next one, not stopping when Sean turns to us in the short silence between songs or when the man next to Mike jokingly offers him a Mentos mint, not stopping until the singer launches into the song we know from the radio, the one we can sing along to.

Kate Sjostrom is a writer and writing teacher educator based in Oak Park, IL. Her work has been published in Rhyme & Rhythm: Poems for Student Athletes, RHINO, English Journal, and elsewhere.