I left Limerick City bright and early the next morning for Dublin, sitting next to a nun who was five pence short of a coffee. I made up the difference and she thanked me profusely. Once upon a time she might have given me God’s blessing, but things had modernized, even here in Ireland, and she turned back to her spirituality convention brochures, and I turned back to my Diderot.
In Dublin, I picked up a guy named Damien at The George. We chatted for a while, then he kissed me.
“Um, before I did that, I should have told you…”
Yeah, I thought, you’re HIV positive, or you’ve had a sex change, or…
“I’m a priest. Well, ‘er, I was a priest.”
“Oh.”
“I hope that it’s not a shock. I should have told you sooner.”
“Why?”
Somehow it all fit into place for me. He looked like a priest. Was it the dark eyes and hair? The black clothes? None of that made a priest a priest. With a wink in his eye, Damien confessed to being an à la carte Catholic. He’d gone to Los Angeles on a mission and had been shown into the Gay Community by the other priests who were almost all fags. He’d resigned from the priesthood after falling in love with a guy. They’d stayed together something like five or ten years. He’d even come with Damien to live in Ireland but never found work, so he left. He said many Dubliners knew he’d been a priest, and some thought he still was. Their eyes burned through him, he said, but he didn’t care.
When we left the bar for my hotel, looking both ways before entering the alley where it was hidden. “There’ve been bashings here.” That wasn’t surprising. I’d never been anywhere where adolescents were more encouraged to go out and get plastered to show their budding manhood, and the main straight drag of Temple Bar was just steps from this microscopic gay world.
“Gays are really quite vulnerable here,” I observed.
“It’s not Los Angeles, that’s for sure.” Not that Los Angeles was much different for safety factor. In Ireland there were certainly less AIDS cases than there were in many other places on the planet, at least at the moment.
Damien had lovely, pale skin with dark black hair, all of it soft. Irish men have a cumbersome masculinity, which might make them the sexiest men in world if it weren’t for the sluggishness of too many beers. When we made love, he was hesitant, distant. I could see that his life had been more hidden than mine, and he wasn’t as good at letting himself feel pleasure. I left Dublin thinking of him, hoping he’d manage to stay safe and healthy.
Shingles: There is a curious cure for this complaint, which seems to be limited to South Tipperary and it is confined to anyone who is by birth a Cahill. Any Cahill can do it and apart from that essential proviso no special powers are required. It merely consists in rubbing the affected place with blood from a Cahill. The Cahill must be present and must himself draw his own blood and rub it on the shingles.
from The Middle Kingdom: the Faerie World of Ireland by Dermot Mac Manus