The New Yorker:

The initiation of a young Irishman.

By Frank McCourt

When you’re Irish and you don’t know a soul in New York and you’re walking along Third Avenue with trains rattling along on the El above, there’s great comfort in discovering there’s hardly a block without an Irish bar: Costello’s, the Blarney Stone, the Blarney Rose, P. J. Clarke’s, the Breffni, the Leitrim House, the Sligo House, Shannon’s, Ireland’s Thirty-Two, the All Ireland. I had my first pint in Limerick when I was sixteen and it made me sick, and my father nearly destroyed the family and himself with the drink, but I’m lonely in New York and I’m lured in by Bing Crosby on jukeboxes singing “Galway Bay” and blinking green shamrocks the likes of which you’d never see in Ireland.

There’s an angry-looking man behind the end of the bar in Costello’s and he’s saying to a customer, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if you have ten pee haitch dees. I know more about Samuel Johnson than you know about your hand and if you don’t comport yourself properly you’ll be out on the sidewalk. I’ll say no more.

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