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John introduced me to two girls one evening. After our initial first-impressions of the pub, we noticed that it was (and I presume still is) a fact that girls (and boys too) tended to travel in mismatched pairs. One would be whom we called "the good looking one"; the other was her friend… The friend, this time, turned out to be nicer (at least I thought so), and, when sufficient courage had been swallowed, at £1.85 a pint, I experienced my first kiss from my first girlfriend. I was nineteen. She, I think, was seventeen. She was a Leaving Cert student, whose father happened to be a school teacher, which meant that boys and booze over books was a no-no in his book. Still, we met a few times "in secret" – she even managed to keep me out of the pub for a while – until reality and her impending exams got the better of us and we ended. I was broken-hearted; she, being of the maturer sex, was upset. We’d lasted maybe two months. There's a saying that you shouldn't wish for things: you might get them. And that was my experience from the time I first walked into the pub scene until I all but crawled back out, years later. "Romance" was my chief interest in visiting Bruxelles, with booze (that is, getting mindlessly drunk) a close second. It wasn't long before I was having more of a "romance" with the booze, than the intended targets, the young women who passed through its narrow double doors and into the gloomy cavern of Flanders Bar. Long ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, ones with ginger heads, unpronouncable names... I drank them all. Sometimes, when I was lucky, I also had a girlfriend in tow. I shed my tears and drank my beers and met someone else at the video-games table. A dozen roses couldn't keep her from another guy, and later a child that ended her Bruxelles days rather too soon. A nurse's aide gave me six months of laughter; an arts student kept me off the streets for a couple of weeks; a wild, mountainy woman shared her passion for nature... Someone introduced me to a drink called "snakebite" as a cure for each of the heartbreaks of lost love... Part lager beer, part cider, it looked like used dishwater and tasted much the same, but it kicked muleishly and rotted the teeth and guts and brain. Plenty of people had a higher capacity for booze than me, and I never envied them. I always thought it was stupid to drink until you were incapable of getting to a place of safety (not necessarily home), and I still maintain that margin for movement. Nonetheless, on occasion John, or another kind soul, had to drag me bodily up the road. I remember, one time, being too ill to travel further on the last bus home. I don't think John was too impressed by my getting off about five stops into the journey, with the prospect of a four hour walk (or five-hour drag) ahead of him, but to give him his due he didn't abandon me. We ended up inside an Indian takeaway in Harold's Cross. "Have you got any Alka-Seltzer?" he asked the man behind the counter. The guy looked carefully at the printed menu above him then mutely shook his head. Despite my condition we both roared with laughter, stumbling tearfully for the door, poor Will clutching the stomach he'd just emptied further down the road as he went. Foreign food was best for lining the guts after a night's overindulgence, and you'd find one or other of us (sometimes both) stuck in an alley behind a pizza place, or draped over a canal bridge eating curry from a tinfoil container, sometimes slobbering doner kebab all over the place in the early hours. By the middle and end of the 1980s, we'd expanded our activities to include two or three different watering holes within striking distance of Grafton Street. I enjoyed "The Pink Elephant" in the afternoons, when its "happy hour" served expensive cocktails at pint-prices. "Bartley Dunnes", which had a reputation as a gay bar, had that dingy quality and dim lighting that had disappeared from Bruxelles. Across the street, "The William Tell" had interesting nooks and crannies, a couple of pool tables, and sometimes an open fire in the fireplace. But as the 90s approached, I was struggling. The marathon was unrelenting, and I was hitting my personal "wall". John and I moved in different circles, doing our own things, and, frankly, life was lonely, despite the crowds. I didn't see my family for days at a time; slept in damp bedsits on concrete floors, spare rooms or sofas lent out to me by fellow boozers. My self-destruct button had been pressed and I didn't know the whys and the wherefores of it all, nor could I see a future. I searched the bottoms of pint glasses in vain until, at last, I walked up the stairs and went home from there for the last time. I think, maybe, I was growing up. Bruxelles, for me, was over.
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