Peadar, 60, Woodlawn, NY

Woodlawn, New York is small enough that thirty-something Irish pubs can somehow constitute a neighborhood ecosystem, two avenues of bars & moving between them, the same people in slightly different permutations. There is a particular species of local who seems to belong less to any one establishment than to the geography itself. When I first started working at the Burren, I remember thinking that I had never encountered such a high concentration of genuinely strange people in one place. Not strange in any particularly dramatic sense, just people who seemed to have developed, over the course of their lives, their own private logic & then refused to translate it for anyone else. There were characters.

While exchanging messages with a friend of mine who had worked there before me about the local clientele, they asked,

Have you met Peadar yet?

I don't know, maybe. Which one is that?

The druid with the beard.

Peadar is difficult to explain in the way most things are difficult to explain when you have only ever seen them in person. He walks down Katonah Avenue usually carrying some inanimate treasure: a road sign without the sign, an axe embedded in a piece of wood, his walking “stick” which is not a stick but an astonishingly heavy, spiral-ridged metal rod wrapped in colorful ribbon. Other times he has Abby & Kaela with him, his two dogs, who he talks about with a seriousness I have never seen him apply to almost anything else. Some days, he boasts blue chalk in an abstract pattern across his face. War paint. He comes in every day, usually in a state of some minor emergency, overwhelmed by the world's various demands, repeating his catchphrase: Oh, Sugar Honey Iced Tea.

He is eloquent in a way that is almost inconvenient. He speaks in riddles, although I don't think he means to. He will tell you something and you have to listen through the sentence rather than simply to it, otherwise whatever he means has already disappeared by the time he finishes speaking. I suppose this is part of the problem with Peadar, or perhaps part of the problem with everyone else: you never really know how much of what he says is true. Eventually you decide to believe all of it.

He has a ‘contract’ with the owner of the Burren. The contract is very serious & very real, except that it consists mostly of Peadar coming in to charge his phone, taking a free Coke, & getting a bag of ice. He keeps a thick book which he calls his ledger, & in it he writes everything down:

Date — 1 soda / 1 bag ice / charge.

He is keeping track of his debt, which he has every intention of paying back, though I don't think anyone ever expected him to. I'm not even sure anyone considers there to be a debt in the first place, but this does not seem to matter to Peadar. There is a ledger, & therefore there is an account, & therefore eventually the account must be settled.

If you are a woman in Woodlawn under the age of, say, 30, you are probably his niece. This, too, is a kind of contract. He was once telling me about one of his many nieces & I remarked,

Oh, she's your niece?

Every young lady is my niece. He pointed at me. You're my niece.

I’m your niece?

You're my niece. Unless you call it quits with your boyfriend—then you're my aberrant niece. See? I am funny!

There are less funny things. Alexei, the Ukrainian man who used to come into the Burren before his inevitable barring, would grab me by the neck & pull me toward him hard enough that I couldn't get away, just so he could laugh hysterically at his own jokes two inches from my face. Peadar does not like Alexei. He doesn't make a grand declaration about this. It's not nice, he says. It’s not nice.

I think about this because of the dogs. Peadar loves Abby & Kaela with an intensity that makes the rest of his mythology suddenly seem less theatrical. After he told me about someone who had hurt one of them, I said, without really thinking, for me, that's a death sentence. His whole expression changed in an instant. You don't know me. Again. Oh, you don't know me. He stared into the depths of me, & for a moment there was none of the strange performance of Peadar, just a person looking at another person & making sure they understood something. Listen. If you're ever in trouble, you come find me.

Every day before he leaves the bar, he always asks: before I go, do you want anything from the outside world? I always say no. I don't think he has much ability to give me anything I could reasonably ask for. This is not the point. He asks every time.

There is something strange about the phrase, although I don't know exactly what it is that makes it strange. The outside world is where we are. The street is outside. Katonah Avenue is outside. The world beyond the windows is outside. & yet, when Peadar says it, the phrase seems to acquire some other geography, as though he is always about to leave the little illuminated room of the Burren & cross into something much larger, something neither of us has any particular control over, & he is offering, before he goes, to bring something back.

For all the things Peadar tells me, I know very little about his actual life. I know that he has six sisters. When I asked if he got along with them he said: No. They’re a week of Tuesdays.

I know that his father is dying. Lately, one of the things that has been keeping him in a hurry. The most recent time I saw him rushing out of the Burren, it was for this reason.

I have to go see my father, he said. I’m going to sing him a song.