Trinity

My first trip to Dublin was in 1980. It was about the pubs then, and in one of them I ended up in a nook with three rugby playing freshmen and an aging professor of theirs from Trinity, a London-born Joyce scholar who took us back to his campus flat and plied us with Jameson's.

The flat was part of a pension-like complex, with the toilets and washrooms located outside the apartment at either ends of a lumpy carpet-wrinkled hall. Because it was after hours, the professor forbade us from using the toilets. "If you need to whiz, use the sink."

The sink was the centrepiece of his sitting room. Surrounding it were mirrors that came alive when the professor turned on the lights, giving the sink a shrine-like appearance. But rather than take its waters, as you would at Lourdes, in this one you left your own.

A first round of shots, then the loudest of the lads stood up, unzipped his fly and announced it was time for his "reverse baptism."

"Ah, the bull's up first, leading the way," said the professor, and I watched the professor watch the lad steady himself to the right of the sink and piss into it.

"Have you read Joyce's Ulysses?" the professor asked me, his eyes on the pisser.

"Only Molly's soliloquy," I replied.

"Then you'll remember this," he said: "... he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst through his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters ..." 

Later that night, while helping the professor assemble a plate of cheese and pickles in the alcove that passed for his kitchen, he leaned towards me and whispered. "They don't know. You do. You're from North America, you're wise to these things. If they knew, it would be bad for me. Very bad. You mustn't let on. Promise me you won't. Please promise me. Do I have your promise?" 

And I promised.