I was exiled in New York 25 years ago ...

IT was Christmas Eve babe, and I wasn’t in the drunk tank.

Not yet, anyway. This is the time of year when most people gravitate towards family or close friends, and surroundings that reek of home. For some, home is just too far a journey, even for the seasonal fare. For others, home is a distant memory, lost or taken somewhere along the road.

Emigration has the country in a vice-like grip. Back on the Sean Bhean Bhocht, the warm glow of Christmas is tempered by worry, or the absence of loved ones. For the absent themselves, the pull of home is strong at this time of year, but sometimes just beyond reach.

I found myself in that predicament nigh on 25 years ago, exiled in New York. Risk would have attached to any excursion out of the country. Like thousands of others, my papers were not in order. The cost was also prohibitive, and, besides, staying put was as experience in itself.

The festive holiday was — and presumably still is — a different kettle of fish stateside. Fidelity to the work ethic, and proximity to Thanskgiving Day — the other great holiday in the US — combine to relegate Christmas below the feast it represents this side of the Atlantic. The holiday persists for a day, two tops, and then it’s back to the grindstone.

My exiled holiday season began on Chirstmas Eve with friends from home. There was drink to be had. And more drink. And you get the picture.

On one level, we told ourselves that we were merely following on the tradition that makes the day one of the great drinking occasions for those disposed toward alcohol.

Yet we were also celebrating the freedom of being strangers in a strange land at this time of year, anonymous rather than displaced.

By the time the night closed in on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, inebriation beckoned from the far side of the next beer. We bade the house a “happy Christmas”, and moved out into the freezing December cold. The evening’s imbibing had fortified us against everything life could possibly throw up, bar sobriety.

There was no sign of the NYPD choir, and we wouldn’t have recognised Galway Bay if they were singing it. But the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.

The drunk tank came into play at a McDonald’s outlet on 86th street between Second and Third Avenue. Therein, a pair of city cops was enjoying a quiet bag of fries, when the tricolour badge on their blouses prompted me to fill them in on how the season was celebrated back home. They were not impressed.

One of them turned to my friend and told him in a paternalistic tone: “You better get your pal out of here if he doesn’t want to end up in the drunk tank.”

We left at speed. I never got to see if there was an old man in there, who might turn to me and say, “won’t see another one”. I never got to sing a song called The Rare Old Mountain Dew, which is just as well, because I haven’t a note in my head.

I have no recollection where I was when the eve turned into the day. In the years before that particular one, like many others I had often found myself going from pub to church for midnight Mass to celebrate the birth of Christ. A certain cohort would be in no fit state to worship, but were in attendance to skip mass the following day, to better nurse the previous night’s takings.

I rose late in the Queens district of Sunnyside, which was then the home away from home. The two housemates had decided they were going to celebrate with Christmas dinner in a local diner. One of these gents is no longer around to celebrate. The other is now a restaurateur who feeds the good burghers of Dublin, although, at the time, he couldn’t cook a sausage to save his life.

My pockets were empty and my soul damaged from the previous night’s carry on. I decided, on the spot, that this Christmas Day lark was not worth the effort. The new year would have to be brought forward. I would celebrate no more. I was going to succumb to an austerity of the senses for the day.

The lads trotted off for their feed. I made my way down to the local deli and ordered a turkey sandwich on rye. The turkey was nothing to write home about, but at least I was observing the traditional ritual. I have no recollection of ringing home that day, but it must have occurred, and I must have briefly envisaged the scene back home, the smell of the dinner, the terrible TV, the fuse that burns slowly when a family of adults are cooped up together for the day.

Come early afternoon, I went for a walk. The streets were relatively empty, and before long I found myself entering the train station at 46th St.

The number seven train to Manhattan had never been as sparsely populated in the six months or so I had been availing of it. With its load so lightened, the train rattled under the Hudson River at a rare old speed.

Grand Central’s customary bustle was nowhere to be seen. Ascending to street level, it was obvious the city that never sleeps actually does manage to fit in a power nap on this day of the year.

I took off up Third Avenue, slightly exhilarated that for this day at least I was king of the concrete canyon where, as Mr McGowan noted, the wind blows right through you, it’s no place for the old.

Just a few bodies were out and about. And in contrastto the usual scene on the streets of Manhattan, everybody nodded at each other and offered a seasonal greeting, as if we were survivors of some terrible disaster.

For some, walking alone through the empty streets of a foreign city on Christmas Day might sound sad. Not me, not then. The solitude was golden, and there was no loneliness. When you yet haven’t reached the official age of adulthood, the day is not about memories of seasons past, or of loved ones who no longer inhabit this mortal coil. It is not about a pause for reflection, as one year turns into the next. The years when it was coated with the magic of presents which appeared in the dead of night, delivered down a chimney by a legendary figure, are long gone. The years ahead are an open book, where all our dreams can come through.

For an exile on the cusp of adulthood, traipsing through the empty streets of New York in the 1980s, it was about putting down the day until the city cranked up again into the wild, untamed beast that it is.

Happy Christmas, and whatever you do, stay out of the drunk tank.