We first went there in January 2000. The Y2K project had obviously come to an end, it was January, and at my workplace in DC, January inevitably meant the mass layoff of IT contractors. Everyone from the NCO-level down knew damn well that we’d have to hire contractors again by May, but the management had head-in-ass disease on matters of staffing that were never fully cured.
So for our parting drinks, we headed up to Cleveland Park to an Irish establishment recommended by the off-the-boat Irish contractor. We arrived at 6 PM that Friday night, saw posted bills for live music that evening, and decided to stick around. There was the best pint of Guinness I’d ever had (and one that firmly clinched the black stuff as my chosen beverage), there was soup that tasted like pure liquid potato, there was chicken in a Tullamore Dew cream sauce and a ground beef-on-hasbrowns thing made with more Guinness, and awesome bread pudding.
And around 9, the two fellows with the guitars took their seats on the tiny stage. I think the first thing they played was “The Liffey Ferry,” and at its conclusion announced “Hallo, good evening, we are the McTeggarts, we come from the south of Ireland…” And they lit into the Black Velvet Band and the Wild Rover and we all had to clap along, and the Irish Rover, and our man Tom kept explaining where to clap and where to yell, and they just kept bringing Guinness, and through an inebriate haze around midnight, I heard “The Fields of Athenry” for the first time.
Long story short: we left at 2 AM when the bar closed. The next night, we all posted at 6 PM, and we stayed until 2 AM again. And we were hooked. Well, I was, anyway. For the next four and a half years, almost everything of any consequence in my life would be celebrated in Ireland’s Four Provinces, up on Connecticut Avenue just down the block from the Uptown theater. And for a long time, McTeggarts week was a regular stop.
When I started dating the woman who I married, the 4P’s was our first stop the second time she came to visit. I wasn’t about to make it the actual Valentine’s Day dinner, but it was the pregame the night before so she could see the lads and hear the music and see what she was in for. It hosted five straight birthday parties for me – the first featuring a band called the Fenians, from Orange County (oh irony) California, which is the night I first heard “On the One Road.” That’s also the night that Tom had me try Jameson’s and Bushmill’s for comparative purpose. He was Catholic but allowed that “that other crowd” had the edge in whiskey, and it proved true. The Jameson made me think “I can whup any man in this house!” but the Bushmills made me think “I can whup EVERY man in this house!”
I was there for World Series games, election nights, NCAA tournament games. Anything worth celebrating was worth celebrating there. It’s where I had my own going-away do in 2004, and it’s where we went back to visit almost every trip to DC since. It’s the pub we closed back in March, six years after leaving town. It’s not quite the same, but it still feels like home.
The McTeggarts don’t come down anymore – they are based in the suburbs of Boston, and it’s too far to make the trek anymore now that they don’t have the second week in DC at Falls Church anymore. But I have all three of their albums on the iPhone at all times – along with two from Ronan Kavanaugh, a couple from the Fenians, and some assorted others – and it’s when I hear those songs that I miss the pub the most. Turn up the music, sip the Guinness, close your eyes – and suddenly it’s an icy February dusk with snow on the ground, pipe smoke in the air, ordering another round and craning the neck toward the door where the friends will be trickling in until the front table is full…if they have Valhalla for old EUS, that’s what it looks like.