St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day is a marker in the diary of both New York’s public revelry and a private episode of excess: on March 17, 1978, the parade crowded the streets, while a later account connected the same holiday to Nelson’s hospitalization after an extraordinary diet of cheddar cheese and whiskey.

Parade and public memory

The parade was just getting underway, making traffic bad. The streets were filled with people wearing green and staggering. The scene called up, for the diarist, an older New York: people swaying through the streets drunk, rather than under the influence of drugs. The holiday thus became more than a spectacle of color and congestion; it supplied a point of comparison between two versions of the city’s street life.

A date recalled through its aftermath

In a later entry, Nelson called from Los Angeles and described what had begun on St. Patrick’s Day. He and Robert De Niro started eating a five-pound cheddar cheese with Jack Daniel’s; day after day, Nelson ate nothing else. Eventually he developed pains and went to the hospital, where doctors said the cheese had become rocklike and gave him a laxative to break it up. His call also turned the anecdote toward the diarist’s travel plans: he wanted to know when they would come to Los Angeles, and the answer was a tentative guess of May.

Across these entries, the holiday shifts from a citywide scene to the starting point of a personal medical episode. Its place in the diary is held together by the date: a public celebration remembered for its drunken crowds, and a later report of a private binge whose consequences were serious enough to require hospitalization.