The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Stop!”

  But, as usual, wouldn’t your hombre assume that Gainor was a righteous, interfering citizen about to insist upon proper public behavior. And your man was now cascading his piss down into the tracks while, busy, two-handedly maneuvering his prick, directing the stream. And at the same time he shouted back at Crist words of highly idiomatic English.

  “Mind your own fucking business, buddy.”

  As the flaming bolt shot up the arc of urine from the tracks, these words spoken were to be this lamentable chap’s last on earth. Pervading the subway air with the appalling smell of burnt flesh, the electric current had carbonized your man’s penis, killing him on the spot.

  “Mike, the horror was unforgettable, and here I was upon another fatal occasion back down again in the subway, hovering over a man I’d just knocked over into the selfsame tracks.”

  On this new occasion of horror, Crist, as he stood there the good citizen, shouted for help as he saw there were two witnesses at the other end of the platform. But they were already moving in what they deemed was the safest and fastest direction in which to vamoose as far away and as soon as possible. In fact, they had in the first place, as it turned out, already unflatteringly moved to where they were upon seeing Gainor arrive on the platform where he paced back and forth with his birdlike nervousness and would suddenly stop, bend over and with a slight paroxysm, twiddle his thumbs and fingers in a manner characteristic of the mentally unstable and who might have just stepped out for a random breath of subway air from their institutional confinement. Plus the man on the other side of the turnstile in the change booth was already keeping a wary eye out for this individual whose bodily movements appeared to give an indication of more eccentric behavior to come. And in these citizens’ appraisals, they were not to be disappointed. For with Gainor now standing clasping his hands in an ecclesiastical manner, having knocked your man into the tracks, the crisis was in full swing. The victim’s body stretched unconscious or already dead down in the tracks, where it had landed on top of the rat attempting to scurry out of the way. And Gainor, the while waiting, horrified, for the inevitable smell of scorched flesh and the man’s last agonizing scream as he was electrocuted.

  But miracle of miracles, all parts of the man’s unconscious body missed being in contact with the third rail. Which, had even the tip of his finger touched, would, just like the pricks of the chaps pissing, have been carbonized and killed him instantly. However, with the thundering noise of wheels upon steel approaching, the train was already trembling the platform. Its lights seen and its destination clearly visible to all who could read. And if it made any difference to death after life, it did now present a new and much more gruesome way of the man’s dying and being dead. Plus in Crist’s ensuing trial for manslaughter, there would be a bigger funeral bill and damages assessed accordingly. For your man’s head with his gray trilby hat still amazingly on, was lying across one of the shiny tracks. So if not to be carbonized, he was soon to be decapitated. And with the train’s wheels passing over the rest of him, he would be ground up like mincemeat, leaving a trail of his thigh and pelvic bones peeking whitely up out of the gore and scattered all over, up and down the tracks. And the poor, honest, responsible, gentleman citizen, Gainor, having witnessed a similar mangled body in London’s underground, and ever the good Samaritan, and ever a stickler for fair play and good manners at all costs, stood his ground. Instead of like any hard-bitten New Yorker, who would have been four steps at a time up the stairs, and long gone out of the station and disappeared around several streetcorners. And Crist was shouting as loud as he could.

  “Stop the train! Stop the train!”

  The power cut, the man in the change booth was already out his door and vaulting over the turnstile. The train’s brakes squealing and screaming, the terrified driver now could be seen, horror on his face as his train wheels bore closer and closer to crush the skull and decapitate the unconscious body lying in the tracks before him. The station attendant next to Gainor as Gainor continued to wave his arms and shout.

  “For God’s sake, stop the train!”

  “Bud, the trains are stopped everywhere all over New York.”

  The two men now holding their breath as the train, with only inches left to go before running over the prostrate figure, finally came creeping to a halt. The cars emptying, a crowd collecting. The sound of police sirens on the street above. The station cordoned off. Paramedics, firemen and police pouring down the station entrance along the platform. Someone had already reported a person mangled in the subway. However, this man Gainor had socked was regaining consciousness and, fished up from the tracks, was leaving a dead rat beneath him. He was in fact, without a bone broken or indeed a scratch and with only his jaw slightly out of place, whisked off by stretcher and taken by ambulance to the hospital for observation. While Gainor Stephen Crist, ever the man trying to be reasonable with unreasonable people, was gently arrested. In the patrol car, the police, hearing Gainor’s foreign and English accent, asked where he was from. And of all things and of all places, this man from Dayton, Ohio, nervously and sentimentally explained he was from Ireland.

  “Hey, do they speak like that there.”

  “Some do. Some don’t. I do.”

  “Hey, you don’t say.”

  Later a couple of friendly executives of the American Express Company, having already highly valued Gainor’s presence in their company, arranged for his release. It was not to be long now before the lawyer’s letters arrived, seeking damages. And when the odd opportunity of telephone communication presented and Gainor reported this desperate event to me, he was already showing signs that his brief honeymoon with America was well and truly over.

  Mike pray God

  That something soon happens

  To deliver me out of this city

  Before it kills me

  Or worse

  I kill somebody

  Another one of my haunted men of the time in whose hunched, pessimistic look one tried to combine a lawyerly and ecclesiastic demeanor.

  21

  WHEN RELATING this subway event to me, Gainor urged me to swear not ever to breathe, report, or repeat a word of it, so that no news of it would ever get back to Dublin or London, where the slanderers and gossipmongers would not only make a meal of it but exaggerate the incident out of all proportion and then would, by smoke signal, tom-tom, telegraph, overnight letter, and Morse code, disseminate it to every corner of the globe, including his ladylove, Pamela, who was already deeply apprehensive concerning his presence in the United States. And except for the Austrian landlady and her cohorts, no word of this event ever did get breathed till now.

  As time passed, other matters were slowly divulged concerning the subway incident. Although the man did not ultimately press charges, Crist, when temporarily arrested, found himself subject to overnight incarceration and put in a daily lineup of others taken prisoner, who, for the benefit of detectives in order that they might better familiarize and acquaint themselves with the mannerisms and appearance of desperadoes, had paraded before them at police headquarters a selection of these to be cross-examined by loudspeaker and scrutinized under floodlights.

  “My dear Mike, you have no idea as to the soul-searing degree such a ritual demoralizes one. I was under suspicion of being a subway marauder who was terrorizing stations by pushing people under trains and, because of my accent, even being suspected of being an international jewel thief and fortune hunter after the assets of money-rich widows. In which latter case, I must admit an increasingly desperate interest. But in my present state of dishabille, not to mention lack of ready cash, I can’t see how I can finance to afford to suitably attire myself as a paramour and frequent the better hotels and cocktail bars in search of victims, indeed if such could ever be found in such dubious places.”

  But that was not to be the last, by a long chalk, of Gainor’s battle of survival in New York’s rapid transit system. It was in fact only the beginning of his
being chased, harried and badgered. For now, Gainor, on the way to court to dispute damages attendant upon the first assault, popped yet another rude bugger right on the old schnozzola and now, among other dire matters, further faced another barrage of legal summonses, subpoenas and writs. But he of course at least had his European legal training at his fingertips, plus his achieved skills acquired in Dublin as to how to avoid and elude payment of bills, or those seeking damages, redress, indemnification, compensation, or restitution, not to mention atonement for the bestowing of grievous distress. However, a stroke of luck. It transpired that the wife of your first man whose jaw Gainor had contused was looking for him for so much unpaid back alimony that your man in court was turning to look over his shoulder to see if she might any second show up, which seemed to help make your man more readily agree to a nonastronomical settlement. The judge, in turn, short of calling Crist’s adversary a sour son of a bitch who richly deserved to be belted on the old kisser, complimented Gainor on his forthright honesty and gentlemanly behavior, which he said he rarely if ever encountered on the bench.

  Ah, but one signal precaution Gainor took with each new threatened lawsuit, prosecution or proceeding, was a quick change of address. So that, as he said, he might sleep more relaxedly, knowing his door was not to be broken through during the night and disagreeable people like process servers jump him as he slept. But all now seemed antipathetic. Even his attempts to commandeer the use of America’s modern artifacts met with disaster. One always recalling Gainor’s brilliance and joy back in the old country with the arrival one day of the miracle of a modern vacuum cleaner upon which he still owed payments but with which he caught flies, and his delight as he developed an uncanny skill in this regard, imitating George Roy Hill, who was a naval fighter pilot during the Second World War. But now chairs broke underneath where he sat. Wake-up devices and coffee makers either jumped off his various bedside tables or outright exploded. Lamps short-circuited and went on fire. And all as if to remind and assist to drive him out of the United States. Where he had so earnestly come to make money to pay off his debts in Europe and now where overnight he was being sued for more than everything he ever had. Especially by the man he popped on the old schnozzola on the way to court. Whose action for damages included the cost of extensive plastic surgery to restructure his nasal angle and return his physiognomy to its original appearance from having had his nose flattened across his face. And in telephone communication with me, I was to hear Gainor’s plaintive but never defeated voice.

  “Mike, this has plunged me into even greater debt and there is no need to remind you to keep further mum. But I must solve the daily problems of my existence. Before I even extricate myself out of one difficulty, I find myself in another. My life is becoming a legal mishmash of mittimus, mandamus, caveat, habere facias possessionem, habeas corpus ad testificandum. The discourtesy in this city is not innocent or accidental, it’s wanton and deliberate. Chimpanzees have better manners. Why must people be insufferably rude and then, as one remonstrates, have their jaws or noses get in the way of my fist. I really do think that I deserve better luck than has befallen me. Pray tell, your advice to me to stay in Europe was all true. In fact, I read it for the second time just as I was stepping aboard the S.S. Ryndam, thinking it was a stray five-pound note I’d overlooked in my pocket and eagerly fetched it out with delight. But rather than its being the price of a bottle of champagne I intended to celebrate with on the eve of my voyage to America, it was instead your last letter to me before I left Europe. And alas contained information and advice I should have heeded. I have now reread it many times and have it taped to my mirror, where it is further reread while I shave in the morning.”

  My dear Gainor,

  Big news I hereby urgently give to you. There is no good life here. They’re all polishing their possessions. Everything is fake. Even the unhappiness isn’t real. Sex is a disease. The populace who aren’t beaten and disillusioned are instead insipid with the philosophy of self-improvement which is nothing more than a narcissistic self-devotion made further appalling by their thinking they’re so wonderful because they’re so selfish. It is extremely sad, and terribly bitter. Where no man has the opportunity to feel any love. Where the whole country is strangling with the tentacles of religion and the obscenity of money. This is a country of cancerous hearts and bodies and leaves one sitting in pain. The only good thing about it is they are getting what they deserve. And everyone at many dollars an hour is attending a witch doctor. All the wonderful things in me are locked up. But I’ll beat them yet. If this letter doesn’t stop you coming here, then I wish you bon voyage.

  Yours sincerely and fondly,

  Guts.

  Guts was a name Gainor had for sometime come to use in addressing me. And one immodestly assumed it was a form of flattery in recognition of my continued fighting spirit in the face of overwhelming odds to which he had often been a witness back in the old sod when many a time he stood by holding hats and coats and taking bets on me to demolish the opposition as one was forced to wade into a bevy of bullies. But here in the good old U.S.A. it should have been Gainor who more appropriately might have been called Guts. Intrepidly upholding gentlemanly principles in the face of intolerable provocation. But there was no doubt that it was with a certain and rapidly increasing degree of awful resignation that this kindly, compassionate man, recently arrived in the New World in order to save his life in the Old, was already realizing that he would soon be compelled to return to the Old World again in order to save his life in the New.

  “Mike, but for God’s merciful blizzards, the cars on the highway never stop. The ethnic bigotry burgeons. Who in heaven’s sweet sense ever dumped all these people together in such a caldron of discontent. They say happiness is everywhere. And I say back to them, have you looked at the faces.”

  Yet America was a place of cornucopia abundance where the shelves of stores were forever full. Where soap copiously lathered and hot water flowed through the pipes and showers sprayed cleansingly upon backs coast to coast across the United States. And where toilet paper could be had which was soft and pliant and did not sandpaper away, as it could in Europe, one’s adrectal area of evacuance. But where nearly none would open up heart, mind or soul to speak of anything resembling the truth of this nightmare. But where, too, there still existed a nobleness such as that possessed by John Duffy, Tally Brown, Richard Gallagher and my own brother, T.J. The last, whose job of previously unsuccessfully selling graves was now counting dresses. And it could have meant that had he not quit his previous work, he would have had a potential customer in his new profession. For as T.J. flew into one far western town one evening to do an inventory next day, he found in the morning the store manager in the stock room hanging in a self-made noose by the neck. T.J. said the man had a terrible, terrible look on his face, and T.J. on the spot returned to the airport, flew back east and never again counted another dress.

  And yet too, none of those friendly with me were ever to say nay, stop, abandon, don’t go on, as I seemed still able to continue to do, in spite of Gainor’s chaos and my own increasingly tenuous holding out in my tiny outpost in the narrow confines of Poplar Street, where I still wrote on in The Ginger Man. And where, pushed in under the door, a letter came. I was now summoned to collect my rejected manuscript back from Little Brown. And upon this humidly warm summer day, I went past the morgue doors of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the high gray stone walls of the Charles Street Jail to head along Charles Street and turn left up the hill on Beacon to enter the offices of these publishers. Instead of the manuscript awaiting me, I was asked by the receptionist to wait a few moments and was then directed up a flight of stairs and into a sedately pleasant office. There behind a desk was a man in his white shirtsleeves who stood up to greet me in my now usual clothes adapted à la Gid Pratt. This man shook my hand in that dreadful, limp manner that reassures that he might not be able to strangle you, but that he might dearly like to do so. He soon sat
down with a look of concern overcoming his face along with outraged disapproval.

  “This manuscript of yours. Were we to publish it here in Boston, we would be tarred and feathered.”

  I already suspected that nowhere, and unlikely that ever again on the North American continent, was I to receive any reception for this work resembling that already given by Scribner’s. Being the well-mannered European, I politely listened and was evasive as to who I was or where I lived. It was clear from this gentleman’s depth of feeling that it did not allow for him to be thought a mealymouthed poseur. But there was an air in his manner that said, How dare you write such a book and how dare you bring it here. And he must have read the work, for, with noticeable apprehension, this gentleman in his neat, clean white shirt behind the elegance of his mahogany desk in this graciously comfortable office, suddenly, rearing forward in his seat, raised his arm and pointed to the corner of the room behind me where the bulk of the manuscript of The Ginger Man sat on the floor at the very farthest point from this man’s desk and, raising his voice in an angered accusing tone.

  “There’s libelous obscenity in that manuscript.”

  But even now, I remained undismayed as the voices were raised against this work, realizing it was nothing but the sincerest form of flattery. As he watched me rise from my chair and go pick up the manuscript, I had the feeling the gentleman behind the desk half expected me to stay and argue the point. And there was ever so the slightest sense of mystification over his face that he had taken this trouble and time to send on his pathetic way a scribbler, not yet an author whose work he clearly detested. I now wonder if back all those years there remains at such publishers any record of this submission of The Ginger Man under the initials of Sebastian Dangerfield and of the author’s visit. For amazingly, this selfsame publisher, Little Brown and Company, was to cause me considerable difficulty much later on in my writing career. But if no record exists, there was no question but that here in this fine Boston town house, I was to find an enemy who would emerge more than once over the ensuing years.