The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Yes, Gainor, I am. I’m even making notes.”

  “Well, firmly and legibly note, will you, that I declined. But in persisting, he said, ‘Why not, you’re in your underwear and you’ve got nothing better to do, plus why are you wearing a red jockstrap if you’re not queer.’ Mike, I simply could not fathom his reasoning for such an assumption. But for all I know in this bloody city perhaps red jockstraps are indeed worn by queers. In any event, stranded there as I was in the hall, one struggled to be diplomatically polite. But the audacity of some people is spellbinding and imposes limits on one’s self control. As he wouldn’t budge from the hallway, and trying to be facetiously helpful, I suggested to him that he go back into his own nice warm apartment, stick his prick in the sucking end of the vacuum cleaner, and that I’d at least try not to short-circuit the lights in the building while he was enjoying himself. Mike, he took this very well meaning suggestion of mine very badly. Said I insulted him and stalked off slamming doors. But not before informing me he knows the landlord, who is queer and who will evict me. I’m sure his remark about the landlord is not true, but if it were I’d breathe a sigh of relief to be sent packing as soon as and as far away as possible. But a squad car did arrive. And still in my underwear, the more I tried to explain in the hall what had happened in the bar downstairs the more the police thought I was a criminal lunatic. Instead of being simply arrested and charged with drunk and disorderly behavior, I was put in a straitjacket.”

  “Gainor, I am sorry to hear of your troubles. Why don’t you go spend a day at the Bronx Zoo.”

  “Mike, please don’t try to be funny.”

  “I’m not. I mean it. You’ll find it an altogether charmingly calming place. Of bears, monkeys and zebras.”

  “Mike, I’ve presently got plenty of bears, monkeys and zebras in my nightmares and don’t presently need real ones.”

  I could no longer conceive of Gainor actually being able to escape. It began to seem that wherever he went and whatever he did now in America brought detriment. I had heard from some source but had never questioned Gainor or had it authenticated that he was in some way related through family to the Amish Mennonites, a sect who held to freedom of conscience and opposed slavery and warfare. If such were the case, it would have accounted for Gainor being an inveterate foot washer. But not for him to unaccountably blunder into constant strife. The Amish too were renowned for their quiet industry and routine hard work. A characteristic that Gainor did in fact have. And it was exactly how, upon such precepts, that I was now trying to hold onto my own sanity in and keep as busy as I could my life, which was now without a core around which one’s existence could center. I had to make it back to the land of Ireland or to the Isle of Man, where one could tramp the heathery moors again and civilized take tea and scones in some hostelry or drink beer before a fire in a pub. But it was as if I were fighting a losing battle in trying to remain quietly methodical in my angst-ridden and hypochondriacal state, with an occasionally rapidly beating heart. Making all efforts to keep moving, in order to be distracted and exercised. Forcing myself out in the cold under the sky and sun. Taking food that I thought would be good for me. All-Bran, scrambled eggs, sausages, brown toast and coffee for breakfast. And even cod-liver oil.

  Meanwhile, T.J., who lay in bed, went on painting his masterpieces. With their exquisite grading of shadows and highlights. And I was dumbfounded as he started about his tenth picture, maintaining it was easy, like water off a duck’s back, which indeed at the moment he was presently painting. On such bird each drop of moisture sparkling like a gem. While he was meticulously anointing his canvases, T.J. would talk. Telling of an old Woodlawnite and school acquaintance who’d gone further afield to another town to make his way and fortune. And who would every so often return to be seen rich and successful, slowly cruising through the Woodlawn streets in the back of a chauffeured limousine. Giving a royal wave to any nosy parker who might be watching, or anyone who might recognize him, which was nearly everyone, to whom he then patronizingly smiled and tipped his cap. But then someone from Woodlawn had accidentally come across him employed working in this distant small upstate town sweeping up in a grocery store. And the chauffeured limousine was seen no more. And T.J. said that when he heard of this unmasking he was overcome with grief that he would not see this man passing again to whom he gave an admiring smile and a thumbs-up sign.

  An editor had now read the manuscript of S.D. at Random House publishers, and reported on a Friday to agents that it was too long in parts and that the story slowed up, but the agents remained optimistic over a weekend when they expected to hear a final decision on Monday. For five straight days now, I had no word from Gainor, used as I was to my long, nearly daily talks with him over the telephone, which always included our plans for departure being rehearsed. As I knew he was hoping soon to get away to the quite rural peace of upstate Woodstock for a brief stay and for some light relief, I thought he must be there. But not having an address or phone number, it was impossible for me to discover. I rang his number out on the wastes of Queens, expecting to hear he’d again been arrested in his long underwear and red jockstrap and was in jail on Riker’s Island in the East River. But instead got an immediate angry answer from what I presumed was one of his flatmates.

  “He’s not here, and I don’t know where he is.”

  In trying his number at the airport, I had to wait, as long, fruitless inquiries were made, to be then told that he was unavailable and that no one knew when he would be back. Finally my worry mounted as to his whereabouts and although relieved not to be in his company, I was now concerned for his welfare. Then, early morning, just after finishing my ablutions following breakfast, and as I was about to sit at my desk to take my temperature, feel my pulse and try to abate the waves of angst by reassuring myself that all my readings were normal, the telephone rang and found me rushing downstairs to the sitting room.

  “Good God, Gainor, where have you been. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Mike, as usual you’re not going to believe this. I’ve been these past several days in the Bronx. And in Fordham Hospital, right next to where you went to school.”

  I listened dumbfoundedly attentive to Gainor. My attendance at Fordham Preparatory School for three years and odd truancy days had made me much familiar with this curious area of the Bronx, where Edgar Allan Poe had lived in a little white cottage I often passed by. And Fordham Hospital was where my father had been treated when he was injured in a fire as a fireman and where as a child I had been taken when breaking a collarbone falling out of bed when I was but five years old. Brought to the hospital’s accident ward, I saw a trolley wheeled by on which lay another little boy, gently moaning and accompanied by tearful parents, his smallness covered in a blood-spattered sheet and his clothes in a little pile at his feet. He had been hit by a car while playing in the street. And somehow I heard as I waited to be treated that this little boy who passed by was now dead. Leaving me forever afterward with a haunting fear and disrelish of hospitals. And these thoughts flashing through my mind as I listened further to Gainor and yet another mishappenstance in his life.

  “Mike, I took your advice. And went to see the spitting cobras at the zoo. Having gone there after having been besieged by Mutt’s bloody girlfriend, who indeed wants to see my prick quiver again. But that’s another story I won’t go into now, save to say that some women in this land are trained up by their mothers to be the killers of joy in men. And the cobras do indeed splash their white poison on the glass of their cage. And I was having such a nice day all by myself viewing scenes from nature. Strolling and reading on a sheltered bench in the sunshine, where the temperature was fifty-five degrees. Everything you said about the zoo is true. I saw two monkeys fucking, over which, unlike us poor mortals, they don’t appear to waste much time, nor seem to sit around worrying much about the consequences. Then leaving the zoo and going nearby to further stroll and look at the fine building where you went to prep school an
d admiring its Old World architecture, and I then did in a very satisfied mood of mind have a couple of beers at a local bar before returning to the subway. I was of course carrying with me to read Luce’s trusty volume Berkeley’s Immaterialism and indeed was engrossed in it on the subway platform while waiting for the train. And, Mike, I absolutely know you’re going to think I’m careless and at fault and to some degree admittedly I am, but I walked right the bloody hell off the platform and fell into the tracks. Yes, I know you’re going to say why the bloody hell didn’t I watch where I was going.”

  “Gainor, yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you why. Because at that precise time, and on Berkeley’s principle that ‘to be is to be perceived,’ I got a flash insight of how the universe came into being. And totally envisioning it all just as I was falling. But when my head hit the tracks, it knocked the perception completely out of my consciousness. I tell you, I have come to my wit’s end and have now gone so far beyond that I’m practically in nirvana. But where I have really been for the last four days is in Fordham Hospital. And having had to be kept there under observation.”

  “Good God, you haven’t cracked up.”

  “Morally and physically, yes, but I don’t think quite mentally yet. A dim shred of reality still hovers somewhere to which I tenuously and desperately cling. However, I have certainly been left having for nearly four days to talk my way out of being permanently incarcerated in a mental institution. And trying to convince doctors that I’m sane, exactly as all true lunatics apparently attempt to do. And as you persist in doing so, they then start regarding one as being troublesome if not malicious and possibly criminally insane. But even more terrible, Mike, is the desperate, anguished feeling in knowing that whatever you say or do is going to even more convince them that one is a mental case. Having hauled me up out of the tracks and just missing the third rail and with a train as usual on its way into the station which luckily stopped but ten feet away, I was shaky and bruised and cut myself, and although admittedly unconscious for a few moments I was intact and otherwise perfectly all right. But I then overheard them saying that, having been on the platform reading as I was Luce’s splendid volume on Berkeley’s Immaterialism, I was an obvious psychiatric case trying to commit suicide. And heard that dreaded name Bellevue mentioned. All just as April predicted. Mike, if it hadn’t been for someone saying I needed immediate medical attention I might now be in a padded cell.”

  “Gainor, you’ve got to, you must, whatever else you do, stay out of the subway. It’s nearly an exact replica of your previous debacle only this time you were the victim.”

  “Mike, it’s the only way I can afford to travel. I just simply walked a mite off course into the subway tracks. And Mike, considering what has happened to me so far in this country, would that the wheels of that train had only accorded me such mercy and proceeded those extra ten feet and ended my days.”

  Except for his collapse in the bath under the shower curtain rail, I had never before heard Gainor express a view dismal enough to suggest that he would contemplate an end to his life. But he was only to reveal now more of what had happened out in Queens the evening of the long underwear. When it transpired that the potbellied, bald homosexual, whom Gainor had told to shove his prick in the business end of a vacuum cleaner, then called the police to inform them that Gainor was a raving lunatic, threatening violence and loose on the landing, which produced a whole team of police paramedics charging up the stairs to put Gainor Stephen Crist in a straitjacket.

  “Mike, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that there is no worse feeling than to have about a dozen hands grabbing you from every side as they pin you down to encase one in that most disagreeable restraint. Mike, I never ever again anywhere want to undergo that again. But having lost my temper on that occasion, I was at Fordham Hospital able to convince them that not only was I sane but that I was supersane in wanting to get the hell out of there. But there was of course a hairline fracture discovered in my skull. With the outcome of it all to be just one more sizable bill presented to me. And obviously to see if I could pay my bill, they were checking my credentials and phoned my employers. Of course some bloody no-do-gooder there told of my having sent passengers to Helsinki who wanted to go to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Then in phoning my address and getting an earful from Mutt and Jeff of red jockstrap, wigwam, long underwear and attempted rape, they were again contemplating sending me to Bellevue. I nearly went berserk but fortunately didn’t. I announced in the simplest, calmest, quietest, clearest, sanest manner possible, that were I to be manhandled or put in a bloody goddamn straitjacket or that they do any similar such thing to me that the entire hospital would be bankrupted by the most stupendous ensuing litigation for damages ever mounted or devised by the hungriest bunch of contingency lawyers ever assembled on the North American continent. Miraculously, that little spiel of mine seemed to quiet everyone down. And I was given a private room and made happier than I think I have been at any other time in America, enjoying a few welcome hours of peace and calm under treatment there. Played chess and beating everyone and outwitting them in every other intellectual endeavor, I became, I believe, an object of affection for various nurses and doctors who took to paying me friendly visits. I had the undivided attention of the most charming and wonderful nurse too. Who’s made me a present of quite an unusually good bottle of brandy, which I’m presently sampling. She’s even rung me to see if I’m all right. Mike, I did truly enjoy strolling through the Fordham campus, whose rather impressive college buildings seemed a quite marvelous place. I passed a tiny little building in which they measure earthquakes. They even seemed to have an infirmary, which I presume was available to you when you were there as a student and were injured or had a tummyache. But I do truly think they did themselves a woeful disservice to expel you. But ah, Dinnlay, in the words of Jesus Christ, one simply murmurs under one’s breath, father forgive them, for they know not what they fucking well do. And, Dinnlay, with time to contemplate in the hospital, I was thinking of S.D. I know you have described the literary world as a bunch of small-minded, self-congratulatory, timid little shits, who, aware of their own insignificance, lurk waiting ready to reject and dismiss the meritoriously original. Of course, you are entirely correct and quite rightly will keep your life forever clear of them. And by the way, Mike, you must solemnly promise to never, never reveal ever to anyone till at least twenty-five years after my death about my being restrained in a straitjacket.”

  Having received anguished letters from Pamela asking me to urge Gainor to write, I did as she requested but did not disclose to her any of Gainor’s reasons for not doing so. And now small interruptions of silence were coming as Gainor went on talking, and I thought I could hear the movement of brandy in its bottle. And as I clung to the phone listening and attempting to hold onto my own sanity, Gainor’s voice took on a strange incantation. I had nervous thoughts that perhaps he had finally cracked and would indeed be finally, by straitjacket, hauled off to Bellevue. But there was now no one anywhere with whom I could better maintain comradeship and seek what solace I could from being in an identical predicament and probably about to suffer an identical fate. And I listened raptly as his voice droned on.

  “But you know, Dinnlay, one day, and as certain as the drums now beat for us in retreat and we await to sail, even these deceivers of genius will have to come out from under their cowardly cover. To acknowledge you, if not to sing your praises. Believe and trust me in that prediction. Let it sustain you through these next days if dismal they might be. Be loyal to your royal blood. Be certain that soon the betrayers will be betrayed. And not that too far away in the future. Even as you continue to humble yourself. Your name will be spoken of in praise and in awe. Again believe me. Again trust me. Have faith that this shall be so, Dinnlay.”

  “Gainor, for God’s sake, don’t drink any more of that brandy.”

  “Ah indeed, Dinnlay, I can’t. What do you think abo
ut that. Because I’ve just drunk it all. Down to the last drop. And am about to decamp to downstairs for a midmorning nightcap. And in the full covering of my airport uniform, I might add. But before I go, let me say this. Let us not let the present make us forsake the future. We both must patiently abide till relief shall come from all this disappointment and chagrin. Which shall happen as the good ship Franconia pulls out to midstream from its dock. To float down upon that great river, the Hudson. Passing on our left Cortlandt Street. Rector Street. And Bowling Green. Oh yes. I know the names. Then, Dinnlay, as we go out across New York Bay, past the Statue of Liberty, we shall, as former naval persons, be standing to attention on deck. Watching the tall spires of this city shrink behind us. At long last escaped as I shall be from Queens Boulevard. My highway to doom. And you relieved of your temporarily dashed hopes. And then, out there. Upon the Atlantic waves. Finally we will feel the swells of the sea under us. Heading home. Back to where both our hearts eternally lay. Where both our loved ones dwell. Where shall befall us no more ignominy. No more pain. Nor breaches of courtesy. And there shall we find. A little contentment. And where we might hear if we listen, a strange sound. From the wise owl. And ask.

  “Who doth it be

  Now

  Who hoots

  Out of a sorrow