The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.”

  “When thinking this, I must have also been unconsciously thinking that nothing further could happen to me for at least the next five minutes. And was just wondering how to explain to Sally how a condition had come about that she’d noticed in the bedroom while I was undressing to shower. Mike, it could only have been another miracle which saved me from total amputation. Sally saw and drew my horrified attention to the circle of red teeth marks around my prick. Dinnlay, you see the embarrassments were not yet over. But at least Sally, like April, I must count among the trusted good friends I still have left in America. And she does always have about her an endearing air of optimism. Somewhat attributable, I’m sure, to a modest but steady private income from a trust created by a great grandfather who had a share in a gold mine and also later discovered oil. Ah, but I digress, Mike. Sally, in her tartan tweed skirt, was crossing the floor to the kitchen in pursuit of my soda water. And I was admiring her legs. She has in fact, as many American girls do, quite stunningly attractive legs. Mike, the following happened just exactly as I am going to exactly tell you. And now that some of the static has disappeared from this line. Sally, upon this somber if sunshiny afternoon, got just a little more than halfway across this floor. When, without preamble, without a sound or any warning whatsoever, she disappeared utterly and completely from my sight. Gone. No longer there. Vanished from where she had been just a split second before and not more than thirty or so feet away across the floor. The room now empty save but for myself. You can grunt now if you like, and if you’ve heard enough I’ll hang up.”

  “Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.”

  “Does that mean in the parlance of three grunts for no and two for yes to continue, Mike.”

  “Ugh. Ugh.”

  “Well, I sat there. Hardly able to even be aghast. Not wanting even to know of such things as psychic phenomena. I gripped the bourbon bottle tightly by its base. Just in bloody case that too disappeared. I then lifted it up and put the open end of the bottle to my lips. Making a sound resembling glug, glug, glug, I found myself drinking as one would do water when one had been stranded a week in the desert. Glug, glug, glug, it continued to go. Down the hatch. Till, a third consumed, I came back to my senses. Or went out of my senses completely. All was silent. All was calm. I don’t know now how long I sat there. It could have been two minutes, an hour, or two hours. Or a whole day. All I know was that I was getting some blessed relief from Rebel Yell. And was any second feeling a tendency to get up myself and yell all over the bloody place. Mike, I wish you could speak. But I know and trust you are still listening. I admit that I lack a certain discretion. But, my God, I seem to have no luck whatsoever. I did finally hobble up, totally terrified. Carried the whiskey bottle with me. Inch by inch I made my way across the floor. To where Sally had disappeared. And she had. She was down twenty feet below in the cellar. Luckily part of her descended on a stack of old burlap bags. Otherwise she would have broken her neck. She had been knocked unconscious with her head hitting the trap door, which had been under a rug and opened and through which she fell, plunging down to where she lay groaning until I fetched help. Now, Mike, with Justin gone and me in the sole company of this charming heiress, I am not for a second suggesting that anyone deliberately tried to murder anyone or that it was anything other than an accident. After much maneuvering, tugging and lifting, I finally carried Sally back to bed. Neither one of us now hardly being able to walk. Nor did we want to speak. In fact, we both got back under the covers and wept in each other’s arms. Or rather, if truth were to be known, she was consoling me and I was weeping. But Sally’s pain continued to be such that the doctor was called and he insisted on Sally’s immediate hospitalization. Which turned out to require an ambulance. Mike, to stand there and see that vehicle pull away, which it barely did twenty minutes ago, made me feel just about the loneliest human being in the world. Mike, I know you’re still there even though you’re not saying ugh or ugh, ugh, or ugh, ugh, ugh, or ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh. I should have listened while still the other safe side of the water to all your cautions, warnings, exhortations and caveats. But if I can crawl, just crawl. If I can see, just see. If I can speak, just speak. And not even speak. I am going to get out of here. On a bus. Or train. Or bloody mule if needs be. And be back in New York. Where I shall hide out until it is time to traverse along that pier. And up that gangplank. And onto that ship. Mike, I have been utterly faithful in mind if not in body to the women who love me. But honest to God, to delay death, one does need a good, honest, unpremeditated and uncompromising fuck for distraction now and again. And, Dinnlay, even as the final curtain does come and our thought waves escape from gravity to go to dwell erstwhile and far away out upon some dim star, dead for eons out in the stellar graveyard, let it be known by those remaining back in the earthly ferment that we fought well and valiantly against the cowardly mealymouthed, hoping always not to get our asses permanently busted. And as our souls have come to rest on the nebular scrap heap. Rusting to infinity with all the other souls. Shrinking and cooling for the rest of time. I shall recall those marvelous last words April said to you.

  “Hey J.P. maybe you’d like

  To know

  That at night seals sing

  They come up out of the water

  With their big sad eyes

  With good news

  In the sweet by and by”

  28

  WHILE DEEPLY MINDING my own destiny in my own despairs, I took some encouragement from Gainor’s uncanny ability, always quite unbelievably remarkable, that no matter what befell him he always seemed able to rebound from doom. And then in his quietly matter-of-fact way be able to state plausible explanations for his problems. But by the timbre of his voice, his travail now was, I knew, a dire situation. The knee swollen up like a football had become infected, making it difficult to walk. He went to the doctor who shot him full of penicillin and who cleaned the leg up a bit but left him financially destitute. And I was only to hear from him briefly once again before leaving. Informing me that he’d made a last return to Queens Boulevard, arriving late at night to try to get his mail and vacate with his few remaining possessions. And as T.J. handed me the phone at approaching eleven P.M. I felt a degree of “acerphobia,” a word which Gainor used occasionally to refer to a fear of situations.

  “Mike, I am speaking to you from down in the pub located at what will soon be my former apartment house, where I am hoping that my good friend the bartender here doesn’t suddenly ask me to settle my bar bill. Which of course I shall do once safely across the other side of the water. I am now going to hide out, God knows where, but inform T.J. that I very much appreciate his offering to accommodate me. I can’t talk to you at length now, and apologize for calling so late. But I had to wait till Mutt and Jeff were both on night duty at the airport, and safely out of the building before I could vacate my remaining possessions and also to avoid the bloody homosexualist across the hall who I feared might be lying in wait ready to call the police to put me in a straitjacket again. Mike, never should I have got behind the wheel of a car, having as an American trained myself in Ireland and England to instinctively go to the left side of the road, and I should have realized I would continue to do just that. I won’t bore you now with what has just happened out here in Queens, suffice to say Mutt’s girlfriend suddenly turned up just as I was dismantling my wigwam. Judging by her behavior in suddenly confronting me, this girl’s a total sex maniac. Being chased hobbling around the bloody apartment in my present infirmity has just about finished me. She has clearly never forgotten my prick quivering, which, Mike, I still don’t think you’ve adequately explained to me other than its making randy women upon sight of it insatiably unable to control themselves. And even following one’s stupendous efforts to do everything possible to try to satisfy them, which seems only to incite them to wanting more. But I won’t digress into zoological phenomenon. This call is principally to tell you that I am now gone from this address and to req
uest you once again not to breathe a word to anyone about what happened in Woodstock. I fear most that the insurance people over my most recent car crash, hearing that I might be fleeing, will be after me and could of course be even waiting for me at the boat. Or worse, if news gets reported back to Europe, they could be waiting ten days hence at Liverpool for me to step off the boat. I will be in touch as usual, when least you expect. I am leaving here as soon as I down this triple shot of Power’s Gold Label. Mike, I now place my trust for deliverance in the blessed Oliver Plunket.”

  From my present vantage point in Woodlawn and as I placed the phone back on its hook, I saw no possibility of Gainor being able to make that ship or any ship. Although Valerie was comparatively isolated on the Isle of Man, I did caution her to keep quiet concerning the considerable amount I reported about Gainor and his movements, which now consisted of visions of Crist in his red jockstrap, his dismantled wigwam over his head and making his way down his apartment house stairs as he was pursued by Mutt’s naked girlfriend. I was also trying to rack my brains to remember if I’d ever witnessed Gainor actually driving a car. But realized from his background that this would have been sine qua non in growing up in America as Gainor had done in considerable affluence. And the usual brightly colored brand-new convertible would have been sitting in front of his house for his sixteenth birthday. And it would have been merely just another simple artifact expected to be part of the life of any decently rich kid in this cornucopia land, as it was for more than a few of my own contemporaries. Yet to Gainor, when speaking on his last evening to stay in Woodlawn, pleasures could be ultrasimple.

  “Mike, although justifiably sad that you are unable to converse, I am truly most solemnly happy here. Just like this.”

  He had come up to my bedroom, having just been watching TV downstairs with T.J., and he had gone to sit in a green rocking chair, a blanket across his knees and fiddling and twiddling his fingers and thumbs, as he gently rocked back and forth. He spoke and I typed back my answers to him. But then he would become still and silent at the brutal bluntness of these replies. However, moments later he would slowly shake his head up and down in affirmation. And as Gainor further sat on in the green chair wrapped in a blanket, his mood suddenly changed as he spoke about his two little daughters and about trying to get his first wife, Constance, who was in Ireland at the time to come with them to London. Things not being good between them, he was always fearful that he might be stopped by immigration upon his arrival in England, as his original right to be there stemmed from his marriage to a British national.

  “Mike, one tries and tries so hard to keep everyone happy, even to the extent of trying to comfort those in their remorse for having betrayed one. And, Mike, who am I to argue over these, your forthright if pitiless replies. Ah, but here is arrived, I must say, a gesture to warm the cockles of the heart.”

  T.J. had brought Gainor a tumbler of whiskey, and Gainor smiling, shaking his head yes as he took the glass and looked and sniffed into the tea-tinted liquid as he put it to his lips to take a delicate sip. Then raising his glass in a toast, he optimistically announced that he was looking forward to having his first drink at the bar aboard the boat. It was always at moments such as this over a drink and most often contemplating a future drink somewhere, that Gainor was at his magically most pleasant. As if such occasions were a preamble to the time certain to come when all his problems would be solved. In the intensity of such moments, he would place aside his whiskey, and leaning forward would indulge then a further finger-twiddling paroxysm. As he did on this very last occasion I was to see him on American soil.

  “Mike, my dear Dinnlay. As I sit here in this sacred comfort, the cold winds aswirl outside, I tell you of a song. ‘The Water of Tyne.’ Which as I weathered the worst of my circumstances, I sometimes heard sung by girls’ voices somewhere out on the distant edge of my mind. It is a sad song. Of a girl whose love is the other side of a river that flows from the ancient wilds of Northumberland and out to the sea. She is crying out for a boatman to come to row her across to him. For she is sighing and dying. Mike, my dear Dinnlay. It is as we are. And we two wait. To be ferried back over that big and cold sea. To our loved ones. And having borne more than a root and a toot of ignominy up the rear end, let me say to you that I shall be deeply glad to go. But despite a bust here and there upon the old bones, I assure you that better days are coming. Count on it.”

  Of course I did not count on it. But this same day all now was haunted by having had walked for three or four miles through Van Cortlandt woods, showing Gainor the sites of my childhood. Of where we flew gliders we made, and where we hunted by gun, slingshot and bow and arrow. Where my friend Alan Kuntze trapped muskrat. I brought Gainor to secret sites where campfires had been built and potatoes and squirrel legs roasted. We strolled past the community dump, which was then encroaching on the wetlands we had tried to prevent being drained. Amid the tall cattails, big black snakes and snapping turtles lived and the red-winged blackbirds flew. We then ended up sitting on a curved enclosure of benches which half encircled one of the strangest memorials in America. And the site where the bones of the seventeen braves of Chief Ninham were buried, attesting to where the Stockbridge Indians had fought on the side of colonists and gave their lives.

  “Mike, I am truly fascinated to see where you grew up in comparatively wild and open spaces and in one of the largest cities in the world.”

  Since Valerie left, it had been the rare day spent like that with Gainor that kept me resolute to hold on and continue to hope. And as we sat in that front room that evening, one of the last sounds now that one heard in America was a Celtic lament, which suddenly came at this strangely appropriate moment on the radio station WQXR that one had constantly listened to growing up.

  “Dinnlay, they play those sad, strange strains of music, knowing that we’re going.”

  But now following his return from Woodstock, and except for his brief call from Queens, Gainor vanished. There had been fog for three days. A letter had arrived for Gainor from Pamela, full of her sound advice, and another letter asking me to prevail upon him to write. But I was already packed up and ready to leave. Having thought that after waiting and waiting the precise moment would never come. My big steamer trunk already delivered to the ship. And now on a cold misty but thawing morn, the lonely day of departure had dawned. Snow turned to a gray slush in the streets. The last music I listened to on station WQXR was Offenbach. At one-thirty P.M., with just a bag and my typewriter, I was driven by my father and mother down to the boat. T.J., left behind, still furiously painting and turning out his pottery. If I were in any way sentimental in departure, I was also remembering words I printed out for Gainor to read on my pieces of paper I handed him.

  I AM

  WAITING LIKE YOU TO FLEE. TO BE GONE WITHOUT PAINFUL

  PROLONGED GOOD-BYES AND BE NO LONGER HERE ON

  ANYBODY’S

  MIND. I AM STILL A HUMAN BEING BUT ONLY JUST

  IN THE UNMITIGATED, UNRELENTING VULGARITY AND ALL THE

  LIES

  HOW COULD THE BEAUTY OF LOVE EVER EXIST

  OR IF IT DID, EVER PERSIST HERE

  THIS COUNTRY NEEDS ITS PHONY FACE SMASHED

  AND A REAL ONE PUT IN ITS PLACE

  AND EVEN IF I WERE ABLE TO SURVIVE HERE

  I COULD NOT BEAR TO

  DIE HERE

  A hurricane having penetrated north from Florida, it was looking as if the trip to Liverpool on the Franconia could take longer than ten days. Being early to the boat, I asked my parents not to wait to see me off. My spirits, if they were not picking slightly up, were at least not any longer sinking. I had even allowed myself to toy with the thought that before leaving I would submit The Ginger Man to another publisher. But then realized that only some force from without and far away from the United States could ever change matters for The Ginger Man. My mind already casting itself back to Europe, I had come to hate America but swore that I would survive the damage it had don
e.

  What I had left of a future was now the other side of the Atlantic, where storms were still raging over the Irish Sea. On the Isle of Man, the wind had been blowing so strong that when Valerie took little Philip out for his walks he was blown over.

  From an almost deserted pier, I climbed the gangway to come on board the Cunard line’s R.M.S. Franconia. In my silence I managed with notes to find my way to the four-berth cabin shared with two others and “squared my things away,” as they said in the navy. Looking everywhere, there was no sign of Gainor on the ship, and one did not want to start slipping strange scribbles to the purser as to having seen any sign of a man in white socks and sandals toting a paper bag with a length of rope in it. I was returned now up on the deck and looking down on the pier. Not long to go. Blue peter hoisted on the main mast. Fore and aft, they were lifting away lines from their moorings. The great rope hawsers splashing in the water. The steam winches rumbling and whirring, reeling the lines back up on deck. Either side of the gangplank, sailors were standing by, waiting ready to take it up. Undoing ropes and knots. A bell ringing and a voice over the Tannoy had already sounded throughout the ship.