My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  Tommy fancied himself as an underwater swimming champion, and so did my dad, so once they both swam the entire length of the pool underwater, which was pretty impressive as it was quite long. If the underwater swimming competition had no clear winner, my dad’s big moment came when Tommy claimed that my dad could not strike him out underhand. In baseball no man likes to be struck out underhand. It is the softball way of pitching, and softball is for girls and fat old men with beer bellies. My father had a wicked way of throwing the ball. He would run up and his arm would do a one-and-a-half turn before he released. He could get some serious speed. Three of my dad’s throws struck out Tommy Kennedy underhand.

  His ball-throwing style was actually one of the ways I found out that my dad was more Cork than I had given him credit for while growing up. Years later, when I was jogging in Tralee, Co. Kerry, I stumbled upon a bunch of travellers playing a game I had never seen before. I had heard of road bowling because I had lived in Cork for four years, but I had never seen it being played. I knew that only travellers and Cork people still played the game. They let me watch them play and when I saw it I got goosebumps because it took me right back to Mineola Pool Club and I realized that my dad had learned to throw like that in Midleton.

  Queens people are no longer allowed to pay for membership at Mineola Pool Club. We stopped going there in 1989 and bought a house in Westhampton before Christmas of that year.

  It sounds really posh, but buying the house in the Hamptons was a gamble. The house was on Dune Road in Westhampton and five years earlier the entire area had been destroyed by violent winter storms, mainly Hurricane Gloria. It was still impossible to get anywhere without a four-wheel drive. Houses should never really have been built there in the first place. In fact, there was a court case pending over the area’s future. The County of Suffolk was fighting to have the area turned into a state park, and the homeowners were fighting to have the Army Corp of Engineers reclaim the land back from the sea. There was a distinct possibility that it could be deemed unsafe for human habitation. Essentially, my mother gambled that the court case would be won by the homeowners. As a result, my parents got a house (for $80,000) right across the street from the ocean and only an hour and a half from Manhattan.

  It seems so eerie and dangerous now when I see these pictures.

  I don’t remember it feeling that so much when we were kids.

  Those early days there were amazing. It was like a post-apocalyptic scene as half-fallen houses lay open-faced on the beach. Waves broke beneath houses high enough on stilts not to have been washed away yet. The pipes from the septic tanks that had once sat below them hung eerily above the foam. It was a great lesson about the power of the sea.

  We would sneak into the abandoned houses all the time. It was fascinating to see how people’s lives seemed to have been frozen in time. Often our dad would come with us and we would try to salvage useful things for our own house. The main thing we needed was wood to make walkways over the sand. To this day, when I see a stray bit of wood I immediately assess it for its usefulness.

  We became scavengers. It was Westhampton Beyond Thunderdome. We were the Dune Road Warriors, making our house from the wreckage. Sometimes you would see a strange object wash up on the shore like a refrigerator door. The appliances of Dune Road’s past were being spat out by the ocean like pistachio shells.

  Getting rid of garbage was always a huge issue in our area. In the washed-out years you had to take it to a dump because they could not collect as there was no road to get to the house. Later, after they rebuilt the road and reclaimed the beach, my parents were too cheap to pay for private collection. With all the development going on, my father became obsessed with skips. He had a deep inner skip sense and he would spot them throughout the day. He couldn’t drive, so he would bring us in on his scheme. In whispered tones he would say, ‘When it’s dark we will load up the car with the garbage and you can drive me down the road. I saw a skip there. I will jump out and throw it in fast so no one sees us.’ As I got older I stopped coming back so frequently, and Aidan lives with me now and he is still the one who worries about the bins.

  Our house was a humble, low-lying bungalow. It sat on the bay side of the road and you could see the most amazing sunsets in the evening during the summer. Its position meant that it sat below the breeze, as the house was sheltered by the high reeds growing out the back. Therefore we were invaders in a land of mosquitoes, and though we never let them win they tormented us nightly and there was more bloodsucking than in a Twilight novel. Our evenings were spent in the orange light of the sunset, with the aroma of barbecued cooking and insect repellant in the air.

  There was a good crew of people in their early thirties who played volleyball on the beach every weekend. None of them had kids yet and they welcomed us into their circle on the beach. At fourteen I was just about old enough to make up an even number to play a game, and my dad was just about young enough to do the same. I can actually remember the day they let me play for the first time. I did not believe them at first, but then they were waiting for me to come on the court. I would spend the next six summers of my life wanting to be on that court as much as I could. It is still one of my favourite things to do in the world, to play beach volleyball.

  Me, Michael John and Aidan absolutely idolized those guys. I would say they had a serious influence on us growing up because they were very different from the type of people we grew up with in Queens. They were all professional people from the city and maybe they were more sophisticated. I just remember that I loved trying to impress them. I think they found us very entertaining because we were pretty wild kids and liked to mess around. All those guys loved to joke around too and pass on the knowledge of the area to us since they had been coming out there forever.

  Stu was one of the guys on the beach and he loved to joke around. One day I remember becoming very frustrated over something on the court. I argued to the point of my frustration boiling over and I had a hissy fit and walked off the court. I could hear Stu shouting as I walked away, ‘Why don’t you go home and shave your goatee and put a dress on!’ I had a goatee that day – which must have been comical as I was never a very hairy guy, and it must have taken me a month to grow enough hair for anyone even to be able to see it. So I had to walk over the dunes with the sense that everyone was laughing at me and I had just made an ass of myself.

  I wanted to just turn back, but my pride would not let me. I was back in the house, kicking and screaming to myself, so pissed off at myself for losing my head, and then it hit me. I went to the bathroom and shaved off my goatee. I went to the linen closet and wrapped a sheet around my chest like a summer dress and walked back over to the beach. It was the only way I could go back. I was admitting that I was an asshole but also that I had a sense of humour. It was like a penance for messers. They were all laughing hard at that one. Those were very happy summers.

  Throughout all those years my dad would just sit on the beach for hours and stare out at the sea, lost deep in his thoughts. All our lives we would come across our father lost in thought. It often seemed his life was elsewhere. He loved telling us that the ocean was mighty. He loved telling our friends who would come out that it was all about the ocean. Most of our friends’ dads talked about cars and the NY Mets, but my dad wanted to know how the ocean made you feel.

  7

  When I was a kid I believed every one of my dad’s stories. So far as I was concerned he was pretty famous when he was younger. I did not know much else about his life other than his career as an actor and a model; he had been in the British Army and had lived in Midleton, Co. Cork, during World War II. Sometimes he would be watching TV and would recognize someone he knew from his past. One I always remember was Robert Shaw from Jaws. Jaws was a big movie in our hood and the fact that my dad knew somebody from it was pretty cool. I can’t remember some of the other claims he made, but I remember finding an old modelling photo of his which
included all the clients of an agency he was with at the time. His picture was very close to Cybill Shepherd’s, and at the time she was in Moonlighting with Bruce Willis. She was incredibly beautiful and I was very impressed.

  One of my dad’s final modelling jobs after he had moved back to New York.

  I knew that my dad had been in a movie or two and had done a few ads, including a Blue Nun advert that used to run on RTÉ. Years later, when I met my cousins in Midleton, they would all say to me, ‘Red or White, darling? BLUE!’ That was my dad’s line in the commercial. But when we were kids the only movie that mattered to us was The Day of the Triffids. It was not a big movie by any means, but my dad had a proper scene in it. It’s a pretty silly horror B-movie, but we had a copy of the videotape when we were kids. Of course it was my cousin Ira who got it for us. I think it was as important for him to keep the legend of my dad going as it was for us. Up until he sourced a copy, I only had Ira’s word for it that my dad had a lot of lines. Ira always said my dad was a blind pilot trying to land the plane. ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ Ira would always say.

  Then we got the movie and we could watch it all the time. We would rewind back to the beginning of his scene and watch it over and over. ‘Mayday! Mayday! Please talk us down.’ It seemed like a massive scene when we were kids. I watch it now and I think it’s quite short, but we were just in awe back then. He has this extra-long close-up, right at the end of the scene, which appeared to last for ages. We thought this was the coolest thing. It took me years to find anyone who had ever heard of the film The Day of the Triffids, but I would show it to my friends when they came over.

  All my friends loved my dad. They loved his accent, and he would always tell them ghost stories. He was great at doing Dracula stories. They would always begin with him saying slowly, ‘It was a daaarrk, daarrrk night …’ I can still picture a large group of us, sitting in the living room one early evening while my dad was telling one of his stories, and how mesmerized we were by it. He was doing it differently on this particular night and he never got to the actual Dracula story because after a five-minute intro of slow ‘daaarrk, daarrrk nights’ and wind noises, he shouted something really loudly and we all jumped, completely startled. It was great. He was a great performer for my friends. It’s cool when you are young and the young girls that you are beginning to take notice of tell you that your dad is cool. ‘Did you know that Des’s dad was a model?’ ‘Did you know that Des’s dad was in a movie?’

  When we were kids, there wasn’t much to dislike about my dad, but he didn’t really have much authority in the house. The truth was, if our family was a company my mother was the managing director and my dad just did the PR. If it had been left to him, we would have looked amazing but we would have been starving. One of the few things I can remember my dad really caring about was that we didn’t get fat. ‘If you keep eating those cookies you will end up being as fat as a house.’

  My mother was the boss. We were never even allowed to ask my dad for permission to do things. If we did, knowing that my mother would say no afterwards, she would say, ‘You know that’s not the way it works in this house.’ He never even had a driver’s licence. This added to his dependence on my mother and to our view of him as not being much of an authority figure.

  To us, our dad was just cool and fun. He never gave me a hard time about school or homework. He just encouraged us to do well in sports and he hated it when we spoke like real Queens kids. He never really corrected us, but he would just tell us we sounded rough. My mother was very Catholic and was adamant that we go to Mass every Sunday. My father didn’t mind. He always fell asleep at Mass but would wake up for the songs because he loved to sing. My mother hated the singing and once wrote a letter to Monsignor Fogarty complaining that the ‘Our Father’ was not a song and should not be sung at Mass. It was a good example of how different they were from each other.

  Let’s face it, puberty was cruel to me. I woke up one morning and this afro was on top of my head where once my wavy hair had been. And look at the style. It must have been in the one-week window when MC Hammer was cool; Hammer-time was a lonely time for me. What was I thinking, with those trousers up to my nipples and the turtleneck with the medallion? I actually thought that made me look cool. It turns out it made me look like a young lesbian.

  Up until I hit puberty, most of the time I just saw my dad as a really cool guy. I was too young to be aware that he was not the authority figure. He was just the guy I always wanted to impress. He was the guy I wanted to see watching me do things. ‘Dad, watch me dive off the diving board.’ ‘Dad, count how long I can stay under water.’ ‘Dad, listen to me do the beat box.’ He was myself and my brothers’ hero.

  But it all changed when I became a teenager. I developed a desire to challenge my dad’s authority. I went from thinking my parents were the coolest people on the planet to thinking they were the dumbest people to walk the face of the earth. I think Mark Twain said it best when he said, ‘When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.’

  I had entered my period of rebellion and my brothers would enter that period at two-year intervals behind me. We expressed it by making fun of my father all the time.

  When our dad went from being the only person we wanted to impress, he became the butt of our jokes and our attempts to impress each other. We were like diehard fans who turn on their idols with a vengeance. We had outgrown his style. He was not cool anymore. I know a lot of people go through that phase, but I think for us a few things were different. First, we were all like our dad, in that much of what we did in the house was a performance. Second, our dad let us make fun of him with minimal retribution. And finally, most people do not have a dad who was in a cheesy 1960s British movie like The Day of the Triffids.

  It was one of my running jokes for a while. Any time my dad would get pissed off at me for something and raise his voice, I would say in a British accent, ‘MAYDAY, MAYDAY. Please talk us down.’ Or if he shouted up the stairs at me, ‘Desmond, get down these stairs right this minute!’ I would say, ‘PLEASE TALK US DOWN, MAYDAY, MAY-DAY! THERE IS STILL NO REPLY, SIR.’ These were his lines from the movie. My brothers and I thought we were being so funny when we did that over the years.

  Though I was not aware of it at the time, I suppose we were actually making fun of the fact that often he wasn’t present, either in mind or body. He always forgot people’s names and very often would fall asleep on the bus and wake up out in New Hyde Park, Long Island. He would call up, all panicked, ‘I fell asleep, man. Tell your mother when she gets home that I am out in New Hyde Park.’ You could often hear him cursing to himself as he hung up the phone. In the end we used to insult each other by saying, ‘You’re just like Dad!’

  It was when I was in my teens that I became convinced that my dad was a spoofer. And for a large part of my life I went on believing that. ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’ was definitely something he believed. His life story was always confusing to us anyway. So many of his memories had overlapping timelines. Things didn’t add up. It was easy for us to believe that he was just making up a lot of his past.

  Not only did I think that his stories were bullshit, but I also thought he had used his charm to get through life and that he was actually not a very smart man. He was an incredibly nice man in my eyes, but I felt he had used his niceness to hide the fact that he was inherently silly. I don’t know where this thought came from originally. I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, because there were often times when he would try to show off, just to fit in, and would talk about things he knew nothing about, which would kind of embarrass me. But now I know that was not because he was stupid, he was just too proud or too desperate to be liked not to put in his two cents’ worth on every subject.

  He always found a way to connect hi
mself to someone, wherever they were from. It was usually through sports. If someone was from India he would talk about cricket. If someone was from Argentina he would talk about Diego Maradona. Within a minute of meeting someone he would always ask, ‘Where are you from, my friend?’ After a while we knew that if they were from India he was going to talk about some cricketer called Singh, and he would then say, ‘Gandhi was a great man!’ He would sometimes botch it up though, give himself away in small ways – things like calling over a waiter with a commanding ‘Signor!’ when the restaurant was Greek.

  His worst blunder though came in Burberrys when Liam Gallagher from Oasis came into the store. My father was assigned to make sure everything was all right for him. Of course my father did not know who he was, so his first question was, ‘Where are you from, my friend?’ When Gallagher said, ‘Manchester,’ my father said, ‘Manchester United are an amazing team.’ Gallagher replied, ‘I am a City fan, I fuckin’ hate Man United.’ And walked away.

  We really went to town on him when I discovered he had been secretly watching porn on the TV. This happened after my mother kindly but unwittingly laid on free hardcore porn for us. She had got our cousin Teddy to get us an illegal cable box, which was then all the rage in Queens. It meant that we paid for basic cable service, but we got all of the channels all of the time, including the pay-per-view movie channels, so we could watch all the latest releases for free. That is really why my mother wanted it, so she could watch movies when repeats of Murder, She Wrote weren’t on.

  She did not realize that there was a pay-per-view movie channel called the Spice Network that showed hotel-room standard porn 24/7. This stuff was not the French soft porn we used to have to trawl the TV guide to find. This was full-on porn-star porn all the time. Well, this was a gift for us three boys who had just entered the height of our masturbatory prowess. I was sixteen and was in need of porn for at least three to four years. My brother Michael John was fourteen and was definitely on the hunt, and Aidan was just entering the realm of self-help.