My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  Porn was a rare thing to come across in the early 1990s. It’s not like now, when you can find it on the internet. We watched it all the time. But we assumed we were the only ones in the house watching it.

  One day I came home at one o’clock in the morning and I caught my dad watching the Spice Network. Now when I say I had caught him, he was actually watching Channel 62, the Japanese channel which was one channel down from Spice. It’s important to understand that until the day he died my father did not know how to use the remote control; he called it the ‘flicker’. He called it that because the only thing he knew was flicking through the channels with the arrow keys. He never figured out that you could just press two number buttons one after the other. He would have thought that going from 5 to 85 in one go was magic. Watching TV with my dad was seriously annoying, as getting from one channel to another involved him flicking through all the channels in between. Maybe in 1990s Ireland it wasn’t annoying to Flick, Flick, BOOM – all the channels – but we had 130 of them.

  However, this became a big problem for my dad when I walked in unexpectedly. He must have thought I was upstairs in bed when in fact I had been across the street getting drunk in another kid’s basement. So I took him by surprise and he was quick enough on the draw to only flick one channel down. Therefore he had to sit confidently in front of a period Japanese soap opera with no subtitles that he had no business watching whatsoever. I knew straight away what he was doing. I watched Spice every day and I knew very well that the Japanese channel was one down. He was screwed either way, because 64 was the Arab channel.

  I was willing to give my dad a chance to keep his dignity, so I let him come up with an excuse. I asked him, ‘What are you doing watching the Japanese channel?’ All he could think of to say was, ‘Well, they come into Burberrys so I thought I’d watch what they watch.’

  It is actually really funny when your dad appears to be in trouble in front of you, and it was too funny not to tell my brothers. For a long time after that we would sometimes put on Japanese accents and ask my father if he wanted to watch TV with us. ‘Ooooh, Michaelson, very good soap opera on today. Flicky, Flicky 62 for you. But oh be very careful do not a flicky flicky too faa. Sixty-three verrrry diiirty.’ It was silly and, until my mother saw the routine about it in the stage show, she never knew why we used to do that.

  8

  One of the running jokes in our family was doing my dad’s accent and saying, ‘I am going to study the rules of the road and take the test this year.’ He was always going on about it. Actually, because he couldn’t drive I don’t have that many memories of just being with my dad on my own when I was young.

  One day, about six years before he died, we were driving down 188th Street by Peck Park and I asked him why he never learned to drive. Then I asked him when was the last time he had actually even tried to drive. He told me he could hardly remember. It was not a busy time of day so I pulled over and told him he should give it a go right that minute. For some reason he said yes; he must have been in a very good mood. It’s a strange thing to teach your dad to drive. It’s not meant to happen that way; it is supposed to be the other way around.

  The first thing he did was to ask me where the clutch was. Now this will tell you how clueless he was because he had been driving with my mother in America since 1976 and had never figured out that in an automatic transmission there is no clutch. My mother never drove a manual transmission in her life, so there had been no time in their life together when he could even have heard mention of the clutch. So I told him there was no clutch and that it was the same as going on the bumper cars. Of course he had never gone on the bumper cars with us because of his back, but I think he got the gist of what I was trying to say.

  So he got behind the wheel and made the usual mistake of putting his left foot on the brake. I told him to use just the right foot, and away we went up the hill on 188th Street, two blocks from our house. He was not bad. The best moment was when he said, almost childlike, ‘Holy shit, man, I am bloody driving!’

  He panicked a bit as we came up to the stop sign at our corner, where he stopped and we swapped places so I could park the car, but he had done well. He said he was going to learn the rules of the road so he could drive in retirement and not have to rely on my mother. But of course he didn’t.

  When my mother went through his stuff after he died, she found three copies of the rules of the road study manual in his drawer.

  My father wasn’t a total pushover and we had some proper clashes during those turbulent teenage years, but later on I wondered why he allowed us to make fun of him as much as we did. At times our dinners became like a sketch show, all based on us doing impersonations of my dad. As an adult I thought back to those times and wondered why my dad had never stood up and properly let us know that he had had enough. A lot of it was good fun, but more of it was disrespectful. I sometimes wished when I got older that he had slammed his fist on the table and let us know who was the boss.

  In the house it was all about our performance, and my dad took a lot of slagging; but outside the house it was a different matter because there were other people observing us. My father’s favourite thing to say to us was, ‘Don’t make a scene.’ He was essentially a very quiet man in the very loud world of New York children with a very loud New York wife. My mother loved making a scene. It was in drama that she functioned best. It’s quite funny that a man who desired the spotlight much of the time hated the drama of everyday life. My mother hated the spotlight, but she loved the drama. This was also unfortunate for my dad, because he hated sudden loud noises in the house and would often jump when we were shouting or knocked something over.

  We grew up with the language of chaos. My mother described everything as a disaster. Now we do. I can hear it when my brothers say it nowadays. Of course, out of our New York mouths it sounds like, ‘Dis is a disasta!’ A long line at customs: Dis is a disasta. Waiter taking too long to bring the food: What a disasta. Ordering a taxi that takes too long to arrive: Dis is a disasta.

  I too always describe the most basic problems as a disaster. For example, if I ended up in traffic I would say, ‘This is a disaster!’ It’s not the right word to use, because an earthquake is a disaster; traffic is a minor inconvenience. I was never really aware of how frequently I said things were a disaster. One day, while I was making a documentary, the director Mike Casey said to me, ‘I realize now that you just use that word in a specific way. For a while I thought you genuinely viewed things as disasters, but now I know it’s just the way you describe things.’ It came to me that he had been thinking until then that my radar of how serious a situation is was quite irrational.

  The strange thing is that we never viewed the big things as disastas at all. I don’t think anyone once described my dad getting sick as a disasta. I can hardly remember my mom getting breast cancer because she wouldn’t let us know how it was going. In fact, if you ever asked my mother how she was around that time, she would tell you it was nothing. It certainly was not a disasta. Not like getting parking at North Shore Hospital on her way in to treatment. ‘Gawd, what a disasta!’

  My father always tried to remain calm. He was not great at anything confrontational. That’s why he always said things like ‘Don’t make a scene’; or maybe it was because we were always making scenes. Us boys made the scenes that hyper kids make when they fight in public, and my mother made the scenes that battleaxe women make when they are trying to get deals or are fighting against car dealers who are trying to pull a fast one. Perhaps my dad did not like us making scenes because he was not in them. Maybe he was such an actor he would have preferred to be the one making the scene, because then he would be the star of it.

  I sometimes wonder if I am wrong about feeling that I had a very passive father, so while writing this book I asked my mother what she thought. She told me that my dad never really wanted to be our father as much as he wanted to be our friend. He was too worried tha
t if he was tough on us we would reject him. He just wanted us to love him, which frustrated my mother. I never really knew that, but she often felt that it was her versus all the men in the house. She does have a tendency to see herself as the victim, so I take that with a pinch of salt, but she certainly always had to be the bad cop. The problem was, my dad was not even playing the good cop; he wasn’t being a cop at all. He was just waiting for us to get out of the interrogation room so he could play some more. He left the police work to her.

  If I were to say what kind of cop my mother was, I would say she was like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. She got the job done but she had a pretty crazy way of going about it. She had everyone around her on edge all the time. But she had learned to fuel herself with anxiety because anxiety was all she ever really knew while growing up. This is not really my mother’s story, but it is important to know that she had a really tough childhood, which I found out about quite late in life. My grandmother was one of the most loving women I could have known in my lifetime, but after she died (in 1998) I found out that my grandparents had been terrible alcoholics and my mother and her siblings had had to deal with the unpredictability of that throughout all their childhood. My mother told me she often had to pull her mother out of the local bars and would have to deal with my grandmother’s harsh and shame-filled rants when she was boozed up.

  In my show I joke that my mother was American but was raised in the proper Irish way, in that she was raised by alcoholics. People always laugh, both in Ireland and in the UK. I know that why they laugh is because of the way I phrase it, but I always think that it should not be funny. It is kind of darkly humorous to know that so many people in the crowd are laughing from pure identification. They are thinking, ‘Is there any other way to be raised? I thought one of your parents being an alky was part of it. That’s how it works: most of the time your parents are angry and every now and then they come home happy at one in the morning and you begin to associate affection with the smell of chips!’

  We did not grow up around booze, so that image comes more from the family life I saw when I was staying with friends in Ireland after I moved there to go to boarding school when I was fourteen. I witnessed those Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde parents many times. But my mother was not an observer of that life, she was an active participant. There are so many stories of what she had to go through. She used to hate going to Gaelic Park with Michael John and Aidan when they got into playing Gaelic football in the Bronx when they grew a bit older. Gaelic Park was a very emotional place for her because she could remember spending all day Sunday there when she was a girl, watching Gaelic football in the heat and then having to drag her parents out of the bar and carry them to the subway and get them all the way back to Queens.

  When I found out about all this I was kind of impressed with what she had had to get through. She had survived The War of the Alcoholic Home. She had survived the stress and the uncertainty. She survived that war by developing the survival skills of wartime. She had found a way of coping in this very turbulent situation when she should have just been being a kid and worrying about playing and doing homework. That could not have been easy.

  I always say that it is amazing my mother survived it. The fact that she had to develop those wartime skills to get through it was tremendous and I commend her for developing them. It was just unfortunate for myself and my brothers that she chose to use the same skills in peacetime and brought a little bit of that war home to the sober Bishop household. There was no need for all that drama, but that was all she knew. Crisis management was her strong point, so she needed to create a crisis in order to manage it. This meant that as kids we grew up with an enormous amount of anxiety without there really being that much to be anxious about.

  My mother’s family enjoying Kissena Park in the mid-1940s. From the left: her father John O’Hare (‘Pop Pop’), my Aunt Mary, my mom, my nan Peggy O’Hare and my Uncle Jack. There were still two more to come – my Uncle Kev and my Aunt Peggy.

  If you want further evidence of how this manifested itself in our lives, I can tell you about times when my dad would have his blowouts. When I say a ‘blowout’ I just mean when my father would blow his fuse. He rarely did so, but when he did it was pretty strong. He would often ask to be let out of the car wherever we were.

  ‘Stop the car, Eileen! Stop the car, now!’

  Big drama. My father would get out of the car and walk away. It was not a really cool thing to do and my mother would be seriously panicked. After an hour or so, if my dad had not come home my mother would pack me in the car and drive around to the local bars, looking for him. She would send me in to take a peak to see if he was in there. I would have thought it was cool if he was in one of them. Not realizing that he had had a drink problem, I would not have thought it at all strange when I was small if my dad had decided to have a beer in a local bar. That’s what grown-ups did.

  Of course we would not find him because he was always just walking around Kissena or Peck Park, or he would just go for a haircut or something to cool down. But my mother’s reflex was to go back to that place of terror.

  Actually that is one other really interesting thing about my dad. Any time he ‘blew his stack’, which was his way of describing it, within a day or two he would always apologize to us. He might also say, ‘Hey, Dessie Doodle, I am sorry I lost my cool, man!’ It was always pretty cool that he would do that.

  One final thing I’ve realized about my parents as I work on this book. When I go through all the family photographs, I notice there are hardly any of us with my mother. That is because she was taking them all. She was the director. She was the one behind the scenes. Perhaps she should have let herself take part more. Perhaps my dad should have insisted on getting her in. It just became the way it was. That was the role she played. She did not have time to horse around, because the whole production was resting on her shoulders. It had been since she was just a girl.

  Once again it’s my mother taking the picture. All the photos with her in them were taken really badly. My father was made for one side of the lens only and was always terrible with gadgets. I loved that Transformer.

  9

  The weird thing that happened to me in the early days of my father’s illness was realizing just how much I was like my mother. Though I had followed in my father’s footsteps in so many other ways, my personality was much more like my mother’s. I have a short fuse, like her, and I am not very patient. In the past, my mother would have been the one to take charge in a family crisis like this, but she was not really able to take charge in that first week after my dad’s diagnosis. My brother Michael John and I had to have all the chats and relay the information to my mother and hide most of it from my father.

  Suddenly the children were in charge. And I was also into being in charge. I even noticed that once or twice in the first day or two I would get annoyed when people did not want to do things my way. It had nothing to do with what was best for my father and everything to do with me being right. I remember actually thinking to myself: ‘I AM MY MOTHER!’

  Even when he moved into a nicer room after his initial assessments were over, my father was still not sleeping well. I think it was after his first day of chemo that he asked me quite innocently if he could have a sleeping tablet. I rang for the nurse and I asked her if my father could have one. She told us that she had to ask the doctor first. That was not much of a big deal, but for some reason they could not find a doctor who could answer that question for my dad. It probably should not have been that much of a drama, but it was late and my father was pushing us to leave because he was feeling bad that we had been there all day. My mother on the other hand would not go until I had secured a sleeping pill for my father. Suddenly it was up to me to try and get this pill for him.

  Life goes on in the hospital and, of course, to the nurse there was nothing urgent about the situation. I called again fifteen minutes later and she had still not got an an
swer for us. The long day and my mother’s worry were not helping my ability to deal with my growing frustration and I was losing patience big time. In fact the frustration of everything that had gone on in the last few days was building up in me, along with the responsibility of getting this pill for him, no matter what. Of course my dad was trying to say that it was not important, but it was not even about him anymore. It was all about the fact that this was ridiculous. It was not a big deal and I was moving beyond any rational reaction to the delay in getting an answer to my request.

  In the end the nurse came back with a negative response: the doctor had said my father could not have a sleeping pill. My mother made the noises that she makes when she is not happy with the situation. I then got a little upset with the nurse about why it took so long to find out such a simple thing. I was making a scene and my father hated that. He was probably thinking: ‘Oh my god, he’s become Eileen. The metamorphosis is complete!’

  My dad must have felt compelled (as he had done for most of his life) to try and chill out the situation. How he did it was quite funny. I did not really see it as such at the time, because I was quite worked up. He turned to me in front of everyone and said, ‘Look, Des, it’s all right, if I don’t get a sleeping pill, I won’t lose any sleep over it!’

  Everyone laughed. I kind of laughed too but I was annoyed that he was undermining my attempt to push for him in the hospital. It was as if, only a few days into my newfound authority in the family, my new parent/son was undermining my authority as I had once done his. Here was me back in NY, cancelling all my shows, so I could look after my dad and pay him back for looking after me as a child. And he was trying to pay me back for being a smart ass when I was a teenager.