by Des Bishop
The piano players loved me because they could ripple up and down the keyboards while I was imitating bird sounds. I would drink for free. Brady loved going to the pubs with me because he would be included in the free drinks. Unfortunately Brady started to get homesick for Dublin, going from one extreme to the other to save every penny – he wouldn’t even buy new socks, or a bar of soap, and his feet used to stink. One day he upped and left, owing the landlady a week’s rent, and he stuck me with having to pay it. Life became very lonely for me after that.
The demolition job I had no longer needed labourers and my money started to run out. I would go to Victoria Station and stand there all night, feeling very lonely and hoping I would see a face that I recognized. I would make my way up to Piccadilly and hang out in the snooker halls and talk to broken-down boxers. They were the only friends I had. A boxer called Tommy Burke told me the worst thing I could do was to go through life feeling sorry for myself and that my eyes were oozing self-pity. After he told me that I made up my mind that I would never feel sorry for myself again. He introduced me to a man who had a window-cleaning company and told him that I was looking for work and he gave me a job.
The owner of the window-cleaning company, Tommy the Scrum, rolled his own cigarettes very, very thin like a matchstick. He told me, ‘That’s how you roll ’em in prison.’ Everyone that worked for him had done time. He treated me like his own son and he protected me. I never forgot his kindness. This crowd were also heavy drinkers. It felt like winning a gold medal when they told me that for a young lad I could really hold my beer. On a Saturday we would finish cleaning windows at noon, and we would go to the pub and drink till three o’clock in the afternoon. On this particular day the thought of going back to my room and being alone again was too much. That afternoon I walked into an army recruiting centre and signed up to the British Army for twenty-two years.
When I told Tommy the Scrum that I had signed on to the British Army, he said it was an insane thing to do, ‘But now that you have done it, you’ve made your bed and you will have to lie in it.’
What Tommy didn’t realize was that I’d signed up out of loneliness and desperation. What also prompted me to do it was I had a belly full of beer at the time.
I knew that my dad had known some of London’s criminals; it just never made sense to me until I read this. My father was very friendly with Terry ‘Lucky Tel’ Hogan, a notorious and very successful thief in London. Terry was the best friend of Bruce Reynolds, who masterminded the Great Train Robbery. It seems like my dad might have just been name-dropping, but I have seen a photograph of my parents with Terry Hogan and his second wife on holidays together in Hastings while my mother was pregnant with me. My mother remembers visiting his amazing house and she also remembers how good Terry’s wife was to her when she was pregnant. She visited her all the time.
Terry Hogan, his second wife Roz and son Keith while on holiday with my parents in Hastings in 1975. Keith remained in contact with my father and stayed in our house in New York while I was in Ireland. Sadly, Terry committed suicide in 1995. Bruce Reynolds spoke at his funeral and Keith sent us a picture of his family with Bruce at the winning post at Aintree, where they spread his ashes.
My father knew all those characters from the London underworld. I just never understood how and why he met them. Now it makes sense that before he got into modelling, like many kids who went through what he did, he found himself in London in the shadier circles, working on building sites and hanging around pool halls. (He was very good at pool. Every time he hit a shot he would always say, ‘Sign of a misspent youth!’ I would say now it was a sign of a life story untold.)
I am not surprised though that the story about peanut butter was the catalyst for him to remove himself from Bexhill. He was always talking about that moment.
One of the reasons my dad wanted to place himself in London when he was much younger was because he loved Oliver Twist and he loved London. I think he wanted to see himself as the young Oliver, fleeing tyranny to London. When my dad went to write his memoir he tried to fit the experiences of his life into narratives he was familiar with. Essentially he had no belief in his life being interesting enough without these embellishments and half-truths.
My father did not want people to know that he had only been in Ireland for four years during the war. He did not want people to know that his years of struggling in London did not take place until his mid-twenties. He did not want to admit that he had been back living with his parents in Bexhill after the army, but in fact that was the case. I don’t know why it was the case, because it makes even the story of him breaking his back all the more tragic. Yet it may have been what saved him because it got him out of Bexhill.
Once my dad moved to London he would never return to live in Bexhill again either in reality or in his memory. It is understandable that he would eradicate as much of Bexhill from his story as he could. It was horrific. By the time he came to writing a memoir, he had forgotten the truth to a certain extent. He had a story in his mind that he told the world, and he nearly believed it himself.
PART TWO
… Like Son
I was the youngest of my friends on our block and I was the last one to start proper school, so they had all gone into first grade and beyond by the time I was in kindergarten. I have a vivid memory from this time. I can see the four-year-old me standing in the alleyway where we always played and it is still warm in the late September sun. It is so quiet and still. There is literally no one anywhere, which I see as eerie because I know the alley only as a place of noise and play. I have to squint, it is so bright. I can see the clothes hanging off the lines in rows, gently flapping in the midday sun and their shadows dancing on the asphalt.
I walk to the alley at the other side. I look down there, and again there is nothing to greet me but clothes and the barking of the Fullers’ dog, which has smelled me from four houses away. I can hear the leaves in the breeze and it’s the first time I am ever aware of them because I have never experienced such quiet. It is too quiet and all I can feel is a terrible loneliness and a longing for my friends to return. I go and stand on the corner of 189th Street to wait for the school bus to return to the corner, but it’s hours away.
After a while I give up and I walk back towards my house. I don’t know why, but I don’t want to go in there. I feel a terrible anxiety and I am aware of it clearly. Something just doesn’t feel right. I stand there and I listen to the trees and I hum to myself, but all the time I am thinking: what is wrong with me? My mother was inside watching the soap opera All My Children, yet I was more comfortable in this lonely isolation than in my home.
I can’t help but notice that for much of my life I wished I was somewhere else. I can’t say why I was already searching for something at that age. But this is not the beginning of a story about blame. It is a story about not being comfortable in the places where we should have been safe.
15
Connemara, 2008.
Becoming the parent of my parents was a real education. It was the first time that I really put someone else’s welfare before my own. My mission in life was to make sure that my dad would be OK and that my mother had enough help to get through everything. I am a natural procrastinator, but very early on I realized that would have to change if I was going to help my dad. I knew I had to make awkward phone calls. I knew that I had to do some research to make sure my dad was getting the best care. I knew I had to cancel gigs I did not want to cancel. I knew that for the time being my life was no longer mine.
In real terms this was nothing like the sacrifice of parenting. For starters there were four of us helping each other out, and thankfully my dad was not helpless. He was still able to do things and did not need round-the-clock care. My mother was also very capable, and very soon after my dad got sick she pulled herself together and began to organize things in an almost obsessive-compulsive way.
It was stil
l a real eye-opener for me to know that when the buck stops with you, the only option is to act. I had to force my dad to eat when he didn’t want to and would snap at me. My dad could get very sharp at times when I would try to force him to have a few sips of the nutrition shakes we had for him. ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake; are we going to start with this bullshit again?’ It was tough to have to fight with him over our desire to help him survive. I can’t identify with his aversion to eating because I have never been in his situation, but I can tell you that for the first few weeks, when the weight was falling off him, at times he was violently opposed to eating.
My mother would be nearly crying downstairs, she was so worried about him not eating. She would ask me to try to persuade him to eat because she thought he would not want to let me down. That worked only twice, and then he realized that I was taking over my mother’s role and that he would have to treat me with the same disdain. The doctors had told me it was essential that my dad ate, because he would need the strength to get through the chemo. They had told me that at that point in time not eating was actually the greatest threat to his survival.
We had some great battles back then and, to be honest, I liked the dynamic. When I say that, I mean I liked having to be strong enough to not give in to him. I would try and shame him by asking him if he wanted to die. I told him that it was no problem if that was what he wanted, but he would need to let us know so we could prepare.
‘Just one more sip, please!’ We all joked that we could play airplane if he thought it would help. It really is an incredible role change when you end up feeding your dad. It just makes you closer really. In the end my dad was very grateful, and finally he got his appetite back. He ended up putting on so much weight that his vanity took over and he began to worry that he did not look great. I think he worried about that more than about dying. Often he would stand in front of the mirror and grab his belly. ‘Look at that gut. Look!’ The first thing he told everyone who came over was that the oncologist said she liked her patients to be pudgy. He was probably thinking that everyone’s first thought was, ‘Wow, Mike has put on some weight!’ Of course what they were thinking was, ‘Wow, Mike is looking great for someone who is dying!’ but you can see what my dad’s priorities were; even when he was dying he was worried about his image.
When I was growing up, my mother used to love to say, ‘One day you will understand.’ That was her favourite expression. She did not say it to get out of having to explain something; it was always when we were challenging her as to why we could not do something or why we were in so much trouble for something. We were like professional footballers when it came to challenging our parents over some perceived injustice. We were up in the referee’s face for every decision, and we could rarely see what we had done wrong. As with all referees, they made the odd mistake; but their decisions, whether correct or not, stood. Like most referees, their intentions were noble despite their imperfections.
The other thing my mother used to say and do when she was really stressed out was to look up to the heavens and exclaim, ‘What am I am going to do with these children?’, or, ‘Please, God, give me the strength to deal with these children!’ You could see the stress in her mouth as she said it. My mother used to store all her tension in her jaw. When I clench my teeth I think of my mother. It seemed that this was her expression most of the time. My mother’s sisters were the same. It’s an O’Hare trait. If I was joking around about making a movie about my brothers and my cousins swimming in calm water where no parents were around, and that calmness turning to terror when they showed up, we would have no problem calling it Jaws.
As I got older I knew the moment would come when I actually would understand what my mother meant. Life had given me enough insight to know that I was a hyperactive hothead who was hard to handle. Maturity and sobriety had made me a more peaceful guy and I had begun to understand a few things. But I assumed that the real moment of understanding would come when I had a child myself. I always thought that this is when the grandparents really get their revenge. This is when they get to watch you try to organize life with a crying baby in one room and a jealous toddler in the other. This is when they get to watch you try to break up a fight and make both children feel like they won. This is when they get to tell you how much better than you they were at all that stuff. This is how the cliché goes as far as I was concerned.
I see it with my brother’s kids and my cousins’ kids. The grandparents love making comments about things they would not let the kids do. They are very critical.
But the moment I figured out what my mother meant was when I became the parent of my parents and I knew that they had become dependent on us. My life flashed before my eyes and I could see my entire existence in a new light. I realized I had spent my life telling my parents to relax as much as I possibly could.
Found passed out, drunk, on the kitchen table in my own vomit on the eve of Mother’s Day, 1990: ‘Relax!’
Kicked out of school at fourteen years old: ‘Relax!’
Drug problem at nineteen: ‘Relax!’
Testicular cancer at twenty-four years old: ‘Relax!’
I could not tell my mother to relax enough, truth be told. It was as if I thought I was the Dalai Lama.
Now I was feeding my father, cleaning my father, taking him to the doctor. Plus I was trying to keep my mother from imploding while also making her feel like she still mattered. My dad was like one child getting all the attention, and my mother was like the other, stomping her feet and thinking, ‘What about me?’ My mother has her own health issues, so I would offer to take her to the doctor and then for coffee, but she would say, ‘No, we have to get back to your father.’ Of course I was thinking, ‘No, actually you need to look after yourself because Dad is just chilling and watching football and you are just stressing yourself out.’ But of course I didn’t say anything because, like a parent, I was trying to be especially patient.
My father would snap at my mother a lot during the day. He took much of his frustration out on her. My mother made a lot of pained noises and pulled a lot of pained faces and then, when you asked her what was going on, she would say that nothing was wrong. You could not get her to admit a thing. Instead, there would just be this tense atmosphere around the place. You just got the sense that, if she admitted a thing, she would just break down and cry. I wished that she would. It would have been the appropriate response.
‘Mom, why don’t you come to the movies?’
‘No. Desmond. There … Is … Just … Too … Much … Stuff … I … Have … To … DO!’
She would emphasize each word, as if asking her to go to the movies was some sort of insult. There was nothing she really had to do other than sit still, which she was incapable of doing. So she would be making her noises and my dad would be refusing to drink water, despite the fact that on a few occasions we had to bring him to the hospital to get hydrated. Once or twice I found myself looking up to the heavens and thinking, ‘What am I going to do with these children?’
Or my new personal favourite cry for help: ‘MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Please talk us down.’
The day had come when I really understood. In fact, after a few weeks of my dad being sick, my mother turned to me and said, ‘Desmond, you need to relax.’
You fucking relax! One day you will understand …
16
As I said, this is not a story about blame and I will spare you the details of how I ended up such an uncomfortable teenager, but something had been building up in me from a very young age. It managed to stay beneath the surface for years, but when the hormones of adolescence kicked in my emotional life exploded.
I have joked in my shows for years about how I ended up coming to live in Ireland at fourteen. The joke is that I got kicked out of school because I had a problem with alcohol and my mother came up with the ingenious idea of sending me to Ireland to go to boarding school. Of all the countries in the world … perhaps she
saw potential in my alcoholism and wanted to make me the best alcoholic I could be. Ireland was the premiership, and if I was showing this much talent so young, I would need to be among the best if I wanted to progress. It was as if I was the Wayne Rooney of drinking.
It’s not really true, though. Yes, I already had a drinking problem at the age of fourteen, but it was only one factor in my coming to Ireland and a small one in getting kicked out of school. The drinking was just a symptom of something deep within me that was very discontented.
The first problem was that I started drinking at twelve years old. I was the youngest of the gang of us who hung around together in the neighbourhood, and some of them were already sixteen during the summer of 1988. So when they started drinking, I started drinking. It was innocent enough for them – they were just teenagers having a few beers in the park – but I wasn’t a teenager yet. The other problem was, I was the product of multi-generational alcoholism on both sides. I had ‘the gene’, as my mother would call it, and once I let that genie out of the lamp I didn’t need three wishes because I had only one: MORE!
I can still recall how it felt that first night I got drunk. I don’t feel twelve. I feel like a man. My mind is empty and the questions ease. I can see the corner of 188th Street and 47th Avenue illuminated under the street light. I can see the trees. They look so beautiful and still. I want to stare at them for ages. I feel still, too. I have no anxiety. It is the greatest night of my life …
In the summer of 1989 I began drinking a lot more. I had major blackouts and it was miraculous that I did not get caught by my parents. I wet the bed from total drunkenness for the first time and I remember telling my mother that I must have had a wet dream. I will always remember what she said because, despite the seriousness of the situation, it was really very funny. ‘I don’t know what kind of man you think you are, but wet dreams don’t soak all the way through the mattress!’ I thought I was busted for sure, but I guess she was not ready to admit what was really going on.