My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  The real reason I wound up wanting to go to another country had a lot less to do with booze, however. I went to high school in the fall of 1989. Most of my friends had gone to another high school, so I did not know many people when I got to St Francis Prep. It was a high school with three thousand kids, and half of them were girls. All three thousand of us were dealing with more hormones than the Tour de France. I joined their ranks and for some reason I was not equipped to fit in.

  Within a few months of being there I experienced two major instances of what people today would say was clearly bullying, but back then nobody used that term. First, this Italian-American kid developed a serious crush on my girlfriend and started to make my life a misery. He knew all of the Howard Beach kids, the largest group in the school, and I knew hardly anyone. Suddenly, every day I was going to school afraid of these kids.

  If that was not bad enough, my best friend who had gone to another school fell in with a new crowd. No sooner had I found a way to deal with the intimidation in school than my friend and his new gang turned on me. By Christmas I had lost all my confidence, my interest in school disappeared and I was failing loads of subjects. To add to the problems, as a result of the rejection of these groups I started hanging out with the neighbourhood kids every weekend. That meant drinking every weekend. My life became drinking, figuring out ways to lie to my parents about how school was going and hanging out with my girlfriend. The sense of exclusion was excruciating.

  Since my very young days I had had the feeling that something was not right with me. I could not put my finger on it, but it was with me so often. Now these feelings were verified. There was something wrong with me and everyone else had figured it out. I would sit on the couch at night in our living room. We only used it when people were over so it was a very quiet room. I would sit there and pray for the phone to ring. I would wish that someone wanted to be with me. I could feel the emotion in my ankles and my fingertips, it was so strong. Sometimes it almost paralysed me. I wanted to fit in so bad.

  On the eve of Mother’s Day, 1990, my parents came back from a wedding very late to find me passed out, drunk, in my own puke on the kitchen table. This was more teenage drama than Beverly Hills, 90210.

  I had been put on academic probation in school, and a few months later the inevitable happened: St Francis Prep informed us that I had been expelled due to inadequate academic performance.

  A few weeks later my parents found me blacked out, drunk, for the second time. I actually came home and pissed in the fireplace in our house in Westhampton. I have no recollection of it whatsoever.

  It must have been tough on my dad because these were the things he used to do himself when he would black out. Initially he said nothing much at all. Then weeks later he got angry at me over nothing. I said, ‘What the fuck is your problem?’

  He got really angry and got right into my face, his chest nearly touching mine as he shouted, ‘My problem is you coming home here drunk and wetting the bed and getting kicked out of school and thinking that you haven’t done anything wrong!’ He said many things that had been building up. I think he told me I was full of piss and wind as well. I know that it was pretty intense and was one of the only times I really thought my dad was going to kick my ass. I stood up to him as if I was ready to fight him, but I was actually freaked out by his anger.

  My mother knew that I was an alcoholic. She had been around it her whole life and she could recognize ‘the gene’. This time when they caught me, drunk, my mother told me quite calmly, ‘Desmond, you don’t know it yet, but you are an alcoholic and it is going to bring you so much pain.’

  I remember giving her a smartass answer and saying, ‘What do you want me to do, go to AA?’

  I would like to think she said, ‘One day you will understand!’ But I know that at that point she had no time for my arrogance. She was not really angry that second time, she was just disappointed and upset because she knew that now she would have to deal with a third generation of alcoholism in her life. She had been surrounded by it from birth, and it was refusing to leave her alone. Looking back, I guess I was lucky that my mother was so good at letting me know when I was really young that I was screwed with the booze, so I never really had a chance to be in denial for too long.

  I was in Queens in 1990; it was on the fringes of New York City. It was at the edge of a time when crime was rampant and crack was king. Though we lived in the semi-suburban quiet of eastern Flushing, the dysfunction of the city leaked into our safe, tree-lined world. Many people who were close to our family, including extended family members, had graduated from graffiti-writing, robbing cars and gang violence, to cocaine and crack addiction. People had no faith in the public school system which was now the only option open to me after being expelled. You could succeed there, but the cracks to fall through were wide. It was not a safe place for an impressionable young kid like me who was attracted to all the wrong things.

  I can’t really say why I was so uncomfortable in my skin at that time, but I knew I was on a bad road. I was desperate for attention and acceptance after the rejection of my friends. I don’t really know if there was anything my parents could have done at the time. It was in this atmosphere of chaos and confusion that the idea of moving to Ireland came up.

  On the day that Ireland beat Romania in the World Cup, I got the letter with the official word that I had been kicked out of school. I had to call my mother with the news and she broke down crying. But she stopped crying when I told her that Ireland was in a penalty shoot-out with Romania. I had to give her a play-by-play of the shoot-out, and when David O’Leary popped it in the back of the net, she was happy for a moment, and then she went back to crying. ‘Desmond, what are we going to do with you?’ This was a genuine disasta.

  That summer, a cousin – Fiona Treanor, the daughter of my father’s first cousin Marie – was visiting us on her way to Cape Cod to work for the summer on a J1 visa. Having been kicked out of school, I was in summer school and she was helping me with my homework. We were unsure where I was going to go to school after that, and Fiona suggested that maybe I could go to school in Ireland. I thought it was a great idea. I could not get out of New York fast enough. I was incredibly miserable and I thought anywhere would be better than there.

  I told my parents and at first they just laughed. But then they turned to my godfather, Eamon Doran, for advice. His own kids had a very transatlantic existence and he thought it would be a great thing for me who had become so distracted. Because Eamon was a big fan of me going to Ireland, so was my dad. My father really trusted Eamon’s opinion. It is understandable really that my dad would think that me going to Ireland was a good idea. It was the only time he was happy in his childhood so I am sure he thought I might find happiness there too.

  For both my parents it seemed quite a prestigious thing to do. They both liked the idea that I was going to boarding school abroad. The perception of boarding school in the States was very elite. Due to the difference in the standard of living between Ireland and America in 1990, boarding school in Ireland seemed quite affordable. St Francis Prep was pretty expensive anyway. To them, it was a cheap way to offer a very prestigious solution to my problems in education.

  Fiona’s dad Tom came back with loads of information on St Peter’s College in Wexford, where he himself had gone, and the final decision was made after I had a conversation on the phone with St Peter’s principal, Fr Donal Collins. He asked me a few questions about myself and why I had been kicked out of school. He seemed happy with the conversation and he said he could see no reason why I should not be happy there. (As it turned out, he was aware of a few reasons why some kids might not be happy there, because he was sexually abusing them. He would later go to prison and was one of the three main priests featured in the Ferns Report into clerical abuse in the diocese.) It literally all took place over a six-week period, from the day it came up with Fiona to me leaving. Suddenly that was it; I was going to
Ireland.

  My mother told me recently that she said to my father before I went to Ireland that I was going to have to go through whatever journey I was going to have with booze. She had no idea what that journey would be, but she thought that I would be safer there. She had seen what our neighbourhood had done to the children of people she had known, and she thought that Ireland would be a place where I would get in less trouble. She truly thought that if I stayed in Queens I would end up either in jail or dead.

  I knew nothing of my dad’s past then. I had no idea that in much more dramatic circumstances he had ended up living away from his parents at exactly the same age as me.

  17

  Part of my wanting to tell this story is because I wanted to make sense of my dad’s life. There were parts of his life he did not want us to know about for a long time. I eventually accepted that my father had a narrative about his past that he had come to accept. Still, it was a narrative with gaping holes in it. There were always holes because, even when my dad was there, he wasn’t there. It’s hard to locate those vivid memories of a man who is lost in his thoughts.

  First thing in the morning, before his routine in the bathroom, my father would come downstairs to get a cup of coffee. He would often sit there, just staring out the window on to 188th Street. You could come down the stairs and pass him and he would pay no attention to you at all. There is nothing on 188th to absorb that much attention, so you knew he was in some other place. Sometimes he would be shaking his head and often he would start talking to himself. He would completely forget where he was.

  When I think of how often we would find my dad pacing in car parks while we were shopping, his hands clasped behind his back or, smoking, lost in some other place, it seemed like he was only coming along for the ride. Once, on the way to the Hamptons, we all went into a 7/11 and he stayed outside to pace and smoke and think and talk to himself. While we were in there a woman came in and said to the cashier, ‘There’s a crazy man outside walking in the car park.’ We realized she was talking about our dad. At times he was like a hitchhiker on our family’s journey, a quiet presence who didn’t like to get too involved.

  He just didn’t know how to do it. All our lives he would say to us, ‘One of these days I am going to take you to Great Adventure’ or ‘One of these days I am going to take you bowling.’ I guess it would have been on one of those days when he got a driver’s licence. But the day never came.

  I assumed those gaps in his story were filled with the things we didn’t know about his past. But then I thought about the story of our relationship and there’s a hole there too. I kind of noticed it by accident. When I say that, I mean that I am aware I spent my teenage years in Ireland away from my family, but I honestly didn’t realize until I sat down to write this story how much of a gap it creates. I then noticed that, without it being intentional, I had jumped from the age of fourteen to my dad getting sick in the stage show, with no mention of what comes in between. I didn’t even want to get into explaining all those years we spent apart. It was a story I was not comfortable telling. I guess, like my dad, I was worried about the judgements others would make.

  Because of the hole in my story, I think that is why it was so important for me to spend so much time with my dad later on. I was the absent son. I needed to be present. Maybe he thought he was the absent father.

  I pretend the gap in my story is not there and try to talk about things in a way that no one will notice. It is one manifestation of the distance that grew in our family. Many kids are sent to boarding school and perhaps they don’t always feel so separate, but there is a strange thing about going to boarding school in another country that makes you feel apart. There are so many experiences when no one is there.

  I left New York as an unaccompanied minor on Aer Lingus flight 104 on the evening of 25 August 1990. I was fourteen years old and had never been outside the United States since arriving when I was less than one month old. I was going to an entirely new culture on my own with hardly a pubic hair to show for myself, to be met by cousins I had never met before. I thought I was much wiser than my fourteen years and I was not afraid.

  Now, when I think about writing down stories about my father, I can feel that distance when I think of all those years when I never turned to my parents. They did their job in the way they thought was best. Nothing was ever dealt with calmly in our house. It was a dramatic situation, and they responded to it in a dramatic way. There was nothing about me at the time that suggested I would end up loving Ireland and staying. My mother always says that she thought I would only last a semester, and she really hadn’t planned on me staying.

  The strange thing is that they never even saw St Peter’s. The first time they came to see me in Ireland was for my graduation from University College, Cork, in 1998 (which they should have been very proud of because it took me two extra years to get there). They did not really get involved in any of the big decisions in my life. I did not have to ask their permission to do things. I did not have to show them my homework. They weren’t there to help me with my Leaving Cert. They were not there to help me choose a college. If I mentioned the letters CAO* they would not have known what those letters mean. They were not there when I got my results. They were not there to help me find a place to stay in Cork. They could not even visualize all those years of my life. They had very little context.

  This is not something I am upset over, it is just a statement of fact. They were not part of that story. And believe me, at the time I was not wishing for them to be around. I had plenty to be getting on with that I did not want my parents knowing about.

  It is not so much about them not doing their job; it’s more about all the moments when they were absent. It brings with it a loneliness; it brings with it memories of a premature independence that was joyous and sad in equal measure. I used to tell my cousins in Waterford with whom I stayed at the weekends that I would be staying with school friends the following weekend. I would have no idea who I would be staying with, though – I would just find out who had big plans the following weekend, and go and stay with them. I once had nowhere to stay and ended up sleeping in the gate lodge of the cemetery in Crosstown, County Wexford, because some of my school friends would often use it as a place to get drunk at weekends. I was going out with a girl then who lived around there, and I remember walking up and down the road to pass the time because I knew I could not call around to her until after eleven o’clock. Her mother had seen me strolling around and the girl told me afterwards that her mother was concerned that I had no one wondering where I was.

  But nobody was wondering, because nobody knew where I was. I was pretending to be somewhere else. All I had to do was check in with my parents on a Saturday, which in those days I could do from a payphone. My mother would just call me back wherever I was. On the surface there was nothing to worry about. I had become a good student and was on the Student Council. There were never many bad reports going back to them.

  For me it’s all about the peanut butter. When I finally got a chance to read my father’s abandoned memoir, of all the things that stood out for me it was the moment he writes about when he overheard his foster parents discussing the fact that my dad ate too much peanut butter. There is nothing worse than that feeling of being a burden. I had that feeling many times while I was in Ireland. I would never disrespect the people who looked after me. They took me in and welcomed me, but there are always times when you feel you are a burden in a place where you don’t belong. My father never knew a safe place called home. He was forced into a place where peanut butter became an issue. I chose to leave home too and ended up feeling the same way. My father always talked about the peanut butter story after he revealed his past to us. For him that was the breaking point. After everything he’d been through he wasn’t worth forgiving for eating peanut butter from a jar.

  I wanted to run from Queens back then when I was fourteen. That’s why I was so happy to come t
o Ireland. I was so discontented and I did not even know why. I don’t have any regrets about those years of independence, though, as I feel they turned me into the person I am. It definitely accelerated my becoming a clean and sober person. But I am glad eventually to have had such a strong coming back together as a family. We were not divided at all: we had a strong bond and a real one. We got to that stage in our own strange way, but oddly it could not have turned out any better for my dad, because Ireland had such a strong place in his heart. I felt in some way that I was able to reconnect him to a time when he had known real happiness.

  18

  There was always a clash in my life between what Irish people would call the working-class sentiments in my upbringing and the world I found myself in when I came to Ireland. There was nothing fancy about St Peter’s, but it was considered the most prestigious school in the town. Suddenly my friends were the sons of lawyers, doctors and engineers, whereas in America they had been the sons of firemen, cops and electricians. Kids in St Peter’s made fun of the kids in the Tech because one day they would be plumbers. Kids in my neighbourhood whose dads were plumbers had very nice houses because all the tradesmen made great money in New York.

  It was very hard to compare the two societies and I was not aware of the class change until I was much older and looking back. I did not know there was a stigma attached to being from Queens. I did not know that people who were more educated or refined could hear an uncouth tone in our language. Never once in my life was I aware of not fitting in to any aspect of society. My mother had always tried to give us the impression that anyway we were above it all in Queens. Her mother always said she had champagne taste on a beer income.