by Des Bishop
But our neighbourhood did not celebrate refinement. It was not a place of soft speech. It was a world of blatant racism. The winner of any debate was the loudest and not the smartest. It was a world of jewellery and cars, with radios that played way too loud and kids who thought they were tougher than they were.
Loads of the kids I grew up with were obsessed with getting huge by pumping iron at the gym every day. I can remember one summer when I came back from Ireland, meeting loads of guys I used to know, and they would have blown up. They would always have real tight hair at the sides and big hair at the top. They would always be tanned (which was not hard to achieve because most of them were Italian) but at times it appeared a bit orange and too bright to look healthy. They were cocky as can be. They would always be wearing jeans shorts that were a little too big, as was the style, and a bright polo or a Tommy Hilfiger shirt tucked in one spot only so it hung out at the back. They would also often have a baseball cap on that always appeared to be brand new. This hat had to be one that was not adjustable; it had to be sized to the exact measurements of your head.
My neighbourhood was tacky, what can I say? People were loud, and in the summer they loved to take their shirts off. We were always taking our shirts off. For years I thought that was an American thing, but lately I have realized it was more of a working-class thing. We did not grow up with the rules of middle-class living, even though we were sold the idea that we were middle class. It was a modern American way of understanding class, because the American Dream was that we were a classless society.
I did not know that the strip malls of Northern Boulevard were cultureless and that one day I would look at them and wonder how I was ever happy here. I did not know that, as a result of my experiences and my education, I would look back on the people I grew up with and wonder how we were all once the same. I don’t judge them, but we could not be any more different.
However, there is still a part of me that feels comfortable in Queens. I love hanging out with people I grew up with there because it unleashes a part of me that otherwise lies dormant. It is the wildness that gets set free when you are away from the pressures of middle-class living. There are fewer rules in the working classes.
There are other rules, however. I censor myself a bit when I go home to Queens. I bite my tongue when people get a bit racist or stop myself from speaking against the Iraq War or military spending or universal health care. I can’t understand that becoming a fireman is celebrated as an achievement greater than going to Harvard. I always joke with them and say that firemen are the most racist heroes you will ever meet.
I have this routine I do about being in Australia and taking my shirt off to go jogging. I always feel a bit liberated in Australia because I love the beach lifestyle and I love the fact that no one knows me over there, so I can do whatever the hell I like. So I make a joke about how you can never take your shirt off in Ireland because when you do people assume one of two things: either you love yourself, or you are a scumbag. I live in Dolphin’s Barn in Dublin, which is a tough neighbourhood; people there who are perceived as scumbags take their shirts off all the time. I see myself in them often. My life in ‘The Barn’ has a lot in common with my life in Queens. I see these little tough kids and it reminds me of myself and my friends trying to be tough. I think it’s great when people take their shirts off, but I know that all my friends judge it as being ‘common’. They would never do that. (I never even knew that ‘common’ was an insult until I came to Ireland. To me something common was a regular occurrence, not a character flaw.)
‘What would people say?’ That is the refrain. ‘Put your shirt back on; what would people say?’
I like to put the question back to people, ‘I don’t know. What would people say?’
I think for a lot of people the answer would be, ‘Well, they would say, “You love yourself!”’
Well, God forbid. Imagine loving yourself. You see, that’s the problem in Ireland: loving yourself is a sin. I have a lot of problems about the area I grew up in, but the one thing I like and miss about it is this: if someone said to you in my neighbourhood, ‘What would people say?’ most of my friends would say, ‘Who gives a fuck?’ To me that’s enlightenment.
Who gives a fuck? I wish I didn’t. But in my house my dad always worried about what everybody else thought. And so do I. I always gave a fuck, that’s why I never really fit in there.
19
It was very important to my father that I got to Midleton as soon as I could when I came to Ireland. I decided to go for the week of the Halloween mid-term break. So, after sneaking out of my cousin’s house in Waterford on the Friday night to get drunk with my cousin Cormac, I headed to Midleton, sick as a dog.
Despite the beauty of the arrival at Youghal, the winding road between Dungarvan and Youghal nearly pushed me over the edge. When I finally made it to Midleton, after missing the stop and ending up in Cork City, I was ready to die. But they greeted me from the bus and I will never forget it when I walked up the petrol station forecourt towards the door.
My grand-uncles William and Dick were jumping up and down, shouting, ‘We reared your father right here! This is where your father was reared!’ They were very excited, and when I say they were jumping up and down I mean it literally. It was quite a sight to see two grey-haired men in their seventies react with such gusto.
I loved the place straight away. My uncles were mental in a good way and never stopped messing around and singing stupid songs and repeating old rhymes. ‘What’s that you said you said?’ There were loads of them and I wish I could remember them now. Every minute with them was a performance. They even showed me pictures from the days when they would perform around pubs in Ireland.
My dad’s first cousins in that house were closer to my age because William had married very late in life. So there was Valerie, with whom I became great friends, Michael, who was closest to my age but quite shy, and Majella, who was the oldest but was great fun and used to take me downtown during the day. Michael was in a band, which was really cool because we got to go to a pub to see them, which meant I could drink. Valerie was into Lou Reed and my summer-school teacher in New York had introduced me to him that summer, so we used to chat about music. Even though she was my cousin, I think in a small way I kind of fancied her. She was quite mesmerizing. She had dark hair and very intense eyes. They said she looked like my grandmother.
The house was old and wild and the fire was blazing all the time. You had to go through one of the bedrooms to get to another as the extensions to the house were quite haphazard. They had a two-tub washing machine, the like of which I had never seen. You had to connect a hose to the tap in the kitchen sink to fill it with water and the other hose went back in the sink to let the water out. They could not fill me up with enough tea and Coca-Cola. They had bought loads of Coke because they thought all American children loved Coke.
They had a fry every morning I was there and they used to get a freshly baked batch loaf every morning. I ate my potatoes ‘skin and all’ and they loved that because Dad used to do the same. My uncles would then say some rhyme that finished with, ‘How do you ate them? Shkin ’n’ all!’ It saddens me that I can’t remember it properly because they said it every time I ate the skins.
My dad’s uncles would point back at the estates behind the house and tell me that the Ryans once owned all those fields, but their father drank it all. ‘He was a right bastard,’ my Uncle William would say.
Cork people love ‘going for a spin’. My cousins were always asking me if I wanted to go for a spin like it was some kind of novelty. It was just a drive to somewhere, but I remember thinking that there mustn’t be much to do in a town like Midleton if there was this much excitement about going for a spin. My Uncle Dick took me for a spin once to a little town called East Ferry. It was a really peaceful place and the marina was full of boats. Even at fourteen I was aware of how nice and quiet it was. He wanted to go
for a drink in the pub there. He said it was a spot he went to often. There were no more than three other people in the pub and they were all old men. It was not even midday yet. He ordered a pint of stout and a Paddy whiskey. He had a ritual and I did not interrupt it. The pint looked so delicious as he savoured each sip. He said nothing but it was not awkward. I liked the quiet.
It was the first of many visits. It was nice to be with my dad’s family. There was a madness there and I fit right in. I liked being around my uncles too, just as my dad did. They talked quite openly about loving my father. They said it about nothing else, but boy did they love my dad. Nobody ever mentioned a thing about my grandmother and what happened to her.
In St Peter’s in those first few months I used to dream about being back home. I would then wake up in my wooden corner cubicle on the third- and fourth-year dorm to the sound of other kids snoring and sleep-talking. I wasn’t terribly homesick in those first few months but I was always disappointed when I woke up. Then I went home for Christmas 1990 and the things I missed killed me: my family, my girlfriend, good central heating, 130 channels, a massive refrigerator, NY pizza with no pineapples on it, and of course having a shower without having to heat the water first. Ireland seemed so damp and dark and ancient, and I really didn’t want to go back. Those first months of winter 1991 in Ireland were torturous. I begged my mother to let me come home in February, but she told me that I would have to wait until the end of the year. I was sick of the cold-water taps in my dorm. I was sick of the smell of cigarettes and fag butts in the showers, I was sick of being called a Yank all the time. I was sick of the wet walls of the dorms; you could see the drops of condensation running down them. It looked like they were crying, and I felt like I knew why.
I went back to Midleton for St Patrick’s Day, 1991. I loved being back in the madness of the Ryans. I felt free again. I rang my mother and told her I wanted to stay in Ireland. Twenty years later, I’m still here.
20
As much as I want to keep this story about my relationship with my father unbroken, I can’t ignore the gaps in it. These gaps are filled with booze and drugs. Still, I can’t ignore either what my years of addiction gave me. It was through those experiences that I became much closer to my father, both through the shared experiences of the way we drank and, more importantly, the shared experiences of overcoming it and breaking free from it.
My mother had been right about Ireland: it was definitely a safer place for me at the time. My addiction was hampered by my inability to come across anything too dangerous. All of the guys I became friends with didn’t really get into drinking until the following year. Things did not really get troublesome again until late into my second year in Ireland when I had matured a bit and started to go out more with my school friends in St Peter’s. I began to go on major binges with some of the older guys from school. First we would go drinking in a pub in Wexford and then get the bus to Bogart’s nightclub in Rosslare. It was the days of happy hours and supper tickets, slow sets, shifting and fake IDs.
The happy hour meant that loads of people would stock up on cheap booze when they arrived. As a result they would leave so many full pints on the table. All I needed was money to get in and the confidence to steal as many pints as possible. The rest was down to quick hands. Use it or lose it.
I grew very tall and lost my zits, and my confidence grew. I began to crave the buzz of Saturday nights, drinking and meeting girls. In the early parts of my final year in St Peter’s I began to get out of control and, for the first time, I had a violent blackout.
In my show I joke about why I gave up drinking. I say that I got sick and tired of coming out of blackouts, surrounded by really angry people, and turning to my friend and saying, ‘Hey, man, what is going on here?’ They reply by saying, ‘I don’t know, but it’s all got to do with you!’
That is actually taken from a real-life memory of the Halloween weekend of 1992. I blacked out in a nightclub and, for reasons I don’t know, I punched a friend of mine from school in the face. When I say I don’t know why, I really mean I don’t know why. Many times after this I would have the same experience, but that was the first time. I was popping in and out of this blackout; but I remember various people in my face and then getting kicked out and punching a bus, and my girlfriend of the time trying to calm me down and then this moment where I was surrounded by all the bouncers and a few local guys and my girlfriend pleading with them to leave me alone. These moments were not one after the other; they are just flashes in my mind. I turned to Mick Gall, who was a buddy of mine, and asked him what the hell was going on and he responded pretty much in the way the joke says. He told me I needed to get the hell out of there.
It was my first introduction to the chaos that would become the norm in my life every time I got drunk. Picture the scene. People are holding me back. Faces of fear and anger surround me. I don’t know why I am here, but the rage directs me. Soon I will be on my own, punching walls and turning the rage on myself, where it is familiar and controlled. Amidst the fading oblivion I will chant, ‘What is wrong with you? You piece of shit. You worthless piece of shit.’
I can’t say why I was that type of drunk. I have met many who were just like me and many others who laughed and sang every time they got drunk. The pain of drinking brought us all to the same place. I later learned that my dad was the same when he got drunk.
For a short time no real harm was done other than a few scuffles. But then I ran out of money to feed these weekends and I began to rob other people’s lockers on the dorms. It’s funny how I ended up choosing to learn Irish, because I never had to do it in school. I was able to go to an empty classroom and study. But when the desperation for money kicked in I began to go back up to the dorms during Irish and take money out of my classmates’ lockers. While the poor bastards were stuck learning a language they hated, I was robbing their stuff.
A few days before the Easter holidays I struck it big with a wallet of a friend of mine. There was £30 in it. I ended up down at his cubicle while he was trying to find his wallet. I remember playing along and saying things like, ‘What kind of scumbag does that to one of his classmates?’ It felt crappy but I now had £30 to head to Dublin with before I flew home to New York.
The day before I headed home to NY for the Easter holidays in 1993 I managed to show my very worst side to my best friend, Peter. We went to Dublin together and during a blackout I beat him quite severely. The next day I was told the full extent of what I had done. The other dramas I had created were with people who didn’t really matter to me, but Peter and I were two lonely souls in a rural boarding school who had bonded and shared together our frustrations with life so many times. We read poetry that we had written to each other and sang songs in study hall when nobody was around. Now he hated me, all because of this other character that would emerge when I was drunk. I was ashamed. I could not believe what an asshole I had become.
I felt so guilty – but, worse than that, I was worried that I had told Peter how I got the money. Not only was I worried about what I had done to my friend, I thought my reputation would be ruined. I was tormented by not knowing how much damage I had done.
When I got back to New York, I was dying. I asked my dad if I could go with him to an AA meeting. I can’t remember how it came up, but I passed it off as if I just wanted to spend time with him. He told me later he knew something was up. The meeting was in New Hyde Park and all my dad’s Irish buddies were there. These were men I had known my whole life and now I was sitting across from them in a completely new context. The sharing was going around the room and my dad whispered in my ear that when it came to me I could just pass. By the time the meeting ended it never had come around to me, but I remember thinking that if it came to me I was going to tell these people that I understood everything they had said. I was not married and had not neglected my kids but, sitting there, I knew that booze was taking things from me. I had just lost my best fr
iend.
21
It would take another two years before I finally gave in. I won’t give you a play-by-play account of how I ended up getting quite fond of taking Ecstasy and LSD. I am just grateful that those drugs were all I ever really came across before I decided to call it a day.
The first time I took acid was the Christmas break of 1992. I was with a close friend of mine on one of my trips home. All I had ever done up to then was take mushrooms because they grew on the grounds of St Peter’s before the frost came. I had taken them many times that autumn as a group of us in St Peter’s had become like farmers, out harvesting every night after study hall. One time my buddy handed me a pencilcasefull right in the middle of study hall and I snacked away until I was completely high. I lay down that night, very happy with my thoughts.
So when I got back to Queens for the holidays I knew one of my friends could get his hands on acid and I asked him to get some. It was the best feeling I had ever had. We played NHL 92 on my Sega Genesis for hours until the feelings were so intense I needed to be on my own. I went up to the bathroom and looked into the mirror and I remember saying out loud to myself, ‘What have you become?’ I then went into my parent’s room to shut off their TV. My mother woke up and I told her I was just turning off the TV for her. But really I wanted to be close to the danger with this new clarity in my mind.
I went back down and I clearly remember telling my buddy that now I understood all music: I was convinced that U2’s ‘The Fly’ was inspired by acid; I really got Jimi Hendrix’s grinding style, and when we listened to Led Zeppelin, that made sense too. We then listened to Pink Floyd as we always did, and it goes without saying what I thought about them. ‘Wish You Were Here’ always stands out for me from that emotional intensity of tripping hard. It hit me how sad everything was in the world. It just made me so comfortable with the sadness at that time.