My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  27

  We became a very affectionate family as a result of everything my dad was going through. When I thought afterwards about holding my dad to my chest and trying to comfort him on the day of his diagnosis, I could not believe how intimate a moment it was. I would say that if there is one positive thing about what terminal illness can bring to a family, it is that it washes away emotional repression and awkwardness. We went from being the least affectionate family to becoming the huggiest, most I-love-you-est, most cry-in-front-of-each-other-est family on the planet. I have to be honest: it felt amazing. Oprah was right all along. I wish we’d listened.

  In fairness to my dad, he was always a pretty affectionate guy. I think for some families it is a huge thing for a dad to tell his kids that he loves them, but he was never afraid to say, ‘I love you.’ My mother was not so heavy on the affection front. We were not really the typical American family; I would say we were more of an Irish family.

  Our Irish identity meant a lot to us and we tried to prove ourselves as Irish as much as we could. I mean, we were the children of alcoholics who were the children of alcoholics. Our mother never really hugged us, but she had an extremely dominant personality. The main thing was that emotionally we were not really that normal. That to me is our most Irish trait of all. I love living in Ireland and I think Irish people are the most fun in the world. I would not live anywhere else and I would not want to be around any other people, but dealing with emotion is not Irish people’s strong point. I would go so far as to say Irish people are emotionally retarded. If there was an emotional Olympics, I think Ireland would be in the special one, which is great because you are a winner for just taking part.

  I don’t want to get into railing on my mother, but she hated people touching her. It drove her crazy. I have the same thing myself nowadays, and when I am in a particular mood someone touching me can be the most uncomfortable thing. I actually wrote a stand-up show called Desfunctional based around my inability to deal with emotions. The premise of the show was that I turn every moment of emotional intensity into a joke. I suppose it’s hard to say that I am not still doing that as I have turned my father’s illness into a stand-up show. We were not the type of family that really trusted each other with the stuff we found difficult to deal with. At times I would say there was even a coldness there. Hugs were not in high supply, that’s for sure.

  I think the only times I really ever saw my parents being affectionate with each other was when they danced together at weddings. That’s why it was so wonderful to see glimpses of their love for each other shine through in the end. I could see my mother’s love for my father in her pure dedication to looking after him.

  What was so nice about my dad’s vulnerability when he got sick was that he needed us. We had no choice but to come together. My mother needed us too, and a wall was broken down by the urgency of the situation.

  As I said earlier, I am definitely more like my mother than my father in so many ways. Both of us had cancer before my dad: she had breast cancer in 2005 and I had testicular cancer in 2000. Neither of us went to the family for help. We just tried to deal with it on our own as much as we could. I had some great help from my cousins and my girlfriend at the time for which I will always be grateful, but it never really entered my head that my parents should come over. I did not even want them to come over. I just wanted to deal with it all myself.

  My mother was the same. She did not want me to come home when she was diagnosed with cancer. She told me hardly any details about it, and if I asked her how she was, she would just tell me, ‘It’s fine,’ in a way that suggested I never needed to ask again. I feel bad sometimes when I think back, because I actually forgot about it for a while. I never really engaged in it much at all. That is not to say I was irresponsible; it just did not seem like I needed to.

  I guess in both cases you could argue that we both should have ignored the pleading that everything was all right and just gone in both directions to be there for each other, but that was not the way it was for us at that time. It was the same with my dad. I know it would not have really entered his head to come over to me in 2000. It just wasn’t how things worked with our family in those days.

  That is why I was so inspired by our time together during my dad’s illness. It turned out that we were quite a strong and loving family, and it was such a nice feeling to be there for each other. I look back and see my desire to deal with my illness on my own as much as I could as a rejection of my family. I see the same in the way my mother dealt with her illness. Neither of us has any real desire to be vulnerable around each other at all. We are seriously defensive around each other most of the time. That is why moments like the one on the bench after we heard my dad was sick stand out so strongly.

  I have been to plenty of therapy and you can draw your own conclusions on what is going on between me and my mother. I have my own theories, but this is not Dr Phil. I won’t bore you with solutions or my theories. Anyway, the actions and events are more powerful to me than the analysis. There were times when it was one way and then it was another way, and it felt very nice.

  When it comes to my relationship with my mother I would not use words like ‘liberation’ as I do with my dad. I think I would use words like ‘slowly opening up’ or ‘gradually breaking down’. That language goes for the two of us. It is funny because, particularly in Ireland, I often hear men talking about this momentous moment when they had some communication breakthrough with their father. It seems often that the father is the one that is hard to break down. That was never the way in our house.

  Irish people find it much easier to take the piss out of people than to praise them. Sometimes being nice to someone can actually make you squirm. If you watch Irish people in their natural habitat they will commonly greet one another with an insult. That is really a sign of affection. In fact, Irish people feel it is a personal duty to not let anyone get too big for their boots. A compliment in Ireland is treated with the utmost suspicion because it must be associated with an ulterior motive. If it is not, then why the hell would you be saying it anyway, because it makes people uncomfortable. It does not really compute. That’s the way we were in our house: we just took the piss out of each other; it was way more comfortable.

  I would say Irish people are like the Ultimate Fighting Championship when it comes to hugging. If you’ve ever watched the UFC, then you know that ‘tapping out’ is really important. These fights are no-holds-barred, so people end up in jujitsu holds that can actually kill them unless they ‘tap out’. Tapping out means admitting defeat and thereby saving your life. TAP, TAP, you tap out to live to fight another day. Well, if you ever watch two Irish people hug, within three seconds one of them is tapping out of the hug for dear life. They are like myself and my mother; it feels uncomfortable, so it’s easier to admit. TAP, TAP. OK, you can get the hell off me now.

  We can all still fall back into our old ways on that front. I don’t always let the intimacy flow. I am definitely a bit better, though, since all this with my dad. In saying that, I am still single at thirty-five; I still find relationships tough. I have to stop tapping out, otherwise I will have no other option but to love myself.

  28

  It is possible that I have a problem dealing with serious situations seriously. I may have to face the jury one day in therapy about turning something so personal and poignant into a comedy show. I am sure there is a psychoanalyst or two reading this thinking that I have some major issues with needing to share with the anonymous masses things that I should just be processing quietly. I will admit that I always make light of tragic situations. It may be a defence mechanism.

  It is also possible that because I had testicular cancer, and almost immediately found things very funny about that experience, that I was comfortable finding things funny about my dad’s situation. He found humour in it himself. I think he was on his second day of chemo and the nausea had really started to kick in. He had b
een getting sick a few times that day already, but nobody had been around other than the family. Suddenly we were all in the room and my dad had an audience the next time a bout of nausea came on. He was not comfortable with so many people around. I don’t think he saw it as an inconvenience, I think he just didn’t like people feeling bad for him.

  After a good few heaves into the bucket, my dad looked up and said with gusto, ‘If I survive this fucking thing I am going to get that musical off the ground, I can tell you that much. And do you know what the first scene is going to be about? Seasickness!’

  I sometimes like to indulge myself in some amateur psychoanalysis as to why my dad was so funny and irreverent after getting sick. There was an extraordinary amount of laughter going on during quite a serious time. Some might say – as I do in this book – that is the way Irish people always deal with moments of emotional intensity: they always turn everything into a joke rather than feel what is really going on. But this was not that kind of laughter. There was almost a party-like atmosphere at times, particularly in the bedroom when he got back from the hospital.

  Like him, I was having comic inspirations while I was still in the hospital after my operation back in 2000. I still have the notes I wrote down on the night before my operation.

  You see, I had waited months before actually doing something about the lump I had on my left testicle. Then one day I met a friend of mine who had testicular cancer and he described his lump to me and it was exactly the same. This freaked me out completely and suddenly I knew I had cancer. I wanted to do something about it immediately, but it was five o’clock in Cork City on a Saturday and I had no GP down there.

  I was back in the house I was sharing with my buddy Ian in Glanmire and I finally admitted to him that I had a lump. Until then I tried to keep it a secret because I did not want anyone telling me to go to the doctor, because I was afraid of what I might find out. Telling him was a good thing. But I was beyond just needing to tell somebody. I wanted a diagnosis straight away; I wanted to take immediate action. So I asked him if he would feel his own and then feel mine and tell me what he thought.

  Now Ian is a Cork man from Ballyphehane. Talking about men’s health issues is tough enough for guys like that, let alone the prospect of feeling another man’s sack.

  ‘No fucking way I am touching you. Are you crazy, like? What if people think we are gay?’

  ‘We are not gay and no one is looking, so what are you worried about?’

  ‘But what if you get an erection?’

  ‘An erection!’ I said. ‘I am worrying I am going to die, you idiot; it doesn’t exactly turn me on. I think I have cancer, the last thing I am worried about is getting a boner.’

  In the end he gave in: he could see I was desperate. So we went into the sitting room. I closed the curtains. I tried to be funny and said, ‘Do you want to light a candle or something?’ By that stage we were both seeing the funny side. And then we dropped our trousers. I have to say, standing there with my best friend, with my trousers round my ankles like two kids playing doctor, I could not help but think that this was, actually, very gay. In fact I would say it was the gayest moment of my life. We had a good giggle at that one, and then he felt his own and he felt mine.

  He then made his own joke because he said, ‘OK, cough.’

  But the joke ended there because he was quite surprised at how obvious the lump was. He told me I needed to get that checked out as soon as I got to Dublin on Monday. I could no longer pretend it was not there.

  In the end it turned out to be cancer and I was immediately scheduled to have the operation to have it removed. You have to get the whole testicle removed, which is a pretty big deal in terms of your manhood. People always talk about balls: ‘You must have some balls to do that’; ‘That was a very ballsy thing to do.’ Tony Montana says in Scarface: ‘All I have is my word and my balls, and I don’t break them for nobody.’ But now I was having to break them to stay alive. That was a big deal.

  I remember sitting in the room a few hours after having the operation, thinking about the fact that I now had only one. Luckily I was on a urology ward. In fact there were four men in the room with me and two of them had also had the same operation. I felt empowered by that. I knew that I only had one now, but between the five of us we had seven testicles. I felt the power of the brotherhood, and the humour of that thought got me through. I wrote down loads of thoughts that night.

  I thought about Lefty who was now gone. I imagined that he had taken one for the team. He was like the soldier who jumps on the grenade in the trenches to save the rest of the platoon. He jumped on that tumour and smothered it so it could not travel to my lymph nodes. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes and he said, ‘You go, Des, run! I will look after this. We have had some good times. Some very good times actually. You go and live your life and never forget me.’ I will never forget Lefty for the sacrifice he made for the team.

  They offered me a fake one just before the operation, but I didn’t want one. I would not do that to Righty anyway. It’s bad enough losing your best friend: you don’t want to have to live for eternity with a silicone-filled replacement to stare at for the rest of your life just to remind you of what you’d lost. I really did not see the point, to be honest. I did ask the doctor though why men get one.

  He told me that a lot of men get it for ‘cosmetic reasons’. Still to this day this makes me laugh. Cosmetic reasons? There is not now and never will be anything cosmetically pleasing about the scrotum. Even the word is really horrible. It really is a man’s least attractive feature. You never use the word ‘scrotum’ when you are having phone sex because there is no less sexy word to describe any part of your body. Tonsils sound sexier. Never once have I been with a lady and thought, ‘Hmmm, I am not sure how this is going. Wait a minute; I know what will seal the deal. Wait till I unleash my wrinkled, turkey’s gizzard sack of love and she will not be able to resist me.’ Anyway, if a girl is close enough to be examining your sack, then she is too far committed to turn back.

  So it’s not an issue. I would have been worrying about the fake one for the rest of my life anyway. I would have been sure something was going to go wrong. Every time I got on a plane I would have been worried about the pressure. I did not want to spend the rest of my life wondering which one was the real one. I did not want to be buried and then one hundred years later when my grave was dug up to turn the cemetery into apartments, all that would be left to represent me was a silicone jellybean. ‘Oh my God, Des Bishop was an alien; I always knew there was something funny about that fella.’ I did not want to be cremated so that when my grandchildren went to spread my ashes over the rocky shores of West Cork, the ashes would fly into the breeze and a little marble would bounce down the rocks and into the sea like the pit from a peach.

  No thank you. Righty and I will be just fine.

  Most of those were thoughts I had in the hospital, and the humour of it helped me to feel like I was in control of the situation. Sometimes I think it is a protection from pity. If people see that you can laugh about it, then they know that you are dealing with it OK. I also liked joking about it on stage afterwards because it was a healthy thing to be telling people about. I knew it would make men check themselves. I also knew that if anyone was ever going to try and piss me off about having one ball, I would have told all the jokes first. In a way it was a pre-emptive strike.

  I had just started doing a TV show on RTÉ called Don’t Feed the Gondolas. As a result some of the papers ran with the story. The Evening Herald put it on the front page, with the headline: ‘Cancer Shock for RTÉ Star!’ It was full of massive exaggerations. I guess the headline, ‘Man on TV that We Have Never Heard of Gets the Best Cancer to Get if You Are Going to Get Cancer’, was not a great headline. First of all I was not an RTÉ star. Second, when you read the article, it talked about how I was rushed to hospital after filming the first episode of the show. Now it was true that I f
ilmed the first episode and then headed to the hospital, but my cousin Josephine drove me and there was no rush. In fact we stopped at every light.

  A lot of people asked me about how I felt about something so private being so public. I guess it would appear intrusive to some. But what happened was that the devil actually came to me and said, ‘Give me your left testicle and I will make you famous.’

  I said, ‘You don’t want my soul for the next three generations, like the Kennedys?’

  She said, ‘No, just your left testicle.’

  The publicity was great and I still have Righty to do the devil’s work.

  29

  I used to obsess about not repeating the life of my father. Not just because he told me not to, but because there was a part of me that would not have been happy with it, just as he was not happy with it. I had a sense that I had to do better than he had, just to be accepted. My mother had a bit of that too; she would say things like, ‘We did the best we could in the circumstances.’ Now I had no choice, as my circumstances were better. I had no excuse for a life of discontent.

  One thing about both my parents was that they never discouraged me from pursuing comedy. Once I had my degree they were happy – mission accomplished in their heads – and the rest was up to me.