My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

by Des Bishop

  At times I would look at my life and think that I had no choice but to repeat my father’s mistakes because I seemed to be following the same path as him. I ended up away from my family in my early teens, just like him; I moved into comedy, just as he had ended up in the entertainment business, without really having had that ambition; I was well into my thirties without having a child. I began to fear that it was inevitable that I would repeat the pattern. I felt that the by-product of the lonely life in the wilderness brought an ability to get by, but an inability for greatness. Any success was part of the great con job of our charm and personality, but eventually I would be found out just like my dad.

  Even in my original ideas for My Dad Was Nearly James Bond back in 2004 I had a joke that included my fears of ending up the same as my dad. When the show was over I was going to show footage of two children sitting in front of a TV. The subtitle would say ‘Dublin, Ireland, 2022’ or ‘Connemara, Ireland, 2022’, the idea being that it was in the future. The kids would be watching my tiny scene from the motion picture In America where I rap in the back of a taxi, which so far has been the only thing I have done in a feature film. They would say something about that being their dad and then they would rewind it and watch it again.

  It was just evidence that I was thinking very much about history repeating itself. I thought about my own kids asking kids their age if they had ever heard of the movie In America. They’d say, ‘It was nominated for two Oscars, you know,’ as we had once tried to find a single human being who had actually heard of The Day of the Triffids. That was the great thing about coming to Ireland. I used to actually meet the odd person who had heard of The Day of the Triffids.

  I definitely had a fear of ending up looking back and wondering, like my dad, what I had done wrong. These thoughts were not helped by my dad constantly reminding me that could happen.

  I can give you another example of how obsessed I was by that thought. My girlfriend of the time had moved to London. She was a budding photographer over there and was very focused and ambitious. I was really busy back in Ireland and touring like crazy. I had begun to make quite a bit of money and had become quite famous in Ireland.

  As the years went on she knew that she could never leave London as she was very happy in her career, and she wanted me to move to London. We actually got engaged and bought a flat together over there. We were due to get married in July 2008. I had some good arguments about why I did not want to move over there, not least being that the money I was making in Ireland was very much financing our relationship.

  I did not really care about the money. The real reason I did not want to move to London was because I did not want to walk away from what I had in Ireland lest it should disappear. I did not want to go to London and lose the momentum like my dad had done when he went to New York. If I were to be really honest, I also felt a little inadequate. I thought perhaps I would never be able to recreate what I had done in Ireland. I did not have that perspective on British society that I had with Ireland.

  We never got married. I won’t get into the details of that, but it was pretty traumatic. There has been a lot of healing in my life as a result of my dad getting sick, and all the things we said to each other, but the regrets around that relationship are sourced from a different place and they still haunt me somewhat. But they are the regrets of life experience and they don’t really sting. I would see them more as a fading chalkboard of memories in the classroom, reminding me how not to do things if I am in the same situation again.

  The tension in my father was less in him wanting me to have other options. It was more in him thinking I needed to save money just in case. But deeper than that, I think it just made him feel loads of feelings. I assume some were jealousy, pride, fear and inadequacy. I think at times he wanted to feel like he had something to offer and at other times he might have seen me as arrogant and naive. I was on my own journey, of course, and he was powerless; but that could not stop him reacting to some of those emotions.

  My dad was like that at times, but more often he was just really proud. Those moments of tension were not all of the time. They were usually connected to chats about money, which towards the end of my dad’s life was his greatest source of stress because, along with all the things he thought he did not do well enough, I think he felt he had not made enough money. As I said earlier, he was obsessed about it in the end. They had plenty and they had three successful children on top of it, but he still obsessed about it. I really think money was a trigger for his feeling of inadequacy.

  Dad would continue to interrogate me on a regular basis about my financial situation and about my plans. It was pretty much the same conversation every time, and I got bored and annoyed, having to verify to him that everything was going well every few months. He was always also giving me bad advice on that front. He was very impressionable with that stuff, and his CNBC advice was always a day late and a dollar short. Once in 2000 he insisted that I had to get out of bank shares – this was in the old days, when bank shares were worth something – and put my money into technology shares. So I pulled $12,000 out of shares in Bank of Ireland and AIB, which were doing OK at the time, and put it into a technology fund. Of course the dot-com bubble burst and I lost it all. Within a year the bank shares were worth nearly 50 per cent more than they had been.

  I had a few fights with him about it over the years. It is hard not to sound arrogant, but I had already saved more money than he had saved in his lifetime. At the age of thirty-three, I had nearly as much in my pension as he had in his pension on retirement. I had plenty of other savings too, and I wished he would just be my friend and not a dad who was uncomfortable with his son’s success.

  We would even discuss the ideas behind My Dad Was Nearly James Bond from time to time and I would argue with him that he did not believe his achievements as a father and a man were good enough. By the time he got sick I would say this tension was the only negative thing that existed between us.

  And then one day in those early days of him being sick it was just him and me in the hospital. He had begun to feel a bit better; I know that because he was talking about how there was something nice about all of us being together.

  Then, out of nowhere, he said, ‘You know something, man, I have had a lot of regrets in my life. You know, things I felt I could have and should have done and it ate away at me, man, but I will tell you right now: when you get sick and your sons step up to the plate, it’s an amazing feeling, man. If I snuff it tomorrow, I will die a very proud man!’

  It was the most amazing thing he could have said. In some ways I could not believe he said the only thing that was really left to say. It was almost too perfect. But I know that at that stage my father was not afraid of death. If you are not afraid of it, then you are willing to listen to what its imminence has to say to you. My father was inspired by the power of that. He was open to it. I was open to it then also. I told him he would leave behind three very proud sons.

  For years I had been trying to write a show where I could challenge my dad about his lack of appreciation for his own achievements. I wanted to try to prove to him that his life was worthy of praise. But here in the hospital was the moment I was really trying to create – a moment of epiphany when he would finally get it. Instead of my show, it was cancer, and us coming together as a family, that brought about that realization. It was never going to be a rational explanation that would bring him to that point; it had to be something seismic.

  It was this moment that inspired My Dad Was Nearly James Bond to become a reality. It didn’t happen right away but it became possible because it was no longer a show about tragedy, it was about triumph. I no longer had to tell the story of his childhood because it became a story about the sacrifices of fatherhood being worth it. My father had sacrificed his dreams of being an actor for us, and in the end it paid off. The show was easy to do then because it was just about showing off how cool my dad was in the face of all thi
s.

  I loved that the fantasy of James Bond, the thought that, had he lived another life, he would have been a better man, was gone. Fantasy is an addiction. You need to make reality fantastic, and never was reality more fantastic than at that moment.

  I remember not that long after my dad got sick we went out for lunch; it was myself, Dad and Aidan. My dad had his appetite back and was dealing with the chemo very well, so things were very positive. We were having a nice time just being out and doing things, and my father said, ‘God, this cancer is great, isn’t it? We go out for lunch, spend time with each other, have great conversations. I think this might be one of the best times of my life!’ He really meant it. I have to say I agreed with him. We didn’t have to suppose.

  30

  When I got sober, my father and I quickly broke through a barrier. We discussed the frustrations of the phases of our relationship. The day I made my ninth-step amends to him he told me that he knew he was not the perfect father. In the years after that we had a very good understanding of our imperfections. It never got in the way of our friendship, but would still often lead to some good arguments. My confrontational ways would frustrate him, and his fear-based advice would frustrate me. In the end, though, we used to talk all the time on the phone about things. So really when he got sick there was nothing we had left unsaid.

  I flew my dad over to Dublin at a day’s notice when I got two last-minute tickets for the 2005 All-Ireland Hurling Final. It was one of the great days of our lives, standing amidst the jubilant sea of red, listening to the Rebel Moses, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, giving his victory speech in Gaeilge. Corcaigh abú.

  I told my dad I loved him all the time. He said the same to me. The love of his kids meant a lot to my dad. It’s understandable when you think that he really felt he gave up a lot to give us the life that we had. It would have sucked for him if, after all his sacrifice, we were to tell him to fuck off, now that we no longer needed him.

  Oddly, this explains how the stage show finally came into being. In the first few weeks of my dad getting sick, when he was home from the hospital, my brothers and I spent most of our time in Dad’s room. We felt an urgency at the beginning to spend every second with him, because we were not sure how long we would have in the end. To my dad it was like a performance. He had quite a bit of energy before the effects of the chemo began to tire him out. Also, it was heavenly for him to be home in his own bed.

  In the presence of that urgency there is a sense of openness, a feeling that you can say anything; but the problem for us was that everything that needed to be said was said. So if there is nothing left to say between yourself and your father, when he gets home and he knows he is going to die and he is full of morphine, he will end up telling you things you never needed to know. And it turns out Dad was a dirty bastard. I don’t know why he waited until the end of his life to let us know how filthy his sense of humour was, but he made us laugh so much in those first few weeks after he got home. The more we laughed the dirtier he got.

  I have a theory as to why he was making us laugh so much at that time. It is a theory that has evolved from an awareness of what I like to call the ‘Irish wound’. It is a personal way of me understanding something that I can see in myself and identify it in others. It’s hard to explain the wound without talking about the things people do to avoid ever actually confronting it. But I think if you were to get underneath the layers that protect it – the layers of alcoholism, addiction, abuse, anger, begrudgery – you would find a common belief in many Irish people: No one gives a shit about me, so what’s the fucking point?

  I had a joke in my show years ago about how I was not great with physical affection. I talked about how my mother was not comfortable with it either. ‘I am not saying my mother didn’t love me, she just forgot to let me know!’ Irish parents just assume you will realize they love you because they feed you every day. The Irish way to say ‘I love you’ is ‘Get the stew into you now, good man, and go out and play’. I am not saying that Irish parents did a bad job, I just think they commonly forgot to tell their children that they loved them. I think there is that seething self-loathing in many people here as a result of the coldness in Irish upbringing. I don’t mean this as an accusation: I think it’s just a cultural norm that has pervaded Irish society for a long time.

  As a result of this lack of affection and nurturing, so many Irish people grow up confused about their worth on the planet. Most Irish parents of a certain vintage tend to focus only on what you did wrong throughout your childhood, which can cause you to have a very negative outlook. If you don’t feel good about yourself when you’re growing up, it is hard to be comfortable with yourself, or with anyone else for that matter. Therefore it’s easier to live in fantasy in whatever form. It’s better than the reality of not feeling good enough or worthy enough of praise.

  In my dad’s case I can only imagine what that intense rejection he experienced as a child did to his sense of himself. He did not have to just live in fantasy to avoid being himself, he had to live in fantasy to hide from the genuine terror of his reality. I can only assume having that foundation would cause you to want to be anything other than that kid. I am sure that many times he was convinced he was not worthy of love.

  There are many of us who love to feel like we are The Man. There is a sense of being wanted and needed when you are holding court or on a run of great success. I know my dad felt strongly for a time when he was The Man in London. But the doubts would always creep in. He always felt he just wasn’t good enough. The wound was deep in him: no one gave a shit about him, so what was the fucking point?

  He carried that around with him all his life. It expressed itself as regret and it expressed itself in grandiose exaggerations of his achievements. It even expressed itself in his musical when he tried to create a fantasy childhood for the young Michael Ryan, whose mother was taken from him by illness. He could never face the reality that he was wronged and that he had done nothing wrong. He did not feel that he was worth being let off the hook. The wound motivated so much of his life.

  I feel that to a large extent his wound was healed when he got sick. I felt liberation that day in the hospital when he said, ‘If I snuff it tomorrow, I will die a very proud man!’ His wound was healed when he saw how his family had rallied around him. He realized how much he was genuinely loved. The reality became greater than the fantasy. The reality that, despite everything that had been thrown at him, he was a loving father who now had children ready to drop everything to be with him, no matter what happened. That was the ultimate ‘Thank you’ a dad can receive for everything he did. He was confident in that, I know.

  To have that wound healed must be an ecstatic feeling. To sit there in the end, knowing that you have done everything you can, is unbeatable, and I think that feeling was something my dad liked. I even think he might have become addicted to it, as most Irish men are with good feelings as strong as that. I therefore think that the reason why he made us laugh so much when he got home from the hospital was because our laughter reminded him every day that he was The Man. It was his little hit every day and he became addicted to it; so the cliché is true: love is a drug.

  On the beach in Westhampton, May 2010, with my cousin Kevin.

  I think he was addicted to it and wanted to feel it every day. He was elated. I think he was showing off just because he felt so comfortable with his kids. His boys had rallied around him when he got sick, so he knew that he was loved. We had mocked him most of his life, and I guess at times he felt like an object of ridicule in the house. Now he was the star of the show and he was happy to take the stage. And man, was he funny!

  The more we laughed the dirtier he got. He told the story of how he lost his virginity with an older woman in Bexhill. It’s a total concoction because it has a punchline in it, but we didn’t care because it was just funny that he was telling us. He told us various stories about things that used to make him run to
a hiding spot and jerk off. It sounds crude, but it was just great to see the guy not giving a shit. We just became four lads talking dirty like teenagers. The dirtier he got, the more we laughed.

  Then one day we must have been laughing too much, because he told us the story that began the process of his life turning into a stand-up show. My brother’s friend Pete was over and the five of us were up in Dad’s room. My dad was at it again with the stories and we were all laughing a lot. He was telling us stories of what himself and his mates got up to back in the day. Pete loves to mess around, so there was a real atmosphere in the room. My dad must have felt it and was on a roll and, out of nowhere, he said to us, ‘And one day we wanked off a dog!’

  Without doubt this was the most my dad had ever made me laugh in my life. It was a floor-stomping moment. ‘We fucking wanked off a dog, man!’ He was loving the laughter. He was loving being the centre of attention. Weeks later, my father would say to me on the phone, ‘It’s hard to believe, but I have had some of the best memories of my life since I got sick.’ We had so much fun in the room over those first few weeks.

  Sometime during that early period of his illness I had to go back to Ireland and do a show in Belfast that I could not cancel. I really was not in the mood to do a gig and I had been in Belfast recently, so I had no new material. As a result I decided I would try to improv and mess around as much as possible so no one would complain about me repeating things from last time.

  Messing around with the crowd is great. The problem is, you often end up talking about ‘stuff that I’ve been noticing lately’. Well, I do anyway. This is a problem when the only thing on your mind is the fact that your dad is dying and very sick. It had been on the back of my mind that my father’s way of dealing with his illness was very funny and inspiring. So, without ever making a decision, I began the show by telling them what had happened. Suddenly I was doing comedy about the most recent three weeks of my life. I was telling the stories of my dad dealing with cancer. It all led up to the moment when I revealed that because there was nothing left to say, my father revealed way too much and told us he had once wanked off a dog.