The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  It was Gainor’s strong penchant for involving in the likes of situations as the man from the Legion of Mary that gave him his mesmeric aura. He seemed to be able to find redeeming features and fascination in anyone, although he was quick to bring just retribution to those he thought evil. He was always ready and generous in offering his advice to those in deserving need, and his humane consideration and concern for even the most humble stranger knew no limits. No nervously earnest salesman or religious evangelist was ever turned away from his door. All were invited in and encouraged to present their demonstrations and, provided credit was given, whatever they were selling was bought on the spot. Especially modern contraptions like vacuum cleaners, which usually shortly later had to be repossessed. But it was never Crist’s intention not to meet his creditors in full, as he occasionally did many months later to their utter surprise. However, in celebrating such event over drinks, he would often end up having borrowed even greater sums or acquired newer and more expensive appliances.

  Nevertheless, compassion for his fellow man was an almost sacred part of Crist’s behavior. Few were ever left sincerely feeling that they were being duped or taken for a ride. And almost all agreed that they had pleasantly been in the company of a man they would never forget for the rest of their lives. His charm was immediate, possessed as he was of what are commonly thought of as Old World ethical codes and manners. He would jump to stand as ladies entered rooms. He would smilingly bow and click his heels upon an introduction. He would immediately, upon meeting, solicit one’s opinion concerning one’s health and well-being. Yet along with his splendor of deportment, Crist could be wonderfully absentminded. Which no doubt was exacerbated with the intensifying of his troubles, which had Gainor already voicing intentions that he might follow my example and return to the United States. And during my very last chat with him in Ireland, just before his own departure from Dublin to England, occurred an incident when we had assembled for Sunday afternoon tea with several others in a house Tony McInerney had temporarily rented in Howth. It was a time when he seemed to be at his most beleaguered and distracted, and Gainor and I, both locked in conversation and needing to take a pee, went up the stairs together to the water closet with Gainor being loudly reminded with shouts from behind not to pull the chain, as the lavatory needed to have the outflow of its contents gradually eased sewer-ward by the slow pouring of water from a bucket and definitely not by the rush of several simultaneous gallons plunging down from a cistern.

  There was room for two in the cold confines of the water closet, where the pounding of the nearby sea could be heard coming in the window along with the drizzly mist on that day. I peed and Crist followed. And while pissing, Gainor was recounting a recent delicate matter in Dublin to which I listened avidly as it directly concerned me and a person who was rumored to insanely detest one over a liaison I had with his now wife when she was a wonderfully curvaceous single lady temporarily residing in a chamber down in the Catacombs. And it was with this bitterly aggrieved gentleman with whom Crist now had a recent and particularly unpleasant encounter at a Dublin hooley, where Gainor overheard this gentleman making offending remarks about me and my paintings.

  “Mike, this most unpleasant person said your pictures were a load of shit.”

  Gainor, who thought me a mite more than mediocre as a painter, immediately took this gent to task for his disparagement. Whereupon the gent, a rugby player, struck out at Gainor, grazing his jaw. This was a most dreadful mistake, for in about one second the gent found himself on the floor on his back, his head bouncing on the boards as Crist, his hands locked in his hair, administered the usual wooling. Crist’s philosophy of energy from indolence and his elegant slender stature gave no hint or warning of his phenomenal strength and speed. His muscles were like steel bands and his movements so swift they could hardly be seen. And the occasion for the aggrieved gent to discover this was made more ignominious as news of it spread quickly over Dublin, the man now letting it be known that he intended to gain his revenge. And this Anglo-Irish rugby player may have been one of the very few people I ever heard Gainor express a thorough dislike for or against whom he ever declared violence, and Crist said,

  “Mike, he only wants to hurt me. But I want to kill him.”

  On the words “kill him,” Crist pulled the lavatory chain. And I suppose I may have been about to express my appreciation to Gainor, for it wasn’t the first time someone had undergone a wooling at Crist’s hands for having uttered a disparaging word about me and my paintings. However, from below came screams and consternation as all manner of disagreeable fluid and solid matter poured down out of the ceiling into the sitting room and upon the heads of the tea-taking hapless guests. Made even sadder by the fact that this may have been one of the few ever formal occasions any of us ever had of taking tea together. Poor old Gainor, always the patrician and compassionate thoroughbred, stood nervously entwining his fingers against the yellow softness of his cashmere sweater, formerly my property, while waiting for the disturbance below to subside. While I less politely and helplessly contorted with laughter, reversed my way out of the water closet and onto the landing. Whereas Crist watched and further listened to the lamentations below, I deservedly fell backward down the stairs. At which Gainor merely frowned, gave another twiddle to his fingers and contemplatively pursed his lips.

  This in my twenty-fifth year of life should have been a most solemn of solemn warnings as to what might happen to the poor likes of us in the United States. On August 1, 1951, Gainor was twenty-nine years old. And he firmly believed that, like Jesus Christ, he would be tacked up on his own cross by the age of thirty-three. Which now left a brief four years to go. And this incident of the lavatory in Howth only reminded one of another social debacle befalling Gainor, when McInerney, ever the tolerant forgiver of faux pas trespassed against him, was entertaining Crist while on a visit to Paris, which occurred shortly after Crist had met his elegant young lady Pamela, who, as Gainor could make most movie stars look pretty plain, was justifiably proud of him. And when an old friend of hers with whom she’d been to Convent School and who happened at the time also to be traveling to Paris, showed intense interest to meet Gainor, this was arranged. And I suppose on reflection this incident could vie with some which were soon to befall us in the United States.

  Crist, having arrived in Paris with his little baby in tow, had holed up in a tiny, cramped back bedroom chamber on Paris’s Left Bank near the corner of rue Mazarine and rue de Buci. A heat wave having descended on the city, Crist lay in his underwear vest and a pair of seersucker trousers, his baby asleep on his chest, both having taken a siesta during the hot afternoon in order to be fresh and rested to meet his girlfriend’s best girlfriend. As he often did, Crist assumed his coffin state of inert suspended animation, with his eyeballs still and heartbeat at its maximum minimum. Meticulous always in his dress, he was planning to douche and change in time to present his best foot forward. However, having had a long train journey and crossing of the channel, and with the room curtains drawn, Crist fell into a deep sleep. And with his obsession with the sinking of the Titanic, he dreamt as he often did of a naval drill of abandoning ship and lowering life rafts over the side and just when sighting circling sharks, he woke to a sudden knocking on the door. And his baby asleep on his chest also wakened, in a state of discomfort.

  “All hands on deck.”

  This was a summons that both Crist and I had retained from naval days. Which he now uttered as he quickly sat up and put the baby aside and felt something moistly strange on his chest, which did not immediately identify itself, being that Gainor often suffered severe olfactory impairment due to hay fever. Standing barefoot in the darkness, Gainor two-handedly, feverishly attempted to rub the matter on his chest away, suddenly realizing that the knocking on the door was the girl with whom he had the appointment. Unable to find the light switch and with no time to dress, he quickly tried to find his belt to keep his trousers up, promptly tripping into and knoc
king over the dressing table. Without light and without a mirror, he now distractedly with his hands felt what seemed to be something which would keep hair down and which was congealed on his chest. As he approached the door, he liberally smeared the substance back over his head with his fingers. And to another knock and with his customary élan, Gainor swept the door wide open, the hall light shining upon him and illuminating his tall figure in the doorway. Which bleary-eyed and barefoot suddenly became trouserless as such dropped around his ankles as he realized he was presenting himself smeared all over in his baby’s recent excrement, which innocent feces had not the benefit of a nappy. Alas, now only wearing the upper part of his besmirched undergarment which did not reach low enough to cover his private parts, this elegant convent-bred young lady also had to face impromptu exposure to Gainor’s not insubstantial genitalia.

  “Oh my God.”

  As she uttered her words, the young lady, expecting to see this picture-book handsome swain she’d heard so much about, put her hand up to her summery flowered dress and reversed backward, as I did in Howth to tumble down the stairs. Gainor, the ever-ready gentleman, lunging forward to grab her and just managing to save her, if not from further shock at least from further fall. He did of course make other and future arrangements to meet her under more salubrious circumstances in the lobby of a much better nearby Left Bank Hôtel d’Angleterre in the rue Jacob. And she later reported that not only was he every bit as wonderful, handsome and charming as she had been led to believe but also that she had fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with him. Duly they took tea together, but no plaque seems to mark such occasion in the lobby of this hotel, where, in the eyes of this young lady beholder, the resplendent Crist redeemed himself.

  A first draft manuscript page of THE GINGER MAN, which occasionally evolved into notes, some of which produced tangents so diverse they were not further explored.

  However, with lavatories excepted, all now in my own life was prudent optimism. As an interim and awaiting our child’s birth before embarking westward over the Atlantic Ocean, Valerie and I were to spend five months on the Isle of Man. Halfway between Ireland and England this volcanic outcropping in the Irish Sea was and remains one of the most neutral places one could ever hope to be. The Manx were not your jovial friendship-on-the-lips sort as were the Irish. Indeed, they gave one the impression of their being a withdrawn, dour, and secretly collaborating lot. But as one slowly got to know the Manx, and they, you, they proved to be a reliable and pleasantly helpful people. The island had no stigma attached to illegitimacy, gambling or wenching. Except that to this day of writing, homosexuality is banned. And birching, a punishment for the use of violence in the commission of a crime. And let me tell you, it didn’t half keep visiting vandals and ruffians minding their own peaceful business.

  Over the years, the island was a traditional holiday-making place for the mill workers in the English midland cities, such as Manchester, Bradford and Leeds. With the Irish finding it a place to come to and freely commit the sin of impurity. And I heard it more than once mentioned, and perhaps a bit euphemistically, that some of the island’s female population could be likened to well-plowed fields. This said of course by a “come-over,” which referred to those who were not born at least five hundred years ago on the island. But what the population did to one another was different from what was accepted from a foreigner. And an ancient resentment existed over the novelist Hall Caine, who, born in Cheshire, England, and who, upon taking up permanent Manx residence, dallied with some of the island’s damsels. Indeed, what else might one expect on an island isolated by mists and storm and whose male population, if not sailing the seven seas, had over the centuries past been misleading mariners to founder upon their shores for the plunder this might provide. However, the island, with its windswept lonely moors, was where one could leave open one’s door at night and venture where’er one might unmolested. And those few who might be guilty of violent crimes would think twice about their next feloniousness and remember well the flogging with birch twigs they got for their last malfeasance. Proof enough that the Manx, for all their wenching and gambling, were a law-abiding, not to say highly devout, community.

  But the one appropriately to see me off to the Isle of Man was none other than Valentine Horatio Coughlin. One of my erstwhile Dublin enemies whom I had fought in a mad battle of fisticuffs in the middle of Anne Street outside Davy Byrnes’s pub. This following a famed altercation amid other guests in his drawing room when it got him evicted from his newly rented and decorated flat and helped break up his marriage to one of Ireland’s most beautiful women. Champion whistler, champion heavyweight boxer, champion bridge player, and charming con artist when he had to be, Coughlin was the only man ever in the history of Dublin pawnshops to succeed in hocking various weights of best rump steak, which a lady assistant butcher who adored him put in his hand in unlimited, unweighed and uncharged-for quantities. Val, as he was called, was a product of a Jesuitical institution, Clongowes Wood College, one of Ireland’s best schools. His words always as blunt as they were droll, he was possessed of a jaunty jollity. But Coughlin’s life took a Dublin downturn when he became obsessed with revenging the catastrophic destruction of his new matrimonial abode. And it might have been more his overhearing of Gainor Crist’s words spoken to the landlord who lived nearby and who rushed to inquire at the door as to what was happening to his house. And Crist, as he closed the door in his face and locked it, said,

  “If you’ve ever heard of Iwo Jima, Bougainville, the Solomons, Normandy, and Hiroshima, you’ll know that in exactly five minutes from now you won’t have a house.”

  These words achieved fame all over Dublin, as doors splintered asunder, lamps and light fittings were demolished and full-grown people were sent crashing through windows. Coughlin’s family heirlooms were broken over people’s heads. Meissen figurines flew as missiles toward their targets while Crist, as ringmaster, tried to keep innocent women out of harm’s way. I of course reluctantly was in the thick of it all, dishing out what justice I could to the perpetrators of evil. But the dreadful thing being that, in the melee, one of my left hooks meant for a rich gate-crashing gangster hooligan, instead of landing on his jaw hit his dyed blond moll, who had leaped into the action to scratch out my eyes. Several of her teeth went flying out of her mouth and, like dice thrown, rattled across the floor to bounce conspicuously up against the baseboard. I of course was horrified and full of apology, but the clattering sound the teeth made bouncing across the floor seemed to incite an insane fury on all sides. Nevertheless, as the stricken lady lay unconscious on the floor, I knelt to attempt to treat her. But as I did, so her sneaky gangster husband raised a genuine Chippendale chair behind me to slam down on my head, only to find himself picked up bodily in the air by Gainor Stephen Crist, and held at a full arm’s length aloft was crashed down upon Val’s brand new gramophone, which unbelievably was playing a choral rendition of “Abide with Me,” one of Gainor’s most cherished songs. And the descent of this gent on the rotating record coincided with the last chord.

  But Coughlin, dispossessed of his flat and beautiful and charming wife went searching all over Dublin to find me. I meanwhile in my Trinity rooms slept with a scalpel stuck in the side of my wardrobe, where I could grab it to stab any intruder were I to be jumped on in bed asleep. Finally Coughlin and I had it out in the middle of Duke Street when he ran into me in Davy Byrnes’s pub one afternoon. The fisticuffs were brief as Coughlin, a light heavyweight, encumbered by his slower footwork, was unprepared for an unrelenting peppering of punches sent in combination from every direction. However, he was sporting enough to want to shake hands at the finish, and as a result of our fight we became firm friends. Coughlin then assuming a role of advocacy in selling my paintings and collecting the sixpences for my catalogues sold at my Dublin exhibitions. And this intrepid man, with his marvelous indifference to literature, painting and poetry and those who practiced such, was always ready for anything. As a res
ult of searching for me all over town, he had been fired from his managerial job in a draper’s shop and he now took up residence in Iveagh House, the indigent man’s hostel frequented by Brendan Behan, where Coughlin was soon appointed to the position of monitor to prevent the various inmates so disposed, from pissing, shitting and vomiting all over the place.

  “Mike, you’ve never seen such disgusting filthy behavior, with me having to contend with the likes of Brendan Behan coming in laggards drunk, roaring that his uncle wrote the national anthem and causing a near riot every night.”

  Coughlin often could be found, frequently alone in a nearby pub and surrounded by ancient, shawled old women cackling at his repartee as he drank red biddy, a lethally intoxicating brew which cheaply made one drunk but seemed to have no effect on Coughlin at all. Except that once following a long afternoon of drinking this concoction, he stood that evening on a streetcorner outside a restaurant where he had just consumed his favorite repast of a large mixed grill consisting of steak, blood pudding, bacon and sausages covered with fried eggs, and smoking a cigar, he suddenly disgorged the entire contents of his stomach into the gutter. But then wiping his mouth with his handkerchief he kept tucked up his shirt cuff, he re-entered the restaurant to sit down and order and devour the entirety of the meal he had just upchucked. Just, as he said, to teach his stomach a lesson.

  There was a curious secrecy in these strange pubs lying to the west of Grafton Street where Coughlin’s laughter could be heard thundering out through the pub walls and down these narrow side streets and alleys of Dublin’s Coombe. This roaring man, who ignored fate and who loved big tits and hips on women. Who wanted children and an incentive in life and who could and did, to the delight of slum urchins, stand on the corner of Harry and Grafton streets, and by striking a match, explode his own farts in flame. And whose later London exploits and dodgy activities amassed a fortune, making him the most sought-after gentleman Scotland Yard had come across for years. And it was Valentine Horatio Coughlin who was the one last to be seen standing, waving to me as I looked out the porthole window of my motorbird as it taxied out on the runway to take off on the first leg of my ultimate trip back to the United States. And that figure who remained a staunch and faithful friend stood there till we were aloft and he had become a dot to fade out of sight.