The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  As no money was used in the club and members signed chits, I became somewhat of an imposition on Tom Gill’s generosity and it was decided that for the modest fee it entailed I should become a junior member. And except for an occasional guest that Tom might invite we seemed to be the only two young persons abroad in the vastness of this club amid these older clubmen. After a day’s workout, which now consisted of a round or two in the ring, a game of squash and sometimes even a wrestling match followed by our usual retirement to the palatial tiled baths to bake in the hot room, steam in the steam room, a pummel in the power shower, swim in the pool and an occasional massage, Tom and I would repair to the club’s taproom on the second floor. In this mock English setting of oak floors and beamed ceilings and a fox hunting scene rushing past across the back of the bar, there came at around five o’clock each day two white-coated and -hatted chefs who would assemble themselves at one end of the taproom, sharpening knives behind a long refectory table upon which sat a baron of roast beef and a massive ham. At one’s proffering a dish, great slabs were cut and deposited on the slices of rye, pumpernickel or other breads and then upon one’s desiring it, sauce or gravy would be added. This extravagant repast rendered with the compliments of the club. And often just Tom Gill and myself alone in enjoying it. There were as well selections of cheeses, crackers, butters and other hors d’oeuvres. With our appetites, Tom and I frequently came back for seconds and thirds with which to down beer from a club member’s brewery. This member was also a habitué of the boxing room, who by winter looked like some abominable snowman coming up Central Park South enveloped from ears to ankles in a voluminous raccoon skin coat. He must have known how much of his brewery’s beer we drank. For at the sight of Tom and I, he would stop in the middle of the Fifty-ninth Street pavement, do a little delighted jig and then demonstrate his power handshake, at which Tom and I would dutifully grimace in pain.

  Having been expelled from Fordham Prep for being a bad influence upon the student body, myself now in the U.S. Navy, standing sockless in front of a college hall at Manhattan College. The preparatory school just behind to the left where I attended not unhappily for my last year of high school.

  But my life was not free of traumas. Although possibly I exhibited other devious traits to the Jesuit tradition, the reason for my expulsion from Fordham Preparatory School was given as being a bad influence on the student body occasioned by my efforts to start my own personal fraternity of which I would be the supreme brother master. I also, of course, may have been absent without leave and sentenced to jug by the prefect of discipline, a Father Shea, a meticulously stern disciplinarian who remains unforgotten by anyone who ever attended this prep school during his reign. His clipped words ordering one to write ten thousand words on why my tie should not be loose at the neck. “Jug” was the word used to designate punishment and consisted of walking in a prescribed circle in the gym or out of doors on clement days until told to stop. But my infractions deserved the most serious punishment of all, expulsion. My father exploding his Irish brogue and angrily pounding the desk of the principal with his massive fist when it was suggested that my innocent younger brother be removed as well. A young Jesuit English instructor, however, for whom I had written a theme or two he had admired, stood up for me and was equally incensed and said to the principal that I would be one of the few pupils whose presence in the school would be of some significance one day. And there was also a Mr. Songster, another young Jesuit, who, from an aristocratic family in Germany, sported a silver-knobbed ebony walking stick, and who, although he did not back or defend me upon my expulsion, said he would very much miss the frequent nuisance I made of myself.

  But one other to stick up for me was Tom Gill’s mother, who shoutingly called the principal a bastard over the phone. However, I did have my first European indoctrination at Fordham Prep. The son of the French consul in New York sat in front of me, and when I would incite him to respond to some of my more inflammatory observations concerning his existence on earth, he would turn and resoundingly declare in French that I should lick his ass. This change of usage from the American verb “to kiss” usually associated with this act, made one realize that Europe allowed a more exotic descriptive expression, if not behavior, in dealing with unwanted attention. Alas, my French was not good enough to follow his other lengthier ripostes in that language, but I would let him have blasts back in my most fluently abusive Italian, which seemed to enrage him more than my American English. But this young Frenchman was delighted to hear that I was being kicked out of this school. Nor was it lost upon me that the principal of this educational institution, as he summarily dismissed me, would take the trouble to greet on the front steps the arrival of a pupil, a young star on Broadway, who was chauffeured there in a limousine. But had it occurred to me at the time, which it didn’t, imbued as I must have been with the American ethic of equality, I could have assumed that my parents’ Irish birth and our family’s modest aspirations were such as to make me socially undesirable in the eyes of socially climbing folk. My father still possessed of innocence enough to intercede with an admirer of his, a Madam de Barbac, along with an old-time resident dowager of Woodlawn, to have my sister, a first-generation American, made a member of Daughters of the American Revolution.

  This Dear Mr. letter was written as a punishment to a Mr. McKinney, a Jesuit novitiate instructor at Fordham Preparatory School. My tendency was to have a lot to say, if not to inspire rebellion then to incite minor disruptions and especially to protest oppression. Mr. McKinney was tolerant enough not to insist upon worse than the present letter as my chastisement. Indeed he even fought for my not being expelled, pleading to the principal at the time that my presence at the prep might be the only reason the school would ever have to boast of anyone in future years. As indeed one does now boast of Mr. McKinney.

  Following my expulsion from Fordham Prep, I entered one’s idea of paradise, a coeducational high school north of New York City in Westchester County called Roosevelt. This modest mock Elizabethan red brick edifice, with its small campus, was then located in open countryside and seemed after an all-boys’ school, almost as if one were entering a true American life of sweaters, sweat socks and saddle shoes. And last but not least now provided a constant association with young ladies instead of the infrequent opportunity occasioned by the chaperoned tea dances at Fordham Prep. And it was here I met my first quasi-serious girlfriend one evening during a train ride south between the affluent communities of Scarsdale and Bronxville. A year older and her father dead and her mother working as a nurse, I encountered a less palmy side of American life, where they lived in a small apartment on the slightly wrong side of the tracks. However, her quiet elegance and considerable beauty and her awareness of how the world worked landed her with invitations from the Ivy League colleges and as far afield as Annapolis. I found myself mildly envying her too because she kept Coca-Cola in her refrigerator, a drink regarded as being without nourishment by my mother. During nights we spent clutched together on a couch in the small sitting room, she would say, “Don’t move, don’t speak,” as her senile grandfather, who had once prosperously built many of the houses in Bronxville, would wander in in his pajamas, and as he loomed over us in the moonlight, he would raise an arm and point a finger and intone, “I’m going right up over there now.”

  Her life, once privileged and rich, was now one of parsimony, and I occasionally accompanied her to her babysitting jobs, where she would listen patiently and even appreciatively to my poems. But she once made an embittered outburst at my indifference and unawareness to the sorrow, impoverishment and tragedy of American life. And it was a pity I never realized what a gem this American girl was, who, with her lucid brown eyes, abundance of brown hair, her smooth skin, her soft lips and calm voice, was so far beyond me in sophistication. But my insensibility and ignorance of the grimmer aspects of American life was due to the small-town, pleasant community of Woodlawn, and in some part to the New York Athletic Club, from
which I was not expelled, and which remained a part of one’s daily existence. Its great haunted rooms, always sparsely populated, and Tom and I, after trying to beat each other in chess or to a pulp in the ring, would each day following steam baths and ablutions come sit in the taproom overlooking the park and the bustle of theater customers collecting across the street at the Yiddish Arts Theater. Discussing the verities of life, we would watch the traffic lights change from red to green and green to red and people crossing Seventh Avenue as they made their way along Central Park South. Occasionally, a fire apparatus would speed out of Fifty-eighth Street, clanging and hooting around the corner. Women not being allowed in the taproom, upon more gala occasions Tom and I took ladies, one of whom was my Bronxville girlfriend, to the club to dine in what must have been and no doubt still is one of the most beautiful dining rooms with a cityscape view in America. The cheapest thing on the club menu was sautéed potatoes at fifteen cents a portion, often ordered by me in having to be conscious of a big club bill at the end of the month.

  But much entertainment came free of charge through Tom Gill’s father, an influential lawyer who would frequently have an invitation or free tickets somewhere for Tom and myself to amuse ourselves. Separated from Tom’s mother, his father seemed to live a bachelor’s life out of a shadowy apartment just behind the club in an ornate building known as Alwyn Court, a city landmark whose facing was covered by an intricate terra-cotta French renaissance stone tapestry, and which was lonely viewed by me many times from the club’s library and boxing room windows. Although I never knew precisely what Tom’s father did, he seemed to manage one or two of New York’s notable nightclubs and ran some of America’s famed bands, which started out their careers from what was known as Glen Island Casino, a nightspot on the Westchester shore of Long Island Sound and just across a stretch of water from the club’s country clubhouse. However, he did every day seem to play cards or at least visit in the massive great darkness of the card room up on the ninth floor, where one imagined that under the inverted bowls of light beamed down on the tables, large sums of money were won and lost. And every once in a while, as the chimes of the grandfather clock sounded, one would see a player get up from his seat and, puffing his cigar, cross the soft deep carpets to the corner of the vast lounge overlooking Central Park, where a ticker tape machine spewed out its long strip of paper quoting the most recent price of stocks and shares on Wall Street. A scene which prompted a remark from Tom Gill one day.

  “Pat, for some people it’s all play and no work.”

  And my first confrontations with the deeper mysteries of New York came, when Tom’s father, as Tom was unavailable at the club one day, invited me to drive to Glen Island in a bulletproof limousine with a gentleman in a dark suit and a black Stetson hat, who was saluted by traffic policeman as we drove by. When we reached the casino, and as the band there rehearsed, a young lady singer came to sit on this gentleman’s knee, and he put a large sparkling diamond ring on her finger. Somehow, this simple act, although alien to me, seemed to demonstrate the power of power in America. And I was learning of the artless workings of money in this great unpredictable bourse of New York, as later that day we drove down to the Lower East Side of the city, where Tom’s father went on behalf of an elderly widowed client to collect rents in some tenement buildings for which he emerged with great stacks of bank notes. He once spoke of a man to whom he’d given valuable tax advice, which consisted merely of a change of accounting dates but which saved the man many hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, the man resented paying a considerably large fee of tens of thousands of dollars for such simple but valuable counsel. And one last impressionable ethic Tom’s father left upon me was he refused to do business with anyone drinking or who had been drinking.

  But throughout my goings and comings downtown at the New York Athletic Club, there was another most unforgettable character who was the reason why so many frequented this curious precinct known as the boxing room. Sometime past three o’clock, the door was propped open each day, which allowed the faint smell of steam and newly pressed clothes to permeate, as the boxing room door was across the corridor from the club’s tailor and dry cleaning service. And pulling the door further open, one would see inside Frank Fulham, his feet in boxing shoes propped up on a desk, and wearing an old tattered robe. And it was Fulham these five years later following my departure to attend university in Europe who sat there just as I’d left him and who was now one of the few who instantly said friendly words to me in these United States.

  “Jesus, if it ain’t Pat Donleavy. It is, isn’t it.”

  “It is.”

  “Where have you been all these recent years out of our lives. You know every once in a while people would come in here asking for you. Where’s that guy gone with the fastest fists in the business. All the admirals, captains and commodores, the undertakers, the judges, the politicians and congressmen. You and Tom Gill used to put on some of the toughest fights around here.”

  Nothing perhaps in my stay now in America gave me greater encouragement than the cheerful welcome I received that day from Frank Fulham. Who when away from his duties as boxing instructor operated a “we knock ’em dead” exterminating service, which he was always quick to let us know dealt with bedbugs, rats and that indomitable ancient beast, the cockroach, and was not of the human kind. But such were the myriad connections effected through the boxing room that one was sure that somehow through its network that even the agency to get someone rubbed out could be found. For which, let me tell you, there was no shortage of suitable candidates.

  Upon this exuberant day of seeing Frank Fulham, I went through my first workout since my years in Dublin, where all my punches thrown were in pubs and on the street. And here in the good old boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, such blows and swings were now exercised under the guise of the gentlemanly art of self-defense. But even so, within a few minutes, some collegiate boxing champ invited me into the ring for what was purported to be a friendly sparring match but was to clearly beat the absolute bloody bejesus out of me. And suddenly one felt highly inconsiderate blows raining upon one from all sides. Until I let loose a right under the man’s heart which landed like a ton of cement and quickly corrected his sporting manners. And bent double, the collegiate champ gasped, “Nice shot.”

  Fulham enjoying the event, and it was obvious that habitués of this room still did not hesitate to knock the hell out of each other when they got into the ring. And I was now fully reminded that when any member casually invited one to spar a round or two, he was, you could be sure, planning to murder you. Meanwhile, Fulham was anxious to know what I was up to, having returned from Europe.

  “Hey, Pat, tell me what are you doing.”

  “I’ve been painting pictures.”

  “You mean art. Like Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, that’s good. You try to sell them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, that’s even better.”

  A few days later, in returning to the boxing room, and as I would, visiting it early in the afternoon before the hard-hitting habitués arrived, Frank Fulham, as usual in his old boxing gear and with his feet propped up on his desk and in his old ragged dressing gown, called me over to where he always sat by the telephone. He took up three cards and handed them to me, each with a note written on the back.

  “Here you are, Pat, these are three introductions. I’ve talked to each of these guys, and they’d like to meet you. I said Picasso and Matisse better watch out. You just go around the corner there to Fifty-seventh Street and introduce yourself.”

  The three cards were to the three of the most prestigious modern art galleries on this famed boulevard. I was quite pleasantly astonished at Fulham’s unhesitating help he offered and at the same time wondered how I was to break the different news that I was now writing a novel and had to find a publisher. It became apparent in the goings and comings of the boxing room that Fulham, although
always ready to be amused, was also a very practical gentleman, and in addition to his exterminating service he seemed to have access to many influential pies. But knocking insectile vermin dead was his first love, and business was brisk.

  “Pat, I ain’t a professor of bugology for nothing. We got over fifty species of these cockroaches that will eat anything and survive our ruthless methods. The building owners, with a building so infested that nobody can live in it anymore, think they can get rid of them when they knock the place down and build a new building. But the cockroaches don’t die, they just go swarming into the next building or go across the street at night and wait. Then when the new building’s built and ready for occupation, and when everyone’s asleep, the king of cockroaches says let’s go, and they next morning are all there back again. The whole city is nothing but a breeding ground for the biggest, best-fed healthiest rats, termites, fleas, bedbugs and cockroaches in the world, plus other pests down the sewers they haven’t got names for yet. That’s why we got our new motto, ‘We knock ’em dead for longer than just a while.’”

  Out of the increasing bleakness of my return to America, and as spring approached and the pavements of New York promised to soon fry eggs, I was finding my funds inexorably dwindling despite my family’s free accommodation, so I could not have been more delighted with Frank Fulham’s helpful gesture. And finally when I worked up the nerve to tell him that I was presently engaged in writing a novel instead of trying to paint and sell pictures, I also avowed that I would still most certainly go and make use of his calling cards.