“Mike, I don’t blame you, I really don’t. But Mike, by the good intercession to blessed Oliver Plunket, if I get out of this, I’ll take you up to Woodstock, where we can both be assured of some peace and quiet and take a brief rest.”
Gainor hung up, and I waited by the phone. And after twenty minutes of reading further in Thomas O’Crohan’s tale “Twenty Years a Growing,” his story of life and living on the Great Blasket Island of western Ireland, I went and had my own bath. And there immersed in the water, dreaming up cartoons of fish, who were mostly eating each other, that I was now drawing for amusement, and distraction. And with which I was also hoping to make money. But in assuming the worst now as another hour passed, one’s worry drove one to ring Gainor back. And I immediately took encouragement as I sensed his voice full of relief.
“Mike, for the moment I have to speak quietly so as not to be overheard. She’s not preferring charges.”
“Thank heavens.”
“No, Mike, thank the blessed Oliver Plunket. But my God, what an unbelievable nightmare. The police arrived, about two hundred of them. Summoned by about a dozen bloody different people. It was thought the Martians had landed and Orson Welles himself was leading his legions out of his spaceship to take possession of Queens. The road cordoned off, searchlights illuminating the whole building. She, meaning Mutt’s girlfriend, who has, by the way, the most incredibly fantastic figure, rang all the bells down to the ground floor. Mike, the damages I’m going to be sued for here are going to be overwhelming. And the sooner I quietly decamp with my wigwam from this address the better. Water from the shower I had neglected to turn off as I was being accused of being a rapist on the rampage, poured down into the apartment below and in turn down into the apartment below that. And to put it mildly, this apartment is now a mess of every possible bloody description. Then when the police arrived and saw my wigwam, they immediately assumed I was a total nut case, which of course I am now. But together with the neighbors jabbering their accusations and having previously complained to the landlord that this apartment had been turned into an abode of ill repute, being a mere rapist seemed a mild enough accusation. But, Mike, I did as you advised, however, and I know what I am about to tell you may seem a bit farfetched. But the girl, whose eyes I suddenly met, as there I stood surrounded by police and handcuffed ready to be taken away and hopelessly making a last-ditch effort at explaining what happened, changed her expression completely. Now, this is the astonishing thing. Her eyes had exactly the same instant expression they had of a certain sudden appeasement when she was out in the hall and glanced down and saw my erection. I don’t know what she was thinking, but there was an almost inviting backward glance as she fled down the stairs to ring more bells on the lower landing. And now, giving me the exact same look again, she suddenly and unbelievably announced it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding and mistake. I was unhandcuffed. The police left. All two hundred of them. And one last jocular chap saying as he closed the door, ‘Have a good day.’”
“But you did intercede to blessed Oliver Plunket.”
“Yes I did. But, Mike, honest to God, I am absolutely convinced that had I not got an erection, which obviously her unbelievably attractive figure must have involuntarily provoked, I do believe I’d be sitting in a jail cell right at this bloody moment. The only trouble now being that all of this could appear in the papers because reporters and photographers were all over the place. Plus we’ve just sat the last hour in the sitting room facing each other, and I must confess to having had more than a drink out her bottle of her duty-free gin. She’s presently gone to the bar downstairs to buy more.”
“Gainor, you’re mumbling a little, I can’t quite hear you.”
“That’s because I’m seeing if my teeth are still intact. Trying to brush them in the ensuing darkness of the bathroom, I bloody well used instead of toothpaste an athlete’s foot preparation. What in God’s name they put in that stuff I don’t know, but now I feel my teeth any second are going to drop out. But that’s entirely minor. I believe as a result of my involuntary erection, I have become the object of this girl’s very immediate attention if not lifelong affection. She now clearly wants me to fuck her. Such a state of affairs not making matters any easier to deal with Mutt, a most unpleasantly conscientious type who already seems resentful enough about me. Pray God, I can avoid any such additionally complicating emotional strife. Turns out she knew someone with whom I went to high school in Dayton, Ohio. That’s all I can tell you now. Except that as a result of all this, I’ve been replaced on my shift and have missed a day’s work. Which bloody hell is not going to improve my financial affairs any. I need rest. I need to escape from it all. Before I float away, borne by life’s strange sadnesses. And please, Mike, I beg of you, please, please don’t mention a word of this to anyone and especially not to certain people in London and Dublin who behave as central news agencies in such matters. I know you forget nothing, but for God’s sake do forget this incident. But I know, as one who lives on in utter ignominy, that, Mike, you’ll be writing all this down, if not for your own amusement, then for posterity’s sake. Well, if you are, write this down too.
“I can take
Slander here
I can take
Slander there
But I can’t take
Slander everywhere”
24
THE DAYS now having drifted toward Christmas and the New Year, I was now walking a mile or two to even save a dime and had by miraculous means accumulated $115 with a further $50 to go to pay for my fare overseas. Finally, my ever dependable mother giving me the remainder. The New Yorker magazine rejecting a first few drawings now asked to see more of my fish cartoons. Earlier having booked passage in middle January and in my desperation to secure some last-ditch foothold of achievement in the U.S., I delayed my departure and booked instead on the Cunard liner Franconia, sailing out of New York on February 13. But again, when more cartoons were sent, a letter came back saying they had similar ideas in the works, and their indifference made me send no more.
One of my later cartoons, marine life having become a ready symbol, for in aid of their own survival they often swallowed one another whole.
Gainor too I knew was contemplating his exit. But from his position ever growing more complicated with Mutt and Jeff holding onto his mail till his rent was paid, and his continued consistent reportage to me over the telephone of his dealings with money and its being wired here and there and everywhere, there seemed to be only more chaos compounded by yet more chaos in his life. Which since his rape scene in Queens and the ensuing dunning for damages and his previous indebtedness from his subway assaults and his day-to-day survival getting more and more precarious, one could not see how he could afford a ticket to get out. Nor did it seem he could get free travel by air as he might have been entitled to, and one guessed his employers must have discovered who it was who was sending folk to Helsinki. He was now spending more and more time in touch with me and indeed was planning to come stay as a guest with me in Woodlawn.
Ernest Gebler from Ireland sent me a copy of the Irish Times with a picture of a bullock running amok in Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. And this newspaper seemed also full of meanness and the overtones of the Catholic church’s repression. But even this I found a brief and lovely relief from America and the gadget-crazy desires of its populace. More and more of them, always looking for any label to boast of and searching for anything to shine, anything to represent their continued whiteness of skin, cleanliness of body, sameness of mind and their camaraderie cemented by their heartfelt bigotry. My sister’s husband, Jack, moving house, was already concerned that the new neighbors might see their old refrigerator, and although I had sympathy for this honest and hardworking man, this widespread American attitude made one want to dent their bloody cars and appliances and spread horseshit and cow dung everywhere across the nation.
I went to see the agent Diarmuid Russell, suggested by Wheelock
. The meeting was short and not so sweet. He thought I could write but that S.D. was an unlikely book for publishers and that John Hall Wheelock had probably not read the book at all. Which I knew he had since he was able in our talks to vividly describe details of scenes and seemed especially taken by the stout bottles that were secreted in a pile of turf. It made me realize that this well-meaning and quite kindly agent actually didn’t believe I’d even spoken to Wheelock. And with the manuscript of S.D. again under my arm, I walked out of an office on Fifth Avenue for the second time. And brought the manuscript to Random House on Madison Avenue. Writing back to Valerie to say that everywhere it was said that editors couldn’t find authors who wrote with feeling and that there was no interesting literature to publish, and here I was putting it in front of them and their cozy little minds seize up. But then a copy of a letter I’d written to someone describing a visit to Lea and of her lavish optimism in the Fountain household and sent to Ernest Gebler immediately elicited Gebler’s response that I was indeed a writer and that my manuscript should be sent to his agent, Mavis MacIntosh.
Meanwhile, as Valerie wrote back tolerantly to my continued depressing news of rejections, with my letters containing nothing but proclaimed hope and renewed resolves, her letters contained no good news either. I was now even getting reluctant to return to the Isle of Man. Full of anger as I was at Valerie’s treatment by her mother, who, hearing the book was rejected by a publisher, now said that she was not allowing Valerie her money in order that I could exercise my libido. I soon let it be known that I never had any intention of ever seeking money from her or anyone else. Nor was I to be used as an excuse for someone being denied that to which they were more than morally entitled. Always having held that a moral matter was as binding as one legal and therefore legal. It seemed now a battle on both sides of the Atlantic, with it being no longer clear as to where or even if there was somewhere a promised land.
It was now every bit a certainty that with the roots of our strength withering, Gainor and I were as on a raft, isolated and adrift on an endless ocean. The sharks’ fins circling. America had beaten us both. But still I felt I had, albeit three thousand miles away, Valerie’s courage, faith and wisdom to in many ways depend upon. And that they were there to escape to. However, as I wrote in my letters of land and of a cottage again somewhere, even she was losing hope in any future. And as the days passed of further fruitless waiting, the lifeline between us was being relentlessly stretched and torn. I was now down to simply having to say, have faith in me. Still unable to believe that there wasn’t at least one other person somewhere in America with enough or some integrity, or even the desire to grow rich by publishing S.D.
A full moon was rising and glistening white across the landscape on these December nights. Then a day came pouring rain and washed the snow away. Duffy invited me downtown for a meal, and his quiet voice and his smile would come as he bid welcome as he always would with his two reassuring words.
“Hello, friend.”
And he was one of the few people I was now feeling safe with. For I was finding Gainor a more and more nightmarish ordeal. And as I tried to pound sense into him, even referring to him in letters to Valerie as a lazy, irresponsible bastard who was now planning to leave his job sending folk to Helsinki and to go on the dole. Then one would sheepishly regret such words, as I’d find he was sending money back to support his children in Europe. But with Duffy, all was a respite as we had spaghetti and Chianti. His now wife Judy had left Sarah Lawrence College to be a housewife. They had moved from their tight tiny apartment in Thompson Street to a much larger, airier, brighter place nearby at number 50 Grand Street, where they installed a concert grand piano. And I remembered that when they found a big chair and table on the street in front of their old apartment and took it in as furniture, that it made me feel that it was at least one pleasant and contradictory certainty about America that people would throw away useful and even luxurious items as garbage and refuse, which vicarious generosity one would never encounter in Europe. Although Jack and Judy did wince over my vehemence on matters American, I did try to provoke a little laughter and avoid a lot of lies. I read them the end of The Ginger Man just as Gainor arrived, took a glass of wine, sat down, listened and applauded. He was impossible to beat when showing his discrimination, commendation and wholehearted appreciation. But survival now was another matter and just like fighting air. And daily forbearing the time to pass. While in fold-up postal air letters, and hardly missing a day, I wrote paeans of love to Valerie.
But now closer to home, tragedy struck. Early morning, a policeman called at the door on East 238th Street to inform that T.J., having been stabbed in an affray, was in a critical condition, clinging to life downtown in Bellevue Hospital. The story unfolded that with his car remaining parked at Tenth Street, he’d left his girlfriend, with whom he’d had a fight, and then at three in the morning near Brooklyn Bridge had got into an altercation with two ethnics of the moment as T.J. referred to them, one with a knife and the other with a gun. T.J., an outstanding athlete, not only as a speed ice skater but also in track and field and as a discus thrower had, when confronted with the two armed assailants, knocked the gunman to the ground and while grappling with the assailant with the knife and lifting him up over his head to throw him at the other man reaching for a gun, was stabbed three times in the back. With both attackers briefly on the ground, T.J. ran, and running had just enough time to get far enough away not to be an easy target for the bullets whistling by. Realizing immediately as he sprinted that he was losing blood fast and might not get far, he was lucky to be able to hail a passing taxi and be brought to the hospital.
Sister Rita, my mother, myself, at the side of our Dodge car replaced by my father with a new one every two years. Again Thomas standing in front of his mother with his somber demeanor.
Following in my footsteps as he too left Fordham Prep and followed me to Manhattan Prep to be taught by brothers of de la Salle, a French order, my brother, Thomas, in front of St. John the Baptist de la Salle, whom he maintained was the only decent man in the academic movement who understood him. T.J. much cheered up in his Manhattan Prep school days, which he said were idyllic, but he decided to be deliberately photographed wearing, as he described, “the sneer of the year of 1947.”
Misery and apprehension within one, I approached this famed New York City landmark of Bellevue and one of the oldest hospitals on the North American continent. Its great anonymous reception halls patrolled by armed security police was lined with brown benches and a motley bewildered-looking assortment of waiting patients. Having to ask directions to find the way to T.J.’s emergency ward, my English accent seemed to elicit immediate, helpful attention. Walking past medical orderlies emerging from myriad other wards, wheeling bodies under their white sheets and on the way to the morgue. Reclining back with tubes from bottles stuck into his arm, T.J. seemed alert enough. His forthright and intelligent sense of observation not deserting him on what had to be thought was his deathbed. The doctor saying that although it seemed he had not suffered any clinical shock, it was now touch and go over the next twelve hours. Back in Woodlawn, I for the first time in my life heard my mother break into sobs, but then heard her say that she would rather see T.J. dead than married to his present girlfriend. One realized that despite the battering one’s confidence had already undergone that one now could not let oneself crack any further and had to undertake an even greater steely resolve to battle on and cling ever harder to the wall of the abyss and prevent falling while awaiting the strength to take the slow, clutching climb back up and out. A tension now gathering in my throat. And my tendency to speak growing less and less.
As Bellevue Hospital became a daily visit, and T.J. at last seemed to be mending from his additional wounds done by a stiletto, a thin, round blade which had punctured him in face and legs as well as lungs, one could still not chase the morbid gloom out of one’s brain. So sapped by everything on every side. Lonely, without lust, w
ithout joy. Each day purposefully taking the bus to the terminus of the Lexington–Jerome Avenue line. And in the roaring noise of the train riding downtown. And before plunging underground, staring at the passing windows at all these lives stacked up in their living boxes. Arriving at Twenty-eighth Street, jammed with cars and people. All seeming wretched as one walked in the direction of sunrise to reach this vast complex of buildings located bordering the East River and occupying a dozen city blocks along First Avenue. The grim barred windows of its huge, gloomy, psychiatric building, lurking full of brooding death and violence. Which gave the name Bellevue its latency of haunting fear. Its vast corridors leading to its massive wards. The beds full of cancer patients, accident and murder victims. T.J. said that as he thought he might live instead of dying that now lying there just watching and hearing them die on all sides had shattered his last illusions.
But then for all its grimness, this was also one of the great hospitals of the world. Where, if you had any chance of living at all, they could keep you alive. It was also, as T.J. said, the kidneys and bowels of New York. Excreting out its demented and dead. Keeping full its massive, somber morgue. From which were taken daily the boxes of amputated limbs and the unclaimed deceased to the back of the hospital and a barge T.J. could see awaiting in the East River. A derrick lifting the wooden-cased corpses and lowering them into the barge’s hull. To be towed on the East River up past Sutton Place of the rich and farther through Hell Gate and past the prison windows of the apprehended on Riker’s Island and thence to Potter’s Field on yet another island called Hart. Nothing in New York could make a greater impression than the fate awaiting the failed. As these, the tens of thousands of bodies, passed through this vast morgue of this great hospital, half of whom, unable to pay for death, are never claimed. And then who go to final rest on this small piece of land standing in view of the shore of Orchard Beach, a massive man-made crescent of sand teeming by summer with swarms of New Yorkers who come to swim and sun and occasionally drown. Growing up, I would go for the day to visit childhood friends like Alan Kuntze and Gerry McKernan, who worked there as lifeguards. Saving the living from death. Pulling those crying for help back to shore. Kneeling over their bodies to resuscitate them. The skin of these drowned turning blue and lips white when they failed.
The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Page 31