The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  It was witnessing such frequent fisticuffs behavior around the Dublin pubs and myself being constantly challenged and attacked by similar folk, and having to instantly defend, that could have resulted in one’s own reputation for physical tempestuousness. And now as I waited on the street for Behan and in spite of Lead Pipe Daniel’s alleged fear of me, I was relieved when Behan came out alone from the pub, where he said he had investigated the lavatory from whence Daniel the Dangerous got his name, having once wrenched a length of lead pipe from the toilet wall in order to wield it upon the pub owner’s head and the heads of a few of his customers at whom he wished, as Daniel the Dangerous would say, to demonstrate his aggrievement over a slight made concerning tinkers and traveling people. Behan mimicking Lead Pipe Daniel’s grumbling gruff voice:

  “Didn’t I hit the hypocritical miserly fucker a clout on the cranium with his own fucking lead pipe I pulled out of his own fucking gent’s convenience.”

  Behan often would recite a verse or two of a poem this dangerous man had written which referred to the Blessed Virgin but which for all the flowery, adoring words ended up being of a sacrilegious nature. And Behan could see one was not a little grateful to know this poet of the plain people of Ireland could not be found. Together on the street again, Behan and I walked along the park railings of Stephen’s Green.

  “Ah, Jesus, Mike, I’m glad to be back in Dublin, where there’d be maybe a familiar face and sight with every footstep you take. I’m a city rat, thankful for all the old crumbling walls, alleys, sewers and streets that I can be scurrying in and out of. And excepting yourself, who’s put the countryside to good use, you can take your plots of turnips and potatoes and the mean people who till them and shove them as far as they will go up the arse of the biggest farmer you can find.”

  As we walked on under the leafy, thick trees of this deserted thoroughfare of Stephen’s Green East, ahead in the distant shadows a solitary strange apparition approached. Which appeared to be a man bent forward pushing a wheelbarrow in which a light glowed. As we got closer, one was able to see it was in fact a man pushing a wheelbarrow in which a light glowed which gave his face a cadaverous skeletal look, like the Grim Reaper of Death. The man was wearing a pair of boots, sou’wester and trilby hat and the barrow contained a pick, shovel, pail, and as I learned later, Ireland’s first Geiger counter. As we confronted to pass on the pavement, Behan endearingly greeted this gentleman as an old friend.

  “Horace, how is your hammer hanging. And, does your redeemer liveth. And will he soon be opening the heavens of joy to swallow us both, Horace Bartholomew Durrow Mountmelton.”

  “Hello, my dear Brendan, how good it is to see you on such a fine evening as this.”

  “Well, Horace, to my way of observation, it looks, if you don’t mind me saying, like a fucking awful evening.”

  “Ah, to be sure, Brendan, there appears to be a temporary indecision with the barometric pressure not knowing whether to go up or down.”

  “Jesus, Horace, you couldn’t, with me temporarily bollixed betwixt the throes of circumstance, let me have a bob or two.”

  “I could indeed, Brendan, and welcome. Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  Horace, without a moment’s hesitation, reached into a large inside pocket of his sou’wester and pulled out a packet of documents along with a thick sheaf of bills. Peeling off two large white English five-pound notes and bowing deeply, Horace handed them to Behan. The man’s impeccable manners and the preciseness of his elegant voice made me think he was some professor of quantum theory or wave mechanics, who, like the more than a few in such rarefied pursuits knocking around Dublin with their ohm meters, had gone into permanent orbit and was now out for an airing before bedtime from one of Dublin’s better mental institutions. Of course too he could have been sane enough, being that he was in the land where batteries, soda water and leprechauns were invented. In any event, Behan was now possessed of enough money which at the rate of less than a shilling for a pint, could purchase more than fifty gallons of porter or ten bottles of whiskey. Enough to keep a modest drinker like Behan drunk for a week. As this gentleman put away his roll of bank notes, he smiled and bowed and again took up the handles of his wheelbarrow and proceeded south into the shadowy mists along Stephen’s Green.

  “Mike, he’s been my patron now for years. Buying every copyright of mine. I just tell him what I’m writing and if I’ve got a spare copy, give it to him or I let him see it. If not, it doesn’t matter. This is just a small part advance emolument to be added on to the lot he has already given me.”

  As we walked beneath the drips of moisture from the park’s tree branches and toward the lighted windows of the Shelbourne Hotel and to where my car was parked, Behan, as he tucked the money away in a pocket, saw the wonderment on my face.

  “Sure, what’s the point of being a writer if you don’t get paid.”

  Behan indeed assiduously adhered to this principle. He was at the time being published in a column in the Irish Press newspaper, whose editor innocently assumed Behan would reasonably wait to be paid like other contributors at the end of the week. But found one night about midnight, while asleep in his sylvan suburban surrounds, that Behan intended to be remunerated at the end of the day his piece appeared. This editor’s wife being wakened by rude shouts outside their house, and failing to inquire as to the source of the ruckus, was then assailed by small stones hitting the windowpanes, breaking one and cracking another. The editor, jumping from his bed, investigated to see Behan standing on the pebbles of the front apron of their entrance drive, his fist raised and shaking and yelling up to the window.

  “Would you ever throw me down my money for my piece you published. I am without a penny in my pocket for a glass of stout. And having just walked in the rain four miles out from Dublin, my belly is screaming with the thirst that my throat is cut.”

  And this type of midnight alfresco remuneration could have been what influenced Behan in later years, as he would at a literary cocktail party sell a work at one end of a room and a few minutes later, crossing over, sell the same work to someone else the other side of the room. But knowing Behan and his sense of natural justice, such was no doubt perpetrated upon deserving conmen.

  “Now, Mike, in fairness to myself, the one thing I do concerning a piece of writing is to keep scrupulous accounts of anyone owing me money for it.”

  I was to learn later that this same man, Horace Bartholomew Durrow Mountmelton, in addition to being a patron of the arts, did also have the deserved reputation of being the politest man in Ireland. And despite his present ability to be generous to Behan, he did have his times of impecuniousness. He was a longtime friend of Ernest Gebler’s and would occasionally call on Gebler at his estate of Lake Park for afternoon tea. But once ended up staying, but not wanting to inconvenience Gebler, took to sleeping on a sofa in one of the smaller sitting rooms. After the days extended into some weeks of affording Mountmelton such hospitality, Gebler decided that it was time to give Horace his walking papers. Gebler, who wrote throughout the night, would only appear midafternoon, encountering Horace in his usual stiffly upright sitting position, from which Mountmelton would leap to his feet, bow and announce in his cheerful manner a long stream of complimentary banter, which never allowed Gebler to emit any harsh word of eviction. Gebler basically being a very kind man always found himself helplessly succumbing to these blandishments.

  “Ah, my dear Ernie, how good it is to see you on this fine country afternoon. I trust you slept well and that your work progresses in fine fashion. The dew, I fear, has dried by now, which was sparkling on the grass this morning, as I took my constitutional following breakfast and witnessed the daffodils in their glorious profusion along your front drive. I did then go to visit your lady’s garden. And here I have been keeping to give you this, a yellow, most fragrant rose, the petals of which are as soft as the dew was this morn on the grass. And I do hope you do not disapprove of my taking the liberty of plucki
ng it. But I did so with the motive that this flower might start your day with the inspiration provided by its inestimable fragrance.”

  Mounting my sedate motor again, Behan and I made our way north of the Liffey quays. Where we again stopped to enter a pub, and Behan greeting and being greeted on all sides and with one of his five-pound notes ordering us bottles of stout, and he informed me that this was the pub he would frequent on impecunious days in order to drink bottles of Mountjoy Nourishing Stout, which at sixpence a bottle was a penny cheaper than a bottle of Guinness.

  “You see, Mike, with the price seven pence for a bottle of Guinness, if we drink now seven bottles of Mountjoy Nourishing Stout at sixpence a bottle, you’re saving a penny on each bottle and then you can go back again, south of the Liffey, with the saving and have a bottle of Guinness free of charge, as you might say. So, you see, there would be more than slums to boast of this side of the Liffey.”

  I had only rarely ventured to the north side of Dublin and on such occasions was either heading to the grandness of the Gresham Hotel in O’Connell Street or to catch the Aer Lingus bus to the airport from Cathal Brugha Street, or the train from Amien Street Station for Howth. And except for Behan, who sang the praises of the north side of the city, mostly all social life I had met with in Dublin was conducted in the fashionably regarded south side of the river. But where, nonetheless, one could still encounter slums the moment one stepped a few steps beyond the smart streets. And where, in solitary, walking these bereft corridors of poverty, as I often did, one would pass these broken tenements, their tattered curtained windows, the panes of glass gone and patched with cardboard. And inside on the walls see pictures of the Pope or in the dim darkness of a room, a candle glowing in front of the bleeding heart of Jesus Christ or a saint. And from Ernest Gebler’s descriptions to me of Dublin slum life, one knew coughing and crying children were crowded into the Georgian rooms, sleeping one next to another on damp, torn mattresses spread across the floors, where death and disease were the daily currency of life. And Behan once while taking a pee on my Kilcoole lawn exhibited his penis as he referred to his scars of war.

  “Mike, let me tell you, if you don’t know already in your studies at college that there is every venereal pestilence to be had in Dublin. They would have you believe it would be coming in with the sailors on the ships, but I’m telling you the sailors would be going out with a lot worse than they had when they came in. And on such matters there’d be more in the population not knowing what the itch or burning was up their private parts that a little holy water applied wouldn’t cure.”

  Although there was always a trace of deeper concern in his voice, it was difficult to tell if Behan was being serious when he spoke with a seemingly careless indifference concerning venereal matters. But even one’s Trinity professor of bacteriology would lightheartedly open up his lectures on such as syphilis, with the caution to be skeptical of the patients who represented they had caught their infection on a toilet seat. In any event, as much as it would have been clinically enlightening, I had no desire to inspect Behan’s so-called scars of war. But even with the recent advent of penicillin, I was surprised that Behan seemed nonchalant concerning the spirochete of syphilis which remained, in my eyes, an equally grievous matter as that of the tubercle of tuberculosis. But there was no doubt that the latter disease, pervasive enough in the rest of the country, was one of the scourges of Dublin’s tenement slums.

  “Mike, it’s why you’d see in the matrimonial column of the Evening Herald and Mail, farmers advertising for wives, specifying that they be of stout build. It’s not only as a sign they’d be strong enough to hitch them up to the plow if the horse got sick but also as being an indication that they were not wasting away with consumption and the farmer himself soon having to be sweating, digging her grave.”

  But Behan had no need to elaborate to me on this bane malady. As I’d learned of a young man dying and, in his last operation, had to have his testicles removed, and I had on one chill Dublin late afternoon been present down in the basement gloomy morgue of Sir Patrick Dunne’s Hospital, witnessing a postmortem on a young girl where the prevalence of this disease was amply demonstrated by an almost cynical pathologist who pointed out with perfunctory indifference the many tubercular lesions on the child’s internal organs. And the sadness and haunting memory of that small young life, and tiny unmourned body so alone and cold in death, and on that grim slate-gray slab, eviscerated and taken apart under the eyes of strangers, stayed with me underlying all I would ever write about Dublin.

  Behan and I now drove through some dark, desolate streets into Night Town. This an area notorious back in the years for its brothels, slums and destitution, but where Behan again maintained that one found a better class of people. On the gentle slope of a hill, we stopped and I followed Behan into a tenement and up some flights of stairs into a large, high-ceilinged, smoke-filled Georgian room, crammed throbbing with voices, curses and songs. Sweating, singing faces aglow in the blaze of fire within the still elegant chimney piece. There were men, women and children of every age and Dublin description. Behan, tugging me by an elbow toward a grandmotherly old one and whispering in my ear, urging me to give her a squeeze, kiss and hug.

  “These are people, Mike, who face life as they’d find it, for there is no other fucking choice they have to do otherwise. Now come here, meet this great old one. She’s me own nearest and dearest, me great-grand aunt now, give her a hug. She was a whore all her life down on the quays. And now here she is enjoying herself in dignified retirement. And she loves nothing better than a good hug.”

  Behan, in the midst of singing a song, was, as he did in Kilcoole, filling a bowl with a concoction of food, now filling a pint glass, first with stout, then with sherry, whiskey and brandy and finally topping it off with poteen. As he finished singing the final refrain of his song, he put the pint glass to his lips and, his head thrown back, swallowed without stopping the entire pint glass of mixed beer and spirits. And as I watched the last of the liquid in the glass go down his throat, the glass suddenly dropped from his lips and, felled like a tree, he keeled over backward, to thunder his thirteen-stone weight upon the floor, shuddering the windows as screams came from the room below. The rest of the party makers seemed to regard me as Behan’s keeper and bid me rid the floor of his supine unconscious presence. And were quite threatening and anxious that I remove him without delay.

  “Would you ever now, you who brought him, take this drunken beast out of the midst of decent people before he does more damage.”

  I was not to know that most present had been that day at a wedding. And that these newlyweds had a while before our arrival and before the moment of Behan’s collapse repaired to happily honeymoon in a bedroom below. Behan was limply lifted up and laid over my shoulder, and I carried him out of the room and down the stairs past the recently honeymooning newlyweds’ door. Which, as we were passing, opened, and framed there, were the pair of them standing wrapped in blankets, heads covered in plaster, the entire ceiling of their room having collapsed upon them in bed. And as I descended the next flight of steps, straining under Behan’s weight, with his head and arms hanging limp over my back, and the couple unleashing their bitter complaint, Behan suddenly regained consciousness and shouted back up over my shoulder to the recent bride and groom,

  “Would you ever fuck off, you pair of sanctimonious eegits.”

  And go

  Fuck yourselves

  Back

  In bed

  10

  OPENING A REAR DOOR of my Austin 11.9 this night of the hooley, I dumped a comatose-again Behan in the back of this dignified automobile and drove the twenty-two miles return to Kilcoole. Parking on the lawn, I left Behan in a heap on the back seat of the car and stepped out into the fresh air of one of those rare but unforgettable bright moonlit nights of this haunting countryside. One walked across the dewy, wet meadow, hearing a curlew’s mournful whistle as it flew overhead. And the distant sound of th
e waves gently splashing on the shore. Out on a shimmering Irish Sea, an ancient sailing ship that often plied this coast was making its way north from Wicklow Town, its pale white sail aloft in the moonlight, its starboard green lantern flickering toward the beach. Reminding one that this land could so suddenly be so tranquilly beautiful.

  By morning, pounding hoofs and a sudden bellowing roar awoke me, and I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. Behan, hair dripping wet following ice-cold sea immersions, was as full as ever with life when he should have been near death from alcohol poisoning. He was in the middle of the lawn, a clump of grass in his hand and holding it out, trying to make friends with a massive bovine beast who had no similar intention. Its bulging eyes were already rolling around in its monstrous curly head, as I swept out the door of the cottage, grabbing a pitchfork kept for the purpose. The ferocious beast belonging to the neighboring farmer was now pawing the ground and sending sods of my carefully tended lawn high into the sky.

  “Jesus, Mike, what’s wrong at all with the ungrateful animal not wanting a bit of grass.”

  I shouted just in time for Behan to retreat, as the bull, with lowered horns, charged. Behan, shouting in Irish, his unlaced shoes flying off, ran across my strawberry patch and was hopelessly trying to climb the slippery bough of an ash tree. Up which a moment later he suddenly got instant assistance, the bull squarely levering him from behind, his arse mercifully between the horns and ascending skyward into the tree. Where Behan clung to the branches as the beast pawed the ground, his massive weight uprooting and nearly overturning the tree, with Behan clinging to the uppermost bough with all his might.