The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  REGRETS, GREETINGS, CONGRATULATIONS,

  USE TELEGRAMS.

  In the upper right-hand corner, there was even the symbol VLT, which stood for “International Victory Letter,” and Crist’s message very aptly seemed to fit Western Union’s style.

  DONLEAVY

  51A POPLAR STREET

  ARRIVING TONIGHT WITH GUILD LITTLE GELD NO GUILE MUCH GUILT

  GAINOR

  I was finally to lay eyes upon the living and breathing Gainor Stephen Crist in the New World. Ray Guild, mentioned in the cable, was a Bostonian of exotic lineage, who had grown up a close friend of Donoghue’s in the area of Cambridge. Guild, one of the most affable and good-natured of men, when hearing of Donoghue’s plan to go to study at Trinity College, Dublin, immediately jumped on the boat with him just as Donoghue was about to leave. Ray, an outstanding scholar and star athlete at Harvard, was a member of the black community of Boston and one of the first ever of your dusky variety of complexion to play on Harvard’s football team. With American Indian blood in his veins and Ray’s father a prominent lawyer and a pillar of the black community, Ray, good-looking and debonair and a master diplomat, was now representing one of America’s prominent beer firms, spreading its name, fame and goodwill in such places as New York City’s Brooklyn, and places beyond, and occasionally buying complimentary rounds for a bar’s customers. And he could not meet a more ideal or congenial companion to do this with than the accommodatingly agreeable Gainor Stephen Crist, whose thirst could be trusted to be never without need of quenching.

  It was through Ray Guild and Donoghue that much of our early socializing was done during our first weeks in Boston. And it was mostly among black folk who heaped hospitality upon us. Which seemed appropriate enough. For upon my return to America, I had long got used to, during my years at Trinity, associating a black face with a well-mannered and pleasant aristocracy who were a privileged lot indeed. Many having already been to Britain’s best public schools and were, as the sons of the very rich and politically powerful chieftains and tribal kings in Africa, usually accompanied by a retinue of servants and marvelously solicitous and obedient womenfolk. And feasts given by such gentlemen were welcome occasions during the cold and dreary winter days of Dublin. Upon my first arrival back in America, I found myself favoring to seek out black faces among the whites to ask of directions or other matters of information one found necessary in the city. However, at first surprised by the lack of reciprocation, or much elegant semblance to my former mates at Trinity, I did not long persist.

  For a dollar and seventeen cents, I nearly furnished our Boston kitchen, purchasing twenty glasses for three cents each, together with ten plates and a platter. As one or two other former Trinity people arrived at the shop front redoubt of 51A Poplar Street, it became for a brief moment a meeting place, as had my rooms at college. Besides Ray Guild and Donoghue, there was Douglas Wilson, who lived just over the river in Cambridge and who had been a frequent visitor to Kilcoole. One does not know if he were trepidatious, as he showed up down this shadowy ghetto street and he exhibited no signs of it, issuing us with our first invitation to the countryside, where his family had houses at Grafton, Vermont. There to witness over a weekend New England’s spectacular turning of the leaves. And also to witness a crisis with Philip, who, when one’s back was turned, managed to crawl and open a kitchen cupboard and get at some rat poison, which he was induced to vomit out copiously as a precaution but seemed to sample without harm.

  Away from our narrow little street in Boston’s West End, aswarm with its Italians, Poles, Jews, Czechs, Slavs and Russians, one had now at the Guilds’ and Wilsons’ houses at least got a glimpse of the family life which Americans aspire to. And upon Gainor’s weekend arrival with Ray in Boston, he was at his cheerful best and seemed to be going great guns. Although it was never known to me for Gainor to suffer from melancholy, he would have his distracted and down moments, but even during these his priority would always be to cheer one up. His thank-you note came back to say that he had enjoyed a thoroughly wonderful weekend and had, after an arduous road journey, arrived safely back in New York to there drink beer with Ray from two to four A.M. And as always in his communications was his added encouraging word.

  “Mike, I’m genuinely most impressed with SD and really feel that its publication is inevitable. Be patient, however, and don’t be discouraged by preliminary disappointments should they occur.”

  It so far seemed that with a brand-new fresh start in the capital city of the New World that Gainor had not yet too much complicated his affairs. And was in his respectable job with American Express doing fine and hoping to do better. But in all these assumptions, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was to learn not that much later that new, bigger and more ominous complications had already accumulated in his life. Facts slowly emerging that someone somewhere had begun to chase him, necessitating his taking up residence out in the semisuburban wastes of Long Island, where he claimed he had also moved, having left American Express, for closer access in his new job, that of playing host on behalf of an airline to receive very important people from abroad. And forsooth, no one anywhere could do such job better. As compliments poured in to the airline’s executives from such dignitaries of every description from every corner of the globe, upon whom Gainor had danced his attendance. His being the first voice who might greet them to escort them from the plane or to see them off on their departure. Even the United States State Department were dumbfounded by the paeans of praise. Ah, but the entertainment and refreshment expenses incurred by this brilliant host, Gainor Stephen Crist, were astronomical. With the bar bills crippling the airline, the otherwise appreciative executives decided that in spite of the enthusiastic VIP praise for Crist, that this host had to go.

  Gainor, now with an income abruptly less, was looking for the cheapest rent possible. And wouldn’t you know he would find along with it the worst kind of landlady. An Austrian from Vienna. Who older but still attractive was charmed by Crist’s good looks and exquisite manners and, unable to speak or read much English, made inviting eyes at him. But when this was not reciprocated by Gainor’s slight standoffishness and unexplained absences, she became increasingly suspicious of his activities and was soon steaming open his letters and attempting to read his mail. She employed such skill in this that Gainor was kept unaware of her activity. This disagreeable invasion of his privacy could at least be thought tolerable when letters were delayed only a day or two, but as the landlady had to have them translated this could extend the delay. Warming to her pastime, and the landlady finding some of the letters more bizarre than just tasty gossip, she began lending them to a friend to read, who soon began to send them on to a further friend of similar ethnicity, and she in turn invited in guests to hear the incredible contents. This latter sequence of events causing an entire month to go by, preventing Gainor getting some very urgent mail. It did not take long before minor misunderstandings in Crist’s life became momentous ones and began to multiply to an incredible extent. Especially as the landlady was now attempting to blackmail Crist into seducing her.

  However, in now changing his address to a new landlady, Crist, forever an ear of sympathy, quickly found himself in even deeper trouble in Flatbush, an area known as a desirable residential neighborhood. Married to a policeman, this new and reasonably attractive landlady made Crist generous maple syrup and pancake breakfasts and confided in him that she was forced to commit, to her horror, unpalatable sexual practices. These consisting of being made to stand with her hands cuffed behind her back and positioned in front of mirrors, where her husband, holding his service revolver to her head, buggered her at gunpoint. Finding Crist an attractive and compassionate listener, it did not help Gainor’s peace of mind to further learn from the landlady that her husband had already murdered two people, one of whom had made a pass at her. Which promptly made Gainor conspicuously attend the Flatbush Reformed Protestant Church and to make it known that he was a member of a midwestern religio
us sect specializing in celibacy. But although Crist, who had read law at Trinity and taken his dinners at Lincoln’s Inn in the Inns of Court in London, regarded the landlady’s revelations as grave and heinous matters, and were perhaps deserving of his making a citizen’s arrest, he thought, at least for the time being, that because of his own quickening problems, he might give such apprehending a miss, especially as he related to me over the telephone.

  “My dear Mike, one does not mind donating one’s deepest sympathies to a victim of such unwanted carnal practice by a grievously violent husband, but one does draw the line when one is handed this gentleman’s spare service revolver and is then invited to fulfill his amorous role naked and candlelit in front of mirrors while he is away the weekend playing golf with his submachine gun-toting Mafia cronies in Florida.”

  Ah, but you’d wonder as to what were the kind of goings-on in the letters purloined and delayed delivery by the first landlady. These were for the most part brilliantly colorful accounts of carnal relations going on back in the old country which Desmond MacNamara described as achieving a grandeur of mischievous behavior that would make the old Marquis de Sade himself gasp in shock. And were further added to by a few candidly unrestrained missives written by yours truly to what turned out to be my first ever, albeit unofficial, American reading public. But it was in the comparative distant safety of Boston and over a beer or two in the West End that Gainor now revealed the stories of his first days in New York, the ensuing correspondence over which must have kept the landlady and her cohorts enthralled. It seemed that Gainor had not been overlong in stepping off the S.S. Ryndam when he lost his glasses with nearly the last thing he read being George Hill’s Hollywood address on George’s steamer trunk. And although Gainor could still read print held very close up to his eyes, he could not decipher words at a distance, this often necessitating him to question the nearby public as to what certain signs read. In this his recent life in the New World, directions on public transport were becoming vital if he were not to be deposited in oblivion. Being as he now had to head as cheaply and as quickly as possible from one distant part of the city to another on New York’s unfamiliar and complicated subway system, which was capable of confusing even an Einstein. But not a thief or assailant you might hope to bring to justice.

  It was on a sultry, humid late-afternoon subway station platform near the Brooklyn Bridge that Crist was attempting to head to Canarsie, an area of dispiriting flatlands smoked over by the perpetual reek of fires to which Crist was innocently going, alas at my lighthearted behest, in search of ultracheap accommodation and to free himself of the scourge of landladies. I told Crist that it once had bordering its coastline on Jamaica Bay an amusement park called Golden City. This had been a once forlorn beach resort where Crist thought he might find anonymous and isolated refuge, which he felt he desperately needed. And now waiting for the train, Crist, as he squinted about him, asked a man standing nearby on the platform if the trains stopping on that side of the station went uptown or downtown. Gainor attempting to sound as matter-of-fact as possible, as it had already, on enough occasions, become the case in America that his aristocratically British accent, combined with his politeness and elegance of behavior, was mistaken for effeminacy. Notwithstanding this impression, and Crist getting no answer, he repeated his question. And as he was in the habit of doing in order, as he said, to make people understand what the fuck he was saying, did so using an even more clipped tone.

  “Excuse me, but I would appreciate very much if you could possibly tell me if this train goes uptown or downtown.”

  “What’s a matter, bud, can’t you read.”

  “As a matter of fact, without my glasses, I can’t. So I would appreciate your telling me if this train goes uptown or downtown.”

  Assuming a distinctly sour expression, the man, ignoring Crist’s question, belligerently grunted. And it must be said here and now that Gainor so abhorred rudeness of any kind and especially when shown to a woman that it could anger him to instant violence. His abhorrence of those discourteous also including those who lacked compassionate humanity for their fellow man. But Crist, in spite of provocation, always remained every inch of his six feet a consummate diplomat and in addressing anyone would invariably couch his statements in the most polite manner possible, often accompanied by a slight bow and delicate clicking of the heels. He himself would never hesitate to even abandon his own urgent journey in order to conduct by the elbow another fellow pedestrian to his or her sought destination. However, so far as your man on the station platform was concerned, he was having none of it, clearly assuming that Gainor was a raging homosexualist attempting to make his unpleasant acquaintance. With the rumble of an approaching train heard, and with no one else to turn to, Gainor again, urgently, one more hopeful time repeated his question just as the train’s lights came into view and were approaching in the tunnel.

  “Please, does this train go uptown or downtown.”

  Of course there was yet another deep-grained socially correct aspect to Crist’s deportment, insofar as he was the most democratic of men, and no man, no matter how mentally deficient, emotionally disturbed, sexually deviant, or lowly of station in life, would not get his most kind and undivided attention. Gainor too had recently witnessed the exquisite panoply of a king’s funeral back in London, and was already much homesick for the good manners he’d been long accustomed to in reciprocal British behavior. That when such a question of direction to somewhere might be raised to a brolly-toting, bowler-hatted resident of London, this would be fluently and courteously forthcoming. And if it were a lady inquiring for help of such gentleman, he would, while giving her assistance, remove his hat, bow and again tip his hat before leaving her presence.

  Ah, but we were here. In the New World. Upon this island bought for beads from the Manhattan Indians, where the skyscrapers now reared and the sun blindingly reflected hot rays into these canyons. It was a humid and sultry New York day, where fumes choked the lungs, the noise of traffic assaulted the ears and on all sides machines threatened limbs and everything harried the eye. And down in this subway, where black blobs of chewing gum made unsightly spots everywhere, a large careful rat was running along between the train tracks away from the pounding, deafening noise of the approaching train. And staring malevolently back at Crist, the man, with a snarl, suddenly replied.

  “This train doesn’t go anywhere near to where you ought to be going, bud.”

  It was patently clear that this disagreeable chap was possessed of little perspicaciousness and was unmindful of the sinewy strength of the man to whom he addressed this regrettably unhelpful remark. It was with a speed that was blinding and a force that was like a bolt of lightning that Crist’s fist exploded up out of nowhere and landed with such bone-shattering concussion on your man’s jaw that the sound, according to a deposition given later in court by the change maker in the station kiosk, could be heard above the noise of the approaching train. His feet separated from the platform, your man, once vertical, was now horizontally sent ten feet farther away. His body in free-fall having reached the edge of the platform now tumbled over down into the tracks. Already flashing through Crist’s mind was the daily lethal phenomenon of the scorched and carbonized penises encountered by pathologists in New York City morgues, and which Crist had already witnessed befalling drunks late at night, who, in pissing from subway platforms, discovered too late that when the stream of urine hit the third rail alongside the tracks it suddenly turned into an arc of electricity, and as a bolt of this shot up in its thousands of volts, electrocuted your pissing man on the spot.

  “Mike, I do for God’s sake deserve better luck than to have twice now been an unwilling beholder of some poor idiot with a bladderful killing himself. Everywhere there are signs forbidding spitting, but none suggesting not to urinate. And even as God forbids, I must get myself a license and a car to drive above ground as soon as possible.”

  This was yet another heartfelt plea from Gainor, for
as a frequently late-night traveler, the New York subway system was playing an ever-increasing major role in his life. And one could sympathize. The existence of all the mysterious and distant destinations, the local trains, the expresses, the shuttles, free transfers and the separateness of one line from another all led to finding this form of rapid transit being harrowing in the extreme. Despite Gainor’s ultra-yeoman-efficiency acquired in the navy, of checking and double-checking, the existence of the Myrtle Avenue line, the Canarsie, the Fulton Street, the Rockaway, not to mention the Concourse, the Jerome Avenue and White Plains lines and trains marked GG, DD, AA, BB, EF, any of which could land you up at a godforsaken last stop in Brooklyn, the Bronx or Queens. And all contributed to a nightmare of confusion for the unwary newcomer, as well as being a risk to life itself. Crist, in a telephone aside, saying,

  “Pray, Mike, that I do, if it can be avoided, forever in the future stay off the Seventh Avenue-Dyre Avenue line, upon which due to witnessing a most awful event, I took a recent mistaken ride to the last stop, which was dire in the extreme. And having been on the Lexington Avenue line, how I managed to get on this line in the first place I shall never understand. The only explanation I can fathom is that I perhaps went into a catatonic state.”

  It was Gainor’s second time witnessing this dreadful phenomenon of the carbonized penis. And upon this occasion he was in fact to a degree involved. He had left a New York pub past midnight in the area of City Hall and was on his way to a somewhat literary and liberally congenial gathering just one subway stop away. The station was called Brooklyn Bridge. Which bridge, as folklore had it, was oft sold to the unwary immigrant fresh in off Ellis Island, who might be found standing admiring its massive engineering and who, upon being offered it at a cheap price by a local con man and buying it, thought he could charge traffic admittance and who then, upon stopping his first customer to exact payment, promptly got the shit kicked out of him. Gainor was in fact amusing himself with this very thought as he came down into the dungeonlike darkness and urinic smells of the subway and, having popped his nickel in the slot to push through past the wooden arm of the turnstile, he was now putting his cuff-tucked, perfumed handkerchief up to his nose when he spotted down the end of an otherwise empty platform a gentleman undoing his fly and about to relieve himself into the tracks. Horrified at what might be about to happen, Gainor, always the good Samaritan, shouted.