The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  But there was no question but Crist by far fitted the description of the tall good-looking guy. And his accent was certainly somewhat more English than mine. And it was amazing that in a land where accents were not supposed to matter, they mattered very much indeed. But I thought in the case of Gainor’s arrival in America that there had been enough disagreeableness and enough folk had already been knocked unconscious into the tracks and enough others, one of whom was at that very moment far out flying over a wintry Atlantic Ocean and, probably hysterical, was flying on toward the good city of Helsinki, having to be restrained in a straitjacket. My tendency now was to swallow what was left in our drinks on the bar and if not to go to April’s pretty apartment for a nightcap, then to go quietly home and even more quietly stay there. That is if these overtly questioning folk would let us. Which by the sudden attitude now being taken by their associates at the table was seeming more and more unlikely. As they were just entering the one-sided conversation.

  “Hey buddy, didn’t you hear what the lady said to you.”

  The considerably beefy lesbians attired in unpleasantly green clothes had now sidled up closer. April in the circumstances seemed fearless enough, and I wondered if springing from her tall willowyness she packed a wallop. I knew that she had once chased another hillbilly up a mountain and whacked him with an axe when he thought he was going to rape her. She said she laughed herself silly and sick as she saw him with his pants down and his bare ass skidaddling for its life. But now out of the corner of one’s eye, one saw that the bartender, who while telling the lesbians politely to mind their own business, was also reaching for something beneath the bar. And one could only wait to see whether it was a truncheon, knife or gun. But the lesbians in turn told the bartender to mind his own fucking business and, reaching out, one of them took Gainor by the arm to pull and turn him around to look at her. Gainor of course behaved unresistingly to the extent of there not being a physical contretemps. But as he attempted to gently retrieve his arm away, he did speak. In his most precise legalistic manner.

  “I think perhaps, madam, you may have had too much to drink, and I’d prefer if you let go of my arm.”

  “Hey buddy, you leave her alone.”

  These latter words came from one of the guys at the ringside table, who was already up out of his chair and making for Gainor, who was further pulling away from the lesbian’s grasp. The guy, shoving Gainor hard against the bar, never realizing for a second that a blistering fist was already on its way to catch him smack on the jaw and to send him flying backward, crashing into the table and chair he’d just left. As all hell broke loose, a citizen previously lurking in the dark had selected and was playing on the jukebox the Christmas carol “Silent Night.” As I stood in front of April, to whom the fatter lesbian had already made an indecent suggestion, the other lesbian waded in to attack Gainor, who had knocked their friend at the table into the middle of next week but did it with such lightning efficiency and speed that the lesbian was unaware of it. Ah, but the other guy at the table who was aware was quickly wasting no time to be quickly elsewhere. But poor Gainor, even as provoked as he was, was refusing to defend himself, except to hold the lesbians at arm’s length as they tried to knee and kick him in the balls.

  “Get the fucker in the nuts, get him in his fucking nuts.”

  My own thumbs and knuckles had already been contused enough in Dublin fights, and now one needed elbow room to land immobilizing blows to the softer parts of folks’ anatomies. And for the sake of Gainor’s gentlemanly life and the preservation of his nuts, I realized I had to do the ungentlemanly thing and let go a few light shots into the first lesbian’s belly, for the second one had already tried to grab April’s tits, and April kicked out, then grabbed her coat and ran for the door, saying upon her departure,

  “This little ole soul is going to get the living fuck right out of here and bring her little ole alive tits with her.”

  The lesbian meanwhile, clearly a jujitsu artist, trying to get me in a headlock and throw me on my back. But this plan I instantly reversed and instead, grabbing her elbow, threw her on her back. But she knew her Greco-Roman wrestling and clung on, getting me in a scissors as I sat out on the floor and got her in a grapevine, producing squeals of agony and breaking her hold. But boy, was she tough. As she got up, I was tempted to hit her a couple of hooks in the haggis. But meanwhile, the first guy Gainor had hit had slowly got back on his feet and had a bottle in hand. Plus the bartender, who obviously also had the hots for April, whose spectacular beauty was the cause of it all, and who had long since departed, was now clearly not on our side, and it was turning out to be five against two.

  “Kill the English fuckers.”

  With this announcement, one was keeping a wary eye out for knives and bullets. But happily, the bartender was only armed with a blackjack. I couldn’t believe my eyes when Gainor, in a flash picked up and downed his whiskey off the bar and in the next flash contused the second gentleman from the table with an uppercut which lifted him off the floor and nearly sent him to the ceiling. And just at that moment, I luckily ducked. The bartender, coming up behind me and wielding his blackjack, had just missed my head to land on the side of my neck and shoulder, nearly paralyzing my arm. He could see that there was murder in my eyes at his dastardly sneakiness and did, as the rest of the opposition had now done, run. To escape, they entered and slammed and locked a glass door behind them. Through which went flying my fist. And now we were running.

  “Good God, Mike, are you all right.”

  “No.”

  My arm pouring blood, Gainor and I were someway down a cross street when the sound of police sirens came. We were making our way back to April’s to seek some shelter and first aid. But like Gainor’s own rage in his subway confrontations, another had been boiling over in me. Gainor now trying to make for calm. To hold our horses. That I would be published. That recognition of The Ginger Man would come. Indeed that I might even achieve more. But to be patient. Then we rang April’s bell. She was such a great believer in cutting men’s pricks off instead of their balls. Because she said most guys were nothing but pricks anyway. And I thought tonight we needed more of such sensible advice. But getting no answer and some justifiably rude bastard telling us she was away and objecting to the noise we made, and with Crist trying to restrain me, I again punched my hand through a pane of glass in a door. I was roaring revenge at mealymouthed America. And for the first and only time ever of my being in his company, Gainor, who signed his letters “Your affectionate friend,” fled for his life. I actually laughed, and one was convulsed as I saw him disappear down the middle of Jane Street. But now bleeding badly from my torn wrist, I stopped a taxi and asked to be brought to the nearest hospital. This happened to be St. Vincent’s, only a short distance away. And wherein only some months later, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, died. Apologizing as I struggled to get my hand into my coat pocket for money to pay the taxi driver, he turned around, and I heard him say,

  “Buddy, I don’t take money for an emergency.”

  Again one was reminded of the humanity lurking in American life. And of the mean calculation one encountered in Europe. Remembering the similar taxi ride in my early Dublin years when, having my false heart attack, the driver leisurely taking me the longest way to the hospital and finally getting there, was mostly worried that in running up the fare I might die before he might get paid. But now around midnight, I found myself in the emergency ward of this charitable place, surrounded by nuns. Along with reciting all my most abstruse bacteriological knowledge, I was also giving an extemporaneous lecture on the nonexistence of God. And of how my own present plight proved that He couldn’t exist. And if He did, I could easily beat Him in chess.

  Because of the deepness of the cut, I was given a tetanus shot while an angelically beautiful nun took wry pleasure in administering a deep jab of penicillin in my arse. Now guided by my angelic nun, and with a doctor summoned, I was then brought to a small operating room to
lie on my back. Refusing anesthetic, seventeen stitches were, according to my angelic and now more sympathetic nun, beautifully sewn into my ripped arm, as would, she said, befit a great work of art. And when my nun asked how I could stand the pain, I said that I had learned how to do it from the historical example set by the American Indian. Then this angelic nun, who seemed to be personally looking after me and who, listening to my random raves and my announcement that I was going to surely die, put her delicate soft hand on my brow and said, “Oh, after all I’ve been hearing you say, Mr. Donleavy, you’re surely not ready yet to meet your maker. And he surely won’t let you die.”

  But having been sewn up and having lost much blood, I did moments later nearly meet my maker. Again on my feet and my angelic nun escorting me ahead of her to depart the hospital, I suddenly stopped in my tracks and keeled over backward in a dead faint. Landing at the nun’s feet, my head banging the floor with a crack like a thunderclap. I woke up again supine on a hospital couch, being examined to see if I had fractured my skull. With Angelica, as I now called her, saying it sounded like I had. But at dawn fully examined again, I was still in one piece with the most comprehensive and expert medical attention I have ever known in my life. However, Angelica asking that they be allowed to keep me for further observation and that she’d already arranged a bed for me in the hospital. But I said I had to go.

  “Oh, Mr. Donleavy, I’m sorry you’re leaving. You know we don’t get many patients like you here. And if we did, I’m not too sure this might go on being a hospital.”

  Slowly now arising, holding onto Angelica to take my first steps, I was guided to the street. And after much pleading was allowed to kiss Angelica good-bye on the cheek. I took the nearest subway, the Seventh Avenue-Broadway line, which would bring me back again into the uttermost, northernmost Bronx. But which would deposit me two miles away from Woodlawn. It was snowing as I trudged by the boathouse of Van Cortlandt Lake, where growing up we would get our hot chocolate to drink as we ice-skated in winter. And then I trudged up across by the old winding road through the Van Cortlandt woods. With my girlfriend Ann Henry, I had often walked to school this long way. In the biting winter winds and meeting at an early eight o’clock in the morning. It was with her that my earliest philosophy was often discussed. And she thinking my reasoning pretty poor, it more often made her laugh. But into whose patiently listening ears, and tolerant of my mispronunciations and appalling grammar, I would tell my poems.

  No route to school could be lonelier as we met this way each dayand made our way walking nearly an hour, I to Manhattan Prep and she to travel another mile and a half all the way to the banks of the Hudson to the college of Mount St. Vincent, for she was in college and I was still in high school. But in this dawn after this night and the premonitions it now brought, all the world seemed such a bowl of tears. In the squawking bluejay silence of these woods, where I hunted and played and walked and talked and held hands with the girls I loved. Each step I now took in the deepening snow, my confidence slowly draining away. And so began my gradual demise into despair from which I was never again to recover in America. Gainor’s words echoing in one’s mind.

  Ann Henry in New York’s Washington Square Park. Such lady whose gurgling laughter and warm charm set one’s anticipations and expectations high, but her allurements were only very rarely encountered again in other women one met later in life.

  Mike there is

  For us pure of heart

  No end of

  Malice

  No end of

  Scorn

  23

  I HAD PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN to Valerie that from what I could gather of the publishing world, it was booming, and the sale of cheap reprints was skyrocketing. I was beginning to imagine S.D. selling seven thousand copies and the royalties that one might make amounting to four hundred pounds yearly. Enough in Ireland to survive on. But now with no book to write nor pictures to paint, the wait to hear no word from Scribner’s and energy sapped, my decline into full-blown despair was accelerating. Gainor still advising me:

  “Mike, according to John Preston, one of their authors, you’re getting the recognition and respect of one of America’s best editors, who has almost complete power at Scribner’s. You must continue to be patient.”

  But with nothing left to fight, as each afternoon wore on, the greater the gloom became. I was already thinking I was wrong to resubmit the book to Scribner’s and was now wishing they had rejected it outright when it had first been submitted. I again recalled my first visit there seeing Wheelock, and he had a sheaf of authors’ royalty checks handed him and these were waving in front of me. And then, just as I was slowly feeling some physical recovery from my drunken night with Gainor, through the letter slot of the front door of the sun porch, the fatal news came.

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  PUBLISHERS

  597 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 17, N.Y.

  December 18, 1952

  Mr. J. P. Donleavy,

  233 East 238th Street, New York City.

  Dear Mr. Donleavy,

  At last we have had a chance, two of us, to read in its entirety this somewhat revised version of your novel, S.D., and I am writing you about it now.

  S.D. came up for discussion at our editorial conference yesterday, and I’m sorry to report that, in spite of our admiration for your writing talent, we are not in a position to make you an offer. As you know, I had thought there was just a chance that, with some revision, we could do the novel — in any case, you had not at the time turned in the whole thing. The difficulties which I feared might be strongly felt by our present editorial set-up still remain in the manuscript.

  I am sorry to be writing a letter that can be so little inspiriting and, particularly in the case of a manuscript that reveals so much imaginative vitality and writing skill.

  Will you let me know what you wish us to do about the manuscript, which we hold here pending your instructions?

  With kindest regards,

  Yours sincerely,

  John Hall Wheelock

  When I read Gainor the letter, he said not to get panicky. But the consciousness of this rejection and my present vulnerability were overwhelming. I recalled a thunderstorm in Connecticut in the middle of the night and in a lightning flash saw a fox in the woods barking in hopeless defiance up at the sky. And too, there was a vision of dying and death. I remembered a time growing up. That of one snowy Sunday morning just as the winter light was dawning and I was collecting my stack of newspapers that I was to deliver from where they were dropped and where they were now covered in snow. I reached down with my hand and seemed to grip on something soft and round, and it was a dead man’s arm. Something made me look up, and I saw a window open from where he had jumped and curtains blowing out in the breeze. It was a man who owned a candy store who’d sickened with cancer and left his warm bed for the cold street. Somehow I knew the letter was fatal. And I was agonizing now to be away back in Ireland and digging my bare hands into its loam again.

  But I wrote back to Wheelock, hoping to keep some door open. That there could be some reconsideration based on revisions I still intended to undertake but also that I would come and collect back the manuscript. And Gainor telephoned me back from Queens.

  “Mike, I’m sincerely sorry to hear this news about the book. You mustn’t be discouraged. I still firmly believe that somewhere somehow you will find a publisher. But perhaps not here. And I must confess that my own feeling for this place is transcending into deep hatred. Mike, there comes from time to time in one’s life sworn situations where the resolve to do something becomes so great that all other matters pale into insignificance. Well, the sworn resolve I have committed to is to get out of here before anything else befalls me. Today is Sibelius’s birthday. He is eighty-seven. And it should be some small encouragement to us who are of a less advanced age. Except I guess one might also point to all the years we have theoretically yet got left in which to thoroughly get fucked up. Especially
when one considers one’s past indoctrinations undergone in this land. Mike, are you there.”

  “Yes, I’m still here but only just.”

  “Well, I wonder if you remember that in school growing up as I did in Ohio that one stood at the side of one’s desk every morning and saluted the stars and stripes and recited something called the Pledge of Allegiance. Which, if I may remind, states, ‘I pledge allegiance to my flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ This was written by a man called Francis Bellamy, who, among other things, let it now please be said, worked for an advertising company. Mike, it’s those words ‘liberty’ and ‘justice,’ in which we believed and which have left us bedeviled since. Meanwhile, I trust and hope your wounds are healing. One could never have predicted that night that something actually awful was about to happen. By the way, April says to send you her love and not to forget to wear your steel jockstrap next time you go out. She did as an aside also suggest that she thought we were both badly in need of long, lingering blow jobs. Although she did not suggest that she would oblige, she did say that from her experience it was just amazing how it calmed guys down. And I shall tell you more of what she said on this subject later. She is of course just the sort of girl we need to have to stick by us when we are in trouble.”

  In the old white house atop the hill in Woodlawn, I was now in for the long haul and hoping to make it as short as possible. Toying with the idea of getting an agent. And suffering the slow, uncertain wait to garner enough money together to get out. A blotch of red from a penicillin reaction at last subsiding on my arm, I darned my socks and washed my underwear and went on my first outing. To a place I earnestly recommended Gainor visit for respite. The Bronx Zoo, a rare open space that existed in this part of the Bronx and through which the Bronx River flowed. People still staring at me as I traveled by the bus. Along with the spacious Botanical Gardens, the zoo was part of the many green acres that lay to the east of the Fordham University campus and the prep from which I’d been expelled. There was also Fordham Hospital, where I had been brought as a boy with a broken collarbone, and where too, unbelievably, Gainor was to shortly end up from yet another incident in the subway. But meanwhile, here I was purposely attempting to hold on to what was left of my fighting spirit, just as I sensed Gainor was trying to hold on to what was left of his sanity. Crossing to the zoo entrance, a voice accosted me.