by Des Bishop
10
This might be the most light-hearted and quickest account of a father’s alcoholism you will ever read. My father was sober in my lifetime and, except for one slip, I was never aware of my dad being drunk. I did not even know he was in AA until I was thirteen years old. I knew this because all my dad’s friends were in AA and they used to come over on New Year’s Eve. One of them, John Gilholey, used to bring his daughter over. Of course, as the years went by, we hit puberty, and one New Year’s Eve Tracy Gilholey was the first girl I properly made out with. We were up in the attic while they were downstairs.
After that night we got to chatting on the phone and I asked her how our dads knew each other and she said it was probably from AA. This was a total shock to me. In fact I did not believe it until I found my dad’s copy of the AA book, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, and it said: ‘Church on the Hill AA Group’. All my life my parents would mention Church on the Hill. Every Monday and Saturday my dad would go there. Eventually it just became ‘The Hill’. I am sure we even said to my dad, ‘Are you going to The Hill?’ Until I found this out I just thought it was weird that my parents didn’t drink.
My dad had one slip, and I thought it was cool. There was an empty bottle of wine downstairs and my dad was asleep on the couch. I was delighted because I thought it was so funny. My mother was not delighted, obviously, but she had more back story than I did. She herself had given up booze when she got pregnant with me and she never drank again. She saw herself as having a problem, but she was not a member of AA.
My parents with my Aunt Mary out in the Hamptons. I love this picture because none of them drank anymore at this time and they were pretending to be drunk. Look how happy they are – even pretending works!
So I don’t know that much about my dad’s drinking. I know that when he moved to London from East Sussex in his mid-twenties, booze quickly became a huge part of his life. He was connected to a big drinking scene in which most of the actors and models drank all day. He was actually sober when he moved to New York in 1969 to work for the Ford Modelling Agency. My parents met even before he had a place to live; they met at an advertising agency party to welcome the London models to New York. He was not drinking in those early days and my mother went to some AA meetings with him, as she was concerned about her own drinking problems.
By the time my parents were living together in Manhattan my dad’s back problems had taken a very bad turn. He got back into drinking and developed a fondness for painkillers. As a result he began to miss jobs and Ford was not too happy with him. One day my mother had to call an ambulance because my father was immobilized by pain. He ended up in Bellevue Hospital and had to have another operation. His convalescence was long and he moved in with my grandmother in Queens while he was recovering. She was very good to him at that time and this was one of the reasons why he was so incredibly fond of her. By the time he recovered, he found that the work had dried up. His only thought was to move back to London and pick up where he had left off. My mother agreed to go with him.
It was a good move and he began to get loads of work in and around 1971. My parents lived in Putney and my mother enjoyed the London life. Then, some time in 1972, Nevs, the model agency that was looking after him, organized for him to move to Düsseldorf in Germany, where there was much money to be made. My mother speaks fondly of this time as they had an amazing flat full of antiques, she had her own job and Dad was making loads of money. My father’s drinking was the only source of tension in the relationship, and things came to a head when my father got a job modelling for a Pushkin Vodka advertising campaign, which meant he would be in Iceland for two months. My mother told him she would not stay in Germany on her own for that long. She flew back to New York the following day and began working in her brother Jack’s bar, called the Rub a Dub Pub, in Middle Village in Queens. My dad went to Iceland.
Months passed and one day my mother got a call from my dad’s friend, the publican Eamon Doran, to say that there was someone in town who wanted to talk to her. It was my dad and he told her he was getting a taxi to Queens to see her. That night he told her he wanted to marry her. He got what he wanted, and within two months – in May 1973 – they got married and set up home in an apartment in Queens.
My dad was never crazy about his wedding pictures because he had a brutal hangover and always thought he looked terrible.
Booze was still a source of tension, and after an argument (about my mother’s drinking, oddly enough) my father decided to leave and go to Ireland. I don’t know why he decided to do that, but it was quite a dramatic move. My mother was left on her own and had to get rid of the apartment and move home. She thought that was the end of things and that she would never hear from him again, but eventually he called from London and asked her to move there to be with him, and she agreed. They moved into a place my mother remembers as ‘the Irish house’, where there were a lot of Irish actors. It was definitely not the best place to be living if booze was causing problems in your life.
Later, Nevs organized an apartment for them on Markham Square, off the King’s Road in Chelsea. They had a great life. My mother loved her job, working for the Australian company Rio Tinto. Dad got good modelling work and he made a lot of money.
After they moved back to London, I know that my dad was in and out of AA. My mother was also still drinking. When her father died in January 1975, she made a vow to the Blessed Mother, with whom she feels a great connection, that if she got pregnant she would never drink again. At that stage she had been trying to conceive for a while and she was beginning to panic. She got pregnant soon afterwards, and she never drank again. She liked to joke that I might be the reincarnation of her father. I know that in the end my mother gave my father an ultimatum about his drinking because she was not going to raise her child in a house of booze. She had been raised in a house like that, and she was not going to repeat it.
She gave her mother an ultimatum, too. My nan sailed to London in 1975. She got off the boat, stinking of booze, and my mother was devastated because she had been sober for a while before that. She told her mother that she could have nothing to do with her children if she continued to drink. My mother had pretty much had it with the negative effects of booze in her life. I never saw my nan drunk and I never knew she was an alcoholic until I was much older. My mother liked keeping even the mention of booze as far away as possible from us. She did not want us to end up that way. She fought hard and failed, but God loves a trier.
11
JOURNAL, 16 NOVEMBER 2009, FLUSHING, QUEENS, 6.39 A.M.
I had been looking forward to getting some time to write down some of the powerful things that have happened, but the reality of the situation came crashing down on me in the last few hours. I woke up to the sound of my father moaning in the bathroom. He had not made it to the toilet and had had an accident. When I walked in he was just sitting there, embarrassed, and I have to say for a few seconds I just looked on in shock.
There was shit on the floor and all over his legs. My mother woke up and we quickly went about dealing with the situation. His pyjamas were badly soiled, but we just got on with it. The smell was terrible, but I did not gag because I did not want him to realize how disgusting it was as I didn’t want him to feel even more uncomfortable.
The minute you begin the clean-up, something changes and it does not really seem like a big deal. The yellow water, the stained cloth and what was left on his leg no longer seemed dirty. The acceptance comes so rapidly. You don’t give it a thought as you wring the cloth and yellow water streams across your hand. The more yellow the water becomes, the better, because you want him to get clean. I wanted to make him feel fresh again. I rubbed his swollen legs down, and they were so swollen I just wanted him to let go and not bother fighting.
I tried to make him laugh by asking him if he realized shit was yellow. As I wiped his bum I reminded him that only a few years ago I had joked that one day I would be wipin
g his ass – I had just not expected it to come so soon.
Most of all, though, I just felt sorry for him. He was so helpless on the toilet, speaking about how embarrassed he felt. He was not a fan of the jokes as he was normally so terribly private about this type of stuff. ‘Oh come on, man, please! This is not funny!’ I wished he was not embarrassed around me. I just wondered if he was thinking how it had got to this point so fast. He seemed so helpless, it was hard to bear.
We got him back to the bed, clean and smelling fresh. We joked about cockney slang and before he lay down he sang some of the cockney songs he wrote for his musical. Then he reminded me that it was he who wrote it, as if he had invented cockney slang himself. His vanity had returned, and I could rest easy.
JOURNAL, 17 NOVEMBER 2009, FLUSHING, QUEENS, 10.03 A.M.
Another morning, and we have developed a routine. Wake up, check in with my dad and then begin trying to motivate my dad to eat. He is doing pretty good on that front, but I can tell he does not enjoy it. His appetite has not come back at all and he told me he would gladly not eat for the entire day.
It is Mom’s birthday today and she really did not want to make a fuss. I did buy her a card and some scratch cards, which I think she enjoyed getting, but she cried when reading the cards. For definite, she is finding this much harder than the rest of us. The mood swings can be hard to deal with, but, to her and our credit, we have been doing pretty good at keeping the communication very open. Yesterday it got pretty intense and an argument between myself and Aidan and my mother culminated in her admitting that she was afraid. I had never heard my mother say those words.
You begin to feel as if you’re living two lives. There is the life upstairs with my father, which is overflowing with love, service and motivation. There are no barriers up there. We have had wonderful discussions about the acceptance of death, the dismissal of regret and buckets of indulgence in nostalgia. It is an affectionate life upstairs, where hugs and back-stroking are in large supply. I have lain down next to him for ages, with his hand in my hand in the most natural way. Despite the horror of what is happening, there is something so beautiful developing as a result.
Then there is the life downstairs. Here there are no hidden facts to soften the blow. Down below is the harsh reality of care. There is the cold truth of organization, health insurance, information and preparation. Every time the phone rings there is hope, dread, fear and annoyance.
Down below there is my mother about to lose the only life she has ever known, or at least a life that has existed long enough to have erased the memory of what had been before. I find it frustrating that she chooses to hold on to miracles as her way of coping. She rejects what is going on upstairs as an admission of defeat. She can’t engage with it at all. I try to bring her in but she keeps her ear cocked for a noise from the room, like a dog during a thunderstorm, and, given any chance, she heads away into her safety zone of responsibility and care. She pretends that she has been open with Dad about things, but I know she hasn’t.
It is tough because I want to help them both equally, but it was easier to deal with her in those first few days when she was helpless and vulnerable. Now she is determined to organize everything every minute of the day. I know it helps her to be busy and to feel like she is doing everything she can, but sometimes it just leaves you feeling a bit cold.
JOURNAL, 21 NOVEMBER 2009, FLUSHING, QUEENS
Things have settled down. My father has rekindled his interest in watching the English Premiership all through Saturday. There is nothing immediate. My dad seems stable. Chemo does not start again for nine days and all the prescriptions are filled. This helps my mother to relax, which helps everyone else to unwind. We have moved away from the intense emotions of the last few weeks. The accidents have stopped and there is no more drama.
Yesterday I saw such a lovely thing. My father had befriended a young girl from the house next door. Her name is Jenny and she moved here from China when she was only a baby. Sometime in the early years of her life in Flushing herself and my dad developed a friendship. I believe they made a snowman during one of the snowstorms. Over the years since they have become quite close and she has been dying to get in and see him since she heard he was ill.
She came in yesterday with the cutest card that she had made herself, with all her own messages of support and motivation. There was a body-builder cut out of a magazine and she had written ‘You are strong’. The card was huge and pink and full of little cut-outs and drawings she did herself. In big letters it said ‘I LOVE YOU’.
She came in and they hugged. My father held her for ages and said, ‘My little friend, Jenny.’ It really made me cry.
When my dad first got sick I decided to keep a journal. That is where these journal entries and the ones in Part Three come from. It can be hard to remember how you feel at these intense moments and I wanted to have something to remind me. But looking back on them, I’ve realized that the entries come to a sudden stop. There are about ten for the first six weeks of my dad being sick, and then only two more for the following three months.
Originally I thought that maybe this was because he began to feel better and we had got into a routine, but my mother reminded me that it was around then that I bought a box set of the HBO series The Wire. The Wire took over our lives more than cancer did. So did street language – and, of course, the way Senator Clay Davis says, ‘SHEEEEIIIIITTTT.’ Now, for those who have not seen The Wire this won’t mean much, but for us it completely took us away from what was going on. I watched every single episode with my mother and father. My mother told me that at that time she began to organize the day so we could just sit down and watch three uninterrupted episodes.
When I hear the opening song now, I just think of that time. When I hear the music that finishes an episode I just think of us looking at each other and saying, ‘Will we go for one more?’ The opening song has a repeated line, about putting the devil down in the hole. We heard that song four or five times a day. After a few weeks my dad and I would be having breakfast and he would look up at me and say, ‘You wanna go down in the hole?’ That was his way of asking if we could watch some of The Wire. It’s all we thought about for nearly eight weeks; we did not think about cancer: we put that devil way down in the hole.
12
My dad was the general manager of the Burberrys flagship store on East 57th Street for most of my life. Essentially he was just a store manager, but it seemed a lot more prestigious because it was a big store with a famous name, and it was on a street that at one stage had the most expensive rent on the planet.
People are very familiar with Burberrys today, but it was not that way when we were growing up. This was before the Burberry check became the national flag of the British degenerate. Young people did not really know about Bur-berrys, so it was not that exciting to tell people what my dad did. My friends’ parents used to care though, particularly the dads; in the 1980s the Burberry trenchcoat was a must-have for a Manhattan businessman. Most of my friends’ dads were tradesmen or cops, but even the cops used to love showing off to their friends the fact that they had some Bur-berry which was really out of their price range.
Some of the dads worked on Wall Street, however, and they were really big fans of the discounts my dad could get for them. I really only became aware of that when I got a bit older, but still when I meet some of them when I am back in Queens they will always say they think of my dad when they wear the raincoat or the sweater he got for them at a discount. Not that I am promoting Burberrys; but it has to be said, the quality is fantastic. I know this because, once we were big enough, that is all the clothes we wore. Anything that was slightly damaged in Burberrys would be put into bags to be given to homeless charities around New York City. But when my dad got involved, my mother would drive into the city and pick him up because he would bring bags of homeless clothes home for my mother to go through. The damage was always minimal, so we got loads of good stuf
f out of it at the expense of the needy.
Burberrys rebranded in 1999 and dropped the ‘s’. You would be amazed, the number of sweaters I have to this day that still have a ‘Burberrys’ tag on them. The stuff lasts forever – as does the guilt that some homeless guy froze in a New York winter so I could look preppy and rich when I was a youngster.
It looks like he is working but he is probably on the phone to my mother, telling her what time to collect him from the subway or the bus. We never liked it when he got the bus, because way too often he would wake up too late and miss his stop.
I am not sure exactly what my dad did in his job. It was a pretty big operation. In the early days there were five floors of shopping and quite a lot of staff, as well as a huge shipping and stock staff in the basement. My dad’s skill was to make everyone feel important – from the basement guy to the department manager. I assume he had to deal with staffing and stuff like that, but I would say he had a lot of help with any of the logistical stuff, which was not really his strong point. Customer and staff relations were his forte, and he charmed the great and the good of Manhattan and all who came to visit.
When I say my dad was a showman I do not mean that he was loud or liked to tell jokes and attract loads of attention. I mean he was constantly aware of his image, both physically and in what people thought of him. The best example of this is the fact that he wore bronzer every day he went to work. As a boy I was clueless as to what he was doing every morning when he would put this tiny dot into his hand. Even the amount he squeezed out of the bottle was done with precision. This dot would then be rubbed into his hands to turn them a strange brown-orange colour, and then he would rub it into his face, making sure that he stretched this tiny dot into an even colour all the way down his neck. He would then wash his hands in almost the same way every morning after the application. I am sure if we had filmed his hand-washing, you would find it hard to spot any variation in time or pattern. He was obsessed with his image going to work and never deviated from this routine.
