The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  Ah, but wait. In those days, Christmas did come once. And our class was delegated to perform Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” as our school play. Chosen to play Scrooge, a tall, temperamental introspective boy, Regan, who combed his hair straight back and who parted it in the middle, suddenly at rehearsals finding the role unsympathetic, became stubborn, sulky and difficult and finally was sick and absent. I had had a fight once on the streetcorner near school with this boy, which I won when I bloodied his nose, and following which he became an intellectual friend. And now on this occasion of his indisposition, I was chosen to play his role. It was as if I had been ripped from my contented obscurity as a backward pupil and the struggle to memorize and repeat lines was immense and my fluffing of them appalling. My legs were still too short to let my feet touch the floor from the seat upon which I sat on stage. Happily, I was enamored of a pretty girl, Joan Skillen, who stood next to my chair. But as I was a replacement on short notice, I seemed to endear myself to the audience as I trembled in terror, trying to remember my lines and the sympathetic applause brought the house down at the final curtain. Although I was to occasionally hanker over the lore of the theatrical world, it was to be my first and last performance on stage. And the only time I was ever able to distinguish myself in an educational institution.

  But being so outlawed academically then must have marked me and made one deliberately dissident. And following my expulsion from Fordham Prep, my bad influence on others must have included Duffy. For when my family separated me from the coeducational influence of Roosevelt High School, and when it was known that I was then to attend Manhattan Preparatory School, Duffy, already a student there, was promptly removed and sent off to a different school by his family. However, I still had recourse to Duffy, and now for other and mostly unfriendly reasons. Both of us had for a time been enamored of the same marvelously attractive girl, Carol, my very closest childhood friend Alan Kuntze’s younger sister, whom I’d taken to the cinema and invited to Fordham Prep tea dances. But not only was I incensed over this trespass. For Duffy one day, a year or two later, by the drinking fountain in the park suddenly produced treasured photographs of my Roosevelt High School girlfriend, which he proceeded to slowly tear up in front of me before I realized what he was doing. Having myself been often threatened by Mafia children, I now in true Mafia tradition threatened to kill Duffy. And perhaps no wonder efforts were made to keep the two of us apart.

  But Duffy was no stranger to other menaces and misfortunes and, like Richard Gallagher, must have also grown up through his young years without the illusions I must have had over these mightily wonderful United States. And seemed to have retained all through my years in Europe. Of the grandeur and promise it still offered. And of how one planned in daydreams to perfect one’s leisure in the glow of its glamour. But there were tragic reminders of a more solemn world. Duffy’s older brother called Tag, so named because of his skill in playing a peculiar Bronx game of ring-a-levio, had his head severed from his body by a passing car while retrieving a ball from a street manhole. On my way to and from school, I saw the blood left on the grass where Tag’s body lay on the sloping lawn outside the big brick house on the corner overlooking where the accident had happened. And now on my return to the United States, from Duffy emerged a different view of America. That of a society maliciously wielding its prejudices and exploiting its poor and downtrodden and dispossessed. And Duffy was to be a singular friend who would always upon greeting use that word “friend.”

  “Hello, friend. How are you doing.”

  Jack Phonecious Duffy, as he was called growing up, was tall and sturdily built. He was called Phonecious as a nickname because of his extraordinarily striking face, and with his astonishingly handsome classical profile, we imagined we could find a resemblance engraved only upon some bronze from a remote period of antiquity. His waving orange-crimson locks frequently had totally strange women stopping and offering themselves to him on the street. And once, as I casually went strolling with Duffy through the neighborhood, and seeing a house alight within and hearing the sound of music, Duffy mounted the porch, knocked on the door and politely inquired in his gently quiet, unassuming and hesitant voice,

  “Excuse me please for my intrusion, but I just happened to be passing and I just wondered if there was a party going on here.”

  Such was Duffy’s elegance and charm that when the first shock of his inquiry had worn off, the door was opened and Duffy would duly be invited in. And even when he turned and waved his arm to his waiting cohorts, I and another lurking in the shadows across the street to come and join him, Duffy soothed any apprehension of his soon-to-be host.

  “Oh, I hope you don’t mind, they are just some of my friends.”

  Duffy had been as a teenager a formidable boxer, football player and a musical prodigy as well as a fashion plate. Wearing collarless jackets of outrageous pink and yellow tints, and even zoot suits with their drape shape and which required the wearer to stand astride on either a streetcorner or in front of the local sweetshop with the palm of his hand encircling upon a perpendicular plane as he polished air. And often joining Duffy was a quick-witted and acerbic raconteur, Red Walsh, who all the many years later was to become a publisher’s representative and deliver a copy of the Paris-published Ginger Man to its first contracting American publisher. And Duffy was to compose the music for the first stage production of The Ginger Man in the United States, which in its turn provided a tiny atom in the matrix of American history, as its premiere took place on the eve of President John Kennedy’s assassination.

  Woodlawn, because of its geographical intimacy as a community and location isolated on the edge of America’s then largest city, was a small forcing ground in many a teenage pursuit. Producing a handful of young musical prodigies who won amateur talent contests on the radio, either singing, playing drums or stroking the viola. As it had with Richard Gallagher, others too innovated young men’s fashions. A local figure called Stevie Bennett, who, along with Alan Kuntze, pursued their various forms of rakish conservative dress. Alan Kuntze, upon spotting a pair of Norwegian leather bedroom slippers in a man’s fashion magazine, decided to wear them for ordinary street wear. And having won a swimming scholarship to Trinity School downtown was soon shuffling about, spreading the awareness of this footwear everywhere until loafers came into being. My own taste in clothing was nonexistent until I was indoctrinated into what the fashionable young Woodlawn man should sport, exchanging jackets with Alan and his brother Donald, both of whom had considerable collections. But one choice I’d made from my own inventory and originally belonging to my sister, and which was a total rainbow of bright hues, met at once a stern admonition from the prefect of discipline of Fordham Prep.

  “Do not. Ever. Wear that again to this school.”

  Alan, as well as being meticulous in dress and being older by a couple of years, was a mentor in almost all matters governing social behavior, sport and girls. Which in the last case included descriptions as to how to stimulate the pleasure-sensitive areas of the female anatomy. Or how, on introduction, to execute a firm handshake or impart a reassuring squeeze to a girlfriend’s limb. He was the first to pick intellectual holes in my obtusely bigoted arguments and to suggest books, such as James T. Farrell’s, to read. He was also a pal of a sophisticated Bill Pain, who’d wax emotionally impressed by films he’d seen and books he’d read, once keeping us spellbound under a summer tree in the street, describing a great film he’d just seen called Citizen Kane. Alan also insisted on social decorum, even when it involved one’s sister. Pursuing his perfections in everything, he could be charming just as he could suddenly be blunt and hard. And then with immense charm be immediately contrite. He was a marvelous athlete, winning trophies for speed skating on ice, and by evening one would find him meticulously sharpening his racing skates. He held high school freestyle swimming records and would take morning doses of glucose for breakfast and would let his fingernails grow long to get a better pull from
his strokes in the water. He could also, on his way to school, waiting each morning for the bus across from the cemetery, infract his fitness by unathletically puffing on a cigarette. Which allowed me to tell my first joke I’d ever heard from a country cousin visiting Harold Farrell, who lived nearby and who, when asked if he smoked, would reply,

  “Ain’t never got that hot.”

  Among the proper Protestants in Woodlawn for whom four Protestant churches catered, there were a handful of rich Italian families along with five Irish families, all with many children and all of whom lived in big brick houses discreetly behind their lace curtains and for whom one Catholic church provided worship. Of the Irish there were the Dordans, the Deacys, the Duffys, the O’Connells and Horgans. It was from the twin brothers of the last family, who were slightly older and who, both having asthma, were sent periodically to the clear air of Denver, Colorado, that I learned to throw a lariat and could catch, as they could, someone running away by the ankle. They would return east with ore samples of gold and silver and all the practiced skills of cowboys. The Horgans held annual venison parties and kept horses in their garage on 236th Street which sometimes galloped past toward Van Cortlandt Park, where they would ride the bridle paths through the woods. They also owned a Kerry blue dog, and I had a Chesapeake Bay retriever puppy, which, when I ventured down their way, would, encouraged by the twins, be attacked and chased and bitten. But when Chess, my dog, got some months bigger, and I brought him back down the street and the Horgans’ Kerry blue sailed at him, my dog stood his ground and bit the hell out of him and chased him back into his yard. And such victory was sweet.

  Adjoining the community of Woodlawn were what we referred to as the first, second and third woods, inhabited by owls, hawks, chipmunks, possum, muskrat, snapping turtle, black snakes, fox and occasional deer. Indian arrowheads were still to be found in people’s back gardens. And hunting wildlife was part of growing up. Alan Kuntze knew all there was to know of the lore and way of life of the American Indian. How to shimmy as Indian children did to the top of a birch tree and, holding to its top, throw oneself off to gracefully descend to the ground again. How to hunt with bow and arrow, follow trails and skin animals. Alan, with a slingshot fashioned from the fork of a dogwood branch, was as accurate as he was with a rifle, and we often ate roasted squirrel around an evening campfire. He kept pet crows and owls and had a trapping line in the swamp of the third woods, catching muskrat for their pelts, which he cured each winter and sold to the Hudson Bay Company. We also unwittingly became America’s first conservationists, blocking the trenches dug for the schemes to drain the swamp in the first woods. But across which now roars the traffic of the Major Deegan Expressway.

  As skilled as an American Indian, whose way of life he emulated, Alan Kuntze in Van Cortlandt Park at his trapping line, a caught muskrat in hand. Handsome and charming and a couple of years older, he was my adviser in matters of wardrobe, morals and manners. Equally skilled as a champion swimmer and ice skater, he was also beloved by many a young woman who wept at his graveside when he was killed in an automobile accident while still a U.S. Air Force pilot in the last days of the Second World War.

  In childhood, these growing-up years before the Second World War, we played marbles under the maple trees, and street hockey on roller skates. There were annual community parades with floats and bands and community picnics in the park, with everyone invited to enter games and contests and to win prizes. Ceremonies were conducted at afamed Indian battle site, where was erected a First World War memorial, with its bronze list of names of the war dead surmounted by an eagle, and nearby was displayed a cannon. There were playing fields for baseball and football games. We had weenie roasts and made model airplanes and balsa wood gliders aerodynamically efficient enough that they would sail away out of sight in the sky. The older folk gathered summers to play horseshoes and shuffleboard and sat to swap tales on the benches as the lightning bugs flew by. My only deprivation was not ever to attend at a barn dance or to ever be taken to New York’s annual rodeo. But for these omissions in one’s life, there did not seem to be a trauma too great to overcome.

  Ah, but before I became a tolerated friend of the Horgan twins, and when no more than about six years old, I got my first rejection of the many I was soon to get again now that I was fully grown up and returned to my native land, America. Where with the months passing and without being published and acknowledged for the work I was writing, I was beginning to feel more and more uninvited. But in recalling this youthful incident befalling me, it possibly explained a painful shyness which provided a background to my growing reclusiveness. One afternoon, my mother hearing of a children’s birthday party being held at the Horgans, insisted I go. Dressed in a lavender summer suit with a big white collar, I sauntered down the road. I knocked at the back kitchen screen door, through which I could hear the festivities. And I was told by a voice within to go home, that I hadn’t been invited. I returned, devastated, back up the street. But my undaunted mother took me by the hand and brought me back. I was allowed in and given something to eat and drink in the kitchen but did not venture further into what seemed the shady large grandness of the house. My mother had, as she could with a few direct but diplomatic words, shamed these shunners. Just as she did one day in one of my earliest street fights, when in fisticuffs with another boy his mother grabbed me and held my arms behind my back so that her son could hit me without hindrance. And my mother, who happened to be near, came and said to the woman,

  You know,

  You’re going to have

  To do that

  For the rest of that

  Boy’s life

  15

  IT WAS MANY THE TIME NOW that having returned to America in this year of 1952 from such a different world and life in Europe that I recalled my childhood friend Alan Kuntze. Who I was sure would have been another sympathetic ear into which one could speak. But whose life, before I left for Ireland, was to send the first shadow of death across mine. And like all life that occurs anywhere, it can and does, with little warning, end.

  It was while I was still in the navy, following the end of the war, and had hitchhiked on a military aircraft with other naval personnel from Norfolk, Virginia, and heading to New York somewhere, flying above the Maryland-Delaware peninsula, that smoke seeped out from the holes in the floor of the aircraft. All of us heading on leave and a fighter pilot passenger bemoaning the fact that, having survived six months of overseas combat, he was now to go down in the flames which were already licking up through the floor holes. I thought at least I would save all poetry I’d written and which I had with me in my ditty bag, pushing it near the hatchway to give it a kick out in the sky as the plane exploded. The pilot navigator and others were pressing fire extinguishers to the floor of the aircraft as the pilot dived down below out of the clouds. At best it seemed we could only now, if the plane didn’t conflagrate first, crash-land somewhere in open country. But miraculously, there appeared below a B-52 emergency landing strip. The pilot descending in a crosswind and conducting a brilliant landing, only knocking off the top of a tree. I trudged through woods and swamps to find a road and hitchhiked by land the rest of the way to Newark, New Jersey, where I completed the journey home by train.

  Having so escaped death, I was feeling much like celebrating life and, knowing Alan was expected home, I rang the Kuntze residence, where they had moved farther down into the Bronx. I was told over the telephone by Donald, Alan’s older brother, that Alan, who had the evening before been celebrating his imminent discharge, had been killed in a car accident. This golden boy of so much promise. His lifelong love of being a woodsman, hunter and the follower of American Indian lore, and who planned to study to be a forester, now had his young life ended. Stricken and never wanting to forget this closest of all my friends and in the memory of his bus stop cigarette, which even then he called a coffin nail as he smoked it with such amusing ceremony, I swore to never smoke again. And I suppose if there were a
heaven and if he did, in spite of his young sins, go there, he’d at least now know I had a benefit for which I now have him to thank.

  But just as death had taken a once dependable friend, nothing now was dependable in the world that one remembered as America. The predominantly middle-class WASP nature of Woodlawn was being imperceptibly eroded. Of its four Protestant churches, other religious folk would soon take over one of them and arrive there in buses to worship. The more Irish of the Catholic Irish were seeping in. The mostly pleasant years of one’s growing up were now ominously shrouded as more baneful human tragedies were revealed. And these now, rather than being accounts read in the city’s newspapers, were told by word of mouth which gave them a just-around-the-corner reality where in fact they were all happening.

  Rita and my always philanthropic mother at Royal Oak, Michigan, where they went to visit an unusual church. My mother, who had much traveled the United States, had a special interest in ecclesiastical architecture.

  My father, myself and younger brother, Thomas, whose expression is of a slightly more pessimistic view than mine, as we stand on a hillside of Van Cortlandt Park in our corduroy knickerbockers.