The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  My mother, a lady of impeccable discretion and a purveyor of only the best view of any matter or person, invariably upheld and defended the reputations and respectability of all. Even that of the town drunk to whom one might listen at the last stop of the bus. She would patiently explain that he had troubles on his mind. Her belief being that some people had misfortune thrust upon them through no fault of their own. Nor did she feel there was any need to unnecessarily worry anyone, even when it involved the most mountainously consequential of disasters. An example of which occurred one evening, when my sister Rita, before retiring for the night, phoned my mother while she was taking her hot toddy and reading the next day’s newspaper. Between them, they passed pleasantries of plans and weather and then said good night. It was not until the next morning that my sister Rita saw emblazoned over the full front page of New York’s biggest circulation newspaper, in a now nationally famed photograph, that one of my mother’s houses, where we had once lived and which she still owned, had burned down. Rita, this next day telephoning in a panic, listened as my mother explained that she had of course seen the picture the night before but thought not to mention it, as she had enjoyed her own night’s sleep and why should anyone else lose hers over something that could not be rectified.

  But my mother’s faith in the basic goodness of people must have been often sorely tried. Having the undeserved reputation of being the richest woman in the Bronx, with folk even walking in front of her house, hoping they would slip and break a bone or two if not their ass, she was promptly sued over the fire by all and sundry and even by those trying to put it out. But it was an example of her coolness under such onslaught that only once was I ever to see her crack, albeit for only a few seconds, and over another tragedy that was to populate the coming months. But she and I continued to cross swords over calling a spade a spade and if someone did a dirty deal or took the stalks off the mushrooms in the supermarket before they were weighed, that’s what they did. And that not only was it unnice but that it was deliberately dishonest. If I did not go to church or marry or worship in the Catholic faith, no God, if He were such and in His right mind, was going to think less of me than He did of those who were hypocritically devout. I challenged her that it was secretly whispered that some of the richer families and pillars of the community in Woodlawn had got that way by other than fair and honest means. And that there were bigoted tax payers in league who saw to it that ethnic undesirables did not penetrate the neighborhood.

  However, as the first murders had now occurred in this tiny community, it was getting harder for my mother to keep up the appearances of neighborly respectability. A man had been shot dead by a gunman when he was held up and robbed of his wallet on his front lawn. The more profound, if not terrifying, nature of this violation being that it was this man’s own front lawn and that it was in Woodlawn. But there were others in the family to whom I did not have to repeat my cavil on American life. I now sensed a disguised desperation in the daily existence of my father and my younger brother, Thomas. That whatever dreams were once dreamt in this great wide land of opportunity were now no longer dreams but nightmares. My father, sitting resigned by evening watching television, regarded it as killing time. He no longer wrote his homespun poetry or recited it, as he could do, from memory. My talented brother, who could be entertainingly, whimsically witty, now having given up his attempts to sell cemetery sites, had found a job working as a security checker in a large dress clothing chain, flying from city to city to descend without warning to take inventory of stock while worried store managers and their employees either immediately left for Mexico or chewed on their fingernails or indeed, as one did, hung themselves. And now Duffy, on our walks, told of an older, exotically beautiful married sister to whom he was a confidant and who disclosed to him her unhappy marriage and the utter broken desolateness of her life. And Duffy in sorrow and despair listening to her sympathetically, until her tragic death. These stories underlining our own despair and told as we would wander as we did down a steep hill to the bridge crossing the valley of the Bronx River and New York Central train tracks the roar from which one could hear in the silence of summer nights.

  Duffy’s sensibilities, tempered by the tragedies that touched his life, gave some solace to me. That I was not alone against the mealymouthed and righteous. On our many meetings, we randomly walked mile after mile throughout New York City, talking and talking. I would accompany him, buying vegetables and fish on Tenth Avenue. He was always ready to stop and loiter and look in the windows of pawnshops and funeral parlors or stroll unafraid along the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. In politer places, we attended music receptions and concerts, where one or two other kindred spirits lurked. He was one of the first to whom I’d occasionally recite a line or two of one of my little poems out of The Ginger Man, some of which he later set to music. And Duffy, fighting his own battle for recognition and against injustice and exploitive indifference to the downtrodden and impoverished in this land, had already posted notices to that good effect on the parish bulletin board in the vestibule of the local St. Barnabas Catholic Church, where we had both been to grade school. Although I remained aloof from attempting corrective measures on those deserving, Duffy never hesitated to raise his fist in the face of any narrow-minded bigot whose prejudices were expressed in his hearing. Which in America at that time or indeed at any time since, would give you big biceps in a hurry.

  By evening, finishing my workout at the New York Athletic Club, I would occasionally visit Duffy, who at that time was living in Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, farther downtown. This area, known as Little Italy, where the Pope in Rome was referred to as the Big Ginney or Mountain Wop. Although its residents were unfriendly to strangers, one took comfort from the streets’ European flavor. Through a cramped dark hallway and up a creaking staircase, Duffy’s must have been one of the smallest, most windowless, cold-water flats in New York. Which he occupied with a comely ballet dancing girl from Sarah Lawrence College who later became his first wife. A cat swung would bounce off all four walls, and his one window opened into an air shaft across which one could reach to take something off his neighbor’s kitchen table. Only that, as Duffy said, being the kind of neighbors they were, if you tried this to borrow a little salt, they would chop your arm off, cook it and try to sell it back to you as sausage.

  But the spaghetti we ate and wine we drank and words we spoke within these sunless confines made it an oasis. And Jack had lost none of his robust readiness to take a justified stand against objections voiced to his brilliant playing of the clarinet and his occasional notes rendered on the French horn. Upon such protests, he would open his door and roar a warning through the building’s narrow hallways that discourtesy to Debussy would be instantly avenged. In this I admit to helping him one night, as a devout lover of Debussy, to instill a little long-term terror into one or two of the more unpleasant bullying and deserving neighbors that any more lip out of them would find a couple of pineapples rolling past their door. One did find it disheartening that as fair and as good as some Americans could still be, there seemed to be so few of them. Whereas with those to whom manners had to be taught in these United States, their number seemed legion.

  Meanwhile, in the news, the Collier Brothers turned up. Two gentlemen who occupied their large town house on the West Side of Manhattan but who never threw anything away. They were finally found dead, hidden within their massive, labyrinthine, catacombed building. Each room crammed to the ceiling with their furnishings and newspapers and collected junk. The only access throughout the house were tunnels through which the brothers had to crawl to get from room to room. And one found it some relief to hear of these other nonconforming eccentrics who had been living in this nation. Then fast on the heels of the Collier Brothers came another highly publicized event affecting my life in America. And just as one had nearly had enough of the hostility one met on streets and on buses and on trains. All abruptly changed and did so overnight as a spectacular headli
ne appeared in the newspapers.

  WILLIE THE ACTOR SUTTON ARRESTED.

  This gentleman was the number-one most-wanted criminal in America. And called the actor because he often assumed roles disguised as a telegraph messenger or similar to gain admittance to rob banks in which endeavor he had a reputation for never having used violence. When captured, he was adept at escaping from wherever he was imprisoned and while on the run or hiding out he had also earned the near admiration of the public for his Robin Hood good works and generosity to the poor and needy. And here there was more evidence of yet another American of staunch principles and humanity from whose existence one took a little comfort as well as felt a little sadness at his capture, which the newspapers and television now dramatized. It being revealed that the arrest took place as a result of the observance of a young man who worked in his father’s tailoring establishment and who had, as is the custom in American post offices, a poster affixed in his father’s shop portraying America’s most-wanted criminals, the number one of whom balefully stared out at him throughout the day. Along with these photographs, a substantial reward was offered for information leading to capture.

  Then on the subway train one afternoon, this young man was casually reviewing the faces seated across the aisle, when suddenly he saw among them this face he’d seen a thousand times tacked up to the back of a door in his father’s tailoring shop. And he at once recognized Willie “the Actor” Sutton. When Willie left the train, the young man followed and trailed him to where he lived and alerted the police. These latter in force descended upon the area to make Willie’s arrest. Sutton was found to be living as usual in his quiet, dignified manner, and dispensing help to his neighbors and even paying tuition for one of their children so he could attend college. As the human interest stories multiplied and were reported across the United States, there were probably few people in New York who did not sympathize a little with Willie Sutton. The young informant was seen on television and interviewed to tell his story. It seemed for a moment as if criminality had been put to rout by civic-minded citizens and that such good deeds would receive their well-deserved substantial reward. But such was not to be. For another day later, the young man was found in his doorway shot to death.

  My drawing reflecting the mood of the time of McCarthyism in the early fifties in the United States.

  Upon the day following this killing, I continued my usual routine of walking to the bus, which I took to the train. On the way to school, we used to play devils and angels, skipping over these blue flagstones upon some of which a cross was marked and which reminded of a more carefree time of one’s Woodlawn life. And now taking the train downtown, I had got used to adopting my deadly profound Mafia expression of letting people know not to stare too long or more than once at me. As this was the terminus I usually went aboard the last car and into a nearly empty train. But upon this day as the journey began and as we passed each station, I noticed that the cars in front were filling up and the one in which I traveled was left empty. Except that as we reached our first major express stop, the doors opened and a crowd of people, pushed by those behind, came in filling the train. As we were now underground with nothing to see passing outside, I looked up and surveyed these newly assembled faces. I noticed immediately that as my eyes met theirs, there was no attempt to stare back. Quite the contrary, they seemed to nervously turn away and push farther toward the doors. Then at the next stop the entire train car emptied, with no one’s gaze dwelling that extra microsecond on me to let me know I was undesirable. And what a nice relief.

  Ah, but now I noticed that none of those leaving were crossing the platform to get onto other trains or were departing the station through its exit stiles, but all were instead going ahead and entering other cars of the same train. It suddenly dawning on me that it was my beard making me look suspicious and like a wanted criminal in disguise and with no one wanting to be thought identifying and unmasking me. And so it was thanks to Willie “the Actor’’ Sutton and his avengers, whoever they were, who had now made the city my pleasant private preserve, and the conspicuousness of my beard was not to unduly trouble me again in America.

  And with only

  The very briefest of glances

  Required to send

  Any hostile bastard scurrying

  Toward quick obscurity

  16

  ON THIS WESTERN SIDE of the Atlantic, the drums were beating steadily now. If the beautiful, the brave and the wonderful were anywhere in abundance, they could not be found. All I encountered were teetering on the abyss of despondency, waiting for something even more awful to happen than a broken ass or hip, which would sentence them to an avalanche of doctor bills, which could simply wash you away. Letters more revealing of his intending departure to the New World were arriving from Gainor Stephen Crist. Mine in reply were, he found, dispiriting in the extreme. Not surprising for I penned in large printed capitals,

  “IF YOU COME HERE BE PREPARED FOR THE UTMOST IN DESPAIR.”

  Crist, now living in London, had been employed by the Festival of Britain as a clerk going through great ledgers and had been living in a room overlooking two tracks of a short stretch of London’s underground system at Earl’s Court, where the trains ran from five-thirty A.M. in the morning till one A.M. at night and, as Crist said, briefly surfaced for air as they passed beneath his window. Then, typically of Crist’s life, he found a new enjoyable job traveling all over England canvassing people as to what they read, what soap they used and if they owned a TV set. But he wound up on the seafront at Blackpool, in contrary circumstances, surrounded by his first wife and second wife-to-be and his little daughter, Jane. Returning to London, he escaped to an address, Mount Ararat in Richmond, Surrey, through which area ran a road called Paradise. As I quickly looked in my encyclopedia, I found Ararat celebrated in legend as the mountain on which Noah’s Ark came to rest as the waters of the Deluge subsided. Crist, of course, was soon going to fervently wish he had stayed there. He was already alarmed by my reactions to America, asking that I did not further frighten him too much with tales of horror about the New World just before he was ready to emigrate, sailing June 12 on the Georgic for New York, which he later changed to booking on the S.S. Ryndam, June 15, 1952.

  But some unexpected changes had come into one’s life. A pleasant lady called Jane Pratt, who through the Zurich Jungian grapevine had heard of Valerie’s presence in New York, and shortly later, hearing we were free to move, she asked Valerie if she might help her in the summer temporarily care for her grandchildren while her daughter was having another child. As the Pratts lived up in the deeper reaches of the Connecticut countryside, it was an invitation readily accepted. Meanwhile, Duffy and I attending at occasional musical gatherings, did find another friend or two. Traveling one evening to Bronxville, an isolatedly strange bit of carefully zoned suburbia forming an enclave of your more luxurious houses located just some miles north of Woodlawn. Through this area ran Ponfield Road, over which I had so many times walked carrying home my Roosevelt High School girlfriend’s books. The recital we attended was held in the large château of a Bronxville industrialist, whose son had musical aspirations, until casually meeting a girl who welcomed his amorous intentions and said she had taken precautions that she wouldn’t get pregnant and, promptly in the little time it took to do so, got pregnant and demanded marriage. But here, at least this young vulnerable man was still host at this gathering, where Duffy and I met a confidently acerbic and witty lady, who was a voluptuary in all things and a marvelously brilliant blues and opera singer and actress called Tally Brown.

  Tally, who lived in a sprawlingly strange windswept apartment on Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson River and nearly under the New York side of the George Washington Bridge, was to ease one’s life considerably. A lady of solidly ample proportions, she was a wonderful cook, and Duffy and I would come to her apartment to lavishly dine and enjoy her splendid, forthright intelligence. The wine flowed, and tasting her garlic
bread and spaghetti sauces and her mustard made from a grandmother’s recipe made one swoon with delight. Concerning the making of the latter, Tally promised to leave me instructions in her will. It was the first time too I had come across hashish. Tally retreating to a small sitting room, where in the shadows she and her closer friends collected in a little circle, smoked as the breezes outside swept by up and down this Hudson valley. Duffy and I, both conscious of our good health, stood by politely refusing a puff but remaining appreciative of their suddenly increased good humor. However, even in this pleasant redoubt, the coinage of American life was making itself further known as more and more news came of men in nightmares and the women with whom they associated in torments much worse. And on top of it all, no one wanted to wash dishes or scrub floors anymore.

  Arthur Kenneth Donoghue sporting his graduate’s gown in front of my rooms, New Square, Trinity College. A classicist, Donoghue regarded Trinity as academically superior to Harvard and would allude more often to having attended the former than the latter institution of learning.

  But now appearing out of the blue into my less than tranquil life, a voice from the past, and recently from Boston, came visiting to Woodlawn. A. K. Donoghue, who had already nearly four years previous, courtesy of the American consul, sailed off from Ireland, tail between his legs, on a merchant ship, tossing, as he said, like a peanut shell on the Atlantic waves, to return via the West Indies to the U.S.A. A Harvard graduate, Donoghue first arrived at Trinity College to delve into further and better particulars of Greek and Latin. But due to the bureaucratically delayed arrival of subsistence checks on the G.I. Bill of Rights, he was in short order plunged into debt and hungry impoverishment. A condition which befell nearly all American ex-servicemen at Trinity at the time. Who, as one of Europe’s coldest winters descended, were hard put to survive the chill. And with the lack of opportunity for temporary employment, these rich and powerful world conquerors, despite the awesomeness of the United States molding their backgrounds, were turned into overnight beggars. A role the Irish simply didn’t believe, so that at least the likes of an elegantly educated penniless Crist, George Roy Hill, and Ray Guild, a handsome Harvard football star, were given financial credit. And just as the impoverished poet and intellectual was tolerated and often encouraged to drink and scrounge in his day-to-day survival, so too were these former warriors, which only helped descend them into even deeper debt.