The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Read online

  “Now, Mike, I’ll say this about you, no one would ever guess you were an arms dealer and gunrunner. And clever enough at it too.”

  My denial of being a gunrunner only encouraged Behan to believe it was true. But it was the steely-nerved baronet’s son in a series of trips from Belfast to Dublin who brought the guns to my rooms. Arriving each week and braving customs with brown paper parcels to put on top of my wardrobe. And often on the train having to sit with the muzzle end of a rifle barrel sticking up out of his shirt collar. And as the train conductor would invariably notice the gun barrel while taking my friend’s ticket, he would be met with the steeliest of stares, which indicated he’d best go quickly about his business. My friend would then proceed like a wooden-legged cripple, with guns down both trouser legs, to as nonchalantly as possible stiffly stagger through the ticket barrier into Dublin. And even did this once while lugging a valise full of Lugers.

  With the heathery Wicklow hills passing, Behan and I had now proceeded southward a brief distance down the road to Glendalough, where lived one of Behan’s own longtime friends, Ralph Cusack. Although another case entirely from Ernest Gebler, this charmingly eccentric Anglo-Irish gentleman occupied a large Victorian mansion in its sylvan grounds, where he grew tulip bulbs for export. He was both a practicing artist and writer. As well as being of a romantic bent, Cusack exuded humanity and tolerated and perhaps even encouraged Behan’s transgressions of polite behavior. However, despite his forbearing charm, Cusack could equally be of a violent nature and especially in respect of his pictures he’d painted. And should you be crassly foolish enough to venture a disparaging word concerning them, Cusack would not hesitate to perforate such canvases over your head, where they might remain as a large garland around your neck. This usually being done unsuspectingly from behind at mealtimes in the dining room just as you were finishing your pudding and before the ladies withdrew to allow the port to be passed among the gentlemen. But as violently rude and unyielding as Cusack could be to those to whom he took exception, he was overwhelmingly welcoming and kind to old friends. And on this day with actual tears in his eyes, his arms were open to embrace a wet-haired, bedraggled Behan stepping from my dignified automobile.

  “Ah, my dear, dear Brendan, how good it is to see you.”

  “And, Ralph, I’m glad to be seen still alive and to be able to declare my patriotism in the battle to make this island into one indivisible nation. For according to Einstein’s law of relativity and the bending of light, won’t we one day soon, and before anybody else does, put a shamrock-branded, baptized mouse on the moon.”

  “Dear boy, you are the true noble savage who was preordained to inhabit the Elysian Fields and the Garden of Eden. Come now and join me for wine in our arboretum in which tranquility reigns this sunshiny day.”

  One felt sure these befrilled words were euphemistically spoken to soften the prospect of Behan having during his visit to be taken to task. For staying with Cusack were two maidenly and mildly lesbian English guests, Winifred and Lydia, who were notable authorities on the Pre-Raphaelite period. And these ladies had in their tweeds and stout brogues been for a long tramp on the heathery hills to sketch wild-flowers and were soon to have afternoon tea on a terrace which enjoyed a splendid view down a westerly vista across Cusack’s lawns while the playing of a madrigal from Cusack’s ancient gramophone with its great horn came through the open French doors. And the tea had not been that long served and cups refilled and the hot scones slathered with whipped cream and dolloped with damson jam when the ladies’ attentions were distracted from their auction house catalogues by a most odoriferous fume wafted to their nostrils.

  “Oh dear, whatever wretched smell might that be, Winifred.”

  As the ladies glanced westward in the direction of the gentle breeze, there suddenly at the end of the flower-bordered prospect, and beneath a white marble plinthed statue of Aphrodite, crouched a grunting, defecating, trouserless Behan. His buttocks gleamingly exposed to the ladies. Who at once rose to their feet and shrieked. Behan, his back facing the commotion and wondering at the disturbance on the terrace, stood up and turned and, seeing the ladies, waved his considerably tumesced organ at them. Whereupon both of these gentlewomen swooned in a dead faint. Behan, not meaning to have made such a strong impression, immediately sauntered up to the terrace and, while dipping a scone in the whipped cream, dolloping on the damson jam and chewing away, was peering down upon the unconscious faces when Ralph Cusack, who had been taking me on a tour of the tulips, came running to see what the matter be.

  “Ah, Ralph, wasn’t I below there discreetly enough hidden by the shrubbery relieving myself to make room in my digestion for a massive bowl of food I had there earlier at Mike Donleavy’s when I heard screams and found the pair of these emotionable, well-bred ladies here fallen out of their chairs.”

  However, upon this their day of departure, the ladies Winifred and Lydia upon their recovery told a different story to their host. Both bitterly complaining of the unsanitary and uncivilized nature of the event they’d had to witness and the disgustingly filthy penis-wagging habits of the Irish. When this news was related by Cusack to Behan in the privacy of the library, where Behan had gone to read, it met with a violent outcry, especially regarding the words describing the penis-wagging Irish. Behan raging and railing against the hypocrisy of British middle-class morals and values.

  “The no-good pair of them tweedy, unctuous, fucking pharisees. Having the audacity to complain of an Irishman having an Irish crap on Irish soil. And what’s more, in the fresh air and within the territorial freedom of the present republic.”

  Although, and usually at a discreet distance, having witnessed Behan’s culpability on many an occasion, Behan now sounded so convincing in condemning the primness of the ladies that I, with an irrepressible desire to always be fair, found it difficult to take up sides in the matter. Especially knowing the purgative nature of the concoction Behan had mixed at Kilcoole, and into which one forgot to mention had also been dumped a jar of sauerkraut and one of molasses. However, the ladies had had a goodly dose of smelling salts to revive them and now having packed to travel were recovered somewhat from their ordeal and in the drawing room they were now further calmed by Cusack’s administration of large snifters of brandy. And to whence Behan came with tears verging in his eyes. For he much admired Cusack and the last thing he wanted to do was to distress him. So Behan, shuffling forward with bowed head, proffered with his outstretched hand the most abject of abject apologies, to which the ladies replied,

  “You beast, you worse-than-senseless thing.”

  Behan stunned, retreated. Back out the drawing room door and into the hall. Sad at first, he was then overtaken with smoldering fury. Sarcastically repeating again and again in his best and astonishingly authentic English pukka accent, the words, You beast, you worse-than-senseless thing. Indeed so often did he say it, it appeared he liked the sound and then began to chant it to a musical tune. But had these poor ladies Winifred and Lydia known of the revenge they were inciting by rejecting Behan’s apology, they would have instead professed delight at the opportunity of witnessing his exercising his bowels on the lawn. And perhaps even put a small suitable monument there. For Behan gave them something unspeakable to take with them in their picnic basket back to London. To so commemorate and remember him by. And which upon its unsavory discovery caused both of these mildly lesbian ladies to faint again.

  Right

  In the

  Middle of their flight

  Back to

  Civilization

  9

  DEPARTING CUSACK’S, Behan had plans unfolding and prevailed upon me to go with him up to Dublin to a hooley that night. And following a brief downing of a pint or two of stout in the Horse and Hound, located in the refined quiet precincts of the little Wicklow village of Delgany, Behan, pied piper, entertainer, sorcerer and conjurer as he was, began awakening the inhabitants to his presence. His louder declamations and singing
already echoing back from the nearby hills as his tenor crooned the irreverent words to the sacredly patriotic tune of Kevin Barry.

  Would you live on women’s earnings.

  Would you give up work for good.

  Would you lead a life of prostitution.

  You’re goddamn right I would.

  I was particularly conscious of not offending the sensibilities of these highly respectable people thereabouts, not to mention a nearby convent of cloistered nuns. Plus I was on dining terms with a most elegant gentleman, the local parish priest, Jack Hanlon, who said mass for them and heard the nuns’ confessions, and whose reputation as a painter was highly esteemed. Living in the village too was the local vicar, another elegant gentleman who had written a letter in defense of me and in answer to an unpleasant critique published in the Irish Times concerning one of my painting exhibitions.

  However, Behan’s outrageous language in this genteel neck of the woods bothered me less than his interruption of an innocent people’s night rest, and I told him to keep his voice down, as nearby nuns would be trying to sleep, who had taken vows of silence.

  “And, Mike, not to mention vows of sublime indifference to carnal cravings. Now here’s a lullaby, Mike, that would put to sleep a condemned man in his cell the night before his execution.”

  Behan, then, affecting an English upper-class boy’s choir voice, launched into singing a cradlesong. That soon had village windows opening. Not in complaint but in silent delight and admiration. And it was astonishing how he could make such sudden transformation with his brilliant mimicry, which also embraced both the Irish rural brogue and the English cockney accent. And he would often regale me with stories of when he’d resided in the Iveagh House, an indigent men’s hostel he frequented in Dublin, where, in a shilling cubicle late at night after lights-out, he would enjoy as part of his bedtime entertainment to shout out in his strongest cockney from his curtained confines.

  “You bunch of no good fucking scruffulous Irish pigs, Cromwell didn’t do enough to you and your filthy ways. Come on, in the name of my king and country, I’ll take on the whole poltroonish fucking lot of you.”

  In the usual three seconds as the usually imbibed inmates were roused from sleep, and with an opportunity to wreak vengeance on what could only be an innocent singular Englishman, the dormitory floor would resound with the pounding of bare feet and shouts of, where’s that limey fucker who said that. And outside Behan’s cubicle, an angry inquiry would be made.

  “You British cunt, come out of there and we’ll see who’s an Irish pig.”

  “Ah, bejesus, Paddy, the Blessed Virgin be my judge, it wasn’t me the boyo who said that. I was saying me rosary with a decade to go of an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be.”

  Behan then letting loose another brief broadside of anti-Irishness would often bring the vigilante interrogators back. This time stretching his point of identity to absurdity, rendering another display of Irishness, throwing in a few remarks concerning the struggle to reinstate the universal use of Gaelic north and south of the border. And when the spokesman from the vigilantes inquired as to where he was from, Behan would protest with tears in his voice.

  “How can you not believe me that I’m from over beyond in Roscommon and a member of the Small Farmers Union and amn’t I just after getting out of me own bed into me own shoes to go looking for the fucker meself. And sure as an Irish speaker only occasionally speaking English, I wouldn’t know what the word ‘poltroonish’ meant.”

  Behan would refer to these night shelters for indigent men in the same way as one might to the elegant hotels, of the Shelbourne in Dublin or Claridges in London. And in the latter city, finding himself in a similar destitute men’s hostel, Rowton House in Hammersmith, Behan would, following lights-out, make similar insulting declarations concerning the English, waking the inmates from sleep in his thickest Irish brogue.

  “You fucking bunch of British limey cunts, wake up the fucking lot of you. Bollocks to your fucking king. And if he’s married to the fucking queen, bollocks to her too. Leave Ireland to the Irish. Up the Republic.”

  And as entrances to cubicles flew open and a plethora of patriotic Britishers poured out, the pounding feet would stop just outside Behan’s door. And from within, Behan would let it be known, in his best Bow-bell cockney, that he was already up and ready to go looking for the Irish bastard who had insulted his king and country.

  “Ah, but Jesus, Mike, let me tell you, after a close call one night, temptation would, as it always did, get the better of me. And after waiting a discreet twenty minutes or so till the indignation had subsided and inmates were nodding off to sleep again, I unleashed such a vitriolic, vicious diatribe of derision against the English that when the band of drunken limeys came roaring out again for blood, they went up and down the cubicles making each and every inhabitant speak out his allegiance to king and country, till, Jesus, didn’t they come to this poor simple Kerryman with a brogue so thick you could butter both sides of a piece of bread with it at once. Jesus, I could hear his pathetic denials as they were dragging him out of his bed. But then by the sound of the limey squeals of pain, the Kerryman must have given as good as he got and broken a few jaws and noses before he himself had the living bejesus kicked out of him. And I did feel sorry for that little bit of injustice to a fellow countryman which marred my entertainment, but it was a lot better that it was him who was beset upon than me.”

  Myself bearded, which invariably was a target for trouble, one was always conscious, in Behan’s conspicuous presence, of the possibility of a fight erupting at any moment, especially in places where Behan might be making an appearance for the first time, and especially in country districts and especially in a neighborhood where some of the residents were bound to play rugby, as was the case in the purlieu of Delgany and Greystones. And one kept a wary eye out for trouble, somehow feeling that when it came and the fists and kicks were flying, that Behan, despite his shooting at policemen and his forays with bombs to the British mainland, could easily be the first to abandon ship and leave one in the lurch. However, Behan would charmingly warn one of such an eventuality.

  “Mike, when necessary for preservation of my general health and provided the safety of the nation is not at stake, I’m good at giving an excellent example of cowardly behavior.”

  Yet, I had known Behan, as an altercation was in its glowering, simmering stages, to break a pint glass on the edge of a pub table and snarlingly brandish the jagged edge in someone’s face. Having been indoctrinated with an American brand of sportsmanship, this was not the kind of battle behavior I applauded or admired. And indeed in confronting such foul play, one was ready to administer dire consequences to the perpetrator. But now, as we safely left this Delgany pub without incident, Behan was declaiming loudly enough for the nearby nuns to hear.

  “Get me Vat Sixty-nine, and I don’t mean the Pope’s telephone number. And while I’m drinking it, would you give the woman in the bed more anchovies. And give the nuns in the convent more cucumbers.”

  Before Behan launched further into his more indecently indiscreet proclamations, one seated him in one’s sedate vehicle and we finally headed off toward Dublin, the late evening twilight descending upon these local wooded Wicklow hillsides. Passing through the Glen of the Downs, the automobile’s windows open, Behan now in quiet reflectiveness was again talking about the manuscript of The Ginger Man.

  “Now, Mike, you don’t mind the few comments I’ve written in that book of yours, which I did in pencil in case you’d want to rub them out. Here and there you ridicule the Irish, and it makes me sad enough now for having to agree with you that in this petty and pathetic little country they deserve every fucking critical word you’ve got to utter about them. But, Jesus, despite the berating you give us, that’s an awful funny book. But now, I’d only make mention of something Irish people would be sensitive about for the amount of lament and affliction it has brought, and I would only suggest it would be sort
of unbecoming to point a finger at it. It would be tuberculosis I’m referring to that you describe in the book as the ‘white death.’”

  Behan’s voice lowered as he spoke in a tone of sadness. The scent of wild garlic was blowing in through the car windows, and thick foliage of the overhanging trees made the night now doubly dark. Behan could sense that I was surprised by his remarks and he reverted to mentioning again the critical picture the manuscript gave of Ireland.

  “But, Mike, the other hard things you say and the kicks you give us up the backside hole doesn’t stop your book from being the great act of love I think it is for Ireland. Now some would imagine that you had in mind to write about Gainor Crist. And I’d agree he’d be a great subject and a hard man worth to figure out, but there’d be little or no resemblance I can see whatsoever. Crist was never like Dangerfield. The only similarity being that Crist is one of the few men I’ve ever seen managing to get credit in a pub. And if there were any more like him, it would soon bankrupt the nation. But maybe there’d be a resemblance to Crist in Dangerfield’s manner, for I once overheard him at the pawn shop talking to the pawnbroker and haggling over a couple of old pieces of crockery as if he was bargaining to form a treaty between nations. And Jesus if I could fucking talk like that’d be running nations.”

  Behan, however, was now touching upon a part of Gainor Crist’s personality which unquestionably resembled that of Dangerfield’s and which had undoubtedly long intrigued if not mesmerized me. That of getting credit and raising debt all around one, and continuing to do the former as the latter bottomlessly deepened. While at the same time keeping up appearances and ignoring to economize. But then Crist seemed to gracefully accept when these appearances became frayed or were very transitory. My first ever meeting with him in the Pearl Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street took place with Crist being introduced to me in a V-necked, primrose yellow cashmere sweater borrowed from me by his brother-in-law Randall Hillis so that Crist could more fittingly present himself to get a job with a modeling agency. But even with Crist wearing my sweater, he did not hesitate to put me immediately on the defensive by rigorously cross-examining me over my chronograph watch, which was broken but which I said I was still wearing because I was able to keep a sort of time with the stopwatch mechanism, which registered one hour at one-hourly intervals. Crist would have none of this nonsense and said it was nonsense and remained totally indifferent to the possibility that at any moment one might have said, “I say there, my good fellow, by the way you’re wearing my sweater.”