Читать книгу Singing My Him Song - Malachy McCourt - Страница 10

During all the time since July, I’d maintained contact with Louise Arnold and her roommate, Lynn. Indeed, while I was still living with Epstein, I was sometimes the overnight squatter at their place when I’d had the snoot-full and didn’t feel like facing the trek to Queens. In November, Louise invited me to some party that had to do with promoting a ski resort or skiing fashions, or some such. Having absolutely no interest in skiing or fashions connected thereto, I said, “Of course,” and off with me to the party for the free cocktails.

I arrived at the threshold of the large room where the gathering was taking place. A goodly number had assembled by the time I got there. I stepped into that room and ’twas then my life changed forever. Standing by herself against the wall was the beloved Diana of my dreams. She saw me as soon as I saw her and I began to make my way through the thicket of blatherers that stood between us.

At that time ’twas rare for me not to know somebody at these gatherings, but tonight not one soul impeded my path. In short order, I was standing in front of Diana, encouraged by her lovely, warm, welcoming smile. With a greeting I took her hand, mine all atingle at the touch of her, and said, “I will never let you go again.”

There was a band playing some music, and I asked her to dance. With my arms around her, the next words out of my mouth didn’t surprise either of us as much as it seems they should have.

“Will you marry me?” I asked her.

Diana smiled and didn’t say anything, but she didn’t chase me away, either. As usual, I had my ordinary quota of whiskey; after all, a person has to celebrate meeting the love of one’s life. (Conversely, of course, a person would have to drink because of losing the love of one’s life. Or, indeed, misplacing her, or taking her to dinner, or to bed or to Spain, for that matter, and so goes the nattering, insistent voice of alcoholism.) But I was in good spirits, as they say, and as charming as could be to my newfound, refound love.

I took Diana home that night to what seemed to me a perfect night of lovemaking and was awakened by the gentle touch of her hand on the forehead as she held for me the cup of coffee in her other hand. And there was Nina, the silent, wondering, blond little Nina, just turned two, living in her own world of tongue-clicking and rhythmic head motions, totally baffling the professionals as to her nature. Some said she was retarded; others ventured that she was autistic. Someone else decided on brain-damaged, and one famous specialist said that she was perfectly normal and the only problem was having a nervous mother.

Whatever it was, Nina and myself got along quite well, as I’d grown up with people who bore all kinds of disabilities, physical and mental and emotional (if they are not one and the same thing), and it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.

I took right to this new family, and before long I was quite determined that I would now settle down and take care of Diana and Nina, and try to start seeing more of my own children, Siobhan and Malachy. But I’m the man who gave good intentions a bad name, as simply intending to do something good is no match for derangement and the disease of alcoholism. I still attempted to maintain the fiction that my drinking was harmless fun. I know now that before I could change, before help could be sought and accepted, I had to acknowledge that I had a problem, but I still wasn’t quite ready. Love may conquer all, but it does not begin its activities with my timetable in mind.

I’d like to have the proverbial dollar for every broker or banker who has said to me, “I’d like to open up a place like this and have all my friends come and drink there, and I’d get someone to run it for me, and I’d come in on the weekends to say hello to everyone.”

HA! I did forbear on most occasions from launching into a blistering response on how hard it is to run a saloon; the sycophantic air one has to adopt to keep good customers coming back, not to mention the vague unease of constantly selling booze to known alcoholics.

No matter how I looked at it, the reality of what I was doing bashed me in the brain every time. All around the world at distilleries, breweries, and wineries, people were pouring into bottles the fermented results of that which grows generally in fields. Bottles and barrels and jugs and jeroboams full of whiskey, beer, wine, vodka, gin, champagne, and bourbon, just to mention a few. And thousands of trucks, trains, ships, and planes were used to transport this stuff to wherever it is needed, and me calling up to order cases of it to sell to my so-called following. Some of them could take it or leave it, but there were others who I knew to be alcoholic (though of course I couldn’t see I was one of them), but that didn’t stop me from vending the stuff to them. Like any dope pusher, I had fixed expenses, and always, as is said, the rent has to be paid.

There was one lad, Chris, a member of a well-known acting family, who drank enormous quantities of Jack Daniel’s every night. He was about twenty-two years of age and was spending on an average one hundred and fifty dollars a week at my place alone. I didn’t mind the income, as it literally paid the rent in the early sixties, but I was worried about the damage being done to this young man. So I went to his father, who told me that the son had his own trust fund, and he had no control over it or him. When he found out, Chris was furious that I’d gone to his father. He told me that was the end of his days as a customer at Himself and stomped out.

I ran into him again years later, and he is a sober and mature man, and we are now quite good friends.

Jim Tierney was another one, a tall red-visaged literary type who could quote from Finnegans Wake, indeed, from a list of other classics as well. Brilliant as he was, he had a spot of difficulty in holding the job, so he generally hooked up with well-to-do ladies, one of whom was Sally Smith. On the first of the month she breezed in regular as the dawn to find out her beloved’s consumption for the previous month and what the bill was. There was great comfort in this until the day she informed me that the free ride had come to an end and no more tabs would be picked up and good luck to you Malachy and off she went.

Jim arrived a few hours later and ordered his usual double Dewar’s on the rocks. “A word with you, Jim,” sez I.

“By all means,” sez he.

“There is a substantial tab due from last month and your lady guarantor has decided not to pay any more of your bills, she tells me,” sez I.

“She will get over that,” sez he. “I’m delighted we are having this little confabulation,” he continued, “as on the way here I was thinking that should I someday own a hostelry such as this, and if you were a habitué, it occurred to me that I should extend to you unlimited credit.” He always did speak in flowery terms, which amused me when he was conning other folks, but, as usual, I was in a financial clutch and not in a mood to be so conned myself.

“You don’t have a saloon,” said I. “And I’m not a habitué, and you owe me seven hundred dollars, which needs paying now.”

He slowly shook his head and assumed a disbelieving and disappointed look, and said, “I never thought I would see the day when my friend Malachy McCourt, bon vivant, man of letters, compassionate friend of the needy, would descend to the dungiest depths of sordid commerce by demanding filthy lucre from a man who disdains such transactions. If you persist in your demands I shall have no choice but to leave these premises and, when I do, I assure you I shall never grace your porte cochere again!”

Jim stalked to the door, opened it, turned dramatically, and, in stentorian voice, he bellowed, “And furthermore, FUCK YOU!” He marched off into the night, leaving me with the gob agape and somehow feeling that I was guilty of something.

That other Limerick git, Richard Harris, had just finished playing King Arthur in the movie version of Camelot. Harris had grown up among the toffs in Limerick, not part of my crowd, but I’d encountered him there once, in a game of rugby, and he had been among the Irish and British actors that made my first bar, Malachy’s, home base. In a fit of noblesse oblige he now decided to once again move among us common people.

Wearily he told me he’d had his fill of the chicanery and falsity of Hollywood and the acting profession and that what he would like to do is work for me as a bartender. So it came to pass the man got behind the stick with another stalwart man, Jack Sandon, a fine barkeep, who never removed the cigarette from the corner of his mouth even to deliver the most stinging of insults.

Harris poured with abandon and without measure and never seemed to take money from any of the clientele, and there were many more than usual, as word got out and the dazzled came to gaze at this movie star boniface. One eve, a couple of cheery and quite inebriated elderly ladies told me that my bartender was a very nice young man as he refused payment for the bottle of Dom Perignon they had imbibed. The hand was clapped to the forehead on receiving that piece of news.

But at the end of the week the King was surfeited with serving hoi polloi and gave me notice that he was quitting and going back to London. None too soon, sez I to myself. But there had been a deal. Harris had instructed Jack, my other barman, to write down all that he gave away, and at the end of the week he gave a check to Jack to give to me after he had left and that check covered all of what I had thought were free drinks. A generous man.

I continued my brooding through all of it, and couldn’t see any way out of the dilemma of making the living. Running a public house (from which the word pub arises) means you are open to the public, and have to be prepared to greet any and all who walk through the portals, be they drunks, arseholes, fools, convicts, prostitutes, Wall Streeters, laborers, cadgers, the sad, the bad, the glad, and, horror of horrors, the boring. One of these had gotten my ear one quiet night, and was describing his work as a salesman of steel products and proudly showed me his business card, which was made from rolled steel. That was it, too much for me, so I hied my way to the back room to get away from the rigor mortis of his talk.

I was alone in the back room a little while later, dozing at the table, when I heard a commotion and a voice shouting in the bar, followed by a gunshot. A small parade entered the back room, where I had placed myself under a light so as not to startle the gunman. The little procession consisted of Jack Sandon, barman Ally Cobert, a serious waiter, the hilarious Bob Boland, who was also a waiter, a customer lady, some unknown man, and a young scion named Thomas Fortune Ryan, all with arms and hands well up into the air. They were followed by two lads of African-American descent carrying guns, who made loud and frequent reference to the fact that all of those in the assembled group had had some kind of sexual relations with their mothers.

We were seated at the various tables and told to keep our hands in sight. One of the gunslingers sat guard whilst his pal went out front to get at the cash register. The conversation did not touch on anything of importance, no reference to current affairs, theatre, or literature. Indeed, it was more demanding. Orders, in fact, emanating from our hold-up man. To wit, “Empty your motherfucking pockets,” to the men, and “Gimme that purse, bitch,” to the only woman in the group.

The cash register ransacker came back swearing that he couldn’t open the motherfucking thing and some motherfucker better come and open it or some motherfucker was going to have his motherfucking head blown off. Jack offered to do the job for him and, while they were out of the room, Fortune Ryan asked our captor if it were permissible to smoke.

“Go ahead,” sez the gunman.

Fortune R. picked the cigs out of his shirt pocket and, being a well-bred lad, offered one to the armed friend, who seemed highly offended that anyone would think he was a smoker. Ryan apologized for his assumption and timidly asked if the man had a match. The lad raised the pistol and told Ryan to put the cigarette in his mouth and it would be lit with a bullet.

Jack returned, along with the other fellow, who complained about the paucity of money in the register, and then shouted at Bob Boland to stop looking at him, and fired a shot past his head into a mirror to emphasize his point. We all looked pointedly elsewhere. Then we gallant six were herded into the cellar as the duo announced they were going to work Jack over until he revealed where the rest of the money was concealed. I said there was no more money, and I should know, as I ran the joint. The cold rim of a gun was placed at the right side of my head an inch from my eye and it was pressed hard into the skin.

I couldn’t help but think that a simple pressure on the trigger was the next step, and that through that cool barrel would travel a sheathed bullet at a great blasting speed, entering my head, tearing and rending the flesh, the bone, and the brains, scattering them and splattering them on floor, walls, and ceiling.

Closing my eyes, I said good-bye to Diana and Siobhan, Nina, and Malachy, but my good-byes were interrupted by a snarling voice ordering me down the stairs, still alive, to my astonishment. I’d always wondered what I’d do when faced with the possibility of immediate death. Some people say you’d pray, beg for forgiveness, beg for your life, plead with God to save you, but I found myself strangely without fear, as if this were happening to someone else, a trifle curious to know what it is to be shot and to die.

In the end, the bandits didn’t beat Jack, as they finally got the idea that there was no more dough, and off they fled into the night. Ally Cobert promptly locked the front door after them, which led Jack to ask him if he’d ever worked in a stable. Then, when the police arrived and asked how much money had been stolen, Bob Boland told them not much, but I’d written them a check for the rest.

Despite the fist-sized cloud of Vietnam, hanging low and menacing on the horizon, the sixties had come up smiling, with JFK and the charming Jacqueline riding waves of adulation from cheering and cheery crowds everywhere. Yes, we’d had the Bay of Pigs, but that was wriggled out of and had been planned by the Eisenhower crowd, egged on by Nixon. There were some nasty confrontations in the segregated South, but President Kennedy kept the lid on that boiling pot, and on Khrushchev, and on anything else unpleasant brewing in the world or beyond, as the Mayoman said.

I was in my monastic bed in the apartment above Himself when the phone rang around noon on November 22, 1963. ’Twas the soft-spoken Diana asking if I’d heard any news on the radio about the president being shot. My tendency is always to move into comforting mode, so I said it was probably a mistake and that there would be clarification very soon.

It wasn’t a mistake, and the clarification came much too soon. The man had been shot and he was dead. Within me, I had held a pride that an Irishman had made it to the White House, and it told me that America was opening up to me, too. There was a wit about the man, and the way he would poke fun at himself and the brothers made me think he was like me, someone I could have a drink with. When he was shot, it felt as if it had been done also to me, as if they had told me that the dreams I had for the future and my life in America weren’t possible.

If you could collect a dollar for every time the words “I can’t believe it” were uttered in those gloomy days, you would be among the wealthiest of the world’s denizens. We, Diana and myself, spent all that weekend together cementing our love in the grief of the day. We walked, talked, played with Nina, turned the television on and off and on again. Listened to people raging on the radio as to whether ball games should be canceled, whether Broadway plays should stop, was it profoundly disrespectful to go to movies. I did manage to get to work, but Himself was empty, the gloomiest place to be. I went to P. J. Clarke’s at one point, to immerse myself in a crowd, but it was nearly empty, too. There was a lot of staring into glasses going on during that weekend. I’d look up, shake the head in disbelief, say something inane, and go back to staring. One fellow stood up in the back room at P. J. Clarke’s and announced that if anybody said anything against President Kennedy he would deal with them personally. Needless to say, there were no takers. Of course, there were mutterings all over town about conspiracies and dirty doings by Nixon, who had been in Dallas that morning, and about Johnson and the coincidence of the assassination taking place in Texas, his home state. Then came the arrest and killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, leading to a confusion that has never been dispelled.

But time passed, as it always will, and everything eventually went back to normal, or whatever passed for normal. Diana still smiled and remained silent when I’d bring up the subject of marriage. She was virtually a prisoner at home, having to take care of Nina, and was still trying to get a straight diagnosis on whether the child was retarded, brain-damaged, or autistic, and she was still not getting one.

Diana was, and remains, the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met. As a young girl, she had studied ballet with George Balanchine, at the School of American Ballet, and attended the Professional Children’s School in New York City, whose curriculum was designed for kids involved in show business. Her father and mother, John and Bernice Huchthausen, encouraged the odd schooling despite the long commute from Ossining, in Westchester County. Diana got a scholarship to Smith College, from which she eloped shortly before graduation. She went into the publishing business, as a foreign rights manager at Harper and Row, and started up a literary magazine with her husband. But then came Nina, and then divorce, and she was now limited to taking in typing, which was somewhat akin to taking in washing. She wasn’t even that good at it, and didn’t really care to be, but she did type Catch-22 for Joe Heller. He paid her as an act of charity, she sez, as her work was quite bad.

We spent many nights together, but there is no denying that on drinking nights, when the opportunity presented itself, fidelity, never my strong suit, was right out the window, without a second thought. Whiskey was and is a wonder to me in that it made me comfortable enough to be something of a lady’s man, and it transformed me in my mind from a guttersnipe to a wit, a sophisticated, erudite man-about-town. I prided myself on never stuttering, stammering, or stumbling in the course of an evening’s peregrinations. I had the ability to speak the most arrant nonsense and appear as if I were in command of facts and statistics to confound any listener.

There was a night when I did a long monologue on the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci, ending it with a peroration on the magnificence and beauty of his sculpture the Pietá. Some know-it-all spoilsport piped up that it was Michelangelo had done the job. I tried to oil out of that one by saying that I wanted to make sure everyone was paying attention.

Late in 1964 Diana suddenly told me, quite upset, that she didn’t think our relationship was going anywhere and that it had to come to a halt. She had to look out for herself, she said, and it was true that I was taking her very much for granted. I gave her no sense of commitment, but assumed that she would always be there whenever I was ready to grace her with my company. Not infrequently, I didn’t bother to show up when I said I would. Nonetheless, this was completely unexpected, and I was stunned. Not having a terrific speech ready, I agreed we should separate.

There followed days of grief, anger, and sorrow over my latest loss, which of course called for some serious drinking. When I thought about what Diana had said, in my few sober moments, I had to agree she was right to be quit of me. Here I was, stuck running a smelly saloon that not only was losing money, but was a totally illegal operation anyway, as the man on the license was only a front. We were always late with our taxes and with Con Edison, always failing health inspections because a damn sewer pipe was leaking into the cellar, where large gray rats didn’t bother to scuttle off when we came down for beer and supplies.

Sometimes I’d have no money left to pay myself after the secret owners came and took their weekly share. I was trapped in this place by my fear and self-loathing, feeling savagely inferior to everyone around me. There didn’t seem to be any exit in sight.

Now, the woman of my enveloping dreams, the woman who seemed to hold out some hope of a future, had seen fit to leave me because our relationship was going nowhere. I managed at frequent intervals to curse God and the donkey he rode in on.

But for once in my life, instead of saying, “Bollox on it!” I took a positive action. After a week of this, I picked up the telephone and called Diana and poured out from my soul a torrent of love, of loneliness, of longing to see her and be with her again. I yowled that I would lay down my life for her, that all I had was hers and that she must marry me.

There was a silence on the other end of the phone, and then that gentle voice spoke, saying she had missed me too. “Yes,” she said. She would marry me.

“When, when, when,” I said, rushing headlong.

“December first,” she said, after a moment’s thought.

It was September then, and as soon as I realized how little time there was between then and now, I slammed on the brakes. “That’s too soon,” said I. From the loneliest man in the world to the most terrified: elapsed time, two seconds.

“All right then, when would you like to get married?”

“March first,” I blurted, for no good reason.

“That’s fine,” sez my beloved, and so we were engaged and committed to say the I dos and live happily ever after.

Ha.

Of the bad habits available, I missed very few. I drank too much, ate too much, philandered too much. I had managed, though, to somehow remain a nonsmoker, a state I remedied at about that time. There were still commercials for cigarettes on television then, and an advertising campaign for Lark cigarettes featured a truck traveling around the country with someone on board shouting, “Show us your Lark!” to people in various walks of life.

I auditioned to be one of the sham workers and, not being a smoker, I had to practice. I reasoned that I’d never get addicted like my mother and father before me, as I really disliked the damn things, but in the course of doing the commercial I got hooked. I got paid around three hundred dollars for the day’s work and proceeded to spend thousands of dollars to maintain my new habit, not to mention my damaged health and yellowed teeth and the hundreds of little burn holes I put in various garments (my own and others’) over the years.

I also got to do some other commercials during this period. I played Henry VIII for Imperial margarine and again for Reese’s peanut butter cups. Large, bearded Irishmen seemed interchangeable with English kings on Madison Avenue. My pal, Dick Hope, husband of the witty Marilyn, took up a professional challenge one night at the bar, to wit: Could he create a commercial for his client’s product, Colgate-Palmolive lime shave, using me, a bearded man. Not only did he do it, I got the part. What he had me do was act the bartender role (less a stretch than Henry VIII) and squeeze a lime into a drink. Instead of lime juice, out comes shaving cream, which I lathered onto my beard, saying, “Now why would they go and tempt me to shave?” A poet, a scholar, and, above all, a decent man was Richard Hope.

I also found myself a panelist on The David Susskind Show, a syndicated television program that had a huge viewing audience. This particular show had as a theme folks who had to deal with the public and the difficulties they encountered. There was a waitress, a hairdresser, a taxi driver, and myself, from the saloon business. As was my wont, I had fortified myself against vocal aridity with a few jorums of whiskey.

Susskind was his usual expansive self, very sincere, trying to accommodate the nervousness of the neophyte panelists. Many successful people get the backlash from the begrudgers, and David Susskind did not escape. In those days, people were quite vociferous in their opinions of him, which were quite low, similar to those who speak ill of Geraldo Rivera in this generation, saying he’s not to be taken seriously. However, it was not generally known that this man Susskind, a successful producer of television shows, movies, and Broadway plays, employed many of the writers and performers who had been blacklisted by the Hollywood and congressional scumbags, and risked his own career in doing so. I believe he should be judged by the good he did, which was quite a bit, and more than enough for me.

On this panel, the talk wandered about the table—complaints about the vagaries of the public, and the stupidity of certain segments thereof, the paucity of tips, and the insecurity of jobs. There were calls from the public as well, one of which was from a hairdresser who could only be described as extremely effete in manner. He complained that because of his profession, he was always being teased about being a homosexual (the word “gay” still being public property at that time), though he said he wasn’t. He added that he had ample proof of his manhood, being an ex-Marine.

The gruff New York taxi driver who sat beside me said, “Why dontcha wear your Marine uniform while you’re woiking?” The image struck me, in my somewhat liquored state, as so funny that I began to laugh and couldn’t seem to stop. As I leaned back in my chair, it broke, tumbling me to the floor, helpless, on national television, with the cameras following me. Eventually, I recovered, got back onto a new chair, and continued the discussion.

What I didn’t know was that Diana had alerted her mother and father, who had yet to meet me, to the fact that I was going to be on the show. Her father’s response the next day was, “You are going to marry that?”

Diana’s parents, John and Bernice Huchthausen, didn’t exhibit a wholehearted acceptance of me at first, and understandably so. That had been their first glimpse of me, drunk and falling off a chair on national television. Not long after, Diana and I spent a night together at the parents’ apartment while they were safely away in the country. We thought. Early the next morning, sounds of a key being inserted in the lock heralded the arrival of the mother, who was quite shocked to see her daughter in the parental bed in the company of a naked, bearded man. There was a grim set to the lady’s jaw and a steely glint in the eye, which I felt boded ill for our future relationship.

For all that, though, things did get smoothed out. I wrote a letter to Bernice apologizing for the seeming insensitivity and tawdriness of the in flagrante moment and vowing the honor of my intentions. She seemed to accept the apology.

I liked Diana’s parents, and her sister, Heidi. Diana’s father, John, an architect by profession, was also an amazing classical pianist. He wrote music, painted, drew cartoons, wrote poetry, and designed Christmas cards. He was very whimsical on occasion, too, a trait not usually associated with folks of German origin. He was one of ten children of a Lutheran minister from Minneapolis, but he wasn’t at all hidebound by religion or by convention. He remained to the end of his tenure on earth a New Deal Democrat, and there was no saying anything against FDR.

Bernice, his wife, was of Swedish origins and working-class background. Her family name was Engstrom. She had studied art, interior design, and architecture, but, as a woman, she encountered restrictions in entering that last profession, and became an interior designer. Still, not bad for the children of Swedish and German immigrants.

After those initial, bumpy, encounters, we all got on fine. I never told or countenanced any mother-in-law jokes, either.

The situiation in French Indochina, or Vietnam, as it properly came to be called, was looming ever larger on the horizon. Lyndon Johnson decided that an errant floating log was a torpedo that had been fired at a U.S. destroyer, and persuaded Congress to grant him power to carry out any military action he wished under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

I’d read a bit about Ho Chi Minh and his struggle against the savagery of the French colonials, and I knew he’d assisted in the war against Japan, so I was shocked to learn the U.S.A. was now attacking this patriot. Charles E. Martin, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and his wife got me involved in my first antiwar demonstration in 1964. People on the sidewalks screamed at us and threw things, calling us scum, traitors, commies, and perverts, and letting us know that if we didn’t like it here we were strongly urged to go to Russia.

I didn’t know enough about the issues to really debate them, but I did know that the Vietnamese people had a right to live in their own country, and the French had that same right, only in France. Looking at those faces, twisted with hate, I wanted to tell them that it was their sons who were the likely dead and wounded victims of this war, and that they should join us to help stop the inevitable mass murder.

Little did any of us know that it would be more than a decade and three presidents later before it was all over. There would be fifty-eight thousand U.S. dead and a quarter million wounded, and several million Vietnamese dead and maimed before a semblance of peace would be restored.