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I dedicate this book to
Siobhan, Malachy, Nina, Conor, and Cormac, my children.
And to Fiona, Mark, and Adrianna, my grandchildren,
for filling my heart with joy, pride, and breathless love.
WILLOWBROOK WARS
A special dedication to some of the warriors of the Willowbrook Wars. It was a place of horror, brutality, and awful suffering with the Stars and Stripes high above on a flagpole in ignorance of the carnage below. When some parents, with the help of some doctors and other workers and a few legal minds, began a desperate revolution, they were called communist Vietcong terrorists. But that they persisted in the movement proves that all citizens are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, even if handicapped, mentally or physically. So, to those who rose up and exposed Willowbrook for the place of despair and death it had become, All Hail! And to the thousands of men, women, and children who suffered and died there, Rest in Peace, and may the atrocities committed there never occur again!
Time, memory, space, and human fallibility prevent me from mentioning all of the Willowbrook warriors and the names of the victims, but here are just a few: Rosalie Amoroso, Eleanore Ash, Dr. Bill Bronston, Kathy Bronston, Bernard Carabello, Tim Casey, Gene Eisner, Bruce Ennis, Ira Fisher, Jerry Gavin, Willie Mae Goodman, Charlie Haney, Connie Haney, Chris Hansen, Jerry Isaacs, Jane Kurtin, Elizabeth Lee, Marie Marcario, Mark Marcario, Anthony Pinto, Ida Rios, Geraldo Rivera, Murray Schneps, Vicki Schneps, Dr. Mike Wilkins, and many more. Thank you for your dedication to the best of humanity, and for your compassion and humor.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I Behind Bars
Part II Stages
Part III How It Works
Keep Reading
Acknowledgments
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
For he comes the human child
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy hand in hand
From a world more full of
Weeping than he can understand
—W. B. YEATS
Part I
Behind Bars
On Sunday afternoons in 1963, the summer I worked in a Hamptons hostelry called the Watermill, myself and assorted staff would adjourn to the beach, armed with a largish cooler chock-full of ice, vodka, and orange juice. One of our number, Dan Cohalan, did a creditable job with the guitar, and, as we knew a reasonable number of songs with choruses, we were able to gather quite a number of children around to join in, and their parents were delighted to have us in loco parentis so they could go off walking, swimming, or having affairs in the dunes.
What a joy it was to hear forty or fifty silvery six- and seven-year-old voices raised in bawdy song, and sung with as much conviction as if they knew what they were singing:
Oh, I’ve got a cousin Daniel,
And he’s got a cocker spaniel,
If you tickled him in the middle,
He would lift his leg and piddle.
Did you ever see,
Did you ever see,
Such a funny thing before?
D’ye know my Auntie Anna,
And she’s got a grand piana,
Which she rams, aram, arama,
’Til the neighbors say, “God damn her!”
I taught them the occasional limerick, as well.
Rosalina, a pretty young lass,
Had a truly magnificent ass.
Not rounded and pink,
As you possibly think,
It was grey, had long ears, and ate grass.
I can only assume that the parents never asked to hear the new repertoire the silvery-voiced little ones brought home from their sandy Sunday school.
Not a few adults joined us, too, as we were the jolliest gathering on that strand. Two very attractive young women, Louise Arnold and Lynn Epstein, plunked themselves down on the sand at Cohalan’s invitation, and soon became regulars. They revealed that they had produced some Off Broadway shows, which sparked my interest. I was of a mind to get serious about the acting trade, due to my newfound penchant for suffering.
It depends on where you are in life, I suppose, but some people think that to be a great actor it’s necessary to be entirely miserable, and if misery is the grandest qualification, then it was, Move over, Burton, Olivier, and Gielgud—McCourt is on the way.
Sundays were not a joy unalloyed, as every child singing there might suddenly remind me of my own two, who seemed lost to me forever. That summer, my estranged wife, Linda, had informed me that she was going off to Mexico to divorce me. We’d been separated for two years by then, but occasional bouts of blind optimism had led me to believe that it would somehow all work out.
“What about the children?” I had asked her.
“What about them?” she asked. “We never did have anything resembling a marriage, so don’t be a hypocrite and pretend we were a family.” She spoke truth, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.
One Sunday, when it was too hot to sing, my morbid contemplations were knocked right out of my head, at least for a time. I was enthroned beneath my protective umbrella (this because I have skin which, when exposed to the sun, makes the common beet seem albino), when out of nowhere there hove into my purview the most astonishingly beautiful and graceful woman I’d ever seen in all my life and travels. She had rich brown hair and striking almond-shaped eyes. She wore a modest white bathing suit and, as she stepped along the water’s edge on her long lithe legs, the water glinting with sunlight behind her, her slim body and swanlike neck seemed to sway in time to music. Upon her right hip there was perched like a koala bear a bright-faced, blond-haired child in the two-year-old range.
It never occurred to me to think that the presence of a child might imply that there was a husband somewhere; in that moment I was so absolutely smitten that I couldn’t conceive that any obstacles might stand between me and this vision.
I don’t know how long it took me to realize I wasn’t breathing, but a huge exhalation brought me back from near drowning on dry land. Turning to the nearest body on the beach, who happened to be Louise Arnold, I gasped the question, “Who in God’s name is that vision walking toward us?”
“That’s my friend, Dee, who’s visiting me this weekend,” sez she.
I was flabbergasted that a mere human being would know this celestial creature.
“I must meet her,” said I, “and would you be kind enough to do the introductory honors.” Louise was amenable, as she was quite the hand at matchmaking. “Dee!” she called out. “Would you come here for a sec?”
“Dee” came striding over, a somewhat bemused expression on her lovely face. Silenced by the presence of such beauty, I could only extend my own paw to shake her soft hand. The brain and the tongue had disconnected at once, and anything I thought of saying seemed stupid and banal. Finally, I managed to rasp out a “How do you do?” though my tongue felt inert.
Dee sat down and, as I’m not fond of nicknames or diminutives, I ascertained that Diana was her proper name. So Diana she was to me, although old friends and family still call her Dee. I mumbled something about it being a nice day. She agreed. A bit of silence, then I tried again, “A bit too hot, though.” She agreed again. An agreeable woman, she was.
Shortly, Diana excused herself, and off down the beach she went, and I was left feeling like a complete ass. “By Christ, McCourt,” I said to myself, “for all yer gift of the tongue, for all your much-vaunted charm and gallantry, you couldn’t trot out the treasure trove of complimentary clichés you keep on hand in case of being caught without something to say?”
Diana was leaving that afternoon, Louise told me, so I asked Louise for her friend’s telephone number, which she obliged me with on the usual matchbook cover. It was a RIverside-9 number, and to this day I haven’t forgotten it. I made the vow to ring her immediately upon returning to the city, and I was to carry her number with me everywhere, but I never dared telephone, not even when I was filled with the bravado conferred by whiskey.
This was sacred business, which made my brain whirl and my legs go rickety—and there was still Linda, and the unresolved matter of the divorce. Or unresolved for me, anyway. It was well resolved for Linda; she was divorcing me.
Divorce is an odd thing, but so is marriage for that matter. Although you are generally present at your own wedding there is a certain unreality to the whole goings-on. There you are, having reached the age of reason, standing up in front of two to a couple of hundred friends, relatives, and neighbors, making promises to love, honor, and cherish, to have, to hold, to cleave flesh to flesh, till death do you part. A bloody tall order to ask of a twosome who in most cases have only known each other for a short period. The sort of commitment that if you are asked to make to a member of your own family, or a childhood companion, someone you knew and loved your whole life, your immediate response would be, “Not on your Nellie.”
But at least you’re physically present at your wedding ceremony, whereas at the divorce, equally momentous, changing your life just as much, it’s not always necessary to be at the formal smashing of the union. According to my soon-to-be ex-wife, she was proceeding to Tijuana, our signed agreement in hand, and there a sofa salesman who also repairs mufflers and works as a judge in his spare time will stamp a document declaring our marriage to be over and done—the parties of the first and second parts now free to proceed singly through life without let or hindrance from each other.
It’s eerie enough waking up of a morning to be startled by another head on the pillow, who turns out to be your new marriage partner. You find yourself saying, “I’m married. Jesus Christ, I’m married! Now what will I do?”
But, then, another morning, you wake up with a vague notion that something important happened yesterday, and it dawns on you, ah, yes, Linda said she was going to divorce me in Mexico. There is no other head on the pillow, but it wasn’t just a bad dream, you are unmarried again, but single no more, now you are divorced, such a serious word, even to a recovering Catholic like myself.
Your own mind can be a remarkable thing, telling you things about the world that nobody else standing right alongside you would even suspect to be true. In my years of marriage to Linda, it didn’t occur to me that my amorous extracurricular adventures might have consequences. Didn’t I come home to her in the end, and shouldn’t she be grateful for that? When she’d thrown me out, hadn’t I broken into the apartment, ripping the place apart in a rage, and gone to jail for it? Didn’t that show I cared? And during the years after, when I’d be off smuggling gold in India, or living on a houseboat on the Seine, couldn’t everybody see I loved my children anyway? They were five and four that summer, Siobhan and Malachy, and if I’d been absent much more than I’d been present in the last few years, surely my drunken bouts of self-pity, my maudlin despair at having them taken away from me, counted for something. Why couldn’t Linda see any of this? How could she want to divorce me?
I had to avoid that word, “divorce.” I was still so bedeviled by remorse over wrecking the marriage I couldn’t yet get the sleep I needed without having the drink, and lots of it.
That summer, there was a huge debutante party for a young thing named Fernanda Wood at one of the grander manses dotting the Arcadian landscape. A few of us plebeians popped over after our toils to join the festivities. Apparently, the mini-scions and -scionesses had made a decision to redecorate the Hamptons mansion wherein this bacchanal took place. They had hurled champagne bottles through the windows and attempted to set a number of small fires. The place was aglitter with flitting Caucasians, debs leaping half clad throughout the house, pursued by young bucks garbed in the remnants of tuxedos. Furniture in disarray, glasses smashed, ornaments shattered, chandeliers gyrating to twist music, until some of the higher-spirited lads began to swing from them, bringing them crashing down (predating that famous chandelier scene in Phantom of the Opera by many years), while shrieks and screams echoed throughout the house: It was simply the rich at play.
Somehow the press, local and national, got hold of the story, and there were sober articles and tut-tutting editorials re the younger generation and what they were coming to, and rich kids with too much money to spend and too much time to waste. There was a great deal of “In my day, sir” commentary, and headlines containing the words “rampage,” “orgy,” “volcanic eruption,” “riot,” “uproar,” and every other synonym known to Roget and all the sauruses.
I, being somewhat of an adult, took a different view. I just cheered them on. But it was too rowdy even for us old hands at running amuck. We had gotten to the party just as it was breaking up—in the most literal sense—anyway, and as there didn’t seem to be an intact glass to sip from, we departed, shaking our comparatively hoary heads at the wonder of it all.
As I drove down the road, I spied flashing police lights and, not wanting to face judges again, I congratulated myself on making the getaway. I found myself on the Montauk Highway, drunk at 2:00 A.M. It seemed to me a good idea to see how fast I could drive, and off I went.
’Twas a dark night with lacy swirls of sea mist floating toward me as I raced along the empty highway. The only indication of speed was the needle quivering on the dashboard; despite my foot savaging the accelerator, the damn car seemed to be encased in air, immobilized in a Bakelite night. The thought that I could crash and reduce myself to smithereens did float into the head, but I didn’t respond, so it left of its own accord.
There were no other cars on the road, no house lights, nothing to tell me I was hurtling to possible destruction. My concentration was on the speedometer and stomping the foot on the accelerator and of course the thought of the soon-to-be ex-wife took over as it generally did in the small hours, spurring me to more teeth-grinding, jaw-clenching, screaming efforts to outrun the demons.
All that tumult being in my head, it took me a while to become aware of the sound of the tires on the road, a sound that seemed to form the words: Stop it now. Stop it now. Stop it now. And as I slowly touched the brake, I became aware of the high speed I’d been hitting and suddenly shuddered with the understanding of what this attempted suicide might have done to my children, Siobhan and Malachy, and then I stopped the car.
My friend Steve Epstein had little to do those days so he, as they say, hung out with me. I owed Epstein for letting me stay at his digs back in the city, and there were times in the Watermill when I didn’t present a bill to my pal. I would just add his bill to some nonparticular well-to-do type, or forget it altogether.
The summer was moving along slowly toward its end when my tenure at the restaurant suffered a similar fate. One night, Epstein arrived from the city with a girlfriend. I served them dinner and drinks for free, whilst neglecting to make out a tab. The boss, David Eaton, in a fit of sudden efficiency asked to see the tab I was keeping on Epstein. I said, “’Tis in my head.”
“Oh yeah,” sez Dave, “you write everyone else’s down but not Epstein’s?”
“Right,” sez I, thinking rapidly. “He drinks so little it’s easy to remember.”
“What about the lobster dinner he had with that broad, and the bottle of wine and the cognacs they had after dinner?”
“All in the noggin,” sez I, tapping the side of the head.
“I’m going to have you both arrested,” sez Dave. “You for stealing and Epstein for trespassing, as I know he slept on the couch in the accommodations we supplied strictly for your personal use. I’m calling the state police right now, and I know them well.”
I slithered over to Epstein and, speaking out of the side of my mouth as I’d seen Humphrey Bogart do in convict films, informed him that if we didn’t get our asses on the highway we were likely to be guests of the county.
I was trying to speak in an understandable code yet not give the game away to the man’s dinner companion. He was irritated, as he was making great progress with this young thing, and she had already indicated her readiness to have a mutual exploration of the nether regions of their respective bodies, but after I had pulled him into the kitchen and explained the situation the lust left him and fear of being stuck behind immovable bars took over.
What to do with the lust object? Give her money for the taxi and tell her your uncle is at death’s door and ’tis necessary to get to New York City to open it for him. I handed over to him my paltry tips to pass along as cab fare, then nipped out the back door and dashed up to the hovel on the roof to pick up the few belongings. I met Epstein in the parking lot, where he was waiting for me as the getaway drivers do in movies. We dropped the young bird off at a gas station where there was a telephone, and then began the flight from justice toward the forgiving arms of New York City. I kept the sharp eye out for the flashing lights of the law while he gunned the engine and got the car up to about ninety-five mph, which was stupid, as it would only draw the police’s attention.
It’s amazing what the imagination can do when you’ve had a few drinks and have a voluble tongue to convince the other person of the imminence of a frightful incarceration. I was convinced that the entire police fraternity of Long Island was being mobilized to get us heinous criminals who had cheated a restaurant, and had Epstein believing the same. We were bedeviled, too, by the sight of the gas tank needle doing its delicate dance and gently touching empty, with no gas stations open at that time of the morning. We stopped at every closed gas station and practically sucked out the gas remaining in the hoses. At one of them, we discovered a jerry can half full of blessed petrol, which we stole without so much as a “Sorry to have to do this.” I would have stolen it from an old-age pensioner to avoid another night of durance vile. ’Twas that plus faith plus talking nicely to the car, now named Matilda, that got Epstein and myself to civilization and safety.
I deposited the odd bits of clothing in a room in Epstein’s digs in Astoria, Queens, New York. The building was owned by the uncle and Epstein’s mother, and the lad was living rent-free. There’s nothing like a rent-free bed in a reasonably comfortable flat with a roommate who thinks you are the wittiest, wisest Hibernian he has ever encountered, and when I realized that the FBI was not coming after me for an unpaid dinner tab of $19.27 plus tax, I relaxed and circulated once more.
The atmosphere in the apartment was ripeish, to say the least, which I attributed to deficiencies in the housekeeping department, but upon inspection it seemed clean enough for a bachelor’s digs. The smell seemed to get worse, though, and finally my nose led me to the epicenter of this horrendous stink. Under the place of my repose, my bed, I discovered a dead crow decomposing and giving nourishment to a full complement of maggots and other guardians of the environment. That foul of the air took its last flight out my window, accompanied by larvae, worms, maggots, and other bosom buddies taking their first and last flight, startling a gossip of elderly women exchanging dark forebodings in front of the building, and giving them fodder for even darker words about the world of dead carrion that flies.
Great barmen, like great hairdressers, are reputed to have what are known as followings; that is, they attract coteries of bods who like the way a bartender talks about sports, or mixes a martini, or in the case of the lasses, the bit of flattery and name recognition. ’Twas said that I had such a following. I wasn’t being unduly modest when I said I didn’t believe it, as I honestly wondered who in the name of Allah would follow me anywhere. But if Epstein believed this, as apparently he did, and if his uncle was going to finance my reentry into the bar biz, as apparently he would, who was I to say nay, and the search for a suitable premises began.
We found an out-of-the-way spot at 118 East Eighty-eighth Street called the Dublin Bay Café, apparently owned by a Dublin man name Larry Luby. We broached the idea of purchasing the joint but the man did not seem able to say yes or say no. He mumbled something about having to consult with somebody or other, that he didn’t really own the place.
The real, but concealed, owners were a couple of shadowy speculators, a husband-and-wife team, smallish stout people named Joey and Tessie who, despite appearances, were brilliant at deal-making in real estate, saloons, diners, jukeboxes, and cigarette machines. Tessie did a wonderful good-kindly-mother act, whereas Joey did a lot of growling and talked about cutting people’s balls off and other sporting events of that nature. Because of some legal difficulty with the SLA (that would be the State Liquor Authority, and not the Symbionese Liberation Army, though the one often seems no more reasonable to deal with than the other), they were prohibited from being licensees in any premi wherein liquor was vended.
So we negotiated with them, and settled upon an agreeable price, and all that was needed was the check from Steve Epstein’s uncle, which we were assured was a routine matter and would be taken care of as soon as said uncle returned from whatever trip he was off on. But the weeks began to pile up and so did the pressure from the stout people to conclude this deal. I never did figure out whether Epstein was in a fantasy world about raising the money for the purchase of the place all along, or if his uncle just changed his mind in the end. Finally, though, Epstein confessed that his uncle had no intention of financing a saloon for his dopey nephew and his drunken Irish pal.
’Twas left to me to inform the other folk that there was no money in the coffers and the deal was off. They weren’t too perturbed, as they immediately had an idea for me. They would shift Mr. Luby to another location, and put me on the Dublin Bay license. I would move into one of the three studio flats in the building. Fine with me, and I immediately took over and changed the name to Himself and did the bit of renovation to make the joint more publike.
While all this was going on, Diana’s telephone number remained imprinted on the brain, but I was hesitant to call her, as I was sure she wouldn’t remember me. There was many a night I’d take out that matchbook cover and look at the RIverside-9 number, go for the phone, and then find a list of reasons not to call. She wouldn’t remember me. She wouldn’t be interested in me. There was the vaguest possibility she’d remember me, but suppose she said, “Why are you calling me?” or said she was deeply involved with someone, or demanded—angrily, of course—to know who gave me her number. So, even though my mind was slowly letting go of its obsession with my now ex-wife, Linda, and it came back again and again to a vision of Diana, with all its lovely promise, I never called. I’d say bollox on it and have another evening at the drink as we fixed up the new saloon, Himself.