Last Notes from Home (8 page)

Until we were a thousand-plus miles out over the Pacific, where Jimmy at last passed out completely and went into a deep heavy snore for the remainder of the flight to Honolulu, so that he would have neither chicken luau, manicotti, nor his glorious thump, his monologue was unceasing. As quickly as Ms. Glenn set up his vodkas, he’d down them, continue his lyrical and nonsensical spiel, throw his hairy head back into his seat, catnap and snore lightly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes, waken, furiously jab my elbow, and begin his rambling blarney all over again. No matter that I feigned reading magazines, that without turning up the sound I at one point put the earplugs in and feigned watching
Jeremiah Johnson
—the “Limey Robert Medford” had a lot of snow in his beard, throughout the flicker he kept looking higher and higher up some mountain or other, and at the climax—I think it was the climax—he single-handedly took on,
mano a m
a
no,
a whole shitload of redskins—no matter what I did, the fierce jab at the elbow invariably came.

Whenever I tried to introduce more mundane subjects, hoping to bore him into silence so I could get back to memories of my brother, his replies to these timid overtures were, if possible, even nuttier than his nonstop monologue. When, for example, I asked him how he’d broken his leg, he told me that this tour he’d arranged for some of his “more deserving workers” (he’d tell me who they were soon enough) had begun in New York City. Upon their arrival, as was Jimmy’s duty and custom whenever he was in New York City, he had one day strolled up to the archdiocese on Madison Avenue and had passed some lurverly hours swapping yarns with his great and good friend, Terence Cardinal Cooke.

“With whom?” I cried.

“Terence Cardinal Cooke. My bosom brother in Jesus, Cookie.” O’Twoomey never batted an eye. “Jesus, Frederick, as a New York State Irishman you don’t even know who your own bleeding cardinal is?”

Cookie indeed! I mean, really, what the hell could one say to this crazy bastard?

Whatever, it was after passing some lurverly hours with “Cookie,” when Jimmy was leaving the cardinal’s quarters and crossing the piazza separating the archdiocese’s entrance from Madison Avenue’s sidewalk that he slipped on a patch of ice and sustained a hairline fracture of the fibula in his left leg. Jimmy threw his great hairy head back and roared with laughter.

“Oh, Frederick, me lurve, didn’t Cookie and me have a grand laugh over that leg! Here I am directly come from making sweet talk with a padre who practically sits on the right hand of God—yea, and to be sure, lurve, every bit as close to God as Dermot Ryan, Cookie is—just leaving this holy man’s domicile and I break my bleeding leg practically on his stoop!”

O’Twoomey was quite beside himself with laughter. Again he reached under the tray, grabbed my thigh, pinched it at the inseam next to my left testicle, and again drained the blood from my face.

Certainly I’d heard of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes? I’d heard of the sweepstakes but didn’t know it had anything to do with hospitals. In fact, in all my forty-plus years, I said, I couldn’t recall ever having seen a ticket, least of all ever having purchased one. With a kind of unspeakable and seething fury, Jimmy reached into the inside pocket of his gabardine jacket, violently ripped from it an expensive-looking and magnificently soft leather pocket secretary, sloppily wetted his fingers with his tongue and lips, snarlingly counted ten tickets onto our cup-stained vodka tray, loudly enunciating the number of each ticket as he counted,
one, two, three, four,
and so forth, ordered me to sign my name and address in the appropriate place, tear the ticket in half, give the parts with my name and address to him, and keep the other halves for myself. As I started to do so, I detected the tickets cost four dollars each, calculated immediately that the tickets would cost me forty dollars, and told Jimmy that one ticket would do me just fine.

“But, Frederick, me lurve, you don’t understand—the bleeding tickets are on me! Look here what I’m doing, lurve. I’m transferring forty dollars from this slot in my wallet to this other slot with your stubs so Fll know exactly what it’s all about if you win. Even I, you see, darling, in the very higher echelons of the Hospital Trusts’ public relations—ha! ha!—have to account for every ticket which is dispersed. All the money, you see, goes to pay the hospital bills for Ireland’s poor, impoverished souls. All of course but for some minute sums we hold out for mundane and worldly things like expenses, salaries, and that sort of unavoidable crassness. Who do you think all these gentle souls are? Nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, all with years and years of dedicated, utterly devotional service to curing the sick, the broke, the downtrodden, the devoid of spirit—the Gaelic crackpots, that is—aye, that’s one of the reasons this bleeding tour was set up, a gift to the saintliest among us!”

“Oh, I see. I used to do public relations myself. Your job is kind of employee relations, setting up tours like this, planning annual company picnics, that kind of thing?”

“Oh, no, Frederick, me lurve. Don’t slight me. As I’ve said, this tour is only one of the reasons that this outing was set up. My personal public relations is a rather more discreet and delicate operation than this little group would suggest.”

Although O’Twoomey would say no more, I never for a moment doubted that sooner or later he would. Shortly before Jimmy passed out completely, when at last I could get back to the memory of my brother, when we were about midway between San Francisco and Honolulu, Ms. Robin Glenn, inevitably joined by Padre Maguire, who would take the mike from her hand and repeat her every word, gave us American Airline’s canned spiel on the Hawaiian niceties. Across the aisle, the old lady, her head back, her mouth open, the Demerol doing its work, still slept. A must word in the islands was
mahalo,
which meant “thank you.” Ms. Robin Glenn pronounced it for us, as Father Maguire did directly after her. “Maw-
h
ow
-low!” In unison we were all asked to pronounce it. Save for O’Twoomey, we did so. “Mah-
h
ow
-low!” (In the first bar I would enter in Hawaii, that of the Honolulu International Airport, a classily dressed mainlander, after having a mere two highballs, would leave the bartender a five-dollar tip and start for the door. “Mahalo!” the bartender would cry after him. The guy would turn back, smile, wave and say, “Yeah, bah-fungoo or whatever!”) We had of course all heard the word
aloha.
This meant both hello and good-bye and many other things as well, as, for example, in the expression “aloha spirit” which would be interpreted as “the true spirit of hospitality.” Parroting both Ms. Glenn and Father Maguire, we all, save Jimmy, twice chirped “Ah-low-
haw
!”

With abruptly seething, near-obscene, and terrifying bitterness, Jimmy grumbled, “Aloha, me bleeding arse!”

Alarmed, nearly unmanned at the vastness of Jimmy’s loathing, I, agape and wide-eyed, turned to him. Jimmy gave me a rueful but sneering smile of apology, the smile seeming to suggest that of a rabid fox.

“Oh, I forget, lurve, this is your first trip to Hawaii. I suspect you imagine it Elysium. It is true, Frederick, as your Mr. Samuel Clemens has claimed, that they are the lurvliest group of islands on God’s green earth. It’s what’s on them that sours the bleeding stomach and has one eating Turns like popcorn. Nothing but a bunch of bleeding wogs and dagos, bleeding savages come right down to it. They can’t even speak English, Frederick. You’ll have the bleeding devil’s time trying to comprehend a word the bleeding eejits are saying to you.”

Here, adopting his most hyperbolic Oxford accent to date, Jimmy gave me a lesson in the pidgin he claimed all Hawaiians used. When they want to know where you have “been” (Jimmy said “bean”), “Instead of saying, ‘Where have you bean?’ these wogs say, ‘Where you went?’” For “What do you want?” it was, “What you like?” Rather than answer. “I do not want anything,” one heard, “I no like nawting.” By this time Jimmy was working himself into such a state—he’d already told me “I’m peloothered, lurve, bleeding peloothered”—that I felt he’d be unable to proceed, so excruciatingly difficult had it become for him to form his fish mouth and articulate. But proceed he did, his exasperation far outweighing his inebriation.

“Suppose, Frederick, I wished to exhort you to make your best effort. Do you know what these bleeding wogs will say to you? These bleeding dagos will say, ‘Geev-um!’ Now tell me, lurve, if I hadn’t told you that, would you have known what anyone was saying to you when you got to Hawaii? Of course you wouldn’t!”

“Nevertheless, having read a lot of Irish writers I know that ‘peloothered’ would be the equivalent of one of us quaint Yanks saying he was ‘drunk out of his skull.’ But how many Hawaiians would know what you were saying if you threw peloothered at them?”

“Peloothered can be found in any serious dictionary in the English-speaking world!”

“I take serious exception to that. If it were found at all, I’m sure it would be either slang or a colloquialism.”

‘To hell and back with your bleeding exception!” Jimmy cried.

If I found myself eating with any of these bleeding wogs, I shouldn’t be allowed to say, “It tastes delicious.” I’d have to say, “It break da mouth.” But even this was inaccurate as these bleeding savages were incapable of handling an h. “It break da mout.” For some reason I found this vastly amusing and was thinking what a field day Ireland’s James Joyce would have had in Hawaii. I almost said as much to O’Twoomey. Not only did I suspect, however, that Jimmy would deny James Joyce’s existence but O’Twoomey’s monologue was not about to be interrupted. Something as simple as “How are you today?” became “Howzit?” When and if I finally became accepted, I’d know because “these creatures or whatever they are” would start calling me “brother.” Of course these “dagos” couldn’t be expected to handle anything as simple as “brother.” This came out “bruh-duh” or, even worse—and here Jimmy shook himself feverishly, as though the malaria was on him—simply “bruh.” “The day you are completely at one with them, Frederick, you’ll be walking down the street and on meeting you every one of these apes will cry, ‘Howzit, bruh?’” Jimmy turned to me, his hand slid under the tray and came over to pat me affectionately on the left thigh. He sighed. “I told you I was going to tell you something, lurve. Then I told you what I said I was going to tell you. Now I’m telling you that I’ve just told you. You get my point, Frederick?”

Oh, dear reader, Jimmy sat there as complacent as Gibraltar. The pleasure he took in himself had its boundaries somewhere in infinity. It was at this point I thought I might slip in my observation on what Ireland’s Joyce would have done with pidgin. There would be no such luck. Jimmy had removed his hand from my thigh, had gone back to looking straight ahead, and as he again began talking his head bobbed up and down and his mass of graying hair flopped all round his enormous forehead.

“To the heart of the matter, Frederick. Who in Christ’s damnation wants to be accepted by these savages? Like your bleeding niggers, lurve, these people have no written history, no literature, no nothing but rice and shrimp. For that matter, and come right down to it, the Irish have produced the only writers of enduring value. Shaw, Yeats, Synge, O’Casey. Ah!” Jimmy sighed with immeasurable nostalgia. It was the sigh of the gods, coming, as it seemed to do, from that far-off and clouded-in Olympus.

I absolutely refused to let that slip through. “Well, Jimmy, there was Shakespeare, you know?”

“Overrated,” Jimmy sneered.

What the hell could one say to this Irishman?

It was now Jimmy’s moment to set me straight on any fallacious notions I might hold of Hawaii’s being a paradisiacal mixture of racial and ethnic groups. Listening to Mr. James O’Twoomey—the most biased man I’d ever encountered in Christendom, a not uncommon phenomenon among the Irish—lecture me on the bleeding evils and seenfulness of racial and religious prejudice stupefied and undid me to the point where I sat in a kind of mind-blowing euphoria, imagining that I was caught up in some unending improbable dream. It was rather as if I’d reached that eminence whereon I’d been granted a private audience with the Pope and the Pope had spent my allocated five minutes proselytizing the health-inducing—high color to the cheeks, peace of mind, calmness of spirit—advantages of frequent participation in wildly abandoned sexual orgies.

The most despised man on the islands, according to Jimmy, and as I would find out soon enough, was the white man, who was invariably referred to as a
haole
(
how
-lee), which was the equivalent of a mainland “nigger” calling a white man “a fucking honky.” As it was the first time in our conversation—that is to say, Jimmy’s monologue—that Jimmy had used the all-purpose adjective “fucking,” he abruptly and violently cupped his mouth with the palm of his chubby hand, rather as if he expected his Jesuit schoolmasters to be waiting in the wings ready to cane him half to death, his eyes opened wide with the horror of his indelicacy, he removed his hand from his mouth, apologized profusely, and promised he wouldn’t let that awful word slip out again.