Midlife Irish (30 page)

Noel Turley, it turned out, was related to me in some obscure way, but it was such a complex, tangled line of aunts, and cousins,
and grandmothers, that I cannot say exactly what that way was without consulting sources. I can diagram it more easily than
I can explain it. But, after talking with Noel for a while, it really felt as if I knew him, as if I had known him for a very
long time, since I was a kid. He seemed as if he had been at all those Saint Patrick’s Day Hibernian parties at my cousin’s
restaurant.

Noel Turley knew a great deal about the Gannons. He knew all three of the brothers, Bill Gannon, Johnny Gannon, and my dad,
Bernie Gannon. Johnny was the character, but Bernie was the tough one. He told me a little story about my dad and some potatoes.
This is a story that depended a lot on the performance, but it was, told by Noel, a great story, but an Irish story without
a plot. I had heard many of them from
my mother. I thought that it is a great tale, but essentially unrepeatable because it depends more on the performance than
the details. Anyway, here it is, sans performance.

“I had some spuds. And this man told me to sell ’em. I asked him, ‘Are they good?’ and he said, ‘They’re fair.’ Now ‘fair’
isn’t ‘good.’ It’s worse than good. So ‘fair’ is another way of saying ‘bad.’ So I tasted one. And it was worse than ‘bad.’
You’d do better eating the dirt it grew in. So I was walking around with the sack of spuds, and I saw your dad. And I knew
he was headed off to America in a few days. And I asked him to sell the spuds for me. And he said, ‘Are they good?’ And I
said, ‘They’re fair.’ So I went off to mass. When I came back I saw Bernie. And the spuds weren’t with him. And I asked him
if he sold them. He said, ‘I did.’ And I said, ‘Who did you sell them to?’ And he said, ‘A lady.’ And I split the money with
him. And I asked him, ‘Do you know what “fair” means?’ And he said, ‘I think it means “bad.” ’ And I said, ‘Do you know the
lady?’ And he said, ‘I do.’ And I said, ‘What are you going to tell her when she sees you again?’ And he said, ‘When she sees
me again, I’ll look different.’ And then he went to America.”

Noel took me on an amazing tour of the world my dad saw when he first saw the world. The house my dad was born in was still
standing, sort of. Next to it was a little barn, which was also still standing. Sort of. My dad’s place was six acres. They
didn’t “own” the land. They “rented” it from somebody they rarely saw. It looked impossible to farm.

They did farm it. It was almost a living when everyone was alive. You are what you grew. It is the sort of place that looks
beautiful in a photo, but would be mind-numbingly hard to work. They got by until the bad things happened.

Noel then showed me the cemetery that he thought some of my people might be buried in. This was within easy walking distance.
Noel was an easy man to talk with. If you couldn’t think of anything to say, no problem. Talking was
like shooting a water pistol standing in a lake. There were no Pinteresque moments.

We finally came to the cemetery. It was very small, a square twenty feet on a side. There were maybe ten graves there. A lot
of the writing on the tombstones was worn away, but right in the front I saw it. The grave of the grandpa I never saw. I never
heard my father talk about him.

J
OSEPH
G
ANNON

D
IED
M
ARCH
15, 1916,
AGED
45
YEARS

And under that.

F
RANCIS
G
ANNON

B
ELOVED SON

D
IED
D
ECEMBER
21, 1916

Francis was the brother I was named after.

So my dad was seven years old when his dad died and eight when his big brother died. Bernie was eight years old, but he was
the man of the house. He had to start making a living. On six “leased” rocky acres in Ireland. He quit school and worked.

I asked a few questions and tried to put together something like my dad’s typical day when he was very young. He had told
me that he had always worked, that he had been forced to quit school when he was a little kid. He would get up early and take
the horse out. He would walk from farm to farm, attempting to get a farmer interested in sort of “renting” the horse for a
day. When my dad did get somebody interested, he would stick around and help him hitch up the horse and plow.

When he got home, he wasn’t finished yet. As the man of the house, he had to do most of the chores as well as help look after
his little brothers and sister. He would fall into his
bed hungry, tired, and sore. Tomorrow he would get up and do it again. And again.

I looked again at the little house with the caved-in room. At the thick walls. I looked out the window, the view my dad saw
every morning. I remember some few comments that my dad did make about those years. “The animals got fed better than I did.”
“We didn’t have enough money to be poor.” I realized why he didn’t laugh when he said those things.

I thought of looking at my old man sleeping on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. I remember, as a little kid, being amazed
at all the little scars all over his back and legs. I remember looking at his huge hands, how his fingernails were all broken.
I remember asking him how they got that way. I remember him telling me that I didn’t want to know.

And I understood why my dad mowed down my tomato plants.

The greatest Irish play may be
The Playboy of the Western World
. The theme of the play is a very familiar Irish motif: The son, to earn the respect of both himself and those around him,
must, in some way, symbolic or literal, kill the father.

I have written a lot of boxing journalism, and I vividly remember an old trainer telling me, “Irish fighters? Their first
go is always their old man.”

I could never imagine hitting my dad, but I guess, in some subconscious Freudian way, I saw him as a rival for my mom. This
whole thing remained subliminal, but I do remember the quiet satisfaction I took in showing him how much better I was at certain
sports than he could ever be. Of course he never saw a basketball until he was in his thirties, and he was utterly clueless
at golf (we played once) and bowling (we played many times). I do remember sitting there watching him sit in his big chair
reading his newspaper, and I remember thinking, after he punished me for something,
I will do things that you can’t do, old man.

So I guess he was, on some Oedipal level, the guy I had to
overcome. I remember one incident that seemed to encompass all this.

I had just come home from college. I was twenty. I weighed 205. I was “almost as big as your old man” to guys at the bar.
(I worked on vacations.) I had lifted weights every day for about a year. My dad and I sat alone at our kitchen table. We
had consumed two or three beers. No one was anywhere near drunk, but I felt a little buzzed. I don’t know how it started,
but we decided to arm wrestle.

His hand was like a catcher’s mitt with calluses. He was, at that point, over sixty. He was wearing bifocals. We began.

It took about five minutes. I won. I was not surprised. I had won my dormitory bench press contest. I could bench 325. I was
a very dangerous person. I had menacing veins.

He stood up and walked to the refrigerator. He came back with two long-neck bottles of Budweiser. I tried to be graceful in
victory. Yeah, Dad, you’re really strong for your age. I’ve been working out a lot.

Near the end of the beer he wanted to try it again. I rolled my eyes a little. Sure. Why not? I won’t rub it in. But I would
not, I firmly decided, lose. No way.

It took less than thirty seconds. I never had a chance. He had gotten a lot stronger since the walk to the kitchen. My hand
hurt. I felt like saying, “No fair!” but I couldn’t think of anything to claim. I felt like my shoulder was dislocated. I
had that injury before and now I had it again.

He went to bed.

My dad died on June 2, 1974. He died from cancer. He knew he had cancer for several years but he didn’t do anything to treat
it. At his funeral I asked an old friend if my dad had said anything when he found out he had cancer. He could remember my
dad saying only one thing: “That figures.”

He died at home. The last time I saw him, he weighed
about 170 pounds. My dad’s bones probably weighed 160. He rolled up his sleeve, looked at his thin yellowish arm, and said,
“I can’t believe that’s my arm.” He shook his head and stared straight ahead.

“Me,” he said. “I can’t get used to this.”

At his wake a lot of people that I didn’t know showed up. Some of them told stories about how my dad kicked various people’s
asses. Two old guys discussed how far he threw a guy out of his bar.

He was buried in a cemetery across the street from where we went bowling. He was an inconsistent bowler. He’d bowl 250 and
then bowl 120. He was the only person I ever saw who used a bowling ball with only two holes. Two big holes.

“That’s best for me,” he told me.

My dad’s funeral was held on a very sunny day. Then we drove in the hearse to the graveyard. On the way over someone made
a joke. We laughed politely.

We got out of the hearse and stood around in our black clothes and sunglasses. While the priest read the “Thou art ashes”
part, I thought about how, when we rode past the cemetery after work, he would say the same lame joke.

“That’s the most popular place in town. People are dying to get into it.”

He told me that about fifty times—every time there was somebody else in the car with us.

My cousin Bill, the only priest in the family, read the service. My mom always wanted me to be a priest. She wanted my brother
Bud to be a priest. Bud got a lot closer, but we didn’t make it.

She didn’t look at Bill while he read. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t look at my dad’s casket. She looked at the parking
lot. At the end I walked over to my mom. I didn’t know what to say. She looked at me.

“Are you hot?” she asked.

FIFTEEN

Mom

We awoke in our larger-than-usual bed and breakfast room in a place just outside Athlone. I looked around the room and decided
to count the religious artifacts in the room. There were nine, not counting the cross over the other side of the door.

This seemed like a good jumping-off point for our search for Mom.

Athlone is about fifty miles due west from my mom’s home. So, after the massive breakfast, we knew that we wouldn’t be driving
more than an hour or two. The day was pretty clear (by Irish standards). The Punta had a little minor dent on one of the wheel
covers (a by-product of Athlone), but otherwise it was still capable of attaining the mind-jarring speed of forty-five miles
per hour, and we were in no big hurry. We had a lot more information about my mom. Compared to the Athlone search, this was
going to be easy.

We had, of course, been very near “Mom Land” earlier in our trip. But on our way back out to the west, we intentionally meandered
even more than our usual meandering. No matter where you drive in the West of Ireland, you feel you were somehow meant to
go there. If you make some wrong turns they aren’t really wrong.

John Belushi did a great little bit where he pretended to be a straight-arrow newsperson. He began, “Well the calendar says
March 17, and we all know what that means. It’s the time everybody is a little bit Irish. It’s the time for ‘the wearin’ of
the green.’ ” He then continued in that same, standard television announcer’s voice, saying the same boring clichés you hear
every Saint Patrick’s Day. “Top o’ the morning,” “Sure and begorrah,” “The luck of the Irish,” ad nauseum.

Then he said, “I know this guy, he’s Irish. He’s a friend of mine. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, but he gives
me a call, wants me to pick him up at the airport.” Belushi then told us about the Irish guy, who was a crazy drug dealer.
Belushi’s voice became more and more manic as he told about his “friend” and his efforts to smuggle serious narcotics into
the country. As he told the lurid story, Belushi got more and more out of control. Finally he was standing screaming about
his crazy Irish friend. The bit ended with Belushi completely spinning out and falling to the ground.