The Harder They Fall (20 page)

And when you think about it, it’s quite logical. So anyway, back to my drinking … I didn’t drink again as a youngster ’cause I took a pledge at my confirmation, and I didn’t drink again until I came to America at the age of twenty. People here said to me, “Oh, you must drink a lot. You’re Irish.” And I said, “Sure I do!” but I didn’t. What a people pleaser! So I started to drink.

I had no education, so I was always ashamed of that. I left school at thirteen, but I was always a good reader. I loved reading and still do, and that saved my arse. I faked my way about my education so I would speak knowledgably or eloquently. I could recite a list of poetry and they would think, “He’s educated,” but it was still bullshit.

Through a series of events I got myself hired as an actor, though I was only a dockworker and dishwasher. And then a friend of mine, Tom O’Malley, who died of this disease, Tom got me on
The Tonight Show
’cause he booked the show. So I got famous for about fifteen minutes. Then somebody offered to back me in a bar, so we opened Malachy’s, and it became a very famous singles bar. I was just having the grandest time, drinking and carousing. There were lots of young, nubile women who were willing to share my bed, and I was not at all discriminating. Then I met this young woman who said, “We should get married,” and I said, “Oh yeah, we should do that.”

Then after three months, we discovered she was pregnant and we had a baby. Then a short time later, we had another baby. And I’m still drinking, and she’s getting annoyed because she can’t go out. She’s got to take
care of the babies. So she dumped me, much to my astonishment. As I said before, everybody loves me. But she said, “I don’t!” That was it and it drove me nuts.

But I kept drinking, and I was still trying to win her back. Crazy, crazy drunkenness, belligerent and threatening. I never, ever hit her though. Never violent, just a threatening, nasty person. Here’s the thing. Here I was doing exactly as my father had done. My father had deserted us. Although I was here physically, I wasn’t here. I wasn’t a father to those children. I was this sort of lunatic whirlwind. I amused them a lot, but I was not a caring father. I always said I wasn’t like my father. My father took off. This is the alcoholic denial thing. What I
don’t
do. I’m not like … I don’t drink gin, I don’t mix my drinks, I don’t drink before five o’clock, and I never do this or that. And it’s all bullshit you see, which we are. Bullshitters. And that, of course, is the denial. I
don’t
do …

So here you have me, the Great Egyptian, living on denial!

I had one saloon and then another and another. My fourth saloon was called Himself. Richard Harris, who was from Limerick, the same town as me, was always coming to see me when he was in town. One time we were drinking and Richard said, “I’m fed up with all this Hollywood shit, and I’d like to work for you.” And I said, “I already have a full staff.” He said, “You don’t have to pay me.” So anyway, he got behind the bar and started pouring drinks. He didn’t know a damn thing about bartending, but he would pour and pour. One day these two little old ladies came up to me and said, “You have the nicest bartender. He gave us a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne and didn’t charge us. He’s so nice.” I said, “He sure is.” I couldn’t naysay anything Richard did because people were flocking in to see him. After a couple of weeks, Richard decided “bartending is not for me” and packed it in. He left and off he went. He was heading back to London, so I saw him off at the airport. I then went back to the bar, and my other barman says to me, “Here, Richard left this note for you.” So I open up the envelope and inside is a check to cover everything he had given away during those weeks.

After my wife and children left me, it was all downhill. It was like watching the whirlpools: slow at the top, then sucked into this hell of
despair of hopelessness. As a retired Catholic, I recognize only one sin: the sin of despair. No hope and no forgiveness. That’s a thing about alcoholism, you see. “No one will forgive me.” The fact is, I continued to drink. I met Diana. She was a bright light that came into my life. And through this agony of this awful disease, I saw Diana’s face and the beauty of her soul, and I thank my God for that.

It didn’t stop me drinking though. For the next nineteen years or so, I was not the most faithful of husbands or partners. We got married. She had one child and I had two. Her little girl was retarded, and that got me very involved in the movement for the retarded. And that, for once, got me out of myself and out of my own selfishness and self-centeredness. I still drank but, at the same time, got involved in doing some kind of good, you see. For me, the good finally started encroaching on my soul; it sealed the evil within me. Evil goes when the light comes upon it. At the same time, my disease was being forced out into the light and I began to see what it was.

I traveled to Ireland with my brother Frank to do a show there. I was very angry at that place because of the horrible way we were treated as children. The humiliation my mother suffered over there. Being on welfare. The deaths of three children. The deaths of eleven classmates. Constant sickness and death. Fear and this rigid Catholic society. God was always threatening to beat the shit out of you. It was always sin, sin, sin. Never to talk about a loving God. You were told that if you were very good you’d get something at Christmas, so you assumed you were bad. There was never any credit for trying! No acknowledgment that you were essentially a good kid, a decent kind of a little fellow. So what you did was take refuge in booze.

When I came back from Ireland, I went to a doctor because I was feeling sick. Physically ill and mentally ill. He said, “You’re drinking too much, you’re smoking too much, and you’re eating too much.” So I asked this physician, who’s a friend of mine, would he give me some medicine for those conditions? He said, “I’ll give you medicine. I’ll give you a boot in the arse. Now get out of here ’cause you know what to do.” And I said, “Yes, I know what to do.” And I knew. I knew what to do. I knew about the Twelve Steps. God knows I had recommended them often to other
people. I didn’t need them, but I knew people that did.

So here’s the odd and embarrassing thing about getting into recovery. I said to myself that drinking was no problem and smoking, well, I can’t stop smoking till I stop drinking, but the real problem is that if I stop smoking and drinking, I’ll start eating way too much. So the eating is the problem. Somebody said to me that there is a program for overeaters, and I said, “What do they do, give you diets?” And he said, “Why don’t you try it and find out?” So I did, thinking this would solve all my problems. I wound up listening to people talking about the toxic and fatal effects of chocolate chip ice cream and lemon meringue pie. While in the room, I started substituting the word “alcohol” for “food.” So I just figured that my God has a peculiar sense of humor. It wasn’t long before I said, “Fuck this, I’m an alcoholic. I’m also a food addict and a nicotine addict and I have other addictions: being judgmental and a finger-pointing asshole.” And I said, “Yeah, go to an alcohol recovery program, jerk-off.” And I did.

At first it was terrible. I was also a debtor, horrendously in debt. I had borrowed over $200,000, which I couldn’t possibly ever pay back. At this recovery meeting they said to me, “Keep coming back.” I told Diana that I would stop borrowing and try to get some kind of work that would keep us afloat. No matter what kind of work it was. But somebody offered me a large sum of money, a loan, and I took it and didn’t tell Diana. Then we split up for a while. I was living out in Queens here in New York, living on somebody’s floor. I couldn’t get any work, so I ended up on welfare. So here I am at the age of fifty-four going into welfare, like my mother used to do. Something I said I’d never do in my whole life. That’s where I learned the difference between humiliation and humility. I said, “I’m not being humiliated. I’m learning to acquire humility.” That’s what it was. I did it with my heart, mind, and brain. I had been a fairly successful actor and a fairly successful saloonkeeper, and I used to have quite a bit of money, and I was recognized by some people in the welfare office from being on a soap opera…. That caused a bit of a stir in the welfare office. Here I am signing for welfare and signing autographs. A most bizarre situation. They were so nice to me there. They were mostly black folks, and they kept saying, “You’ll be okay. We have seen people like you who have taken a hit, and
we know you’ll be fine.” They were very sweet and nice. I thought they would stomp on my head and say, “Yeah, look at you, you big deal asshole.” But they didn’t at all.

So I kept in touch with Diana over that period and learned how to say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I said and for what I did, and will try not to do that again.” And I said to her, “Would you see me again?” And she said, “Yes, but I don’t sleep with men on the first date.” So we started seeing each other, and I was able to say that due to this recovering program I’m on a path, and hope to stay on it. A day at a time I don’t drink. A day at a time I go to a meeting. A day at a time I stretch out my hand to help another alcoholic. A day at a time I try to remember those I injured and make an amend. Making amends isn’t always about forgiveness. Some people have told me, “What you did is unforgivable.” And I say to them, “If you don’t forgive me, I will be your burden. You think of me with anger, which means I have the power to make you angry. You shouldn’t give me that power.”

Sometimes my God pisses me off and I say, “What the fuck are you doing to me?” You know God always answers your prayers, and many times the answer is “No, asshole!” Then you find out it wouldn’t have been good for you anyway.

In recovery I have laughed and cried. I have buried friends, ’cause there’s no guarantee that they’re not going to die. I’ve suffered prostate cancer. I’ve suffered heart disease. I’ve suffered very, very deep depression, and I’ve seen some pretty horrible things, but a day at a time it is certainly better than it is bad. Because I don’t think of myself as bad anymore. I’m not too bad at all, as a matter of fact! So life gets better. I tell Diana every day that I love her, no matter where I am. I like using the word “love,” you see. Like when you use the word “hate.” People use the word “hate” all the time. I said to Diana one time—we were watching the first President Bush on television, and he said he hated broccoli—I said, “He won’t get re-elected.” And he didn’t, ’cause you can’t use that word. “Hate” and “hatred” are two words not in my lexicon. It’s amazing, you can use the words “kill” and “hate” on television, but you can’t say “fuck,” which could connote the sexual act of love. If you’re doing it right! But anyway, that’s another matter.

The change in my life has been remarkable. There’s been so much
laughter. Not jokes either. It has to do with absurdity. The appreciation of words and observing. I used to think that all life took place in these shoeboxes we call saloons. I didn’t drink much at home, but wherever I did drink, I could not just stop. I never said, “I need a drink.” I always said, “I want a drink.
I want it
.” I didn’t need it. Nobody does.

So now I’m in love with life. I’ve had some health things, but I’m able to handle them. Like recently I went for a physical. Part of it was a colonoscopy. All of a sudden my heart began to race, like Indianapolis:
boom
,
boom
,
boom
,
boom
,
boom
. And they couldn’t do the procedure. It was up to 150 beats a minute. So they sent me to emergency, where they try to stabilize it and all that. Finally they gave me these defibrillators—
ba-boom
,
ba-boom
—to get my heart back to a normal rhythm. They thought I was going to have a heart attack. I could hear them talk. They told me that maybe because of the preparation for the exam, I drained myself of these various nutrients that the heart needs, like electrolytes and stuff like that. So I’m lying on the gurney and this very serious young doctor is listening to my heart go
biddy-beep
,
biddy-bump
, and I said to the doctor, “Do you sing?” He said, “No.” And I said, “You really should sing.” Trying to get a smile out of the guy, but he was deadly serious. I said, “Everybody should sing.” And he said, “Well, I don’t.” So I turned to Diana and said, “This is what comes from not paying your electrolyte bill!” I got him, I made him laugh. I just thought, “Isn’t this absurd? Here I am on the verge of a fuckin’ heart attack, and I’m telling jokes to make a doctor laugh.”

So life is fun and sometimes sad. I go to funerals and all of that, but for now, I’m staying on the right side of the grass. As an alcoholic I was a liar, a swindler, a thief, a deceiver, and just about anything else that a person can become when his defects are allowed to run wild. Getting sober did not mean I suddenly became a haloed saint, or all the defects took a hike into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Not bloody likely! You can take the brandy out of a fruitcake, but you still have a fruitcake. Getting sober has allowed me to work on those defects and bit by bit get better. It’s fairly clear to me now that if I stay clean and sober, I’ve got a good chance of acting right and having a peaceful day, and then tomorrow, if there is one, I won’t have to lie about what I did the day before.

A Benedictine monk named Father Basil once told me there’s another life after this one, and when I reach it, the only question the deity will ask me is “Did you have a good time?” While I’m in no hurry to get there, I’m ready with a “Yes, I did, thank you very much. I particularly like those parts towards the end.”