Singing My Him Song
Malachy McCourt, actor, gadfly and raconteur follows up his international best seller A Monk Swimming with this, the second instalment of his hilarious memoirs.Malachy McCourt grew up in Limerick amid death, squalor, poverty and abuse. When he went to America as a young man, he took with him a gargantuan appetite for what life had to offer – and an equal drive to forget what it had delivered so far. In A Monk Swimming, he caroused his way all over the world, becoming a familiar face in movies and television, and in bars from Paris to Calcutta.Now he tells us the rest of the story – how he went from world-class drunk to sober and loving father and grandfather. Bawdy and funny, naked and moving, and told in the same inimitable voice that left readers all over the world wondering what happened next, he tells as honest and entertaining a story as you could hope for.
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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
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
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.
