Read The Harder They Fall Online
Authors: Gary Stromberg
The Harder They Fall (19 page)
Hopeless.
As if I was drowning.
Voices swirled in my head so that I wasn’t able to tell which came from me and which were hallucinations. My conversations became animated, like those crazy people on the street. I heard people who had worked for me talking outside the bedroom window. They were loud, rude, laughing, angry. They made fun of my helplessness. I yelled at them, louder and louder, and still they refused to answer.
“What the fuck are you doing out there?”
As that craziness went on, I continued to smoke until I ran out of cocaine. By then, I was experiencing serious dementia. Stuck in a surreal landscape of constantly shifting emotions. No weight. Floating at the distant end of a tunnel. Miserably alone. Frightened. Voices growing louder,
closing in. Wave after wave of depression. Needing to get high. Real high.
No more dope.
Unsure what to do, I panicked.
“God, what do you want me to do?” I cried. “What do you want me to do?”
I didn’t wait for a response.
“I’ll show you.” I said with the giddiness and relief of a certified madman. “I’ll show you.”
More laughter mixed with tears.
“I’m going to set myself on fire.”
Hysteria.
“Then I’ll be safe. Yeah, then I’ll be okay.”
Now here’s how I really burned up. Usually, before I go to bed I have a little milk and cookies. One night I had that low-fat milk, that pasteurized shit, and I dipped my cookie in it and the shit blew up. And it scared the shit out of me. Not the blowing up, but the catching on fire.
Imagining relief was nearby, I reached for the cognac bottle on the table in front of me and poured it all over me. Real natural, methodical. As the liquid soiled my body and clothing, I wasn’t scared. Neither did I feel inner peace.
I was in a place called There.
Suddenly, my isolation was interrupted by a knock on the door. A bang, really. My cousin opened it and looked inside at the moment I picked up my Bic lighter. I saw him trying to figure out what I was doing.
“Come on in,” I said.
He zeroed in on the lighter in my hand.
“Oh no!” he exclaimed.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Then I flicked it. The lighter didn’t work. I tried it again and nothing. Then I did it a third time.
WHOOSH!
I was engulfed in flame.
Have you ever burned up? It’s weird. Because you go, “Hey, I’m not in the fireplace. I am the fireplace!” (186–89)
Deep down, I knew the truth. Lying in my hospital bed, I let my mind wander back to the time when I’d asked Redd Foxx why I always wanted more, more, more cocaine, and how he’d looked at my ignorant face and told me it was because I was an addict.
An addict.
I didn’t tell anyone.
As if it was a secret. As if it wasn’t true.
But who were you fooling, Rich?
Even then you wanted more. (204)
You go through changes in your life and you just fucking change. Something happened in my life just fucking changed my mind about all the shit. I used to think I knew everything, man.
I’d be fucked up and I knew it. I knew all the shit.
And all of a sudden I didn’t know shit.
I was one of the dumbest mother fuckers that ever lived. If you catch me on the wrong day and ask me my name, you’re gonna get trouble. (206)
Several weeks later Richard got a call from a friend in a rehab. She wanted him to help her in recovery by participating in her therapy. He reluctantly agreed. As he remembers the situation: (207)
One day, caught in the fervor, I stood up and admitted that I, too, was a drug addict and alcoholic. It wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. Amen. Or hadn’t known for years. Sing it brother. But to say it loud, in front of strangers, without adding a punch line, man that was like saying adios to the greatest, funniest character I ever created. My best work, you know. And it scared the hell out of me. (208)
From
Richard Pryor: Here and Now
(Columbia Pictures, 1993)
I stopped drinking.
It’s really strange.
I stopped after twenty years. I’ll probably die tomorrow.
I got tired of waking up in my car driving 90.
You ever go home drunk, trying to get to your bed, and your house starts moving?
You know you’re fucked up when your dog won’t come to you!
And where does that breath come from? Did someone just come and shit in your mouth?
I couldn’t stop drinking until the bartender would say, “We got no more liquor!”
I went for a job once, and the guy told me I couldn’t have it because I wasn’t dependable. I told him, “I got a $200-a-day habit. Tell me that ain’t dependable.”
I can remember when I was just off drugs. I noticed that my dick was a lot smaller than I thought.
I get scared when I’m out on stage sometimes. I want to run. If I had some drugs, I wouldn’t give a fuck. But then I come off stage, and I still wouldn’t give a fuck. Then, by the time you’re fifty, you’ve had a lot of don’t -give-a-fucks. You miss a big part of your life that way.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water
.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water
.
—Zen saying
(writer, actor, entrepreneur)
P
OOR AS CHURCH MICE
were the McCourts of Limerick. Starvation and death all around and sexual molestation by priests were the order of the day. Two brothers, Frank and Malachy, shipped out as soon as they could and struggled to make a better life in America. Malachy worked as a longshoreman and became an actor and saloonkeeper. He owned New York’s first singles bar, Malachy’s, a hangout frequented by the likes of Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, and Grace Kelly. As an actor, he played in a half-dozen movies including
Reversal of Fortune
,
Bonfire of the Vanities
, and
She’s the One
. He has also had many television roles, including that of a priest on HBO’s prison drama
Oz
. Frank told the story of his boyhood in a book,
Angela’s Ashes
, which became a hit movie. At sixty-six, Malachy became a published author with
A Monk Swimming
, an account of his adventures as a young immigrant in New York. This became a best seller and was followed by
Singing My Him Song
in 2002.
Transforming desperate straits and madcap adventures of their real lives into art has been the brothers’ stock-in-trade. In several productions of their autobiographical stage play,
A Couple of Blaguards
, Malachy even played himself.
Frank was more the literary brother, Malachy the happy-go-lucky one who lived it up. A regular in the Hamptons bacchanals that were wilder than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s by far, he was a gadfly of the
sixties-seventies rich at play. Signs of political conscience began to surface, and today he is a political and environmental activist.
Meeting him at his cluttered apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, I was greeted by his warm and friendly wife, Diana, who explained that Malachy was off getting a haircut and should be home shortly. In the meantime, she told me all about the breakfast they had both just attended that morning to hear new presidential candidate John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. The McCourts are heavily involved in politics and freely shared their liberal ideology with me.
Malachy arrived full of energy and spoke to me as if we were old friends, even though this was our first meeting. We began the interview in his cozy den, seated across from each other in two overstuffed chairs. His readily adapted to its occupant’s shape almost as if it does so automatically. Books and bookshelves fill three walls, the fourth allowing for a couple of windows that provide nice morning light. Malachy is dressed in a simple, white, long-sleeved shirt rolled up to just below the elbows, and a wrinkled pair of white linen trousers. Add the shock of uncombed white hair, which contrasts nicely with his bright red Irish complexion, and you have the basic picture.
As we begin the interview, I sense that even though Malachy has told his story countless times, he still enjoys retelling it for my benefit.
There was always an acceptance in Irish society of drinking alcohol and drinking to excess. Brendan Behan said, “To get enough to eat was an accomplishment, but to get drunk was a victory.” Getting food was grubbing, but getting alcohol, not just stout or port or beer, but getting whiskey … you made it! Under the cover then of drinking, all sorts of terrible things were done to people: assaults, violence, murder, assaults on women, and the most horrendous of all, abuse of children, both sexual and otherwise.
If you looked at any of the Irish newspapers, the defense lawyers, or solicitors as they are called, would say, “The way it is, Your Honor, my client had the drink taken.” … “Ah, was that the way it was? So the poor man must not have known what he did.” I remember one case, it struck me so forcibly, they’re having these traveling people in Ireland called tinkers, and they had animals that would wander grazing. They never fed them, so their horses and donkeys or mules were all over the place. I remember one of them; he got six months in jail for letting his horses roam. Another fellow had raped a young girl and he got off ’cause he had the drink taken and didn’t know what he was doing. So with that sort of a background, I looked on alcohol as something to aspire to. That you would grow up and be able to drink like the men.
And the men, of course, congregated in pubs, and the women had snugs, little areas in the pub that were walled off, like the Taliban does. Like little speakeasies with sliding doors. They looked like a confessional.
A lot of people didn’t drink and a lot of people drank moderately. They would have one or two pints and that was it, but the disease of alcoholism is always after people.
One day my friend and I, at the age of eleven, talked about getting drunk. He said, “Let’s do it,” and I said, “Fine, but where are we going to get the money?” And he said, “I know where my brother keeps some money, some savings.” So he stole it. We went to a pub and we ordered some cider first, and we got drunk. That was the first one. And I found it to be absolutely exhilarating. I had never felt like that. Coming out of poverty—there are a couple of things that accompany poverty just like those that accompany alcoholism. The sense of shame. You’re ashamed of being poor. As an alcoholic, you’re ashamed of what you did and what you are. So it was the business of escaping, always escaping what we are. Shame takes care of the past, and all fear is future based. Fear is always in the future. In our own heads we project what is going to happen, and it almost never does. It’s like coming attractions, but my God doesn’t make coming attractions. I do, because God is far too busy.
My friend Father Michael Judge, who was killed on 9/11, was a recovering man too. A decent, terrific man. I was moaning to him about what
was going to happen to me. “My life was coming to an end,” I thought. I couldn’t make any money. My career was in the dumps and I was depressed and all of that. Things were not going well. And he said to me, not once but several times, “My God does not deal with the future, and I don’t think yours does either. You see, God is extremely busy dealing with today, and consequently he has not yet made tomorrow. That’s the future. Nor has he made next week, next year, or any time, really. As infinitely all-powerful and infallible as God is, as much as God knows, he has not yet made tomorrow. He does not know what’s going to happen, so who the fuck do you think you are?”