Dissident Gardens (26 page)

No, it is not possible to have refused Rye at the prospect of that call, and who would have wished to? Not the twenty-year-old Toronto bricklayer—born and raised in Ulster, yes, but then few were the Canadians upon whom no greater claim of citizenship elsewhere lay, whether borne lightly or heavily. No, certainly not this bricklayer, he who to take the call leaned on the wall beside the telephone in the corridor of Powell’s Residence for Men, in northeastern Toronto, a mostly Scottish suburb in this vast mosaic of suburbs, where the frowning Scots-Canuck landlady had to her chagrin found herself housemother to a fresh contingent of Irish bricklayers, including himself, and she was not a friendly or forgiving sort of housemother either, least of all when it came to micks. Here in her corridor where he clutched the telephone’s heavy receiver with knuckles and fingertips so dry and cracked from the laying-in and smoothing of mortar that he doubted the chances he’d lift up his Silvertone tonight after dinner. Even if willing to brave the shushing disapprobation of Mrs. Powell, rising through the transom into the room he shared with George Stack, should his and George’s harmonizing voices drift above a certain volume, a measurement verifiable only by her. Often he suspected Mrs. Powell hovered at their door just waiting, such pleasure did she seem to derive from the action.

Apart from his mate George Stack, Tommy Gogan couldn’t any longer recall the names of the other brickies and hod carriers there at Mrs. Powell’s. For all he knew they still lived and worked there as he’d last seen them, a scattering of young northern Protestants who, by dint of an uncle’s letter or because of a friendly tip from a beaverish fellow at a settlement house’s labor office, on being viewed en masse were seen as unemployed men to be sorted into professions according to their birth nationalities and creeds. So the Irish had been
fated to assemble the dull brick two-stories with which this young city was hurriedly fleshing itself, and in the process to have whatever was native in them be leached by Ontario’s winter light.

For to leap to the Canadian provinces was to shed the lineage of European woes not for the great boorish seduction and mystery of the States. Instead it was to come to reside in a cooling zone, a place for blanching memory and grief in the cheery tolerance of Anglophone Canada. This New World where Her Majesty still squinted at you from the currency when you cashed your paycheck. A function, perhaps, of the ratio of humans to timber, to acreage, there being inordinate quantities of the latter and an incurable scarcity of the former. Such that those settling this expanse appeared to have largely huddled against the young nation’s southern border for solidarity and warmth, however unpopular it might be to point this out.

Tommy’s secret curse, though it hardly struck him as curse at the time, was how little credible woe he’d imported with him in the crossing. Not even a thrashing’s worth. Their father could spare the three of them only a single thrashing, bestowed on Peter at age seven, just to convey the hint of tyranny behind such propriety as that of the Geoghans of Belfast. Coming of age inside the crabbed prospect of postwar Ulster, Tommy Geoghan had at sixteen fibbed his way into the Royal Navy, yet never boarded a ship that went beyond sight of land. Never earned a thrashing there either, nor even witnessed one. Bumped out after a service spent playing cards, reading Conrad Aiken and A. E. Housman and six-month-old newspapers, cooking a little, picking up a guitar. Then trailed his singing brothers to Toronto only to find them decamping immediately to contrive their fortunes in New York City.

Despite residing in Toronto nearly for two prime years of his early manhood, Tommy scarcely recalled anything, short of the ache of his brickie’s forearms, the thin bite of the evening beer. The time had been spent primarily in the forgetting of the fact and flavor of Ulster. Two years to forget Ulster, then five minutes, off the train at Pennsylvania Station, there barraged with the vibrancy of his new city, to forget the Toronto suburbs and the names of his fellows at Mrs. Powell’s, dim threads of memory he scrabbled now to regather, questing in the name of
material
.

Your material being evidently that which you’d shrugged off gratefully behind you.

“Brickies of Ontario”

“We Should Have Made a Union (But Made a Disunion Instead)”

“Mrs. Powell’s Breakfast Admonition”

No, he thought now in his room at the Chelsea, where the ashtray was heaped with cigarettes and his guitar lay fallow, set on the bed insufficiently distant from the tiny hotel room’s desk, and from where his notebook lay before him on that desk with naught but these absurd song titles scratched out to measure his day’s efforts, no, that was merely the life that had in the space of one train crossing been shed. He’d begun shedding it as soon as Niagara Falls, where he’d been taken off the train to present to the immigration officials his passport and a letter from his eldest brother, Peter.

His earlier life, that of the shipbuilder’s son, the boy in Ulster, was the life wholly falsified, once he’d arrived and inked his name to their manager’s contract, pen’s progress halting in the struggle to omit the surplus letters in “Geoghan.” Warren Rokeach, their manager, Jew in a turtleneck as promised, issuing a small throat-growl of satisfaction, his franchise expanded. Tommy, having donned the brocade vest, having donned the sailor’s cap and corduroy trousers, began ascending the claptrap stages of the Gate of Horn and the Golden Spur, leaning into bare microphones to harmonize with good brothers Rye and Peter.

Petey, eldest, played their act’s endearing lout—their drinker, their brawler. Draining pints onstage, Peter mumbled Celtic nonsense not even his younger brothers could decode. Rye stood as their practical joker and lady-killer, a mick Dean Martin. So Tommy slotted into his place as “the sweet one” or, when he hastily carpeted the pink of his cheeks with mutton beards and began, in their stage talk, to distinguish himself for his sympathies, “the sincere one.” It seemed to Tommy Gogan in retrospect he’d been in waiting since his discharge from the British military for the world to issue a clarifying demand, to give outward shape to his hapless impostures. Or else, to accuse him of voyaging into adulthood without the proper paperwork. Now this demand made itself apparent: He was expected to produce a counterfeit
of Tommy Gogan. In that disguise to voyage beyond accusation of any authority except his inmost heart.

Still, any peasant Irishman wandering in his exile into a Greenwich Village nightclub would recognize them for Ulster Protestant at one glance.

Tommy’d spent at this point a year and a half sleeping on a spare mattress at Peter’s Bowery apartment, while nightly thickening the harmonies on “Old Maid in the Garret” and “The Humors of Whiskey.” Afternoons when it wasn’t cold he’d dress as a civilian, in slacks and a cardigan, step over the Bowery derelicts, and take with him a paperback and a pack of cigarettes to Washington Square. There he’d sit pretending to read and eavesdrop on the rehearsals of self-invention playing round the clock on that outdoor stage. The flamboyant students, the teenagers dressed as artists, making drama of their agonies as he could never have imagined doing. The unfurtive homosexual men and—more permanently astonishing—the dykes, those who pretended to be men in order to unveil their secret selves absolutely, those who faked to be real. Tommy made friends for a day or an hour with runaways, with drunk-in-the-morning poets, with charismatic Negroes who’d borrow his pocket money and cover him with praise and promises and never return. In that park you only had to open a book to have someone tell you why it was no good and you ought to read another. When an embittered painter strolled him up to a second-story saloon and explained it was where the famous expressionists did their drinking, Tommy wanted to reply that the whole city was naught but expressionists so far as the eye could see.

And you all seem famous to me.

Days spent as a lonely walker in the great mad city, he understood its genius to be that of indifference, the conferral of the sweet gift of anonymity on hordes tormented by a surplus of identity, by a surplus of wounds and legacies, and he felt himself to be one upon whom this gift was quite utterly wasted. No use to confer anonymity on a man who’d already achieved anonymity, a man for whom that was his only achievement. No use to offer absolution to the unguilty or disguise to the invisible.

The brother act’s ceaseless gigging, along with Tommy’s naïveté at
what lay past the perimeters of the folk scene, kept him circumscribed within a handful of streets. No matter. Inside these bounds, its coffeehouses and saloons, its basements and walk-ups, was a world bottomless in its presumptions, a bedlam of fraudulence. If the brothers were faking their Irish, at least some measure of Irish lived beneath the fakery. Performers sold one another on “traditional” ethnic folk songs cribbed from Mitch Miller, on songs learned five minutes earlier or invented on the spot. Stages were booked by cynics who loathed the music, yet then turned around and let the most hapless and broke of the singers sleep in their basements and fed them hot breakfasts in the morning. Singers of hobo chants or Wobbly anthems turned out to be bluebloods, born of Ivy League families. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the most authentic cowboy singer Tommy or anyone had met, was a Brooklyn Jew. A poshly accented actor who declaimed Shakespearean monologues on coffeehouse stages was arrested drunkenly berating commuters at Grand Central while wearing a dress and wig, a
Daily News
photograph of which was immediately pinned over the bar at the Golden Spur. The Shakespearean’s real name, revealed in print, also that of a Jew, an Armenian refugee from a work camp.

Greenwich Village’s Jews struck Tommy as better fakes than the rest. Their fakery seemed to derive from a fund of dispossession and self-skepticism that made them each and all exiled kings of this preposterous city.

It occurred to Tommy it might be fairly original to pretend to be a Jew, yet the notion was too odd, each time it arose in him, to ever audition saying aloud.

Nights after shows Tommy nursed his complimentary pints while his brothers got bombed or chased tail, or bragged of getting bombed and chasing tail. Tommy chased no tail. Instead Tommy stalked chimeras of authenticity in the counterfeit world. His harmless observing presence found itself begrudged nowhere. If you asked now, you’d find no one who recalled when there hadn’t been a third Gogan, it seemed plain as any Rule of Three. He went where he liked, everyone’s fondly regarded kid brother. Tommy examined the singers going on before and after them, sorting as best he could the committed from the ersatz; Tommy spun the Lomax field recording
Negro Prison Blues and Songs
, otherwise untouched in the stacks near Peter’s stereo;
Tommy unobtrusively haunted the Folklore Center and the office of
Caravan
, nodding along as the protest bards put fresh songs to tape for transcription; Tommy, though forbidden from playing it onstage, ate, slept, and bathed with his Silvertone; Tommy daily battled his limits as a guitarist, driving everyone mad with talking-blues accompaniment to himself, his long fingers if anything too long, leading to a dependence on barre chords; Tommy one day in May ’59 in the back room of the Spur debuted for his brothers his own composition, “A Lynching on Pearl River.” He’d written a song. He wished them to be astonished as he was. Mack Parker’s body was barely dry from the dredging when the lyric came to him—coursed through his scribbling fingers, blunt pencil on a paper sack, with help from the
Herald Tribune
.

Rye scowled. “You been to Mississippi while our backs were turned, brother Tommy?” Boorish Rye disliked Negroes, had once tried to refuse on their behalf an opening slot for Nina Simone, until Peter berated sense into him.

“I can be as stirred as the next man,” said Tommy. “Or don’t civil rights move you at all?”

“Not one black shiny face has yet appeared at a Gogan Boys show, brother. And show me the Pinko that ever paid to hear a note of music. They don’t even drop nickels in a workman’s cap if it’s passed. They sing the union hymns themselves, so why pay? Somebody brings an ill-tuned banjo to the rally and everybody howls along.”

Peter, more damningly, put thumb to upper lip and squeezed his eyes shut, as though the tune had converged with his hangover. “I’m at a loss for the word … this type of number, there’s a word for it, surely.”

“It’s a topical song,” said Tommy.

“Ah, and so it is. Topical. The topic in question, is it only me that’s finding it a wee bit
lugubrious
? That may be the word I was questing for.”

“More lugubrious than ‘The Lambs on the Green Hills,’ say?”

“Fair enough, but ‘Lambs’ is a traditional thing, then. This of yours isn’t our sort of number, is it? It’s a fine curious song you’ve gone and written, Tom. Rather bluesish, without being actually a blues.”

Rye, sensing advantage, piled on. “Not a lot of melody there, apart
from your relentless strumming on that thing. We need no guitar in our group.”

“Up yours, Rye.”

“Ah, but your lyrical gift! Our brother has been possessed by the spirit of sheerest prose, Petey-o.”

The Gogan Boys, behind cherished egalitarian façade, possessed a ruler—their eldest, stumblebum though he might rather appear. With words like
lugubrious
Petey made his directives known. The fix was in on “A Lynching on Pearl River.” By the time Tommy was allowed to face a crowd with guitar in hand, the death of Mack Parker was forgotten, and Tommy Gogan’s lugubrious song had been buried, too.

But Tommy learned, in the months that followed. He took care to anchor his lyrics to the tune of one of the mossiest ballads, familiar enough to beguile his brothers into doing harmony on the choruses. Peter made him wait until deep in their set—three deep, if you told time in pints—and prefaced what he introduced as Tommy’s “fish-wrap songs” with a harangue out of his own fuddled politics.

So
the sincere one
became
the protest one
. “Topical Tommy,” they’d not let him forget. Yet through their chivvying Peter and Rye saw the refurbishment he’d brought their act. As his lyrics debuted in the mimeographed broadsheets, as the Gogans began to appear at benefits for causes, they bridged from their old audience—moldy figs who’d fled the bebop venues, tourist-trap rubes at the Café Bizarre—to the idealists, sit-in sympathizers too distant from any segregated Woolworth’s, blue-eyed girls with crushes on John Glenn and Senator Kennedy. They came to hear Tommy sing “Khrushchev’s Shoe” and “Sharpeville Massacre” and “Talkin’ Gary Powers Blues,” these girls. So in a delayed action, needing to make himself the golden boy before he could let any gold shower upon his person, Tommy partook of that which Rye had promised. Tommy chased a little tail. Tommy broke a few hearts. Tommy bowed to the urging of a girl named Lora Sullivan and allowed her by her own hand to artfully trim and shave away his foolish sideburns and then when he caught sight of his own pretty face in the mirror broke with Lora Sullivan within twenty-four hours, an instance of assholery Rye might have bragged of, but which never entirely quit the arena of Tommy’s self-recriminations.