Brendan Behan made much of growing up in a tenement, but he did not say that his grandmother owned the building. Brendan’s mother’s mother, Christine English, was referred to as the Empress of Russell Street, because she owned several tenement houses there, each of which could hold up to a hundred people. Residents would come up to her bedroom to pay rent while she was sitting on the bed with Brendan’s uncle Paddy beside her like “peasants coming to pay the tithe”.
Grandma English was in the affordable housing business.
Behan had deep Republican roots. His uncle, Peader Kearney, wrote the Irish national anthem. His mother, Peader’s sister, was housekeeper for Maud Gonne. At fourteen, Brendan joined the IRA youth organization. At sixteen, in 1939, he was arrested in Liverpool for trying to blow up the docks and sentenced to a stretch in Borstal. He was released and expelled from England when he was eighteen. A few years after that, he shot a cop in Dublin and spent time in an Irish prison. He spent a few years in Paris, supporting himself by writing pornography. He returned to Dublin, wrote two plays (The Hostage and The Quare fellow) and a brilliant memoir called Borstal Boy. He spent long periods of time in New York, and drank himself to death at the age of forty-one in 1964. You can still see pictures of him, arm and arm with Jackie Gleason, hanging in faux Irish pubs in the Financial District and Midtown East.
(‘Borstal Institutions’ of the type to which Behan was sentenced were what we would refer to in this country as ‘reform schools’, or ‘youth offender programs’. The Borstal system was begun in the early twentieth century and dismantled in 1982, by the Thatcher government. The aim was to separate young offenders from older criminals and to place an emphasis on rehabilitation and training, instead of punishment. The daily regimen consisted of manual work, PT, education and outdoor activities. The original model for the institutions were English public schools.)
Behan once said, ‘Where I grew up, there was no stigma attached to drinking. To have enough to eat was an achievement. To get drunk was a victory!” As soon as he was old enough to walk, Grandma English would take him to the pubs. When he was seven, a passer-by saw him weaving as he walked home with his grandmother and said, ‘That poor boy. He is retarded’, to which Grandma English replied, ‘He’s not retarded, you cunt. He’s drunk.’ When he arrived in New York once, he said, ‘I saw a sign that said, ‘Drink Canada Dry’. I did’. When he travelled from France to Spain in the early 1950s, the border guards asked him why he had come. He said,
-To attend Franco’s funeral.
The border guards looked surprised and said,
-The Generalissimo is not dead.
-I can wait.
Borstal Boy is a little too long and a little too plotless. He inserts too many Republican songs and leans heavily on the Irish schtick. But – Christ on a bicycle – the world-building and writing are brilliant. Here is Behan, speaking about a morning in jail before he goes to Borstal, after the chamber pots had been cleaned for the day and before room inspection, when everything was supposed to be spic, span and empty:
The breakfast came around before I had started [cleaning] and I ate it, and then, God of war, did I want a crap. I squatted down anyway and used the pot. There was a lid thing for it and when I finished I put it on, and started to scrub the furniture; bed-boards, table, chair and wash-stand, and then started on the slate floor, to wash it first, and dry, and then I got on my knees and soaped it, and then had to move the chamber-pot out of my way, like some covered dish of disgust.
When I had finished, the cell had the smell of shit and soap – the first smell that I was conscious of when I came into reception, the smell of a British jail.
He could do lyrical, too. Here is Behan describing the coast of the North Sea near the Borstal where he was sentenced:
Going back down the road I could see the moon, wild and hiding itself, behind an odd cloud, over the mad grey sea, beyond the half-drenched marshes.
And here is his return to Dublin:
“Passport, travel permit or identity document, please”, said the immigration man beside me.
I handed him the expulsion order.
He read it, looked at it and handed it back to me. He had a long, educated countryman’s sad face, like a teacher, and took my hand.
“Cead mile failte sa bhaile romhat”
A hundred thousand welcomes home to you.
I smiled and said, “Go raibh maith agat”.
Thanks.
He looked very serious and tenderly enquired, “Caithfidh go bhuil se go hiontach bheith saor”.
“Caithfidh go bhuil.”
“It must be wonderful to be free”
“It must”, said I, walked down the gangway, past a detective, and got on the train for Dublin.
The book is divided into four sections. Behan is arrested. He spends some time in jails in Liverpool, pre-sentencing. He does a bit in a Borstal on the south-eastern coast of England. He returns to Ireland. The first and the last sections take up no more than a few pages each. The meat of the book is the time in jail and the time in Borstal. From the way he tells it, jail sounds bad, but Borstal sounds pretty good. He got in a few fights, but he fell in with a good bunch of chinas. He worked on a Navvy gang for a while, before he was transferred to the building crew, and then to the painting and glazing crew. He won an essay competition, acted in a play, read, and learned how to play rugby. The screws were mostly retired military, but they were more high school football coaches than corrections officers. It is more Welcome Back, Cotter than Scared Straight.
Three themes undergird the story. The first is Behan’s Republicanism. The second is friendship. The third is sex. Although he was married to a woman and fathered two children, Behan was bisexual. He couldn’t write openly in the 1950s about what surely happened, but it is easy enough to read between the lines. His best china, Charlie, puts cigarettes in Behan’s pocket for him when Behan’s hands are wet. Behan admires the back of Charlie’s neck when they stand in line. There are references to ‘married quarters’. These are fifteen-to-eighteen year-old boys cooped up together with no girls around, for feck’s sake. What do you think will happen?
(I understand that a movie was made of the book in 2002, and that it was crap. In it, the Behan character tells Charlie that he doesn’t go for that stuff, there is a love story involving one of the screw’s daughters, and Behan tells a screw, ‘I will renounce my loyalty to the IRA until you are done with that bastard Hitler’. In fact, there are almost no women in the book, Behan never renounced the IRA and even tells a screw near the end that he doesn’t care about ‘your bleedin convoys’. Although the Irish government was officially neutral during the war, they were quite warm toward their enemy’s enemy, and de Valera even sent a telegram of condolence to Jodl when he heard that Hitler had died. But, then, there is Hollywood, and there is the world.)
Behan has no problem sending up educated people, dumbasses, the Catholic church, the Church of England, toffs, middle class people, cops, screws, squaddies, sailors, cockneys, Geordies, Irish people, the Welsh, Channel Islanders – everyone, really, and their friends in America. But the one thing he does not complain about in his book was lack of organization. The jails and reform schools where he spent his time were well-run.
Not so, the title division of the New York State DMV.
I have written previously about the knuckle-dragging, bog-man, gob-shite eeeeeedjtis who work in the title division of the DMV. They are thick as shite and half as handy. If work was the bed, they would sleep on the floor. They are sharp as a beach-ball. May the cat eat them, and the devil eat the cat.
In September of last year, Mike, the manager of my park in northern New York and I bought a double-wide from an old lady who had moved to a retirement community in Utica. She had bought the home from the park’s previous owner, a guy I will call Paddy. When Mike and I first inspected the home, we found cead mile at-home Covid tests, some canned tomatoes, piles of detritus, and a blank certificate of origin.
A certificate of origin, or a C of O, is like a birth certificate for a manufactured home. When a dealer buys a new home from the factory, it comes with a C of O. The dealer signs the C of O over to the first retail buyer, and the retail buyer sends the signed C of O along with a bill of sale, a completed and executed Form MV82-TON and a check for $125 to the DMV. The DMV sends the new owner a title. When it comes time for the new owner to sell the home, she signs over the title to the next owner, same as she would the title for a used car.
When Paddy sold the old lady the double-wide in 2004, he did not sign over the C of O.
Paddy is old and not in good health these days, but I managed to track him down. We met at a diner north of Syracuse. He told me about his wife, who is also not doing well, and about a medical procedure he recently had that involved shoving a flexible tube up his nose and into his stomach. He and his wife were planning to spend the winter on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He spoke a bit about politics. He is MAGA, so I steered the conversation to safer topics. He signed the C of O. I filled out a Form MV82-TON, wrote a letter explaining what had happened and sent everything, along with a check for $125 to the bog-men at the DMV.
Then, two months of radio silence.
In November, I called the DMV to ask what had happened. After a very long wait on hold, I reached an operator, who told me that the application containing the original C of O had been sent back in September because the C of O had not been signed. ‘The feck you say’, I said. ‘I never got it.”
-Check with the post office.
-What if they don’t have it?
-It was sent in September.
-Why was it bounced?
-The case notes say that the C of O was not signed.
-Yes, it was. I am looking at a copy of it now.
-I just know what the case note say.
-So, what the bloody hell do I do?
-Send us a new application with the copy you have.
When I checked with the post office to see if the original packet had been sent, the clerk asked, ‘You want me to check your box for you?’ I said,
-I can check my own mailbox.
-So – what do you want me to do?
-They say they sent it, but it did not end up in my box. Could they have mis-labelled it? Could you check to see if it is sitting on a shelf somewhere, like where you put missing mail?
The clerk looked at me like I was a bug, so I walked away. I remembered that, in the Easter 1916 uprising, the Dublin General Post Office was the center of the action. I hoped the IRA men slit a few postal workers’ throats before the English and the Black and Tans came in to finish them.
I filled out a new application, enclosed a copy of the signed C of O, and sent it off. Two weeks later, the application came back, rejected. The notes said that the DMV could not accept the application because it did not include the original C of O – the original document that was in the packet that was send back to me and that, I had explained to the DMV two weeks prior, never arrived.
Oh, good Jesus, I thought. They’re trying to take the piss out of me. May the dryshites be eaten by the itch.
I called the help line again. A woman who spoke in complete sentences picked up. This could be my lucky day, I thought, and knocked on some wood. ‘Could you help me, please’, I said. ‘I am acting the maggot here’. I explained about the C of O, the lost packet, the original, the signature and the copy. She said, ‘Send it back in, with a new signature on the copy.’ I said,
-I already did that once. How do I know it won’t get bounced again, for the same reason?
-Send it to me personally. I will issue you a title.
Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I thought. It’s a grand day for drying. I asked,
-What’s your name?
-Kathleen.
-Do you have a last name?
-Kathleen O.
-May you be halfway to heaven before the divil knows you’re dead, Kathleen.
So I signed the copy for a third time, wrote another check for $125, stuffed everything into an envelope and dropped the envelope into a mailbox. When I checked the mail two weeks later, I found two things. The first was a thin envelope from Kathleen, containing a title to the home. The second was the packet that had been sent to me in early September. Some Gombeen in the DMV had transposed two of the digits in the mailbox number. It had been sitting on the shelf for mis-labelled mail during the three intervening months as the staff of the post office walked past it each day, going about their business.
It is established knowledge that mohls bring the scraps from their work to a central warehouse in Elizabeth, NJ at the end of each work-week. Once enough flesh is collected, the staff send it to a black site in Ireland whose location is known only to the pope, the anti-pope, the head of the CIA and the Taoiseach. The Irish do their magic and send it back to us in the form of priests. But where do DMV staff and postal workers come from? Only Mr. Behan knew that – and he took it with him to his grave.