SOUTH DARTMOUTH, Mass.
We’d drifted into The Old Landmark, first bar on Bowery, for my big brother’s bachelor
party. There was no plan, just the assurance of youth. Two brown lookers in leotards of
multi-colored, glittering spangles heaving voluptuously above great lengths of fishnet stockings
tended bar while I wondered why I had never so much as peeked inside the place previously.
The bar was on the southeast corner of East Fourth Street and Bowery, in Lower Manhattan. We lived a half-block away in a fifth-floor, one-bedroom walkup, where about a dozen close friends were to spend the night
before the wedding. Tomorrow would be the luckiest day of brother Chip’s life. He was then a week short of
his 23rd birthday and about to marry Ellen Dee, 20, out on Long Island. Young Rascals’ “Good Loving’’ was en route to Number 1 on the hit parade.
Whether the two Puerto Rican men who hosted that evening had, with or without their
ladies, bought or leased the premises is unknown to me, but memory tries to insist that it was their opening
night. What’s clear as a bell is that Terry Dooley, from East Aurora, N.Y., about 20 miles
southeast of Buffalo, pulled in alone, shouting encouraging words and slapping a wad of cash
on the bar barely a month after losing his dad to an airplane crash against Mt. Fuji.
Within hours perhaps, 20 young men from upstate New York, as well as Michigan, Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey
and elsewhere, had crammed the place partying hard. I think that the new proprietors thought
it would be like this every night, as if they had stumbled onto a gold mine.
There was maybe an inch of beer and possibly a tilt on the Old Landmark’s floor because
some specifically recalled Dooley shout “Watch this!” and then throw himself chest down across
that shallow lake, bodysurfing nearly the length of the bar. New York leisure spots were
dangerously free of restrictions back then, with a drinking age of 18 and generally a 4 a.m. closing time.
Chip and Ellen had recently leased an apartment on West 92nd Street, where the
groom and I, the best man, were to stay overnight with groomsmen Ralph and Paul, because
that’s where the rental tuxedos hung to change into. In the morning, we were to get into
Ralph’s 1956 DeSoto – acquired from a former girlfriend’s mother—before going down to St.
Francis Xavier Church, on 16th Street, to pick up the priest and then drive about 30 miles to the church in
Merrick, the suburban town where Chip and I had grown up, arriving by 11 a.m. for Mass outside the rail (Ellen
wasn’t Catholic.)
When the party was over, there was a problem: Paul was gone, and no one knew to where. Chip and
I and Ralph got in the car and began to drive through the West Village on our way uptown. Paul
would show up somewhere. It was a warm night, and our front windows were down. Ralph
drove, I sat shotgun and Chip was in the back seat. We stopped at a red light. There were four
or five guys standing on the sidewalk. It was late to be just hanging on a corner, but we didn’t
think much of it until Ralph asked me: “Who they beating on?” I shook my head and looked out
to see the group flailing on somebody. Idly, I turned to Chip in the back seat. He wasn’t there.
How or why he silently left the car remains a mystery.
Ralph and I jumped out simultaneously. We waded into the group and started pulling
strangers off of Chip. We got him back into the car and locked his door. I jumped back in,
pushed my lock button down and slid away from a head and hands reaching for me through my
open window. I made as if I was trying to slide onto Ralph’s lap while he started the car, then
raised my right leg to slam a booted foot into the attacker’s face. He dropped like a branch in
the forest about the time Ralph gunned it.
We made it to 92nd Street, parked, then went inside. Still no sign of Paul.
I felt as if I had set an alarm as I woke up on the living room couch with a droning noise
in my head and could not immediately find where to shut it off. Chip was sleeping soundly on
the floor. I crawled over and shook him gently, saying “Get up, Chip. It’s your wedding day.” His
left eye opened briefly and his right fist caught my jaw. “Tomorrow,” he grunted. I was plenty
hung over, but now my jaw hurt more than my head. I got a quick glass of water from the
kitchen faucet, took a sip, and then – leaving some distance between us-- poured the rest onto my
brother’s face. I’d like to say we shaved, showered and dressed quickly, but I wouldn’t swear to
all of it. I do not recall the time, but we were running late already. There was still no word of
Paul as we headed out.
We were on at least the second floor; I think the third. There was a little trouble opening the
front door because a pile of somebody was sleeping it off in the front foyer hugging the
threshold. It was Paul. I suddenly connected the droning in my head to his curved nail scissors
jammed between the apartment’s buzzer button and its housing. It must’ve been blaring all
night. We roused the panic within him, pushing Paul back upstairs then into his tux and shiny
shoes.
You ought to hear a bit about my brother. He was as good as they come, usually. He was
always four grades ahead of me since he skipped a half-year once. The evolution of his thinking
is the evolution of mine. Mom provided much love and incredibly good food, while Dad mostly provided
discipline, softened slightly by stories of Ireland. Dad was a police officer who’d never seen the
inside of a high school, but he’d gotten his GED and attended Columbia University nights. We
kids would leave our homework out on the dining room table and he’d check it over when he
got home after we’d gone to bed. If he objected to what he saw he would come upstairs to wake the
offender and bring him downstairs to review. Without exception, I think, the “him” was me.
On weekends and in summers I was pretty much assigned to shadow Chip. The
best part was that if Chip minded the assignment he never really let on. We shared a room from
the get-go. Don’t get the wrong idea. There were plenty of nights he was so annoyed that he
told me if I fell asleep first, he would get out of bed to get a clear shot at punching me in the
stomach. This made me sit up, back to the headboard, and struggle to stay awake while he
secretly slept. He built a crystal radio from scratch. He got much better grades and was very
popular, particularly with girls. As young kids we’d scour the apartment houses for bottles and
newspapers to haul to the junkman. The money from that usually bought us Saturday
double-feature movies with cartoon, newsreels and popcorn.
After freshman year at college, Chip came home with the family’s first record player since an
early gramophone that only played 78’s. He acquired the stereo with a pawn ticket bought from
a classmate for five bucks, redeemed it and then bought an album of Maurice Ravel’s music.
With our younger sisters we’d open the doors and windows and play Bolero with the volume
as loud as possible. Until the day I retired from practicing law if I had a trial or serious motion to
argue I still played Bolero full blast all the way to court just to gin me up to fighting mode.
On Chip’s first college Christmas he gave me a subscription to the National Review in his
conservative phase. Next Christmas my gift subscription changed to The Catholic Worker,
edited by socialist Dorothy Day. Chip attended meetings of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee in New York and came home talking about Stokely Carmichael. Then
he nursed me through Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, The Dharma Bums and Maggie Cassidy as well as Beat
poetry. At the time he got married he was a junior high English teacher in The Bronx, but that soon
morphed into fire spotter, wheat farmer and newspaper sports columnist from a log cabin in
northern Alberta, Canada. He and Ellen went on to raise four kids and a couple of First Nation
foster children, starting with learning to build that oil lamp-lit log cabin by the White Mud River
where you could meet a bear while waiting for the school bus.
Chip was the kind of brother who invited me up to visit for a week when he worked two full-
time summer jobs at Lake George, N.Y. I never asked him why he did that, but he knew that since I was 15 I’d jump at such a furlough.
Our dad was off in World War II when Chip was born. They didn’t meet until after Chip turned two. That may have affected their relationship.
I don’t recall that Chip ever flunked a course in school whereas I could bring home a quarterly report
with five of six grades writ bright red. If it weren’t for the New York State Regents exams –you passed
the test, you passed the course—I would still be in high school. Yet my brother took Dad’s
displeasure more to heart than did I. I assume that Chip must have been hit by Dad
occasionally, but I don’t remember one such instance. I, however, progressed to the full leather-
belt treatment twice.
Back to Chip’s wedding day. With less than an hour to go, we picked up the Rev. Eamon Taylor, the curate from St. Francis Xavier, and headed out to Long Island. By coincidence or otherwise, Ellen had endured the pre-
Marriage-at-Cana conference scrutiny and the commitment of unborn children to Holy Mother Church at
the very same Manhattan parish in which my mother had been married more than 25 years before. Unlike mom, who converted, Ellen chose to stick with Martin Luther. Father Taylor did not seem to mind, and Ellen liked him very much.
We had not yet found the exit off the Southern State Parkway as the radio announced the
upcoming 11 a.m. news. I was not eager to be late but given that our car contained the priest,
the groom, his best man and two ushers I was willing to bet that the bridal party would wait a
few minutes.
The four guys in our car besides the driver focused out loud on getting off the parkway as the
Merrick exit came into view. Nevertheless, Ralph missed it. I think that’s the reason we were
20 minutes late to the church. We had to go to the next exit and drive back to Merrick.
The Mass was long, yes, but I spent most of it kneeling next to Chip while using my shoulder
to help him to keep looking vertical. Before the reception at The Thatched Cottage, in
Centerport, Chip gave Father Taylor a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. After the reception the
only guy sufficiently sober to drive the couple to the rather cheap Times Square Hotel for their
wedding night was Ellen’s younger brother, Charlie, who wasn’t yet old enough to have a
license.
Chip and Ellen each flew to Miami impersonating friends. Chip went with an ID supplied by
Ralph to qualify as young enough to fly standby student rate. Ellen got hers from former
roommate Mary Lynne Warren to use in Florida to meet the older drinking age.
Their marriage lasted 38 years until my brother passed away.
Gerald FitzGerald, who lives on the Massachusetts South Coast, is a writer and lawyer. He has served as a state prosecutor, defense lawyer, newspaper reporter and editor.