Shaken & Stirred - The Playwright
NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
Bowery Bum.
That’s the politically incorrect term that could have applied to my paternal grandfather James, except that he didn’t come from the Bowery. He came, originally, from County Galway in Ireland to the great city of New York. His wife, my grandmother Catherine, came from County Monaghan.
Grandpa James didn’t live in the Bowery, either. He and my grandmother settled into a tenement on West 51st St. in a neighborhood affectionately known to this day as Hell’s Kitchen, which at the time – the time being the late 19th, early 20th century - was a bastion of poor and working class Irish immigrants.
James, Catherine, and their three boys fell under the category of “poor.” In fact, I believe “dirt poor” would be a more accurate description. You see, James could not hold down a job to support his family – he was an active alcoholic. So when Catherine had finally had enough, she showed the iron backbone with which God blessed all Irish women and threw him out, making him homeless and making my father, the oldest son, man of the house. He was eleven at the time. He quit school, lied about his age, and went to work, while his mother got the rent lowered by scrubbing the halls and stairways in their tenement.
Fast forward almost twenty years later. My parents, not yet married, were out on the town in Manhattan with a group of friends when a panhandler approached them for money. My Dad recognized the vagrant as his father, pulled him aside, briefly spoke to him, and gave him a few bucks. As far as I know, that was the first time he’d seen James since he left home. It was also the last. Some years later someone – I don’t know who – notified my Dad that his father had died. My father paid to have him buried. Where, I don’t know.
The interesting part of this story is that it all came to me from my mother and my siblings. My father never spoke to me of Grandpa James. Never once.
- Virginia Wall Gruenert
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