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ORAN

Colin
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T
GU AN a
memoir

r
B e
od rick
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Copyright © 2009 by Colin Broderick

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of

the Crown Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are

registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on request

from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-307-45340-2

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Maria Elias

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First Edition

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Orangutan 
 

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FNG

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“Wanker. Hey, wankhead.”

Someone was standing over me, yelling. I felt the toe of a
boot prodding harshly into my rib cage. I clenched my fists and
snapped bolt upright, ready for a fight as I forced my leaden
eyelids open.
“That’s it. On yer feet and let’s go,” the voice continued.
“You’re in New York now, ya little bollox. This is not your
mother’s house back in Tyrone.”
It took me a moment to wrestle the face above me into
focus. It was my cousin Sean towering above me.
“Come on. Get up. Move it. Let’s go.”
I grabbed him by the leg of his pants, determined to halt his
onslaught, but released my grip again just as quickly, clamping
both hands on my head to quiet the searing pain that was rising
behind my eyeballs.
“Oh fuck,” I said. “What happened?”
“You drank about a bottle of vodka and ten peppermint
schnapps is what happened. Come on, up.”
Hearing him say the word “peppermint” triggered a series of
vaguely familiar mechanisms that stirred my internal organs
into something that felt like a wet dog circling for position on a
green shag carpet. I was going to be sick.
I pried myself off the living room floor where I’d been

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4 Colin Broderick

sleeping and shoved my way past Sean with one hand clamped
over my mouth.
“If your mother could see you now, huh,” I heard him shout
after me as I lurched toward the toilet bowl on my knees. “You’d
better be ready to go in two minutes. It’s nearly seven thirty; we
should’ve been on the road a half hour ago. This is no good,
lads. This is no fucking good at all.”
As I hunkered on the floor, hugging the bowl, it was coming
back to me. I’d staggered off the plane at JFK the previous
evening. My cousin Paul had been there to meet me. We’d
driven in over the Triborough Bridge. I remembered seeing it
now, Manhattan, a silhouette of skyscrapers, like black head-
stones against a hazy orange sky. We’d gone straight to an Irish
bar in the Bronx to meet the rest of my cousins. I remembered
the air-conditioning and the first frosty beer stein. The rest was
a blur.
I pried myself off the toilet bowl and splashed some cold
water on my face at the sink. The wet dog had found its spot on
the rug and was resting peacefully. I took a look at myself in the
mirror. There I was: Colin Broderick, twenty years old, an Irish-
man in New York; I’d made it.
“When you’re done admiring yourself there, George
Michael, it’s time to go,” my cousin Paul said, standing in the
open door of the bathroom. Sean appeared behind him.
“What do you make of this little bollox, huh? Sick, after a
few civil drinks like that.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs, alright, when a man can’t hold hees
drink,” said Paul.
“It sure is. It just won’t do. I’m calling your mother this
evening,” Sean continued over Paul’s shoulder, “and telling her
what a show you made of yourself last night, disgracing the
Broderick name on your first night in America.”
“Sean,” I said.

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ORANGUTAN 5

“What?”
“Shut the fuck up, please.”
“Oh, I’m calling her.” He grinned before breaking into that
laugh of his that sounded like a donkey having its balls
squeezed. “Mark my words: Claire Broderick’s goin’ to be hear-
ing from me, I can tell you.”
“Great. Say hello for me when you’re at it.”
“Oh, I will. Don’t you worry about that. Right, lads, seri-
ously, let’s get the fuck out of here. Paul, you’re supposed to be
in the city at eight o’clock. Take Des and this useless cocksucker
with you and I’ll take Ian and the rest of the gang to Brooklyn.
Right, lads, come on, let’s get this show on the road.” I glanced
down at the clothes I’d woken up in, a wrinkled and stained
white shirt and blue jeans. I’d been wearing them since I’d left
my house in County Tyrone early the previous morning.
“Maybe I should put on some work clothes.”
“I thought they were your work clothes.” Sean laughed
again. “Come on, they’ll do for the day. Let’s fuckin’ go.” He
turned back into the living room and yelled, “The vans are leav-
ing, lads. Anybody who’s not outside in two seconds will be
looking for a new job and a new place to live this evening.”
I moved to the door of the bathroom and took a look around
the apartment to see who he was yelling at. There were lads ris-
ing, bleary-eyed, off the couch, off the floor, out of the arm-
chairs, from doors that opened off the small living room.
“Jesus,” I said to Paul, who was still standing next to me.
“How many of us live here?”
“I’m not sure,” he said pensively. “I think it was thirteen at
last count . . . maybe it’s fourteen now that you’re here. We’ll
have to take a head count on rent day.”
“So where should I leave my suitcase and stuff ?”
“Whatever patch of floor you dropped them on when you
came in last night, I suppose. Right, come on, we’ve got to roll.

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6 Colin Broderick

We can sort that out later.” He turned to the door to follow

Sean out into the hallway, yelling over his shoulder, “OK, Des,
let’s hit it, you’re with me, time to roll.”
I followed him on down the stairs and out into the morning
heat. It was a hot, clammy May morning in New York in 1988
and I was on my way into Manhattan for my first day’s work.
I was ushered into the van to sit on a five-gallon drum of
polyurethane that sat on the floor between Paul and Des.
“How come I get to sit on the drum?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we
toss for it?”
“That’s the way the thing works here in New York, Colly,”
Des said, getting in behind me. “The FNG always sits on the
drum.”
“What the fuck’s an FNG?” I asked.
“That’s you,” Paul said, handing us each a smoke. “You’re
the Fuckin’ New Guy.”
Paul and Des were brothers. We’d grown up together.
They’d left Tyrone ahead of me for similar reasons. There was
the issue of the dismal economy, of course, and the miserable
climate as well, but most importantly there was the desire to es-
cape the caged feeling of living as a Catholic in the British-
occupied North of Ireland. It had gotten so bad back home that
a lad couldn’t leave the house for a quiet drive anymore without
the prospect of being stopped and harassed at gunpoint by a
pimply-faced British soldier no older than himself. Lads that
we knew had been shot and killed by the British already. Occa-
sionally we could hear bombs as the police stations and army
barracks were attacked by the IRA in the neighboring towns of
Ballygawley, Carrickmore, Omagh, and Beragh. We would go
silent and count off the explosions on our fingers: one . . . two . . .
three . . . four . . . five . . . “They’ve killed a few with that one, al-
right,” someone would say. “The more the merrier,” would come
the reply.

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ORANGUTAN 7

I’d tried London for two years already, but that was worse
than living at home. Having to take the worst job on the build-
ing site from an English foreman who referred to all Irishmen
as Paddy was not part of the life I’d had in mind. And then of
course there was the drinking. It seemed no matter where I
lived, my drinking was becoming an issue. But it would be dif-
ferent now that I was in America. I was sure of it.
As we roared down the Major Deegan, Paul was pointing
out some landmarks. The area to our left was known as the
South Bronx, or Fort Apache, as it was more commonly called
back then. Red brick buildings tattooed with graffiti towered
over the highway, surrounded by garbage-strewn lots and the
occasional old couch or busted dresser that seemed to have been
tossed out of the dark windows high above. I made a mental
note never to go there. And on we thundered past Yankee Sta-
dium, with Des tuning the radio to 92.3 to introduce me to
some popular new DJ called Stern, who apparently did nothing
but talk for four hours straight every morning. On through the
throng of early morning traffic over the Macombs Dam Bridge
and onto the island of Manhattan for my very first time,
through the streets of East Harlem and onto Lexington Av-
enue, where Paul got into a yelling match with some black guy
with a filthy rag and a squeegee who’d jumped onto our front
bumper and refused to budge until Paul tossed him a few coins
out of his pocket.
“Asshole,” Paul yelled at him as we tore through the green
light, almost colliding with a silver hearse that’d apparently
jumped the red to our left. Paul jammed on the brakes, slam-
ming Des and me up against the dash and spilling our coffee all
over the front of the van. “What the fuck . . .”
The driver of the hearse, a stocky-looking gray-haired
woman with a cigarette dangling out of the corner of her
mouth, paused in front of us just long enough to flash Paul the

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8 Colin Broderick

middle finger and yell out her open window, “Go suck off ya
mudda’s ass, ya bastard,” before screeching off again, her middle
finger held high out the driver’s-side window.
“Did you fucking see that?” Paul stammered in disbelief.
“That old granny almost totaled us,” Des said, peeling him-
self off the front window. “Get her.”
Paul floored the old blue Chevy van, sending me flying
backwards off my bucket as we lurched down Lexington Av-
enue after her, swerving in and out of the scattered traffic.
“Is that a coffin in the back of that hearse?” I said as I gath-
ered myself for the chase.
“Looks like it,” Paul said, almost ripping the front off a yel-
low taxicab as we flipped furiously from lane to lane.
“Should we be chasing an old lady in a hearse with a coffin
on board?” I asked.
“Welcome to New York, pal,” Paul said, laughing, and Des
joined him, grinning gleefully as we whipped in and out of traf-
fic for about thirty blocks, hot on the trail of the speeding hearse
before she pulled a sudden right onto a side street, leaving us
with the sight of her middle finger again raised defiantly as we
slowed into the steady roll of the traffic. Before me suddenly lay
the great canyon of Lexington Avenue as far as the eye could
see. Skyscrapers stood on either side of us for miles in a per-
fectly straight line. I was breathless. There was no way I could
ever get to know all of this. It was just too big, too overwhelm-
ing. It would take a lifetime to get to the bottom of it all. I
thought that the two years I’d spent living in London had pre-
pared me for city living. I was wrong. London couldn’t shine
New York’s shoes. There was just no comparison.
That day Paul and Des introduced me to the floor-sanding
business. I was assigned the job of cleaning the corners of the
floor where the machines couldn’t reach. For about six hours I
shuffled around on my sweaty knee pads with a backhand

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ORANGUTAN 9

scraper and a file, trying to stay ahead of the roar of the sanding
machines. By three thirty we were covered in a fine layer of dust
from head to toe as we lashed down a potent coat of shellac on
the clean floor and began lugging all the equipment down the
service elevator and into the back of the van again.
“There’s only one cure I can think of for a dusty throat,”
Paul said as we bailed into the van again for the ride back to the
Bronx and I took my seat on the bucket.
“A man’s not a camel,” Des said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“Can’t live on water alone.” He grinned.
“I like the sound of that,” I said as we roared off up Park Av-
enue, Bronx-bound. Floor sanding sure was thirsty work.
By the time we pulled up at McKeown’s bar on McLean
Avenue there was already a line of Irish construction workers’
trucks parked outside. The vans were adorned with shamrocks
and tricolors, and names like Celtic Construction and Emerald
Flooring Service. There would be no hiding our heritage here. I
was astounded. I had never lived in a place where I was free to
be Irish.
“Looks like Sean and the lads beat us home again,” Paul
said as he wheeled the Chevy into a parking space and we all
jumped out.
The inside of the bar was cool and dark after the bright,
sweaty ride home.
“Look, everybody, it’s the FNG,” I heard a familiar voice
shout from up the bar, followed by the unmistakable roar of a
donkey’s laugh. It was my cousin Sean.
“Watch out,” someone else yelled. “More Tyrone men.”
“Get these lads a beer,” Sean yelled to the bartender as we
approached.
“No, no, I got it,” another man next to him leaning against
the bar insisted.

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10 Colin Broderick

“It’s about time you bought one, ya tight bastard,” Sean

began. “I was beginning to think somebody’d swiped yer wallet
again.” He tipped back his head and brayed like an ass and the
whole bar joined in the fun.
The atmosphere in the bar was joyous. The beer was served
in frosted steins. You couldn’t finish one without someone buy-
ing you another. There was so much money being flung onto
the bar it was impossible to tell after a while who owned what.
It didn’t really seem to matter. The surface of the bar was lit-
tered with cash. It was like Monopoly money; it wasn’t real. Big
juicy steaks were carried through the throng all night, sizzling
on steel plates. All you could eat, mashed turnips and carrots,
baked potatoes as big as footballs, smothered in butter. And the
girls, oh my God, the girls. I fell in love that first night with at
least seven or eight different girls, their perfect smiles, tanned
skin, bright, eager eyes. What had I been doing my whole life?
Why hadn’t I come sooner?
At midnight we left the bar to go on to the real party. Once
again I was floored by the heat as I stepped outside. It was mid-
night and here it was, perfect warmth. I’d spent my whole life
warming one piece of my body at a time, against a fire or a radi-
ator, but never this, this allover body heat, like being safely
wrapped inside of the womb. About ten of us piled into a little
Colt RS and raced off to Bainbridge Avenue.
Bainbridge was the heart of the Irish bar scene in 1988.
There were something like thirty Irish bars on a strip of about
six blocks, and every one of them was packed. The Roaring
Twenties was the most popular of the lot at that time. Once in-
side we had to wrestle our way to the bar. There were six or
seven bartenders, tending to a crowd that stood at the bar like
an audience pushed up against the stage at a rock concert. A sea
of outstretched arms waving twenty- and fifty-dollar bills, try-
ing to snag the bartenders’ attention. Luckily for us, my cousin

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ORANGUTAN 11

Ian knew all of the bartenders and we never had to wait very
long for service. He also knew a lot of girls, and I was intro-
duced around as the FNG, a title I was beginning to embrace. I
was the Fuckin’ New Guy.

The following morning my cousin Sean had me up at seven

o’clock again. I was barely asleep when I heard the shout.
“Come on, ye lazy bastard, are ye goin’ to lie around sleeping
all day?”
“What? It’s Saturday. I just got here.”
“You’re not in London now. Up. You’re coming with me.”
And off we went again, an army of floor sanders, groaning
and rubbing our heads. This was my cousins’ flooring company,
Hudson Valley Flooring Company. Paul, Ian, and Sean had just
started the company weeks before I had arrived, and already
they were swamped with more work than they could get to.
After a quick stop for coffees and breakfast sandwiches the con-
voy of vans hit the Major Deegan, dodging and weaving, racing
each other through the early morning traffic. Two of the vans
branched off for Manhattan, and Sean and I went on toward
Brooklyn.
“The sooner we get this job done, the sooner we’ll be back
on McLean Avenue having a cold one,” Sean said as we pulled
up outside a miserable-looking brown brick building some-
where in Brooklyn. That was all the incentive I needed.
We grabbed the machines out of the back of the van and
blasted through the job in a flash. We slapped down a coat of
sealer, gave the floor a quick screening, and lashed on a coat of
polyurethane. By one o’clock we were done. Sean collected the
check for $450 and we were on our way back to McLean Av-
enue for brunch. Sean handed me two hundred dollars for my

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12 Colin Broderick

first two days’ work. Four crisp fifty-dollar bills. It would have
taken me a month to earn that much money before I left Ire-
land. And here I was barely awake and already I’d earned
enough to pay my rent for a month. Everything else was gravy.
They were right about America. The streets really were paved
with gold.
By two thirty we were sitting in Fibber Magee’s bar on
McLean Avenue having brunch and a beer. The bars up and
down McLean Avenue were already buzzing with activity. The
vans were parked up for the day. The bar windows were thrown
wide open and the girls strolled by in a constant procession in
miniskirts and halter tops. There was an intoxicating air of opti-
mism about the whole thing, like anything was possible. We
clinked our frosty steins and toasted America. I’d never felt
so free.

Within two months I had rented a two-bedroom apartment on

237th Street just off Katonah Avenue and bought the Colt RS
from Paul. My cousin Ian decided to take the other bedroom in
the apartment I had rented and we split the rent down the mid-
dle. Two hundred and fifty bucks each. No more sleeping on the
floor.
We spent two weeks before we moved into the new apart-
ment painting the place and redoing the floors. We stained the
living room floor the exact colors and design of a pack of Parlia-
ment cigarettes, right down to the silver-and-white borders.
The rest of the floors we pickled white. We bought expensive
new furniture and a sound system powerful enough to blow the
ceiling off. We bought new beds, a dining table and chairs, new
blinds for all the windows. We even remodeled the bathroom
and retiled the kitchen floor.

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ORANGUTAN 13

Ian was the son of my uncle Brendan, who had died of alco-
holism just a few years earlier at the age of forty-two. Ian was a
good guy to have as a roommate because he knew firsthand the
pain that too much partying could bring. Not that the knowl-
edge stopped him from being a party animal; it just made him
more aware. Ian was like my party barometer. He could tell
when we were pushing the needle into the red. He’d make sure
we cooled off and spent a few nights at home to let the liver take
a breather. On our nights off we’d rent a movie, cook a big din-
ner, and drink a case of beer. We hadn’t known each other very
well growing up in Ireland, but in the first few weeks we spent
with each other in New York we realized we shared a few very
important interests: movies, music, girls, and beer.
I had soon decided that floor sanding wasn’t for me. I didn’t
like the dust and the heavy machinery. I’d had my own painting
business before I left Ireland. I decided I’d give that a shot in-
stead. My cousin Paul made a phone call for me on a Saturday
evening and I was all hooked up to start a new job on Monday
morning.

That Monday, Paul dropped me off outside a house on a street

just off Broadway in the Bronx. It was seven thirty in the
morning.
“Con’s apartment’s down the driveway in the back. Tell him
I said hello.”
As I walked down the steep driveway between the two
houses, I could hear some kind of a commotion going on in the
backyard. I rounded the corner to see a group of about ten guys
standing around watching as two guys tore into each other.
They pounded each other with a few punches, then the big guy
had the skinny guy down on the ground and they both had each

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14 Colin Broderick

other by the throat. There was blood on the big guy’s face and
he was shouting, “Give it up, for fucksake.”
“Fuck you,” the skinny guy screamed back. He landed an-
other punch to the side of the big guy’s eye and they rolled
around some more.
I considered turning and slipping back up the driveway. I
was barely awake. I had a hangover. I didn’t know these people
and this seemed way too violent for a Monday morning. Then
one of the guys closest to me, standing casually with his arms
folded, turned and noticed me.
“Oh, how are ye?” he said.
“Good, and yourself ?”
“Oh, not so bad,” he said casually, watching the mayhem as
if he were pondering what he was going to have for breakfast.
The big guy had the upper hand again, but he was losing blood
from his left eye.
“Has this been going on long?” I ventured.
“A little while, yeah, it should be over soon, though. My
name’s Derrick, by the way,” he said, extending his hand.
“Colin. I’m supposed to start a job here this morning.”
“Oh, yeah, that’ll be with Con, I presume.”
“That’s right.”
“Mmmm. That’s Con on the bottom there, the skinny guy.
And that’s Dessie there on top of him. The two fellas live to-
gether here.” He motioned to the door of the basement apart-
ment. “They’re actually pretty good friends when they’re not
killing each other.”
“That’s good to know.”
Another lad walked around the corner of the driveway and
stood next to me, his eyes wide with surprise at the scene before
him. Nobody seemed to notice him either.
“What the hell is going on here?” he whispered to me.

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ORANGUTAN 15

“I’m not entirely sure,” I said. “I just showed up here a little

while ago to start a job and this is the way I found them.”
“I’m supposed to start here myself with some guy called
Con.”
“That’s Con there,” I said, pointing to the screaming lunatic
on the bottom. “And that’s his buddy Dessie there on top,
pounding the head off him.”
“Nice, nice setup. Lovely stuff. So what do we do now?”
“Wait, I suppose.”
The two boys wrestled for a while longer, then Dessie
jumped up and backed off out of swinging distance.
“It’s over, stop it!” he roared.
Con jumped to his feet but kept his distance, screaming
back.
“It’s not nearly over. I want you to get your shit moved out
of this apartment before I come back here this evening.”
“But it’s my apartment.”
“Get your shit out, Dessie, or I’ll throw it out.”
“I’ll throw you out, you skinny bastard.”
“Ah, Con . . . excuse me, Con,” Derrick began. “Con, there’s
a couple of lads here to see you.”
Con turned to us, the two FNGs.
“What do you want?” He was flushed red, his shirt was
ripped at the neck, and he was bleeding from his lower lip.
“We’re here for the job. I’m Colin, this is . . .”
“Right, get in the van,” he said, turning and pacing to the
van. “And the rest of you fuckers, if you want a job, get in the
fuckin’ van now.”
“Ah, Con . . . ,” the other new guy began.
“Get in the fuckin’ van now or you’ll be left behind.”
We all piled into the van. There were six or seven of us in by
the time he had the van started and into reverse gear.

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16 Colin Broderick

“Ah, excuse me, Con,” the new guy began again. Con ig-
nored him as he floored the van, the tires squealing as we hur-
tled backwards up the steep driveway.
“Con!” the guy shouted as the van crashed into something
behind us.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Con screamed. “Who the fuck left a
car parked across our driveway?”
“I was trying to tell you, Con,” the new guy said, rubbing his
forehead. “I didn’t get a chance to move it.”
“Well, get out and move it now, you bollox.” The door was
opened and the new guy stepped outside to survey the damage.
The front wing was destroyed and the bumper was lying in the
street. “Get that piece of shit moved out of my driveway!” Con
screamed.
Without responding, the new guy got in the car and backed
it up slowly, dragging pieces of the front end with him. Con
lunged the van into the street and floored it, leaving the new guy
and his wrecked car sitting there in a cloud of smoke.
“Jaysus, Con,” Derrick said. “I think you destroyed that poor
fella’s car.”
“He’ll be careful where he parks it the next time.” Con
laughed and everyone sort of laughed along with him. “Put on
some Wolf Tones there, Derrick. I’ll give the lad a call later and
sort him out for the damage.”
“Good man, Con. That’s the stuff.”
And we roared on down the Deegan toward the city,
everyone singing along to the Wolf Tones as if nothing had ever
happened.

As it turned out, Con and I became very good friends almost

immediately. I was good at my job. I was the fastest and tidiest

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ORANGUTAN 17

painter on his crew. Within one week he handed me the keys to

a van of my own. I was painting apartments in a building just
across the Hudson River in New Jersey. I had a studio apart-
ment a day to paint. He allowed me two days to complete a one-
bedroom.
I’d start at nine in the morning, horsing the paint on with an
eighteen-inch roller, and be on my way home at about two
thirty. I did this six days a week for the first two months. On
Friday evenings Con would have all the boys into Characters, a
bar down on Broadway at 242nd. He’d order beers for every-
body and pitchers of kamikazes and we’d all spend a few hours
getting hammered together before we’d go our separate ways for
the weekend. I’d never seen so much alcohol consumed in all of
my life. Not at home. Not in London. Nobody could afford to
drink like this anywhere else.

The first time I did cocaine, I was with a friend of mine from
Dublin. He was one of the painters I’d met working with Con.
He played bass guitar in a band on Saturday nights down at
Characters. I had always had this romantic idea about doing co-
caine. How could I not? Every time I’d heard about cocaine use
while I was growing up it was always some cool rock star with a
bevy of beautiful women around him. What could possibly be
wrong with cocaine? Let’s face it, in the time I’d been drinking—
since I was fifteen—I’d known only one person who died from
doing cocaine. I’d known tons of people who’d died or gone mad
from alcohol. I’d just take it easy on the stuff and everything
would be OK. God knows I had plenty of money to buy it.
The first night I did it, I got a taste of how dangerous co-
caine could be. I was in Characters. Ronny, the bass player, had
the night off, and we were getting pretty hammered when he

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18 Colin Broderick

suggested we take a little trip and pick up some of the devil’s

dandruff. We left the bar and got into a gypsy cab outside.
Gypsy cab drivers in the Bronx, I was to find out, always knew
how to get their hands on drugs.
The driver was a Middle Eastern guy. He knew Ronny. He
knew where we were going. He took us somewhere in Yonkers,
not far from Getty Square. Not too far from my old apartment.
It was after midnight and we pulled up near where a few black
guys sat on a stoop outside of a run-down shack of a house. All
the streetlights were busted and a few old cars sat around on
blocks. Two of the guys got up and approached the car.
“What you want? Want some blow, some rock, weed. What
you want?”
Our driver did the talking for us.
“They just want a little blow.”
“How much, a gram, you want an eight-ball, I’ll give you an
eight-ball for two-fitty.”
“No, just a gram. That’s plenty.”
“You guys cops. He looks like a cop,” he said, pulling a gun
out of his belt.
“No, man, we’re Irish,” Ronny said through the open rear
window.
“What about you? You a cop?” he said, tapping the barrel of
his gun on the door, pointing it at me.
“I’m Irish, man. Do I look like a cop?”
“Yeah you do. You look like a cop.”
“Well, I’m not. When was the last time you heard a cop with
an accent like this?”
He pulled the gun back and shoved it into his belt again.
“OK, you cool.”
Ronny handed him the money and he passed Ronny a small
foil wrapper and sauntered off back to the stoop. Our driver

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pulled away slowly and I slipped down in my seat a little, half

expecting a bullet in the back of my head as we drove away.
“Jesus, is it always like that?”
“I told you it was dodgy.” Ronny laughed. “Hey, buddy,
when you get a chance pull over somewhere so I don’t spill
this shit.”
The driver pulled over and Ronny chopped out a couple of
fat white rails on the back of a cigarette box and handed me a
rolled-up bill.
“Here, get this into you. And don’t fuckin’ sneeze.”
I leaned over as he held the box up close to my face and I
gave it a good snort. I could taste the powder down in the back
of my throat. I sniffed a few times to make sure it was all the
way up there. Then I held the box for Ronny.
“I don’t feel anything, Ronny.”
“Oh, don’t worry, you will. Just relax.”
When we returned to 240th Street we went into the Termi-
nal Bar, and that’s when it hit me. My heart was racing. The
rush went through my whole body. I was sober—I was super
sober. I was talking fifty miles an hour. The rush was so power-
ful it scared me.
“Just slow down,” Ronny said. “Just relax. We’ll have a drink.
Stop talking so fast or everybody will know you’re high.”

I wish I’d had a bad experience. I wish I hadn’t loved every sec-
ond of it. It does happen that people do coke once and never
want to do it again. No such luck for me. I’d always smoked pot.
I’d been smoking pot since I was fifteen, but this, this was what
I was looking for. After a few drinks I was off by myself; I’d lost
Ronny somewhere in the crowd. I didn’t care. I went back to

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20 Colin Broderick

Characters. The band was in full swing. I was euphoric, unstop-

pable. More drink. I talked to one beautiful girl after another. I
was dancing. I never dance. I am the world’s worst dancer.
And then I woke up. I was in bed in my apartment. The sun
was shining brightly through the open slats of the blinds and
next to me was a beautiful blond-haired girl, naked and sleeping
peacefully. I stared at her in disbelief, trying to figure out how
this could have happened. I tried to remember leaving the bar. I
had no recollection whatsoever. I remembered the cocaine, los-
ing Ronny, dancing, feeling great. I propped myself on my
elbow and watched her sleep for a few minutes. She opened her
eyes and started to smile and without speaking she began to kiss
me, rolling over on top of me. I wish I’d had a horrible experi-
ence the first time I did cocaine, but this was the beginning of
trouble.
A while later she said she had to go and catch the bus and
make her way back to Queens. I offered to walk her to the bus
stop, but she told me to stay where I was and maybe we’d bump
into each other in Characters again sometime. She kissed me
good-bye and she left. I hadn’t even asked her name. I was in
trouble alright. Trouble with a capital C.
If it’s true what they say about addicts always chasing that
first high, I had presented myself with an impossible situation.
Doing cocaine would never be the same again. Although I was
sure going to give it a good try.

When I showed up for work Monday morning I found out

Con had been arrested over the weekend for drunk driving.
He’d smashed the van down in Bainbridge after watching a
World Cup soccer match. He’d spent the weekend in the slam-

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mer and they’d taken his license. I was his new driver. It didn’t
seem to matter that I didn’t have a license either. Somehow it
made sense.
We were heading down Seventh Avenue that morning at
about ten thirty. I remember it was almost a hundred degrees
already and we didn’t have an air conditioner. We were late for
an appointment downtown and stuck in some kind of traffic
backup. Con perched up on the edge of his seat, chewing his
fingernails and barking directions at me, when suddenly he
spotted some guy on the sidewalk.
“Pull over!” he shouted. “Pull over.”
“Right here?”
It wasn’t easy in all that traffic.
“Yeah, right here.” Con laughed. “You have to meet this
lunatic.”
“Who is it?”
“This guy’s crazy.” Con calling somebody crazy. This I had
to see. I managed to wrestle the van into a bus stop next to the
guy Con was pointing to. Con leaned over and shouted to him.
“Hey Caffrey. Caffrey. Come here.”
The guy sauntered over and stood next to the truck.
“Ah, Jaysus, Con, how’s it goin’?”
“Whassup, Caffrey?”
“Oh, the same old shit.” The guy was balding a bit on top;
he had a round beer face and the wildest sparkle I’d ever seen in
his eyes. The kind of look you might imagine peering at you
from behind a row of steel bars.
“I don’t suppose you have anything to do with this backup
here, do you?” Con said.
“Mmmm. That might be my car there in the middle of it.”
He smiled, rubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Where?” Con laughed, looking around, as did I. Sure

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22 Colin Broderick

enough, there in the middle of the traffic jam, just a few feet
ahead, was a brown station wagon stalled right in the middle of
Sixth Avenue. “That’s your car? The brown one?”
“Mmmm.”
“You break down?”
“Mmmm.”
“You look like you’re not quite over the weekend, Tony.”
“Mmmm. I just got out of jail this morning in Boston.”
“In Boston?” Con laughed. “How long did they have you?”
“Oh, since Saturday night.” He smiled. His eyes glistened in
the sun. “But the bastards didn’t know about the uppers I was
taking. I had a pocket full of those to keep me going.” He
seemed proud of this little detail.
“They got me too at the weekend.”
“Mmmm. Where’d they get you?” He didn’t seem at all
surprised.
“Bainbridge.”
“Mmmm.”
“This is my new driver, Colin.”
“How’s it goin’, Tony.”
“Oh, great. Just great.”
“What are you going to do about that car in the middle of
the avenue there, Tony?”
“I think I’m going to go for a drink and have a think
about it.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want us to push it for you?” Con offered.
“No, I think I’m just going to leave it there. There’s no plates
on it. It’s not registered and there’s not much in it of value.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mmmm. I’m thirsty. I think I’ll have to go wet my throat.”
“Well, I wish we could join you, but we’re late for an ap-
pointment.”

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“I’ll see you around, Con,” he said. “Nice to meet you,

Colin.”
“You too, Tony.” And off he walked up the block, looking for
the nearest bar. I wished I could have gone with him. Tony
looked like he had a story or two to tell. God knew where his
day was going to take him. I pulled out into the traffic and
slipped past his beat-up old brown station wagon and we went
on about our business.
“That guy’s as crazy as it gets, right there.”
“Crazier than you?”
“I’m a choirboy compared to that lunatic, Colin.”

After I started doing cocaine, I found it impossible to have a

few drinks without the urge to get high. At first I limited use to
only Saturday nights, when we would go out and really rip it up.
I had found out where all the after-hours bars were in the area,
so there was never a closing time; the party could go all night. I
could go out for a drink on a Friday evening after work and be
home in bed by about ten or eleven on a Sunday night. In those
days I could survive on one night’s sleep out of three.
On a Saturday night if you hadn’t picked up a girl on Bain-
bridge Avenue by two a.m. it was time to hit the Archway down
on Jerome under the elevated train tracks. That way you could
scout the bar for any stragglers and if all else failed you were just
a few blocks from the Shamrock for after hours, the most pop-
ular late-night spot.
The Shamrock was without a doubt the saddest place I ever
drank. After four in the morning the place was dark as a coffin.
The whole bar smelled like piss. The filthy bathrooms were
crammed with cokeheads with empty, murderous eyes sniffing
their way to oblivion. Someone was always sprawled on a bench

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24 Colin Broderick

unconscious, or dead for all anybody cared. At least two or three

would be slumped facedown on the bar at any given time. There
was always a girl or two, differentiated in the smoky haze only
by the streamers of dark makeup plastered down their cheeks.
Nightmarish stories were mumbled and lost in the din. Some-
one was always wailing away about the old country. The pool
table in the corner at this time of night was about as inviting as
a cockfight at a nuclear plant. Tempers would flare. Glass would
be broken. Blood was nearly always shed by sunrise. Maybe
that’s why I loved it so much. The kind of bar crowd that even
the devil himself would shake his ornery head at in disgust.

One night after running short on coke, I left the Shamrock

and flagged a gypsy cab on Kingsbridge. The driver, a hyper,
skeletal black guy, said he knew of only one place but it could be
a bit dangerous at this time of night. It was almost five in the
morning.
“Sounds good,” I said. “Take me there.”
I always loved this part of the high. The search. The antici-
pation. The danger of getting caught or killed. He drove me
through the twisted wreckage of the South Bronx to a street like
all the others. Brown brick buildings down one side, brown
brick buildings down the other. He paused at the end of the
block. And turned to me.
“Whatever happens, just go with it. Don’t panic.”
“Cool. Just don’t leave me down here.”
“I won’t.”
He slowly made his way down the block and stopped about
halfway down, outside an apartment building with a huge cen-
ter courtyard. A group of about ten black guys were standing on
the pavement outside of the tall steel gates. Three or four guys

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came to the car immediately, pushing and shoving each other.

They were all carrying semiautomatic machine guns.
“What you want. Rock, rock, rock.”
“I just wanted a little blow. A gram.”
One guy just opened the back door of the car and grabbed
me by the shoulder.
“Out. Out!” he shouted, dragging me onto the pavement.
“Look at me. Look at me.” I looked at him square in the eyes.
“Keep your mouth shut and stay tight to me. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
He turned, keeping a tight grip on my arm, and held his gun
up in front of him.
“Back off,” he said to the others. And shoved his way past
them toward the gates. “Open them,” he shouted, and the gates
were opened enough for us to walk through into the courtyard.
They clanged closed behind us. Inside the courtyard there must
have been fifty guys with semiautomatics and bags of drugs.
They waved as they swarmed us like a school of piranha.
“You want rock?”
“Coke?”
“What you want, muthafucka?”
My guide never let go of me. He never stopped moving. He
just held out his weapon and kept moving through the court-
yard toward the front doors of the building. It was one of those
moments in my life where I thought to myself, “This is it,
numb-nuts. You pushed it too far this time.” I didn’t expect to
get out of this one alive. I could picture my cabdriver disappear-
ing down the block. No one knew I was here. The pieces of my
body would never be found. Maybe I’d been set up. Maybe the
cabdriver was in on it. I stayed calm and tried to stay as close to
my guide as possible. There was death in the air. Here were a lot
of very high guys with enough artillery to start a war. Not even
the police cruised these streets at night. This could get ugly in a

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26 Colin Broderick

heartbeat. As we reached the doors to the building, the crowd of

guys backed off and went back to adjusting their weapons; the
click and clack of magazine clips and gunmetal rattled around
the courtyard. I didn’t need the coke anymore. I was high
enough already. There was enough adrenaline racing through
my body to keep me up for the next two days.
The inside of the building was worse. This was a drug fort.
No one actually lived here. The hallways were dimly lit. All the
apartment doors were wide open; some had been ripped off
their hinges and fell against the graffiti-raped walls. We made
our way up the dark stairwell. Barking echoed down the hall-
ways. There was the rattle of machine-gun fire and loud angry
shouts too muffled for me to decipher. On the fourth floor my
guide dragged me into an open doorway. Two rottweilers
chained to a radiator lunged at us, their chains snapping them
short by just inches. Their teeth bared, drool dripping off their
jaws. Another gunman appeared in the lighted doorway of the
kitchen. He nodded to my guide and I was led into the kitchen.
There was a guy at a table in the middle of the floor. He was
sitting behind a mound of cocaine about the size of a football.
He had three guns laid out next to the coke. A semiautomatic, a
large handgun, and a small palm-sized gun with a gold handle.
There were two other gunmen in the room, one leaning against
the wall by the window and another in a chair in the far corner.
The guy behind the counter kept staring at me.
“What do you want?” he eventually asked.
“Actually, I just wanted a little bit of blow,” I said. “If I’d
known we were going off to war I could have brought my rocket
launcher.”
The guy behind the table let out a huge laugh and looked
around at his buddies, who smiled a little. Nobody else laughed.
“You Irish?”
“Yeah, I’m Irish.”

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“Fuckin’ Irish in the house.”

“Yup.”
“You fuckin’ guys are crazy, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You got that war goin’ on with the English, man, right?”
“You got that right.”
“You from Belfast?”
“I’m from the North. Fifty miles from Belfast.”
“So you know what I’m talking about.”
“I sure do.”
“You guys got guns in the IRA, right?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“I know your story. You Irish guys are fuckin’ crazy. What do
you think of these guns?”
“They look dangerous.”
“They look dangerous.” He laughed. “Here . . . ,” he said,
tossing me the big handgun. I managed to catch it without
shooting anybody in the process. “What do you think of that?” I
held it up and sighted down the barrel, being careful not to
point it in anybody’s general direction.
“This is a sweet gun. I could use a gun like this back home.”
It was the first time I’d ever held a gun in my life.
“Go ahead, shoot it.”
“In here?”
“Shoot the damn ting.”
“Cover your ears, boys. This thing’s gonna make some
noise.” I raised it and blasted a hole in the wall. The dogs in the
next room howled ferociously. “Jesus,” I said. “This thing’s like a
fuckin’ cannon.” My new buddy behind the table laughed again.
“You don’t have no guns like that in Ireland?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“You’re one crazy mutherfucker, Irish. Here, take a seat.” He
shoved a chair out from the other side of the table and I sat

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28 Colin Broderick

down across from him. He lifted a knife and shoved some coke
off to the side and chopped out two big rails and handed me a
straw.
“Have one on the house. Slicer, get our buddy here a drink.
You like to drink, Irish?”
“That’s my specialty.”
Slicer poured two dirty glasses of Jack Daniel’s and handed
them to us at the table.
“Sláinte,” I said, raising my glass.
“Sláinte,” he said and clinked my glass. “To freedom.”
“To freedom.”
We finished our drinks in a swallow.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a gentleman.”
“I’m no gentleman, Irish,” he said, shaking his head.
“You’ve been very hospitable. You take me in here and you
don’t even know me, you give me a drink, some free coke. You
even let me shoot your gun. I have close friends who don’t treat
me so well. Unfortunately, I have to go. I have a cab waiting
for me and a girl sitting in a bar who thinks I went to use the
men’s room.”
“You have a twenty-dollar bill, Irish?”
“I sure do,” I said, taking a bill out of my pocket and hand-
ing it to him.
He took the bill and placed it on the table and shoveled a
nice heap of coke onto it and refolded it carefully.
“This is for making me laugh,” he said, handing me the
package. I took it and offered him my hand and we shook.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Irish, enjoy it. Mamasboy, make sure this
guy gets out of the building safely. No one touches him.”
I got up and gave him a quick salute.
“We’re alike, you and I, Irish.”
“I know it,” I said. He saluted back and I slipped out the

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door with Mamasboy. Down the stairs and out through the
courtyard. This time nobody bothered us. There was my cab-
driver, waiting nervously by the gate. I slipped Mamasboy a
twenty. He nodded and turned away without speaking.
“Where the hell did they take you?” my cabdriver blurted as
we pulled away. “I thought you were a dead man.”
“I guess it was my lucky night,” I said. “Thanks for waiting.
We’re going back to the Shamrock on Kingsbridge. I think I
need a drink.”
“I think I need one myself.”

Around this time I got a phone call from my mother saying that
my good friend Brian Mullin had been shot by the SAS, the
elite hit squad of the British army. He was in a car with his
two bothers-in-law. They were ambushed near our home. All
three bodies were riddled with bullets; Brian was shot twenty-
eight times.
As usual, any truth around the details of the shooting was
shrouded in shreds of the real facts woven with conspiracy sto-
ries. As usual, no explanation seemed to justify the fact that an-
other three men had been ruthlessly slaughtered when they
could have just as easily been captured and imprisoned. I was
floored by the news. I never thought they’d get Brian. I was
angry with myself for not being there. I felt like a coward. Here
I was, three thousand miles away, while my friends were being
murdered for standing up for their freedom. For my freedom,
and my family’s freedom.
I went out and got drunk. I didn’t talk about it. Too many
guys who knew nothing about it were doing enough talking
around the bars. In the bars around Woodlawn, the IRA card was
played extensively for the sole purpose of liberating American

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