WHEN RELATING this subway event to me, Gainor urged me to swear not ever to breathe, report, or repeat a word of it, so that no news of it would ever get back to Dublin or London, where the slanderers and gossipmongers would not only make a meal of it but exaggerate the incident out of all proportion and then would, by smoke signal, tom-tom, telegraph, overnight letter, and Morse code, disseminate it to every corner of the globe, including his ladylove, Pamela, who was already deeply apprehensive concerning his presence in the United States. And except for the Austrian landlady and her cohorts, no word of this event ever did get breathed till now.
As time passed, other matters were slowly divulged concerning the subway incident. Although the man did not ultimately press charges, Crist, when temporarily arrested, found himself subject to overnight incarceration and put in a daily lineup of others taken prisoner, who, for the benefit of detectives in order that they might better familiarize and acquaint themselves with the mannerisms and appearance of desperadoes, had paraded before them at police headquarters a selection of these to be cross-examined by loudspeaker and scrutinized under floodlights.
“My dear Mike, you have no idea as to the soul-searing degree such a ritual demoralizes one. I was under suspicion of being a subway marauder who was terrorizing stations by pushing people under trains and, because of my accent, even being suspected of being an international jewel thief and fortune hunter after the assets of money-rich widows. In which latter case, I must admit an increasingly desperate interest. But in my present state of dishabille, not to mention lack of ready cash, I can’t see how I can finance to afford to suitably attire myself as a paramour and frequent the better hotels and cocktail bars in search of victims, indeed if such could ever be found in such dubious places.”
But that was not to be the last, by a long chalk, of Gainor’s battle of survival in New York’s rapid transit system. It was in fact only the beginning of his being chased, harried and badgered. For now, Gainor, on the way to court to dispute damages attendant upon the first assault, popped yet another rude bugger right on the old schnozzola and now, among other dire matters, further faced another barrage of legal summonses, subpoenas and writs. But he of course at least had his European legal training at his fingertips, plus his achieved skills acquired in Dublin as to how to avoid and elude payment of bills, or those seeking damages, redress, indemnification, compensation, or restitution, not to mention atonement for the bestowing of grievous distress. However, a stroke of luck. It transpired that the wife of your first man whose jaw Gainor had contused was looking for him for so much unpaid back alimony that your man in court was turning to look over his shoulder to see if she might any second show up, which seemed to help make your man more readily agree to a nonastronomical settlement. The judge, in turn, short of calling Crist’s adversary a sour son of a bitch who richly deserved to be belted on the old kisser, complimented Gainor on his forthright honesty and gentlemanly behavior, which he said he rarely if ever encountered on the bench.
Ah, but one signal precaution Gainor took with each new threatened lawsuit, prosecution or proceeding, was a quick change of address. So that, as he said, he might sleep more relaxedly, knowing his door was not to be broken through during the night and disagreeable people like process servers jump him as he slept. But all now seemed antipathetic. Even his attempts to commandeer the use of America’s modern artifacts met with disaster. One always recalling Gainor’s brilliance and joy back in the old country with the arrival one day of the miracle of a modern vacuum cleaner upon which he still owed payments but with which he caught flies, and his delight as he developed an uncanny skill in this regard, imitating George Roy Hill, who was a naval fighter pilot during the Second World War. But now chairs broke underneath where he sat. Wake-up devices and coffee makers either jumped off his various bedside tables or outright exploded. Lamps short-circuited and went on fire. And all as if to remind and assist to drive him out of the United States. Where he had so earnestly come to make money to pay off his debts in Europe and now where overnight he was being sued for more than everything he ever had. Especially by the man he popped on the old schnozzola on the way to court. Whose action for damages included the cost of extensive plastic surgery to restructure his nasal angle and return his physiognomy to its original appearance from having had his nose flattened across his face. And in telephone communication with me, I was to hear Gainor’s plaintive but never defeated voice.
“Mike, this has plunged me into even greater debt and there is no need to remind you to keep further mum. But I must solve the daily problems of my existence. Before I even extricate myself out of one difficulty, I find myself in another. My life is becoming a legal mishmash of mittimus, mandamus, caveat, habere facias possessionem, habeas corpus ad testificandum. The discourtesy in this city is not innocent or accidental, it’s wanton and deliberate. Chimpanzees have better manners. Why must people be insufferably rude and then, as one remonstrates, have their jaws or noses get in the way of my fist. I really do think that I deserve better luck than has befallen me. Pray tell, your advice to me to stay in Europe was all true. In fact, I read it for the second time just as I was stepping aboard the S.S. Ryndam, thinking it was a stray five-pound note I’d overlooked in my pocket and eagerly fetched it out with delight. But rather than its being the price of a bottle of champagne I intended to celebrate with on the eve of my voyage to America, it was instead your last letter to me before I left Europe. And alas contained information and advice I should have heeded. I have now reread it many times and have it taped to my mirror, where it is further reread while I shave in the morning.”
My dear Gainor,
Big news I hereby urgently give to you. There is no good life here. They’re all polishing their possessions. Everything is fake. Even the unhappiness isn’t real. Sex is a disease. The populace who aren’t beaten and disillusioned are instead insipid with the philosophy of self-improvement which is nothing more than a narcissistic self-devotion made further appalling by their thinking they’re so wonderful because they’re so selfish. It is extremely sad, and terribly bitter. Where no man has the opportunity to feel any love. Where the whole country is strangling with the tentacles of religion and the obscenity of money. This is a country of cancerous hearts and bodies and leaves one sitting in pain. The only good thing about it is they are getting what they deserve. And everyone at many dollars an hour is attending a witch doctor. All the wonderful things in me are locked up. But I’ll beat them yet. If this letter doesn’t stop you coming here, then I wish you bon voyage.
Yours sincerely and fondly,
Guts.
Guts was a name Gainor had for sometime come to use in addressing me. And one immodestly assumed it was a form of flattery in recognition of my continued fighting spirit in the face of overwhelming odds to which he had often been a witness back in the old sod when many a time he stood by holding hats and coats and taking bets on me to demolish the opposition as one was forced to wade into a bevy of bullies. But here in the good old U.S.A. it should have been Gainor who more appropriately might have been called Guts. Intrepidly upholding gentlemanly principles in the face of intolerable provocation. But there was no doubt that it was with a certain and rapidly increasing degree of awful resignation that this kindly, compassionate man, recently arrived in the New World in order to save his life in the Old, was already realizing that he would soon be compelled to return to the Old World again in order to save his life in the New.
“Mike, but for God’s merciful blizzards, the cars on the highway never stop. The ethnic bigotry burgeons. Who in heaven’s sweet sense ever dumped all these people together in such a caldron of discontent. They say happiness is everywhere. And I say back to them, have you looked at the faces.”
Yet America was a place of cornucopia abundance where the shelves of stores were forever full. Where soap copiously lathered and hot water flowed through the pipes and showers sprayed cleansingly upon backs coast to coast across the United States. And where toilet paper could be had which was soft and pliant and did not sandpaper away, as it could in Europe, one’s adrectal area of evacuance. But where nearly none would open up heart, mind or soul to speak of anything resembling the truth of this nightmare. But where, too, there still existed a nobleness such as that possessed by John Duffy, Tally Brown, Richard Gallagher and my own brother, T.J. The last, whose job of previously unsuccessfully selling graves was now counting dresses. And it could have meant that had he not quit his previous work, he would have had a potential customer in his new profession. For as T.J. flew into one far western town one evening to do an inventory next day, he found in the morning the store manager in the stock room hanging in a self-made noose by the neck. T.J. said the man had a terrible, terrible look on his face, and T.J. on the spot returned to the airport, flew back east and never again counted another dress.
And yet too, none of those friendly with me were ever to say nay, stop, abandon, don’t go on, as I seemed still able to continue to do, in spite of Gainor’s chaos and my own increasingly tenuous holding out in my tiny outpost in the narrow confines of Poplar Street, where I still wrote on in The Ginger Man. And where, pushed in under the door, a letter came. I was now summoned to collect my rejected manuscript back from Little Brown. And upon this humidly warm summer day, I went past the morgue doors of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the high gray stone walls of the Charles Street Jail to head along Charles Street and turn left up the hill on Beacon to enter the offices of these publishers. Instead of the manuscript awaiting me, I was asked by the receptionist to wait a few moments and was then directed up a flight of stairs and into a sedately pleasant office. There behind a desk was a man in his white shirtsleeves who stood up to greet me in my now usual clothes adapted à la Gid Pratt. This man shook my hand in that dreadful, limp manner that reassures that he might not be able to strangle you, but that he might dearly like to do so. He soon sat down with a look of concern overcoming his face along with outraged disapproval.
“This manuscript of yours. Were we to publish it here in Boston, we would be tarred and feathered.”
I already suspected that nowhere, and unlikely that ever again on the North American continent, was I to receive any reception for this work resembling that already given by Scribner’s. Being the well-mannered European, I politely listened and was evasive as to who I was or where I lived. It was clear from this gentleman’s depth of feeling that it did not allow for him to be thought a mealymouthed poseur. But there was an air in his manner that said, How dare you write such a book and how dare you bring it here. And he must have read the work, for, with noticeable apprehension, this gentleman in his neat, clean white shirt behind the elegance of his mahogany desk in this graciously comfortable office, suddenly, rearing forward in his seat, raised his arm and pointed to the corner of the room behind me where the bulk of the manuscript of The Ginger Man sat on the floor at the very farthest point from this man’s desk and, raising his voice in an angered accusing tone.
“There’s libelous obscenity in that manuscript.”
But even now, I remained undismayed as the voices were raised against this work, realizing it was nothing but the sincerest form of flattery. As he watched me rise from my chair and go pick up the manuscript, I had the feeling the gentleman behind the desk half expected me to stay and argue the point. And there was ever so the slightest sense of mystification over his face that he had taken this trouble and time to send on his pathetic way a scribbler, not yet an author whose work he clearly detested. I now wonder if back all those years there remains at such publishers any record of this submission of The Ginger Man under the initials of Sebastian Dangerfield and of the author’s visit. For amazingly, this selfsame publisher, Little Brown and Company, was to cause me considerable difficulty much later on in my writing career. But if no record exists, there was no question but that here in this fine Boston town house, I was to find an enemy who would emerge more than once over the ensuing years.
Following this further dispiriting event concerning The Ginger Man, I found myself walking one early afternoon with Donoghue. We had just progressed past the back morgue doors of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and were emerging from Blossom Street into the sunnier clime along the Charles River embankment. I voiced one’s gloom over the book and that I was now coming to the conclusion that the obstacles to its publication were insurmountable and that it would be a wise decision to not continue and finish it, but to throw in the towel. Donoghue, who was at the moment just passing a fire alarm box on the corner, stopped in his tracks and, his whole body slumping, he reached out and held on to the red fire stanchion. And I for a moment wondered if he were going to pull the lever for the fire brigade. But he was merely clinging for support to stop himself from falling to the ground as he gasped out his alarmed words.
“You can’t do that. You can’t stop. You’ve got to go on.”
It was an amazing moment. And that someone could feel so strongly about someone else’s work was a surprise, more so perhaps because of those so recently vociferous in wanting to reject it. Donoghue, however, was so crestfallen as we headed off to have a coffee in Charles Street that by the time we got there, and so as not to squelch the little that remained of cheerful optimism and to not depress the enjoyment of coffee and slice of blueberry pie for which he was paying, I reassured Donoghue that I would go on. But it was becoming increasingly difficult, with the suspicion intensifying that I was not to find a publisher in these United States. And with few small pleasures and less and less to look forward to, my confidence had already started to wane.
Melvin and Deedi, previous occupiers of the apartment, suddenly descended to remove their two beds. And one was left to sleep on a mattress on the floor where bedbugs now invaded. These unpleasant creatures seemed to come in under the apartment’s permanently closed back door, which was just across a narrow hall from where lived my Jewish friend, who now passing as I sat on my stoop, tipped his homburg hat, bowed and called me Mr. Yid. Then on the advice of Donoghue’s close friends the Moynahans, one managed to get a cheap bed from the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which remains the only instance of the Catholic Church in any way contributing to the writing of The Ginger Man.
Although much abated, there was still an occasional fight between the prostitute and her customers in the courtyard. But at least in the teeming ghetto of Boston’s West End, with its smelly garbage-strewn streets, there was less conformity than was required in the rest of this lemminglike nation. However, both Valerie and I were now feeling a serious and growing yearning to be back in Europe, and to be there on nearly any terms. But there was a smidgen of encouragement left. In response to mine, a pleasant letter from Wheelock came. Although I could not see how I could change the character of the work, I still held out vague hopes that this highly thought of editor of whom Crist had heard and Scribner’s might acquiesce to the difficulties first expressed concerning obscenity. In our meeting in New York, there had been mention of a thousand-dollar advance, which kept vague hope of survival in America alive. But that dream became more and more remote as I found as I wrote on that there was little or nothing in the work I could change. If anything I was becoming conscious that it was presenting even more of the problems Scribner’s did not want. Especially in the matter of frank depiction of events too delicious to part with. And which in turn seemed to give rise to more outrageous matters in the telling of the tale of Dangerfield. Thus digging a deeper and deeper hole out of which no expurgation could now retrieve me.
As cheap as it was to live in the West End of Boston, our infinitesimal money, with no income, was running out. Such food items as a twenty-seven-ounce tall can of Friend pork and beans were luxuries beyond our purse, as were two for forty-nine cents. Or a ten-ounce can of Gorton’s ready-to-fry codfish cakes at twenty-one cents. Or Bang-O popcorn at sixteen cents or fancy solid white tuna at twenty-nine cents. One did, at thirty-five cents for a pound package, make a magnanimous exception to purchasing Ritz crackers, which, coated with peanut butter, was one of Crist’s favorite staples, and continued to buy half a pound of kidneys now reduced to fifteen cents. Valerie investigated working again as a speech therapist, but with the prevarication of the possibilities and referrals in distant different directions, that soon became an unenthusiastic route to pursue. Return to New York City was looming. And Gainor now in his communications constantly alerted one to the fact that these United States were not for us.
“Mike, why is it impossible for me to be able to pursue my daily life without strife. God knows I’ve tried to abide by the rules, maybe not all, nor to the letter but at least made every effort to uphold chivalry in a land boasting of freedom. But more a freedom for fucking other people up. There seems to be no escape for yours truly. And I am sadly left, an unhappy dangling puppet of the fates. Pray God that someone soon pulls for me more sympathetic strings.”
Having both been five or more years away, we did expect too much of America, and for it to resemble the ethic we had known growing up there, that hard work and fair play was rewarded if not necessarily accorded the poor. And leisure, privilege and money would, as one’s background ordained, be heaped upon those cultured and astute. Neither Gainor nor I really expected to confront a country ruled by corporate mores and riddled by fear and suspicion. But at least a few times it did achieve one’s best anticipations, often enjoyed for little or no money. Although ten cents was a large investment in carfare, I occasionally visited Cambridge, climbing up to the station near the county jail to take the train over Longfellow Bridge and across the Charles River Basin, where along its shore were held summer orchestral concerts and where oarsmen on the ripples of the water rowed and pretty sailboats wafted back and forth in the Boston breeze. Then one came to the strange abruptness of this underground last stop at academia and Harvard Square. Where up the steps and across the street was the Harvard Coop. Donoghue had already walked me along by the elegant houses of Brattle Street and brought me to sit in Widener Library to hear poetry and music. I even ventured with him to a pub hangout of Harvard students. Where Donoghue explained that one had to beware concerning intellectual discussions held in such leisure environs, as sometimes these could be interrupted by intruding Boston Irish vulgarists, who, overhearing such conversations, would interject uncongenial disagreement and then on the premise that might makes right would threaten a fist to break the Harvard student’s jaw.
I did feel it was all the more reason why I should be attired as I still was, in my khaki shirt and chino trousers and looking like a ditch-digger. Albeit one sporting the overtones of a British accent. However, Donoghue finally seemed to stomach his embarrassment of my being so dressed, and I met some of his oldest friends, native Bostonians of very Irish backgrounds and Harvard folk who were possessed of sophisticated charm indeed. One being Dr. Edward O’Rourke, the then commissioner of health in Cambridge. O’Rourke, a medical doctor with an astonishing range of interests, was of a marvelous, understanding air, diplomatic, tolerant, chuckling and assenting to all free thought. He would snatch minutes during his busy lunch hour to rush Donoghue and I about while shooting a pleasantly cultural breeze with us. And generously, if only briefly, providing redeeming moments among the many accumulating depressing ones.
Among other of Donoghue’s earliest childhood friends were Julian, and his wife, Lizzie, Moynahan. With Valerie and Philip, we visited them, in what seemed to us, from Boston’s West End, their commodious Cambridge apartment. Dining on delicious heaps of spaghetti, we downed nourishingly rich and highly intoxicating Chianti wine. Julian, having been at Harvard, and Lizzie at Radcliffe, this young couple both knew of the hard lot of the Irish and the privilege the best educated of this race could achieve. With their intellectual assurance and possessed of an astonishing handsomeness, they were natural patricians free of the mealymouthedness and suspicions rife across the continent. They were eagerly able to listen to my own iconoclastic talk. And were thinkers of the kind that both Crist and I had imagined would still be found in American life. One took some comfort from the fact that these of Donoghue’s friends now had read the manuscript of The Ginger Man. And were not dismayed.
Funds had now just about run out, and our ghetto sojourn in Boston was to be short-lived. When we left for New York, Donoghue took over living at 51A Poplar Street. The weather cooling, we were back again in the old white house atop the hill at East 238th Street. It was decided that the way to get out of the United States had to be piecemeal. Valerie made plans to depart for Europe and the Isle of Man with Philip. I returned the 558-page manuscript of The Ginger Man to Scribner’s. I was now with minuscule money left, depending on handouts from my always dependable mother but beginning to see that in hanging on through a last-ditch stand and trying to see if I could find a publisher, one could bite the dust sooner than soon. But I would persist to wait till I could wait no longer. The attraction of the Isle of Man was that we felt we had there an ace in the hole. Old man Heron’s will had provided for money that had been left to Mrs. Heron in such a way that a modest sum could be paid out to the four children at her discretion. Before we left for America, Valerie’s mother had volunteered that the money so left would be at our disposal should we want or need to return to Europe.
Upon the sad nineteenth day of November, Valerie departed for Prestwick Airport in Scotland and from there to the Isle of Man. I was alone in America. And with Valerie gone and as I awaited a reaction from Scribner’s, the days passing made one feel more and more barren and beaten. In the distant downstairs of the house and in the middle of the night, I could hear T.J. playing his “Knobbly Wood Concerto” on one of his three pianos and, as he sometimes astonishingly did, playing all three at once. Although not yet acute, the strain was beginning to tell and tensions were growing. For safety and solace, I now went to visit Woodlawn Cemetery. To muse among the tombstones under the huge trees along its winding lanes. I was frequently in touch with Gainor, who had most of my photographs I’d taken in Ireland and a carbon copy of the manuscript S.D., which he said he often dipped into to read. One so far spoke pleasantly to him on the phone, always making sure one stayed at least fifty miles away. As benign, reasonable and pleasant as he could be, one knew of the risks he ran in this violent city and felt him as an awful threat. But I could hear a plaintive note in his voice as he would so politely say, “Mike, I completely understand your not meeting me. But because I feel you would be most interested to see the airport in action, I urge you to take an afternoon to do so.”
Gainor had removed to yet another address, Clyde Street in Forest Hills, which was near the area’s tennis stadium. Significantly, the street ran closely parallel to Dartmouth Street, after the name of the college in New Hampshire where Gainor had first attended university. I now agreed to go see him out at the airport at work. I took the Lexington Avenue train downtown, which was elevated half the way. And as it arrived underground, a benign-looking lady of early middle age got on at 125th Street and sat across from me. I was transfixed by her calm and contented countenance. And thought, my God, there at least goes one face that does not carry that cast of unhappiness writ deep and sour as it is on every other visage one sees. At her feet, there was a bag and an address airline tag on it, which, as she glanced away a moment, I could read. And it said British Overseas Airways, with the lady’s destination writ just beneath. Totnes, Devon, England. And I remembered Gainor’s words.
“Have you looked at the faces.”
And here I was on my way actually going to see him and surely risking life and limb. Queens Boulevard, on which we rode in the long black airport limousine, was like some great highway to an oblivion one felt awaited both Gainor and I in the United States. Passing cemeteries in which the white upturned teeth of the tombs seemed ready to devour us. Then rearing up at the side of the road, a massive palace erected by the Elks. And as one stared ahead down this boulevard, doom seemed part of the landscape. Recently one had walked through the New York streets and heard the booming blast and throb of an ocean liner’s whistle as it sounded its intention to back out into the Hudson River and sail for Europe. As the echo reverberated through the gray canyons of buildings, it clutched at one’s heart.
Arriving at Idlewild, I finally found Gainor inundated by passengers. I approached an airport employee to convey the message to him that I had got there. And as he looked up and out over the milling crowd to acknowledge me, he smiled assent as he saw that I lurked, half-hidden behind a steel pillar. The airport had been for days jammed with swarming passengers and their hordes of friends seeing them off. I had already read a couple of strange accounts in the newspaper of those who, intending to fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico, had instead boarded flights which ended them up bitterly protesting in such places as Nome, Alaska, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was thought that with their speaking Spanish and their poor English, mistakes of destination were being made. Gainor, with a command of this language, seemed to be coping, as I, with hardly room to move from my redoubt behind the pillar, watched him at his station dealing with irate folk in the wrong line, overbooked seats, and excess baggage. Gainor, having previously over the telephone told me,
“Mike, you have no idea how uncooperatively violent and exasperatingly unpleasant some of these people can be. The temptation to send some of them to Spitzbergen is immense.”
If not involved with his own affairs, Gainor was possibly one of the most super efficient of people, his administrative capacity in dealing with another’s business, invariably swift, accurate and polite. But one immediately saw that some of these present passengers were of a totally dissimilar behavior. Impatient, pushing, noisy, demanding and screaming and all insisting on making complaint. Fights breaking out in the long lines. Gainor, trying to keep some semblance of order, remonstrated with a snarling man demanding to be first in the queue because his plane was about to leave. When Gainor said there was still adequate time, the man suddenly went berserk, drawing a flick knife, and rushed Gainor to stab him. The six-inch-long blade ending up embedded deep in the check-in desk. But Gainor seemed to keep his cool. In a lightning flash, he had your man grabbed by the wrists and immobilized. But not but a minute later and before the summoned airport police arrived, one saw this formerly bitterly vociferous and murderous complainant minus his weapon and smugly satisfied, rushing on his way to join his ready-to-leave flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico. And I should have known and guessed when reading the newspaper reports as to whom was behind this selected handful of misdirected passengers. For Gainor had just sent this impatient Spanish-speaking fucker off on a two-stop flight to Helsinki, Finland.
However, throughout this astonishing melee and during the nearly two hours I stood at my station by the pillar, I noticed Gainor every twenty minutes or so would have a replacement and leave his post to disappear into the gents’ convenience a short distance away. It was now getting late afternoon and, having seen enough, one was weary of the sight and noise, not to mention the continued risk one ran to one’s life, and I decided to go home. Also needing to pee and now with the opportunity to alert Gainor to my leaving, I headed over to and entered the men’s latrine. The pissoir was at the end of a longish narrow hall. But among the few pissing passengers, no Gainor was to be seen either urinating, or, in surveying the cubicles, could any black-trousered and shoed feet like his be observed taking a crap. I now thought that in my having witnessed him so many times entering this place that I was now beginning to suffer self-deception and was seeing things. I had already been experiencing acute hypochondria to the extent of almost hoping I would break a leg for relief. But even so, I now examined every inch of the latrine. The small window apertures were barred and were far too high for a man to reach. Again, as discretion would permit, and short of kneeling to peer under the door of each of the cubicles, I did, where there were no feet showing, open wide each door to see if Gainor might be there behind and standing on the seat for the sake of privacy in case someone he’d recently socked in the subway was looking for him. And still no Gainor.
I took my pee. And now slightly dazed, with depression closing in and my desperation increasing to get the fuck as far away as possible from the roaring motorbirds and from these once mud flats upon which the airport had been built, I gave up. Plus I was in fear of arrest as a soliciting homosexualist already getting dirty looks as well as an occasional inviting one, and I now proceeded out the entrance hall. But just as I was about to push through to emerge into the airport melee again, I noticed a narrow-shaped door in the wall. Waiting till the hall emptied, I reached and turned the brass knob and pulled it open. There inside the small space and cramped between the brooms and mops, his two feet stuck in pails, and with hardly an inch in which to move a muscle, was the one and only Gainor Stephen Crist, his head tilted back under a wicker-basketed gallon bottle of Chianti and his lips locked around the open end. Now suddenly turning in alarm from under his bottle to look at me, the wine was meanwhile pouring out, splashing over his hair, face, jacket, shirt, trousers and shoes.
“Good God, Mike, it’s you.”
And
Good God
Gainor
It’s you