Denis Leary: The Upside of Anger
“No,” he says stiffly. “We’ve never done the cute-nickname thing.”
“Actually, we barely speak to each other,” Ann trills gayly. “We have as little to do with each other as we can.” She then tells about taking the kids to the premiere of Rescue Me. “We didn’t know there was going to be all this sex in it, and my daughter was mortified. After that, we had a rule that the show couldn’t be on in the house if she was home. The sound of it made her crazy.”
Leary doesn’t say anything about this. The day is drawing on a little, and he’s beginning to look more his age, craggier and more bitten. The subject of his drinking returns, under the guise of what he was like when he did drink.
Ann turns toward her husband. “I don’t know how much you’ve said about your drinking.”
“I just said I don’t drink.”
Ann nods. “Very few people have seen Denis drunk, because he doesn’t get drunk in front of people, and even if he did, they wouldn’t know it. He’s a quiet drinker.” She glances at him. “I don’t know how much you want me to say.” He kind of grunts. She nods again. “Anyway, that’s all I’ll say about that,” she says.
Obviously, something is going on here, but in terms of Leary qua Leary in a historical sense, his drinking is not worth another moment’s thought. What’s more to the point, it turns out, is a stuffed, potato-size teddy bear named Tim.
Tim sits somewhere in the recesses of the Leary house. Tim belonged to Leary as a kid. Tim went through everything that Leary went through, the various assassinations and all else that remains unspoken. He was Leary’s companion, maybe even a kind of doppelganger. “Would you like to see him?” Ann says.
She goes into the house and returns with the thing in her hands. It’s fashioned out of plain beige cloth. It has two button eyes, both rusty, and a bit of thin red thread to indicate the mouth, which is shut. Its ears have been gnawed, perhaps anxiously. To Ann, Tim looks like a “germ” or a”weird paramecium.”
“I’d heard about this Tim that Denis loved,” she says, “and when I first saw him, I was profoundly disturbed. Look at its expression. Look at its eyes. Its eyes are like, ‘Oh, my God, no!’ ”
Leary has pushed himself back in his seat and stretched out his legs, taking long drags on his cig. “You look at it horrified,” he says to Ann. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ “
“Look at its eyes,” Ann says again. “It’s like the closing shot on a psycho movie. I mean, doesn’t that explain everything?”
Leary doesn’t say anything about that. He’s too smart for that. That’d open him to further examination. Instead, a few moments later, he gets up from the table, ambles around and announces that he’s going inside to take a leak.
After he’s left, Ann says, “Did he tell the story about his Beatles guitar? No? Well, one summer he got sent to some inner-city boys-club camp, and he brought this Beatles guitar that he got for his birthday and loved more than anything. That guitar was going to change his life. Everything would be different. But when he got to the camp, some of the other kids snatched up the guitar and smashed the crap out of it and made fun of him. He cried and begged his parents to let him come home. His Beatles guitar. How much he loved it!”
Leary returns, catching the end of the tale. He proceeds to retell it his way, leaving out any business about how the guitar was supposed to change his life, because the way his childhood story goes, he wouldn’t change a thing. It’s like with Tim. Nothing wrong with Tim.
“I can still remember that guitar,” he says. “It was a white guitar with a black back and red frets, with pictures of all four Beatles on the front.” Lighting another smoke, he says, “Tears? Yes, I think there were tears involved,” as if there was some doubt.
He sits there then, looking uncomfortable, like maybe this is just the kind of stuff he doesn’t ever like to talk about, personal family stuff that should remain hidden and, if ever, only come up onstage, in his comedy, making its way to the surface through various layers of humorous rage and bile. That’s when he’s most comfortable. That’s when he can really be himself. Not now.
“There had to have been tears,” Ann says.
“There were,” Leary says to her. “It was my favorite thing. It was the Beatles.”