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Three Men by Frank Murphy



There were two people my father brought home from his work on the docks, Walter MacClaren and Floppy Ears. Rarely did my father bring them together as the two argued with each other. However, there were nights when all three sang together. We had a piano which my father played with his two fingers banging out the tune while Floppy Ears strummed the guitar. They had fine voices. Sometimes my mother joined in.

The drinking was heavy, father drank from a souvenir whisky glass with three levels. The lowest read, “Sparrow,” the next, “gentleman,” and the third level—which nearly touched the rim of the glass—said, “Jackass.” My father took the jackass glass, filling it up and over the Jackass line. They drank “Boilermakers,” a drink of whiskey followed by a long gulp of beer. “Up to the lips, over the gums. Look out stomach. Here it comes!”

Walter often drank straight whiskey, earning some praise from my mother who ranked people by what they drank. Whiskey drinkers were classy, wine drinkers were okay, but beer drinkers were low class, and the fact that they drank whiskey with beer as a chaser didn’t cut it with her. Her drink of choice was a Tom Collins, but other whiskey drinks, or wine were considered suitable. As heavy as her drinking would become over the years, she never touched beer.
My mother had issues with Walter, most of them concerned his treatment of Floppy Ears and of my father. She didn’t like the way he, as someone who spent years in a Catholic seminary studying to be a priest, baited Floppy Ears who had difficulty following intellectual arguments. Additionally, she did not take kindly to how he treated my father as inferior to himself.

My father, on the other hand, respected and admired Walter because, “He works with his mind, not his back.” This, of course was precisely why Floppy Ears didn’t like him. One evening, when the drink was heavier than usual, the argument stronger than usual, I heard Floppy Ears called Walter a “Pencil pusher.” Walter worked in the dock workers administration building, the Red Building. It was one of the offices of the New Haven & Hartford Railroad, and you could still see it crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge until it was demolished a few years ago. That was where all the hiring and firing happened. —a world in which people pushed pencils and not wheelbarrows. To be called up from the docks to the Red Building always meant trouble, a chewing out or a firing. That Walter worked there seemed a betrayal to Floppy Ears. To him, Walter played on a different team.

My brother, sister and I liked Floppy Ears. He was funny, always making faces, wiggling his enormous ears for my sister who, at four, called him Poppy Ears. When he came, she often pulled him into our room where she proudly showed off the doll house my father brought home one night. In particular, she delighted in pointing out to him the outhouse placed carefully in back.

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Continued... Three Men by Frank Murphy


Floppy Ears was born in the north of Ireland. He didn’t speak of Ireland much, but once I heard him say that his family came from Ballymena. To which my father said, “You must have had it rough.”

Floppy Ears was bone thin; my mother always tried to feed him or advise him, “not to drink on an empty stomach.” When he was persuaded to go to the table, he praised my mother’s cooking but ate very little. His arms were muscular, and when he played his guitar, his veins looked like strands of rope pulled tight. He served in the war and was wounded in Italy. I think my father was proud of his friend, but also a little envious. My dad tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor but wasn’t taken. Floppy Ears never spoke of his time in the army except to mention somewhere he’d been, some city he’d seen.

Sometimes, on a weekend, weather permitting, Floppy Ears would come over and he and my father would go into the backyards of our neighborhood and play for the few coins people threw down from their windows. One night, towards the end of the war, they tried to get on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts program, returning hours later, drunk and very happy. Although they didn’t pass the first audition, Arthur Godfrey invited them to view the program, an honor and a reason for months of self-congratulations.

What I most remember about my father and Floppy Ears is that there was a lot of laughter when they were together, and I don’t remember my father laughing much. Even when I saw them together clearly stone drunk, they were holding each other up and laughing. It was good to see. But that’s why to this day I am puzzled by the furious fight where they were suddenly shouting curses at each other. As the argument grew more intense, they moved the fight outside swing furiously at each other. We were outside of the old Greyhound Bus Depot in Manhattan, me trying to separate them and getting knocked down in the process, crying, tasting the tears and snot dripping down my mouth as I begged them to stop.

It was the first real fight between adults I had ever seen. Until then, the only fighting I ever saw between adults took place on a movie screen. But the two men rolling on the sidewalk in a drunken brawl looked nothing like the cowboy fights I saw in the movies. Cowboys throwing punches do not get tangled in each other’s overcoats or roll on the ground clutching each other and tumbling over the sidewalk, nor do they sit looking sad and bewildered in the gutter after the fight. Cowboys in the movies do not have sons who sit beside them on a curb feeling embarrassed and afraid. They don’t have a child trying desperately to comfort the sobbing man who was their father.

Floppy Ears got up and placed a hand on my father’s shoulder, looked sadly at me for a moment, and then walked into the bus station. He never came to our house again. Oddly, neither did Walter MacClaren.

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