I always knew, but I never knew exactly. Then someone came forward, and then there was another person who knew about it, so it’s corroborated. We knew who the guy was. He died in a New York state prison. For raping little boys. Serving his third or fourth term.
My parents would go out. They’ve been through the Depression and World War II, and they go out on a Friday night, like, “We beat the Nazis. Let’s go.” This guy would come over. I was like five years old, and it was life threatening. Getting asphyxiated because I was getting my face shoved in a pillow, so that was what I had to get back, to figure out. It’s funny how this stuff sticks with you because, really, the main thing I do is try to help people. Helping others, it’s promoted my healing more than anything, like AA or whatever.
You think you’re fine for years. Well, like a month and a half ago, there was a story in the paper about a little girl in India who was about three years old who had died from being raped. Then I was just sitting in my living room by myself, and I just thought, “That poor kid. Imagine, raped to death.” Then the light came on, like, “Holy shit. I almost got raped to death a bunch of times.” You know you got a couple choppy weeks after that, and that isn’t being some wimp. This stuff is serious, and you gotta wrestle every wolf-man that knocks at the door and get through it. You can’t go around things, you have to go through them, but that doesn’t mean it’s my whole identity or whatever. I’m like a million other things.
The day I found out who the rapist was, I get a call from a social worker. She knows the guy. She says the name. “Oh my God. That’s who it is,” I said. “Well, where is he?”
She said, “Well, he died in prison. I was involved in that case. He died in prison last year.”
The first thing I felt was pity for the guy. Some people get really mad at me about that, but I just thought like, “What a complete waste of a life.” I tried to find out from New York State where he was buried so I could go put flowers on his grave to say, “I didn’t become you. I didn’t become what I resisted.”
Marc
As opposed to pissing on it.
Barry
Yeah. Well, that’s what everybody wants you to do. But I became a human rights activist and not someone that offends human rights.
JACK GALLAGHER—COMEDIAN, PLAYWRIGHT
My mom died after a long illness. She was sick for a long time with a mental illness, and she died. I had a sister who died when she was very young, forty, and my mom never got over it. It just sent her into this little pit of despair, where she was depressed and never got over it. It was really sad, she was such a vibrant person; then when Sharon died, she just lost it.
My mom died, and then nineteen days later, my father died unexpectedly. Like out of nowhere, and when he died, he left nine hours of audiotape talking about his life, which my younger brother got him to do. We knew he was making the tapes, we didn’t know what was on them. When he died, I got the tapes.
The beginning ones are funny. They start, “My name is John Gallagher.” At the end he’s like, “Goddammit, pain-in-the-ass son of a bitch, if I ever see him again.” Got really honest, and he talked about a lot of stuff you don’t want your dad to talk about.
He had a nervous breakdown, and I remember the nervous breakdown because I was like eleven. I remember them taking him out of the house in his robe, shaking, and saying to my mom, “Where’s Dad going?” She said, “He just needs to see a doctor.” We were Irish Catholic, you didn’t talk about that.
I remember walking up to his bedroom, my mom saying, “Your dad’s sick.” The door was shut. “Don’t bother your dad.” The door was shut for days, and I remember putting my ear against the door. Then I remember just thinking, “Fuck it.” Opening the door, and I’ll tell you, I remember this like it was yesterday, there was a little light coming in from the bottom of his shade, and my dad was lying in his bed, curled up in the fetal position, shaking. I shut the door and I thought, “Fuck.” I pretended it didn’t happen, then a couple days later, they took him away.
My dad became one of my really good friends as we got older, and I would talk to him on the phone every day. I’d call him every day because he was a good guy, and when I got past the point of him being my father I realized he was just this frail guy who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He had five kids. He was trying to keep his head above water. He didn’t have a college education, he hustled, and he was a good guy, and we never were hungry.
I didn’t give him any fucking credit for it until I started thinking, “This is fucking hard to do.” Then he became my friend, then he passed away and I missed him. Why did I expect my parents to know what they were doing? Because I don’t.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
I always look at my dad as, of course, he had anger and frustration and humiliation, but he was also just a guy that was lost in the wilderness. He’d never undertaken that project to find your course and steer it toward something. Of course, what I was doing looked ridiculous to him, as it might to a parent looking at their kid who’s spending ten hours in the day just whacking on the guitar in their room.
All of those things sort of contributed to, I think, what he would have felt was an unsuccessful life, which is not necessarily how I look upon it right now. I mean, he had three children. He raised solid citizens and my mother was a fabulous partner and there was actually a lot of joy in his life. I think he was too at sea himself to appreciate it.
On top of it, he was truly mentally ill, and that cast a shadow over everything. He certainly didn’t know it and really neither did the rest of us until we were probably into our twenties and he was in his forties.
Your parents, you love them regardless. I was just more interested in who he was, what that had to do with me, and also how I could be of service and helpful, once I realized that I was going to be the parent and he was going to be the child.
It happened when he got very ill and he needed to be taken care of. My mother’s relationship to him was limited as to how disciplined she could be, so it kind of fell on me to get to California. I had to get him medicated, I had to get him to the doctors. All of which he resisted, resisted, resisted, but he become a danger to himself and to others. He was paranoid schizophrenic, which is what they called it at the time.
It was pretty intense because you’re hearing voices and you’re becoming very manic. You’re going for days without sleep and engaged in very manic behavior. At some point he became a risk to himself and to my mom and to the citizenry at large, so I had to go out and try to assist him in getting better, which we were able to do after quite a big battle.
He had to get treatment and the correct medication, and it improved his life greatly toward the last fifteen, twenty years of his life.
ALLIE BROSH—WRITER, ILLUSTRATOR
I was actually really relieved when I first became depressed because that was the first break I’d had from anxiety. When I’m really depressed, I don’t have enough energy in me to be anxious.