It’s been three years since my friend Johnny Ferguson died, but I still hear his voice so clearly. I hear the grain and lilt of that marvelous Irish accent as he tells me “for Chroissakes get on with it”, or to “stop being such a feckin eejit”. In some ghostly way, he has taken up residence inside my head.
Johnny changed me from a borderline cynic into a borderline romantic. I had never dreamed of getting married, because I didn’t want my love life confined in a legal institution. But Johnny loved weddings, and persuaded me to think again.
I met Johnny on a press junket in Dublin. It was 1987 and I was starting out as a freelance journalist; Johnny was editing a weekly London magazine. Neither of us had a strong interest in the guided tour of historic buildings, so we managed to slip away and get thoroughly bent out of shape on Irish coffees, before repairing to various excellent pubs that Johnny knew.
Vodka was his drink – except when it was Guinness, wine or whiskey. When it came to drinking, he loved to let the wolf loose.
Johnny looked, by his own description, like a potato. Blue eyes shone from a round, pudgy, unmistakably Irish face. He could make me laugh harder than anyone, and while he still advises, argues and cajoles from beyond the grave, the humor of his razor-sharp quips is gone.
In the first phase of our friendship, we lived in London and grumbled about it. With obvious exceptions, the English were a shallow, drab, narrow-hearted people, in Johnny’s opinion, and guilty of monstrous crimes against the Irish. Despite my English accent, I agreed with him.
Somehow we saved up enough money to fly to New York and spend a couple of months traveling across America and down to the Yucatan. Neither of us lived in England again. I stayed on the road, living in the $300 station wagon we had bought, painting houses and selling magazine stories, and finally renting a place in Tucson, Arizona. Johnny moved back to Dublin, and prospered as an advertising copywriter before throwing it all away to write screenplays.
We did well as long-distance friends. Once email was invented, we stayed in regular contact and saw each other once or twice a year. Increasingly, our conversations were about storytelling, and we started to influence each other’s work.
It’s around that time that Johnny might have saved my life. I had signed a book deal to write about the lawless, violent, narco-dominated Sierra Madre mountains in northern Mexico. The idea was to travel from one end of the mountain range to the other – 900 miles in total – and record my experiences and findings. Late in the journey, I was hunted for sport by a group of drunken hillbillies with rifles. I made a narrow, terrifying escape, and then drove back as fast as I could to Arizona.
When Johnny arrived a few weeks later, I was fully intending to go back and complete the last leg of the journey. “You mad bastard,” he said. “Why? You’ve already got your book. What it feels like to be hunted: that’s the opener. Then cut back to the beginning of the journey and why you’re doing it. The ending is obvious: how you escaped.” That’s exactly how I wrote it.
During the last few years of our friendship, we wrote a screenplay together. It was based on the life of an Anglo-Mexican friend of mine who was summoned from his mother’s home in Tucson to his estranged father’s cattle ranch in northern Mexico, and plunged into a world of violent machismo and outlandish behavior.
When Johnny arrived in Tucson to work on it, he greeted my new girlfriend Mariah by handing her a box of expensive chocolates. She was 16 years younger than me, quieter and more sensible, and I was worried that Johnny would pour scorn on the match. Instead he gave me his full approval, and reminded me that he was an expert on womankind, having grown up with three sisters.
We made an adventure out of the screenplay, working out the scenes during a hard-drinking road trip to Montana and back. Once it came to writing, however, our divergent personalities started to clash. I wanted to accurately depict the cowboy culture of northern Mexico, because it was such rich, unmined territory in film, and Johnny went ballistic when I criticized his writing for being too divorced from factual reality.
Meanwhile, our love lives were advancing. Mariah and I became more firmly attached, and Johnny moved in with his new girlfriend Ali. He had always suffered from allergies, wheezing and spluttering like an old piece of steam machinery, and she got him on a new diet that cured him and made him less potato-shaped.
The last time we saw him, on the west coast of Ireland, he was almost thin, but his pale milky skin had a grey, drawn look. He mentioned stomach pains and some worrying test results, but he wasn’t going to let that spoil our visit. We had a marvelous time on the magical coastline of County Kerry, but worried about Johnny’s health as we flew back to New York, where we were living in a tiny underground apartment.
Soon afterwards, on a sudden reckless whim, I bought a grand old farmhouse in the remote swampy depths of the Mississippi Delta. Johnny was overjoyed. He always enjoyed my inability to adhere to normal patterns of behavior. The more I told him about the place, the more fired up he was to come to the gigantic housewarming party we were planning.
Then came a long, and surprisingly upbeat email about the “great big fucking carcinoma” the doctors had found in his bile duct.
Obviously I should have flown to see him. But we corresponded instead by email and talked on the phone. I could never really tell if he was being courageous, or secretly relieved that there was nothing he could do now except make the best of it.
His last priorities were writing and romance. He completed his adaptation of The Secret Scripture, a novel by Sebastian Barry. It is currently in production. He then wrote himself the most romantic ending possible: he proposed to Ali and she agreed to marry him. The wedding took place a few days before his funeral.
I missed both.
Soon afterwards, I was driving home through the Mississippi Delta, and I heard Johnny’s voice in my head. “Go on, man,” he said. “She’s a good un.”
Slowly and reluctantly, I had been inching towards the idea of marrying Mariah, despite my hostility towards the idea of involving the law and the state in my personal life. Now Johnny was pressing me, arguing that I was blocking myself from greater happiness. He was very persuasive.
When I got home, I was barely through the door when I blurted out my proposal – and she accepted.
I later found out from Johnny’s sister Ciara that his biggest regret was not having children. Soon afterwards, his voice started telling me that men untempered by fatherhood end up brittle and estranged from the life force. He made the case that lots of sex without contraception, followed by new life, was the best possible response to his death.
When baby Isobel screams in her crib, I sometimes curse him, and he tells me not to be so pitiful. Sometimes I wonder if my conscience has merely adopted his accent for its own reasons, but I’m more persuaded by my earlier explanation. What I gleaned of Johnny’s personality and intelligence is now lodged in my head somewhere, and speaking in his voice. For better or worse, I can’t imagine that he’ll ever leave.
Richard Grant is the author of Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta. Next week: author Elizabeth Wurtzel on her best friend.
