William Monahan, High School Graduate?

Writer-director William Monahan attended Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, as memoirist David Lovelace (author of Scattershot: My Bipolar Family) passingly mentions in an interview with The Boston Globe. There's a history of members of Mr. Monahan's family on his mother's side having attended Gloucester High School, going as far back as his maternal grandfather, Harold L. Armstrong, who graduated there in the 1910s and was later a member of the Gloucester School Committee.¹ Although Mr. Monahan did go to Gloucester High School, it's difficult to determine if he graduated from there. Figuring out Mr. Monahan's educational background is a bit tricky. After his parents divorced he "lived all over the North Shore with his mother and sister," so there may have been several high schools that Mr. Monahan attended in his youth. He has, on one occasion, situated his high school in a "well-to-do country town north of Boston," which hardly describes Gloucester, Massachusetts well enough.² Whichever high school it was that Mr. Monahan attended in his final year, he has written that he was not allowed to graduate. He explains why in his New York Press essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":²

That pinhead was a member of my high school class. Not in any functional sense, but he was graduated with all the rest of us, to wild sentimental applause. They didn't (not that he could have given a shit either way) give him a special diploma; he got a regular one. This seemed to be regarded in some fashion as socially progressive. But I thought that it was an atrocity—a barbarity, a bafflement, a lie. I thought it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

The pinhead didn't complete any of the courses of study—he was a whole galaxy away from being able to read—and they let him walk with a full diploma. For my part, I wasn't allowed to graduate because I had something like 12,000 unserved detentions, and hadn't been to gym class in seven months. I had no complaint against the pinhead. Each of us has his own row to hoe, that sort of thing, and I've never measured my existence against anyone else's. But it struck me as pretty damned typical about the pinhead.

Mr. Monahan's mockery of the pinhead is rife throughout the essay. Along the way, he subtlety groups himself in with the natural intellectuals of America who are hindered by the public education system's attempts to cater to the lowest common denominator. He uses the pinhead and his ilk ("hydrocephalics, stutterers, mongoloids, loonies and people who just couldn't read a cereal box in a million years if you took a bat to them"²) as a prime example of what is wrong with education in America and provides a proposal toward the end titled "This Is My Proposal for Improving the American Public Education System." The final recommendation succinctly describes Mr. Monahan's ideal public education system:

Enact the most savage classical standards in the history of mankind. Anyone failing to meet those standards for free public education shall be summarily expelled and have to go to a safety school, like Exeter.

For those of you who attended Gloucester High School yourselves, here is Mr. Monahan's full description of his high school— which is only maybe Gloucester High School— from his essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":

My high school was supposedly a very good school. It was in a green and well-to-do country town north of Boston. Its test scores were the highest in the state, which meant that a lot of parents who in another town, would have been shucking out private school fees, simply sent their kids to the public high school. The general impression was that the school was just great.

Despite not graduating from high school in his final year (did he end up taking summer classes in order to graduate?), Mr. Monahan did attend university. In an essay titled "A Night on the Tiles," he briefly discusses his university years and indicates that he made good use of CLEP credits during the admissions process, perhaps to compensate for not having a high school diploma:³

John Allen plays a pennywhistle and isn't an Irishman and back in the old days in Northampton when I was a complete asshole (decompensating, as they say, after my father's death, and the auto-destruction of my almost-scary academic career: "If I don't do it now," I thought in horror, meaning, start to fuck off, having entered university as a functional CLEP-ed out junior, and having read everything in English already, my professors practically in line to blow me out of sheer gratitude, "I'll be a professor"), I held that against him. Young Irish-American men go through bad patches when they can't quite figure out what they are—what this "American" shit is.

In my opinion, Mr. Monahan actually started to fuck off in his final year in high school, but, as some might say, whatever... What is particularly interesting is this part about entering university as a "CLEP-ed out" junior. A junior can avoid a lot of the boring introductory college classes by passing CLEP exams that cover the same material. You can CLEP-out of some of the courses encountered in the first two years of college if you pass the related CLEP exams with a high enough grade. Since I have my high school diploma, I never had to turn to alternative avenues to get into university. Would a lot of CLEP credits be sufficient to enter university without a high school diploma, or did Mr. Monahan go another route, such as getting a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) instead?

High school aside, he may have attended a middle school in Hamilton, Massachusetts. In an essay titled "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", he tells of how, at the age of 14, he discovered a Marlin bolt-action rifle in his great-aunt's house and would skip classes to fire it off in the woods.⁴ He recalls living nearby Bradley Palmer State Park, which is located in Hamilton, Massachusetts. At the age of 14 and given the seasons of the events of the essay, Mr. Monahan would have been in the 8th grade and the year would have been 1974 with Mr. Monahan preparing to enter high school toward the end of summer:

At that time we lived inland, in a horsy town, on property with plenty of woods. As for shooting the rifle, I could get away with it; my parents were divorced and my mother's job at that time involved spending half the week in Manhattan. At home with my grandmother watching me, I could get away with just about anything. On not a few mornings I doubled back from the bus stop, got in through the back door and dragged my motorcycle silently off into the woods, or spent the schoolday happy as a clam in the furnace room doing something I couldn't do in school—reading. I had no record of dereliction whatsoever (and was in fact a pretty good kid). It was no trouble to start shooting in the glades by the pond every afternoon and again. There was always firing from the Bradley Palmer State Park, which adjoined the property.

At any rate, after high school, as Sam Allis of The Boston Globe reports, Mr. Monahan "tossed boxes at Blanchards in West Roxbury" before attending UMass-Amherst as an undergraduate. How he fared there is another blog entry, a future one, that will reveal even greater mysteries. More to come. Stay tuned.

Take-away question: Did William Monahan ever achieve a high school diploma?

Sources:

1) Obituary: "Harold L. Armstrong, Magistrate in Gloucester for 45 Years; At 83", 1981-04-22, The Boston Globe.
2) William Monahan. "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate: Education in an Ignorant Society", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 15 (April 12–18, 1995), pp. 1, 27–28.
3) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.

4) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.

William Monahan the musician

There is melody in writer-director William Monahan's prose, so much so that you could easily sing-a-long while reading most of his works. It's not the same with textbooks, the reading of which is almost a daily grind for me. With a textbook, you're only processing the information laid out to you, but with Mr. Monahan's prose you could easily sing-a-long if you were so inclined. As Sam Allis of The Boston Globe said of The Departed: "At its best, [Mr. Monahan's] phrasing and structure rival the music of the late, great novelist George V. Higgins." That may be in part due to Mr. Monahan having been a performing musician in the early 90s. He used to play guitar for a band called the Slags and then later for another band called Foam.

Although the chronology isn't too clear, at a minimum Mr. Monahan played guitar for the Slags during the period 1990-1991, and perhaps even going as far back as the late 80s. By 1993 he was playing for another band called Foam, touring in San Francisco at one point, though his career as a musician came to an end around 1994.¹

One of his bandmates in the Slags was New York artist Antony Zito, an old friend of Mr. Monahan's from Massachusetts. Of his days in the Slags, Mr. Zito has said, in an email, "We played in Sheehan's cafe and a few other spots in and around Northampton Mass around 1990 or so." According to a contributors note in an issue of Perkins Press, Mr. Monahan was still a guitarist in the Slags toward the end of 1991.²

Then, shortly afterward, Mr. Monahan started playing in another band called Foam. David Cronin, whose online handle is BostonBeaneater, recalls getting to know Mr. Monahan when visiting a friend in San Francisco in February 1993 who was the bass guitarist in Foam. Mr. Cronin said to me in an email, "I saw Foam perform live at an empty club in San Fran sometime around February 1993. They were a decent band with some clever songs. I'm not sure if Bill wrote all the songs but I know he had his hands in the pot. I was out there visiting a high school friend who had moved out there and shared a house with Bill and played bass in the band."

Though rare, occasionally Mr. Monahan has written about his years as a musician. In an essay titled "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub," he writes "When I was a musician I felt like a vaudeville fraud dying of cancer whenever I said what I did. We just got a new booking agent. I was on the radio once. We're opening for another band you've never heard of at Uncle Nasty's House of Pie."³ The italics are his own. I figure it was probably Foam that played on the radio and had a booking agent, since they also put out a demo tape according to Mr. Cronin who had a copy, and maybe still does, but hasn't yet searched through his archives to see if it's still there. A sampling of Mr. Monahan's work as a song-writer would be extremely interesting. Right now, we can only imagine how scabrous the lyrics might have been, but perhaps something will leak out onto the Internet in the years ahead as Mr. Monahan's star in the film industry continues to rise.

Mr. Cronin also got to know Mr. Monahan a bit when he was a graduate student in Western Massachusetts. That is another area where little is known about Mr. Monahan: his education. Though, don't worry, I'm hard at work on a future blog entry that pulls together tidbits about his education that I've gleaned from here and there.

A lot of great, original bands came out of Northampton, Massachusetts, according to Mr. Monahan in his essay "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England."⁴ One of the most amusing bands to come out of Northampton was The Unband. A few of Mr. Monahan's friends were in the band, such as bassist Mike Ruffino. These crazy bastards were actually banned from one of Mr. Monahan's favorite dives in Northampton, the former Bay State Hotel, where, also, one of the bands that Mr. Monahan played in performed once, twice, or more (yeah, I know: vague). At any rate, the members of The Unband were banned from the Bay State Hotel in the 90s for a "nudity-and-pepper-spray incident" that they had been involved in.⁴ Mr. Monahan's friendship with Mr. Ruffino goes way back, farther than I know. When Mr. Monahan was briefly editor at Hamptons magazine in 1996, he hired on Mr. Ruffino as his assistant.⁵ When Kurt Vonnegut moved to Northampton in 2001, The New York Post briefly joked (probably in Page Six) that Mr. Monahan and Mr. Ruffino were going to personally welcome Mr. Vonnegut to their neighborhood, or something to that effect. There are also a couple of humorous mentions of Mr. Monahan in Mr. Ruffino's memoir, Gentlemanly Repose.⁶

All this background will probably inform, in some way or another, the rewrite that Mr. Monahan has been hired to do of the script for The Long Play, a film project about the music business that originated at Mick Jagger's production company Jagged Films and that Martin Scorsese is intending on directing. Obviously, however, Mr. Monahan's musical background is evident in any of his scripts.

Take-away question: During which years did Mr. Monahan play for the bands the Slags and Foam?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Vanity Plates: Something's Got to Give", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 8 (February 25–March 3, 1998), p. 62. QUOTE: "Four years ago I was in a band and weighed 160 in any weather."
2) "Contributors Notes", Perkins Press, vol. 2, no. 4, Late-Summer 1991. QUOTE: "William Monohan [sic] 'writes fiction and plays guitar for the Slags.' A long (but it's worth it) short story eats up pages 12 and 13."
3) William Monahan. "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub", New York Press, vol. 12, no. 27 (July 7–13, 1999), pp. 1, 18.
4) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.
5) William Monahan. "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at 'Hamptons'", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 29 (July 17–23, 1996), pp. 1, 28–29.
6) Michael Ruffino (2004-11-01). Gentlemanly Repose: Confessions Of A Debauched Rock 'n' Roller. Citadel Press. ISBN 978-0806526263. NOTE: Monahan is mentioned thrice in Ruffino's memoir: in the Acknowledgments as the person without whom the "book would not have been possible", on page 37 at a computer monitor smashing party, and on page 157 at a concert where The Unband opened for Def Leppard at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Monahan may be present on page 193 as one of the "guest-listed friends" for The Unband's final show at the Bowery Ballroom on July 29, 2001.

The political reporting of William Monahan

Of writer-director William Monahan's past political reporting, there isn't much, and of what there is, it's all published in New York Press. He's covered politicians ranging from Hillary Clinton, to Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush. He sort of specialized in the New Hampshire primary, covering the stump speeches in 1996, and then in 1998 he covered the history and culture of the event before the primary date had even been set. In 2000, he covered George W. Bush on the NY campaign trail, in so much as he had an encounter with him, of which you can read about below, in Mr. Monahan's own words from his essay "A Glimpse of Bush" (illustration to the right republished with permission from Tony Millionaire), and Holy God.¹

With nothing else to do I took out my notebook and started organizing some notes. It was while I was doing this that George W. came down the aisle, greeting each member of the press, and he finally came down toward me. I thought of pretending to be asleep, but the tour was far too papal. I grasped his hand. This was not much of a man in front of me: a person who took every advantage and just became a cowboy apostle. Yet I was looking at probably the next president of the United States:

"William Monahan. New York Press"

"Am I supposed to know what that is?"

I gave him that one; after all, it was his plane. Universe, too, maybe.

"It's a weekly in Manhattan."

"A weekly," he said. (Later I wondered if he was thinking, Is it Catholic? In appearance I could have been a deranged Maynooth father in mufti come to bitch him out for breaking bread with a bigot, or being one.) "Well, I better be particularly nice to you. What day's it come out?" Meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Day of," I said, meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Well I better be real nice to you. Can I get you anything? A coffee? Something to eat?"

The candidate was antic; the mediums sycophantic. It seemed a developed and harmonious relationship. I said, "Already very generous, thank you." I think what happened then, I'm afraid, is that I had the arrant balls to ignore him. He passed on. I started transcribing mental notes from Long Island. The candidate came back and looked at me.

"You do know the rules," he said.

"Sure," I said, grandly and at hazard.

"What are they?" asked the candidate.

I had no idea, and had to inarticulately concede it.

"That everything here—" he indicated the plane—"is off the record."

I hadn't written anything down except the names of cookies and the way Long Island looked from the air, but I figured that he was still having fun.

"Oh, yeah, obviously."

"Then what," asked the Governor of Texas, suddenly about as fun as Caligula, "are you writing?"

I sat there, looking the candidate in the eye, glazed with fever, realizing that here was a seminal and useful encounter: the first guy in my life I cannot tell to fuck off. What could I say? Shut your ass before I kick it off you, your dad was worth 50 of you, you fucking prick, and that's your problem anyway, isn't it, you fucking meatball? Why don't you go back up to the front of the plane and brand a couple lobsters for me? Who the fuck are you, you fucking prick, telling me anything at all? Much less what the "rules" are, Your Excellency, you evil fucking pinhead? I'm a novelist. You're just the president—and only maybe. Shut up. Christ and Holy Mary will spare me from further intercourse with pricks with wired courtiers and security details.

If I had not been running a fever of 103 I probably would have gotten Tasered for a misinterpreted bon mot, or ended up on the national news as a crazed loner who sawed the head off the Republican nominee with a complimentary yogurt knife. Motherfucker telling me not to write. Worse, assuming I was one of these five-dollar wire service mediums.

I went to sleep. I must have snored, because I jolted awake again. I wanted off the plane more than I have wanted anything in my life. I am far from perfect, but I'm a lot more perfect than anyone who will put up with that sort of thing—from a president, or God for that matter.

There was a media event in Buffalo (a rigged GOP circle jerk designed as the theatrical backdrop for the release of "news"), but I'd already figured that one out, and I got on the bus and went to the hotel. I had a few drinks (not with the Bush cavalcade, of which I had ceased to be a part, but some people from a Sesame Street roadshow, which seemed cleaner), made a few calls and went to bed. Buffalo is a nice place for a dismal experience. I ran out of Kleenex and toilet paper, blowing my nose.

And that was the last of Mr. Monahan's political reporting, though the first instance of his political reporting seems to have been his column "Straw Dogs," covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary for six weeks.^2—7 Years later, when he returned to New Hampshire at the end of 1998, he mulled upon how the primary defines New Hampshire, in his essay "Up New Hampshire: Dark Thoughts in Dixville Notch," seemingly indicating at one point that he was a registered Democrat at the time: "the only thing good in this country at the moment is that Republicans are accidentally minting registered Democrats like pennies, one of them being me."⁸

Then in 1999, Mr. Monahan was interested in covering the 2000 NY Senate race but eventually begged off. Here is his explanation, as reported by New York Press publisher Russ Smith in his Mugger column:

"Belay the Hillary offer. Just say she's bogus and leave it at that. I have a theory that she's actively attempting to exhaust disgust. When critics are speechless and everything's been said she'll just waddle on to victory. She loses in New York, she notches up a defeat for women everywhere, thereby winning. She has no brains whatsoever. It's fucking unwatchable."

The following week, Russ Smith published another quote from Mr. Monahan, in which he rants further about his reasons for passing on the assignment to cover the Rudy-Hillary race, re-iterating that Hillary Clinton holds an extremely low brain cell count:

"What's frightening about Hillary is what's frightening about Bill Gates. They know they have a crap product; they don't care. That may be an angle. Hillary has no talent, no brains, she's sort of this virus-like thing, that should, maximum, have been a low-rent personnel officer, but escaped from the petri dish and hit the road, wearing that sick smile, altitude-sick, totally out of her depth, but on the march.

She's gotta know she's gravely unsuitable and actively bad for people, who deserve better. She doesn't care. She wants what she wants. That's what creates the late-century nausea.

There's also a tragic component in a literary sense: She's making a huge, overreaching mistake, and the only thing she's gonna accomplish is making Giuliani look like a combination of Thomas Jefferson and the Christian savior. I saw her on tv talking to the U.S. citizens as if they were illiterates to whom she had brought religious tracts and wagons of food paid for out of her own personal First Lady Treasury and almost lost my lunch.

So it's insane. I could do it. I wouldn't like it. But I could get something out of it if the nausea is just gotten over with, which is the thing I was missing."

While Mr. Monahan has hardly ever been kind to the politicians he's covered, he is particularly menacing toward Democrats. An anonymous comment on the Sadly, No! blog from someone called "forked tongue" alleges that Mr. Monahan despised liberals in general, not just Hillary Clinton as demonstrated above:

Since nobody asked, I had a few run-ins with Bill Monahan, screenplay winner for The Departed, and at the time at least (mid-late 90s) he was a drunken reactionary fucktard. Not exactly a wingnut, kinda more a South Park contrarian–claimed to hate conservatives, but REALLY FUCKIN HATED liberals. Wrote several pieces of ain’t-I-cute race-baiting and a stirring paean to Steve Forbes on libertarian grounds in a local pennysaver called New York Press

There is a grain of truth in the comment made by the anonymite named "forked tongue". Steve Forbes was definitely Mr. Monahan's favorite candidate in the 1996 New Hampshire primary. In "It Doles for Thee," he writes: "In the Forbes ascendancy there is a promise of the end of interest politics, of an impending altruistic and sensible vote, and a very worldly one, too. ... [The people of New Hampshire are] liking Forbes because they do not like the government, and because Forbes is a sensible revolutionary choice."³ As for the "ain't-I-cute race-baiting" pieces that the anonymite refers to, there are certainly essays by Mr. Monahan that could be interpreted as such. I'll leave a treatment of that for a future blog entry, but off the top of my head the essays "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself"⁸ and "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist"⁹ could be considered race-baiting depending on your definition of the term. So there may indeed be something to "forked tongue"'s comment about Mr. Monahan's apparently confessed hatred for conservatives, yet apparently greater and more evident hatred for liberals. Applied to most writers, the previous sentence would probably be ridiculous, but Mr. Monahan's hatred of most politicians is so conspicuous in his political reporting that it merits serious attention. His misanthropy is really one of the defining characteristics of his journalism.

Back to then-Presidential hopeful George W. Bush: after only a day with the Bush campaign on the NY campaign trail in 2000, Mr. Monahan had had enough. In his hilarious essay "A Glimpse of Bush," he reports that he shortly "stopped traveling" with them for "moral and practical reasons." He found the entire experience to be pretty dismal, which is what he seems to have figured covering Hillary Clinton would have been like.¹

Mr. Monahan has been described by his colleague Dawn Eden as "libertarian-leaning," and he indicates in his essay "The Angel Factory" that he's a constitutionalist. He writes, "If I were the pope instead of a constitutionalist, and you didn't like this essay and got hit by a bus before you repented, you'd barbecue everlastingly in hell."¹⁰ He even adds, "I've got a handful of ideas that I'd probably die for, if it was absolutely necessary; and though none of them came from anyone else—except the ones that came from the United States Constitution—the severity of my stances on some of the things I believe in probably reflect Catholic thought, that original admiration of the backbone of the martyrs."¹⁰ That gives you a bit of an idea of Mr. Monahan's politics, as they were in the 1990s.

It would be interesting to hear Mr. Monahan's opinions on President Barack Obama. In the 2006 film The Departed, written by Mr. Monahan, the fictional character Costello says:

Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a job, we had the presidency. That's what the niggers don't realize. If I got one thing against the black chaps it's this. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.

That was before Barack Obama ran for President and won.

Take-away question: What strong opinions does Mr. Monahan hold about President Obama?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "A Glimpse of Bush: Happy Cowpoke George W. Hits the NY Campaign Trail", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 10 (March 8–14, 2000), pp. 1, 15.
2) "Hillary on Golgotha: New Hampshire in the Primary Sense", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 5 (January 31–February 6, 1996), pp. 1, 18, 20.
3) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: It Doles for Thee: And Other Notes From the North", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 7–13, 1996), pp. 1, 26–27.
4) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Fairytale in New Hampshire", New York Press,  vol. 9, no. 7 (February 14–20, 1996), p. 20.
5) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Stop the Weasel", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 8 (February 21–27, 1996), pp. 27–29.

6) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Steve, Pat & the Strangler Fig", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 9 (February 28–March 5, 1996), pp. 20–23.

7) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: We Just Get Close", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 10 (March 6–12, 1996), p. 21.

8) William Monahan. "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 25 (June 21–27, 1995), p. 14.
9) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
10) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.