True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  A chic haunt in Long Beach, Crotty said, was a place where the bartender didn’t wear a tattoo.

  But the joke was on us. Because the really funny thing was that if I hadn’t come up with that name, we would have had a nice quiet little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days. But “The Virgin Tramp” brought us a lot of attention we didn’t need, and with the attention came the heat, and then it got out of control and a lot of things happened that never should have.

  Anyway. 39th and Norton two weeks ago. It’s a Jap neighborhood now, Jap and middle-class colored. No empty lots, no bungalows, no Hudson Terraplane. The Neighborhood Association has put up streetlamps that look like gaslights and there are topiary trees and over on Crenshaw there’s a Honda dealer and a Kawasaki dealer and Subaru and Datsun and Toyota dealers. The colored all have Jap gardeners and the Japs have colored cleaning ladies, and right where Frank Crotty said, “You don’t often see a pair of titties as nice as that,” there’s this Jap-style house and just about on the spot where we found Lois Fazenda’s bottom half, this Jap family has put up one of those little cast-iron nigger jockeys.

  Son of a bitch if they haven’t.

  3

  I knew I’d get to 39th and Norton eventually, because I drive a lot these days. Trying to put it all back together about me and Des. Over to Boyle Heights usually, where we grew up. The signs today are all different in Boyle Heights. It’s one big body shop now. Acapulco Wrecking. Azteca Body Repair. Carro Latina. Not like when Des and me were kids. Boyle Heights was tough mick then, just like it’s tough Mex now. Cops and priests, that’s what the Heights was famous for. And drunks, hod carriers and bookies. A few stickup men, an occasional shooter. The priesthood, that was a way out. And the department. Boxing was the way I got out. I was the terror of the schoolyard at Saint Anatole’s. The enforcer. The smart guys ran the pitch-penny games and put the market value on the bubble-gum baseball cards—three Ross Youngs for one Joe Dugan—and if any kid didn’t like it, I put him on the grass. At home I used to lie in bed and try not to listen to the old man grinding away at the old lady in the next room, him drunk and her saying, Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the Beginning, is Now and Ever shall be, World Without End, Amen. It made you think a bit about how much fun it was to fuck, and so I used to lie in bed and imagine a bell ringing and the microphone coming down into the ring and some guy in a tuxedo pointing his finger at me and saying, “. . . the welterweight champion of the world.” Anyway, I joined the navy when I was seventeen. Some old petty officer in the recruiting office said I could join the boxing team and avoid sea duty and fuck Chinese girls, which is pretty much what I did for six years. None of the Chinese girls ever said the Gloria. Four years straight I made the quarter finals in the China navy championships, but when the tough boys came in, I stuck and ran and made sure I didn’t get knocked out and bet on the other guy. The funny thing was, I always knew I couldn’t fight much. I had bad hands and no punch and I always had trouble making the weight. The rap on me after I got out of the navy and turned professional was that I liked to hit all right, I just didn’t like to get hit back.

  You’re just like your father, the old lady used to say to me. I guess she meant no good. She had other plans for Des. He couldn’t have been more than three when she had him spelling all the Holy Days of Obligation. A-s-c-e-n-s-i-o-n T-h-u-r-s-d-a-y. I-m-m-a-c-u-l-a-t-e C-o-n-c-e-p-t-i-o-n. The priests loved it. I remember our pastor, Monsignor Shea. The monsignor was a man of a few firmly held opinions. Like the Jews killed Jesus and you named your first daughter Mary and your first son John. When my cousin Jerry got baptized, Monsignor Shea wouldn’t pour the water on his head. “Jerry!” he said, that big harp voice booming through the sanctuary. “What kind of name is Jerry? You ever heard of a Saint Jerry? It’s a name for a tap dancer.”

  And that was that. Except to the day he got killed breaking up a strike at the Ford plant in Pico Rivera in 1937, my cousin Jerry was always called Taps. There were a lot of guys like Taps Keogh in Boyle Heights, hard guys with not too many brains, good only for strike breaking or doing heavy work for Frankie Foley. Frankie was king of the Heights when me and Des were growing up, a real Public Enemy. Girls, protection, every now and then a hit. They made his life story into a Jimmy Cagney movie, although it was more Cagney than Frankie. I mean, I used to do errands for Frankie and he never wore a tuxedo and a wing collar and spats and a gray fedora like Cagney wore in the movie. And he was never good to his ma and the freckle-faced kid brother who wanted to be an altar boy. Then he got burned on a Murder One rap and he got life in San Quentin. I used to see Frank occasionally when I delivered bad guys to Q. He’d become the queen of the joint. The fag Cag, Des called him. The story made him laugh.

  The house where Des and I grew up is still standing, which should tell you something about Boyle Heights. All I can really remember about the house is when the priest came to call. The priest would be there to take the parish census and he and my mother would sit there and drink tea and talk about living saints. She should have been a nun, my mother. She set great store by living saints.

  “Tell me about Maureen Delaney, Father. Does she still come to the Sodality Meetings?”

  “Never misses, Mrs. Spellacy.”

  “It’s grand, as crippled as she is, with them wasted little limbs. Grand.”

  “You give her the Blessed Sacrament and you see her shining little face all scrubbed nice and clean to receive the sacred body and blood and she makes you feel you’re doing her the grandest favor in the world.”

  “A living saint, Father,” my mother said. I. think now she was wondering if living with the old man qualified her for living sainthood.

  “Not like some, Mrs. Spellacy.” Then the knowing nod. “With the patent-leather shoes.” Reflecting the underwear in the gleam is what he meant.

  “Marie O’Connor,” my mother said, with that special whisper she reserved for scarlet women.

  “No names, Mrs. Spellacy.” No slander from the lips of Father.

  The subject was quickly changed. “Tell me, Father, Tommy’s bowels are all plugged up. Would you recommend the castor oil or the milk of magnesia?”

  Father folded his hands over his stomach. His advice was sought more often on matters of purgatives and politics than it was on questions of doctrine, and he gave as much thought about what laxative to take as he did about what Protestant or Jew politician to vote against. “The castor oil, Mrs. Spellacy. Oh, yes, a grand laxative, simply grand, like a physic. That’s the ticket, no doubt about it at all.”

  “That’s high praise for the castor oil, Father, coming from a man like yourself with such a fine intellect and such grand grammar.” A little more tea in Father’s cup. “And tell me about Tyrone O’Keefe.”

  “He’s still all covered with the bug powder, Mrs. Spellacy.”

  Another living saint, Tyrone O’Keefe. Because of the tremendous growth of sanctifying grace in his soul.

  My father wasn’t a living saint. Nor was his grammar very grand. He used to take Des and me on the streetcar over to Lincoln Park to ride the merry-go-round. It was working then. He was a snappy dresser, the old man, poor as he was, always jingling the coins in his pocket and smiling a lot. He had that sweet harp smile when he was drunk, but then he was pissed so much, he never lost it, even when he was sober. Which was like every other Feast of the Assumption. He wasn’t much with the words. I remember when Uncle Eddie Keogh died. Him and the old man did dig-and-toss work for the Southern Pacific, and the old man took me and Des to the wake over to Sonny McDonough’s funeral parlor on Boyle Avenue. That was before Sonny merged with Shake Hands McCarthy and McDonough &McCarthy began to plant every stiff in the county, even branching into fox terriers. Uncle Eddie was stretched out in his fifty-dollar coffin, wearing the black suit that Sonny had sold Aunt Jenny as part of the package, although she didn’t know the suit didn’t have any back and that Uncle Eddie was na
ked from the waist down under the coffin top, Sonny McDonough even then being into low overhead. Aunt Jenny was crying and everyone was saying, “Didn’t Sonny do a grand job, Eddie looks like he’s just received Holy Communion,” and Jenny throws herself on the old man and says, “Tell me what kind of man he was, Phil, you knew him better than anyone,” and the old man with that beautiful mick smile looked down at Uncle Eddie, lying there wearing Sonny’s fifty-dollar special, and finally he just took Jenny’s hand and he said, “He was a good shoveler, Jenny. Not a fancy shoveler, mind, but a good shoveler.”

  High praise from Phil Spellacy.

  4

  The first Tuesday of every month I go see Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret is my wife. She is in Camarillo. Not to put too fine a point on it, Camarillo is a state mental institution. There is nothing really that wrong with Mary Margaret. She talks to the saints, is all. Especially to Saint Barnabas of Luca. Now being an ex-cop and all, I’ve done a lot of legwork on this Saint Barnabas of Luca and to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t appear on any saints’ roster I’ve been able to dig up. I thought I had a lead when the Pope gave the chop to Saint Philomena a few years back, but Barnabas of Luca doesn’t even appear on any morning report of former saints.

  Barnabas first showed up after Moira was born. Moira is our daughter. Little Moira she was called. I suppose if a little elephant is little, then Moira was little. Poor Moira. When she was thirteen, she was 161 pounds in her stocking feet. A walking Hershey bar.

  “What’s that you got stuffed in your face, Moira?”

  She never lied, even then. “Tootsie Roll, Dad.”

  “Jesus.”

  A tear rolled down Moira’s face and some Tootsie Roll juice gathered at the corner of her mouth. I think she had a Mars Bar in there, too.

  “You took the Lord’s name in vain, Dad.”

  Moira is Sister Angelina now. A perfect name. Short for angel-food cake. She never misses a family funeral. Fourth cousin once removed and there’s Moira, looking like a black battleship in her nun’s habit, knocking out the rosary louder than anyone else.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,

  The Lord is with thee.

  Blessed art thou among women

  And blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . .”

  (This is where Moira really belts it),

  “. . . JAY-SUS.”

  It takes a lot of effort, the rosary, so Moira is always first at the eats table afterward. A little shrimp, a little ham, easy on the potato salad, a dumpling or two. Chocolate eclair? Don’t mind if I do. Twice. It’s like they starve her at that convent between funerals.

  “How’s Mom, Dad?” says Moira, eyeing the platter of deviled eggs. “I sent her a spiritual bouquet for Christmas.”

  “She’ll appreciate that, Moira.”

  “How’s Kev?”

  Kev is my son. I’ve lived with Kev and his wife Em since the last time Mary Margaret went to Camarillo. I make Kev nervous. He suspects I know all about his girl friend. I do. I was just keeping my hand in. To see if I had lost my touch. Kev is in the religious-supply game. That’s what he calls it. The religious-supply game. Scapulars, mite boxes, statues. And those cheap gold-leaf chalices with the fake emeralds and rubies that he flogs to parents whose sons are getting ordained. There was an article about Kev once in Church Supply Quarterly, with a picture of him holding up a new chasuble, and under the picture the line, “A Pioneer in the Design of Double-Knit Vestments.” Anyway, the pioneer was always going off to religious-supply conventions in Las Vegas, not that I ever heard that Vegas was a gold mine for double-knit chasubles. Em thought it was grand, of course. Kev going to Vegas all the time, keeping on top of the latest developments in altar linen. But as I said, once a cop, always a cop. So one night there I decided to follow Kev when he told Em he had to go to an affair honoring Monsignor Barney Carey on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anniversary in the priesthood.

  “I whipped up a new silver chalice for him,” Kev said.

  “Silver,” Em said. “Because it’s his twenty-fifth.”

  You couldn’t say Em wasn’t quick.

  “And the monsignor doesn’t know it yet, but they’re giving him a new car. A Buick LeSabre. Red.”

  “What are they thinking of, Kev?” Em said. “Hungary and Albania and all those Polish countries going over to the Communists and they’re giving him a red car. Black is what priests drive.”

  “They got a deal from Fuzzy Feeney over to Feeney’s Buick,” Kev said. “Red was all he had.”

  “It’ll be a convertible next,” Em said. “And the sunglasses.”

  I knew Barney Carey from the old days when he was a curate at Saint Vibiana’s. He ate on the cuff more than Crotty. So I was surprised he only got the red LeSabre. I figured Barney Carey good for a whole Buick dealership, easy. Not that Kev hung around long at Barney’s catered affair. He slipped out after the presentation of the silver chalice and headed over to the Valley. I kept a block behind. As I said, just keeping my hand in. He turned south on Winnetka and into the lot of a building called the Ramada Arms. In the space for apartment 6C. The rest was easy. The occupant of 6C was one Charlene Royko and she was a computer programmer for National Cash. Twice married and also banging a utility infielder for the Angels. Which was why she only played ball with Kev when the Angels were on the road.

  I hadn’t lost my touch. Not that I told any of this to Mary Margaret when I went to Camarillo the first Tuesday of every month.

  “How’s Kev?” Mary Margaret said.

  “Getting his innings in.”

  “And their boy?” Mary Margaret said. “Has he made his First Holy Communion yet?”

  “Fourteen years ago.”

  “That’s grand, Tom,” Mary Margaret said. “Napoleon always said that the day of his First Holy Communion was the grandest day of his whole life. With all his honors. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t know that, no.”

  “Saint Barnabas told me.”

  5

  The headline said,

  TIMOTHY J. O’FAY

  MONSIGNOR WAS 104

  No known kin. Oldest priest in the archdiocese. Ordained in 1894. Had spent his declining years at Saint Bridget’s Retreat in Chatsworth since his retirement from parish duties. That was a laugh.

  “You okay, Dad?” It was Em knocking at the bathroom door.

  “Just having a laugh, Em,” I said. She hated me to lock myself in the bathroom. She thought I’d have a stroke or my heart would go and she’d have to call the fire department to take the door off the hinges and the new paint job would be chipped.

  “Reading the funnies then?” Em said. She had this idea that old people had to sneak off to the crapper to read the funnies.

  “The obituaries,” I said.

  Em wouldn’t see the humor of Saint Bridget’s Retreat in Chatsworth. Saint Bridget’s was a nice way of saying the old priests’ home. A lot of twinkly-eyed nuns laughing at some old boy’s jokes about Fat Phil Doolin. Father’s got such a sense of humor, they would say. He laughs so hard the tears come to his eyes. And the drool leaks out of his mouth, is what they usually forget to say.

  The thing about Tim O’Fay was that before he was at Saint Bridget’s, he was in the old priests’ home at Saint Margaret’s in Oxnard and before that at Saint Stephen’s in Chula Vista. Eighty years a priest, Tim, and sixty-one of them he had spent in some old priests’ home. Which is one way of saying that Tim O’Fay was nutty as a fruitcake from the day he was ordained, although it took twenty years for the archbishop to figure it out, the archbishop never being known for being quick on the trigger. You can say that sort of thing now, but when Des and me were growing up, if you even hinted that the archbishop was a little short upstairs you’d get a cuff on the ear for your trouble. Nowadays, with Phil Berrigan and that crowd, all of them showing up on “The David Susskind Show” with the boots and the blue jeans and the turtleneck sweaters and the kids and the wife, who was the former Sister The
odosius, you can say that the archbishop is banging his housekeeper and the nuns will smile their twinkly little smiles and say, “A living saint, His Excellency,” probably because they’ve got a little going on the side with some curate who wears a gold chain around his neck.

  “Monsignor O’Fay was well-known throughout the archdiocese for his musical endeavors.” I wonder where the paper dug that one up. The truth of the matter was that Tim O’Fay had one of the most beautiful tenors you ever heard. It used to be said around the archdiocese that Tim was the only tenor ever made John McCormack envious. Except he used to sing at odd times. I got that from my brother Des. My brother Des was Tim OTay’s curate. That was right after Des was ordained and long before he became famous in his own right as the “Parachuting Padre.” Des would call and say the monsignor was going to sing the solemn high on Sunday and not to miss it. Des had a little Berrigan in him, even then. So I’d drive out to Saint Malachy’s to hear the monsignor. He said a good mass, no flourishes, and with that voice and all it was a treat, like watching Charley Gehringer hit. Except that every once in a while, instead of singing the Sanctus or the Agnus Dei, the monsignor would wing into “My Old Kentucky Home,” or “Marching Through Georgia.” Of course there were people over to Saint Malachy’s didn’t appreciate the old Civil War standards, and they would complain and the archbishop would come out, but then Tim would just croon the best Agnus Dei you ever heard. Old Tim was shrewd and he had already served a stretch at Saint Stephen’s in Chula Vista, and with the archbishop there he wasn’t about to break parole. Until that last time at Morty Moran’s funeral, Morty being an old pal of the archbishop’s, what with him donating a new Packard every year, and Tim thought it would be a nice touch at Morty’s requiem mass if instead of the Credo he slipped into “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” since Morty was born in Roanoke and all. Right after which the archbishop shipped Tim back to the old priests’ home. For keeps.