“Hard night, Nunce?” asked O’Rourke.
“Not a-tall,” twanged Nuncio as he staggered up to O’Rourke and put his arm around him. “Sure I met a lovely young lad just in from Dublin and we had a grand fook. Sure I’m just back from the Plaza Hotel meself.”
“Nunce, you’re a fucking degenerate,”said O’Rourke as he physically removed Baroody’s arm from around his neck.
“Well,” said Nuncio with conviction, “I’d rather be a pedophile than an Anglophile.”
O’Rourke looked at Baroody with appreciation. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “Buy the little prick a drink—on the condition that he drinks it at the other end of the bar.”
“Ah, sure ya toooo dacent,” said Nuncio as he scooped up his Pernod and waddled back down to his end of the bar.
“Jesus, Cyclops,” said O’Rourke, “it seems to get worse by the year. A hell of a way to spend your life.”
“Fucking A,” said Reilly as he waved the barman for two more drinks. O’Rourke dropped a twenty and gazed out the window, as if searching for the meaning that his life now lacked.
For as long as anybody could remember, Tone O’Rourke, with his creative profanity, Village street smarts, and outrageous wit, had been sitting in the corner of Hogan’s Moat every Saturday morning with his friend, Cyclops Reilly. The two of them told everyone that they were cousins—which they were not—and that their family came from the same small town in Ireland—Ballyslime.
The two of them had met in Vietnam in 1970 when Reilly was a Marine PFC, or, as he liked to say, “Young. Dumb. Full of cum,” and O’Rourke was a Navy Corpsman—a medic—assigned to their platoon.
Reilly had actually joined the USMC to escape some trouble with the Westies in his native Hell’s Kitchen and a pregnant girlfriend. Eighteen and mean, he went to Vietnam looking to kill Communists.
O’Rourke was a far different case. He thought he had beaten the system. He had just finished a master’s degree in political science, and he thought that no army would want anything to do with his 20-500 vision. He was half right. The army didn’t want him, but the navy sure did.
Even after being drafted, O’Rourke, always the impossible romantic, thought of himself on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise directing jet launchings and landings. Those dreams dissipated when he found his ass at the Great Lakes Naval Station training to become a corpsman. Upon graduation O’Rourke went right past the Enterprise and directly to Saigon. Within a week he was dropped out of helicopter in a rice paddy—how ironic, thought O’Rourke, a Paddy in a paddy—in Qua Dong in northern South Vietnam into the waiting arms of the 3rd Marine Division, whose previous corpsman had stepped on a landmine and had come up two legs and two balls short—or, as the doctors liked to write in their reports, “avulsion of testicles.”
In a platoon populated with “Gomers and Homers,” as Reilly put it, the two New Yorkers had taken to each other. Reilly was born in Hell’s Kitchen and had gone to parochial school and Power Memorial High School. O’Rourke, although born in Dublin, had grown up in Greenwich Village and had the same background as Reilly. Soon, the “Two Harps,” as the good ol’ boys referred to them, were inseparable buddies.
One day, Reilly took one look at O’Rourke and declared to the whole platoon, “How does he do it?”There was O’Rourke, all five-footseven, 135 pounds of him, packed from head-to-toe with equipment. Helmet flopping down on the bridge of his nose, flak-jacket open, heavy medical bags on his left side, M-16 on his right side.
“Fuck you, Reilly,” said O’Rourke that fateful day when their lives would change forever. “If I don’t do it, you certainly won’t.”
“Up yours,” replied Reilly as they went out looking for the “dinks” that had been ripping the marines to shreds in recent weeks.
“We got to do something,” declared Second Lieutenant Howland Meager of Falls Church, Virginia.
“Hey, Howland,” said the ever-irreverent Reilly, “what’d they teach you about this in OCS in Quantico?”
“They didn’t,” said Meager.
“Well, you better hurry up,” said Reilly, “your time is almost up.” Meager knew what Reilly meant—the average life span of a marine second lieutenant in Vietnam was six weeks.
“The cocksuckers got to sleep,” said O’Rourke. “They’re killing us by night with their mortars. Why don’t we kill them by day?”
And that’s just what they did. They went looking for the dinks in the daytime—when the VC were sleeping. They came across them in a wooded area and they were up in the trees, in rolling hammocks. Most of the VC never knew what hit them as the M-16 rounds torn into them, twirling their hammocks around, turning them into human sausages, dripping blood onto the Marines below them. The VC lookout had tossed a grenade before being hit in the head by Marine fire. The grenade exploded and managed to miss all the Marines except O’Rourke, who took a chunk in the fleshy part of his right arm and Reilly, who was hit with a tiny sliver of shrapnel, right in his left eye. He left out a scream that would frighten a banshee. “Tone, Tone, Tone!” Reilly cried and O’Rourke, bleeding heavily himself, was at his side in a second.
“Cocksucking VC!” O’Rourke yelled. He pulled his belt off and looped his own arm, pulling it tight in one motion. “Fuck,” was all O’Rourke could muster as the makeshift tourniquet slowed the bleeding to a trickle.
Blood was gushing out of Reilly’s eye. “I can’t see,” he screamed. Then, in a voice suddenly quiet with resignation, “Doc, I can’t see.”
He couldn’t see because his eye was mush. O’Rourke was afraid he would bleed to death. He quickly put a field dressing over Reilly’s ruined eye and plunged a syrett of morphine through his fatigues. He stuck the spent syrett in one of Reilly’s buttonholes to alert the MASH surgeons that morphine had already been given. “I don’t wanna die, Tone,” Reilly said slowly as the morphine began to take effect.
“You’ll be okay, kiddo,” O’Rourke said, but he wasn’t so sure. The morphine had put Reilly on queer street, and he was beginning to drift off. O’Rourke didn’t want to take any chances. He put his mouth to Reilly’s bloody ear and began to recite a Perfect Act of Contrition in Irish.
Reilly awoke and heard the Gaelic. “What Tone? What are you saying?”
“‘Cad a dhéanfaidh mach an chait ac luch do mharú?’” replied O’Rourke, again in Irish.
“What?”
“What will the cat’s son do but kill a mouse?”
“Oh, of course,” said Reilly completely baffled as he fell into a morphine-induced coma.
Soon Reilly was on a copter and out of Vietnam forever. O’Rourke, though wounded, stayed. He didn’t want to leave his men without a corpsman. But the trauma had left O’Rourke with a stone-empty feeling in both his gut and his heart. Since that day O’Rourke could not stand the sight of blood—his or anyone else’s. And as a corpsman, he was done.
O’Rourke couldn’t believe it, but that had been 30 years ago. Back in New York after a prolonged AWOL hiatus in Dublin, O’Rourke had done his time in the brig in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Navy had finally discharged him. The two of them had again met up at the Moat and their friendship, based on insults and a battlefield bond, had continued.
The front door opened again and the procession of mourners paraded in, led by Napoleon Quirkle, an itinerant carpenter—“Just like Jesus,” he liked to remind—who always referred to himself as a “published poet” based on the one poem he had published in the Village Voice in 1974. The bar was now two-deep as the mourners tried to drown their sorrows.
“How did the funeral mass go?” asked O’Rourke of Quirkle.
“It was a moving experience,” replied Quirkle haughtily as he sipped a glass of Chablis while he prepared his Holmesian Calabash pipe for a smoke.
It was the burial day of vainglorious Michael O’Dote, the legendary Moat bartender who had finally succumbed to terminal laziness after all these years.
Quirkle cleared his throat a
nd the Moat went silent. “To Mikey O’Dote,” he said, “a legend in his own time.”
“Here, heres” were heard around the room.
Cyclops turned to O’Rourke, “A legend in his own fucking mind,” Reilly said and Quirkle turned to him sharply.
“What’s that?”
“Ah, Cyclops was saying,” said O’Rourke, “that that was a lovely sentiment of yours they quoted yesterday in the obit in the News about Mikey. What was it you said, exactly?”
“I said,” said Quirkle posturing in his sensitive poet’s mode as he tugged on his beard, “that Michael O’Dote was ‘a true renaissance man.’”
“Yeah,” spat Cyclops, “the only problem was that he couldn’t spell fucking renaissance!”
Quirkle was thinking of a comeback for Reilly’s “renaissance” crack when Fergus T. Caife entered. The sea of mourners and drunks parted as the famous Donegal poet made his way to the center of the bar.
“Irish whiskey, Lady Mountbatten back. Any of my fags back there?” asked Fergus T. looking for his Capri cigarettes behind the bar and Nuncio Baroody snapped to attention and began to rise from his seat.
Fergus would have none of it. He flipped his hands up as if to say: Stop! “Don’t touch the poet!” Caife intoned in Nuncio’s direction.
The threat abated, Fergus slipped in next to his old friend Tone O’Rourke, whom he had known since Dublin in 1971 when O’Rourke was getting IRA men out of the country with phony American passports and Fergus was establishing himself as a poet and lecturer. They had spent hours drinking together in the Bailey on Duke Street and the Palace Bar on Fleet Street, just across from Trinity College.
“How’s it going, Fergus?” asked O’Rourke.
“Awful.”
“How so?”
“Do you know what I had for dinner last night?” he asked. “The wife ordered in sushi. I washed it down with a Moussey. It all tasted like pussy!” O’Rourke and Reilly roared.
Fergus T. Caife looked like a bewildered Edgar Allan Poe. He was now the Distinguished Professor of Celtic Poetry at NYU, but at the Moat he was always referred to as the “Pussy-Whipped Poet.” His American wife, the former Maggie Yeats—a distant, distant cousin of the great Irish poet—had met Fergus in McDaid’s Pub on Harry Street in Dublin. She was looking for the ghost of Brendan Behan when she came upon Fergus, who had been reciting verse for his drinks. He looked her sincerely in the eye and declared:
“Stroked:
A wife stroked me in my dream
I turned, laid a hand on a breast—a scream
She turned away, her own Aran Isle
Leaving me barren, astir, in my Celtic bile.”
A torrid romance had followed filled with drugs, wine and passionate and creative love-making. Marriage soon followed and a move back to New York. With the arrival of their first child all his vices were declared null and void by his wife. Thus he was referred to as “pussy-whipped” because his wife wouldn’t allow him to drink or smoke in his own apartment. “I married a smoke detector,” he was honest enough to admit. So he got his drink and smoke surreptitiously on the run at the Moat as he ran out for groceries or the paper.
“Caife,” said Cyclops. “You got to put your foot down. Remember,” he continued in his best Ralph Kramden imitation, “you’re the King of the Castle.”
“And every castle,” returned Fergus, “has a vassal!” Sometimes there was no arguing with Fergus T. Caife.
Fergus sipped on his whiskey and cleared his throat. “Ha’penny,” he said. There was absolute silence in the bar.
“She had red hair and I was on the hunt
She turned away as if to shunt
I knew she was a right cunt
So I asked her how much in punts
She turned around and said, ‘But I’m just a nanny!’
So I offered her a ha’penny”
“Good Jesus,” said Reilly.
“Get the fuck out of here, Fergus,” added O’Rourke, “you fucking fraud!”
Fergus finished his whiskey, washed it down with his non-alcoholic Lady Mountbatten, then turned and started to exit the bar.
“Fergus T.,” said Napoleon Quirkle. “Do you have a poem in memory of Mikey O’Dote?”
Fergus stood in the middle of the floor, his feet wide apart, his thumbs tucked inside his vest and cleared his voice: “For Mikey O’Dote:
Mikey O’Dote in now in the grave
For in matters of pussy he was always brave
A man only talked to because he was as handsome as a Cheshire cat
It won’t do him any good now that he is as dead as a fucking bat
Still stiff, now, a necrophiliac’s delight
The big donkey is dead and gone is his bite.”
The bar was hushed in memory of O’Dote. Fergus turned, winked at Reilly and O’Rourke, and ran out the door. “How moving,” said Quirkle. In silence O’Rourke and Reilly looked at each other, smiled, and clicked their glasses together.
With the after-hours drinkers, the mourners, and the other Saturday morning regulars, the Moat was soon so loud that you could hardly hear yourself think. The door opened once more and in came Dr. Moe Luigi, fresh from his morning rounds at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and J. Howard Byrne, professional grief counselor.
Luigi and Byrne were the original Mutt & Jeff tandem. Luigi, diminutive, intense, minutely-groomed was just the opposite of Byrne who was nicknamed “The Commandant” because he looked like an IRA commandant, circa 1920, sent by central casting. It was said that you could tell the changing of the seasons by observing Byrne, because he was either wearing his winter tweeds or his summer tweeds.
“What’s going on here?” asked Byrne as he looked at the mourners.
“Mikey O’Dote’s funeral,” said O’Rourke. “Do your stuff, Commandant.”
Byrne had a Ph.D. and a sharp bite. In the touchy-feely ’90s, he had put a hard Irish gaze on life, the antidote to the saccharine voices on TV and in public life who took delight in grief and mourning, like President Bill Clinton. (“He gives good eulogy,” Byrne liked to say of the president.) From the bombing in Oklahoma City to the latest teenage nuts with AK-47s shooting up their high school, Byrne gave the same advice on national television as he would to Mikey O’Dote’s mourners: “They’re dead. Get over it. Move on.”
“You show great sensitivity,” said Quirkle with an edge as he pulled on his pipe.
“Fuck you,” said Byrne. He ordered his morning soda. “Never trust a pipe smoker,” he added as he went to read the papers.
“Good morning, Tone, Cyclops,” said Luigi, surveying the bar. “I see they’ve rounded up the usual suspects.”
Dr. Moe Luigi, according to a fawning profile in the New Yorker, was the famous “Proctologist to the Stars.” He was referred to simply in the Moat as “the asshole doctor.” And as Luigi himself often proclaimed, “What’s all this veneration for me? A doctor’s a doctor and an asshole’s an asshole.”
“How’s it going, Moe?”
“The same, Tone. I look at assholes from nine to five. I stick my fingers in them. I peer up them. I shove proctoscopes up them. I wink at them, and they wink back at me. If I never see another asshole again, it’ll be too soon!”
“Moe, you’re in the wrong saloon.” O’Rourke smiled.
“Touché,” said Luigi, as he raised his glass of anisette in salute.
The story of Moe Luigi was the stuff that the American Dream was made of. The son of an immigrant Italian shoemaker, Giacomo Luigi was his father’s first American-born son when he made his belated appearance in a railroad flat—the “dumb-bell” apartments of New York lore—on Mulberry Street in 1930. A graduate of Brooklyn College just before the Korean War, he too, like O’Rourke, had started out as a navy corpsman. After the war he entered the Cornell University Medical School on the GI Bill and finished first in his class in 1957. Declining offers from such places as the Mayo Clinic, he worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital on the causes and cure
s for colorectal cancer. Over his long career he had peered up the rectums of such varied celebrities as Marilyn Monroe (“Nice,” he said), Francis Cardinal Spellman (“He liked it too much”), Roy Cohn (“Clean as a whistle”), and President Ronald Reagan (“There was nothing at my end either”). But the thing that endeared him to the other regulars at the Moat was his plain speaking. The man had absolutely no pretensions. He was also a man of humor and kindness who had taken care of many of his impoverished drinking pals and their families free of charge.
“How’s it with you, Tone?” asked Luigi. “How’s the glamorous world of political consulting?” O’Rourke did not answer. He just looked at Luigi and gave the old jerk-off sign with his hand. “My boy,” Luigi responded, “you have a lot to learn. Life was meant to be a giant circle jerk. You just can’t beat the bastards. It’s their game. They made the rules.”
“But Moe,” O’Rourke said, “look at you. You’ve done it. They always want you for some committee or panel or commission. They respect you.”
“My boy, you’re wrong. They don’t respect me. They need me.” Luigi pulled out a pack of Chesterfields from his jacket pocket and stuffed one into a long cigarette holder. He stuck it in his mouth, lit it, and slanted it upward like a grand erection. FDR couldn’t have done it better. “I’m the best there is,” he continued, blowing smoke through his nose. “I’ve forgotten more about assholes than those bastards could learn in a lifetime. I’m a pro’s pro. So when some WASP President is worried why there’s blood in his stool, and he doesn’t know if he has cancer or just some temperamental hemorrhoids, he calls Luigi. He doesn’t give a fuck about me. All he knows is that I’m a greasy little Wop who knows more about his dreaded malady than anybody else in the goddamn world. Always remember that. People want you for what you can do for them. Always stay on top of the bastards and fight them toe-to-toe and you’ll win because most of these assholes have nothing but air between their ears. Just keep fighting.”
Our Lady Of Greenwich Village Page 4