Our Lady Of Greenwich Village

by Dermot McEvoy

  “Oh, shut up,” said Fopiano as he hit the power button on the remote and Dan Rather disappeared. “I can’t stand it when he does that Texas shit-kicking bullshit,” said Vito. “Where do we stand?”

  “How the hell did this all happen?” asked Madonna-Sue. There was no answer out of Brogan or Drumgoole. “Well?” she said with agitation, taking another Chesterfield drag.

  “We were working on the omnibus pornography bill,” began Brogan, who was interrupted by Madonna-Sue’s shrill laughter.

  “The fucking pornography bill,” thought Madonna-Sue Fopiano. “Couldn’t they come up with anything better than that for an excuse?”

  Here she was, pregnant, stressed out, and puffing away. She wondered what the hell she was doing in politics in the first place. Every man in the room had his eyes on Brogan. As much as Madonna-Sue disliked her, as a woman she had to admire her. She was picture perfect. She wore a dark blue suit that highlighted her cleavage, her impossibly round ass, and her stunning legs. Madonna-Sue felt like Aunt Bee from Mayberry standing next to Sophia Loren.

  It was Brogan’s sex appeal that bothered Madonna-Sue the most, the way she was always flaunting her physical attributes. She had the tan and every piece of blonde hair was meticulously combed into place. No wonder their marriage had cooled. Madonna-Sue knew she could not compete with Peggy Brogan. At least not sexually. Madonna-Sue looked at her father and saw a sexual stalking by eye. For Christsakes, even Drumgoole looked interested.

  She wished that she could just fire Brogan, but it wasn’t that easy. Who would run the man? Who could control, manipulate, and basically frightened the indolent Jackie into doing his job? Madonna-Sue didn’t even want to think about that. She couldn’t do it; she had her own office to run. They had no choice. She needed Brogan and she hated herself for it.

  Madonna-Sue had an aura about her that could not be explained. She had worked the cute-little-Staten-Island-girl act of hers to the hilt. They loved her on the Sunday morning talks shows, alone or holding hands with Jackie so the whole country could see their devotion to each other. So photogenic with such well-rehearsed replies that Tim Russert or David Brinkley or Sam Donaldson were reduced to smiles no matter how outrageous her opinions had been.

  The real Madonna-Sue was just like her father—as tough as nails. The current pregnancy was a slap in the face to Brogan. She could just see the two of them fucking on the Thanksgiving coats, Jackie pinning Madonna-Sue’s ankles behind her ears as he gave it to her, but good. Brogan looked across the room at Madonna-Sue and shook her head. There was the congressional icon, four months pregnant and puffing away on her Chesterfield with a desperation that was shocking, even to Brogan. Five months from now Madonna-Sue and Jackie would be waving the newborn for the cameras at the Republican National Convention in San Diego. Family Values, thought Brogan. Dysfunctional family values.

  Brogan looked at Vito Fopiano, the proud grandfather with the aphrodisiac hands, and wondered what she had gotten herself into. The Fopianos knew she was fucking Jackie, but nothing had ever been said. This was politics, the dirty politics of 2000. Everybody was looking into Bill Clinton’s bedroom to see who he was doing and so they had to be careful that the media didn’t start looking into their own bedrooms. But Brogan would somehow survive. She was a tough girl from Queens, and she could handle herself. As she looked at Madonna-Sue, Brogan realized that she might have to extract the ultimate revenge on the congresswoman. “Tread softly, Madonna-Sue,” she thought, “tread softly.”

  “The omnibus pornography bill,” repeated Madonna-Sue Fopiano with a laugh.

  “Yes, we had the television on,” continued a distracted Brogan, “and The Song of Bernadette was on Turner Classic Movies. I told Georgie on the phone what had happened and, apparently, The Song of Bernadette became an appearance by the Virgin Mary when that little cockeyed shit Benedict Reilly of the Daily News got a hold of Georgie at the emergency ward.” Everybody looked at Drumgoole and knew they didn’t call him George-the-Fifth for nothing.

  “So it never happened?” said Vito.

  “Of course it never happened,” shot back Brogan.

  “You should be fucking fired,” said Madonna-Sue to Drumgoole.

  “Madonna-Sue, Vito,” pleaded Drumgoole.

  “Oh,” said Madonna-Sue, “fuck off.”

  They were squared off against each other. Brogan and Drumgoole on one side, the Fopianos on the other, with Swift, trying to look innocent, lying between them.

  “Nobody is going to get fired,” said Vito.

  “He deserves it,” replied his daughter.

  “That’s not the way I do things,” said Vito sternly to his daughter. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’d rather have Georgie inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in—especially under these circumstances.” Drumgoole was so happy he was staying that he’d piss wherever they told him to.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Brogan. “How are we going to handle it?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” said Vito. “The Cardinal’s already praised Jackie. Remember, he’s the new Joan of Arc of the GOP. Calls are running 9 to 1 in favor of the Virgin at both your offices. We’re stuck. Our Lady of Greenwich Village did appear to Jackie.”

  Everyone was silent, all the energy drained out of them by the weekend’s events. Finally, Vito wearily turned to his son-in-law, “What do you think, Jack?”

  From the movie encyclopedia in his head Swift retrieved the answer. “Mother of Mercy,” said Jackie in a dead-on impersonation of Edward G. Robinson’s death scene in Little Caesar, “is this the end of Jackie?”

  No one smiled, but Vito was thinking that maybe Jackie was right. It might be the end of Jackie—and maybe the Fopianos too.

  10.

  St. Patrick’s Day.

  It was all a sham. It was a date reserved for acne-faced teenagers from the suburbs who celebrated by throwing up on each other. An excuse to get drunk and talk about the “Troubles” and the “Risin’ of ’98,” “good ould Dev,” and what a marvelous literary tradition we had.

  When O’Rourke walked into the Moat at the end of the day the only familiar face he saw among the loud green throng was Clarence Black. “What the fuck are you doing here?” asked O’Rourke.

  “I don’t know, Tone,” said Black. “I keep telling these harps that I’m black Irish.”

  “Black Irish,” said O’Rourke.

  “Black Irish,” laughed Black, who was, in fact, black.

  Clarence Black was a retired New York City firefighter. In his twentieth year on the job as a river fireman, a burning pier had fallen on him, and after a long convalescence he had hung them up. Clarence had been around a long time. When he had started in the FDNY, the notorious “black bed” was still in fashion in the firehouse. The black bed was reserved for black firefighters and only black firefighters. It was a way of reminding the few blacks that managed to make the cut that that this was still a department run by the Irish. Black, a very sociable and sensitive man, had been hurt. After enough abuse, he took his hurt to the river, where he put in most of his career. It had been an exciting time, the last epoch of the ocean liner, big beauties like the United States, the France, and the two Queens, Mary and Elizabeth. But it all ended that day in 1973 when that old, abandoned, rotting pier had come down on him. Several homeless men, trying to make a fire for warmth in winter, had almost killed him. After retirement he went to work for an insurance company as an arson investigator. Taking the next step, he ended up working as a PI. Now, he lived on his pension and operated his own one-man private investigation agency. When asked what he did for a living he would smile a piano smile of white teeth that lit up that unlined black face, making it years younger, and say, “Me? I’m a private dick.”

  “You out to keep an eye on my fellow countrymen today, Clarence?” asked O’Rourke.

  “Shit, Tone, you keep your own eye on your own. I had to deal with these fucking harps for years in the department. I don’t need
to do it now.”

  “Absolutely right, Clarence. I know exactly what you mean, but after what I did to you years ago on this day I thought you still might be gun-shy.”

  Black laughed, “Shit, Tone, I ain’t afraid of much, but you’re right, I must be nuts to come out on St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Buy that man a drink,” said O’Rourke and two Remys were placed in front of them.

  “Slaínte,” said O’Rourke.

  “L’chaim,” returned Black.

  Five years ago to the day. O’Rourke, after a bitch of a day at the office, had come in for his evening “pop.” The Moat was raucous with people drinking beer and wearing pointed green leprechaun hats. O’Rourke swung into the corner bar at the Moat where Clarence Black was standing. “How’s it going, Tone?”

  “Fucking amateurs, Clarence.”

  “I know what you mean, Tone.”

  “Clarence, do you know what’s long and green and has assholes on both ends?”

  “Nope.”

  “The St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” Black laughed. O’Rourke did not.

  The drink was poured and the two men stood there in silence as the noise level seemed to grow and grow, as it reached for some impossible apogee. As he looked around the crowded bar O’Rourke could feel himself growing depressed as he saw in his people everything he hated so much about them and himself. They were fools, parodying themselves, with a distinct meanness and ungraciousness that brilliantly pierced through the thin veneer of the camaraderie of the slurred words. He wished that St. Patrick’s Day would just disappear. Forever. He was growing more depressed as he looked down toward the beer pumps and saw a cute little college girl with red hair and freckles on her nose raise her mug of green beer in toast.

  “God Bless the Irish!” she said in a voice that told O’Rourke she would have her next beer on July 4th.

  O’Rourke was no longer depressed. He was mad. “Fuck the Irish,” O’Rourke said.

  The bar suddenly grew silent. It was as if O’Rourke only wanted to think it, but the words jumped out of his brain and dashed out his mouth before he could stop them. O’Rourke then realized that Clarence Black was standing beside him, the only black face in a joint full of bombed harps.

  Black Irish.

  A blurry figure pushed in front of the cute red-haired girl. O’Rourke and Black took one look at the guy and had him cut and quartered immediately. Long Island Irish. The kind that had a defiant strut—so similar to that of a black ghetto kid’s, yet so different—instead of a walk. The kind of a guy who had a chip on his shoulder. The kind of guy who liked his beer with the boys at The Holy Ground Pub, watched the Yankees at the Stadium regularly, and jerked off more than he ever got laid. The kind of guy whose idea of a date was going to an Irish writer’s bar in Greenwich Village on St. Patrick’s Day to drink green beer. The petulant kind of Irish kid whose every third word was “fuck,” but who, if you said “fuck” in front of his cute little red-haired date, would react like a priest who had been just told that Sister Ignatius was blowing the whole Fordham basketball team.

  “Hey,” said the big Irish kid from halfway down the bar, “what’s your name, boy?”

  It didn’t register with O’Rourke. It did with Black, who reached inside his jacket to instinctively feel his revolver. It also registered with Big Zeus, the bartender, who snapped up the bridge of the bar and prepared for a preemptive strike. Then O’Rourke realized what “boy” he was talking to. Clarence Black just stared.

  O’Rourke broke the silence. “Wolfe Tone O’Rourke. What’s yours, fuck face?”There was more silence. Fordham Joe had just realized he had broken a very important bar law—don’t cause trouble on foreign turf. There was a prolonged silence. The two Irishmen stared at each other.

  “Wolfe Tone O’Rourke,” the cute, little red-haired girl said as she finally broke the deafening pause. “I guess we can’t top that. God bless you, Wolfe Tone O’Rourke.”

  O’Rourke nodded. “Zeus, buy those nice people a drink.” The crowd began to hum again. “Sorry, Clarence, I forgot you were here.”

  “That’s all right, Tone. I would have whipped that fat sucker senseless.” He meant it. He leaned over and whispered in Tone O’Rourke’s ear, “Fuck the Irish.”

  O’Rourke smiled. “I owe you one, Clarence.”

  So it’s come down to this, thought O’Rourke.

  It was after ten o’clock and leaning against the side-bar, Remy still in hand, he surveyed the ever-increasing madness.

  His people.

  He was too drunk to laugh at the idea. His glazed-over eyes only smiled at the absurdity. He couldn’t escape them. What had that mad chronicler of Irish ghosts and their random hauntings, Eugene O’Neill, said? “One thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish.”

  “May God help us,” thought O’Rourke.

  O’Rourke now saw the procession to the men’s room. Lots of people going in and lots of people coming out rubbing their noses. O’Rourke was beginning to get the itch. He hadn’t used the shit in a long time—as his weight would confirm.

  “Anything shaking, Zeus?” O’Rourke said to the barman, elegant at three hundred pounds and mightily bald.

  “Not a thing, son,” said Zeus. “The Fish hasn’t shown up tonight. Must be afraid of our people. Maybe it’s time to invoke the intercession of St. Leroy.”

  “St. Leroy?”

  “St. Leroy,” said Zeus. “The patron saint of drug abusers.”

  “Yeah,” said O’Rourke, “better say a prayer.”

  “The Fish” was Fischbein, the house Pablo Escobar. Thirty years ago they used to give rent parties for the Fish so he wouldn’t be thrown out of his $126 rent-controlled apartment. Thanks to the cokeified’80s and’90s, Fischbein now had a house in the Hamptons, investments on Wall Street, and his $126 rent-controlled apartment. Fischbein wasn’t the best dope dealer in the world, but he was the only one in the Moat. It was said that beer drinkers had their six-packs, but the Moat’s cokeheads had their “Fish-packs.” In fact, Fischbein’s stuff was so diluted with baby laxative that the saying around the Moat when John Belushi checked out was that he’d still be alive if he was using the Fish’s shit.

  Fischbein recently had a habit of talking to himself. “Met the Fish on the street yesterday,” Zeus once told O’Rourke, “and the three of us had a nice conversation.” Fischbein had deluded himself into thinking he was providing a middle-class service, not breaking the law.

  Aloysius Hogan and Barney walked into the Moat, and the bathroom immediately cleared out. “Anyone see the Fish tonight?” asked Hogan.

  “Not a sign,” said Big Zeus.

  “Yeah,” said Hogan, a man who liked to brag about his cokeinduced deviated septum, “dope dealers are getting to be like cops—can’t find one when you need one.”

  Hogan poured himself a cup of coffee and set it down in the waitress station. The section was defined by a brass pole that ran from ceiling to floor. Everyone in the place, for some reason, called it Hogan’s Pole. A pretty young woman sat down on the other side of the pole. She had a sweet smile, but Hogan’s eyes—on instinct—roamed lower. Hogan noticed her superb breasts. Hogan had a thing for breasts. The bigger, the better. She began jotting things down in a notebook. Hogan’s grip on his pole became taut.

  “You a writer?” asked Hogan as he began the chat-up. The answer was in the affirmative. “I must introduce you to Mailer the next time he drops by.”

  “That would be swell,” she replied with genuine enthusiasm. Soon Hogan learned that she was working on her first novel.

  “Yes,” said Hogan as he took a swig of coffee, “I may go back to Paris this summer and finish my novel.”

  “What are ya reading?” said Zeus to the laughter of the bar.

  With that, Fischbein walked in the front door. Big Zeus’s eyes implored the heavens as he quietly intoned, “Thank you, St. Leroy.” Barney howled at the ceiling, and the Fish went to work. Hogan
moved so swiftly toward the Fish, he looked like a wolf in search of a pork chop in Fischbein’s coat pocket. Fischbein surrendered an offering to Hogan, who immediately went with Barney to Little Peru.

  “I’m a bold Irish navvy, I work on the line . . . “ sang the Clancy Brothers on the jukebox. To O’Rourke it sounded like “. . . I work on the lines.” O’Rourke gave Fischbein the high sign and headed for the bathroom.

  “I thought you gave this stuff up.”

  “I did,” said O’Rourke. “Just for tonight.”

  “Well,” said Fischbein, “you sure you want this?”

  It was like trying to buy dope from your mother, thought O’Rourke. “For Christsakes, yes,” said O’Rourke. “Give it to me before you talk me out of it.” Fischbein slid him the package and O’Rourke passed him two Jacksons. O’Rourke went in the toilet stall and tried to open the aluminum foil. That son of a bitch, thought O’Rourke. He’s still too cheap to buy proper wrapping paper. Still using the foil. Must have stock in Reynolds Wrap. He shot a couple of lines and rubbed some of the shit on his gums. Things were looking up.

  Back to the bar for another cognac. That was the trouble with coke users, thought O’Rourke. They had no self-control. The only reason anyone continued to use coke, O’Rourke believed, was that they were trying to rediscover that first coke high, which can be almost spiritual. The hope of that return-high was based on wishfulness. It would never be felt again. And that’s why, O’Rourke surmised, coke made people crazy. O’Rourke was drinking with a friend one afternoon who went on and on about conspiracy theories when he was using the shit.