Our Lady Of Greenwich Village

by Dermot McEvoy

  For some reason he thought of his mother. And the day she died. He was with her that morning, but had to meet an important client. “Now don’t work too hard,” was the last thing she said to him. She was the only person who had ever said that to him. A strange thing to say, but also a sweet thing. She had always worked hard in the kitchens of the Anglo-Irish in Dublin, and of the Jews and Protestants in New York. “Now don’t work too hard,” was maybe her way of saying, “because look where it’s gotten me.”

  She had said she wasn’t feeling well, but O’Rourke was not concerned. His mother would never die on him. He must go to this important meeting. When he returned later that day she was dead and stiff and cold, and O’Rourke had never forgiven himself. They say death is one of the three things that every person must do alone. “Be born. Die. Testify,” Mayor Jimmy Walker had once joked. But it was not true. You are not born alone, and you should not have to die alone. When he was born in Hollis Street Hospital in Dublin his mother had been there, and when she died he had cruelly left her alone. Perhaps Our Lady knew of his mother. Perhaps Our Lady could take a message to Mary Kavanagh. “I need you,” he heard himself say. “Please help me.”

  With that plea he could see Our Lady returning to him. He knew she was smiling behind her veil. Why? He only wished he could see her full face. “Sing to the Lord a new song,” she said, “for He has done wondrous deeds.”

  All he could see was that one damn eye. An eye that he knew. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. Our Lady of Greenwich Village winked at him. And his dream ended.

  “Is everyone here?” asked Tone O’Rourke of the throng that had overrun his office and was hanging out the door and into the hall. Pepoon and McGuire were standing behind him at his desk. Fergus T. Caife and Moe Luigi were huddled in a corner. Tommy Boyle was standing next to Clarence Black. Cyclops Reilly was alone by himself sitting in the windowsill, ogling the young female assistants. Nuncio Baroody was on the other side of the office, ogling the young male assistants.

  “Tone has an announcement to make,” said Winthrop Pepoon, and the hum dissipated.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” O’Rourke began, “I have decided to run in the Democratic Primary in June as a candidate for the 7th Congressional District.” He was met with a round of applause and whistles. He put up his hand for quiet. “It’s April now. We don’t have much time to file our petitions and get on the ballot. Sam McGuire will be my campaign manager and everyone will report to her. We have much work to do, starting immediately. We will need buttons, posters, T-shirts. I will need a personalized 800-number. Clarence Black,” O’Rourke said as he pointed him out, “will be in charge of security. Nuncio Baroody—give a wave Nuncio—will be our liaison with the gay community. And the indispensable Tommy Boyle will be the keeper of the petitions. I will make the official announcement within days. Any questions?”

  “What will the buttons say?”

  “NO MORE BULLSHIT,” said O’Rourke with glee. “I’m stealing this directly from the Mailer-Breslin campaign of 1969. They were right then, and I’m right now.”

  “How about the 800 number?”

  “I’m still working on that,” said O’Rourke, “but it will have to be catchy, because this is how we’re going to raise funds. Same with the T-shirt. Right now VOTE FOR TONE will suffice, but there’ll be more. Let’s see how the opening weeks of the campaign go.”

  “What exactly,” asked Nuncio Baroody, “am I supposed to do with my fellow cocksuckers?”

  There was embarrassed laughter, then silence. “Get used to it folks,” said O’Rourke. “This is not going to be the kind of boring campaign that has forced the voters of this country into a coma. We are going to be audacious, and we are going to be tough. We are not taking shit from anyone. To answer your question, Nuncio, you’re going to be my floor manager at the caucus of the VQD, the Village Queer Democrats. I want their endorsement. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Nuncio. “When do I get paid?”

  “Don’t worry, Nuncio,” said O’Rourke amid the laughter, “you’ll get yours. Anything else now? Okay, if you have any questions, direct them to Sam. Let’s get moving!”

  The room cleared, and O’Rourke was left with his friends.

  “You are out of your fucking mind,” said Pepoon.

  “No hope,” said the poet Caife.

  Black, Baroody, and Luigi nodded their heads in agreement. McGuire slid her arm inside of O’Rourke’s for support, and pulled on his wrist to bring him closer to her. The statements had stung O’Rourke. Even with Sam’s armlock, he felt alone. Strangely, he again thought of Mary Kavanagh on the morning of her death. Sam could feel the chemistry of his body language change. He was in doubt again. Maybe he had made the wrong decision.

  “I don’t think so,” said Cyclops Reilly. “I think Tone can win.” Reilly stood in the middle of the room alone, all eyes on him. He looked like a tired soldier-of-fortune with his eye patch and his hands dug into the pockets of his tweed jacket. “I remember being very frightened one time in Vietnam when I got hit by shrapnel,” he softly said. “I couldn’t see. I was in shock. And I thought I was going to die.” Still facing the small group he started to walk backwards, then stopped. “There was this little prick of a navy corpsman who stopped me from bleeding to death and got me into a helicopter. As they were putting me on board, I noticed he was bleeding on me from a huge hole in his arm. But he stayed with me. And then he shouted over the din of the copter blades: ‘Cad a dhéanfaidh mach an chait ac luch do mharú?’ I didn’t know what the fuck he was saying to me. Then he gave me the translation: ‘What will the cat’s son do but kill a mouse?’ He told me it was an old Westie saying—from the Gaelic, no less—which I found out later it wasn’t. But I held onto that saying like it was a sacred talisman. Like it alone could save me. It stuck in my head as I got out of that rice paddy, out of the hospital, and out of fucking Vietnam forever.

  “Now,” continued Reilly, “that same corpsman is in this room and he’s going to run for Congress. I know this man better than I know any other human being on this earth. He’s scared right now because he’s always scared. He’s tormented now because he’s one of the few men I know who really cares. He’s looking for some kind of redemption. From what? I don’t know. Redemption for Vietnam? For what he did to Bobby Kennedy?” O’Rourke looked at the floor when Reilly mentioned Kennedy, and McGuire’s jaw fell open in shock. “Well, Tone,” Reilly went on, “there is no salvation, no redemption for any of us in this fucking life. When Tone goes out there he will be vulnerable. They will call him a terrorist because of what he did for those IRA guys back in Dublin in the’70s. They will call him a traitor for going AWOL. He will be an easy target—like I once was—so there’s only one thing I can say to him: ‘Cad a dhéanfaidh mach an chait ac luch do mharú?’”

  Cyclops Reilly tugged at his patch and looked directly at his friend Tone O’Rourke, then turned to walk away, “Yeah,” he said as left the office, throwing his voice over his shoulder, “let’s go kill some fucking mice.”

  There was an awkward silence as they listened to Reilly’s footsteps echo down the hall. “I’m sorry, Tone,” said Pepoon. “I shouldn’t have said that. You know we’re all with you.”

  “You can depend on us,” added Fergus T.

  O’Rourke, clearly moved, nodded. “I know I can,” he said. O’Rourke squeezed McGuire’s hand and thought of a dead mouse on its back with four little legs standing up straight. But that vision soon became Bobby Kennedy lying on the filthy floor of that kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. There he was, a big hole in the back of his head, his eyes wide open, as if astonished by the absurdity of it all.

  “What did Cyclops mean about Bobby Kennedy?” asked Sam. O’Rourke’s lips were clenched as he shook his head back and forth. Then he recalled what he had dreamt: “Sing to the Lord a new song,” Our Lady of Greenwich Village had said, “for He has done wondrous deeds.” But O’Rourke could not sing for h
e had been struck dumb by the vision of the dying Bobby and his pleading eyes.

  17.

  “Which way?” the voice, calm amid the ruckus, asked. O’Rourke was pushing forward, and he could feel the senator holding onto the tail of his jacket. “Which way?” he said again.

  “That fucking Bruno,” thought O’Rourke. His boss, Jerry Bruno, was the best advance man in the business, but he had headed back to New York to work on the primary, leaving O’Rourke to advance the senator on the day of the California primary. Truth was, O’Rourke didn’t know which way he was going. He caught the gleam of the stainless steel refrigerators. They were like a beacon and he lowered his head and pushed ahead. Get through that kitchen, he thought, and we’re home free. He could now feel the senator’s fist in the small of his back as he clutched O’Rourke’s jacket for dear life. Although he was always in them, the senator hated crowds. He never said why, but O’Rourke knew. With the pop of every flashbulb, the senator would involuntarily wince at his own mortality.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  O’Rourke thought it was another photographer’s flash. There was a scream and the fist was gone from his back. On the floor the senator, eyes wide open, looked right up at O’Rourke. The floor, where the senator’s head rested, looked like Jackson Pollock had taken a bucket of barn-red paint and just dumped it. O’Rourke was wild-eyed. “Is everybody else all right?” were the last words Kennedy whispered before lapsing into a coma. But to O’Rourke the only words out of Robert Kennedy’s mouth as he lay on a blood red floor on the next to last day of his life were, “Which way?”

  “Which way?”

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “Which way?” said O’Rourke, sitting up in the bed, arm jabbing the air. “Which fucking way?”

  “Tone,Tone,Tone.” She grabbed him under his arm and O’Rourke’s eyes flew open, terrified. “It’s all right, Tone,” Sam said, “you just had a nightmare.”

  For a second O’Rourke didn’t know where he was. Then he recognized Sam and slumped into her arms. “Which way?” he said again and began to cry uncontrollably, the heavy tears running down Sam’s bare breasts.

  “Kennedy once asked me,” said O’Rourke, “‘Why do I like you?’”

  “What did you say?” McGuire asked, lighting a cigarette. It was a cigarette of tension, unlike the smoke after sex, which was pure relief.

  “I said ‘Senator, you like me because I’m a little Irish prick, just like you.’” McGuire and O’Rourke laughed simultaneously and the horror of a few minutes ago evaporated. O’Rourke put his hand on McGuire’s smooth knee, almost petting it roundly like the head of a dog.

  “You don’t really think you killed Bobby, do you?”

  “Of course not,” said O’Rourke, “but I’ll never get over that fucking night, that fucking moment. There’s always guilt in my mind. What if I had turned the other way? What if I hadn’t been mesmerized by the shine of those refrigerator doors? That little shit Sirhan would never have gotten near him. Sirhan Sirhan. A double-barrel of mindless hatred. If I had gone the other way, we’d been out of California and into New York and God knows what might have happened.”

  “As FDR used to say,” said McGuire, blowing smoke in O’Rourke’s direction, “that is a very ‘iffy’ question.”

  “Yes, it is,” said O’Rourke absently. “I often wonder what Jerry Bruno would have done? No matter what, the candidate was killed on my watch.”

  “Just like JFK was killed on Bruno’s watch.”

  “Yeah,” said O’Rourke with a little smile, “we’re the advance men from hell.” McGuire leaned over and kissed O’Rourke and took his penis into one of her soft hands. It remained flaccid. “Not tonight, dear,” he laughed.

  “That’s a change,” said McGuire.

  “Come on,” he said. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “So Bobby getting shot is your big secret,” said McGuire.

  “One of them.”

  “You want to tell me about any of the others?”

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “In time.”

  “You loved Kennedy, didn’t you?”

  “Like I love you.”

  The answer caught McGuire by surprise and she felt her heart jump and she gave O’Rourke a wonderful smile and a peck on the cheek. “How long did you work for Senator Kennedy?”

  “I started in the 1964 senatorial campaign,” said O’Rourke. “After the election I worked in his New York office while I went to CCNY. Then I found myself spending time in D.C. and pretty soon I ended up working for Jerry Bruno as an apprentice advance man.”

  “What was Bobby like?”

  “I know it sounds funny,” said O’Rourke pensively, “but I still have trouble explaining him. I suppose it was his great gifts, his great touch, which you don’t find in people anymore—especially politicians. The best word for him is empathy. He could—”

  McGuire cut him off. “Yeah, the empathetic millionaire.”

  “You didn’t like Bobby?”

  “Nothing personal,” said McGuire. “He was really before my time.”

  “What bothers you?

  “McCarthy.”

  “Gene?” asked O’Rourke.

  “No. Joe.” O’Rourke gave a big laugh. “What’s so funny?” asked McGuire.

  “People always hated Bobby because of one of the two Senator McCarthys,” answered O’Rourke. “Kennedy found it rather amusing.”

  “There was nothing amusing about Joe McCarthy,” said McGuire adamantly.

  “You’re right,” agreed O’Rourke.

  “So?”

  “People change,” said O’Rourke.

  “No, they don’t.”

  O’Rourke looked at Sam and nodded. “You’re right. People don’t change, but they evolve. Without evolution you don’t grow. Would FDR have been the same politician if he hadn’t had polio? Bobby evolved. Without the death of his brother, he would have remained the same, just interested in power, not what power could do for the people. He learned to direct the toughness—the Irish malice, you could say—toward the enemies of the people.”

  “How?”

  “He became a champion of the blacks, the Latinos, the middle class, the disenfranchised.”

  “You think?”

  “You think there’s any votes in this fucking country being for poor blacks and Latinos?”

  “I know for a fact there’s no votes being for blacks and Latinos!”

  The laughter broke the debate. “You know, Bobby could give a speech and bore you to death, but in person he was dynamite. I remember once in ’68 for the presidential campaign I got a haircut and shaved my beard and started wearing a suit and tie and he pointed it out to the whole office and it got a big laugh. I was terribly embarrassed. Here I was this twenty-two-year-old kid with a degree from CCNY and all these other guys and girls were from Harvard and Yale. He saw me blush so he came over to me and stood behind me and put his thumb and index fingers around the back of my neck, slowly massaging it and in a few seconds I felt like a million bucks.” With that he wrapped his hand around McGuire’s neck and rubbed it, just as Kennedy had kneaded his. He then put both arms around her and hugged her with all his might. And as he did he thought he might get hard, but he didn’t.

  “Maybe one time, for Bobby?” Sam joked.

  O’Rourke shook his head. He recalled the saturnine Kennedy quoting Aeschylus to a crowd of blacks in Indianapolis after he had informed them that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. “‘In our sleep,’” began O’Rourke, “‘pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

  McGuire was mesmerized. “Where do you come up with this stuff?” she asked. She stifled an embarrassed laugh with the lift of her hand. It was the wrong reaction, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Someday I’ll tell you,” replied O’Rourke.

  “How about Marilyn?”
she impishly asked, suddenly changing the subject.

  “Monroe?”

  “Is there any other Marilyn?”

  “It was before my time.”

  “But was the great moralist Bobby fucking her?” McGuire used fucking like she would say “The Nazis just invaded Poland.”

  “How would I know?”

  “You never asked him?”

  “Hey,” said O’Rourke, clearly on the defensive, “you didn’t talk about stuff like that back in 1968.”

  “Do you think Bobby fucked Marilyn?”

  O’Rourke was getting exasperated. “Christ, even I would fuck Marilyn Monroe,” he said.

  She let that sit in the air for a moment. “Me too,” said McGuire with a smile that in a mild but wonderful way shocked Wolfe Tone O’Rourke.

  18.

  New York John Mellor’s stretch limousine pulled up in front of the Old Town Bar on East 18th Street and O’Rourke emerged, followed by Nick Pinto, Neil Granger, John Hamill, and Mellor. The five men were old and trusted friends. Pinto was a legendary Village bartender, restaurateur, and convicted felon. “Hey, nobody’s perfect,” he offered. He told the best stories about the old Village—before it became de-gayed, yuppified, and colorless—be they about 86ing Brendan Behan from Stefan’s bar on Christopher Street or baking bread before dawn with Frank Sinatra at Zito’s Bakery on Bleecker Street. Granger was a Marine buddy from O’Rourke’s Vietnam days. He was a big man physically and looked like Fred Flintstone’s doppelganger. All his friends called him “The Corporal,” his finishing rank in the Marines. Hamill, big and handsome, had that rare gift of Irish laughter that would leave a condemned man smiling about his fate. Mellor was a retired banker and man-about-town who split his time between New York and New Orleans, where he earned the handle “New York John.” He was as comfortable rubbing elbows with Bobby Short at the Café Carlyle as he was with the local bookie at Hogan’s Moat or mini-skirted devotees on the carpet of his condo off Bourbon Street. Pinto, Granger, Hamill, and Mellor were rogues, but O’Rourke knew there were few better men.