Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (20 page)

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 he had been struck dumb by the vision of the dying Bobby and his pleading eyes.

“W
hich 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.

N
ew 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.

A photographer came up and snapped a picture of the five of them. “If that makes the paper,” growled Pinto, looking into the camera but talking to O'Rourke, “you can kiss your campaign goodbye. Fuck, I'm going to have to explain to my parole officer why I'm
consorting
with fucking politicians!”

“It is sometimes better to know the judge,” said Hamill slyly, “than to know the law.”

“Now he tells me!” laughed Pinto.

The five men began to climb the stairs leading to the second floor dining room, where O'Rourke would announce his candidacy for Congress. The steep twenty-six steps demanded sobriety. At the top, out of breath, they were greeted by Larry Meagher, the proprietor. “If it isn't the limousine liberal himself,” he said to O'Rourke.

O'Rourke knew he was just breaking his balls. “How's my favorite right-wing nut? How ya feeling, Larry?”

“Lost another toe to diabetes,” he said, pointing a cane at his bandaged, tender feet. “I'm like an old leper with various digits falling off by the week. Otherwise, I'm fit.” Larry was old and tough. He did not complain. “You're looking good, Tone. Sharp suit.”

“Thanks,” said O'Rourke, knowing Larry was about to hammer him.

“I always say,” said Meagher, “if you're going to be
im-PO-tent,
you got to dress
im-PO-tent
!”

“Larry,” said O'Rourke, laughing, “do you know John Mellor, Neil Granger, Nick Pinto, and John Hamill?” Meagher nodded. “So, how's the family?”

“Doin' okay,” said Meagher. “I got six kids,” he said to O'Rourke's group. “Two redheads, two towheads—and two shitheads!” Larry Meagher was a pistol—an old, rusted pistol, but he still had perfect aim. “I hear you're the fags' favorite candidate.”

“I hope to be,” said O'Rourke. “I can use their votes.”

“They've turned Horatio Street,” deadpanned Meagher, “into Fellatio Street.” Amid laughter, Larry shuffled away.

“He's a piece of work,” said Pinto.

“Yeah,” said O'Rourke absently as he surveyed the scene, “going to be a good crowd.”

“Fuck all of 'em,” said Hamill with a Belfast wink, “except the six that will carry your coffin.” Wolfe Tone O'Rourke loved Johnny Hamill.

The Old Town was a
real
bar. Almost church-like with beautiful, high tin ceilings, tall, narrow booths like confessionals, lots of wood, marble, tiled floors, and stained glass windows. The urinals—not on the scale of the ones at McSorley's Old Ale House, but pretty damn impressive—were almost four feet tall and were so comforting in their stolid, milky gleam that they made peeing an event. The original gas fixtures were still there, recalling the time when the bar had opened in 1892. On the wall were pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, photos of regulars like Liam Neeson, and book jackets belonging to Frank McCourt and Billy Collins. A political poster from the 1928 presidential race of Al Smith and his running mate, Joe T. Robinson, declared the candidates “Honest, Able, Fearless.” Nothing about being Catholic. Also on the wall were pictures of Larry's uncle, William J. (Willie) Meagher of the “Regular Democratic Organization.” Although Larry now bent his elbow to the right, his blood was deep in Brooklyn Democratic politics. One headline from the
Brooklyn Eagle
about the avuncular Willie Meagher declared: “Spurned All Jobs!” “Just like Gerard!” Larry Meagher said, nodding at his son—the saloon dauphin—resplendent in his Hawaiian shirt, with hand to forehead, puzzling over the intricacies of the day's menu, as though he were Einstein doodling with the theory of relativity.

O'Rourke knew how to throw a party. Especially if he wanted to attract the media, those poor put-upon souls of the fourth estate who received little respect and less money. Noon sharp. A buffet consisting of shrimp cocktail, slabs of prime rib, lobster tails. And most important, an open bar. In fact, on the invitation, OPEN BAR stood out in fiftytwo-point type. O'Rourke knew his announcement would be well attended.

“You guys get the envelope I left you?” he asked Amy Yax and Christine Reynolds, who were bartending and ministering to the culinary treats. He was talking about the gratuity he had left for them with Larry. Yax and Reynolds—they sounded like a slightly shady law firm—were favorites of O'Rourke. Yax had one of the most devilishly dirty laughs in the city, and shared O'Rourke's political views; she was a dark-haired beauty who ran marathons and wrote wonderful short stories.

Reynolds was Yax's complete opposite—the daughter of a cop, who studied law at Fordham, sweet and upright. O'Rourke had met Reynolds originally on one of his trips to Dublin. He had run into her at the Olivier St. John Gogarty saloon in Temple Bar, where she worked. She had a wonderful disposition and a marvelous sense of humor. One night at the Old Town, a young yuppie sat down next to her at the bar while she was waiting to order drinks. “You come here often?” asked Joe Smooth, shaping his mousse-soaked hair.

“Every night.”

“I'm a Sagittarius.”

“I'm a waitress,” she said without missing a beat.

She now studied law and ravenously read Dostoyevsky. O'Rourke had a sneaking suspicion that she was more interested in the punishment than in the crime.

Sam McGuire entered the room and immediately went up to O'Rourke and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I did good, right?” McGuire had been in charge of the invitations and making sure everyone in the media showed up.

“It's a small room,” said O'Rourke.

“So?”

“It's easy to fill a small room.” She looked hurt, and O'Rourke felt bad. “Sam, remember, I earned my bones working for Jerry Bruno. He never got out of high school, but he was fucking brilliant. Anyway, I was working for him in Oregon in 1968 on Bobby's last campaign. Oregon was a mess, poorly organized. Bobby wasn't popular out there because he was for gun control laws. He wasn't drawing well and the press was on to it. POOR CROWDS GREET KENNEDY. Kennedy was going insane. So we're having this big rally and Bobby says just three words to Bruno: ‘Don't disappoint me.' So—”

“Let me guess,” said Sam.

“Go ahead.”

“Bruno rented a small hall and people were hanging from the rafters.”

“Sam,” said O'Rourke, “I knew there was a reason to love you.” It was only the second time he had mentioned the most treacherous and dangerous word in the English language to McGuire. It was as if he was defying the ghosts of Rebekah and Grace. Sam glowed and O'Rourke felt embarrassed. “Well,” said O'Rourke, trying to cover up his feelings and move on, “the local big-shot Democrat supporting RFK gets up in front of this fire hazard crowd, points her finger right at Bruno, and says, ‘You can blame all this overcrowding on that man over there!'”

“What happened?”

“Bob Kennedy looked at Jerry Bruno and gave him the most dazzling thank-you smile you ever saw!”

“Let me guess,” said Sam. “Next day the papers said Kennedy spoke to an overflowing crowd.”

“You're learning, Sam. You're learning.”

McGuire looked O'Rourke squarely in the eye. “You bet I am.”

“Let's make the announcement,” said O'Rourke and McGuire went to shoo the press away from the bar and the buffet table. O'Rourke, almost unconsciously, touched McGuire slightly on the buttock as she turned away. She turned and smiled and O'Rourke knew exactly how Bruno felt that day when Kennedy had smiled at him.

“I am here today,” began O'Rourke, “to announce my candidacy for the 7th Congressional District. I am running for this office for just two reasons: First, to bring this traditionally Democratic district back into the fold; and, secondly—and even more importantly—to tell some truths about the American political system and how it works. I will tell you what I believe to be the truth, whether you agree with me or not, whether it is politically correct or not, whether an election hinges on it or not. The floor is open to questions.”

“How do you stand on abortion?” was the first question.

“I'm for it.”

“Even partial-birth abortions?”

“What is it,” said O'Rourke with a hard stare, “that you don't understand about the three words ‘I'm for it?'”

“How about welfare reform?” yelled Wellington Mulvaney of the
New York Post
, his Australian accent conspicuous in the roomful of New Yorkers. Mulvaney hadn't changed much over the years; he still wore those shiny Italian suits that went out of vogue in 1975. It was early in the day and Mulvaney was already on his fourth Bloody Mary. The years since Rupert Murdoch had brought Mulvaney in from Australia to type his column had not been kind to him. Like his ideas and prose, his body had taken on an embalmed look. As the years passed and his drinking increased, the average length of Mulvaney's columns had shrunk to less than 250 words. It had gotten so bad that the
Post
had started printing his columns in 16-point type in order to fill out the page.

“I'm for a fair and just welfare system,” O'Rourke continued. “I have no respect for any politician who takes bribes from corporate scumbags—you can fill in the blanks here, Wellington—but wants to act tough with some poor black woman with three kids getting $320 a month from the city. I think that's despicable.”

“I think what you're saying is despicable,” returned Mulvaney.

“Wellington,” said O'Rourke dead-on, “this is my party. If you don't like it, you can go downstairs and buy your own fucking drinks.”

“But why,” Mulvaney continued, “should the citizens of this fair city have to pay for welfare cheats?”

O'Rourke had had enough. He was getting that look in his eyes and McGuire was getting alarmed. Then Larry Meagher came to the rescue. Larry's raspy voice interrupted the dead silence. “I would
never
trust an Irishman named Wellington,” was all he said. Soon there was laughter, followed by applause. Mulvaney blushed. O'Rourke had been saved by his favorite right-wing nut job, very late of the Brooklyn Regular Democratic Machine.

But Mulvaney wouldn't give up. “The president says he never inhaled. How about you? Have you ever used drugs?”

“Yes, I have,” said O'Rourke as he prepared to hit the loaded question out of the ballpark. “I have not lived in a cocoon all my life. In fact, I've used drugs with many of the people in this very room. And,” O'Rourke added, “I hope you'll ask Jackie Swift the very same question.” O'Rourke knew his people. There was no follow-up on the drug question. Mulvaney was done.

“Are you for school teachers being paid on merit?” another reporter asked.

“No,” said O'Rourke, “I'm for school teachers getting raises. But I
am
for politicians getting paid on merit. By that standard every single one of them would owe the treasury money.”