Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (21 page)

“Will you take campaign contributions?”

“I will only take
bribes
of twenty-five dollars or lower. And for that twenty-five dollars the contributor will get my everlasting gratitude and a ‘Tone for Congress' T-shirt and ‘NO MORE BULLSHIT' buttons.”

“How do you feel about NAFTA?”

“I'm against it,” said O'Rourke. “I'm against anything that takes American jobs out of the country. In my opinion, this is a conspiracy by the Clinton administration and corporate America to screw the American worker. Pretty soon they'll want to pay Americans in
pesos
.” There was a slight buzz from the crowd.

“What do you think of Clinton?”

“I think he should get some backbone,” said O'Rourke. “He's been a disaster for the Democratic Party. He's lost the House to the Republicans. In fact, he acts like he's afraid of the Republicans. He's turning the Democratic Party into a bunch of spineless pussies. In fact, he's the best fucking president the Republicans have ever had.” O'Rourke looked at McGuire and could see she was not enamored with his use of the word
pussy
, which had escaped his fast-moving lips.

“How about State Senator Thom Lamè?”

“What about
Lame
?” O'Rourke, still needling the councilman.

“The rumor,” said the reporter, “is that he'll run in the primary, also.”

“That's his right,” replied O'Rourke.

“What's your stand on the death penalty?”

“I'm against it,” said O'Rourke.

“Why?”

“I'm sick and tired of politicians—most of them without morals themselves—seeking easy solutions to very difficult problems. It's nothing but political grandstanding. Look at Texas. The governor down there—great Christian he is—brags about executing human beings.”

“But it's the law in Texas.”

“I am not exactly awed by the law either,” said O'Rourke. “The law is made by men, some of whom are more corrupt than the people they proudly punish. After the basic laws—those against murder, robbery, rape, whatever—the laws every decent person can agree on, just what are the laws and who is writing them? Take bankruptcy. Who's interested in bankruptcy laws? Banks and credit card companies. Certainly not the schmuck up to his neck in hock. And who's writing those laws? Congressmen who take bribes—excuse me, I misspoke, I mean
campaign contributions
—from those same banks and credit card companies. Yet no one gets outraged over that. This government is bought and sold on a daily basis, and I want to change that.”

“How about the Liberal Party endorsement?”

“I won't seek it or accept it.”

“Why?”

“Any party,” replied O'Rourke with vehemence, “that would endorse Rudy Giuliani over David Dinkins should be airbrushed out of New York City history. One of my objectives in my lifetime is to see the Liberal Party extinct. I know you've heard the refrain before, gentlemen, but one, it ain't liberal, and two, it ain't a party. It's more of a dry cleaners, if you ask me.” Laughter went up from the crowd.

“Any other questions?” asked O'Rourke.

“I have one,” said Mulvaney, hoping for a comeback. “How do you feel about being denied Holy Communion because of your stand on abortion?”

O'Rourke did not mince his words. “Boots,” O'Rourke began, and Mulvaney winced at his hated nickname, “the Cardinal should be ashamed of himself, setting Catholic against Catholic. Requiring a litmus test for faith. In Jack Kennedy's time it was Protestant bigots questioning his religion and his patriotism. Now, unfortunately, it's the bigotry of my own Church. It's no big deal for me personally,” added O'Rourke, “because I haven't been in a church except for a marriage or a funeral in over thirty-five years.” He paused. “And may I add that I preferred the funerals, because at least I knew the suffering was over.” It got a big laugh and Sam McGuire wanted to kick O'Rourke in the shin. “One more thing on the Cardinal. I didn't hear a word out of him on the death penalty. Apparently, it's okay for Catholic politicians to be for the death penalty. If he wants to pontificate on theology, at least the Cardinal should be consistent.”

“And gentlemen,” added O'Rourke, “don't forget to tip Amy and Christine—the booze and food were on me. Don't be cheapskates.” Both Yax and Reynolds burst out in applause.

O'Rourke worked the crowd before ducking into a corner to do quick stand-ups for Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, and New York One. When he was finished, Sam McGuire joined him. “You were great,” she said.

“I know,” said O'Rourke, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Except for that marriage crack. You're such a fraud,” she said, laughing, and as she looked down at his pants, she saw a growing pyramid.

“No, I'm not,” said Wolfe Tone O'Rourke.

“You know you're such a
pussy
,” said McGuire as she ran her tongue between her lips. They embraced, oblivious to everything and everyone around them.

New York Post, April 20, 2000

THE CHUTZPAH CATHOLIC

By Wellington Mulvaney

Frankly, it was disgusting listening to Wolfe Tone O'Rourke announce that he was going to run for Congress yesterday at the Old Town Bar on East 18th Street.

The only word that comes to mind is “chutzpah.”

It's amazing how this man, a man in favor of murdering fetuses, has the gall to defame His Eminence, Declan Cardinal Sweeney.

In front of the free-loading liberal press of this city he had the nerve to bash Cardinal Sweeney, who, as all true Americans know, is one of the great men of this nation.

When questioned by this reporter O'Rourke laughed off being denied Holy Communion because of his Godless beliefs. He made himself out as being some kind of latter-day John F. Kennedy, for defying the tenets of his faith. He even had the nerve to accuse the Cardinal and the Church of being bigoted.

I know it's hard to believe, but he even came out against the death penalty. What right-thinking American is against the death penalty in this day and age?

I have just one question for Mr. Big Shot, Wolfe Tone O'Rourke: How do you sleep at night with the murder of fetuses on your alleged conscience?

O
'Rourke took the dusty statue in hand. Everything in his apartment was dusty. McGuire had begun to vacuum, scrub and dust. “The only thing dirtier than this apartment,” she had said, adjusting a bandanna on her head, “is your mind.”

“Quentin Crisp once said,” O'Rourke returned, “that after the first four inches of dust, it doesn't matter.” McGuire looked at him with a fair measure of doubt.

O'Rourke began to examine the white statue of the Blessed Virgin, only it wasn't white anymore. It was a weary gray. It had belonged to his grandmother, Rosanna Conway Kavanagh, and somehow it had survived her and made it all the way to New York. He didn't know how, but it had. He thought his uncle, Dick Kavanagh, had somehow brought it with him when he emigrated to New York in the 1930s. Dick was O'Rourke's favorite uncle. Thinking back, he was Jack Paar's doppelganger. He lived in Queens and he was an elevator operator at the Manhattan Hotel on 45th Street and Eighth Avenue. (“It has its ups and downs,” he used to tell his young nephew—who finally got the joke.) Next to a civil service job, working at a big hotel was pretty good for a lower-middle class Irish-Catholic back in the 1950s and '60s. Dick was married to his Auntie Rose, the first woman O'Rourke had ever seen with blue hair back in the '50s. They had married in middle-age and O'Rourke's father, always casting a cold eye on matters of the heart, had declared at their wedding: “As He made them, He matched them.”

O'Rourke hadn't thought about it until now, but Dick had married a woman with almost the same name as his mother. Dick was also devoted to the Blessed Virgin. He had once been a drunk—being AWOL with the drink, he had missed his ship, saving him from Omaha Beach on D-Day—and to occupy his time he had taken up photography and building altars for the Virgin Mary in his apartment in Jackson Heights. By the time he died, every room in the apartment had an altar, including abbreviated ones in the kitchen and bathroom.

The dissolution of the whole Kavanagh family had begun with O'Rourke's grandmother's death. Mary and Dick in orphanages and young Joe and Frank in the IRA. Up into the Dublin mountains, “on the run,” the proverb of the day said. Irishmen hiding in their own country. If the Tans got them, they would be done.

The appendix jutting from the South Circular Road turned into one long thoroughfare with many street names: Camden, Wexford, Aungier and Georges. A crooked street, long and narrow with terrible blind spots. The Auxiliaries and the Tans in their trucks would come down this road and your man, as innocent as could be, would pull the pin and give it a good toss into the lorry. The result would be a Union Jack on a wooden box and a one-way ticket home to England. Soon Camden Street was known as “the Dardanelles.” But the British had built their empire on ingenuity and they would not be easily defeated by insurgent hand-grenades. A wire screen was slung over the truck so the grenade became superfluous as it bounced back to the rebel and put him in his own snug box.

“Improvise,” Michael Collins would rant to his men. And improvise they would. A fishhook and the grenade stuck to the wire mesh and they began to pile more boxes on the North Wall for their trip home to England.

“Find a solution,” commanded the Lord Lieutenant, Field Marshal John French, sartorial and clueless. The solution was found at number 31 Aungier Street, where Joseph Kavanagh had his barber shop and living quarters above.

“Where are ya fucking lads?” they wanted to know. A knee in the kidney did no harm when looking for an answer. “Where are ya fucking IRA sons-of-a-cunt?”

Sons-of-a-cunt.

Out of Rosanna's cunt and into this terrible world, and like Molly Malone no one could save them now.

Sons-of-a-cunt. Was that all Rosanna was to the Black and Tans? Would she know what the word even meant? Her precious privates reduced to fodder to punish her husband and her sons and her country. Did the Tans know that the boys were conceived in love just down the way on Camden Row? Did they care? Poor Rosanna up in Glasnevin. The Tans wanted to know where the Kavanagh cunt was, but this time she was safe. There was nothing they could do to her now. Joseph remembered making love to Rosanna, then closed his eyes as his kidneys absorbed another blow.

They picked Joseph Kavanagh up and in a bum's rush he was sitting up there in the lorry with the wire mesh over it. High up in his own fucking chair, like the King of the Dardanelles. He was a free pass, for when his neighbors saw Joseph Kavanagh up there, high and mighty in a very bad way, there would be no tossed grenades. The Auxiliaries and Tans would be able to wind their way down to Dame Street, make their left, and continue up to Dublin Castle. Home, safe and sound. Then they would beat the consciousness out of Joseph Kavanagh before driving him back to 31 Aungier Street and dumping him like a sack of potatoes on his own doorstep. Then the next day they would do it again.

Joseph Kavanagh would suffer and Michael Collins would cop the revenge. He would end it on a Sunday morning with a squad of boys with Mausers and Lugers and fine aim and the English would leave Dublin City, first in boxes, then marching along the quays with their famous bands playing the Garry Owen.

And the Kavanagh boys would come out of the mountains and they would never be the same. Frank was wild and alcoholic and Joseph was quiet and studious. Then they went against the treaty and Collins's government was after them. Frank skipped the country, going to America to be a merchant seaman, and Joseph ended up in a Free State court for treason. “How do you plead?” asked the judge of the new Irish State in his old English judge's wig.

“Oh my God!” said young Joe Kavanagh. “I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.”

The Act of Contrition was the wrong response and the Free State would give young Joe a lifelong vacation up in Portrane by the sea, a haven for gentle lunatics. Up there he was harmless and he would study the dictionary, memorizing page after page, just in case someone might need the lend of a word. And he would be a special patient. He would be the patient who went out to fight for his country, went into the mountains like a modern day rapparee and, seemingly, came back into Dublin City as if he had been touched, somehow indefinably, by God.

And it would get worse. Collins would die and Mary Kavanagh would be taken by her father to see him lying in state in Dublin's City Hall, right next to Dublin Castle, recently denuded of English embezzlers. She would look in the coffin at Collins, and she would not believe he was dead because he was so handsome in his general's uniform. But Collins was dead and Ireland was changed forever. Her father, prematurely old from blows of His Majesty's forces, would soon join Rosanna up in Glasnevin. His kidneys were black and blue from the Black and Tans. In less than a decade, disease and revolution in a mad, wet country had taken an ideal, loving family and, with disdain and mindless filth, had destroyed it. The rich don't die for freedom, the aristocrats wouldn't think of it, and the bureaucrats will serve any master. It is the working people who always die for freedom, because they are the ones with impossible dreams and disposable families.

Mary Kavanagh was the only fertile one of the bunch and now O'Rourke was the last Kavanagh. A Kavanagh by the name of O'Rourke. All he had of his mother's family was two photos and a plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin. Except for them, the Kavanaghs might have never even existed. But they must have existed because he was here.

“What are you cooking tonight, honey?” Sam asked. O'Rourke didn't answer and McGuire, scrubbing the kitchen floor on her knees, didn't ask again. She was attacking the floor as O'Rourke searched the statue for clues. She was pretty typical, for a Blessed Virgin. She stood about ten inches tall and he could see where his Uncle Dick had repaired her broken neck and replaced her broken fingers with golden digits. She is stood on the globe with a serpent running under her feet and her arms were outstretched, supine hands open in greeting. The only manufacturer's mark O'Rourke could find is “R & L” on the base of the statue. He took the statue into the bathroom and in the basin places it in lukewarm water, dish detergent and a drop of Clorox. Soon the gray became clear and the statue gleamed white again. He dried it with a bath towel and saw for the first time what a handsome work it was.

“I have to go out for some flowers,” he told McGuire.

“For me?”

O'Rourke, still not fully trained or domesticated, almost told her that the flowers were for the Blessed Virgin, but stopped himself in time. “Yes,” he said in an epiphany of love, “who else would I buy flowers for?” But as McGuire kissed him and sent him out the door, O'Rourke felt in his heart that there was some kind of womanly competition going on for his very soul and he didn't know why.