Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (4 page)

Barney never forgot O'Rourke, and neither did Hogan. “How's it going?” asked O'Rourke as Hogan passed him, grunted, got his everpresent cup of coffee, and headed for his basement office, which was often referred to as “Little Peru.”

“Hey, Hogan,” said Reilly.

“What?” said Hogan as both he and Barney turned around.

“You should do something about that dog's balls,” said Reilly.

“What's wrong with them?”

“For Christsakes, Hogan, they almost hit the floor,” said Reilly.

“Yeah, Hogan,” said O'Rourke, “willya put a jockstrap on him for decency's sake?”

Hogan peered down at Barney's swaying genitalia, then looked up to find both O'Rourke and Reilly with wide grins on their faces.

“Fuck you guys,” said Hogan as he and Barney again headed for Little Peru.

“What a personality,” O'Rourke said, laughing.

“Yeah,” said Reilly, “he could be the advance man for a famine.”

O'Rourke looked down the bar and saw Nuncio Baroody. Nuncio was a diminutive Irishman who spoke with the Liberties nasal twang of his native South-side Dublin. Nuncio was becoming seedier by the year. His hair was always cut as if a bowl had been placed on top of his head and the remaining hair cut away. He now shaved but twice a week and his nose and face were mapped by roads of thin blood vessels that, thought O'Rourke, must run with Jameson. If Nuncio was to be played in the movies it would be by the late Irish actor Jack MacGowran. In fact, it had been rumored that Jack MacGowran, dead these many years, probably looked better than Nuncio Baroody.

Nuncio—no one remembered his real first name—had come by his sobriquet (if you could believe the mendacious Nuncio) through scandal. He had once been a priest, and he served as the secretary to the Papal Nuncio in Paris. His downfall had been the whiskey and Pernod and the occasion when the real Nuncio caught him in the confessional in a pederastic act with an 11-year-old boy. The Church had suspended him
a divinis
, banning him from celebrating mass and other sacraments. They had also “read him out” in
L'Osservatore Romano
, letting the world know that he had been formally
laicized
, a form of ecclesiastical castration. It was believed that he now taught Latin in some Catholic high school, where it was assumed that Nuncio's proclivity toward pederasty was being fulfilled nicely.

“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 and 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: