Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (5 page)

A torrid romance had followed filled with drugs, wine and passionate and creative love-making. Marriage soon followed and a move back to New York. With the arrival of their first child all his vices were declared null and void by his wife. Thus he was referred to as “pussy-whipped” because his wife wouldn't allow him to drink or smoke in his own apartment. “I married a smoke detector,” he was honest enough to admit. So he got his drink and smoke surreptitiously on the run at the Moat as he ran out for groceries or the paper.

“Caife,” said Cyclops. “You got to put your foot down. Remember,” he continued in his best Ralph Kramden imitation, “you're the King of the Castle.”

“And every castle,” returned Fergus, “has a vassal!” Sometimes there was no arguing with Fergus T. Caife.

Fergus sipped on his whiskey and cleared his throat. “Ha'penny,” he said. There was absolute silence in the bar.

“Good Jesus,” said Reilly.

“Get the fuck out of here, Fergus,” added O'Rourke, “you fucking fraud!”

Fergus finished his whiskey, washed it down with his non-alcoholic Lady Mountbatten, then turned and started to exit the bar.

“Fergus T.,” said Napoleon Quirkle. “Do you have a poem in memory of Mikey O'Dote?”

Fergus stood in the middle of the floor, his feet wide apart, his thumbs tucked inside his vest and cleared his voice: “For Mikey O'Dote:

The bar was hushed in memory of O'Dote. Fergus turned, winked at Reilly and O'Rourke, and ran out the door. “How moving,” said Quirkle. In silence O'Rourke and Reilly looked at each other, smiled, and clicked their glasses together.

With the after-hours drinkers, the mourners, and the other Saturday morning regulars, the Moat was soon so loud that you could hardly hear yourself think. The door opened once more and in came Dr. Moe Luigi, fresh from his morning rounds at St. Vincent's Hospital, and J. Howard Byrne, professional grief counselor.

Luigi and Byrne were the original Mutt & Jeff tandem. Luigi, diminutive, intense, minutely-groomed was just the opposite of Byrne who was nicknamed “The Commandant” because he looked like an IRA commandant, circa 1920, sent by central casting. It was said that you could tell the changing of the seasons by observing Byrne, because he was either wearing his winter tweeds or his summer tweeds.

“What's going on here?” asked Byrne as he looked at the mourners.

“Mikey O'Dote's funeral,” said O'Rourke. “Do your stuff, Commandant.”

Byrne had a Ph.D. and a sharp bite. In the touchy-feely '90s, he had put a hard Irish gaze on life, the antidote to the saccharine voices on TV and in public life who took delight in grief and mourning, like President Bill Clinton. (“He gives good eulogy,” Byrne liked to say of the president.) From the bombing in Oklahoma City to the latest teenage nuts with AK-47s shooting up their high school, Byrne gave the same advice on national television as he would to Mikey O'Dote's mourners: “They're dead. Get over it. Move on.”

“You show great sensitivity,” said Quirkle with an edge as he pulled on his pipe.

“Fuck you,” said Byrne. He ordered his morning soda. “Never trust a pipe smoker,” he added as he went to read the papers.

“Good morning, Tone, Cyclops,” said Luigi, surveying the bar. “I see they've rounded up the usual suspects.”

Dr. Moe Luigi, according to a fawning profile in the
New Yorker
, was the famous “Proctologist to the Stars.” He was referred to simply in the Moat as “the asshole doctor.” And as Luigi himself often proclaimed, “What's all this veneration for me? A doctor's a doctor and an asshole's an asshole.”

“How's it going, Moe?”

“The same, Tone. I look at assholes from nine to five. I stick my fingers in them. I peer up them. I shove proctoscopes up them. I wink at them, and they wink back at me. If I never see another asshole again, it'll be too soon!”

“Moe, you're in the wrong saloon.” O'Rourke smiled.

“Touché,” said Luigi, as he raised his glass of anisette in salute.

The story of Moe Luigi was the stuff that the American Dream was made of. The son of an immigrant Italian shoemaker, Giacomo Luigi was his father's first American-born son when he made his belated appearance in a railroad flat—the “dumb-bell” apartments of New York lore—on Mulberry Street in 1930. A graduate of Brooklyn College just before the Korean War, he too, like O'Rourke, had started out as a navy corpsman. After the war he entered the Cornell University Medical School on the GI Bill and finished first in his class in 1957. Declining offers from such places as the Mayo Clinic, he worked at St. Vincent's Hospital on the causes and cures for colorectal cancer. Over his long career he had peered up the rectums of such varied celebrities as Marilyn Monroe (“Nice,” he said), Francis Cardinal Spellman (“He liked it too much”), Roy Cohn (“Clean as a whistle”), and President Ronald Reagan (“There was nothing at my end either”). But the thing that endeared him to the other regulars at the Moat was his plain speaking. The man had absolutely no pretensions. He was also a man of humor and kindness who had taken care of many of his impoverished drinking pals and their families free of charge.

“How's it with you, Tone?” asked Luigi. “How's the glamorous world of political consulting?” O'Rourke did not answer. He just looked at Luigi and gave the old jerk-off sign with his hand. “My boy,” Luigi responded, “you have a lot to learn. Life was meant to be a giant circle jerk. You just can't beat the bastards. It's their game. They made the rules.”

“But Moe,” O'Rourke said, “look at you. You've done it. They always want you for some committee or panel or commission. They respect you.”

“My boy, you're wrong. They don't respect me. They need me.” Luigi pulled out a pack of Chesterfields from his jacket pocket and stuffed one into a long cigarette holder. He stuck it in his mouth, lit it, and slanted it upward like a grand erection. FDR couldn't have done it better. “I'm the best there is,” he continued, blowing smoke through his nose. “I've forgotten more about assholes than those bastards could learn in a lifetime. I'm a pro's pro. So when some WASP President is worried why there's blood in his stool, and he doesn't know if he has cancer or just some temperamental hemorrhoids, he calls Luigi. He doesn't give a fuck about me. All he knows is that I'm a greasy little Wop who knows more about his dreaded malady than anybody else in the goddamn world. Always remember that. People want you for what you can do for them. Always stay on top of the bastards and fight them toe-to-toe and you'll win because most of these assholes have nothing but air between their ears. Just keep fighting.”

“Moe, I'm tired of fighting. I just want to snooze for a while.”

“My boy, you'll be snoozing for all eternity. Have fun now. What did the great Red Smith say about the eternal snooze? ‘Dying is no big deal. The least of us manage that. Living is the trick.' See you dumb mick, living is the trick!”

“Moe,” said O'Rourke, turning dead serious, “I'm having second thoughts.”

“About what?”

“This business I'm in. It stinks. It's a filthy business full of filthy people.”

“What does that make you?” said Luigi, blowing smoke in O'Rourke's face by way of punctuation. It was not the answer O'Rourke wanted to hear. “You think,” continued Luigi quietly, “they give you all that money for doing good?”

“And that,” said O'Rourke, “is part of the problem.”

“Problem?”

“I should be ashamed of myself for consorting with these bums, these politicians,” said O'Rourke. “What a bunch of scumbags.” O'Rourke was becoming animated. “I'm not even talking about the right wingers,” said O'Rourke. “I'm talking about the fucking phony liberals I get elected. They don't believe in a fucking thing, and the only thing that qualifies them for office is their mommy's money. Trust fund patriots. Jack Kennedy said, ‘I'm an idealist with no illusions.' Well, I've become an illusionist without ideals.”

Luigi saw O'Rourke was in genuine distress. He knew O'Rourke liked to avoid confrontation if he could, and now it was obvious that O'Rourke couldn't look him in the eye. He was slowly turning his body away from Luigi as they talked. “It's alright, Tone,” Luigi said quietly, feeling for his friend, “it's just the
dybbuk
.”

“The what?”

“The
dybbuk
,” repeated Luigi. “You got the
dybbuk
.” For a minute O'Rourke thought it was a disease. “You've been possessed by a demon.” O'Rourke looked skeptical. “It's from Jewish folklore,” Luigi added.

“A
dybbuk
?” said O'Rourke.

“A
dybbuk
,” repeated Luigi, then added, “you always try to do good, Tone, but there's a terrible side to your business, politics. It is a business of the bought and sold. No matter what good you do, your means of doing it—deception fueled with money and lies—has its evil side. You want to do good like your heroes—Roosevelt, the Kennedy brothers—but they sold part of their souls to do good. You are no exception. First and foremost, you are a politician, and that puts your soul in jeopardy. Most of them don't care; they check their conscience at the door. You, Tone, I'm glad to say, are different.”

“Moe,” said O'Rourke, “I think you're more priest than doctor.” Luigi smiled. “I must be the perfect politician,” O'Rourke went on sadly, “because I am delighted by idiots and thrilled by stupidity.”
Dybbuks
, thought O'Rourke, fucking
dybbucks
.

He still possessed the conscience of his mother and the nuns. There was right and there was wrong and O'Rourke knew the difference. It had been taught to him first by his mother and the indoctrination had continued with the Sisters of Charity at St. Bernard's Parochial School on 13th Street in the West Village. He still remembered the time he had stolen a peapod at an Italian fruiters on the corner of West 4th and 12th Streets in 1950. He had been apprehended by his mother who made him apologize and surrender the kidnapped pod to the proprietor. He had never forgotten that. Later, the good nuns had continued his mother's work with the help of the
Baltimore Catechism
. The Red Chinese and all their devilish brain-washing schemes had nothing on the Sisters of Charity and the
Baltimore Catechism
. He still remembered what Sister Perpetua had said to her first grade class: “What you are in the first grade, you'll be for the rest of your life.” Years later he sometimes thought about what Sister Perpetua had said, but discarded it as the philosophy of a narrow, sheltered woman. But lately he had begun to rethink Sister Perpetua's logic and realized she was probably right. Nearly half a century later he thanked both his mother and Sister Perpetua for the strong hand they had applied to his moral till.

Suddenly he brightened. “Did you see this?” He picked up the
Daily News
headline about Jackie Swift. “Do you believe we have morons like this representing us?”

Luigi read and started laughing. “The Virgin Mary,” he said, “has Swift flipped his lid? What's the story, Cyclops?”

“Swift,” said Reilly, “had nothing to do with the story. The Virgin shit, it's pure fiction, I guarantee it. That drunken press secretary of his, Drumgoole, must have fucked up the real story from his chief of staff, Brogan. I bet the story behind the story is a doozy. What I do know is that they were screwin' and snortin', and Swift's heart attacked him.”

“Is that really true?” asked Luigi.

“Sure it is,” said Reilly. “Word on the street is that Smilin' Jack loves the white powder.”

“I've heard rumors,” said O'Rourke.

“Well,” said Reilly, “Jackie Swift has been in and out of Betty Ford more times than Jerry. He's disappeared about three times in the last three years. Supposed to be on some fucking fact-finding tour of Southeast Asia. Vito and Madonna-Sue packed him off to Betty Ford to clean up his act. He can't get straight. Loves the shit too much.”

From the other end of the bar Nuncio erupted: “Moses, Moses, King of the Jews. Wiped his arse in the
Daily News
!” Baroody hit the deck as Cyclops's shot glass shattered against the wall where his face had just been.

“Fuck you, and fuck James Joyce,” Reilly yelled in Baroody's direction. He clearly was in no mood to have his scoop belittled by the likes of Nuncio Baroody.