As he talked, I remembered the blowsy old Union Square, saw the tacky Christmas lights, the crowds of women toting shopping bags, and young Frank Parnelli cutting his way through them on his way to Klein’s.
“It’s so simple I do it without thinking. I go up to the top floor like I have some kind of business. It’s an old-fashioned store way back when people used cash. Security is one old guy wearing glasses. I go in the refund line and when I get up to the counter, I pull out the gun. The refunds ladies all soil their panties.
“I clean the place out. Thousands of bucks in a shopping bag and I didn’t even have to go out of my way. I run down the stairs and nobody stops me. It’s dark outside and I blend in with the crowd. As I walk down Fourteenth, the guy from the bar who sold me the gun is walking beside me.
“Before he looked beat. Now it’s like the life has been sucked out of him and he’s the living dead. But you know what? I have a locker at Grammercy Gym near Third Ave. I go in there so I can change from my leathers into a warm up jacket and a baseball cap. Like it’s the most natural thing, I give the guy a bunch of bills. He goes off to his family. I don’t ever see him again.
“I’m still drunk and amazed. That night I’m on a plane. Next day I’m in L.A. Both of those things for the first time. After that I’m not in this world half the time. Not this world like I thought it was anyway. And somewhere in those first days, I realized I wasn’t alone inside my own head. A certain Mark Bannon was in there too.”
I looked down the bar. The student was drinking his gin, turning his pages. The couple had stopped singing and were sitting near the window. The bartender was on his cell phone. I signaled and he refilled Frank’s glass.
“It was a wild ride for a few years,” Daddy Frank said. “We hitched up with Red Ruth, who ran us both ragged. She got us into politics in the Caribbean: Honduras, Nicaragua, stuff I still can’t talk about, Ruth and me and Bannon.
“Then she got tired of us, I got tired of having Mark Bannon on the brain, and he got tired of me being me. It happens.”
He leaned his elbow on the bar and had one hand over his eyes. “What is it? His mother looking for him again? I met her that first time when she had you find him. She’s a great lady.”
“Something like that,” I said. “Anyone else ask you about Mark Bannon recently?”
“A couple of weeks ago someone came around asking questions. He said he has like a news show on the computer. Paul Revere is his name? Something like that. He came on like he knew something. But a lot smarter guys than him have tried to mix it up with me.”
“No one else has asked?”
He shook his head.
“Anything you want me to tell Marky if I should see him?”
Without taking his hand away from his eyes, Daddy Frank raised the other, brought the glass to his lips and drained it. “Tell him it’s been thirty years and more and I was glad when he left but I’ve been nothing but a bag of muscles and bones ever since.”
5.
As evening falls in the South Village, the barkers come out. On opposite corners of the cross streets they stand with their spiels and handbills.
“Come hear the brightest song writers in New York,” said an angry young man handing me a flyer.
A woman with snakes and flowers running up and down her arms and legs insisted, “You have just hit the tattoo jackpot!”
“Sir you look as if you could use a good . . . laugh,” said a small African American queen outside a comedy club.
I noticed people giving the little sidelong glances that New Yorkers use when they spot a celebrity. But when I looked there was no one I recognized. That happens to me a lot these days.
Thinking about Mark Bannon and Frank Parnelli, I wondered if he just saw Frank as a vehicle with a tougher body and a better set of reflexes than his own? Did he look back with fondness when they parted company? Was it the kind of nostalgia you might have for a favorite horse or your first great car?
It was my luck to have known Mark when he was younger and his “guardian angel” was less skilled than it became. One Saturday when we were fourteen or so, going to different high schools and drifting apart, he and I were in a hockey free-for-all down on the Neponset River.
It was one of those silver and black winter Saturday afternoons when nothing was planned. A pack of kids from our neighborhood was looking for ice to play on. Nobody was ever supposed to swim or skate on that water, so that’s where a dozen of us headed.
We grabbed a stretch of open ice a mile or so from where the Neponset opens onto the Nantasket Roads, the stretch of water that connects Boston Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean. Our game involved shoving a battered puck around and plenty of body checks. Mark was on my team but seemed disconnected like he was most of the time.
The ice was thick out in the middle of the river but old and scarred and rutted by skates and tides. Along the shore where it was thin, the ice had been broken up at some points.
Once I looked around and saw that some kids eight or nine years old were out on the ice in their shoes jumping up and down, smashing through it and jumping away laughing when they did. There was a whir of skates behind me and I got knocked flat.
I was the smallest guy my age in the game. Ice chips went up the legs of my jeans and burned my skin. When I got my feet under me again, the little kids were yelling. One of them was in deep water holding onto the ice which kept breaking as he grabbed it.
Our game stopped and everyone stood staring. Then Mark came alive. He started forward and beckoned me, one of the few times he’d noticed me that afternoon. As I followed him, I thought I heard the words “Chain-Of-Life.” It was a rescue maneuver that, maybe, Boy Scouts practiced but I’d never seen done.
Without willing it, I suddenly threw myself flat and was on my stomach on the ice. Mark was down on the ice behind me and had hold of my ankles. He yelled at the other guys for two of them to grab his ankles and four guys to grab theirs. I was the point of a pyramid.
Somehow I grabbed a hockey stick in my gloved hands. My body slithered forward on the ice and my arms held the stick out toward the little kid. Someone else was moving my body.
The ice here was thin. There was water on top of it. The kid grabbed the stick. I felt the ice moving under me, hands pulled my legs.
I gripped the stick. At first the kid split the ice as I pulled him along. I wanted to let go and get away before the splitting ice engulfed me too.
But I couldn’t. I had no control over my hands. Then the little kid reached firm ice. Mark pulled my legs and I pulled the kid. His stomach bounced up onto the ice and then his legs. Other guys grabbed my end of the stick, pulled the kid past me.
I stood and Mark was standing also. The little boy was being led away, soaked and crying, water sloshing in his boots. Suddenly I felt the cold—the ice inside my pants and up the sleeves of my sweater—and realized what I’d done.
Mark Bannon held me up, pounded my back. “We did it! You and me!” he said. His eyes were alive and he looked like he was possessed. “I felt how scared you were when the ice started to break.” And I knew this was Mark’s angel talking.
The other guys clustered around us yelling about what we’d done. I looked up at the gray sky, at a freighter in the distance sailing up the Roads towards Boston Harbor. It was all black and white like television, and my legs buckled under me.
Shortly afterwards as evening closed in, the cops appeared and ordered everybody off the ice. That night, a little feverish, I dreamed and cried out in my sleep about ice and TV.
No adult knew what had happened, but every kid did. Monday at school, ones who never spoke to me asked about it. I told them even though it felt like it had happened to someone else. And that feeling, I think, was what the memory of his years with Mark Bannon must have been like for Daddy Frank.
6.
As soon as Frank Parnelli started talking about Paul Revere, I knew who he meant and wasn’t surprised. I called Desmond Eliot and he wasn’t
surprised to hear from me either. Back when I first knew Des Eliot, he and Carol Bannon went to Harvard/Radcliffe and were dating each other. Now he operates the political blog, Midnight Ride: Spreading the Alarm.
A few days later, I sat facing Eliot in his home office in suburban Maryland. I guess he could work in his pajamas if he wanted to. But, in fact, he was dressed and shaved and ready to ride.
He was listening to someone on the phone and typing on a keyboard in his lap. Behind him were a computer and a TV with the sound turned off. The screen showed a runway in Jordan where the smoking ruins of a passenger plane were still being hosed down with chemicals. Then a Republican senator with Presidential ambitions looked very serious as he spoke to reporters in Washington.
A brisk Asian woman, who had introduced herself as June, came into the office, collected the outgoing mail, and departed. A fax hummed in the corner. Outside, it was a sunny day and the trees had just begun to turn.
“Yes, I saw the dust up at the press conference this morning,” he said into the phone. “The White House, basically, is claiming the Democrats planted a spy in the Republican National Committee. If I thought anyone on the DNC had the brains and chutzpa to do that I’d be cheering.”
At that moment Des was a relatively happy man. Midnight Ride is, as he puts it, “A tool of the disloyal opposition,” and right now things are going relatively badly for the administration.
He hung up and told me, “Lately every day is a feast. This must be how the right wing felt when Clinton was up to his ass in blue dresses and cigars.” As he spoke he typed on a keyboard, probably the very words he was uttering.
He stopped typing, put his feet up on a coffee table and looked out over his half frame glasses. His contacts with the Bannons go way back. It bothers him that mine go back further.
“You come all the way down here to ask me about Mark Bannon,” he said. “My guess is it’s not for some personal memoir like you’re telling me. I think the family is looking for him and thinks I may have spotted him like I did with Svetlanov.”
I shook my head like I didn’t understand.
“Surely you remember. It was twenty years ago. No, a bit more. Deep in the Reagan years. Glasnost and Perestroika weren’t even rumors. The Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. I was in Washington, writing for The Nation, consulting at a couple of think tanks, going out with Lucia, an Italian sculptress. Later on I was married to her for about six months.
“There was a Goya show at the Corcoran that Lucia wanted to see. We’d just come out of one of the galleries and there was this guy I was sure I’d never seen before, tall, prematurely gray.
“There was something very familiar about him. Not his looks, but something. When he’d talk to the woman he was with whatever I thought I’d recognized didn’t show. Then he looked my way and it was there again. As I tried to place him, he seemed like he was trying to remember me.
“Then I realized it was his eyes. At moments they had the same uncanny look that Mark Bannon’s could get when I first knew him. Of course by then Mark had been dead for about thirteen years.
“Lucia knew who this was: a Russian art dealer named Georgi Svetlanov, the subject of rumors and legends. Each person I asked about him had a different story: he was a smuggler, a Soviet agent, a forger, a freedom fighter.”
Eliot said, “It stuck with me enough that I mentioned it the next time I talked to Carol. She was planning a run for congress and I was helping. Carol didn’t seem that interested.
“She must have written the name down, though. I kept watch on Svetlanov. Even aside from the Bannon connection he was interesting. Mrs. Bannon must have thought so too. He visited her a few times that I know of.”
Marie Bannon had gotten in touch with me and mentioned this Russian man someone had told her about. She had the name and I did some research, found out his itinerary. At a major opening at the Shifrazi Gallery in Soho, I walked up to a big steely-haired man who seemingly had nothing familiar about him at all.
“Mark Bannon,” I said quietly but distinctly.
At first the only reaction was Svetlanov looking at me like I was a bug. He sneered and began to turn away. Then he turned back and the angel moved behind his eyes. He looked at me hard, trying to place me.
I handed him my card. “Mark Bannon, your mother’s looking for you,” I said. “That’s her number on the back.” Suddenly eyes that were very familiar looked right into mine.
Des told me, “I saw Svetlanov after that in the flesh and on TV. He was in the background at Riga with Reagan and Gorbachev. I did quite a bit of research and discovered Frank Parnelli among other things. My guess is that Mark Bannon’s . . . spirit or subconscious or whatever it is—was elsewhere by 1992 when Svetlanov died in an auto accident. Was I right?”
In some ways I sympathized with Eliot. I’d wondered about that too. And lying is bad. You get tripped by a lie more often than by the truth.
But I looked him in the face and said, “Mark wasn’t signaling anybody from deep inside the skull of some Russian, my friend. You were at the wake, the funeral, the burial. Only those without a drop of Celtic blood believe there’s any magic in the Irish.”
He said, “The first time I noticed you was at that memorial service. Everyone else stood up and tiptoed around the mystery and disaster that had been his life. Then it was your turn and you quoted Shakespeare. Said he was a ruined king. You knew he wasn’t really dead.”
“Des, it was 1971. Joplin, Hendrix. Everyone was dying young. I was stoned, I was an aspiring theater person and very full of myself. I’d intended to recite Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle,’ but another drunken Mick beat me to that.
“So I reared back and gave them Richard the Second, which I’d had to learn in college. Great stuff:
‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord’
“As I remember,” I said, “The contingent of nuns who taught Mark and me in school was seated down front. When I reached the lines:
‘. . . if angels fight,
Weak men must fall . . .’
“They looked very pleased about the angels fighting. Booze and bravura is all it was,” I said.
Partly that was true. I’d always loved the speech, maybe because King Richard and I share a name. But also it seemed so right for Mark. In the play, a king about to loose his life and all he owns on earth invokes royal myth as his last hope.
“When I was dating Carol I heard the legends,” Des told me. “She and her sister talked about how the family had gotten him into some country club school in New Jersey. He was expelled in his third week for turning the whole place on and staging an orgy that got the college president fired.
“They said how he’d disappear for weeks and Carol swore that once when he came stumbling home, he’d mumbled to her months before it happened that King and Bobby Kennedy were going to be shot.
“Finally, I was at the Bannons with Carol when the prodigal returned and it was a disappointment. He seemed mildly retarded, a burnout at age twenty-five. I didn’t even think he was aware I existed.
“I was wrong about that. Mark didn’t have a license or a car anymore. The second or third day he was back, Carol was busy. I was sitting on the sun porch, reading. He came out, smiled this sudden, magnetic smile just like his old man’s and asked if that was my Ford two door at the end of the driveway.
“Without his even asking, I found myself giving him a lift. A few days later, I woke up at a commune in the Green Mountains in New Hampshire with no clear idea of how I’d gotten there. Mark was gone, and all the communards could tell me was, ‘He enters and leaves as he wishes.’
“When I got back to Boston, Carol was pissed. We made up, but in a lot of ways it was never the same. Not even a year or two later when Mike Bannon ran for governor and I worked my ass off on the campaign.
“Mark was back home all the time then, drinking, taking drugs, distracting the family, especially his father, at a critical time. His eyes were empty and no matter how long everyone waited, they stayed that way. After the election he died, maybe as a suicide. But over the years I’ve come to think that didn’t end the story.”
It crossed my mind that Eliot knew too much. I said, “You saw them lower him into the ground.”
“It’s Carol who’s looking this time isn’t it?” he asked. “She’s almost there as a national candidate. Just a little too straight and narrow. Something extra needs to go in the mix. Please tell me that’s going to happen.”
A guy in his fifties looking for a miracle is a sad sight. One also sporting a college kid’s crush is sadder still.
“Just to humor you, I’ll say you’re right,” I told him. “What would you tell me my next step should be?”
The smile came off his face. “I have no leads,” he said. “No source who would talk to me knows anything.”
“But some wouldn’t talk to you,” I said.
“The only one who matters won’t. She refuses to acknowledge my existence. It’s time you went to see Ruth Vega.”
7.
I was present on the night the angel really flew. It was in the summer of ’59 when they bulldozed the big overgrown lot where the Fitzgerald mansion had once stood. Honey Fitz’s place had burned down just twenty years before. But to kids my age, Fitzie’s was legendary ground, a piece of untamed wilderness that had existed since time out of mind.
I was finishing my sophomore year in high school when they cleared the land. The big old trees that must have stood on the front lawn, the overgrown apple orchard in the back, were chopped down and their stumps dug up.
The scraggly new trees, the bushes where we hid smeared in war paint on endless summer afternoons waiting for hapless smaller kids to pass by and get massacred, the half flight of stone stairs that ended in midair, the marble floor with moss growing through the cracks, all disappeared.
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