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.
21.
“Why me?” asked Nuncio Baroody.
“Because you’re perfect for me,” replied O’Rourke as he sipped a club soda at his end of the bar at Hogan’s Moat.
“How so?”
“You know the gay community,” said O’Rourke. “You know how they think. You also know me and know how I think.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll embarrass you?”
“No, why?”
“You’ve heard the rumors, I’m sure,” said Baroody, his eyes lowered. O’Rourke hadn’t often seen Nuncio sober. He had always been impressed with his sharp wit and utter disregard for protocol. O’Rourke loved people who liked to stir the pot.
“Ah, roomers,” said O’Rourke, inferring an Irish twist to
it.
“Exactly.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” said O’Rourke. “Just do your job and keep your ears and eyes open.” As an afterthought O’Rourke added, “And your mouth shut.”
“Got it.”
“You hire the ringers?”
“They’ll be there,” Nuncio assured.
“Okay,”said O’Rourke.“The campaign begins.” The two men left the Moat and walked straight across Seventh Avenue to the headquarters of the Village Queer Democrats. The VQD was created after the gay riots of 1969. They had become a force and every Democratic politician had come to them as supplicant. O’Rourke and Baroody entered the building on Fourth Street, just across from the back of the Riviera Cafe, and walked the lone flight of stairs. They could smell the gym next door before they could hear the grunts and groans of the weightlifters. Inside the drab room there were only a few people. O’Rourke was drawn to their Wall of Fame, where photographs of the famous and the infamous showed the VQD’s political clout. The wall also showed the part sex had played in New York City politics over the past thirty years. In the middle was a huge picture of Bill Clinton speaking before the group in 1992, just before the New York primary that had saved his candidacy. There was a photo of Harvey Milk, who was literally blown away, posing with an obviously uncomfortable Senator Pat Moynihan. O’Rourke’s eyes were drawn to a picture of Thom Lamè and Malcolm Forbes, the sissy capitalist. “What the hell is this?” he asked Nuncio Baroody.
Nuncio shook his head. “Don’t ask.”
O’Rourke just smiled and replied, “Don’t tell.”
There was a wonderful picture of Barney Frank and the late liberal congressman of the district, Fat Max Weissberg. Then O’Rourke started to laugh. He was looking at a photograph of Ed Koch and Bess Myerson, obviously taken in 1977 when Koch won the mayoralty. “The Immaculate Deception,” said O’Rourke to Baroody. He was referring to the master chicanery that Koch had pulled off with Myerson. It was the first time the middle-aged Koch had ever been seen in the company of a woman, a ploy he used to assuage the fears of the middle-class of Queens and Staten Island. It had been his way of combating the bumper stickers the Cuomo camp had put out leading up to the primary: “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”
“Ed Koch,” said Nuncio, “has to be the biggest asexual of all time—but he’d suck you off for your vote.”
“Agreed,” said O’Rourke. Just then he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Lizzie Townsend. “Liz, how are you?”
“I don’t believe it, Tone,” she said as she hugged O’Rourke.
“Don’t believe what? That I want the endorsement of the VQD?”
“No,” said Townsend, “that you’re actually running for Congress.”
“Why not?” replied O’Rourke. “Life is short.”
Lizzie and O’Rourke had met after Thom Lamè had defeated her for City Council. They had run into each other at the Moat and she was distraught. O’Rourke had comforted her and told her that she had done everything right, but that she just didn’t have the votes. Lamè had played the numbers—gay males—perfectly.
“Do you have the numbers?” she playfully asked him.
“No,” said O’Rourke, “I don’t. But I hear there is going to be media here tonight.”
“Yeah,” said Townsend, “New York One is going to cover the caucus.” Right then Lizzie Townsend got suspicious. “What are you up to?”
She caught O’Rourke off guard. “Why would I be up to something, Lizzie?”
“You don’t have numbers and you’re not upset, that’s why,” said Townsend.
“In politics,” said O’Rourke, “sometimes you have to lose a battle to win the war.”
At that moment Sam McGuire and Clarence Black entered the room. McGuire saw O’Rourke chatting up Lizzie Townsend and immediately headed for them.
“Hi honey,” said McGuire without warmth.
“Sam,” said O’Rourke, “this is Lizzie Townsend. You remember Lizzie, she lost to Thom Lamè for city council a couple of years ago.”
A cloud lifted from McGuire as the obvious became clear. “Oh, yes, Lizzie,” she said. “Tone told me all about you.” Lizzie gave her a smile that said “I’m no threat.”
“You still deputy leader of the VQD?” asked O’Rourke, although he already knew the answer.
“Yep.”
“You must be excited that Lamè will be here tonight,” said O’Rourke with enough sarcasm.
“I am,” said Townsend with a big, false smile. “If he wins the congressional seat, maybe I can get his council seat.”
O’Rourke laughed, but he was disturbed that he hadn’t thought about that. “Who you gonna root for tonight?”
“I am not a political exhibitionist,” said Lizzie Townsend lightly as she turned to walk away.
O’Rourke looked at McGuire and gave a tentative look. “You want me to wipe the egg off your chin now,” asked McGuire, “or later?”
“Not egg,” said O’Rourke. “Grand Clong.”
“What?”
“Grand Clong is when you fuck up so bad, you get a rush of shit to the heart.” O’Rourke was thinking Congress and Lizzie Townsend was thinking city council. Lamè and Townsend in bed together and things were getting hot.
The crowd began to pile in and O’Rourke saw how conservative they all were. There were a few with earrings and leather pants, but it was nothing like 1975. Back then the members of the VQD looked like The Village People. A mohawk here, a jockstrap, chaps, and a pierced nipple there. With the thought of a pierced nipple he looked at McGuire.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” replied O’Rourke.
Dominick Carter of New York One arrived with his crew. O’Rourke introduced his people then jabbed the rotund Carter playfully in the belly. “How’s it goin’ Dom?”
“I’m really looking forward to tonight,” said Carter with his patterned enthusiasm. “I can’t wait to see how you relate to the prestigious VQD,” he said laughing.
“When are you going to go live?” he asked Carter, without answering his observation.
“As soon as the caucus endorses,” Carter replied. “They won’t allow us in here live, but I’ll catch the candidates as they come out the door.”
“Be glad to accommodate you, Dominick,” said O’Rourke.
“I’ll look for you later,” said Carter.
“What was that all about?” asked McGuire.
“Setting up the stand-up later with Dominick,” he said as he turned to McGuire and said seriously, “You must manipulate the media always, and not let them manipulate you. Do you understand?”
McGuire was taken aback by O’Rourke’s vehemence. “Yes, I do,” she said.
He saw he caught her off guard. “Sorry, honey,” he said as he hugged her. “I’m putting on my game face and I want to psych myself up.” McGuire saw for the first time how O’Rourke played political hardball.
Thom Lamè entered the room and was mobbed by the VQD members. He saw O’Rourke and his face went hard. He had never dreamed that O’Rourke himself would run. He thought the primary was going to be a cakewalk. Lizzie Townsend walked up to Lamè and a photographer from the New York Times snapped a photo of the beaming couple.
“We are,” said McGuire, “in deep doo-doo.”
“You’re a riot, Alice,” said O’Rourke, stealing a line from the Honeymooners.
“Can we have some silence here?” said Lizzie Townsend into the microphone. “Tonight’s a big night for the VQD,” she said, “for tonight we are going to endorse a candidate for the 7th Congressional District in the upcoming primary. So far the field contains only Councilman Thom Lamè and longtime Villager and political consultant Wolfe Tone O’Rourke. Mr. O’Rourke has insisted that Councilman Lamè, since this is his home political club, be introduced first.”
“Fellow queers,” Lamè lisped to the thunderous applause and laughter. He went through his spiel about how long he was a member of the VQD and how h
e would fight to make sodomy and gay marriage legal. He was passionate, but he was speaking to the choir.
When O’Rourke’s turn came he praised Lamè for his courage in supporting repeal of the sodomy laws and the legalization of gay marriage. “I hate to sound like a ‘me too Democrat,’ but I agree with Councilman Lamè on these important gay demands.” O’Rourke was met with polite applause. “But I think there are more immediate matters on the agenda. We are in the grasp of a right-wing hold in this country,” began O’Rourke, “that threatens not only gay Americans, but the freedom of every American. Bill Clinton is a Lamè duck.” O’Rourke was stopped by the laughter at his Freudian slip. “Sorry about that, Thom,” he said laughing himself. He noticed Lamè’s hard stare. “As I was saying, Clinton is a lame duck. Who will be the next president? This election is about who will be picking Supreme Court justices. We can’t go back to back-alley abortions. Now that would be a crime.”
“Who cares about abortion?” came a voice from the back. “We’re queer. It’s not our problem.”
“You should care,” said O’Rourke with a sudden intensity. “Because if you don’t care about what’s important to other people, why would you expect others to care about gay rights? To build coalitions you have to compromise, you have to bend. I dare you to stand up to some girl who’s been raped and is pregnant and tell her ‘It’s not our problem.’ It is your problem. You don’t change things by being selfish. You have to empathize.”
Our Lady Of Greenwich Village Page 20
