Our Lady Of Greenwich Village by Dermot McEvoy

Ambrosia and Rome were rattling around in O’Rourke’s brain-cell challenged mind. All of a sudden there came a vision. Divine inspiration had struck.
    â€œWell,” said O’Rourke, “I’ve put a lot of thought into this and I think that American Express needs to spruce up their image a little bit. People are sick and tired of Karl Malden, his hat and nose, and his dire warnings of muggers and thieves. American Express has to think positively. It needs a little glitter.” O’Rourke paused for effect. Looking around the table everybody was nodding soberly. O’Rourke had them in the palm—he loved the pun—of his hand.
    â€œYes, gentlemen,” O’Rourke continued, “glitter. Some big names. And a format. Well, the first one will be terrific. We’ll get ah, ah....” His tongue was now out of control. He couldn’t stop himself.
    â€œGentlemen, we take the pope—you know, Paul VI—and we put him in the Sistine Chapel. The pope is dressed up in his white cassock, satin red cape, and papal stole, white zucchetto”—he knew he must be impressing these five WASPs and one Jew with his Catholic terminology and he was sure glad he had been an altar boy—“and as the camera zooms in on him he says, ‘Do you know me? Here in the Sistine Chapel everybody knows who I am. But when I leave Vatican City sometimes it isn’t always that way.’
    â€œNow,” continued O’Rourke, “we have the viewer fascinated.” The gentlemen were beginning to shift uncomfortably in their chairs, but O’Rourke couldn’t stop. “So we go into the whole spiel about where the American Express Card is accepted by everybody all over the universe and then we shift back to Pope Paul and the Sistine Chapel. This time he has a blank card in his hand and at this point we print his name, in Latin— PAULUS PP VI —on the card with a real zap, zap, zap kind of special effect. Then the Pope ends it with the tag-line: ‘The American Express Card. Don’t leave Rome without it!’”
    Hawkesworth coughed, and Coolville, the chairman of the board of American Express, cleared his throat. The rest of the gentlemen just stared straight ahead with their mouths open. But O’Rourke wouldn’t let up.
    â€œAnd the great thing about this format is that you can get different celebrities to do it. It’ll be terrific.”
    â€œThank you, Mr. O’Rourke,” said Hawkesworth, “that will be all for now.”
    Later that afternoon O’Rourke was made—as Hawkesworth succinctly put it—“redundant.”
    When Pepoon returned from London the following day, there was hell to pay. When he was told that O’Rourke had been canned, Pepoon—totally out of character—had burst into Hawkesworth’s thickly carpeted office with its panoramic view of the East River and shouted at him:“You asshole. Nobody, but nobody, not even the chairman of this goddamn firm, fires one of my people. You can take this job and shove it. I quit.” Pepoon turned on his heel, ignored pleas for calm and reason from Hawkesworth, and headed back to Sag Harbor. He was damned if he was going to take this kind of abuse from some guy who knew nothing about the ad business except that he was supposed to reassure clients by looking grandfatherly.
    O’Rourke handled his unemployment in another way—he went out and got shit-faced for two weeks. After that he calmed down and collected his unemployment checks and drank afternoons and evenings at the Moat. One evening about three months later as he was preparing to go out to the Moat for his second drinking shift of the day, he turned the television set on and, as he sat reading his mail, he heard the voice of Benny Goodman utter the familiar words, “Do you know me?” O’Rourke couldn’t believe it. By the time Goodman had uttered,