Ed. Note. Continued from Doyle, Part One: The lounge was empty and the front exit was engulfed in flames. He headed through the girls' undressing room looking for another way out. He was five feet from the back exit when something heavy and blunt hit him in the back of the head and his screen went blank...

Doyle awoke outside the smoldering Fantasy Lounge to the sight of the hot Asian girl from the local news interviewing the fireman who had saved the degenerate from the burning strip joint. The fireman was Tony Durrance, draped in strippers and smug as ever. Doyle lept up. After 13 years between rounds it was on again live and in color on the Friday noon news.

"Cock block!" Doyle shrieked. He charged his Italian nemesis as parking-lot dust trailed off his corduroy pants and vintage ‘82 Van Halen tour jersey. In Doyle’s dazed state clarity set in as if he was tripping on mushrooms or LSD again. A conclusion some might find delusional, he found quite obvious. To draw a piece of bleach-blond stripper ass, Durrance had knocked him out with a heavy blunt object and heroically carried him out of the burning building. This required retribution. Doyle jumped on Durrance’s back and clawed at his eyes and throat.

With a mouthful of parking lot and a bloody nose, Doyle launched to his feet and kicked Durrance hard in the right kneecap trying to snap it backwards. Durrance doubled over in pain and Doyle moved in to punch out his teeth. Suddenly every hose-tugger in Westshore Station 26 was on him, pinning him down on the ground with elbows, hands and knees. If the news wasn’t there they probably would have kicked the shit out of him, Doyle realized.

The Tampa PD arrested him for assault but a stop at the emergency room of Tampa General, God help him, was scheduled before his trip to the station. Going into the ambulance Doyle paused to share his thoughts with the luscious news correspondent – who didn’t seem near as turned on by him as before – and the live television audience watching from mansions, mobile homes, and condos around Tampa Bay.

"All day, they drive around fast on this big red truck with 250 feet of hose trying to make up for the fact that they have no dicks," he said, "It’s penis envy isn’t it? And screw the cops too. Those cocksuckers…" The viewers were quickly returned to the studio where a square-jawed man with vacant blue eyes and a perky blond with missiles for boobs read cover-up drivel off a teleprompter.

****

Doyle paid his rent and supported his decadent lifestyle through freelance articles for the Gibsonton Gazette, a part-time job as a drawbridge operator and the profits from selling off his old baseball card collection, card by card, at the Oldsmar flea market. Thus he was always broke. When it came time to post the $500 bail, he needed to make a phone call. His mother, who might well have bailed him out on his maiden arrest, was apparently in New York visiting family in Queens. She had left a message the night before telling him that his cousin John had an extra ticket to the big Friday night game between the Knicks and Heat and that he was taking her to the game.

If only she had sprung for Doyle’s airline ticket instead of flying first class it would have been him at Madison Square Garden with his sleazy cousin Johnny (Johnny La Ruffa the mortician from Richmond Hill not Johnny Caruso the building inspector from Nassau County) and none of this would have happened. Without his mother home his options were more limited than Dexter Manley’s vocabulary. It was six o’clock on a Friday night and all his friends were either already drunk for the next two days or too broke to afford a six-pack of Schlitz – forget the bail money. So Doyle called his only living relative within fifty miles, his uncle Sean, more commonly known as Father Sean Doyle, pastor at Bradenton’s All Saints Catholic Church.

Conceived in the shadow of Coney Island’s fabled Cyclone, Sean Doyle had rode a fifty year-long roller coaster of achievements and hellish experience. In the late 1960s he was a promising and savage young amateur fighter, a bruising southpaw who once invested nine minutes of his time pounding on future heavyweight champion and alleged Uncle Tom George Foreman. But then Vietnam and the draft came calling and Sean Doyle spent twelve months watching his friends get killed and maimed by an enemy he couldn’t see for a reason he didn’t understand. There were good times too – once Sean and his buddy Larry Goode from Cleveland both caught a sinister case of the crabs off the same Saigon hooker. Too embarrassed to tell the base doctor, they sprayed down their crotches with a can of Raid and laughed like bastards with the pain of the genitalia burn reinforced their pathetic turn of events. The next day Larry Goode was shot dead while on patrol.

Three weeks before he was going to rotate back to the states shrapnel from a mine blew out Doyle’s left knee. He limped home hobbled in spirit. He had seen enough fighting and could no longer physically or mentally get back in the ring. Out of nowhere he entered the seminary, went on to get a PHD in English literature and became one of the most beloved and intoxicated professors at the University of Notre Dame. For eleven years he taught and lived a life devoted to God, with a certain amount of time set aside for scotch. He even returned to boxing training students.

Then one night in a South Bend bar the inevitable Doyle meltdown came, the type that makes one wonder if the family shield should be an aerial photo of Three Mile Island. It was late evening and the dive was filled with bikers and their old ladies grooving to the best Bad Company cover band in northern Indiana. Sean Doyle was in his element, cigarette smoke spiraling above his head and scotch flowing down his throat. Then, right in the middle of a dead-on version of "Burnin’ Sky," some biker at the end of the bar decided an unaccompanied red head with a beautiful body was his for the taking. When she said she wasn’t at all interested, the vested, shirtless behemoth said in pure Altamont style that he didn’t care what she wanted, either way she was getting fucked. Sean Doyle, who in spite of obedience to his vow of celibacy always had a thing for red heads, stepped in to buy the dude a drink and calm him down. The biker shoved the priest away and told him to go fuck an altar boy. In a calm robotic tone Sean uttered:

"You don’t fuck with this man of the cloth."

The biker went for his switchblade and the three -foot metal chain that was clipped to his belt. Three hours later he was feeding off tubes in South Bend Memorial Hospital. Other boozing and drugging buddies populated the emergency room below in slightly better shape. Sean emerged without a scratch and was summarily dismissed from the Notre Dame faculty without a hearing. A psychiatrist diagnosed him as manic depressive and he was put on eighteen-month sabbatical. His return mass was the funeral of his brother Martin, Doyle’s father. He now spent his days exiled in Bradenton, driving white-haired old ladies to bingo and flushing vials of prozac down the toilet. He hadn’t had a drink in ten years. But deep down, in a pit he cherished but could never explain to anyone, he knew two things: God loved him and "You don’t fuck with this man of the cloth."

Continue on with Doyle, Part III.

• • •

Issue: April 4 - April 10, 2001

The Real Girl Fight
AN INSTANT MESSAGE

One Year: Best Of Rivative

Your Office Time
BY TONY LEONARDO

• • •

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