It's 3 p.m. on Friday, and it's a long way from Liberty City, the Miami slum where Rourke grew up. He is at a back booth at his favorite restaurant, Nello, on New York's Upper East Side, sipping cappuccino with a chaser of warm goat's milk. The waiter brings over the resumé and head shot of an actress sitting nearby who wants to meet him. "See what I have to go through?" says Rourke, stuffing the resumé in between the cracks of the seat. "I don't want her. Look at her. She's too big." Though his boxing and years of hard living have taken a rough, grungy toll on his own face, Rourke says he likes his women to be as magnificent as his custom-designed race cars and his Lippizaner horses. "It's like when I buy a horse," Rourke explains. "I don't want a thick neck and short legs."
He turns to his near-constant shadow. "Pinky!" he says. "Gimme some water, will ya?" Pinky heads for the bar. Nello Balan, the owner, comes by to check on his most notorious customer. "Everything's muy tranquilo, bud!" says Rourke, grasping Balan's hand.
In fact, things are, at this moment, anything but muy tranquilo. Rourke has just been booted from the Plaza after trashing his room to the tune of about $20,000 in damages, and his friends are frantically arranging a room for him at the Ritz-Carlton while his apartment is redecorated. "It was this guy who was helping me train," Rourke whispers confidentially. "I let him live with me at the hotel, but he had no idea how to conduct himself. He'd fall asleep and burn the couch or spill a glass of wine. Now I get blamed for it."
Rourke, in his mind, is often blamed for things — mostly by the media. "I'm a normal guy until you disrespect me," he says. He looks at Pinky. "Am I a normal guy, Pinky?"
Pinky nods, "Very normal."
"But if you cross me or disrespect me, how would you describe it?"
Pinky swallows hard and looks nervous. "He's the most lovable guy in the world, but he can be one of the meanest," Pinky says. Rourke's dark side comes out at the mere mention of archenemy Richard Johnson, with whom he's been feuding for eight years. Gossip columnist Johnson, who now writes for the New York Post's Page Six, says he first raised the actor's ire in 1986 by running a photo of him with a woman who wasn't his wife (he was then married to Debra Feuer). The sniping continued until 1992, when Johnson challenged Rourke to a fight in his column for the Daily News, but the two never faced off. As if to explain, Rourke pulls a gold watch out of his leather bag. "The man who gave me this watch told me not to go after Johnson," he says gravely. "A very heavy man, someone I have a lot of respect for." Rourke displays the inscription on the back of the watch from someone named John. "I can't say who it is," he says, exchanging a meaningful look with Pinky. "His last name begins with a G," says Rourke, whose appearance at his friend John Gotti's racketeering trial almost three years ago was well documented. "Figure it out."
There is much to figure out about Rourke — and that's apparently the way he wants it. He says he won't talk about his family (his father is dead; his mother lives in Miami) but refers to them cryptically in conversation. "Yeah, I got one, I guess," he says when asked about his mother. He says he saw his father only once after his parents divorced when he was seven. He wouldn't marry a woman with children, he says, because of the difficult relationship he had with his stepfather. He doesn't like to drink much because "the men in my family were drinkers, and I don't like to be around drunks." He's tired of talking about boxing, which he took up because he felt "my soul being drained away as an actor," but notes he "had nine professional fights — seven wins, two draws, and six knockouts." He has trouble with women. "I'm not afraid of anything that has a penis," he says. "Get my drift?" He makes unflattering remarks about Otis. (He was arrested last summer after she accused him of beating her up; the trial is set for this month.)
But while he spends much time club hopping for women, he seems obsessed with Otis. His driver, Kenny, says Rourke claims he'd "cut off his right hand to have Carre back." (Otis has said they're divorced, but Rourke's publicist won't confirm it.) And though Kenny drives Rourke all over Manhattan at night, he says, "I can't tell you how many times he goes home alone." When Rourke is asked about his rumored suicide threat last summer (he was reportedly hospitalized in an L.A. psychiatric ward), he is quiet for a long time.
"A lot of times I'd like to be gone," he says finally. "It's a lonely, painful existence. But I'm not going to let them win. That's how I look at it."
