Master of puppets: President Donald Trump’s first homecoming visit to New York City last week was met by a protest of thousands. During his brief May 4 stop in the city, Trump met with Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, aboard the aircraft carrier Intrepid to honor the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a joint U.S.-Australian victory over Japan in World War II. Banging pots and pans, protesters chanted, “Not My President!” as they tried to march as close as they could to the carrier. From Greenwich Village, Melvyn T. Stevens was decked out in a towering costume of Steve Bannon, the White House senior adviser, in a judge’s robe and pulling the puppet strings of a marionette Trump. “The man is just blatantly and sickeningly evil,” Stevens fumed. Asked how the city should welcome the president back from Washington, he said, “I just hope he stays down there and doesn’t ever come back.” The day before, Trump and the Republicans had celebrated the House’s vote to repeal Obamacare. There were a few lonely Trump supporters scattered amid the crowd. One of them, Ron H., from Staten Island, said the president was “trying to do good.” Surrounded by anti-Trump protesters on all sides, Ron sought to find a pro-Trump refuge somewhere, repeatedly asking police officers, “Is there any nice people over there?” to which an officer quipped, “There’s nice people everywhere.”
R.I.P., Apache: Hundreds of mourners packed the Ortiz Funeral Home, at E. Second St. and Second Ave., this past Saturday and Sunday for the wake for John Anthony Mercado a.k.a. Apache. According to John Quinn, the former Lower East Side district leader and husband of former Assemblymember Alice Cancel, Apache died of a heart attack. He was 59. A deejay from the Vladeck Houses, in his younger days, Apache and the late Eddie Garcia made headlines in The Villager and elsewhere for their efforts to clean up the Lower East Side’s Sol Lain Park and reclaim it from drug dealers. Apache earned his nickname back then for his long black hair and the bandana headband he always sported, though later on he eventually cropped his locks. “He was a street guy,” Quinn said. “He had the scars on his arms from all the gang fights down here. He and Eddie took care of the local kids.” Garcia was famous for running youth football and other sports programs at Sol Lain Park, whose playground was renamed Eddie Garcia Field a few years ago in his honor. Hopefully, Apache, Garcia’s partner in their valiant grassroots quality-of life-campaign, will be honored, too.
Hoofing it: We were really rooting for Gormley on Saturday and wished him good luck…but, oh well. Actually, to be clear, we were rooting for Gormley, the horse in the Kentucky Derby, who came in ninth, and wished good luck, in jest, to Bob Gormley, the district manager of Community Board 2. “Not that close,” D.M. Gormley said afterward. “However, middle of the pack should help him avoid the glue factory.” Hey, there’s always the next two legs of the Triple Crown. … But will Gormley run again? We don’t see him on the card for the Preakness yet. Time for a C.B. 2 emergency resolution.
