The sacred and the profane mix like holy water and Red Bull at the West Village home of Mickey Rourke. His first-floor walk-up is in a turn-of-the-century brownstone located on a block where no-name neighbors walk their dogs but celebrities come and go from two venerable hot spots a bottle’s throw away, including the Waverly Inn, where Rourke holds court at his own table a couple of nights a week. Rourke’s choice of neighborhood seems premeditated: close enough to harm’s way, easy enough to bring the party home or leave it behind. And in choosing the digs, he’s created a sort of sequel to The Pope of Greenwich Village. Neighbors shout out to him but don’t take pictures. He stops to talk, patting their dogs, calling them “handsome” or a “real looker.” He purrs, “Ooh-la-laah!” when a pretty girl walks by.

“We know everyone from six brownstones down from the left to the right,” he says in his deep, tough-guy voice. “We know everybody by their first name, and everyone’s got a dog.” And there is history: “The West Village is the first place that I landed 20-something years ago, a few streets down. It’s like I’m back in my nabe. I never knew my neighbors for 15 years in L.A.—not one of them. I hate that fucking city! I hated it the first day I got there, and I hated it the last day I was there.”

His Manhattan stoop, in our interviews, becomes the in-plain-sight confessional, the portal for inward-thinking, self-analysis, self-doubts, where the tape recorder runs freely. Inside the brownstone, the taping often stops, a bawdy dude-party atmosphere dominates, and what his therapist of more than a decade, Dr. Steve, might call “arrested development” prevails.

Rourke has always been a guy’s guy, and a loner when not. The body-building, the biker fixation, the bar brawls; he’s a living Fonzie, lots of bravado laced with nostalgia, defending honor, and being a man. The “bad men” he used to hang with notoriously in L.A. and Miami—outlaw motorcycle gang members, pilot-fish henchmen milking him of his money, hipster hairstylists, losers of all walks—are out of the picture. “I don’t travel with a bodyguard anymore,” he says. “I jump in a fucking cab when I go out.” His new-old posse are people he’s known for years who have stuck by him through the lean ones. “What it’s all about in the end,” he says, “is giving and sharing and being supportive, even when you’re down, you know?”

One pal, a shaved-head bodybuilder named Scott Siegel, drops by one night carrying a black tank of whey protein the size of a mini-keg for Mickey’s use. He’s a shy guy, a gentle giant, but makes a standout cameo in The Wrestler as a drug dealer, grocery-listing the intricate names of his black-market steroids and painkillers to the Ram. Says Rourke in his oft-kilter but fond way: “He’s the biggest Jew on the planet! He may not be as big as Harvey Weinstein”—another pal—“but he’s big!”

Rourke’s friend of 20 years J.P. Parlavecchio lives with him in his downstairs apartment, “taking care of my shit,” says Rourke. He handles his daily schedule, making sure he makes meetings, preparing gourmet meals for Rourke’s many diminutive pets. Wearing his signature fedora, J.P. looks like a guy you’d see placing bets at a Tampa greyhound track. “Mickey and I are old-school people,” says Parlavecchio, who once owned bars and restaurants in New York and Miami. All are gone now. “We believe in trust and friendship. You treat your friends the same, whether they’re on top or on the bottom. I always tell Mickey the truth, whether he likes it or doesn’t.”

Says Rourke: “I like J.P. because he’s a Chihuahua lover.” Then later he adds, “J.P. knew me when I was crazier than a fucking loon! I went through a period where I lost my house, my wife, my credibility, my career, my entourage, and what have you. And when you are sinking, the rats jump off the boat, you know? But even through all the crazy times, J.P. was always there for me. When I didn’t want to be bothered, I could go sit and eat in his restaurants.” He often chose a table in their kitchens. “And if I didn’t want to leave my room, he’d send over the kid with some lasagna.”

Most of his celebrity friends aren’t actors, but iconic musicians—outsiders like himself, from Bob Dylan and Axl Rose (who Rourke says provided, free of charge, Guns n’ Roses’ hit song “Sweet Child o’ Mine” for his film) to Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the evocative title song to The Wrestler for a nominal fee. “If I could have another brother,” Rourke says of Springsteen, “I’d pick him.”

* * * *Contrary to his big-spender days, Rourke often eats at home now, surrounded by six dogs of varying sizes, all small. They clearly rule the roost, along with a few guy friends. He permits himself a blowout one night a week, typically Thursdays. Sundays are “Mexican night” at the Rourke household. On one such September evening, he invites me over to join in the revelry of takeout burritos and tacos, downed with Coronas regularly knocked off the coffee table or over on the parquet floors by his excitable pets.

One might expect Rourke to live in a glass box of a place, like his apartment of ’80s excess in 9½ Weeks. Or perhaps the ultimate bachelor pad, with black silk sheets, mirrored ceilings, and a built-in wet bar. But the two-story apartment is done up like a fancy boudoir right out of New Orleans’ well-heeled Garden District, and it suits Rourke, who lived in the city while filming Angel Heart. Everywhere are framed photographs of his heroes: his brother, Hells Angels captains, the boozing, brilliant actor Richard Harris. There’s a sexy nude of his ex-wife, Otis, that he shot in Tahiti. Ornate chandeliers cast shadows upon Rourke’s visage and share space with a built-in punching bag and a bench press. A gilt-edged portrait of his prized dog, Loki, hangs where a family portrait might preside in another home, high above a marble fireplace.

But there are also touches an interior designer might not quite approve of, such as the anatomically correct rubber dildo that is suction-cupped to a parlor wall. On Mexican night, an attractive blonde-haired female friend sitting on a black leather sofa next to Rourke nibbles on nachos, feigning obliviousness to the prop jutting from the wall, inches from her face. “That’s Little Mickey,” emphasizes Rourke. On a shelf in the bedroom, an arsenal of sex toys that would give Robin Byrd pause awaits somebody or other. Rourke, dressed comfortably casual in a flannel shirt and jeans, points to the stripper pole ensconced in the main room. It was incorporated there as a centerpiece when he moved in several months ago. But so far no bites from female visitors. Like the sex toys, it’s more theater than action. He pauses. “I’m waiting for the right girl to come in and say, ‘You wanna see something?’”

* * * *Rourke isn’t seeing anyone seriously now. Going out at night, he often orders iced teas instead of liquor. Not that he’s happy about it, but he says he has to stay “focused.”

“I’ve never had a drug or alcohol problem. But that’s an easy hook to lay on somebody,” he says. “For a period, I was married to someone who was a drug addict, so it’s easier for me to be labeled that.”

I mention AA, and he shouts, “Fuck AA! I don’t believe in it. But I think it’s real easy to label somebody. It’s like labeling a chick with blonde hair and big tits a bimbo.” Rourke says he only indulges in alcohol after midnight. One of his many text messages reads, “Discipline. Discipline.” Later he confides, “My problem has always been my anger.”

Rourke seems resigned to bachelorhood, being with his pals, a noncommittal date. While his career seems to be moving forward, fast, he lives in the past, and welcomes it. Like a good Catholic boy, he believes that suffering brings redemption of sorts.

Dominating the living room is a candlelit shrine, complete with snapshots, surrounding a statue of the Virgin Mary. It is a requiem to his beloved younger brother, Joe—a good-looking, bearded biker who, Rourke says, “is the inspiration for everything I do.” He died on October 6, 2004 from cancer. When he passed, Rourke held him in his arms, on his deathbed, assured him it was OK for him to go. Rourke later tossed his ashes into the sea, where he says he heard Joe’s voice and saw a flash of blue light. “I just stood at the foot of the ocean and screamed. Then I went back to my hotel room and drank a bottle of whiskey.”

Now when he sees a blue light anywhere, he believes that Joey is with him, cueing him in. It happened when Axl Rose sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at a concert and gave Joe a shout-out. Rourke bawled with tears. “I couldn’t stop shaking.”

He tours me through the denlike basement room where J.P. lives and points to a framed black-and-white photo of four-year-old Joe Rourke being pushed in a wheelbarrow by five-year-old Mickey—always the protector. The photo was taken at the Schenectady, New York house of his grandmother. “Those were the happy times,” says Rourke. “But they only lasted five years.” J.P. says, “Well, you’re smiling now.” As Rourke points at his Memory Lane wall, you see the word "JOE" spelled out in oxidized ink block letters on a finger. The tattoo can be seen in The Wrestler, not by accident.

The loss of Carré from his life was his first heartbreak; Joe, his second. The two inform all he does and doesn’t do. “Being alone has now become like a way of life,” he says on his steps one night, smoking a Marlboro Red. “I can’t foresee myself living in the same house with somebody.” That is, a girlfriend or wife or child. “I have my dogs, and you know what? You couldn’t give me $10 million a piece for them. “I had a relationship in which I loved the woman from here and beyond,” he continues. “But it was a destructive one. We were both damaged goods at the time.”

On the subject of having children, Rourke says, “People say to me, ‘You don’t have kids?’ And I go, No. A guy like me? I could never have a kid, because, you know, it’s like, maybe I’d want one, but I would never…” He trails off. “The worst thing I could do as a human being would be to have a kid, be living with some woman, get a divorce, and have my son or daughter live with some other man. After what happened to me, I couldn’t do that.”

* * * *What happened to Mickey Rourke was that he was born into a broken, abusive family in Schenectady, along with his younger brother and sister. Rourke says he recalls seeing his father only twice: at age six and, 20 years later, at 26. “He was a carpenter. And he was a bodybuilder, back when it was freaky to be one.” He left the family when they were very young. “My father drank himself to death at 47,” says Rourke, who nonetheless is proud enough of his pop to dig up a black-and-white of the handsome, muscular man, shirtless and holding Rourke at age two. His father once held the title of Mister New York, USA.

His mother remarried, reportedly a cop, and when Rourke was still a child, the family moved to Liberty City, in Miami, a town known for its high crime rate. The years there would become his own personal hell. “He was the guy that did all the shit to me when I was little…certain physical shit that happened when I was too small to defend myself.

“The atrocities that happened in that house I lived in were so nightmarish, I later surrounded myself with bad people, really bad people. Jails are filled with people that can’t function because of what happened to them. But, you know, I’ve never wanted to be a victim.”

Rourke wanted to be a baseball player, and he was very good at it, as he was with all sports, including football and boxing. But, he says, “You can’t concentrate on hitting a curveball when you’ve got Halloween III going on at home. I had no discipline because of all the chaos at home. I had no support. No concentration.

“I came from a very disorganized—I’m not going to say dysfunctional, because it was beyond dysfunctional…I can’t even put a word to it. I just never had any encouragement from anybody.”

In the past Rourke has said that he got into acting after auditioning for and landing a role in a Jean Genet play at the University of Miami. His performance was well-received, and it certainly provided the impetus to an acting career. But, he says, the reality was that he had to get out of Dodge to stay alive. “I didn’t run to New York City because I couldn’t wait to be an actor. I ran there because I was with a group of boys down in Liberty City, and we found ourselves on the short end of a gunfight, OK? I’m only 18, and it was just some monkey business gone wrong.”

More specifically, he says, “It was a drug deal that turned into a ripoff. And bullets were flying. And, let’s put it this way, our guns were smaller than theirs, OK? I realized I wasn’t going to live long in this line of work. I didn’t feel right doing it. It’s nice playing those kinds of people in movies, but in real life it sucks. Because when you’re shooting at somebody, your hand is shaking.”

Cut to New York City, where Rourke decided to go for broke, ending up at the Actors Studio, still carrying his suitcase and bags. “A guy there said, ‘Well, I think you should get a room first.’ I said, Oh, yeah…OK.” There he began studying the Method, alongside such colleagues as Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel. “Looking around in that little tiny building and seeing these guys? I shook in my fucking dirty blue jeans. I mean, those were the gods. They were the role models, and they still are. I decided to give acting a year.” Now he’s one of them, suddenly being recalled by many who had dismissed him as a goner.