But that's not how D'Amato sees it. What really did him in, he says, wasn't his own foibles or the incompetence of his campaign or the strengths of Chuck Schumer. What really did him in was the outrageous excesses of his fellow Republicans. "Once those crazy right-wing wack jobs put Clinton's testimony on television, that was the end," he says. "That cost us ten points. Because people were so disaffected, so angry with what was coming out of Washington. We made the villain the victim. The House conservatives, they did that -- under Dick Armey and Tom DeLay and the rest of those . . . jerks." He looks at me, pauses dramatically, smirks. "Yes, I said that."

Representatives Dick Armey and Tom DeLay are, respectively, the second- and third-most-powerful Republicans in the House. "We looked like a bunch of bullies," D'Amato grouses. "Like, where's your class? Where's your taste?"

On Election Day, D'Amato woke up around six and worked out, as he usually does. He voted at 7:30 in the morning, then had breakfast with a bunch of Nassau County politicos at the Ocean Star Diner in keeping with Election Day tradition. At midday, he took a call from one of his pollsters at his friend Larry Elovich's house. The news wasn't very good. "He was very matter-of-fact about it," says Elovich. "He might have used a few curse words, but I'm not going to say those."

D'Amato arrived at the Hilton's penthouse duplex around 7:30 that night. He mingled with guests downstairs while Ed Koch, the Patakis, his top consultants, his family, and his closest friends all sat in a bedroom on the floor above. Then, just minutes before the polls closed, CNN declared Schumer the winner. Soon, half the crowd was gone.

"I felt like crap," says Kieran Mahoney, one of D'Amato's top aides. "It was like having a funeral when the corpse is walking around."

No one was prepared to concede just yet. But at 10:30, Arthur Finkelstein, D'Amato's chief political guru, summoned D'Amato up the spiral staircase and told him to call it quits. The senator went to a private bedroom to call the Schumer campaign. When he returned to the bedroom with his family, he found the Island Park priest, Father John J. Tutone, waiting for him. He embraced the senator. D'Amato started to cry.

The senator had two very bad nights after that. "I had, I think, anxiety attacks and whatnot afterward -- I should have done this, I should have done that," he says. "Maybe I wanted to strangle a few people." But ironically, the fact that he lost by a landslide helped. "If I had lost by two or three points," he says, "I probably'd be in an insane asylum."

By Friday, he was on a plane down to Puerto Rico with some close friends and the governor. When he came back, several law firms offered him jobs. By Christmas, he had announced that he was forming a consulting firm with Wayne Berman, a buddy and lobbyist down in Washington.

"I really didn't think he was going to adapt as well as he did," says his daughter Lisa D'Amato Murphy. "For 30 years, he'd been so engrossed in this entire political thing that he hadn't had time to develop any hobbies or anything -- we never knew what to give him at Christmas. So to see him all of a sudden take up sports, like golf, with a vengeance, and to see him take my kids out to the movies . . . It's like, wait, you're almost being a normal man here. This is scary."

His daughter finds golf impressive. but what D'Amato's male friends can't get over are his glands. "With Alfonse, there have always been a lot of women," says Peter King, the Republican congressman from Long Island, who's known D'Amato for 30 years. "It's hard to keep track."

That D'Amato can be such a smoking Casanova surprises people. I never understood it myself -- he always seemed like Joe Pesci without the shovel -- but I have since learned the secret: He approaches courting as if it were an extreme sport. He pours it on about a girl's appearance, deliberately underestimates her age, makes earnest inquiries about where she's from and who her parents are and what she does for a living. It may be over the top, but it never feels insincere.

"Whether Al knows it or not," says Earle Mack, "he's a romantic. He'll tell women how beautiful they look; he'll send them flowers and write them notes. And there aren't very many romantics anymore."

In February 1995, D'Amato threw a press conference at the Water Club, not to discuss the Republican Contract With America or denounce Clinton's tepid tax-cut proposals but to declare his love for gossip columnist Claudia Cohen. After Cohen, D'Amato had a high-profile relationship with Kathryn Finley, the red-haired daughter of the late Oakland A's owner Charles O. Finley. Then, for a year, he dated Hilary Geary, the blonde, socialite widow of financier Jack Geary, appearing with her at black-tie and rubber-chicken dinners all over Washington, D.C.

Geary was unlike the others. The senator was much more serious about her, and his friends all agree that she had a positive, calming influence. She was his ideal complement: attractive, good-natured, well bred. But D'Amato's randiness, alas, caught up with him. In the winter of 1998, Geary ended the relationship when a friend spotted him having dinner with yet another comely companion. The senator was crushed. Now he pines for Geary, and has spent the past year and a half furiously attempting to woo her back -- with gifts, pleading phone calls, the works.