A Round of Shots
Break McGrath and Life in Shawland Heights
Above the third urinal at The Emerald Isle is the oldest graffiti in the place. Marty Murphy doesn’t want it touched, and nobody has ever touched it.
In black marker it says: “If you can’t guess the caliber from three blocks away, you didn’t grow up in Shawland Heights.”
The new shirts are in stock at The Emerald.
It’s got the outline of the city inside the outline of Ireland on the front and underneath that it says. Cold Beer and Conversation.
On the back it says “It’s Called Shawland Heights.”
Someone in PR for the city, along with a few real estate investors started calling the whole area “West Market.”
If you ask them why, they’ll tell you that it’s west of the Old Central Farmer’s Market , they’ll tell you it’s because Robert Shawland, who owned the carpet company for which the neighborhood was named, employed child labor long after it was illegal.
Nobody who grew up in Shawland Heights gives a half-eaten banana in a nun’s twat about child labor in 1940.
The real estate investors don’t give a steaming soy latte in a gilded goddamn cup about child labor in 1940.
They just care that Shawland Heights was synonymous with gangs and death from the seventies on.
Marty Murphy has a fish bowl in his hand, and he’s walking along the bar shaking it in front of drunk and sober faces like an offertory basket at the Church of St. Aggressive.
That fish bowl will fill with singles and fives, and a few people will have draft beers and shots of Tullamore omitted from their bill.
Marty will dump the fishbowl into an old valise his grandfather carried from Ireland and shake the empty fishbowl at a new round of drinkers when first shift at Heavenly Bread gets off work.
Mrs. Trang got shot outside Wonderful Dry Cleaners.
She’s in Ascension, and Linny Butler called The Emerald Isle to tell Marty that Mrs.Trang is stable, and gonna make it.
Linny is a nurse in the craniofacial surgery department, and a distant cousin of Marty Murphy.
Break McGrath walks into The Emerald.
Some of the guys in the bar coached Leonard James McGrath in youth sports.
Some of the retired cops arrested him as a juvenile.
Some of the women babysat him and changed his diaper.
Some of the people don’t know him personally, but they know his name.
Break McGrath was one of three kids at Elliot Memorial High School’s Senior Prom in 1990 living with a bullet in him.
He didn’t have a date.
He didn’t bother to hook the bowtie on the free tux he was given.
Break McGrath danced to a song at his Senior Prom. Burn Rubber on Me by The Gap Band, a song that was much more popular a few years prior.
He danced because he wanted to.
He did and didn’t do most of the things he wanted or didn’t want to do.
He wasn’t a Shiner, or a Burt Road Butcher, certainly not a LowBoi, because they were all Puerto Rican.
He wasn’t a 7th Street Greenie, he wasn’t TDS, though they would have had him as the only white member as quick as you could hide half a ki in a minibike seat.
Marty Murphy didn’t shake the fishbowl at Break.
He set the fishbowl down and said “Ya ready, son?”
Break McGrath gave a slight nod of his head that was a yes.
Break walked to the end of the bar, nodding at the men who called his name.
DuJuan Marriot reached for Break and extended a pinkie finger.
Break touched his pinkie finger to DuJuan’s, a tradition going back to Police Athletic League Lem Barney Division Football when DuJuan was Leonard’s coach. Leonard was a legend then, at nine years old, before the nickname.
Marty Murphy poured a cup of coffee for Break, then wet a napkin with Tullamore and rubbed it on the rim of the coffee cup.
Break didn’t drink anymore…the taste and burn of whiskey on his lips was something else entirely.
Only Marty and Cindy Q knew.
Break McGrath was gonna skip his senior prom and run to Flint, where some guys were heisting some 67 GTOs from an unmarked warehouse near UAW Local 651.
Then outside the art room he heard some 91st Street Serbs say they were gonna gut slice the dykes who were going to Senior Prom as a couple.
Break McGrath changed his mind.
Cindy Q and Rachel danced all night and kissed during Little Red Corvette.
Boggy Stojanovic and his friends were out on the football field, watching his 1987 New Yorker burn.
Break McGrath leaned against the wall of The Emerald back where the bar opened up next to the ice bin.
He drank his coffee, letting the whiskey touch his lower gums.
Marty Murphy looked at Break. Break had these beautiful blue green eyes that looked like the sky with a chemtrail of ice draped across them.
They looked like if he stared at a ceiling long enough that the next day the roof would leak.
“Mrs.Trang is gonna live,” Marty said.
Break let the left side of his lower lip jut out just a bit.
“I know.”
“I know you know,” Marty said. “That was just kind of a celebratory statement.”
Break nodded.
“It was a .22,” Break said.
“Carlisle tell you that?” Marty asked and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“The Easter Bunny. The Easter Bunny shit that information out into the middle chair at Ernie’s Trims and Clips.”
Break McGrath didn’t tell anyone where he bought his shoelaces or whether he preferred chocolate to vanilla.
He drank his coffee black, with a rim of Tullamore Dew.
Russell Bawinski sipped his well scotch, one rock, and looked down the bar at Leonard James McGrath.
He said a silent prayer that one of the donkey fucks in the ninth precinct would arrest who ever shot Bao Trang.
He loved Break, though he had never said it out loud.
But he knew Break wasn’t teflon, he wasn’t infallible.
Even in Shawland Heights, especially now that it was rapidly becoming West Market, Break McGrath couldn’t keep doing what he did and not pick up a twenty or worse.
Russell Bawinski had been a cop in Shawland Heights for eleven years, three times the average for that neighborhood. He had done the rest of his career in the relative safety of the bomb squad.
As a rookie, an eleven year old kid in the back seat of his number 321 Plymouth Duster had slipped the handcuffs and scooted him.
That kid was Leonard James McGrath.
And Russell Bawinski knew that if the ninth precinct didn’t get the person who shot Bao Trang, Leonard James “Break,” McGrath was going to.
Marty Murphy picked up the fish bowl to keep collecting for Bao Trang’s hospital stay.
He was gonna do a fifty fifty raffle too, and a pool tournament.
Break downed his coffee and said “I’m gonna go pick up my shirts from Wonderful.”
Marty nodded.
Break didn’t own shirts that got dry cleaned.
Break wasn’t gonna go anywhere near Wonderful Cleaners.
He was gonna walk outside and walk circles around the bar a few times and Marty Murphy was going to lay a variety of time signatures on the security video.
As Break headed to the door, a few regulars said goodbye, wished him well.
He didn’t turn around.
He just held up his right fist and said “Drink up, everybody. I’ll see ya soon, we’ll play a little last pocket.”
TO BE CONTINUED.
***
I’m back.
Thanks for allowing me a few days to recuperate from three years plus of daily publishing.
I certainly hope you like this new thing. Not sure how many installments it will be but I promise I won’t let it drag.
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“Russell Bawinski had been a cop in Shawland Heights for eleven years, three times the average for that neighborhood. He had done the rest of his career in the relative safety of the bomb squad.”
Well done, Jimmy. I re-read this line in the voice of Frank Drebin; then it hit me like a pound of Semtex under my chair.
I read this in the voice of Sam Elliott! The cinematography in your story is very vivid!!