A Round of Shots

Part II (Hood Famous)

In the back parking lot of the Emerald Isle, half asphalt, half gravel, Break starts his circle around the building.

Most of the old cops in the neighborhood knew he hung out there, but it never hurt to have your face on a security cam, especially when your friend was capable of editing the time stamp.

The tingle of the whiskey on Break’s gums was fading.

Tires squeal out on the street and Break hears the metallic sound of a fender bender.

Break walks along the east wall of the bar, a little longer than the distance between home and first base.

His father had been a huge baseball fan. There were pictures of young Leonard holding a mitt before he could walk.

Curtis McGrath had considered naming his son Mickey, after both Cochrane and Stanley, but never Mantle. That’s what switched him to Leonard, after his maternal grandfather. Curtis didn’t want anyone to think he would name his kid after a Yankee.

Curtis McGrath cared what people thought and didn’t think.

Probably too much, though his son, as he grew older, understood that mindset way more than he wanted to. He mostly didn’t blame him.

Break blamed Curtis for a few other things, though he was working on it. Slowly.

Wherever on the street the car accident had been, it wasn’t in Break’s view when he walked in front of the bar, circling back into the side parking lot, the all asphalt part of the lot that Deano Warren had done for a one year bar tab.

The kitchen vent on the west wall of the bar spews out the aroma of grilled meat and onions.

Someone had recently installed a new one, the bright, clean metal looking alien to the ancient brick wall of a building built in 1911.

Break hesitates. Maybe he should have gotten a burger.

He inhales more than normal.

Hungry, but not in the mood to eat.

He could smell dinner when he got to the porch, August 30, 1982, an aluminum splint with blue sponge on his left ring finger from a football injury.

Curtis told him football might mess up his pitching fingers. Leonard told his dad to relax, and besides, he was right handed.

Curtis was an anxious type. He had been even more anxious in 1982 and Leonard knew it wasn’t about football.

Leonard knew.

He didn’t know all, didn’t know details, but he just knew, and he would chase that knowledge from his head in a football practice, a fistfight, shoplifting fishing gear from LaLonde Hardware, anything to chase it.

Beer helped too. It wasn’t difficult for a twelve year old to have access to beer in Shawland Heights. Any drunk or dopehead would buy it for you if you gave them enough to get a quart themselves.

The day he hurt his finger at football practice Mrs. Sullivan from Parks and Rec took him to Mt. Carmel Hospital for an X-ray (it was broken) then dropped him off at home about forty five minutes earlier than he would have gotten home walking after practice from Roosevelt Field.

Father Chorczyk was at his house.

Leonard McGrath knew his father and Father C were friends and golf partners. He even heard his father say they were drinking buddies.

Through the kitchen window he discovered they were much better friends than any twelve year old could fathom his father would be friends with a priest.

Is that a secret you keep, or is it a monster that lives inside you that you can’t let out because it will devour you and all your friends and all the old ladies at church?

What do you do when your father is the only person you can talk to, really talk to about mysteries and fears and the scariest fear in your whole life is that you saw your father’s hand on the parish priest’s dick?

You try to act like nothing happened, though Father C knows that you saw, and if he knows your dad knows, and you still try to act like nothing happened.

Then you come home August 30th, 1982. You can smell dinner, and you walk into the house and your dinner is at your place setting, where you always eat, but it has aluminum foil over it, which makes no sense.

Your dad is a good cook. Did he make something so good that he wants you to unwrap it?

That’s a happy thought. Then another thought wrestles its way to the front of your twelve year old brain.

Nicky Vanson took you up on the roof of Torborg’s Appliance to teach you how to remove an AC unit and break into a store.

From the roof, you look down on Adelaide and a Shawland Heights ho is in a KCar jerking some guy off, and he comes all over the place. You actually see the jizz shoot out of him and hit the dashboard.

You see that aluminum foil and you wonder if your dad, who isn’t afraid to touch the priest’s dick, covered your dinner so Father C didn’t spray jizz all over it.

The smell leaves your head and you smell another smell, and you know this smell because the guys in the Tarantulas MC let you come into the basement of the clubhouse and watch them shoot guns at targets that look like humans.

Your father’s blood and brains are all over the wall of his bedroom.

He didn’t have a plan for you finding him with a little hole and a big hole in his head, but he covered your Key West pork chop in aluminum foil so that it didn’t get cold.

Break breathes through his nose.

He is all the way around The Emerald Isle now, and walking down Pinovan toward Fenkell.

This part of Shawland is desolate. It’s tucked up against the freeway and a row of industrial buildings that are a politicians ping pong ball. They should be demolished. They should be repurposed.

They have been repurposed in a certain way, because they are covered in street art and tags, the best paints left alone by the gangs.

A few old bungalows and ranches are tucked back on some streets that dead end into the freeway, families that wouldn’t leave when the industrial boom of the war and post war took over.

The car crash Break heard is there, at the corner of Arsenal and Fenkell.One car against a telephone pole, skid marks where another car was that obviously took off.

There’s a defunct store-front COGIC, an old burned out arcade and a row of bungalows, at least two of which used to be dope houses, boarded up, orange code enforcement No Occupancy signs on them

A woman is sitting against a small tree on the berm. She has a wadded up t-shirt against her head.

The t-shirt is red, so Break can’t tell if she’s bleeding. A black kid about the age Break was when his dad died stands there shirtless.

“This your mother?” Break asks, though the woman is white.

The kid’s face wrinkles.

“Naw, she was just bleeding.”

“Good lookin’ out,” Break said.

“You know,” the kid says, shrugging.

“Anyone call an ambulance?”

“A-rab cab driver said he was radioing…”

Break pulls out a flip phone.

The average emergency response time in Shawland Heights is four times longer than the national average. It’s a bit better now that people are starting to use mobile phones, but some private ambulance companies won’t even roll units into what some of the suburbanites call “The Shites.”

Break kneels down to the woman.

“What’s your name, miss?”

“Joyce. Motherfucker cut me off and I hit the damn pole.”

Joyce’s lip trembles.

Break slowly pulls the t-shirt back. The cut is mostly superficial, like she cut herself on her own rings on her hands holding the steering wheel.

“I’ll get some help for you, Joyce.”

Break holds his phone in his left hand and punches in Virgo Dunlop’s number with his right.

“Virg, I don’t wanna call 911 from this phone. Can you call 911 or just call Hanley at Number Five and tell “em to roll an EMS to Arsenal and Fenkell?

The kid says “I’m wind. I gots other shirts,” and starts walking down Fenkell.

Joyce hears Break say “Because I don’t have Hanley’s number,” then a long pause, then “Thanks.”

Joyce calls “thank you” to the kid but he doesn’t seem to hear.

Break kneels again.

“You hurt anywhere else besides your head, Joyce?”

Joyce shakes her head no, slowly.

“You’re Break McGrath,” Joyce says. Her lip trembles again.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Break says.

A few cars pass. One pedestrian with a two wheeled grocery cart with an oxygen tank bungee corded to it. If anyone wants this neighborhood to be West Market or anything else it’s gonna take decades and bulldozers.

A tow truck pulls over, like they might get the ok from the cops to tow Joyce’s car just by proximity.

Break knows the cops will come with the ambulance and there are a handful of cops he doesn’t want to see.

“You’re Break McGrath,” Joyce says again.

“No,” Break says. “My name is Michael Faruga.”

Joyce smiles but her eyes betray disbelief, like someone who got handed a teener bag you can see daylight through..

“You’re Break McGrath.”

“I don’t know who that is. My name is Michael.”

Joyce pats Break’s left hand.

“There’s a guy named Break McGrath,” Joyce says, looking straight at Break like he’s a famous athlete at an autograph signing.

“My son Spencer was friends with Break. They were locked up in Ionia together. “

Joyce’s lip trembles again and her eyes tear up.

“You’re gonna be fine Joyce, it’s just a little cut,” Break says. “No more than a stitch or two, maybe not even.”

“Break McGrath taught Spencer to read in prison,” Joyce continues. “He’s missing his left ring finger, just like you.”

Break smiles and starts to tell Joyce he’s Michael Faruga, when a police cruiser pulls onto the berm like there’s a robbery in progress.

***

TO BE CONTINUED.

(Photo by me in my old neighborhood).

I hope you like the multi-installment format. Don’t want to call it a serial because I don’t know how long it’s gonna go. I guess it’s by default a serial, but I’m just writing and having fun.

If you want to help me have more fun, you can

buymeacoffee.com/JimmyDoom

Thanks in advance