Ain't Good Enough

Hood Famous

Photo by Tammy Chan on Unsplash

The twin viaducts where the train tracks go over 48th Street got some of the best street art on the west side during the daytime, and they look like science fiction demon eyes at 10:37 at night when second shift at Golney Induction Molding gets off and most of the cars are headed north.

One day, right across the top of the viaduct, in thick black letters, someone painted That Shit Aint Good Enough Joey Sobczak

I knew Joey Sobczak since 7th Grade. He won an award for Class Clown and a real school award for Trombone.

Danny Cochrane was sitting on a shopping cart on its side in the parking lot of GroceryGrand, saying whoever painted it was in trouble because it blacked out a gang tag of Jedinstvo.

Auwshanna Matthews laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world and said errybody know who painted it, Valerie Lumm, who was Joey’s baby mama. Besides, she said, Jedinstvo was 14 year old Bosnian kids who got good grades and only got in trouble for riding their BMX bikes in the dug out foundation of the new cancer center they were building next to Ford Hospital.

Teri Volker walked up with a winning scratcher, a 500, and she bought a box of blush and some cups, we stayed in the parking lot drinking and talking and like a dude stumbling on his own surprise party before people were hiding, Joey Sobczak walked up.

I asked him what ain’t good enough, laughing even before I started talking, figuring it had to be a good story, someone mad enough to hang upside down off the twin viaducts and paint like that.

Joey Sobczak stopped.

I mean like everything around him stopped.

The only thing moving on him was the hairs from the wind going through his thin little mustache.

I almost apologized just from his reaction.

I didn’t say anything though.

Joey made a fist and walked right into GroceryGrand.

My father says I’m an optimist, and I was optimizing Joey having a funny joke about the words on the viaduct by the time he walked out of GroceryGrand.

If anything, he looked madder when he came out. Musta bought smokes and maybe scratchers and jammed them in his pocket because he didn’t have a bag or nothing.

Just a look in his eye like he was fit’na kill somebody, and the second he was out of sight Aushawnna said he was gonna kill Valerie.

We started worrying about Valerie…I barely knew her, but we were worrying, then we got back to laughing because a box of wine just does that to you.

Danny was telling his story of getting kicked out of the Marine Corps, and that story is magic because I heard it fifteen times and it’s still funny, then Brittany Lyle walked up like someone wrecked her happy and stole her makeup bag. She said she just got done working a breakfast lunch double at Top Nosh, because…

You coulda knocked us over with one of them little Jehovah’s Witness comic books…

Because Valerie Lumm no call-no showed and Eddie called Brittany in in the middle of the breakfast rush.

In the twin viaducts on 48th street there’s a Martian passing a fat, overstuffed doob to an already high Panda Bear, Spider-Man spinning a record on a deck with a web, some kinda Santa Claus Robot mashup with a whole bag full of nuts and bolts, and an Angel sitting at a realistic plexiglass bus shelter, along with some gang tags and stuff.

I doubt we’ll ever know what shit wasn’t good enough.

We do know that Joey Sobczak didn’t kill Valerie Lumm, because she works at Erotic Avenue, the lingerie and dildo store on Plymouth Road.

She swears she didn’t paint that thing about Joey.

Some people believe her, some people don’t.

Next to the bus stop Angel, in silver paint pen, it says Rest In Heaven, Joey Sobczak.

That’s no mystery. I wrote that, the day after Joey walked past us mad, scratched off forty bucks worth of lottery tickets hoping to win five grand and catch up on his child support.

We didn’t know Joey was gonna hurt himself.

We would have shared our wine and not talked about the viaduct.

Maybe.

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