Twenty Years and Six Blocks
Neighborhoods
The sign says the pool table is out of order and Andy Curran is yelling at Vic Leipman behind the bar.
Andy is drunk, cocaine dragging the alcohol through his mouth, but he’s right:
The pool table itself is fine, it’s the mechanism that takes the four quarters that’s broken and Vic should just make it free pool night, because it’s Sunday and Razzie’s is closed.
Gil Ferraro hasn’t been in The Dublin in years, he forgets how long, but Tommy Doyle was bartending and he’s been dead since ‘99, Gil thinks.
The front door bangs open and Gil grabs the bar like it’s the handrail of a rollercoaster.
He’s grabbing the back part, the part closest to Vic. He only knows Vic’s name because Andy is screaming it.
Andy goes quiet when the door busts open and a big guy stumbles in yelling “cunt!”
The big guy twists. His torso is bleeding.
The guy seems to be yelling cunt at his own torso.
The guy twists again and Gil sees that he’s wearing a The Dublin t-shirt. The State’s Oldest Irish Pub.
The shirt, Kelly green, is shredded.
The skin underneath, the skin that doesn’t have blood on it, is pale.
There is a large tattoo on the man’s rib cage and below it two distinct wounds.
Gil thinks they are probably stab wounds, but he’s not sure.
He has no frame of reference.
He’s seen blood before but…
A second man enters the bar, holding a knit hat aloft.
“I got his hat, Petey, I got his fuggung hat. His DNA!”
The big man nods, twists again, stumbles and leans against the pool table.
The bigger, lower of the two wounds is now pumping blood like it is somehow meant to be.
Gil Ferraro took a first aid class a long time ago, because he had to. He doesn’t remember a single thing but being handed a certificate.
His hands grip the bar.
He can’t move.
No one is looking at him.
But he feels ridiculous and terrified all at once.
The half full beer in front of him is his first in a long time. It holds no interest for him.
He wants to run. But he can’t let go of the bar.
The bar he grabbed before he even saw blood.
Now that blood is here Gil is silently hysterical. He was catatonic for a while in the spring of 2001. He wonders if that will return.
Deep in his wallet and badly faded is the card of a therapist.
He won’t reach for it. It feels too late.
“Fuck me, Petey, I’m calling an ambulance.”
It’s Vic talking.
Petey sprawls himself on the pool table.
The Andy Curran guy yells “not the pool table” and that makes Gil look at the pool table and the bleeding man on it.
Pete Petrovicki starts to think about death.
It hurts to breathe.
He knows he’s on the pool table at The Dublin and he knows he shouldn’t be.
Carl O’Brien is yelling about a hat. He chased the guy who stabbed Petey. Petey ran about ten strides before his ribs said no.
Gil Ferraro has let go of the bar with one hand.
He doesn’t like blood.
He can’t help the bleeding man so he might as well leave.
The Dublin on a Sunday shouldn’t have had blood. Or loud noises. Or anything but a beer and some peanuts, maybe a shepherds pie.
Petey’s vision starts to change and he thinks of Aaron.
Is Aaron in the afterlife?
He believed that when Aaron died. He had to believe it. He couldn’t not believe it. They were running from the cops, sure, but not for a real sin.
Even Father Boyce said Aaron went to heaven, and Aaron was fucking Jewish.
Petey lets go of the wound he can feel and puts his hand where his tattoo tribute to Aaron is.
He doesn’t want to die.
Gil Ferraro watches the man smear his own blood.
It looks grotesque, purposeful, strange.
He wants to comfort the man but his feet won’t move.
People tried to comfort him, standing outside his city bus.
He wouldn’t leave the bus.
Jesus that was a long time ago.
They took the kid he hit away, they took him away, dead.
No one could comfort Gil Ferraro.
He stood near his bus because he knew when he finally walked away he would never drive a bus again.
The cop who was chasing the kid on foot tried to comfort him, tried to take the blame.
Gil went to the therapy sessions until he didn’t. He would never drive a bus or anything else again.
He quit drinking even though drinking wasn’t a factor.
The Petey guy was unconscious when the EMT carted him out.
The other guy was telling the cops to run the Western Michigan hat for DNA.
Vic Leipman put a second beer in front of Gil though he hadn’t finished the first.
His first in over twenty years.
Petey regained consciousness in the ambulance.
If Aaron could go to heaven he would for sure.
Right?
Gil Ferraro left a twenty dollar bill on the bar.
Vic Leipman called after him to say the beers were on the house because of the commotion , but Gil couldn’t turn around.
Pete Petrovicki vowed in the ambulance to be a better person if he lived. He didn’t feel like he had done much for other people.
Gil Ferraro, walking down the street, said a prayer for the stabbed man, and for Aaron Gelman, the kid he had killed with his bus all those years ago.
He stopped and sat down on the library steps, running the scene in The Dublin in his head.
He said a prayer for the cop who tried to comfort him at the accident scene, and a prayer for the bartender at The Dublin. He said a prayer for the cop who was trying to explain to the man that he couldn’t test a hat for DNA in the middle of a bar.
He said a prayer for the yappy little coke head that wanted to play pool so badly. Maybe the bar would discard the bloody pool table and replace it with a brand new one. Maybe they would just replace the green cover, the thing everyone called “the felt.”
On the man’s rib cage,near the smeared blood he had a tattoo that said RON.
Father? Grandfather? Lover?
Gil couldn’t be sure, but he said a prayer for Ron too.
***
Should you feel moved by this story or any of them and can’t commit to a full subscription, my Venmo tip jar is James-Graham-80
I liked this story a lot, Jimmy. The consequences triggered by the stabbing are the focus, not the stabbing itself, and I think that works really well. And the disparate band of characters expressing emotions?
I ‘felt’ that worked too!
This seemed very real to me. A sign of good fiction. Loved the one liners.