A young drifter incarcerated in a Chicago jail learns a secret and embarks on a quest that leads to a Pueblo Indian Nation in New Mexico. Murder and adventure, combined with an ancient secret, produce a zesty, riveting read.
November 1958 brought three uninvited visitors to the streets of Chicago–Eisenhower’s recession, ice-cold rain, and me. The recession came from the District of Columbia. The cold rain came from North Dakota. I came from West Virginia.
As soon as my feet hit the big city streets, winter oozed up my legs and into my body. In feeble protest, I hauled up the moth-eaten collar of my pea coat. There must be some kind of special warm heaven for the poor bastards who die hunched in a Chicago doorway while the wind off Lake Michigan hunts the streets. No place on earth is as miserable as West Madison Street in the winter.
I huffed into my cupped hands, stomped my numb feet, and thought about how life had been only an hour earlier riding into town on the “No Passengers Allowed” side of a big Diamond-T Rig.
I had aired my thumb for five hours on the highway outside of Wheeling, West Virginia, before that good Samaritan teamster came by and put the air brakes to his truck. At first he claimed he picked me up because I looked like a buddy from his World War II army days. I told him it wasn’t me. I had been in the Korean police action navy. He didn’t give a damn. He just wanted someone to chin with when the country music on the truck radio faded into static. Between trashing gears and honking air horns he laid a bunch of lies about the war on me. I pretended I hadn’t heard them a hundred times before. Like any other ex-G.I., I’ve told every one of them myself, with me, of course, as the hero. Anyway, shooting the breeze with him in a warm truck cab was easier than walking to Chicago.
Seventy-five miles west of Massillon, Ohio, he announced it was time for a rest break, and wheeled us into a neon-trimmed truck stop called “Big Ruby’s Bar-B-Q.” Inside, the jukebox caterwauled that “It wasn’t God who made honky- tonk angels.” As we slid into a booth, a real live angel hustled over with thick black coffee in thick white mugs.
“What’s In Chicago for an ex swab jockey like you?” he asked as he stirred a half pound of sugar into his coffee.
“Work, I hope, They tell me you can still find jobs up there.”
“Yeah, you hillbillies would hitch-hike to hell if you heard they were handing out jobs, wouldn’t you? Well, I hate to tell you the facts of life sailor boy, but things are tight up in Chicago too. If you had any sense, you’d go back in the Navy.”
“No way! The Navy and I made a deal. When they finally agreed I could go home, I agreed I wouldn’t come back. I won’t renege on that bargain.”
“What did you do after you got out?”
“Oh, I got ambitious and went to school on the G.I. Bill. Then my old man got real sick and I quit and went back home. After he died, an undertaker and a pettifogging damn lawyer, between the two of them, took what little he had left. Since then I’ve just drifted.”
“Too bad. Them sonsabitchin lawyers are nothing but bad news. You been to Chicago before?”
“I went through Boots at Great Lakes.”
“How’d you like it?”
“I didn’t.”
“Like the man says, if they was gonna give the world an enema, they’d stick it in at Chicago. Ain’ t that right?” he snickered.
Since he was buying the groceries, I laughed out loud.
Ten hours and five gift cups of coffee later we rolled into Chicago. He didn’t bother to ask me where I wanted out. Of course he didn’t need to. There are only three places in Chicago for immigrant Appalachians, south of 63rd, west of Halsted, or on Madison Street. He dumped me on the far west end of Madison, and wished me luck.
So there I was-end of the line, sleet falling and the temperature fifty degrees below absolute zero. On Madison, you stand or you walk. I pulled up my socks and elected to walk.
By mid-afternoon, I was almost downtown and the sleet had slowed. Other inhabitants had begun to creep out of the woodwork. Among them was the Chicago Police Department’s umbrella squad.
I knew what was coming as soon as I saw that beat-up blue and white Plymouth splash through the slush at the curb line. It hit the puddle opposite me and stopped with the engine running. The fat cop, riding shotgun, rolled down the mud-splattered window, poked his head out and nodded me over to him.
“New in town?” he asked, without curiosity.
“Yes, sir. I’m just in from Wyoming. I’m here to visit some relatives.” That was a stupid lie. I plastered a big phony smile on my face to try to cover it up.
“Wyoming, huh?” O.K., cowboy, tell me your relatives’ name and address”. He knew damn well I wasn’t from Wyoming and that if I had any relatives in Chicago they probably wouldn’t claim me.
“She’s my cousin. I forget her married name; she lives in this end of town. Somewhere,” I added lamely.
“Alright, hillbilly, hear this, and hear it real good. The deadline for bums like you is LaSalle Street. You stay on this side of LaSalle. If you move across LaSalle or mooch anywhere in Chicago, we’ll run your ass in so fast it’ll make your moonshine filled head swim. Got that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Don’t forget it. Now move on!”
He looked me over again and made a note on his clipboard, one more hard look and they splashed on to dispense equal protection to some other good citizen.
I figured that little scene was played on West Madison a hundred times every day. Maybe if a rookie cop had performed it, it would have sounded tough. Tough or not, one lesson I got from it, the cops know every bum on the street. Well, why shouldn’t they? The population doesn’t change that much on any skid row. Before long, I would know all their ugly faces too.
When the fat John Law and his buddy finally got out of sight, I searched my pockets and discovered that if I just had ten more dollars, I’d have ten dollars and thirteen cents. It was time for heavy economic planning. Eight cents would buy me a sack of tobacco and some cigarette paper. On the other hand, ten cents would get three fingers of Sweet Lucy or two cups of coffee in any joint along the row.
The smoke sounded best if I could manage to get one rolled. That would leave me five cents for one cup of coffee for supper. The truth is I never developed a taste for Sweet Lucy. As the old man said, “Liquor ain’t my particular problem.”
Before I found a place elegant enough to fritter away my fortune, the sleet started in again, harder than before.
Weighted in the balance, the sleet was more of a threat to my general wellbeing than whatever the cops might do about a violated deadline. I knew that State Street was in the middle of the forbidden territory; I also knew that it had lots of doorways and stores and somewhere the elevated railway crossed it. One way or the other, State Street meant shelter. So I screwed up my courage, breached the LaSalle Street deadline and headed south.
Traffic was heavy. I ducked in and out of doorways dodging early Christmas shoppers and cops and eventually found the intersection with the El. Unfortunately, it was no help. Even though it covered the street from sidewalk to sidewalk, as I had remembered, it was too high to break the wind and about the only thing it did was change the sleet to ice water.
Wet and disgusted I straggled along another block or two and saw how the neighborhood had mutated from expensive department stores and exclusive boutiques to pawn shops, greasy spoons and penny arcades.
Finally I ducked into a recess in a yellow painted brick storefront. A sign spelled out “Amusement Devices” in flashing incandescent light bulbs above the door. Behind the door glass in silver glitter letters on a blue card was “Ladies Invited–You Must be 21 to Enter.” The last time I had seen a glitter lettered blue card was on the wall of a West Virginia coal miner’s living room. It proclaimed “Jesus Saves.”
The thing that really caught my attention was a “Help Wanted” notice penciled on shirt cardboard and taped to the doorframe. I grabbed the cardboard off the door, and hustled inside. The only visible person was a three hundred-fifty-pound blob perched on a kitchen stool, chewing a toothpick and sweating as he read the pictures in a Sunshine and Health Magazine.
“I’m looking for work. Whom do I talk to?” I asked, as I looked around the room. Two pinball machines, one with “Out of Order” grease penciled on its scoreboard, a popcorn warmer, a gadget to seal drivers licenses in plastic and three double rows of stag movie machines were the only other occupants of the dimly lighted room.
The red-faced hulk tore his close set eyes away from the page and focused on me. “Can you read and can you make change?” he asked in an unexpectedly high pitched, rasping voice.
“I can and I can.”
“Know anything about movie projectors?” He looked doubtful about my prospects.
“Yes.”
“What do you know about them?”
“I used to know a guy that owned one.”
Unexpectedly, that seemed to satisfy him.
“Pay’s forty-five a week. Hours are noon till midnight. Any objections?”
“None, what do I have to do?”
“Make change. Every frigging thing in here takes dimes. When the film breaks or jams, you fix it. I’ll show you how. Keep the friggin’ perverts and the J.D.’s out. At midnight you sweep up. If you need a place to sleep, there’s a cot in the storeroom. We’re open every day. You want it? Yes or no?” The recitation sounded so well rehearsed he must have hired a new man every other week.
“I want it. When do I start?”
“Wait a minute. You ain’t through listening to me, boy. Now I don’t pay no friggin’ communist social security. You take your pay in cash. I don’t take out for no friggin’ income tax neither. If you want to pay the friggin’ government, you pay it yourself. Well, what about it? You want the job?
I said, “Yes.” It was slightly better than no job at all, but his limited range of adjectives and the idea of showing dirty movies for a living stuck hard in my West Virginia craw.
“Then get behind this friggin’ counter so I can get out of this friggin’ place and make some friggin’ money.”
Such as it was, I had found a home.
For the next three weeks, I spent twelve hours every day watching sheep-faced middle age men invest ten cents a minute to stare at out-of-focus I6 mm. movies featuring females in and out of their skivvies. During that entire time, not one soul asked for change to play pinball, eat popcorn or seal drivers licenses.
Clearly, in the Second City the love of cinematic art transcended all other worldly pleasures.
Chapter Three
I soon learned that the fat man’s legal name was Romeo Lillard, but he was called “Grease Ball” by all the bagmen, who used the place as a drop. That was one part of the fat man’s business I left strictly alone. It was bad enough to sit all day in his stinking place handing out dimes to sweaty palmed visiting yokels. I sure as hell didn’t want to spend time in jail on a trumped-up numbers racket charge.
On the first day of December I958, Grease Ball removed the perpetual toothpick from his fat mouth and announced that naturally we would stay open on Christmas Day. I was in a foul mood anyway, and this bulletin was one too much. Generally, I don’t mind people getting their kicks however and whenever they want, but on Christmas Day they ought not be in some sleazy joint looking at dirty movies.
“I quit,” I told him. “I’m not showing skin flicks on Christmas Day.”
“You can’t quit.” He scratched his crotch while he thought about it, and then he grinned. “She-it boy, ain’t I treated you just like a son?” That was some big deal. Any son of his would be glad to trade places with a bastard orphan and pay boot for the privilege.
“You’ve treated me O.K., Mr. Lillard, but I have another offer and I’m going to take it.” I didn’t add that the offer was nothing but a vague hope of drawing unemployment insurance until I could find a decent job in a decent place. The grin was still on his face but there was no humor in his eyes. “Listen to me, hillbilly. I said you can’t quit me and that friggin’ well means you can’t quit! Besides, I know all about what you’ve been doing when I’m not around.”
I blew my stack. “What the hell do you mean ‘what I’ve been doing’?” I shouted. “The only thing I’ve been doing is running your damn dirty movies.”
His phony grin faded. “That’s enough of that crap! I’ve told you a thousand times these here are not dirty movies. They are friggin’ art film, -ART films. As to what you’ve been doing, you’ve been screwing me out of half the friggin’ policy money that comes through the friggin’ door. Boy, you’ve been dippin your sticky fingers into my private candy jar!” A little dribble of spit replaced the absent toothpick in the corner of his mouth.
I angrily denied it, since there wasn’t a word of truth in it, and then I told old Grease Ball he was a horse’s rear end. I also suggested a few more things, mostly about his ancestry, and all of it shouted at the top of my voice.
And then, because I was too worked up to think straight, I made the worst mistake of my life. Instead of just turning and walking out of the place like I had good sense, I decided to throw a goodbye punch at the old devil. I suppose I figured he was too fat and too slow and too stupid to do much about it. Well, I swung. Grease Ball leaped aside like a Russian ballet dancer grabbed a big glass ashtray off the counter and pole-axed me. He probably put the boots to me too, but I was out cold and didn’t feel it. Apparently, after he got tired of working me over, he called the cops to clean up the mess.
They must have done the job for him, because when my next completely conscious moment came, I was standing on wobbly legs in the reception room of a Chicago jailhouse rubbing my very sore head and hearing some bored sounding turnkey clerk ask if I was hurt bad.
“Naw. He’s O.K. He just got his feathers roughed up a little when he tried to assault and rob one of our honest businessmen,” replied the bald-headed cop holding me by my arm.
“Real hot-blooded, American outlaw huh? What’s your name, bandit?” he snarled.
I started to tell him, and then, for some obscure reason, decided to lie.
“My name is Smith,” I mumbled.
“What’s your first name and middle initial, Smith?”
He believed me! Well, why not? I had no identification on me. My wallet was still on a shelf back at Lillard’ s blue movie heaven. He wouldn’t put a name to me because of fingerprints either. The only time I had been printed was in the service and the odds were good they wouldn’t take the trouble to get at those.
It’s Okey, Okey P.” Where the hell had I gotten that name? Wherever it came from I was stuck with it.
“Stop muttering and speak up! What’s your address, Okey?” At least he wasn’t calling me “Bandit” any more.
“I lived at Lillard’s Joint on State Street, in the back room. I guess I won’t be welcome there again, so just put me down for wherever you want.”
“No known permanent address. O.K., Smith, Okey P, park it over there while we check you through the wanteds.” He waved his pencil toward a steel bench under a bulletin board covered with F.B.I. record cards.
I sat on the bench and nursed an unbelievable headache. It was a stupid choice I had made. Instead of spending Christmas Day watching middle-aged perverts ogle pornographic movies, I was going to spend it with a collection of real certified criminals behind the walls of a Chicago jailhouse. God rest ye merry, gentlemen. They finally charged me with “aggravated assault with a non-deadly weapon.” Supposedly I had attacked Grease Ball with the glass ashtray in an effort to rob him. They weren’t the least bit interested in my story about how he laid me out with that “non-deadly” weapon.
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Copyright © 2007 Karl P. Warden. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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