The Holy Terror Page 10

  Found empty syringe by Wash Sq Pkwy. Will continue to survey as might be carrying AIDS or worser.

  CONTINUE STUDYING MANNERISMS. End of re-port.

  CRIPPLED AND INSANE,

  I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM.

  NOTE: PRECEDING AND SUBSEQUENT “PATROL

  LOG” ENTRIES WERE PUBLISHED IN THE BOOK

  RHAPSODY FOR A BATTERED SOUL: The American Dream in Chicago; 1960-1989. Copyright 1992 by Reve Bega Towne. Published by Ziesing Books, Shingletown CA.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The man whose face was the city stared himself down in the dirtied mirror of the tavern’s bedroom. The man is the ancient age of twenty-eight, and his gaze could only attain a greater degree of insane mercilessness if the eyelids themselves were cut and peeled away. There has never been a red vein in the whites of those eyes.

  Having just relieved himself, he washed his hands clean with all the care of a ten-year old boy burying a dead crow in his backyard. Some disrespectful jerk had previously left a wadded up napkin -- the bright pink and green Nolan Void legend a fractal image, at the very bottom of the urinal. The napkin covered the white deodorizers that for some reason always made him think of the Burl Ives snowman in Rudolph, a show he watched from a department store every December, because he did not own a television.

  His name is Evan Shustak. He loved the city he was born and bled in. He did not pick up the wadded napkin, but cared enough to urinate against the inside right wall of the urinal, thus avoiding getting the tissue any more stained than it already was. Now he stared into his reflection, tinged with a manic desperation, eyes that he had to live with for all of his days. His sole consolation was this: closing those eyes only provided him with more horrifying images.

  Turning, he dried his hands under a white and chrome wall dryer. His hands were nearly as white as the painted metal portion of the device. It was now twenty below on December ninth, and the American Dream was arthritic.

  The wall that the dryer was attached to was made up of white and black tiles in a schizoid checkerboard pattern. Like a man wearing glasses, the American Dream rarely avoided the reflection of his eyes, the webbed patches of skin underneath the lower lids.

  Portrait of the American Dream in monochrome, standing before the hand dryer. Beer-stained, though the stains have dried. Perhaps it had been vomit, layered thick enough that the elongated reflections of his receding arms were grey and shades of grey. He had actually witnessed someone turning a hand dryer upwards and puking a green stream into the grill work. The After Hours on Van Buren, it was hard to remember sometimes, because the Haldol made him stupid, sated the way food would a LaSalle Street banker.

  “Why can’t people be more like me?” The American Dream would say aloud sometimes.

  He held his hands horizontally under the dryer, palms down as if he was a magician getting ready to levitate a beautiful female assistant on stage. He did not tilt his hands upwards because he did not want to allow the drying water to drip into the surgical wrist braces he considers to be his fighting gloves. The reflection of his arms showed them to be stretched absurdly, and he thought of the 1940s superhero Plastic Man, from Police Comics. The American Dream thinks of superheroes many times during his days. During his nights, with the El trains keeping time, he dreams about dying.

  Evan Daniel Shustak has been the American Dream for three years, but some, his psychiatrist included, would say that he has been borderline schizophrenic for many more years preceding the February 1986 head injury which “launched his career.”

  The dryer stopped, its jet engine sound dying abruptly like a garbage truck downshifting in a neighborhood of bombed-out tenements. He completed some five-fingered exercises to assure that the wetness did not stiffen his joints.

  The sounds of the dryer were replaced by The Bangles singing ”A Hazy Shade of Winter.” “Look around...” the song told him. He knew that nobody in the bar was paying attention to anything as important as those two words.

  * * *

  “Look around, Victor.” The man with the shoulder-length blond hair had said that his name was Nutman. The silver earring shaped like a skull drew attention to the fact that the lobe was elongated and that the temple hair was graying.

  He motioned around the room with a sweep of his right hand. “Mike oughta be comin’ down inna bit.”

  Tremulis stared down the expanse of the Marclinn’s lobby. The click of Nutman’s steel-tipped boots faded off to the right. Tremulis looked to where the man had limped to. A plaque near the front desk read:

  Pain, Fr. from L., peona,

  penalty, punishment.

  Why the hell do they have to remind themselves of this? Further down the wall, he saw a painting of the Three Fates, each as scarlet as the carpeting down the center of the lobby. He liked Mike, he truly did, but the real reason he had come tonight was that he just didn’t have another damned thing to do.He wasn’t working at Hard Rock Cafe, and his sister was visiting from Crystal Lake.

  In the months to come, Victor Tremulis would perform his own act of contrition. Tonight, he would be content with simply trying to pass the time.

  He thought of himself as Virgil in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and turned to walk further into the Marclinn House. He remembered that Virgil escaped Hell by descending to the lowest pit.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a simple enough matter to rid himself of the chair. Father had taught him on how to think on his feet.

  He shook the snow from his body. He stretched, the bones in his neck cracking. Snow drifted from his lap onto the wheelchair when he turned to stare at it. All of the woman was inside of him now, or so he thought. Sleeping had made him forget about the chunks below the chair’s footrests.

  Haid wheeled the chair down the alleyway to the Trailways bus terminal, right front wheel jagged and so Haid left a series of continually touching infinity shapes on

  one side of his footprints. He stopped at the side entrance, the bus line’s logo stenciled in red on a single glass door marked PULL. Haid could smell the dinner time chicken and fixin’s at Mammy’s, the restaurant next door.

  He pulled the chair shut with a muffled clap and debated his next move. A passing squad car, its cherry flashing silently, made him waffle about just leaving the chair and making book. A glance inside told him that the few people inside wouldn’t even notice him. And all of them were probably leaving town.

  He was right, no one paid him any mind as he entered, banging the wheels against the beige tile floor. Haid displayed a shoulder-shrugging effort of someone weary from the weather. Straight down the aisle even with the doorway, a half-dozen kids were huddled around the video machines. A young male voice yelped an obscenity. An older game, a Pac Man variation that had served the city faithfully and willingly, like a Leland Street native who was “in the life”, sat in the corner, untouched. Dust across the screen, even. As would be the street whore, the metal thing had been used and abused by the older boys in the crowd, until it no longer interested them. And, being old, the game would never interest the next generation of players at all.

  The video game still had its flash, as well.

  A male voice, young and bored, came over the speaker system. “Trailways Bus, final destination Memphis with stops in Kankakee, Rantoul, and Effingham.” A pause, perhaps the speaker was yawning. “All tickets must be purchased at the counter before boarding. Bus for Indianapolis, with stops in Hammond, South Bend, and Stafford...”

  He glanced around, looked at the clock on the wall. Made a nice little show of it. Then he climbed to the first landing of the bus terminal, went through the chocolate-brown door marked Gentlemen, and walked inside.

  He really did have to take a piss.

  A pair of scuffed wingtips peeked from the shadows of the third stall like a pair of horns. He paid them no mind as he went to the north wall and opened the door to the fire escape.

  Fact: he knew about the fire escape because one bored evening in late Au
gust of 1978, angry and depressed at the new drug prescribed to him by the holier-than-thou psychiatrist Father had gotten for him, he leaned against the open door to watch some kind of deal go down in the alley beneath him. Then he went into one of the stalls and sat down, not caring that the toilet’s lid was up.

  In the stillness of the night, the temperature near ninety, with his as-yet skinny ass poking through the chalky white shitter seat, Francis Madsen Haid repeatedly rammed the blunt end of a pocket knife into his forehead. He did this while hearing voices. They were real voices, belonging to real people. Men who had come to gather round and watch, each taking turns at the crack in the door like Haid was stroking off or something.

  He had counted twenty-seven jabs. Then he continued thrusting the knife’s end into his forehead. He just stopped the counting. The blood had written messages on his face.

  Later, he drank coffee at Mammy’s, and a cop from the State Street district house, Officer Rizzi as he recalled, came up to his table and asked him with all the eloquence of those who wore the city’s blue just WHAT the FUCK was he trying to PROVE back there and Haid knew DAMN WELL what he was talking about.

  Back to the present: he stood in the open doorway, the wind whipping his hair around his face.

  “SHADDADOOR YA LIVINA FUCKIN BARN!” Haidturned towards where the shoes protruded from beneath the stall.

  “SHADDADOOR AN LET A GUY SHIT WITHOUT FUCKIN FREEZIN THANK YOU VERY MUCH MOTHERFUCK!”

  Haid thought about looking through the stall door crack. He said nothing.

  “WHATTAYA WAITIN FOR? YOU SOME KINDA FUCKIN FAG?”

  Haid clenched and unclenched his hands. Father had told him how to treat these people, guy was probably a jig from Maxwell Street. “Mister, you don’t know shit from Shinola,” Haid said proudly. He took the steps to street level three at a time. Streets and Sanitation found the remains of Wilma Jerrickson at 6:45 the next morning.

  * * *

  Just a block further north, The American Dream examined himself in the checkerboard tiles of the Nolan Void bathroom. The mask he wore over his face was a shapeless thing, a ski mask with badly stitched eyeholes. Over several layers of long underwear and sweatshirts, he wore a shoulder immobilizer, though keeping his arm free of the thing. Dirty grey now, an American flag was stitched onto the back the previous month by Reve Towne.

  On the front of the grey sweatshirt that was his outermost clothing, he had written in blood red letters:

  Hell’s Kitchen N.Y.C.

  He also wears wrist braces and, at times, finger splints. The garments and devices are all part of his armor. Not costume. That is for heroes in make believe gothams and metropolises. In this city, all too real, this city whose pulse of despair riding the veins of lost hope was as suddenly palpable and as painful as the onset of rigor mortis in a family member’s corpse, one wore armor to survive. Not a costume, never a costume.

  Without the safety of the braces, whether real or imagined, one might just as soon gape like a hooked fish off Twelfth Street as they bobbed on the bus or the train or even the sidewalk. D.O.A: Dead of Afterbirth. Bored In The U.S.A.

  He glanced over at the urinal to his left. The drain clogged by bits of vomit, he stared down at two black, curled pubic hairs, mesmerized. As if he were inverted and gazing up at two high flying vultures, relentlessly circling him ever so high. In a serene Ty-D-Bol sky.

  He then walked out into the bar, ignoring the stares. Sometimes, hell, most of the time, to truly see the show, you had to be the show.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The inside of this place is a fuckin’ Frank Lloyd Wright wet dream, Victor Tremulis thought, taking in everything, moving his head in a semicircular arc, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Waiting for Mike Surfer. Taking it all in.

  He had expected to see the average rooming house as catalogued by the human interest stories the papers ran on Chicago’s holiday homeless. Rick Soll had done several articles on the soup kitchens along Madison and Halsted that about blew him away. Wasn’t often that a newspaper reporter was allowed to have his own voice. He didn’t write the same old lunch bucket “there but for the grace, etc.” shit.

  There were no Bible quotes scarring the windows in harsh, red neon. No dangling crosses over the sidewalk, no sandwich board SERVICEMEN WELCOME print. The Pacific Garden Mission on South State bore a huge cross that read CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS. The DeRamus dive on Poe Street had quotes from the New Testament plastered daily on an old theater marquee.

  Tremulis understood. NO one here needed saving. No one had a desire to be born again. Every single tenant here was crippled; being born handicapped, they knew they had to get their lives straight the first time. Nobody succumbed to alcohol here, he would bet. Being a prisoner of war to one’s own body was difficult enough, he well knew, that one didn’t need a golden arm or a withered kidney, thank you very kindly.

  In addition to the plaques he had seen earlier, up at the front desk when he was talking to Nutman, Tremulis was mesmerized by three figures at the far wall, by the elevators. The Greek Fates. Incredible. He walked closer to examine the detail. Okay, let’s see now. Clotho was the spinner of man’s individual fate and Lachesis was the dispenser of lots. Both had delicate claws’and almost loving visages. The third one, Atropos, The Inexorable One, had a mouth open in a wide shriek. Trermulis wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the residents used the mouth as an ashtray.

  He realized he had committed himself to the center of the main walkway. The room was occupied by a half dozen men. A tray next to the couches held an aluminum bowl of ice and Pepsi bottles. A man with shoulder-length auburn hair sat at the end of the couch in what Tremulis first thought was a lotus position. He then realized that the man’s pant legs were empty and pooled around his lap.

  A man with black plastic glasses and blond hair sat next to him. He had no arms and was wearing a bow tie over a white shirt. Tremulis wondered if it was a clip on. An older man was seated in a straight-back chair, listening intently.

  To the left of that group, two men were shooting pool at a red felt table. From one of the conversations he’d had with Mike, Tremulis knew the red-haired one to be Karl and the man with the walker was Etchison. Spider plants dipped low over bookshelves behind them. Before taking a shot, Karl cracked his knuckles and it sounded like wax paper being torn from the jagged edge of a deli box.

  The front door to the Marclinn slid open and Tremulis saw a familiar face from the street.

  “Brother Preacher!” Karl bellowed. “Frippin-A!”

  Etch slammed his walker gently down onto his companion’s leg in deference to his language.

  “Etch, I oughtta—” Karl said before breaking into a smile of yellowed teeth and receding gums. Then: “Three ball in the side pocket.”

  Tremulis kept his eye on the game at hand.

  * * *

  Nutman looked up from his Lansdale novel as the preacher’s shadow covered the pages. And, besides, he smelled the Aqua Velva. He placed the book spine down over an ashtray from For Cry-Eye, a bar on the north side of the river. Brother Preacher looked down at the novel. The Nightrunners. The things people wrote about, he thought with a slight grimace that Nutman construed to be gas.

  “Cold night, ennit?”

  “Yes, Colin. It is.” The preacher reached into the inside breast pocket of his trench coat. “I find this up by the theater. Think it might be the woman what stays here.”

  “I’ll see she gets it,” Nutman placed it atop a stack of newspapers. The top one, Dziennik Chicagoski, was Gizanmas.

  “Tell Michael I said hello.”

  “Will do, preacher,” Nutman said as the reverend moved towards the door. He reached the weight sensor and the doors shooped open.

  Tremuhis had wandered back over to the men on the couch, avoiding Nutman because of the preacher being there. Where was Mike? This was crazy. The men were talking about the recent Painkiller murders.

  “Zif we didn’ have ‘nou
gh to wor’ bout,” the old man was saying. The blond man with no arms said “The cops will catch him. A guy does crazy shit like he did to the guy up at the Cass, he’s gonna fuck up.”

  His right shoulder stump jabbed forward with conviction.

  “Oh, there will be other murders, to be sure.”

  “S’funny, O’Neil.” The legless man addressed Blondie. “You’d think that it would mean more that a victim be in the wrong place at the wrong time than the killer—”

  “—but we all know that’s not how the killer gets caught, Szasz.” O’Neil pronounced it Sage but Tremulis knew his Polish spellings. That’s what they needed in spelling bees these days.

  Everyone looked past the elevators just then, and Tremulis saw Mike Surfer wheeling down past the pop machine. “Mike, grab me a sodee,” the oldest of the men said. He pulled out a pint of C.C. and noticed Tremulis for maybe the first time.

  Staring him up and down, not seeing leg braces or other supports, he spoke a little too loudly. “Y’ass me, some stand-up whitey gotsda nerve. Big man to go after cripple man inna chair.” He looked directly at Tremuhis, still sizing him up.

  “Haveta be a strong whitebread to hold that blowtorch so steady.”

  The old man reminded him of his mother; both had eyes that didn’t care who or what they impaled. So this was it, then? Another group who couldn’t see his handicap, therefore he couldn’t be considered their equal. He walked away from them, from Mike, with the voices behind him all blending together.

  “I really think a blowtorch is farfetched, Chuso.”

  “Was that your friend Victor, Mike?”

  “Blood. Where was his blood, man?”

  “Mike?”

  “You’re so fucked up sometimes, Chuso, I tell you.”

  “So have a conniption fit.”

  “Oh, quit your pissing and moaning.”

  Tremulis continued on towards the front door, who was he kidding, thinking he would fit in here? Oh, man, was he the fool...