The Holy Terror (13 page)

Father would look at the magazines sometimes while Haid was scratching his scalp. He’d always give him a shiny quarter for doing this.

He scratched Father’s scalp vigorously and furiously, as he might clothes on a washboard. Just the way Father enjoyed it. Meathead kissed Gloria on television. Haid was startled by a sudden ball-grab. Father moaned one last
aaahh
as Haid felt his hands sink down into the skin with a sound like cracking eggs. The skin of Vince Janssen’s scalp. The fingers on both of Haid’s hands splayed apart.

His right hand was wet when he lifted it up, claw-like, before his face. Edith Bunker covered her face and cowered at her husband’s indiscretion.

There were furrows in Father’s scalp. Deeper than the comb marks. Oh God, he was holding part of Father’s brain! His mouth fell open as he watched the grey pulp web the space between his fingers like the semen he ejaculated on Thursday nights. But it was Saturday now and Bridget Loves Bernie was going to be on next followed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. Father’s brains were all over his hand. If one could have been in the dream to watch the proceedings, the half-naked teen’s expression was one of being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His left hand lying half in/half out of his uncle’s skull completing the image.

Haid jolted awake to find that a light snow had begun to fall.

From the Patrol Log of the American Dream

Friday, 9 December 1988

7AM checked in with Father Marvin Melone at Baptist center, patrolling State & Superior Sre Streets on the way. Asst. man from Dillinger, Michigan by pointing out way to LaSalle Motor Lodge park entrance. Their were several packed of unopened Pall Mall cigarettes on blue vinyl seat next to him. Too old for sa stick shift—Might have been a Mercury mercury but not sure. Never understood cars or People Who Drive Them.

715-45AM Patrol. w on Superior, man in md4Osa blue suit, w/face like funnybook pig rolls down window of car he Is parked in and laughs. How Horrible his life must lead him. Cont to chek the area around Su. and Clark Streets. It is MY belief that thre dread Eighth Street Man will will rear his head ugly as thre sun it is. He ids Bound by Destinyy to make hisappearance so soon.

I will be hear for him.

8-9AM: Patrolled Clark and Erie Streets. Uneventful

9:1-OAM took No. 29 State Street Bus #4211 north to Division Street and ate breakfast of silver dollar pannycakes and glassed of milk and ojiuce. Scanned news red by man next to me. We are not at war. Name of rest. is Joe’s.

1020Am talked with Lynch at Marino pk on Rush st. Third bench is his so he claims, okay by ME. LEft him to follow suspicis look man, poss. drug dealer. Stringy hair.

10:36 AM. Lost sight of him while adjusting my armor. But it Had to Be Done. 11AM Took B train to Clark/Division to Chicago and Dearborn. Ran into Ben Murdy & we walked to his car/he drove back to hes rest/ bar. Good man, he gave me water to take my Haldol with. Wants his regards given to all at Marclinn tonight and to remind Etch to pay up on

Superbowl bet from 1986!!!!! Will do this because Murdy is a kind considerate felow who helps adjust the velcro onmy armor. NO ONE tells him he HAS to do these THINGS

215PM: Stoned man in Holiday Liquors asks for half pint of Bumpy Face (looks like Lynch when he has his Bearded). Remind myself to ask Officer Morisette if BF is Strret Slang for DOPE).

415PM Saw girl reading book on Clark St bus, gun-fighter story by Stephen Crane. Explained to her that the ending which mentions hourglass shaped footprints in the sand meant that he was lost in the Sands of Time. She seemed to believe me but might have an attitude problem.

NOTES NOTES NOTES

call Reve about Walgreen’s sale on Medipren

buy new armor for Mike Surfer’s birthday in Jan.

FIND TIME to write to Vice-President Quayle and writte re benefits for crime victims.

SUMMARY FOR 9 DEC FRIDAY AFT, & AM.

no real true crime. Newspapers say to more shooting between Insane Unknowns and Latin Kings. Wood St police have situation in hand. No innocents victimized at any rate.

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.

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.

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 August 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.