The Holy Terror (25 page)

“Hyperactive,” Tremulis told the two who knew him as Tremble. “That’s what they used to call it when I was a kid, always slapping the fridge or screen door shut. That just keyed me up more. Always telling me to slow down, like that would solve everything since birth. I was forever spilling my milk. . .”

“Your dad was like this, too?” Reve asked.

“My father said I did things like I had a candy asshole.”

“I don’t remember my parents, at all.” Shustak said without further explanation. Tremulis assumed Reve knew the full story.

“Sometimes,” he continued, “sometimes my father called me a holy terror, back when I was a kid.”

“Speaking of terrors,” Shustak’s voice rasped from swallowing the tablets dry. “Haid’s never been here, I asked Desmond on the way back from the bathroom. But he has seen him around Washington Square.”

“How can he be sure?” Reve asked.

“Reve, for as many ravers who gargle with the twilight, there seems to be only one who has shouting matches with the Lord.” Shustak told them of how Desmond overheard the man’s ramblings one night before Halloween. “Plus, he’s always crossing himself. Haid, I mean.”

Reve summed it up best, talking about the Painkiller, not Haid, and Dion again asked somebody, anybody, if they’d seen his best friends John, Bob, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Sacco and Vanzetti, as well.

“Like he’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

“Or judge, jury, and executioner,” Tremulis said.

And the lonely drunks played their melancholy songs, their worlds revolving like the black discs with the bright but faded labels.

Later, Haid would think back on it ironically.

He’d think on how, if he had been asked by anyone who had told him to take the boy, he would only be able to reply in one way.

He’d have to say: did it In The Name Of The Mother. And leave it at that.

* * *

It was eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and he stood outside the townhouse where Devin Verbeerst lived. This far north it was called Dearborn Parkway, and most of the buildings had wrought iron gates surrounding tiny front yards and walkways.

The gates had buzzers affixed, and one had to be buzzed to enter. Unless the gate happened to be broken, as the one to 1111 was. Vince Janssen had known the widow Verbeerst during his life, and he knew that the gate had long been broken.

The white labels next to the buzzer read:

Gerberding

Osier

Verbeerst

Mother and son lived on the third floor. From the way Father had spoken of her, the widow Verbeerst, would certainly be away from the apartment this night.

Devin Verbeerst was twenty-four years old and suffered from Lesch-Nyhan disease. Haid walked through the lobby door without looking back. The disease struck only males, and caused them to be self-destructive. They had to be strapped into their chairs. Devin’s front teeth had been pulled after he had bitten through the skin of his upper lip. The apartments on the first two floors were quiet.

The widow Verbeerst had told Father that the worst thing about her son’s disease was that he knew too much. Haid used another bit of Father’s knowledge to jimmy the door to #3F open. Fast and fluid. To the left of the doorway was the kitchen, to the right, the living room. He saw a flicker from the television screen, and a distorted shadow of a wheelchair against the wall and ceiling.

He had been ready -- oh Christ! he had been ready—but the sight of the crippled man before him made Haid expel his breath. The living room was dark, the sole illumination came from the black and white RCA television against the west wall. A Marx Brothers movie was on. Channel Nine always played Marx Brothers movies on New Year’s Eve. A clock above the television read 11:27. He was going to have to move, to shake the sadness from his brain.

The shadows flickering in mad pavanes across Devin’s face provided the initial shock. The gaps where his teeth had been pulled made him resemble a cackling, drooling old hag. The Witch Queen of New Orleans. On the screen, Groucho said something funny to a group of socialites. Devin muttered something, it might have been a laugh. A minute passed. Harpo honked his horn.

Pulling his upper gums across his lower lip, Verbeerst watched the movie in honest rapture. Haid could see three pillows in the boy’s lap. A childhood memory of “The Princess And The Pea.” From beneath the pillows, he saw a tube running from the boy’s abdomen to an opaque, quivering bag near the center of the wheelchair’s right tire. The tube was spattered on the insides. Haid thought of Father’s snuff bowl. A commercial came on the television, and Cellozi and Ettleson told you about their auto dealership, “where you always save more money.”

Haid now stood before the crippled form of Devin Verbeerst. His eyes adjusted slowly to the things in the room beyond the television’s light. There was darkness in the other rooms of the apartment, only a night light above the kitchen sink glowed amber. Like a faraway beacon on Lake Michigan.

He looked down at the boy, his ankles tied to the ankle rests. Haid bent over and lifted the first pillow, then the next. The movie came back on. He placed the third pillow on the floor with the others.

And looked into Devin’s hazel eyes. The boy tried to speak. Clucking noises came out of his mouth along with the drool. Haid moved closer. Then, Devin surprised the holy hell out of him by speaking, slurring his words no worse than a working man who had stopped off for a few beers.

He said: “Will it go on forever?” With the last word coming out like fowewer. But Haid understood.

He couldn’t answer yet. Instead, he focused on the shelf behind the boy. At the boxes on the shelf. A Batman and Robin Colorform. A box of Lincoln Logs. Games like Ker-Plunk and Head Of The Class. Bought before he contracted the disease, to be sure. Will it go on forever?

“No,” he finally answered.

And Devin Verbeerst let loose with a low, ululating moan. Without the pillows’ support, his palsied head flung forward, smashing into Haid’s chest. Verbeerst gummed at Haid’s jacket.

The suede of the jacket shushed as Haid reached his arms around the boy. He pressed his palms into the flesh of the boy’s neck, the knob of his spine.

Under the flesh.

Haid took a deep breath. This was always the most difficult part.

“God wants you home. . . Son.”

The boy’s moan was cut off like a set of headphones being slammed shut.

* * *

He allowed himself a fresh breath. When he looked up and saw the widow Verbeerst staring at him, he thought that his heart was going to explode.

How much did she see? She stood there in the light of the bathroom, the light he missed, damn it. A portrait of impassivity, a woman in a simple white nightgown, no more than forty, not caring that her legs were apart and the light was behind her.

He did not speak. Her eyes bore no questions. The seconds grew heavier, unbearable.

He saw her gaze shift to a point beyond him. Haid turned and saw a photo of Devin in a Little League outfit. There was a dark patch of dirt on the red-and-white pinstriped uniform. The exact spot where, years later, a colostomy bag tentacled out of his abdomen.

The woman, Devin’s mother. She had spoken something, softly. It had sounded like...

It had sounded like she had said...Go.

Sounds from the other room…the bedroom? He spoke towards the hallway. “I’ve saved your son.”

He walked towards the bedroom, saw the woman with her face buried in a pillow. A lamp was on next to the phone, she had not called

911. Thank God for that. She weeped in small whimpers. “I said, I saved your son.” She continued sobbing, louder now.

He walked swiftly to the front door then, feeling dizzy. The last sight of the woman was that of the calloused soles of her bare feet as she lay prone on the bed. Was the crying an act, for when she phoned the police? She would certainly phone the police, wouldn’t she?

Go. She had told him to go. He was sure of it.

He left before the sirens came, if they would ever come, remembering the soles of the widow Verbeerst’s feet. And the photo that maybe had made her final decision.

Haid would remember the smiling face in the Little League uniform for as long as he lived.

Tremulis met up with Reve and Shustak at Navarro’s, a bookstore at 2909 North Broadway. Murdy’s bar, M.C.’s, was down the block at 2850 North. It was Friday, the 6th of January, 1989.

When he stepped off the No. 36 bus, he looked down at the wet pavement, where the little snow they had gotten the evening before had melted overnight. With no wind, the temperature actually climbed overnight. A looming apartment building on Oakdale reflected the sidewalk at his feet. A giant El Marko proclaiming to anyone who cared YOU ARE HERE.

The temperature was still in the thirties, the sun bright, and so Tremulis was unzipping his grey jacket even as he opened the door to the bookstore. A little bell jingled like a memory in an insane person’s head.

Shustak was wearing his Hell’s Kitchen sweatshirt over black cords. He carried a pea green jacket folded over into one fist. Reve was wearing a blue blouse, black skirt, and black boots. Stylish enough that he hardly noticed the limp caused by the metal plate in her hip.

She was holding a copy of the new Zen bestseller by Daemon Winter-Boston, and handed it to him at his request. He again marveled and fell in love with her unpolished fingernails. He wanted to flaw the people and things he let enter his world, and’ mutilate himself in the name of self -knowledge, but he felt the stirrings of his weak heart only when the woman of his immediate desires—it hadn’t always been Reve Towne—was not hiding behind makeup.

The page flipped open to a quote by Heraclitus:

Everything flows.

Tremulis thought of things that flowed. The Chicago River, acetic acid, blood, piss...

Shustak bought nothing. “I read faces,” he told the girl at the cash register even though she didn’t ask.

* * *

This, then, was M.C.’s: wedged between the Broadway Surf garage and Sammon Studios, a video company, the black and pink and chrome two-story building was a far cry from the other gay bars in the North Halsted neighborhood like Christopher Street and Eric’s.

In Ben Murdy’s own words: “M.C.’s is a semi-high tech video dance bar, and I pride myself that the music we play is not so loud ‘that customers can’t talk below a scream.”

Six years ago, the bar had been Absinthia’s, a real shot and a beer joint with hairbag customers. The only thing Murdy kept when he took over the bar was the white canopy front. Across the street were the Green Briar and Commodore apartment buildings. In the twenties, the latter was the site of Al Capone’s mistress, who lived in the penthouse. The suite still rented at twenty-one hundred a month. An escape tunnel between the two buildings ran underneath Surf Street. The Biograph Theater was flashing its marquee a few blocks north, with the Red Lion’s mute colony directly across the street.

Tremulis sat with Reve and Shustak, at a table facing the many television screens above the bar, each showing a music video. The Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was currently being viewed by a dozen men, most with less than rapt attention. The bar covered half the length of the downstairs along the north wall. The top of the bar was polished black, the bottom was glass blocks lit from behind.

Upstairs was a small grey bar and a raised dance floor. The three of them could hear Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” whenever one of the bouncers opened the door at the top of the stairs. The bouncers all had receding hairlines like Hulk Hogan and wore wing-tipped tuxedo shirts over black slacks with pink or turquoise bow ties. Tremulis felt very uncomfortable when a few glances were made in his direction.

Evan sat directly underneath a Warhol print of Murdy, done in electric blues and greens, and, compliments of the house, was sipping a Canada Dry. Tremulis sat to his right, facing the bar and the video screens, and had a Bacardi rum and Coke, overly conscious of the men possibly finding him attractive because his hairline matched those of the muscular bouncers. Reve contented herself with a Gilbey’s gin and tonic.

“Hi, guys,” Ben Murdy waved the hand that held a Carlton 100 Menthol halfway through its brief life. Animated was the best way the man could be described. A year older than Tremulis, he moved with the strange synchronicity that befell the characters in
The Wizard of Oz
, any of them. Taller than a Munchkin, Murdy moved with the gentle grace of either Judy Garland or Ray Bolger, and his wicked, rapier wit was old man Wizard himself.

He sat in the chair opposite Reve and was dressed in a pair of acid-washed jeans more black than blue topped by a black t-shirt that read “I’m O.K. You’re an asshole”. For his stature, his firm chest and compact arms would be, in the North Halsted vernacular, to die for. He exhaled his smoke before sitting down, half-straddling the chair.

“Your hair looks lighter,” Shustak said.

“Life’s a bleach and then you dye,” Murdy said as if Evan was his first straight man ever. In a manner of speaking. One of the bouncers overheard him and groaned. Another lamented, “Always a blond,” and shook his head in a contrived way.