The Holy Terror (6 page)

He came from a close-knit Polish family; Mother Tremulis’s parents coming from some obscure town in the Carpathian Mountains, moving first to Relling, Pennsylvania in the thirties, and on to Division Street— Polish Broadway—in 1947. Diedre - Tremulis did not like the idea of “Wiktor” working at a bar. She’d been a dice girl at the Orange Lantern on Wolcott, and often had stories of those days. Her only child couldn’t get her to understand that the corruptions were a bit different these days. And he was glad for the time it kept him away from home.

He backtracked east. The cafe was on the corner of Dearborn and Ontario, and he had about ten minutes to walk there.

It hit him like a hammer in the gut. Gorshin had used to make wild, unexpected swings at him back at St. Vitus. The kid was small and there was no power to the punch. Yet Haid would double over and expel most every molecule of air inside him. It was like that now.

He had felt more than a little shaky after the incident back on Couch Street, like the adrenaline pump he’d experience after receiving cortisone shots in his back. Like his body was fighting new antibodies, something like that.

A hammer in the gut. He hurt so bad that he had stopped questioning Father on why he hadn’t explained to him that this was going to hurt so bad. This cleansing ritual, this act of contrition, whatever. For chrissakes, Father had never said it would hurt like this.

Stumbling, one foot over another. Someone who looked like he had run the good race. Only the street was deserted. The gangbangers and psychos never strayed this far east, and the clubbers still had a few hours to spritz their hair and primp in the mirror before fashionably showing up at the bars just as they were getting crowded. Even Washington Square Park was empty. Known as Bughouse Square to the natives, because of demonstrators in the park during the fifties, the tree-lined paths crossed each other just a block north of the apartment that was still in Uncle Vince’s name. Later, young and old men both would feel each other up on the green park benches. It was here that John Wayne Gacy met many of his victims in the late seventies, driving back to his house on Summerdale to give them the ultimate sex thrill.

So it was that no one saw him vomit on the sidewalk in front of Melone’s Baptist Ministry, within sight of his place. Long and hard projectile vomit, black and bloody. Shooting it out across Dearborn Street like his body was a lawn sprinkler.

What went wrong? Didn’t He say that it would be fine?

His body was rejecting the black street hustler. All there was to it.

But. . . why?

Haid fell to his knees, then to the ground—sudden as a kid with drop seizures—the dirt at the curb collected with the grey already in his hair. When he stood, carefully, his hair was a dust mop.

He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. Bringing his arm in a curve to his face, Haid’s Book of Psalms tumbled from the inside pocket. It dropped into the puke. Bluish splotches peppered the edges of his sight.

He doubled over with the dry heaves once more before finally collapsing inside his front door, the kitchen tile cool to his face.

As it was in the days when he hanged with Cassady and Barre over at Massie’s, he felt thoroughly shit-faced. The obsessive-compulsiveness kicking in, Haid held his breath, head cocked to the only other room in the apartment. He didn’t want to wake Father. Then he remembered that Father lived within him now, He rested on the cool kitchen floor.

The relief was shortcoming; no sooner had he relaxed then his bowels loosened. He hurried to the small bathroom, hideously pasteled and cheerful, pounding the light switch on as he again fell, this time towards the bowl. Portrait of the man: pants around his ankles, his ten-yard stare just above the yellow-brown crap stains that bulls-eyed his BVDs.

His defecation was long and constant.

It was his cross to bear.

* * *

Haid had fallen asleep on the shitter, head tilting to the left the way a commuter’s on the El did. He dreamed that Father had an explanation for him.

The night of September 27th. The nurses and the doctor attempted to shock his heart back to life, but he was dead. Haid knows this with all his heart. But he cannot cry.

On the television screen, right there in the post-trauma wing at Henrotin, the TV that Vince Janssen was watching when he coded out, was the premiere of a cop show, set in 1963 Chicago. The prowl cars were Mercurys, the skyline in the credits was washed in cloudless blue.

In the dream, as in real life, Haid has listened to a theme song by Del Shannon: Watching all the planes go by, some live and others die, well I wonder...

Others die. Others die. Others die.

He realized what had to be done. Thy will be done, the man in the holy fire had whispered in his ear. Had demonstrated the healing power that lay dormant in Haid. Until the day of September 27th, 1988. The Year of Our Lord.

Son must heal Father.

Jesus wept.

He could save his god.

The dream shifts.

If he was doing what Father wanted, why had he gotten sick after leaving Couch Street? Why?

The dream flutters back...

Haid rushed to the window overlooking Oak Street and stared up at a sky that murdered the stars long ago. And in that polluted sky he sees the blackness of the monte dealer’s face, filled with false twinkle.

He heard the shump shump of the machine, EKG, EMG, whatever its initials, his Uncle Vincent had coded again. The machine failed and suddenly Haid smelled charred flesh and burnt chest hairs. He screamed silently into his face of the reflection in the window. He pounds his fists into the concrete sill again and again.

The hustler’s face whispers to him, coming close over the treetops. The false twinkle has become a conspiratorial wink. The hustler told him that with healing must first come pain... Haid understood. He did.

He understands after he has broken his second finger and has felt the pain, the wondrous, joyous pain and he knew then that yes, his Father, his god, will live. Because of him, He will live.

But he wanted to be certain. He broke his other hand and scrapes his nails hard against the tiled wall until it chips and splinters are driven through his fingernails and into the hand’s top-most knuckle joints.

When he begins an undulating scraping of his skull on the sill, the cement surface bloodied and pocked, a nurse comes forward, and grabs him, holding his palsied hands to his side.

Haid screams along with Del Shannon: Some live and others die, well I wonder. Haid screams I can hear the television bleeding -- Why Why Why Why Why... Puking up bits of his rib cage and crying through the rapture of it all, he saw two nurses giving the high five, one holding a soiled Fleet enema bag, laughing as she inadvertently smeared the shit of the still living man on the other’s palm and Del Shannon stops singing so a Maybelline commercial can be told, both nurses laughed and the doctors clapped each other on the back.

Haid looked up at the television and saw the healthy spikes of the EKG machine.

Beyond that, the night winked at him.

* * *

Levelle Thigpen was overweight, sure. He weighed in at fifteen pounds twenty-six years ago and never stopped gaining. Only, everyone called him Chubby Love because of his taste in women. He’d spot a big-boned gal and nudge Mike Surfer or Glowworm Willie, tell them hey, I’s goin’ to get me some chubby lovin’ tonight. Like that.

Chubby also scavenged for things, when he wasn’t clowning for the crowd. After the McDonald’s on Randolph closed down at eight, Chubby Love had all of three dollars and twelve cents, all in change, jangling at the bottom of his 7-11 Big Gulp go-cup. He figured on a little scavenger hunting on his way back to the St. Benedictine Flats.

Entering the cobblestone walkway of Couch Street, flanked on either side by green and grey garbage cans, he started his scavenging at the first can in sight. He saw a black briefcase propped against one of the smaller bins. Bending towards it, a mean feat in itself, as Thigpen’s lower abdomen looked as if Chubby was hiding an inner tube under his shorts, he saw a three-piece urinating against the wail, both hands pasted to the wall. Chubby thought that the guy looked as if he was being frisked by The Invisible Man.

“Thought they had port-a-pots in the limosines that be taking you threads home.” He couldn’t pass up commenting on the one thing he rarely did in public.

“Get away from that,” the threads talking about his case.

“Just walkin’ by, is all. Take a chill pill, brother mine.”

“I’m not your brother.” But Chubby was no longer listening, because his attention was diverted towards the deserted wheelchair farther down the alley.

For a street person, a wheelchair was almost as good as a shopping cart when it came to carrying one’s life belongings.

Chubby heard the guy zipping up behind him; he was more concerned with that beautiful looking chair. He could set his go-cup between his legs when he sat in it, and keep his Woolworth’s bags on the seat when he was walking.

The Lake Street El roared by, always louder and more mournful in the winter months. The wheelchair was damn near spotless. A Chicago Cubs backpack was slung over the back of the handlebars. An index card, covered by clear plastic, the kind you buy in dime stores, read THIS CHAIR IS REGGIE GIVENS. Chubby knew that name from somewhere, maybe a friend of a friend. It was easy enough to pull the lamination off; whoever Reggie was, the chair was Chubby’s now.

He plopped himself into the chair, the adequate overhead light telling him that it wouldn’t be all that tight a squeeze. Hell, he could breathe, and the fact that his thighs were glued to the arms like Dentu-Grip to false teeth meant that he needn’t worry about buckling up.

Something was sticking to his right foot. Gum, maybe. He hoped that the guy in the suit hadn’t pissed him. He looked down, picking up his right foot best he could.

There was a single playing card on the footrest. A red queen, folded in the corner.

Chubby tossed it to the rats and wheeled back to the street.

* * *

Haid woke up to find himself feeling much better. He also found himself still on the pot.

Dr. Broonioge often had told him that dreams were symbolic. He had learned quite a bit from this last dream. With the rapture must first come the pain. And with Father’s hand guiding him, he would learn to heal without getting sick. Father had told him that the only way to do that would be to find more willing souls.

Tomorrow, he would search for the black-haired man that he saw wheeling away from the strip joint.

“Anybody see Reg, yet?” Colin Nutman looked up from the registration information desk. “His rent’s coming up due, and I see from his box that he hasn’t picked up his mail in at least two days.”

“You know how he be,” Mike Surfer said with a gravelly voice. Even with two fingers pressed up against his shunt, some days his words came out in a way that made Nutman think of gargling marbles.

“Yea,” Glowworm Willie echoed from behind a pool table with shortened legs. “He stay out sometimes three, four days. Just when you think he be disappeared into the earif, he come poppin’ back in.”

Surfer rolled over to one of the lobby’s three color televisions. Two other Marclinn residents, a bearded writer named Etch, because of how he always scribbled notes on a pad of paper tied to his walker, and Wilma Jerrickson, a grey-haired, tiny woman that most everyone called Grandmother.

“If either of you see him...” Colin called in Surfer’s direction.

“I’ll tell him,” Surfer said, over his shoulder.

“Me, too.” Willie said, as he racked up the pool balls, hoping for a partner.

Etch and Grandmother were intent on watching an episode of Cheers and so offered no response at all.

* * *

Vic Tremble’s War Journal:

11/15/88—Time, see what’s become of me, the song went. Paul Simon was right. It is a hazy shade of winter. Ask my fucking body. Christ on a fucking dogwood it hurts. I used to laugh at the tin man when he pled with Dorothy for the oil can. That’s how my motherless shoulders feel now, like they are a solid strip of metal and just why the fuck do I try to move them anymore in the first place?

Nobility? At what? Who am I trying to impress?

Walking past the Midland Building on Adams I saw a policeman directing traffic in the shadows of the Board of Trade. Probably got caught with his hands in the graft cookie jar and got put on detail for a few months.

I envy cops. I’d love to be healthy enough to wear the uniform, the badge. Not as a glory hound. Never that. I guess it’s because the cops operate on the street level, and that is where I am at my best. Where I blend in the easiest. If I lived on the street, I would finally be able to live with myself.

I put Mineral Ice on my back. Doesn’t smell like Ben-Gay. Couple weeks ago, this Hispanic guy sniffs the air like somebody stuck a dog turd under his Duncan Rinaldo pencil-moustache. He said to me, buddy, joo smell bad, joo know joo stink dat way?

I wished I could’ve drooled over his work shirt, the cock-knocker.

More than cops, I envy the men in their wheelchairs on the street corners. Guys like John and Slappy, I’ll give them a quarter if I have it. Because they are honest about their handicaps, and even the most dimwitted of mooks in the lunch hour crowds would understand their pain.