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Sitting on the bench after Rosso left I started thinking about my life. Who was I, now, exactly? I truly didn’t know anymore.
I wasn’t one of the college boys ambling past me, unable or unwilling to lift their feet of the ground when the walked by – never had been. At that age I was already in my first year at the police academy back in Chicago, back when the minimum age to join was 19 and no college was required.
The still-in-shape moms pushing three hundred dollars past to the playground were part of something I had never been a part of. Families, stability, hope: never got the invite for that.
Bounced around from one semi-serious shack job to the next, doing my job, chasing the people that needed to be chased, chasing something that I never could seem to catch up to no matter how hard or how fast I ran.
Gambling filled the void for a while until it became a void of its own that I feel into without too much resistance, just one more bill to pay in a world full of them.
Who’d have time for a family, for whatever it was that these women were a part of with the doting and happy husbands sitting somewhere nearby doing graphic design or whatever the hell it was paid for strollers that cost more than my first car when they were in my shoes.
Then the arrest, the shame, and Pontiac, where every day was a fight to survive even in administrative segregation, nobody was safe when you’re an ex cop on the inside. Too many losers with nothing to lose, why not get some more cred by taking out a pig? Cred was the only currency they had aside from cigarettes and punks and it went a lot farther than two packs of Newport’s and some screaming piece of ass, anyway.
I managed, somehow, I kept my head low and my mouth shut and knew that getting out was just going to be moving from one world of shit to another but I had either not enough balls or too many to do the swing job with a torn up sheet braided into a rope off the top bunk.
If there were that many people who wanted me dead why should I carry their lunch for them?
Then the outside, and Rosso, and this new game, still chasing, chasing, chasing, but for what? To get out of debt? To forget about the past? To forget about my mistakes and the opportunities lost?
Carol was the only thing that made any sense anymore and now whatever port she offered me in the storm seems to have been flooded over and washed away by a force stronger than any ocean, some half-a-fag self-made wiseguy who held all the strings and had us dancing just whether we knew the tune or not just because he wanted something to do.
You spend your whole life thinking that if you just do what you’re supposed to you’ll get what you’ve earned, what’s yours, what’s right and it’s clearer and clearer its just so much bullshit whatever it is.
Punch a drill press for 30 years standing on concrete till it hurts too much to even fuck your wife anymore even when she’d let you and they close the factory down and send your job to Mexico.
Bust your ass pushing paper in some county clerk’s office getting pawed at and breathed on by somebody only has their job because they’re the right guy’s nephew office and when you finally make a beef about it they fire your ass because you took three too many maternity days.
Spend 20 years pulling people from fires, cutting open overturned cars to pull out the still worth saving half of some terrified teenage girl covered in her speeding boyfriend’s blood where the steering column blew through his heart and when you retire because there’s no amount of showers that can wash the stench of death off you anymore your pension is gone because your union invested it in some hedge fund that went under while the folks in charge of it all bailed out with sacks full of cash just before they ran it up against the rocks.
Where, anymore, was there any honesty? Any loyalty? Any dignity?
When I was a kid I really believed the life portrayed in the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers that my grandmother had prints of hanging throughout her house. The older I got I never found myself living that kind of a life but I still believed it was out there, somewhere, just around the corner and one day I’d see happy people sitting around a table, cutting a turkey, some kid oiling his baseball glove to play a game of catch with dad, a little girl selling lemonade to thirsty strangers on a hot summers day. Everybody just so normal, so happy, so at peace.
Did these things exist anymore? Did they ever really exist back then? Or was Rockwell just a dreamer who sold his dreams to a people who needed them? Something to hang their hat on when they came home from the mill, the diner, the garage that was their real home, their real lives?
Nobody ever spoke out about it – loud enough for me to here anyway – nobody ever told me it was all a sack of lies, a happy afterlife sold to the still living by the people who really had the lives worth living. The CEOs outsourcing jobs, the politicians taxing folks out of their homes while voting themselves raises and buying new hundred thousand dollar office furniture suites every few years on the public’s dime, the preachers who were just panderers, raising money by railing the loudest against the very sins they hoped the noise would drown out when they were committing them, The Johnny Rossos of the world.
Every single one of them a have, the rest of us have nots. That’s a simple way of looking at it, sure but is it really any more complicated than that?
And what didn’t have because they took it from the rest of us they had because we gave it to them. Our hopes, our trust, our money our future and they knew we would and played to our naive beliefs that they would somehow do a better job of sorting our lives out for us than we could ever do ourselves.
That was the greatest gag of them all, that was the joke, and they were selling ice to Eskimos just because the Eskimos were impressed by the flash of their sales pitch.
That was the system. It needed people coming in at the bottom to prop up the people at the top all the while promised of that their own time above was never far behind but the top growing further and further out of reach no every time somebody else came in behind them, the folks at the top never ceding their spot to anybody.
A fucking pyramid scheme is all life was for most folks, ultimately, but few were brave enough or smart enough to see it for what it was and risk rocking the boat or jumping off altogether.
It made no difference if you were a cop, a teacher, a plumber a cook, it almost made no goddamned difference at all.
Unless you were the right person, or knew the right person your life was more or less established for you the moment you were yanked out of your mother.
Screaming cold and covered in blood is how we all come into the game and also how a fair amount of us leave it. Stan did, and so many other before him as well and so many more were sure to follow as long as the Johnny Rossos of the world held the leash, the rest of us just their goddamned trained monkeys.
And Carol? To whatever extent she had played me along I knew she was being played at the same time, just one more pawn on a chessboard none of us ever had the perspective to see was rigged and had a few more squares on one end than it did on the other and the guys who kept winning never ran out of queens.
This was my life, such as it was, stumbling around a town built on the promise of better things if you kept your nose clean and finished school, while torn between to evil fucks that were pulling the cash out of the kids as soon as their folks could send it to them in one form or another.
I thought about what Rosso had said about the dentist moving meth, moving girls, the meth made all off the shelf the girls made by problems that were so typical they might as well have been as well.
Just one more bit of currency for guys like that, who held all the cards, and most of the cash, the rest of us just a pack of smokes on two legs, a piece of ass not yet down on all fours puking into a shit-smeared metal toilet while one laughing homeboy after another took their turns with us, not caring about the blood coating their cocks and pooling on the floor beneath them, high-fiving each other after each one finished.
You don’t need to be behind bars to be in prison. You don’t need to break the law to end up inside. Maybe they didn’t know that we knew this, the Rossos of the world, maybe they knew but figured we were too shit scared to try to break out.
It didn’t make a difference either way. They were in charge and we let them be because whatever tiny scrap of food or life or love they allowed us we were so afraid of losing that we just kept smiling and nodding and thanking them for whatever they gave us.
I reached inside my jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of smokes. I fished out the last one that was in there and lit it up, holding the smoke in for a long time like it was precious to me, and maybe it was.
I reached back inside the same pocket and pulled out a small grey digital voice recorder that was no bigger than a cell phone. I had snagged it from the weeping college boy Stan had taken me to collect from way back when we first got into town. I took it out of spite but was glad I had it. I cycled back to the time-stamp indicating the beginning and pressed play.
“ . . .which is why you stay close to your smartest people. And your stupidest. speak of the devil! Lenny boy, how’s tricks?”
I sped through the recording a bit and listened to the conversation I had just had with Rosso.
Even through my coat it captured everything with amazing clarity. Every admission, every philosophical bit of bragging, every murder, all of it.
“Which one are you Johnny? The smart one or the stupid one?”
I put the recorder back in my pocket and finished my smoke.
Getting up I looked around to see if anybody was paying attention to me but there didn’t seem to be anybody in the vicinity who didn’t belong there besides myself.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket while I was walking back to the car and called Kevin’s number.
He actually answered this time which was a relief because if I had to listen to his voicemail message one more time I might have shot the first person I saw just to clean the sound of it out of my ears.
“Hey,” he said, music thumping in the background, some girl squealing about something important only to her and whoever wanted insider her pants the most at that given moment.
“Hey, yourself” I said. “Listen, I don’t know how deep you are in this, if you are at all, or for how long or how these things change from day to day but if I’m responsible for any or it, to whatever extent that’s true, I just wanted to apologize.”
“You don’t have to . . .”
“Shut the fuck up, kid, things are about to become a lot different for a lot of people, maybe even for you and if you had it coming then that’s fine, but if you didn’t , well, I’d feel bad about it.”
“Look, I, like, I don’t want to get into any kind of thing here but . . .”
“Whatever, listen, I really don’t care, just tell your Mom, wherever she is, that it was good for me and I appreciated it. Real or not it was better than nothing and maybe the only good thing I had but I can’t keep chasing anymore, I’m making a stand and when it’s all over it’s over and that’s, well, just tell her I said ‘remember the Alamo.’ She’ll know what I mean.”
I flipped the phone shut before he started talking again and walked out off of the pedestrian mall and down the street towards where I had seen the police station.
A slim good looking college girl was walking up the street towards me smoking a cigarette and, knowing I might not get to have one for a while I asked her to bum one. She gave me a somewhat quizzical look because it was probably she who was in the business of getting stuff from others but she gave me one anyway. Maybe it was fear. If it was I didn’t have a problem with that as that was about all I had left going for me anymore.
I drew hard on her smoke, some sort of weird hard-filtered job I had never had before but beggars can’t be choosers right?
I was about to pretty much lay my life in the hands of the very folks I had once been and beg for my life in more ways than one but that was okay though, because it might have been the first honest choice I had made in years.
I stopped in front of the cop shop took one last look around and pulled Stan’s piece from the front of my belt and wiped it down before dropping it into a garbage can on the corner in front of the building.
I walked through the revolving doors that served both the police station as well as their city hall building, apparently and took a left through the doors into the police station. Up two steps was a glass window where a lumpy looking young man sat working on a crossword puzzle in front of a bank of phones.
“Can I help you?” he asked?
“Yes,” I said, I want to see a doctor, a good one, I suffered a heart attack recently I have not received any treatment for, and I’d like you to contact the nearest FBI office in this state and tell them to send some guys down here pronto: I’m about to give them Johnny Rosso as well as one of the biggest meth pushers in Iowa. You’ll probably want to call the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and get them in on this. I also want to speak with a detective. I need to confess to several serious crimes here in Iowa City, and I’d like to be arrested immediately and held here at the station until the FBI arrives.”
“Excuse me?” said the lump behind the glass.
“Call the cops,” I said, “before I change my mind.”
