Little Village vs. NaNoWriMo: Day 12

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By the time she finished breakfast we hadn’t said but 4 words, and they were all to the waitress. The whole way across the parking lot and back to our hotel room we said even less. Mom was back. She was walking a couple steps ahead of me, holding the door open for me, and throwing her stuff together.

I wish I could say I knew what we were doing. Between Stan, the Dentist and his own physical condition, who knew how many different kinds of trouble Lenny might have himself in in Iowa City? And in Chicago, Rosso is not going to take kindly to a Dear John letter from Stan and Lenny.

Working for the dentist now? After all these years with Rosso? I wouldn’t know what to do with that, but I’m afraid I know for a fact that Rosso would.

If I know my mom she’s trying to figure out how fucked she’ll be if she skips another shift at the bar. More like how fucked they’d be, the bastards. She does everything around that shithole.

We got in the car and started heading to the tollway. My mom was back and I was too, once again, back in my natural state: along for the ride, more than a little scared and confused.

Mom was looking over her shoulders and into her mirrors constantly. Looking at all the cars around us, all the cars at the biggest gas station on earth, and biting her fingernails. Man was she wired.

Eventually these two cars came up. One of them pulled out in front of us and another one pulled out behind us. I sunk down in my chair and Mom let out this long breath.

I sunk down in my chair further and she reached into her bag and pulled out her lighter and her cigarettes.

“It’s okay, honey,” she looked in the rear-view. “They’re with us.” She lit her cigarette and passed the Eastbound on ramp. I guess we were going West.

Mom’s Al Green cassette was in the tape deck. Actually it was Lenny’s, but he gave it to her. I think it’s her only tape. She likes music but she doesn’t have any tapes, she just listens to the radio all the time. Lenny says everything on the radio these days is garbage.

“Rosso really has it in for this dentist.”

“You talked to Rosso?”

“No, not yet.” Nobody talks to Rosso. Lenny doesn’t even talk to Rosso if he can avoid it. “We’ll see him in a few minutes though.”

“Rosso?”

“Yeah, Rosso.”

“Johnny Rosso?”

She smiled at me a little bit and ashed her cigarette, exhaling smoke from the other side of her mouth.

“The Johnny Rosso?” Rosso is a celebrity. You don’t understand. I even knew who he was when I was a kid. I’d come to Chicago on visitation trips to see mom and I’d hear people talking about Johnny Rosso everywhere–on the streets, on TV, at the police station where mom would always have to go check in, make sure she was staying clean.

I guess most moms would want to keep it a secret, but when you have the kind of problem that my mom had, the kind that makes the cops come take your kid away and give him to the dad, even though it’s a dad like my dad… it’s kind of hard to keep it a secret. I’ve known about my mother for as long as I can remember. She’s been through a lot.

I remember the first time I saw Lenny it was at the cop shop on Halsted. We were there for one of mom’s check-ins. It was a place I knew pretty well. It felt like the safest place on earth. Mom was doing her favorite activity of adjusting my jacket and telling me how it’s real cold in Chicago so we were going to have to go get a nice warm coat when we got done there, and asking me if I was hungry and all that. I didn’t know if she was really clean or not. I never saw her sit still before so why should she start now?

Rather than the usual lady, it was Lenny that came out and got us. He was younger then but he still wore the same type suits, with a badge and a full head of hair. He came in with this stack of pictures, walking behind an older guy, also in a suit, silver hair, blue eyes, big smile.

The older guy looked at me. “What’s your name?”

“Kevin.”

“Kevin? You Irish? We have to ask your mom a couple of questions, is that okay?” He smelled like coffee and newspapers. “Why don’t you go wait for your mother out in the hallway?”

That wasn’t the first time I heard my mom cry. I told myself that this time at least I knew she was someplace safe. When she came out the old guy looked at me and said. “Your mothers a real good woman. She’s a hero, you know. You should buy her dinner.” And he patted me on the head and disappeared into an elevator.

Lenny stayed behind and talked real quiet with her.

Then she had her usual meeting and, when we finally left, the TV in the lobby showed a big crowd of people over at the station on Michigan Avenue. The cops were announcing that they had a new key witness in the Johnny Rosso trial and they were showing clips from previous broadcasts of all these bloody crime scenes and boarded up convenience stores. The reporter lady was standing there outside the mansion they said was Rosso’s home, announcing that the charges were final and the judge decided he was a big enough threat to flea that they were putting him on 24-hour surveillance.

“Just answer the questions, I’ll take care of the rest,” Lenny said as he closed the car door for my mother, and we drove away.

My visit ended sort of quickly, so I was back in Florida when the trial began. It was national news and I was home alone all the time, so since the channels that showed news all day would always have some update about the Johnny Rosso case, I was able to follow it. By the end of it I knew everything about Rosso’s “career,” and from that point on it was the only career I ever wanted.

The star witness finally came out, a waitress at a bar where a lot of behind the scenes work gets done for Rosso. Unbelievably, this waitress identifies Rosso as having been somewhere he swore, under oath, he wasn’t, and the analysts are saying this little piece of information, this itsy bitsy leak, could let enough water in to sink Rosso’s ship. 2 Days of testimony follow of all these made guys one after another trying and failing to make their stories square up to the waitress’s and it’s looking real bad for Rosso. On the third day, the defense comes out with this security tape of the waitress, who turns out to be my mother, doing lines with her friend, who turns out to be an undercover cop, in the backroom of the bar.

Turns out the day my mom became a hero was the day she agreed to testify against Rosso, and thereby keep the DHS from breaking down the door later in the afternoon and taking me away for good.

Lenny, when he said “I’ll take care of everything else,” meant he’ll take care of getting Rosso off the hook and keeping us out of harms way. Here’s how it worked: The police signed a document promising not to charge mom for the drugs she bought from the undercover, and to not send DHS to take me away, and she signed a document promising to testify against Rosso. Meanwhile, Lenny went to Rosso, said he’d tell them how to discredit the key witness, but only if they guaranteed her safety and that of her boy. They agreed. Lenny was not a big guy, but Rosso respected him, maybe even needed him. Lenny was steady, a good man on the inside, and he came in handy in other places as well.

Of course Rosso walked. My mom got laid off immediately but that was okay because she had another offer–at one of Rosso’s second or third cousins’ places, over in Evanston.

The department was humiliated. “They made a deal with that druggy mother,” and “What’s going to happen to her son? That poor boy.” The best is, “At least he lives with his dad in Florida and not with her.”

We pulled off at the rest area in Wilton. One of the guys in the car in front of us opened up my mom’s door and gave her a bag. She went into the restroom.

Two guys from the other car got out and as they were walking by I opened my door, but as I did it it slammed back in my face. The guy that slammed it bounced up on the sidewalk and looked back at me and laughed as he was heading toward the drinking fountain.

I tried again. A big laugh these guys are. Whether with my mom or with my dad, all my memories growing up are of getting picked on by these tough guy bastards. Poked in the ribs, spit on. It’s funny when it’s not you but when it’s you, you wish they weren’t so rough. I did at least.

Standing at the urinal I’m right back in my skin. My cowardly, skin. I’m not sure who the man with the plan was this morning, but he’s sure glad to be off the hook. I look up at the ceiling and close my eyes. I had my first job. Next time the guys were talking, I was going to have my place at the ta–

Hands come down on my shoulders and start shaking me from left to right, forward and backward, left, right, i’m trying to hold on to my penis but it’s spraying urine on my hand and on the wall, and on my shirt, it’s getting all over the bathroom, it’s getting all over my only pair of pants.

The shaking stops and I turn my head to see Carl and Tony Rosso, Johnny’s nephews, looking exactly the same as ever, doubled over laughing and pointing their fat fingers at me.

I used to wind up on the wrong end of their schoolyard pranks, back around when I moved here sophomore year, but I never fought back, so they lost interest in me pretty quick. They were Rossos. I was starstruck. Meanwhile, to them, I wasn’t exactly family, but since I was protected it was sort of assumed I could end up in the mix, if I wanted to, which I did, but with Carl and Tony’s help, with their liquor I couldn’t drink and their drugs I couldn’t smoke, I quickly learned that I wasn’t cut out for it. I think it’s because I don’t like low-level work, they think it’s because I’m “a fag.”

I got out of the bathroom and my mom was standing under the picnic shelter looking as brand new as the clothes she’d just put on. My hero, Johnny Rosso, was giving her a light.