Matt was a musician that was mostly supported by his parents who resided in the suburbs of Detroit while he chased his dream to be a musician in Chicago. Matt was an uncommonly good looking young man that also had the body structure where by he looked as though he spent hours a day in the gym when actually he did nothing. No weights, no running or biking. Sex was his only form of physical activity. Mathew was having a lot of sex with multiple women. Mathew was trying to make it playing his own music which was what everyone called alternative. It was really just popular music geared towards white suburban kids who did not really care for dance music. To make the lion’s share of his money, he played with three other guys at a place called the Cubby Bear Lounge which was across the street from the infamous, Wrigley Field. It was on Wednesday nights that he played covers of famous songs with three other guys so that drunken patrons could come up on stage and sing live Karaoke.
Mathew had just played the night before and had woken up to a chubby blond girl who had a Chicago Cubs tattoo on her right butt cheek. Her name escaped Matt. He was really bad with names. She will forever be known as the chubby girl who played rugby at a small college on the Illinois and Iowa border. She was dear to him. Matt left her
apartment on Addison and drove home.
Matt was on his way to his apartment when two of Chicago’s finest happened to be behind Matt at a red light. Officer Ciccone happened to notice the Michigan plates with an expired sticker. They ran the plates and found out that Matt had an outstanding warrant for his arrest. A few years earlier, Matt had taken money his father gave to him and bought a small house in Detroit. It was not in the suburbs but actually in the city of Detroit. The house was in the northwest portion of Detroit near Grand River and Seven Mile Road. It was the anthesis of where he grew up in suburban Detroit in a 25,000 square foot house in Farmington Hills.
The house had been purchased for cash. The old guy who sold it was a widower who had worked for AC Delco his whole adult life after returning from fighting in the Pacific during World War II. His two children moved to Boston and San Francisco and had not seen their parents in years. Of course they flew in for a few days at the time of the funeral. Both of them spent most of their time continuing to do business on their Blackberry phones/computers when they weren’t consoling their father.
The old guy had purchased land with his wife and had always planned on retiring to the upper peninsula of Michigan. They never got around to it before she died. She was gardening and had pain in her shoulder for a few days that radiated across her chest. She took a few painkillers. The old lady and the old man ate their breakfast at the Radford Coney Island and read about the mayor of Detroit sending text messages on the city provided cell phone to his mistress. Neither one of them knew what a text message was. They still had a rotary phone.
After breakfast, the old woman put on her sun hat and weeded their backyard garden while the old man cut the front lawn. The pain grew sharper even though it had been an hour since she took two strong painkillers. She stood and before she could hit the ground she was dead. The old man found their Golden Retriever sitting at her side. She lay peacefully in the grass as if she were only asleep. The old man thought about the day he met her at the USO and vowed to not get killed in the war, so that they could get married, have a house and raise a family. As routine and mundane life was, as old and unattractive as his wife had become in fifty years of marriage, he cried as he approached her corpse. As stiff as his back was, he sat on the grass on a cloudless day and stroked her straw like gray hair and cried alone. It was soon after that day that the old man put his home on the market. Matt offered cash and got all the old man’s belongings except pictures. The pictures went to the Upper Peninsula with the old man, the dog and their Ford Truck.
In little time at all, Matt’s girlfriend Amber had moved in as did several other people who crashed on floors and couches. The house smelled of cat urine and spilled alcohol. The grass was long and highly neglected. It caught nobody’s attention. Many homes in the area were sold for under market value or were abandon all together prior to being foreclosed on. Many abandon places were used to house pit bulls that were used to fight for money. A popular sport in Detroit. Young men trolled good areas looking for smaller domestic dogs that they could feed to the pit bulls. In order to eat, the starving pit bulls would kill the smaller house pets. This kept the dogs primed to continue fighting and killing. Nobody had jobs to speak of and dog fights brought income to poor people. Even though they no longer had jobs with GM, Ford or Chrysler, the under employed of Detroit still drove domestic vehicles.
Matt’s girlfriend Amber had him hooked on opiates of various kinds. Matt’s girlfriend had a small business of dealing drugs from their home. Matt pulled in to the drive way one evening and a dozen or more men in black uniforms surrounded his car. Matt’s girlfriend escaped with her pimp who actually made her sell drugs and her body on the side. Matt was arrested and was out on bail when he moved all of the sudden to Chicago.
Details were just that to Matt. Little things like registering the vehicle were on his list of things to do that would never actually get done unless he was forced to do it. It had been three years and Matt assumed that the State of Illinois would have no record of his arrest warrant. The tag that was six months expired on a Michigan plate caught the police officer’s attention. Speaking on the cell phone while driving within the city limits of Chicago was also a violation worthy of a citation. Officer Ciccone once had a girlfriend who left him for a guy who owned a black BMW like the one that Matt was driving. Everything lined up perfectly for Matt to be caught.
Officer Ciccone had once been in his twenties with a full head of hair and had raced around the northwest part of Chicago in his Trans-Am. Officer Ciccone had his share of moving violations, parking ticket, driving under the influence tickets that caused him to lose his license and spend a short period of time in the infamous Cook County Jail. The whole city of Chicago and most of the suburbs, fall into the jurisdiction of Cook County.
Officer Ciccone had an uncle who was able to get him into the police force. Two thousand applicants applied back in 1987. The city of Chicago was looking for a minority female and instead they got a 100% Italian male… With an attitude.
Officer Ciccone prided himself on never losing a street fight despite the fact that he was five feet seven inches and one hundred fifty five pounds. He was bald up the middle with bushy hair on the sides and a thick moustache. The hair may have left his head but it grew strong in his ears, buttocks and back. Officer Ciccone always chewed gum on the left side of his mouth and chewed in a slow circular motion clockwise. Officer Ciccone hated every ethnic group available except Italians but hated young cocky,
good looking guys that reminded him of himself when he was young and vibrant.
“Look at this fucking guy… Expired tags on an outta state plate, talking on the goddamn cell phone… Run the fucking plates.”
Fearing that his car would be taken from him in the state of Michigan, Matt had the car registered to a fleeting friend by the name of Xavier Garcia. Xavier Garcia was a national of Mexico who had also had brushes with the law. His crime was that he carjacked a car in Indiana and took it across state lines to Illinois. The police department in the suburb of Golf, sought to stop him for travelling fifty miles an hour in a forty mile an hour zone on a road called Golf Road. Xavier stopped the car, climbed a fence and ran through the golf course. The golf course led to a bike path in what they call a forest preserve. A forest preserve is a large park like swath of land set aside to look like a forest. Usually youngsters drink and fuck in the forest preserves. Homosexuals and Heroin meet in the public bathrooms. Heroin addicts are not necessarily homosexual but willing to perform homosexual acts for money. Families and corporations also have picnics and people do jog and ride bicycles through them. There is some positive activity.
As is usually the case, Xavier left behind an envelope with his name on it. The police came looking for him at his previous apartment and were never able to find him. They had new trails to pursue. A warrant was put out for Xavier’s arrest.
“If you’re not Xavier Garcia, I need to see something really fast proving to me that you are not him, Mr. Garcia or we will be going for a ride in my vehicle…” said Officer Ciccone smugly while popping his gum.
I forgot to mention that Officer Ciccone had a first name which was Guido. Guido grew tired of such an Italian sounding name and was given the nickname of Horse
one day in junior high. The boys had to start taking showers after gym class and it was duly noted by all the boys that Guido’s penis hung down to the middle of his thigh. Guido was embarrassed by this as a youngster but as time went on, it was a source of pride. After a few cocktails or being spurned by a woman in a club, Horse would unleash his member to show women and men alike and spin it around like a windmill. Horse’s penis was really one of his few attributes. As a human being, he lacked empathy and was quite jealous of most men that he felt had one up on him. Matt was just too young, fit and attractive.
“I… Think I left it at home. If you guys could just follow me to my apartment, I could run up and get it”… Said Matt, while still looking through his glove compartment for something with his name on it.
“Oh that will be fine… Are you hungry? We could get a bite to eat along the way too… Do you have any fucking idea how much bullshit we gotta deal with in a day? That was a question to not be answered but one that should cause you to wonder.
“Now Mr. Garcia, I am going to have to ask you to step out of that vehicle and place both your hands on the hood… Am I fucking clear? If you do anything stupid, stupid things will happen.”
With that, Matt rode in the back seat of squad car 2948 of the Chicago Police Department. It smelled of stale alcohol, body odor and urine. Matt had the handcuffs placed on his wrists, behind his back. The two officers argued over which Chicago baseball teams were better. Horse was born and raised off of Harlem Avenue near Grand Avenue in an area of the northwest side of Chicago called Montclair. Horse had been a life long Cubs fan.
Officer Sean Reilly, being Irish from the Bridgeport neighborhood, home to both mayors by the last name of Daley. Sean still lived in Bridgeport and loved the Southside. He hated working on the north side but such is life. They both went back to arguing about the Cubs-Sox series that was taking place at U.S. Cellular field, the home of the Chicago White Sox.
“The series is at Cellular because of the Gay Pride Parade on North Halsted. You know that right? The gay parade is more important to the north siders than the god damn Cubs. The Cubs are fucking losers and always will be. There won’t never be no World Series champions on the north side. No fucking way. In 2005 the Sox won 11 out of 12 games, and swept the World Series. What have the Cubs done? Not a fucking thing…” said Officer Reilly, with a toothpick dangling from his mouth.
“Get the fuck outta here with that south side bullshit. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the Sox. They win the World Series and its on page fucking two. The president meets with the girl’s Lacrosse team from Northwestern University but sends that black broad to shake hands with the Sox…Besides what the fuck you know bout baseball? If
they used a goddamn hockey puck, you’d know how to play the game.”
“Alright, bitch… You know what? We’re going to the cages right now and settle this. I could have gone to college on a division III scholarship for baseball. You messed with the wrong Mick… Twenty dollars says I will get more hits on the fast pitch than you…” said Reilly.
“I’ll take your damn money and that still won’t prove that the White Sox don’t suck my big cock…”
The two officers drove squad car number 2948 with Matt in the back seat, to a miniature golf place that had batting cages. They parked the squad car next to the cages in full view of Matt and asked him to critique them. They both put in five dollars worth of quarters. A foul ball did not count, there had to be contact.
Sean stripped down to his, if you’ll pardon the expression, Dago T. He had a tattoo on his right shoulder that said in Gaelic, “Erin Go Bragh” with a harp under the words. His left shoulder had a tattoo of the Chicago White Sox logo which is Sox in gothic letters. Sean was tall and wiry. He smacked just about each ball that came at him at a speed of 85 to 90 miles an hour. Out of the one hundred balls, Sean had 78 solid hits.
Horse had forty eight. When Horse was done, he took the bat and threw it at the mechanical arm. The owner saw this and came out of his office. He was an older bald man with glasses on. He tried to curtail his anger since he knew the two men were police officers and their job was to serve and protect.
“Are you goofy? Whaddya doing? You trying to break my machine?” Said Sol, as he jogged out to retrieve his aluminium bat.
“Your goddamn machine throws curve balls. It says fucking fast balls. I had more than one of them nearly bean me. If I got hit by one of them, I’d sue you so fucking hard you’d think you got my whole shoe stuck in your ass… You should be refunding me a fin for all them curve balls.”
Solomon went back into the office where his wife was stripping the paint from her nails. Her eye brows were removed and painted on with a black crayon like device. Her dress looked like a night gown. Eloise, the wife of Solomon, was talking to her sister who lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. Eloise still had a New Jersey accent. Aside from talking and stripping the nail polish from her nails, she was chewing gum, smoking and watching Jerry Springer. Solomon yelled at Eloise. He often yelled at her and she often yelled at him.
“I told you the smell of that turpentine makes my eyes tear and my throat close up. I told you not to smoke in here either. If someone from the city comes, we’re going to get a $500.00 fine. Tell your sister you’ll call her back, I need you to get off your fat ass.”
Eloise took a drag of her cigarette, leaving bright red lipstick around the base of the filter. She smiled and winked at Solomon.
“No, no… It’s just Sol crying about something once again… The doctor told him that his heart is strong enough for Viagra. He just has no interest in sex anymore… He’s as useful as tits on a bull.”
Solomon took two five dollar bills and handed them back to Sean and Horse. Many officers shook down shop owners for free food and coffee. Free swings at the batting cages were a new one for Sol. The two officers got back into the car. Sean
proceeded to rub it in that he hit nearly thirty more balls than Horse. Sean asked Matt who looked better. Matt should have thought better to answer truthfully. Horse got infuriated.
“You think so, Garcia? Let’s see what you think when some big fucking nigger has got a cock in your ass… That’ll be a good going away present before they deport your fucking ass back to Mexico, you fucking beaner.”
Now keep in mind while this is all going on, it is a warm sunny summer day in Chicago. There are a few scattered clouds looking wispy against a blue sky. Barometric pressure was at a hair over 29.62. There was a chance of rain. It was raining in
Davenport, Iowa but the wind was changing and it appeared as though all the rain would head north and east towards Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The president of the United States was on a farewell tour of the world. He was having tea in Pakistan with a man named Musharif. The general was about to step down. Most Americans did not worry about this. Some did. The people of Pakistan were upset over this. Coincidentally, within the same borders of Pakistan, in caves near the Afghanistan frontier was a man by the name of Osama bin Laden. Two sworn enemies sharing the same country if for only a short day, it would have been like Churchill and Hitler separated in a public bathroom by a piece of metal between stalls. Both men urinating and reflecting on the progress of defeating the other the man in war. Hitler may have finished quickly and not bothered with washing his hands and never met Churchill. This never did happen but as the saying goes, stranger things in life have happened. You’ll have to excuse me, I do this a lot and not just when I write.
And so the president was in Pakistan, a man named Obama was in North Dakota discussing how he would remove American troops from Iraq within sixteen months.
Oddly enough, the people of the state of North Dakota were almost entirely white except for the reserves left for the former indigenous people of the region. Custard may have lost but ultimately the natives lost the war. Be all that as it may, a man African on his father’s side and some sort of a European melange on his mother’s side was holding a press conference in a state where few black men have bothered to tarry. Across the country in Anaheim, California, was an older white man by the name of Mc Cain who had been held in a prisoner of war camp during the Vietnam War. He too was trying to convince the nation that he was the right man to replace the man who was visiting Pakistan.
Now keep in mind while these things are happening, the price of a gallon of gas is at $4.10 nationally for unleaded, $4.55 if you need Diesel. A million homes are in foreclosure, large banking institutions are failing or being bought out by foreign investors. The United States Dollar is worth less than the Canadian Dollar and yet the book you’re
reading cost forty percent more to purchase within Canada. Storms are flooding the Mississippi region from Minnesota to Louisiana and wild fires were burning from Sacramento, California to Reno, Nevada. A tropical storm was just taking shape off the coast of Cape Verde near the continent of Africa that would bowl over small Caribbean Islands within a week. People were being ignored in the Darfor region, China was getting ready for the Olympics, polar bears were dying in even larger numbers across the arctic region and the national debt of the United States was at 93,000,000,000 at that moment or 36,000.00 for all those living within the United States, legally and illegally.
National league teams were playing American league teams in Major League Baseball and for many that was the most important thing happening that day, unless one was headed to jail. None of the above had anything to do with anything. I just thought you should know that other than this human interest story, there were much bigger things at play that nobody really cared enough about.
