Catholic Guilt

My girlfriend believes everything happens for a reason. She doesn’t think it was a coincidence that Markie moved back to Chicago at the same time Val got hired at Smiling Jim’s.

Markie was an OG Chicago service industry guy. But he’d been living in Austin for about ten years before I met him. A dear friend of his was diagnosed with cancer, and he moved back North to take care of him during the pandemic. Of course, Jim hired him back. On his first night returning to the bar, three of the fingers on his right hand were all wrapped up in medical tape.

            “Three guys tried to jump me, my last week in Austin. They didn’t realize I knew Muay Thai…” he smiled, “Fingers are busted though. Keep hurting them again before they heal.”

            Val was a pastry chef. She went to Johnson & Wales. But the only pastries she ever made were her chocolate pecan pies on our birthdays and during the holidays. Otherwise, she was our cocktail server. “You wanna fight?” she’d say jokingly on nights when it was slow. She’d hold up her hands like an Irish bareknuckle boxer and speak in a 1930s gangster’s accent. Me and Markie would juke her out, clenching our fists. She’d flinch and laugh, her eyes gleaming in the bar light reflecting in her glasses. It was endearing to us. Val could never hurt a fly. She was a saint. It would be a sin to lay a hand on her.

            Me, I was raised a good catholic boy. It didn’t stay that way, but what stayed with me was the guilt. The first time I broke the law, I threw a rock through a window of a house in Joliet the Halloween after I turned thirteen. The boys I was with had all planned to do it together, to throw all our rocks at the same time. When the time came, only I followed through. The rest ran away the second they heard the shattering of the glass. A seething voice growled out in the night, and a light flipped on from the second story. The front door swung open, and I bolted for my life. It was then that I realized my actions would have consequences. And that if I were to continue, it would be my duty to escape them.

            I cried myself to sleep that night. I felt I was destined to go to Hell. The next day I went to church at St. Stanislaus and confessed to Father Mariusz. Under the crucified Christ, I said three Hail Mary’s and the Lord’s Prayer twice, but I still didn’t feel forgiven. A Pandora’s box had been opened the previous night. Monday morning before school, my actions were validated by the appreciation of my peers, that I would be bold enough to commit to things most others were scared to do.

            By the time I met Markie and Val, I had been living in Chicago for ten years. I hardly told people I was from Joliet unless they pried. I worked bartending at Smiling Jim’s and pushed cheap bud on the side. There was a level of self-loathing for the way I turned out, rooted in my catholic guilt. But a well-stocked bar, generous regulars, and a replenished plastic cup of Hamm’s Draught Lager helped me not feel anything bad or good besides a numbing buzz, an ease to take the edge off in the black evenings that blended with gray mornings and early dusks.

            The night I came to work and found Val all fucked up at the counter, I had been confronted by some wannabe gang banger from Little Village on the Pink Line headed towards downtown. It was shortly after Thanksgiving. The Christmas lights were already up and glowing in the city. I got on the train at Damen and rode to Clark and Lake. The whole way this young kid with a Latin shag and shoddy face and hand tattoos was smoking cigarettes and crushing tall cans of Four Loko with his buddy. They blasted Soundcloud Rap straight from phone speakers and fogged up the train car. He was talking all hard about something. Guns. Gangs. Opps. Folks. The hood. I shook my head and bit my tongue, trying not to pay attention. I had the anger of my father. And about just as much patience.

            At Clark and Lake, the two of them got off and headed through the doors down towards the street. I followed behind. When I got to the hallway, they shouted and slammed the doors in my face, laughing. Sarcastically, I did the same, swinging them back in front of the people behind me, with a ripping creak and a thud. Past the corner of the second floor where the dope and crack dealers cajoled for money, smoked, gambled, and howled, I boarded the downbound escalator directly behind the two gang bangers, sipping their tall cans and mouthing off.

            “We the rawest in the streets,” the kid with the shag was saying. “These ni**a’s think they raw. But they ain’t shit! They pussy ass ni**a’s dog,” he waved his four Loko in his friend’s face. Then he looked to me. “Ya’ll pussy ass ni**as! We the rawest in the streets!”

            Without thinking, my fist reeled back and pummeled into the bridge of his nose. He stammered and spat booze, falling back into the railing, while his friend’s jaw opened in surprise. When he bounced back, I grabbed him by the shoulders and attempted to throw him down the rest of the escalator. About three or four steps down, he caught himself and started screaming.

            “What the fuck bro? Did you just hit me in the face?”

            The CTA travelers coming up the escalator the opposite way gawked and rubbernecked at the situation. “You just hit me in the face bro! Pussy ass bitch!” He continued. Still, his friend did nothing.

            By the time we were at the bottom of the escalator, I couldn’t get a word in. He kept yapping, and I just stared into his eyes. “You don’t even know, bro! I’ma kill your ass, bro! I’ma kill!” He gestured his right hand like a gun and feigned shooting me. The CTA workers gathered around the turnstiles, eating potato chips and drinking soda pop like cows grazing behind a wooden fence, while the kid and his friend backed away, spouting threats.

            From there, I switched trains and headed to Jim’s. When I got there, Val was sitting at the bar nursing a beer and a shot. She had worked the day shift, taking deliveries, and was still hanging out even past 8 PM. Before I could tell her my story, I was stopped by the broken look in her eyes. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

            “I don’t really want to go home tonight,” she told me. “It hurts to walk. I’d rather just sit here.”

            “Somethin’ happen?”

            “I fell,” she smiled sheepishly.

            “What are you in the mob or something? ‘I fell…’” I laughed. When her face stayed serious, my smile faded.

            “Look at this,” she said. Val pulled up a picture on her phone. Her leg was all black and bruised. “I forgot to shave. Don’t judge me.”

            “I ain’t judging you,” I told her.

            “I feel so alone,” Val said. “I haven’t been alone in so long. I’ve always lived with my dudes when I’ve had them. Jackson…I thought he was different. I’ve been in so many dysfunctional relationships. I feel like an idiot, you know? If it keeps happening, I must be the constant. And Jackson, he made it seem like he was different. He always needed to make a point when he did something nice, as if to show me he was better than the other men I’ve been with. It took me breaking up with him to show his true colors.”

            “Yeah?”

            “This is the third ex-boyfriend to have stalked me. At this point it’s just my fucking fault.”

            “It’s not your fucking fault, Val.”

            “I can’t go home. Have you ever felt so alone in the world, and you can’t even go home to your own bed?”

            I thought about my girlfriend then. We’d been together for half a decade. And before that, I was with my ex for about seven years. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt alone besides the few months in between the two.

            “Well, tell me where to find him,” I said to Val. “I’ll take care of him for you.”

            “You don’t wanna do that. He’s connected. He was in the Irish mob for a while but got 86’d. He’s with some Serbian gangster types now. Always an outsider cause he’s not full blooded. But he’s connected. He’s got people, you know?”

            “Then call the police.”

            “I did. They threw it out. Sided with him. They knew his name. Didn’t wanna touch it.”

            “Well, Val. Hang out here tonight. Don’t go home until you can get a ride from one of us. Here, have a water.” I poured her a glass and tossed in a straw. She sipped it slowly and bobbed her head, intoxicated, while stand-up bass clicked on the stereo to old rockabilly records beating steady with foxtrot drums.

            The next day I got called into work on my night off. When I got there, I was told by Markie that Val was in the hospital. “She says she can’t feel her leg,” he told me. “They wanted to keep her overnight.”

            “She said she fell on it or something.”

            “Must’ve fallen pretty hard…”

            “Right….”

            “That Jackson prick. Few nights ago, he followed her to a bar. Chased her out and down an alleyway. She fell to the ground. I’ve skateboarded basically my whole life. Never fucked up my leg that bad just from tripping.”

            “He had to have booted her.”

            “I’d like to boot him.”

            “They say he’s connected,” I said. “The Irish mob or something.”

            “Man, there ain’t no Irish mob in Chicago these days!” Markie laughed, exposing yellow teeth. “Well maybe there is, but it ain’t no Vice Lord or Disciples shit! They’re just running the trash companies. It’s not like the Sopranos no more. You know, in Muay Thai, there’s like a million ways to bust someone’s leg up all ugly. I can make it look horrific. Don’t even need to break the bone.”

            “If you’re serious, just know I’m in. I don’t got a car or nothing. But if you pick me up sometime, we can go get it done.”

            Markie laughed. “Well, we don’t really wanna get a car too close to where we do it if you know what I’m saying.”

            “Right,” I nodded, embarrassed to have exposed my novice.

            “What we do, is we get two guys to create a distraction. Brush by him. You and me come in and bust him up for ten, fifteen seconds and get outta there. Hell, I can leg lock him up while you stomp him!”

            “I’ve got some steel toes I could wear.”

            “Hey, listen man,” Markie said. “Let me talk to Val when she gets out. I don’t want her to know nothin’. But I’m gonna get a location out of her. Somewhere he hangs. But for real, not a word. Hey! Todays the first? Happy December! This will be the Christmas gift Val never knew she received!”

            “Like A Christmas Carol meets A Clockwork Orange,” I laughed. Markie smiled and shook his head. We bumped fists and got back to work.

            I got home from work that night, drunk off High Life and shots of Fernet to find my girlfriend passed out under a blanket on our leather couch. “Hey. Pssst. Hey baby! I’m home!”  I whispered to her, pulling the blanket from over her face. I kissed her on the cheek,, and her eyes fluttered open, glazed over in the trance of the line between dreams and the physical world.

            “I just had a nasty dream,” she told me. “It felt so real. But it was nasty.”

            “Well, what was it?”

            “In my sleep I woke up on this couch, and the whole apartment was on fire. All your books, your vinyl records, your art. It was all burning. My plants were on fire. The walls were crumbling down. Our whole lives were falling apart. And I felt like it was my fault. I was apologizing. And you were standing there while I tried to pull you out, going, ‘No, babe. Babe, it’s okay. We’re gonna be okay. It doesn’t matter.’ And then the phone rang. Not my cell phone, but the rotary phone that’s never connected. And I picked it up, and there was a voice on the other end. ‘What the fuck is going on over there?’ It asked. And I knew it was my father.”

            “Your father?”

She hadn’t seen the man in years.

            “A phone call in a dream is a bad thing, boo. It’s never good. It’s a wakeup call. The mark of change. Something’s going to happen. Something ugly.”

            “You’re like an oracle,” I laughed.

            “You don’t believe me,” she shrugged. “It was so ugly. There was nothing we could do.”

            It was then, around 3 AM, that my buddy Tim called from New York City, interrupting our conversation. He had just gotten back to the States from Amsterdam. He quit Smiling Jim’s a few months before, and Markie stepped in to take his place. Tim was fed up with the service industry. He wasn’t a bartender. He was an artist. And an artist needed to live.

“I can’t go to sleep every night just to wake up and work every day.” He told me. “That’s not life. That’s a fucking lie. Before I got to Amsterdam, I went to Paris. I walked through the streets towards the Eiffel Tower, laughing at the absurdity! I wasn’t supposed to be there! I’m a working-class American! Born and raised! My father was a criminal! I’m not supposed to walk through the streets of Paris with a baguette, drinking cheap wine! I’m an enigma! Because I am living!

“And when I got to Amsterdam! I walked through the red-light district. It’s the district with the oldest architecture. The most Dutch architecture at least. And there are families walking through covering their little son’s and daughter’s eyes with their palms as they take historic tours through the oldest part of the city, while whores with bolt on tits and plastic lips dance naked for the passersby in glass boxed windows lit with red bulbs. The men all go up to the windows and nod. But it’s up to the woman! If they say ‘Come in,’ then you can come in. Then it’s all transactional before it’s anything sexual!

“I stayed in my hostel three days contemplating it, before I made my move. And even then, I spent hours passing all the windows, going onto side streets past trans prostitutes waving giant cocks, bigger than mine, and rubbing their plastic tits against the glass. In a back alley, I saw a girl in a window, curvy and pale. Looked just like my favorite porn star. She had an undercover cop guarding her. He looked straight up like a thug. I thought, ‘This guy’s either gonna stab me, or he’s her bodyguard.’ I nodded to her, and she let me in. But let me tell you. When I paid her the forty Euros for the hour and she slipped my clothes off on the mattress, my legs were trembling. She put a condom over my flaccid penis and started to blow me. But I was shaking. I couldn’t believe I was really going through with it. I instantly felt regret, and at the same time, never felt more alive. I’m an artist. I’m a writer. This is what we do! This is what I need to do! A guy like me isn’t supposed to be in Europe! It was subversive!”

That night I forgot my girlfriend’s dream and passed out on the couch to have my own visions, of turkey vultures, suburban tennis, stab wounds, and floating cars in highway traffic jams. I wasn’t like my girlfriend. I couldn’t find meaning in dreams, much less in the actions of our lives.

The weeks went on. Eat. Sleep. Work. Repeat. By Christmas Eve, Markie had coaxed a location out of Val. The Shamrock Club on Irving and Kedzie. Jackson spent the holidays there. He didn’t have much for family. But it was Irish, and it was open.

Markie parked his car on Western, and we walked to Kedzie. “Paul and Dave are gonna meet us over there to cause the distraction when he comes out to head home. We get him quick and good. No need to say nothing. He’ll know why it’s happening.”

Paul and Dave were barbacks at Smiling Jim’s. They weren’t the toughest guys, but they respected Markie. He had a name in the establishment. He was part of the bar’s lore.

We got to The Shamrock Club just as it started snowing. The white flakes glistened in the haze of the street light, landing on the swiping wipers of passing cars, breaking the void of the night with glaring headlights. Paul and Dave were dressed in all black, smoking outside the bar. I couldn’t tell if they were shivering or just shaking out of nervousness.

“Way to not look obvious,” Markie smiled, busting their balls.

“What were we supposed to wear?” shrugged Dave.

“Wait around the corner here,” grunted Markie.

“One sec,” Paul whispered, moving to put his cigarette out on the brick of the building.

“You can take your cigarette with you, you fucking moron!” I laughed. I was excited. I had been violent many times before in my adult life, but never premeditated. It felt like I was about to put on a show. We waited there for Jackson around the corner of The Shamrock Club, and the longer it took, the more my anxiousness turned to nervousness. My legs shook. Am I living? I asked myself, thinking of my buddy Tim with a whore in Amsterdam. Is this living?

“He ain’t coming…” muttered Dave.

“C’mon. It’s cold. Snowing. I’m freezing. Cops keep passing by. Let’s call it a night, boys,” said Paul.

“He’s gonna come. Be patient. Do it for Val, you fucks!” barked Markie, adjusting the skull cap beanie on his forehead and rubbing his palms.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Markie,” Dave protested. “This just feels stupid now. What are we doing man?”

“We’re living,” I told him.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Paul glared.

“I’m staying!” I said.

“Well, we’re going!” Dave said. “C’mon, Paul, I got my car round back in the lot.”

“Pathetic…” Markie shook his head. In a moment’s time, it was just me and him. Dave’s car pulled out of the lot, and squealed down the street through the static mist just as Jackson swung open the door to The Shamrock Club and stumbled down the block, adjusting his flat cap and attempting to light up a cigarette with cupped hands around his mouth.

“C’mon,” Markie nudged me. We kept our heads low and followed.

Halfway down the block, I tapped Jackson on the shoulder. He swung his body towards me, sneering. Markie came up the other side of him and walloped him in the lower leg real rough. Jackson shrieked and crumpled back into Markie’s arms. The cigarette fell right out of his mouth and smoldered on the ground, curling smoke next to his flat cap in a piled dusting of snow.

There wasn’t much noise besides the rumbling of passing cars and the muted music pulsing from back inside the bar. We didn’t talk or even shout. We just grunted and struggled while Jackson cursed incoherently and whimpered, while Markie locked his legs on the ground, and I stomped out his knees with my boots. Just ten to fifteen seconds, Markie had said. But it was more than that. It felt like an eternity. And even worse. I was enjoying myself.

We were only interrupted by the whooping of sirens and the flashing of red and blue lights. We bolted, like I had done in Joliet as a youth. But this time I wasn’t as fast on my feet. I was wearing my steel-toe boots. They were tough, but they were clumsy. Markie had gym sneakers on. He got away much faster. As for me, before I knew it, I was on the ground, with my hands behind my back. I lifted my face to see Markie escaping into the darkness blanketed with a silently roaring spread of white, lit phlegm yellowed by the stale street lights. Merry fucking Christmas. 

I teared up with guilt in the back of the cop car, an adult version of the little boy who was bold enough to break a window in the south suburbs until it was time to face himself in the mirror. I thought of the crucified Christ, of Father Mariusz. Both seemed so far away. They had a birthday party to attend.

I said some prayers for myself, but it didn’t matter. Just two Hail Marys swallowed by sirens. Like flies into a spider’s web.

I spent forty-eight hours in Cook before being bailed out by my girlfriend. It was the scariest forty-eight hours of my life. I had nobody but myself. My whole adulthood was a front. I always took what I could get away with. The people impressed by my vagabond stories had checked out of my life with their bar tabs.

I wasn’t a criminal. I was a bartender with an attitude and something to prove. I spent those nights with a stoic cellmate with tears tattooed under his eyes, a callous jail guard, and the sounds of hate and torment flaming on the cell block.

The holidays were over. I lost my job at Smiling Jim’s and spent my days preparing for my trial. Assault and battery. It didn’t look good.

I didn’t see Val or Markie, or even Paul and Dave, after that. We all kept a low profile. I wanted to reach out and apologize or something. But I didn’t even know what I’d be apologizing for. The only bit of closure I got was a chocolate pecan pie placed in a box on my doorstep after a ring of the bell and the sound of a car pulling off down the street. It was the same kind of pie Val made for my birthday back in October. A little bit of sweetness for the bitter.

“I always tell you, everything happens for a fucking reason,” my girlfriend told me when she took me home from Cook County. “Let this be a fucking wake up call, goddamit! It only gets worse from here if you continue. You wanna tear our lives apart? You can’t be acting like this anymore! You’re from the suburbs, not Douglass Park! Is this my fault or something? Don’t I show you enough love? Why do I have to feel fucking guilty to see you like this? Fuck… All over some broad? Why don’t you go fuck her instead, jackass?”

“No, babe,” I told her, “We’re gonna be okay. Everything’s gonna be okay. Look, I’m living. We’re living! I’m alive. It doesn’t matter!” I felt manic with exhaustion, fear, and adrenaline. My girlfriend looked to me with what I can only describe as an expression of inquisitive disgust. She didn’t seem to recognize me. Like I had become some sort of monster. I knew I was going to Hell.

“It doesn’t matter??” she stammered.

Then she said something that undermined all my moral reasoning for being in the situation in the first place.

“What the FUCK is wrong with you?”