Good guys; bad guys, all the same

  Love is an empty box inside my chest, a cold vacuum cube my body aches to fill but cannot. I keep thinking of a woman a hundred miles away from where to whom I write love letters, but never get a reply. I hear her voice in my head always repeating the same bleak words: “go away.” I keep climbing into my car to drive to her, picking up the phone to call, yet take up pen and paper instead, knowing I can’t reach her without her calling the police. I get drunk and drag my friends through hours of details none of them want to hear. “Go home, Matty,” they tell me. “Sober up.” Some even fix me up with other girls, who give up on me half way through the date when I talk too much about the girl I really love. I ought to be in a methadone clinic. Or smoke lettuce cigarettes. I’m so addicted I’m scared I’ll smother her if I get too close, white too many letters, dial her up too many times a day or week. I count my calls, my cards and even how many times I pass her house, never daring to slo...

  I thought I had wasted my time coming to New York to see Harry until the woman came up to me in the bar and handed me the note. It was in Harry’s script and told me to meet him here later after he got off from work. Work? What kind of work does a gangster do? I kept imagining streets flowing with blood while I wandered the city to waste time. I don’t even know why he wanted to see me in the first place, just a phone call to my Chicago office and an airplane ticket stuff under my office door. Rock and Bendon said he wanted to kill me for the hard time I gave him in LA years earlier. But even gangsters don’t send airplane tickets to their victims. So I came, even if it meant missing Christmas at home. Neither Rockefeller Center with its huge tree nor Time Square with its lights could drag my mind back from Harry, and the question as to why he needed to see me, and on Christmas Eve of all nights. I was exhausted by the time I got back to the bar and the first drink made me sleepy, c...

  Sam Bowman may be the no good rat people say he is, but I’ll always have respect for the man, no matter how man people he killed before the cops cut him down. Maybe he intended to rob us when he came into our place two years ago. Then he saw how hard up we were and how empty our shelves were, and how skinny my wife and kids looked, and knew we couldn’t make a living running a stores like that and decided not to hurt us worse than life already had. With the economy as bad as it was, nobody shopped in our place so we ate more than we sold, and this kept us alive. Bowman told me he wanted a job. I laughed and said I wanted one, too, but I offered to feed him if he was hungry. It was the least I could do. He accepted. I guess maybe I might have felt scared had I known how much of a killer he was, but he seemed to appreciate the company at the victuals, taking his share and no more, talking a little about what he had seen on the road. When he decided to go, he pulled me aside and told...

Spielberg and Tom Cruise   (On the telephone)   That’s fine, Harry. I can’t hear you too, well. Are you on a cell phone? Sure, anything you want. I know you got some good ideas. But not all your ideas make good movies. I know you hear that from the studios. But you pay me to make the hard choices. What’s that, Harry? Sure I’m listening. You have my undivided attention. Who’s in my office? That Belmont kid. The one I’ve been telling you about. Yes, yes, that’s right – he writes. But he’s got talent, Harry, and he’ll make this picture a hell of a lot better if we give him a chance. No, I don’t have anything against your nephew. He just couldn’t get the idea we needed for the picture. I gave him another chance, Harry. I gave him 47 chances. Each script was worse than the last. I told him this was a love story, not a horror movie. Se he gives me a script with an eight foot green Frankenstein falling in love with a three foot purple hobbit. That may sell well with the WOKE crowd, t...

    I clean the windows once a week, squeaky clean so I can see the whole street, as there is no glass at all, and I see every detail of every tree and house the smudges blind me to sometimes. I have no acute fascination with what goes out there or in the houses of my neighbors; I just don’t like not knowing things, half the reason I troll news websites knowing I won’t like or agree what I get yet determined to know what it is I disagree with. My neighbors think I’m nosy because they see me when I see them, and they snarl at me when I come out to collect the newspaper from my doorstep, saying untrue things perhaps to get me angry. I mostly don’t talk with them when I don’t have to, and I listen to them only when they complain about my dog being off his leach and leaving not-so-friendly calling cards on their manicured lawns. Sometimes I see too much, the domestic disputes through their unguarded windows, shades down as husband-and-wife shout things I cannot hear, kno...

  Henry – the only one of the four of us with a car – drives us to and from work five days a week. While this is no great hassle since we all work in the same warehouse, it is something of a religious experience since Ted is the only one of us who chips in for gas. Louis, who always hogs up the passenger seat claiming he has a trick knee, treats Henry like a cab driver, direction his route and driving even though we take the same way there and back daily, and Henry is the only one of the four of us with a driver’s license. Henry puts up with this indignity with the patience of a saint. Henry would make some woman a real catch if he wasn’t so ugly. Not only is he so thin a blade of grass might envy him, his face breaks out so often and so acutely, he’s developed permanent scars. Yet for all that, Henry is also the most ordinary man you’ll ever meet, someone you could never pick out in a crowd, always dressing in the same pull over sweaters and the same faded jeans. This is not to sa...

              Can you blame me?             It ain’t no trivial thing what that landlord done.             You would have been peeved enough to kill the SOB, too.             Sure, I know this is a rough neighborhood and that people get even for small slights.             And maybe I should have expected him to get even with me.             Maybe my big mistake was not moving out the minute I heard my wife was pregnant again.             I should have gotten rooms on the other side of town.             But I figured even the landlord couldn’t be as c...

  The guns appear a second after my waitress spills coffee on him, and I know I have to do something before somebody gets killed. I just don’t want it to be me. Maybe I’m a fool for taking over my father’s place after the neighborhood changed. Italians, Germans and Jews don’t live here any more; Blacks and Latinos do, and on some nights like this one, everybody seems to have a gun. Even the people have hair-triggers, ready to go off even over the most innocent thing. My father had to deal with junkies and crack addicts. My grandfather, bootleggers and mobsters. Me, I get these guys and sometimes, Gals, and I wonder when it might get better. I keep hoping the yuppies discover this part of town so I can get rich, though deep down I know I’m not a yuppie kind of person. Black, Italian, Latino, Jew – these are real to me, people I can talk to, people I can connect with even if they’re trying to kill me. I tell my son he’s not going to go into this business the way I did. Yet I see the ...

    I come here because I don’t have to hear the old bullshit about how many trucks I didn’t finish in my eight hours of slave labor from a bus who drives a Mercedes home at five when I drive a ten year old rusted out Ford. No one here asks if I am married as long as I can afford to keep buying drinks. The Coke Girls are out of my price ranges so I get stuck with the alcoholic dogs. I don’t mind. Sometimes they can be good for a spin or two in the Ford’s back seat. No one needs to know what I say when I get home. I don’t repeat any of the crap I hear at home because I don’t want to get mad all over again, and beat my wife twice as hard and get myself locked up again. So I keep it all locked up inside my head. Five nights a week I’m as regular as the revenue man, here at five fifteen – five-thirty if traffic’s bad – and out of here by nine so I’m home by nine-thirty. Sometimes the old lady pisses me off enough so that I come here on Saturday night, too. Then I don’t leave until...

    The crowds clear the plaza after hours of standing in a scaling sun. They all seem weary and starved, charmed masses wondering how things could change so quickly – and how a tiny bit of lead can end a dream, leaving red blots on hard pavement when their dreamer once stood. He was their lucky charm, the charm melting on their tip of their tongues, a sweet sound mingling with their chants of support, turned bitter with the after taste of despite. Their face float passed me, dozens – no hundreds of faces – a thong of disappointment. I know how they feel, each having gone from being part of something to being part of nothing – alone. I have always been alone. I have always been a nobody. Now I am a some body holding warm metal between my thighs and smelling the sweet scent of expired gunpowder in my nostrils. I didn’t come expecting much, but hoping for a moment when no one stood between me and him, and when that moment came, I almost blew it, my hands shaking as I lifted the ...