I was sitting in Sam’s at my usual table.
I was drinking the usual and I felt the usual:
bad. I had many people to thank for my
life, and no one to blame…I figured the
mistakes were mine. Whenever anything
good had happened in my life, someone
else was always the catalyst. At least, that
way, when I died, I wouldn’t be pissed off
at that many people. You don’t want to take
a lot of that garbage with you.
So, I was sitting there, having these
thoughts among others, hoping to make it
through another 24 without a whole lot of
fresh scars. If you’ve been around, familiarity
is an important friend…I mean, familiarity
with your environment…your package. This
is not true only from a street sense p.o.v., but
also for the comfort zone. That’s why spiders
build webs. That’s how they grok their space.
Time was passing painlessly more or less…
the best that could be expected. So far, no
new faces..a few fewer older ones…they
had a tendency to vanish one by one from
time to time. Yes, it was as boring as reading
about it…but, having been around, I never
turned my back on the fickleness of the world.
A woman came in…forties…a few years short
of her Rubycon…nice clothes, but, it looked as
if she had been running. When she reached the
bar, she composed herself and sat down. The
room was as unmoved as a sarcophagus. Sam
seemed to know her…he poured her a shot
and said: “Been a while.” “Yes…” pause…
“It has.” A little ripple in our frog pond…I
took a sip of beer and it tasted like my
grandfather. A man walked in, in a way that
made him seem invisible. He took a seat at a
table. He looked like he had always been there
He seemed like a regular, although I’d never
seen him before…and I’d been coming to Sam’s
bar for thousands of years.
Sam was a third generation bartender.
His mother ran a bar in Cicero, and
kept a sawed off shotgun behind the bar.
William Burroughs wrote that, in a
gunfight, you always go for the shotgun
first. Sam loved Burroughs’ writing.
Sam’s grandfather made booze in Chicago,
and had tunnels leading from the distillery
to garages and other innocuous locations
for distribution. One of his great uncles
published a German newspaper on the
North Side. Note: they interned the Japan-
ese in California…why not the Germans
in Chicago?
Sam and the woman were having their
private, semi- intense little chat. The bottle
was now on the bar. The man went to the
other end of the bar and waited. Sam went
over to him and took his order; a pitcher
of margaritas…a bowl of pickles. The lady
was looking straight forward…immersed
in her thoughts. The man
disappeared back to his table. Sam and the
lady continued their conversation….more
pauses between their words.
The man slipped unnoticed up to the bar, and
suddenly pinned the woman’s hand to the bar
with a Bowie knife. A blast blew a hole in the
bar in front of the man. The second blast from
the shotgun blew the man backwards
across the room where he landed in a crumpled
pile. “Guy must been on codeine…” Sam
muttered as he pulled the blade from her hand.
The bar was suddenly empty except for me,
Sam, the lady, and what had once been a fella.
I’d seen this kind of thing before. There was
always a moment of “Now what?” prior to split
second action when peoples’ fates were sealed.
It hadn’t happened in Sam’s for a long time.
Sam was on the phone to the police.
It was time for me to leave.
