The Bouncer
D.B. Rubin
I.
The two codgers sitting storefront on their morning watch on Ashland saw a glint of movement in the car parked across the street. Jack's platinum hair was rising in a morning fog as was his view of the passenger seat containing a pile of money and a 9mm Glock with the chrome handle. It was his car, but he did not remember driving to this spot. Aside from remembering his name, he had no idea of time or place, nor how this mound of cash or and gun arrived to greet him like a perverse mountain seeking its prophet. Jack could be a prophet of doom but he wasn't kicking like that lately. His pent-up anger had found its release on others over the past decade and a half and now was directed inward.
Last he remembered, it was Monday night about 10 PM and he was sitting in a nearly empty rock-bar. Monday night was the evening for those in the tavern trade to hit the pubs of their choice. It was their night, posers were less likely to go out late on a Monday night. That night it was The Exit, equipped with its Goth biker decor and the glare of the blue painting across and above the bar. Jack was the bar's bouncer but was off duty that night. Upon entry to Exit, Jack's ritual was to down a shot of Maker's, bang the shot glass mouth down on the bar, and raise his middle finger to the painting: a portrait of 5 smiley faces including a famous local mass murderer who worked part-time as a clown, a dead rocker and Hitler. Next to him was an already wasted and loquacious Jerkboy with his silent sidekick and guru, Doc. Jack, Jerkboy and Doc were old friends, the troika from the hood.
Doc actually had attended a few years of medical school but was kicked out, a rare event in academia. He had to have done something more than a little lame than flunking a few classes. Questions on this and other sensitive matters were met with an icy stare that froze close any door to discussion especially if the inquirer was familiar with Doc's rep. Doc's name derived from his drug supplying and anatomical talents. Aside from an unlimited supply of pills, he had surgical ability to put a blade in hurtful places. Jerkboy, his loyal acolyte was handy with an ice pick. Jerkboy was a dumb jerk but his moniker was based on the beef jerkies that incessantly hung from his pre-pubescent mouth fed by a less-than-interested-or-talented-cook of a mother. Jack used to run towards trouble with his buddies. Back then, it's where the truth lay, he thought, where brute force would yield answers. Nowadays, life as a bouncer with side jobs in construction kept life simple and a bit safer.
Jack shook his head, hurting with the glare of sun and dazed with a residual buzz of some kind. Across the street he saw two gray heads staring at him and laughing. Laughing he could take, disorientation and creeping panic was something else. He recalled that Jerkboy was complaining to Doc about his banged up right shoulder, a birthday gift provided by Jack the prior weekend when he laid down the old hood's ceremony of one punch per year plus one for good luck. Jerkboy was a southpaw and spared his left shoulder birthday smacks. At 30, that cost JB a big black and blue. The birthday boy and the crowd had egged on Jack and JB had been numb enough from a variety of sources and was going to take it like a man. Jack, generally slow to heat up, didn't want to be shtucked into socking Jerkboy. He even had words with Doc who rarely lost his temper. He knew there would be repercussions. Somehow during that evening-through-the-fog, Jack sensed the complaints were an overture to his repayment of debt. That's the way it always was with the buddies. Shit and cream stayed evenly spread between them.
But then again, what did his memories of those final clear moments in a darkly lit rock bar have to do with the money that stunk to him like unwashed underwear and a gun that hadn't been recently fired but clearly stunk of his fingerprints. The Glock 9 mm was his, a legacy from his dead cop father. It was an unregistered, non-standard issue sidearm that dad tucked under his trousers. Since dad's death, Jack worked well with the piece over the years. Practiced regularly at the target range/gun shop on Mannheim toward O'Hare. In his Jerkboy/Doc running days, used it to threaten and hit people, but never fired. Dad was a tactical officer for the CPD. His job, 'correct the situation, whatever the cost'. That's how this single parent raised him and his younger sister Jen. Part of their legacy embedded in them as well was the way they took on life like he did: a hard living, hard loving, passionate, dispassionate, and paranoid. They also had Dad's sense of street justice.
Looking at the gun triggered his instinct to 'correct the situation' and augmented his panic when he remembered that the gun was supposed to be under his pillow or in a drawer by the bedside. How did it get next to a pile of money? The bills were used, a mix of 5s, 10s, 20s, and some 50s. Based on the weekend hauls of bar cash he escorted to the safe, he guessed about 5 thousand bucks. He stuffed most of the cash under the front seat and tucked away about $500 and the gun in his jacket. One small blessing, the gun had not been recently fired. One small curse, there was rusty brown coating on the edge of the silver handle. Blood, not his. 'SheeeITE', he thought. I did something bad and I don't know to whom but I know payback is around the corner. He gazed up at the gray-boys laughing and pointing. The growing sense of confusion and anxiety were taking hold when the alligator brain slowly emerged, took over, calmed the beast, who looked at the mirror, took deep Sufi-meditation breaths, the color of asphalt. Opening his eyes, he saw calm and one day's beard growth. Cool, oriented to person AND place. However long he's been zoned; it's just been one night and part of it in his car. Parked across the seats on two dudes, poster children for the neighbor hood watchmen. Jack opened the door. Alligator boy was ready to schmooze.
II
The rumble of the Lake St. El thundering just outside the open window woke up Doc. He had a helluva headache and was broiling with anger. After leaving Jack and Jerkboy at Exit he hopped on his Harley and picked up his stash of cash, this week in a key-locker at the Greyhound bus station. This was to be his down payment for a cacophony of euphoric and hype buttons his customers swallowed: some Ex, some acid, some meth, and some barbs. Something for everybody. Doc never was kicked out of medical school. He quit. Realized his old street ways and need for living on the edge made it incompatible with 8 years or more of books, 4 walls, and sick people. He channeled his therapeutic instincts into distributing happy pills to the rich, bored and sad. He also realized in his first year of med school that he was a bonafide sickie himself, a sadist who enjoyed seeing pain in others. His epiphany was found rounding with an anesthesiologist on the pain service. He grew a boner on the groans of the morbidly ill and dying. He also dug the quick fix a gas passer and narcotizer could lay on others as well as himself. Having a squirrelly sense of honor, Doc understood that being a sadist and a physician would clearly get him in trouble. So he quit school and channeled these dark energies into distributing street medicine and an occasional incision to drain an abscess who wouldn't pay the laudable green pus when a bill was due.
Doc's place was an illegal abode. Against many code violations his large one-room loft was tagged for demolition/renovation. His bedroom, living room, bathroom, kitchen combo, took up an entire floor of an abandoned warehouse downtown next to the Lake St. El looping around the center of the big city. Looping like a hangman's noose around Doc's anonymity. A long dark hall and creaky creepy stairway led to this nondescript hideaway. He slipped the landlord cash and drugs to stay here and had been doing so for the past few years. One thing about Doc, after his stint in med school he dropped out of radar view in a manner of speaking. He left no paper or electric trail. Registered an address only in a P.O. box where identity was guarded by a monthly slip of bills. His licenses were phony IDs. He signed no contracts, wrote no checks, never used plastic, and unlike all others in the trade, wore no pager. All transactions were in cash. Most conversations were face-to-face or over a pay phone.
His place was Spartan, clean, and because of it's palatial proportion and its turn-of-the-last-century trim, elegant. Weapons, cash and passports were hidden behind loose boards where no one but he and the many hidden house rats knew. These and other essentials were appropriately stowed, ready to roll out at any moment. Inside Doc's head was a seismograph that sensitively read the tilt of the land like a Coke bottle upside down, balanced on its mouth in a metal bowl, a Chinese earthquake device used by his distant cousins in Hunan.
Sometime about midnight there was a major tectonic drift of his terra. Coming home, a gun was pointed in his face while climbing up the dimly lit metal stairs that clanged loudly in the empty warehouse with the stomp of his boots. No words were said. A bag was weakly tugged but let loose by angry hands already planning revenge. A head was hit against its left temple that rang a bell and draped a blanket all at one time. When Doc awoke, about 6 hours reckoning by the street sounds and sunlight, he knew he had a hell of a concussion. If he were a man of paper and electric footprints, he knew he would go to an ER, get a CAT scan, and be observed. But he was not such a man. If necessary he would contact 'friends/customers' who would provide the appropriate services, discretely.
Grabbing ice, codeine and old espresso redacted to hypercaf over 24 hours on his turned off makeshift stove top, Doc began to think. It wasn't a turf war. One, he paid his narcos and Streets and San Man for protection and a 'board of exchange seat' to do business in the designated Wards. Two, if it was a turf war, he'd have been warned or dead. Next, only Jack, Jerkboy, the rats and his landlord knew where he lived. In that group, the rats were the only ones he trusted and just under them, Jack. But, only Jack owned the Glock he saw imbedded forever on his cheek. More than once Jack let him play with it at the shooting range.
It didn't make sense unless Jack planned to heist his cash and leave town without a trace for Doc to sniff out. This could have been Jack's long-in-coming suicide gesture, for Jack knew first hand Doc's homicidal tendencies. Back at the bar, he last heard Jack ranting to JB about his dead father, the cop. Jack said he would have committed suicide if he had the Glock on hand, but at the time of this low-point he had only a 22 Lugar target pistol. Doc would be happy to pull a twisted Kevorkian on anybody especially with someone with whom he had special empathy. It couldn't have been Jerkboy. The dude was too dumb and too loyal. Plus what's his motive? JB had no ambition and was happy with the not-too-unsubstantial crumbs Doc threw his way. Sometimes it seemed that JB needed Doc in order to change his underwear or blow his nose. Doc knew his next step was to find Jack and get some answers, one way or another.
III
The old guys were a bit startled to see a short muscular white boy emerge from the car and stroll toward them. There was something friendly but threatening about the pace of his approach. A tense reptilian smile gave him away. Jack's initial inquiries about his whereabouts were met with no me comprende until Jack started rattling off Spanish and waved a 20 at each of them which was stuffed into their shirt pockets. As he figured, the two grizzled faces were eyes and ears for a Mexican gang that ran illegals to the neighborhood and then juiced their charges for various and sundry services including false I-dees and bribes to INS agents. One of the old boys was up at 4:00 making a mix of sugar and hypercaffinated tealeaves called mate. He described Jack's car pulling up around then. A big bald guy with a black hooded jacket gets out of the front seat, pulls Jack behind the wheel, shuts the door gently and runs like hell down the block.
The revelation shocked Jack on one level but made sense on another. The ex-brasero was describing Jerkboy. What did he and Jerkboy do and whom did they do it too? Were Doc and JB setting him up? When his pager buzzed the number of a public phone in a strip club near Grand and Milwaukee, he had one of his questions answered. The voice he heard chilled his heart, loaded his gun, and placed a rearview mirror on his head. A meeting was planned tonight after he closed down Exit.
IV
The last of those who needed a fix of a warm room and loud noise as a refuge from hustling their bodies all night had left. Neither the girls, nor girl/boys from North Ave bridge nor those from the nearby clubs for men who had a more 'graceful bearing' than the street-johns were in the mood to argue with Jack when he escorted them to the street. They rarely gave him as much trouble as the drunk Shaumburgeois looking to be a weekend Goth biker. Once in a while, when they were a tad too threatening, Jack needed to come from behind and rapidly twist their heads just so, as to induce a rapid neuro-shock and drop them to the floor. But tonight wasn't one of those nights. Jack was glad there was no trouble. He was looking to conserve his energy. He was straight edge tonight. Didn't let friendly customers buy him shots as he usually did. The weight of his upcoming encounter and that of the loaded gun on his ankle kept him focused.
As Jack locked the front steel door, a familiar rumble pulled up to the curb in front of the club. Doc looked like crap, pale and bandaged over his forehead. First thing Jack said was that he thought he had something of Doc's but wasn't clear how he got it. Doc's get up made that point crystal clear. Doc didn't argue, just drew an automatic and pointed Jack toward the alley, littered with the detritus of an evening's work of his after-3 AM clientele. Traffic was light, no obvious cops. Jack did as he was told. As he turned into the unlit alley 10 feet in front stood a hulking silhouette of Doc's right hand man.
Like a runner caught stealing home he was in a dark alley between Doc at home-plate and Jerkboy on third. Reaching to his right hip because there was no time to bend and draw from his ankle, Jack picked out his metal flashlight from its holster and tossed it straight at the giant's head. This toss was very practiced and over the years was the most effective tool for Jack in the bouncer trade. The crack followed by a whimper was unmistakable as were the clumped hump on concrete and the rictus smile on Doc's face. Jack thought for sure that move was his last. But Doc's silent joy became an out loud laugh, something new to Jack's ears. Out of JB's pocket an ice pick and shiny gun, a replica of Jack's, was removed. Doc next removed Jerkboy's I-Ds, face and fingertips. He sliced off the tip of the fifth digit and put it in a thin bottle of fixative that dangled on the end of a gold chain that Doc put around his neck and tucked under his shirt. Doc then tossed the body and a bag of writhing groceries into a bin just cleaned and picked out an hour ago, not to be revisited for at least a week. By then, Doc's roommates especially trapped for the occasion would be sated.
There was reported a fire early in the AM the next week along the Lake St. el. An abandoned warehouse burned. Destruction was total. When they parted company, Doc clarified his preparedness with the fixative and all. He told Jack that originally he was convinced it would be Jack's pinkie around his neck and had called on JB for the ambush. But it was unsettling to Doc's forensic mind that he was held up and clouted by a strong left. When he saw Jack lock the club door with his right hand and pocket the keys on the right with the flashlight on the right, everything fell into place. Jerkboy was a lefty who Doc figured had a motive harbored by at least 3 sinful inclinations including anger, jealousy and greed. The breaking point appeared to be his 30th birthday, a milestone to some, but a millstone to Jerkboy. JB thought he'd never reach 30 and agonized over the years of him feeling lauded over by two guys who were supposed to be his closest friends. He hated Jack and Doc but as a man who was spiked metal he could never articulate his sense of insecurity except as a thrust of a sharp point through the nose or ear.
JB thought, mistakenly, that he wasn't as dumb as everyone thought. All went according to plans. Created a fight between Jack and Doc over the arm punching ritual. Drugged Jack, found Jack's signature piece' under his pillow, quietly jumped and knocked out Doc and set up a shoot out between each nemesis. While Doc was feeding the fish in Bubbly Creek, he'd step into the business vacuum created by Doc's absence. In case of poor marksmanship he brought a gun and the ice pick. What he didn't bring was a stem-cell implant that rewired him to heal quickly and become ambidextrous.
Jack couldn't stomach Doc's penchant for violence though understood how to apply it in order to survive. He knew that he'd never see Doc again. Never could see Doc again without retching. He also felt abandoned. An orphan cut off from his past. There would be his stories that no one else but Jerkboy and Doc could translate. He'd have to find new old friends and that could take another lifetime.
